Courtesy of Denis Hayes
Denis Hayes left his graduate studies at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government to help organize the first Earth Day in 1970. Twenty years later he took the movement worldwide and established the first international Earth Day. Today, Hayes is the president and CEO of the Bullitt Foundation, a Seattle-based environmental foundation aimed to protect the natural environment of the Pacific Northwest. He's also served on the board of a number of environmental organizations including, Greenpeace USA, World Resources Institute, The American Solar Energy Society, The Energy Foundation and the League of Conservation Voters.
How urgent of a problem is climate change?
It transcends urgency. We began the transition to a super efficient renewable-based economy, with several faltering steps, back in the Carter administration. And if we had kept on going forward and achieved the goals laid out back then—20% was the low goal, 25% was the high goal for the nation's energy taken from renewables by the year 2000—then today we would have a good head of steam and momentum and we would have begun to lead the world in a transition to mitigate the effects of climate change.
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Instead, we've moved aggressively in the wrong direction, dramatically increased our energy use and become ever more dependent on forms that are not only vulnerable to geopolitical factors but are climatically catastrophic. It's now too late to avoid Katrinas and desecration of farmlands in many parts of the planet, spreading deserts and coral bleaches and all the other phenomena. Everybody says "When is it too late?" It's too late to avoid some things, but it's never too late to avoid the ultimate catastrophe, one hopes.
What do you think of the Bush administration response to the environment?
Well, it's overall response on environmental issues, with very few exceptions, has been to move aggressively in the wrong direction: From loosening environmental standards, dramatically relaxing enforcement, trying to sell off many of the treasures of our public land. Not only refusing to participate in that feeble first step of Kyoto, but aggressively trying in international conferences to undermine the ability of the rest of the world to do so. It's hard to imagine how it could have performed worse. With regard to its energy plan, some of its rhetoric was very attractive, and one hopes that it eventually will be reflected in new budgetary priorities. But nothing meaningful has happened thus far.
What's the biggest priority to address regarding the environment?
In some sense, I guess, I try to define the priorities in terms of opportunities instead of what are the greatest threats. Implicit in solving the climate problem is making a transition to a new set of resources, many of which are at the cutting edge of intriguing fields of science. I mean, to move into increasing reliance on photovoltaics is to move to some of the most sophisticated energy sources out there. Once you've actually manufactured them, they are simplicity itself; they simply lay in the sunshine and produce electricity. But driving them down the cost curve, following the paths of the semiconductor industry, figuring out how we get them integrated into existing control systems for utilities, solving the storage problem—these are the kinds of things that can be an intellectual challenge akin to an Apollo project or Manhattan Project. To get there in the next 30 years would require a mobilization effort akin to the mobilization for WWII.