The Scribe

The bail-out. The lies. The mess we're left with. An interview with Gretchen Morgenson.

Even as Federal Reserve Chair Paul Bernanke and Treasure Secretary Henry Paulson were testifying on Capitol Hill about the proposed $700 billion+  bail-out of our financial industry, New York Times financial reporter Gretchen Morgenson was giving an interview on NPR which was hard-edged and scary in its analysis of what could happen if the proposed rescue effort were to go into effect without oversight.  She used the word "lie" more than once.  The interview, hosted by Terry Gross, is excerpted and edited to make it possible to get it transcribed quickly.

NPR: We've been told by Henry Paulson that unless Congress agrees to a $700 billion bail-out package, we will face disaster.  Give us a sense of what he means.  What would likely happen if we didn't do this big bail-out?

Gretchen Morgenson:  Probably everyone who's listening knows that we already face disaster, regardless of whether this plan goes through or doesn't go through.  That's the very reason why they're scrambling to put together a plan.  We are facing financial disaster -- or armageddon, or whatever word you want to use -- because of a combination of very lax lending, extremely large uses of borrowed money (also known as leverage), and a deregulatory viewpoint that really took a handsoff approach to the financial system.  Those three things together have led us to the edge of the cliff.

NPR:  What is the cliff?  What happens at the other end if you fall off? 

GM:  As you know, several firms have falled off the cliff.  Other firms have been driven into the arms of larger financial entities that can possibly absorb them and not cause them to fail outright.  We've had the failure of Bear Sterns.  We've had the failure and bankruptcy filing of Lehmann Brothers.  Two venerable names on Wall Street.  What has happened here is that these firms took outsized risks with their own money -- and then borrowed more money to take those risks.  When you have that kind of a set-up, when you have borrowed money, and your assets that you've borrowed money to buy decline in value, you are then asked for more money.  What happens is that the underlying assets that you've purchased are the collateral that support the loan that you have taken out.  It's like a mortgage on your house.  Your house declines in value and your loan then exceeds the amount of the house value and you're under water.  It's essentially the same thing that these brokerage firms were doing.  They were borrowing money.  They made bets.  The bets went bad.  And then they had to put up more collateral.  Which they didn't have.

NPR:  What does that mean for everybody else?

GM:  You need to have some certainty in the population that such things as money market funds, for example, are not going to fail as a result of this.  Money market funds have become a real choice of most people as a place to stash their cash when they're not investing it or when they might need it.  It's a very kind of liquid form of safekeeping for your money.  There were some situations earlier this week and last week where money market funds did start to go below one dollar which is their net asset value they like to stay at.  People just had no concept that you could actually lose money in a money market fund.  People were thinking that that was the same as having a bank account that was insured. So this has a spillover effect. These problems at, say, Lehmann Brothers have a spillover effect.  It was the fact that the money market fund owned the debt at Lehmann Brothers, that was then in bankruptcy, that caused it to go below one dollar a share. We're all very connected in this world.  So when one company fails the potential for having a kind of domino effect of spreading failure into, as I explained, such areas as money market funds that seem to be completely unrelated.

NPR:  You said that even with this $700 billion bail-out plan, we could still be facing disaster.

GM:  First of all, a $700 billion bail-out plan that does not describe to me with certainty how they're going to value these assets that the taxpayer is going to be backing --  that's a disaster right there.  How do I know that they're not going to pay too much for these assets -- that you and me and my son and everyone else's children ad infinitum are going to be paying too much for troubled assets to get bankers out of trouble!  And bankers got us into this mess!  Why should we be rescuing them?  I understand that we're in a very, very difficult position and a frightening position. But I want to be absolutely certain and every taxpayer should want to be certain that we are not going to be asked to spend more money than we ought to simply to bail out people who made very big mistakes and took very big risks! 

