President Clinton’s RMI25 Address

Aspen, Colorado
August 9, 2007

PRESIDENT CLINTON: Thank you very much. I didn't realize I had been introduced. I'm hard of hearing in my old age, and I was outside taking pictures in really little bursts of greenhouse gases. Thank you, Amory, and to all the officers and trustees of RMI.

I am honored to be here with so many of you. Although now that we're in political season it would probably compromise those journalists who prefer to be anonymous, I still want to thank Tom Friedman for trying to bring the realities of energy economics to ordinary citizens in the United States. I think he's really done a great job. [Applause.]

We're all supposed to be congratulating the Rocky Mountain Institute on 25 years of being a groundbreaking gadfly for America. But I first read about Amory Lovins talking about the virtues of clean energy, energy efficiency, and even speculating about the prospect of climate change in his groundbreaking article more than 30 years ago.

A little known footnote in his long and distinguished history: in January 1977, I was a 30-year-old Attorney General in Arkansas. About two weeks after I took office, the Public Service Commission in my state had a hearing on what I thought was one of the worst ideas I ever heard. Our multi-state utility, then called Middle South, now Entergy, was about to build two big nuclear power plants at Grand Gulf, Mississippi outside of the normal purview of state regulation and require all the states to pony up, allegedly on the grounds of efficiency. It later turned out that the main reason was that the federal body regulating it was under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Court of Appeals, on which the most important judge was Robert Bork, who thought it was a great idea to observe states' rights except in anything that had anything to do with economics.

Anyway, I knew about Amory, and I don't even remember how much he charged me, probably $3.50 back then, but Amory Lovins appeared with me before the Arkansas Public Service Commission in January 1977. We both had long hair. He pretty much looked the way he does now. I looked like the law professor I had just recently been, and he looked like a colleague on the science faculty.

He proceeded to tell them that we didn't need this big nuclear power plant, that we could simply conserve our way out of our energy needs with, though I don't think he had yet adopted the term, Negawatts. Our testimony was heard carefully, and with almost total disbelief. They thought that we had landed from another planet, and proceeded to approve the nuclear plant.

Then the federal courts, under Judge Bork, took all state regulation away from us, and with that, our ability to restrain the rates in any way, shape or form. It was one of the worst decisions they ever made. It nearly bankrupted the utility, actually. But, anyway, we've been doing this for more than 30 years.

When I was in the White House, RMI helped us to green the White House and the larger White House complex. We did enough, I think, to have the equivalent of taking about 700,000 cars off the road. And when my term ended, I left a whole lot of executive orders that were in the process of being implemented on changing the automobile fleet and upgrading the standards on federal buildings, all of which were promptly discarded. But what we did do helped.

Today, RMI is a partner with our Foundation in our Climate Change Initiative, the first part of which is designed to help cities all over the world do energy retrofits on their biggest and most inefficient buildings. We now represent 40 cities on five continents, 40 very large cities, and a number of associate cities, including New Orleans and Philadelphia, that are interested in how to green the buildings and in the process generate new economic activity.

We are trying, among other things, to help these cities figure out how to organize this kind of endeavor with a program that will allow public and private building owners to finance building retrofits in a way that legally guarantees energy savings. In places like New York, we've got all the money we need. But we’ve also got five banks to commit $1 billion each to help cities in the developing world to work out the financing and guarantee savings.

Interestingly enough, I feel sort of the way I did when I got into the business of providing AIDS medicine. Particularly two years ago, I could go over to a crowd and say, “We doubled the number of children in poor countries getting AIDS medicine.” Everybody would clap. I would say, “Don't clap. 550,000 kids died last year, and we increased the number from 10,000 to 20,000.” It's a disgrace.

Now, that $5 billion would double the amount of money being spent in the entire world on building retrofits in urban areas. [Applause.] No, no, no, don't clap. Urban areas generate 75 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions, and $5 billion is peanuts, it's a walk in the park. I was glad when we got the five billion bucks, but the very idea that in the entire world, urban areas have only devoted that much investment to this is unbelievable. You can spend $5 billion in New York and still not come close to completing the job.

But, anyway, we’ve got it and we're making a beginning. We're going to try to do what we did with AIDS drugs with energy products. We're going to try to bargain for more energy efficient and clean energy products that we buy in bulk according to uniform specifications so that we get a unit discount, which we can then pass along to our partner cities to lower the cost of doing this work and increase their total economic benefits from greenhouse gas reductions. We're also trying to create some standardized measurement tools and get into very concrete metrics so that we'll all know what we're doing. And if we don't know what we're doing, we'll have to fess up to it.