NPR:  How did this situation go so quickly from the secretary of the Treasury telling us that the crisis was being controlled to -- suddenly -- you have to pay this bill immediately or else the whole system is going to crash.  There's no time to think about it.  There's no time to debate.  Stop asking for changes.  You've got to do it right now! 

GM:  That's a good question and one that I don't know the answer to.  I'll tell you this:  it really makes me suspicious.

NPR:  Tell me what your suspicions are!

GM:  My suspicions are that we were not told the truth in the beginning.  Secretary Paulson, Ben Bernanke -- a whole cast of characters -- were rolled out all during 2007, really up until September 2007, saying that it was "contained!"  This problem would be "contained!" to subprime.  Anybody with a brain, anybody with eyes in their head knew that it was not going to be contained because nothing ever is nowadays because we're all so interrelated.  So that was a lie.  You have very little integrity among these people, it seems to me.  Why should I now believe what they're saying?  That I should hurry up and pass this bill or agree to its terms (which are not detailed) when these people weren't telling me the truth five minutes ago?

NPR:  Well, there's also the question that if these people weren't able to rescue the financial situation before, why do we think they can do it now with $700 billion?

GM:  And why do we think $700 billion is going to be the number?  Could it be more?

NPR:  Let's go through what the basics of the bill say and look at what the lobbyists are trying to do behind the scenes.  What is Henry Paulson asking for?

GM:  They're asking for approval to have a fund, a taxpayer funded pool of money to buy troubled assets from banks' balance sheets.  They hope that this will then allow the banks to recapitalize themselves, get healthy, and start lending again.  One of the unintended consequences of the period we're in, where banks are hobbled by these bad loans, is that they retrench on lending.  They rein in their lending to even the most credit-worthy customers, whether a company or an individual who's trying to buy a home.  So we need the wheels of commerce to be greased and lending is that grease.  As long as those wheels are not turning, it's threatening the overall economy.  So they want to get these loans off the books so the banks can feel confident about lending again.

NPR:  What are the troubled loans that this fund would attempt to buy back? 

GM:  Mostly they are mortgages, mortage securities, pools of mortgages that have been sold to investors.  These are some of the loans that were made at the tail-end of the housing boom -- 2005, 2006, 2007 -- when you really didn't even have to be ambulatory or have a pulse to get a mortgage.  There was so much free money floating around that my cat could have gotten a mortgage on a house. So these were very, very iffy loans.  They were made with the kind of aspects where they would increase the interest rate dramatically after two or three years, really putting the borrower in a difficult position if they couldn't pay that increase.  So these are really at the heart of the problem.  There were so many of these loans made that the banks are really troubled by them.  There are also other loans that by association have gotten hurt as well.  Corporate loans that are also feeling the same effects of bank problems that we're seeing.  Heavy leveraged.  Too much leverage, say, on a commercial real estate property.  You really do see mostly mortgages here, but you also see corporate loans and other items as well.

Barton Gellman on Dick Cheney: power, lies, and secrecy

The Washington Post's Barton Gellman is interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR's "Fresh Air" about his new book on  Dick Cheney:  "Angler."

Intro:  Comics used to make jokes about how powerless vice presidents were.  But not in the Dick Cheney era!  Cheney is widely considered the most powerful president in American history.  My guest, Bart Gellman, has written a new book about how Cheney acquired his power as vice president, and how he's used it.  He says Cheney's most troubling quality is a sense of mission so acute that it drove him to seek power without limit.  The title of Gellman's book, "Angler," is also Cheney's Secret Service code name.  "Angler" is an expansion of the Pulitzer Prize-winning series of Washington Post articles that Gellman wrote with Jo Becker.  The award cited their lucid exploration of Vice President Dick Cheney and his power, yet sometimes disguised, influence on national policy.  Bart Gellman is a special projects reporter at the Washington Post. 

NPR:  ... Let's start with how Dick Cheney became vice president.  You write about how he was head of the selection committee -- we knew that.  But you also he'd selected himself before he approached other candidates and before vetting them.  So in other words he put other people through this complicated vetting process knowing that he'd already selected himself as vice president. 

Barton Gellman:  Well, there've been a lot of jokes over the years about Cheney selecting himself.  I wouldn't say exactly that.  Bush selected him.  But Cheney did maneuver the process.  What's especially interesting to me is that he collected this extraordinarily intrusive vetting material on many candidates.  He told several of them, "We'll get back to you later in the week," or "later in the month we'll talk."  And then he didn't.  There were no interviews with Bush.  There were no interviews with Cheney before Bush chose Cheney.  They scheduled interviews afterward in order to conceal that.

NPR:  So what did he do?  What did Dick Cheney do with all this very sensitive, personal material that he collected from the people he was vetting for vice president?

BG:  He did what he was supposed to do.  It is an intrusive process.  You don't want a vice presidential nominee who has hidden defects, secret surprises,  or who is blackmailable.  Every campaign vets them carefully.  There are accusations and a story line in the book, in Chapter 1, that he misused the material as well.

NPR:  How? 

BG: One of the candidates often referred to as "on the short list" -- in fact,  Cheney told him he was on the short list -- was the governor of Oklahoma, Frank Keating.  Keating obviously didn't get the nod.  But when Bush won election and started to form a cabinet, he was considered the front-runner to become attorney general.  He was the former #3 in Justice.  He was a former FBI agent, assistant US attorney, and so on.  Cheney didn't want him.  There was a lot of pressure from conservatives at the Federalist Society and elsewhere to choose Keating.  The next thing that happened was that portions of Keating's vetting file made their way to Newsweek.  Keating, in a lengthy interview for the book, blames Cheney for that and explains why he thinks only Cheney could have done it.

NPR:  At the same time, you say that Dick Cheney didn't put himself through nearly a rigorous vetting process as he put everybody else through.  Some information was withheld.  Halliburton didn't give up information about Cheney.

BG:  Secrecy and discretion have always been very big for Dick Cheney.  Because he was not formally a candidate and kept denying interesting -- kept denying that he was a candidate -- he never filled out the vetting form.  At the time, when Cheney's selection was announced, the campaign spokespeople like Karen Hughes claimed that he did put himself through the same process as everyone else.  I've established that that's simply not true.  He didn't fill out the questionnaire -- which would have called for a giant boxload of documents to be delivered.  And when the campaign announced him and started to face the predictable political attacks, Dan Bartlett tells me that they were just caught flat-footed.  They had no idea how to answer because they didn't know Cheney's detailed record.  The other interesting thing about Cheney's candidacy is that everyone else had to answer very detailed medical questions and in fact to give a waiver to Cheney allowing him direct access to their medical records!  But for the screening of Cheney's heart condition, the campaign relied on assurances from his own doctor.  When they sought a second opinion, they announced that Cheney had been cleared for office by a famous heart surgeon in Houston.  Well, I found out from the surgeon that he's actually never met Cheney or reviewed his medical records.  He, like everyone else, relied on the assurances of Cheney's own doctor.

NPR:  Well, not only did Dick Cheney basically choose himself as vice president while he was heading the vice presidential selection committee, he also, you say, ran the transition team for the Bush presidency and had an unprecedented role in major appointments.  Who were some of the people selected for the Bush team that Cheney was really behind?

BG:  There were lots of them.  The first cabinet officer that Bush announced was Colin Powell.  That was not a Cheney choice, but Bush was committed to him for a long time.  Cheney and Powell had worked closely at the Pentagon but they had a fairly cool and distant relationship.  As a counterweight to Powell, Cheney brought in Don Rumsfeld for Secretary of Defense.  Which was an unusual choice because he'd been out of government for so long.  He'd done the job before.  Bush's people had brought in Dan Coates, the former senator, for an interview for the job.  Rumsfeld impressed Bush.  I emphasize: Bush did make these decisions. Cheney often set them up in such a way that they seemed fairly obvious.  He brought in Paul O'Neill for Treasury.  He brought in Christie Whitman for the Environment Protection Agency.  And he didn't focus only on the top-level jobs.  Cheney understands that an enormous amount of government policy is made at the second, third, and fourth levels and never rises to the level of the cabnet.  So he was helping people get into jobs like Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior.  That was a fellow that once ran Cheney's Wyoming office when he was a member of the House.  Or the number two at Office of Management and Budget.  The number two in the White House counsel's office because the president was bringing in his own longtime lawyer, Alberto Gonzales. 

NPR:  You say that Cheney believed personnel is policy.  In other words, if you hire the right people who believe the right things, you get the policies you want.

BG:  That's right.  He did not try to micromanage every decision.  It's not possible for anyone to do that.  He put peope in place he thought he could rely on, who'd respond to signals, whose philosophy was like his, and let them do their work.

NPR:  You describe Dick Cheney's role in the White House as unprecedented.  For example, he sat in on the principals' meetings.  What is the "principals' meeting" and why is it such a big deal that Cheney sat in on the meetings?

BG:  The principals' meeting is what you call it when the members of the National Security Council meet without the president.  There are statutory members -- secretaries of State, Defense, Treasury.  They're advised by the director of Central Intelligence (as the job was called at the beginning).  The White House counsel and sometimes other cabinet officers as necessary.  The president chairs them when it's a National Security Council meeting.  When he's not there, there are his top level advisers reviewing policy choices that have bubbled up from below at their own initiative.  They're the ones preparing final options for the president.  Historically, no vice president attended those meetings.  Several vice presidents in recent years have attended more or less as observers when the president was there.  But to be the one helping to shape policy -- and not just helping because you know that if Dick Cheney walks into the room, the Situation Room, he's the only one everyone stands up for when he arrives.  He has enormous weight.  There was a proposal early on from one of Cheney's staffers that Cheney should actually chair those meetings.  That job belongs to the national security adviser who was then Condi Rice.  She was quite alarmed by that suggestion since chairing those meetings is about half of her job -- because that's coordinating options that go to the president.  Cheney eventually decided to sort of sit at her right hand chair but nevertheless was the 800-pound gorilla in the room! 

NPR: You write a lot about the lead-up to the war in Iraq.  I think it's fair to say, from what you write, that the vice president misled the American public and Congress about the reasons he suggested for going to war with Iraq.  For example, you say that Cheney was very worried about Iran and North Korea but there were reasons why he didn't want to attack them.  Why didn't he want to attack them, even though North Korea in particularly seemed to be way more advanced in their nuclear development than Iran?

BG:  This is some of the stuff that I found most interesting personally.  Several of the most senior policy aides to Cheney -- many of them on the record -- spoke for the first time about how he thought about the Iraq war and about regime change in general. I found it fascinating.  He did not actually believe, as he often said -- or implied in public -- that Iraq was the most important, most significant, most imminent threat to the US.  He was much more worried about several other countries, including Iran and North Korea, including even Pakistan and Saudi Arabia because of the influence of radical Islamists on their governments.  But there just wasn't any very good option, military or otherwise, for changing those regimes for the better as far as he was concerned.  And so he sought something that one of his advisers, Eric Friedberg, called a "demonstration effect in Iraq."   If you declare a threat and take down a government and you transform the situation on the ground, that's meant to be an object lesson for other potential enemies.  The trouble with that was that it had a flipside.  If you go in and mess it up and get bogged down and pay a much higher price than you expected, that sends the opposite signal. 

NPR: Are there arguments that the vice president made about going to war in Iraq that he knew weren't true?

BG:  There's been a lot of examination over the last few years of Cheney's public statements.  There have been Commission inquiries.  There have been lots of writers who have focused on that.  The verdict has generally been that he exaggerated, he shaded the truth.  Sometimes he left, perhaps, crucial information out.  What I've discovered is that he went beyond that in at least one case.  Dick Armey was the House Majority Leader, old Republican friend of Cheney's from his House days, and I would say that he was more than wavering on the war.  In the summer and fall of 2002, he expressed open skepticism about whether this war was necessary, desirable, even justified.  The White House worked him over pretty good!  They put a lot of pressure on him.  They invited him to Camp David for special briefings.  None of it was working.  So Armey became Cheney's project.   He invited Armey to a little House hideaway that he had in the Capitol building.  Cheney laid out maps, documents, photographs.  What Armey tells me -- and I lay this story out at some length in the book -- is that Cheney told him two things that Armey now believes Cheney knew to be untrue.  Cheney said, number one, that Saddam Hussein and his family had direct personal ties to Al Qaeda.  That Al Qaeda was working not with some mid-level person in the Iraqi intelligence service only (as Cheney claimed in public) but actually with the guy who ran the country.  There was no evidence for that in US intelligence.  The second thing he said -- and this was very scary in combination with the first -- was that Iraq was making rapid progress on miniaturizing a nuclear weapon. This is more or less the suitcase nuke scenario.  So you put together direct close ties to terrorists and a manned portable nuclear weapon and that simply turned Armey around.  He said, "I can't say, in the fact of so much certainty on Cheney's part about so grave a threat, that there's nothing there. "  Armey tells me he assumed that Cheney was giving him good intel and he's learned since that that wasn't correct.

NPR:  I assume that if Dick Armey talked to you about all this, that means he's pretty angry about how he was treated by Cheney. 

BG:  He's very angry.  He feels that it was about the worst mistake he ever made in Congress.  He said -- and you have to think about this ...

NPR: ... the worst mistake Armey ever made?

BG:  Yeah. The very worst mistake that Armey ever made and for this reason:  it was not a given that the war resolution would pass in Congress. There were a lot of people who had a lot of doubt but everyone was afraid to look soft.  That kind of squelched Democratic opposition in particular.  If you had a rightwing Republican, House Majority Leader, with a nearly perfect voting record from the American Conservative Union and elsewhere -- if he came out and said, "This war is unjustifiable and I vote no!", that would have given cover to a lot of other people.  So Armey thinks he could have actually stopped this resolution.  He wishes he had.

NPR:  While Cheney was banging the drum to go to war with Iraq, he was also trying for regime change in Iran by talking with people behind the scenes whom he hoped would have the power to orchestrate a coup.  Who are some of the people he was talking to?

BG:  This is something we didn't know before.  It was assumed that Cheney was interested in the Iranian opposition.  It was well know that his daughter, Liz Cheney at the State Department, was fostering ties to some of these folks -- emigres.  But the story I tell here is that Cheney was meeting with the son of the deposed Shah of Iran. He was sometimes called the "baby shah." He had some of his people meeting with a grandson of the Ayatollah Khomeini, of all people, the late leader of the Iranian revolution. This particular grandson had become kind of an apostate.  He was an ayatollah himself but had come to turn against the clerical regime in Iran and openly called for American help to topple that regime.   That was known.  What was not known was that Cheney's top foreign policy advisors were meeting with him and hoping for ways to use him toward regime change.  On the other hand, Dick Cheney understood that all-out war with Iran would be unbelievably costly.  And although some of his advisors actually favored that, he did not.  At least I've seen no evidence myself to support the claim of a lot of critics that Cheney personally, if he had his druthers, would have us at war with Iran.  Regime change for him was a diagnosis more than it was a prescription.  It was an assessment that a particular government was so implacably hostile to American interests and values and so unreliable that there was no plausible agreement that could be forged with that government.  The government just not follow its own promises.  So his view was, for certain governments, there was no progress possible until the regime was gone.  That did not mean he wanted to go to war with all of them.

NPR: At the same time, he tried to block negotiations with Iran and North Korea.  How did he do that?

BG:  Well, two of his advisors described the process as "rope-a-dope," the famous Mohammed Ali strategy for boxing Joe Frazier back in the day.  It was to let your rivals more or less punch themselves out, spinning their wheels but at critical moments blocking an actual decision.   Or, if you go along with the decision to offer direct talks -- with North Korea, for example -- you try to set conditions that are exceedingly unlikely to be met. So it was the position of the Office of the Vice President in these internal deliberations that before the US could talk with North Korea, North Korea would have to -- in advance -- engage in a complete, verifiable and irreversible disarmament of its nuclear weapons which should have been the main subject of the talks to begin with! 

NPR:  There are so many things you write about in your book that Cheney was really behind:  policy decisions, personnel decisions.  This came as a real surprise to me -- that the vice president designed a lot of President Bush's tax cut programs!  And the two things you say the vice president really wanted were tax cuts for the wealthy and a reduction of the capital gains tax.  Why was this tax policy important enough to the vice president that he took it upon himself to do whatever he could to push it through?

BG: This is a story that is not well known.  Cheney's known for his national security work.  But he has very strong feelings, strong beliefs, about what makes an economy work.  Although he was not a supply-sider back when the term came into vogue, he was a convert by the end of the Reagan administration.  As I know many will be aware, demand-side economics -- the traditional Keynesian/Galbraith economics -- says the way you grow an economy is to stimulate consumer demand and spending.  Supply-siders say the way you do it is unleash producers.  Producers tend to be the wealthier people.  They're the ones who have capital, who can invest it, who run businesses.  Cheney believes very strongly that there ought to be a capital gains cut.  He failed to sell that to Bush.  Here my book relies heavily on reporting by Jo Becker back during the newspaper series.  Cheney went to the annual retreat of House and Senate Republicans and, unlike Bush who spoke to the whole group with a big, formal set of remarks, Cheney just worked the side rooms.  Cheney went to the people who had the greatest influence over the coming tax bill.  He said, "You really oughta reduce the president's request for an elimination of dividend tax," which Bush really liked.  "You oughta say that should be cut instead of eliminated and then make room for a cut in the capital gains tax."  So Bush had specifically decided not to do that.  People like Karl Rove told me that this was an example that proves Bush was the president but not Cheney.  Cheney wanted one thing, Bush decided another.  Well, Cheney basically undid that decision.  He worked with House Republicans -- and the House has to initiate tax bills, got the capital gains tax put in that he wanted, and he was present when House and Senate negotiators came to visit Bush in the White House residence.  He said, "Look, I don't think we can pass an elimination of the dividends tax.  Let's split it out like this and put the capital gains cut in here."  Bush didn't say anything.  The members of Congress all left.  No one knows exactly what was said between Cheney and Bush after they left, but Bush bought it.  So he agreed to support the bill that had been revised in Cheney's image.  The final irony, of course, is -- for those who remember -- the vote in the Senate on that bill deadlocked at 50/5o.  So Dick Cheney used the only power granted to him under the Constitution and cast the tie-breaking vote and caused the passage of bill he had done so much to influence. 

NPR: You're one of the people who have written about executive signing statements that Bush wrote, basically saying, when he signed a bill into law, that as president he had the executive power to decide what he thought was constitutional and unconstitutional within the law he was signing.  He could decide to obey the law according to what he thought was constitutional.  David Addington, who was Vice President Cheney's legal counsel during most of the Bush-Cheney presidency, would write these signing statements.  One of the laws that President Bush used a signing statement for was the detainee treatment act whose goal was to prevent the torture of detainees.  [Republican Senators] John Warner and Lindsay Graham had introduced this bill.  So Bush had a signing statement saying that he would say what was constitutional.  Can you tell us a little about what the signing statement said?

BG:  We need a little bit of background on this.  Cheney had bitterly opposed the detainee treatment act as Congress worked on it in the summer through the fall.  In fact, he slipped into a White House policy statement a veto threat before it had even been debated in the inter-agency process.  Addington wrote some language issued by the Office of Management and Budget which said that if Congress tries to regulate the treatment of prisoners/detainees, the president's senior advisors will recommend that he veto it.  So there's a veto threat.  And then the Senate passes the bill by a veto-proof majority -- I think they had 90 votes.  At this point most of the president's advisors counseled him to embrace the bill and to say, "Yes, we want to treat detainees humanely.  I embrace this  bill."  And they worked for weeks on a signing statement that would have done so.  At the very last minute, Addington intercepts the statement and he literally slashes a red pen through the whole thing and substitutes a single sentence.  It's a very long sentence which says, in lawyer-speak, that the president will interpret this bill consistent with his authority as commander-in-chief, as chief law-enforcement authority, and so on.  The clear implication was that he'll follow its provisions where he thinks appropriate and not otherwise.  Again, Cheney and Addington are starting with something that's fairly widely accepted.  Many presidents have issued signing statements.  Every president has asserted a responsibility on his own part to interpret the law.  But Addington was far more aggressive about this and the language was so forward-leaning that it tended to suggest that the president need not take account of the legislature's opinion about what the law was.

NPR:  So, what happens to the president's signing statement saying he doesn't have to follow the stipulations of the detainee treatment act?  What happens to that signing statement when the next president comes on?  Say that president is John McCain who pushed through the legislation in the first place.  What does he do with President Bush's signing statement?

BG:  That's a fascinating question.  Congress often tries to lay down a record in terms of hearings and non-binding resolutions and committee reports that accompany a bill.  They lay down this record so that the words of the bill will be interpreted as Congress intends.  Presidents use signing statements to say, "This is going to guide my interpretation."  Cheney and Addington have buried a lot of little nuggets all around the federal bureaucracy that give this president -- and future presidents -- a tool that they can use to disregard portions of laws that they don't like or to interpret those laws so narrowly as to defeat Congress's intended purpose.  It's a great question!  What is the next president and the president after that going to do with those powers? You have both McCain and Obama saying that they think this president overreached and that Cheney's role was too powerful and that the claims of executive power have gone too far.  But there are not many players in history who have voluntarily relinquished powers they found on their desk when they arrived.  I think those nuggets will be stored away for possible use by presidents, whether they're Democratic or Republican.

NPR:  Vice President Cheney reinvented the role of the vice president.  He redefined it.  He expanded it.  What does that mean for the next vice president? Do they automatically walk into this expanded vice presidency? Or do things return to the way they were before?  What's your guess there?

BG:   The way they were before was evolving in the direction of more influence for vice presidents.  Beginning with Walter Mondale under Jimmy Carter the vice president started to get a suite of offices in the west wing of the White House, permission or invitation to sit in on policy meetings, and often a role in some specialized area of policy.  Gore, for instance, had supervision over environmental policy and space policy.  Cheney brought this to a level that's never been seen before.  He's the closest thing to a deputy president that we've ever had.  Now I emphasize that Bush really was the decider on anything that came to his attention and that he wanted to do.  He made the final call.  He rejected Cheney's choices on a number of occasions.  He did so more and more often as time went by.  There was a trajectory to Cheney's vice presidency which peaked at around the midpoint and he had a very productive period where he made a lot of things happen early on.  Bush realized that he had to take account of factors that Cheney was not going to take account of.  So he said no to Cheney more often.  Nevertheless, Cheney had an impact on this country and on the vice presidency that is unlikely to be repeated because it depended on a very specific confluence of personalities and talents and experience -- and on major events in the world that, themselves, can't be repeated.  So it will be a long time if ever that a vice president has this much power.

NPR:  I wonder what you make of this kind of paradoxical situation that, as the most powerful vice president in history, Dick Cheney is on the way out.  John McCain has chosen as his running mate Sarah Palin whom a lot of people think of as one of the least experienced candidates to have been a vice presidential candidate.

BG:  Well, if you look at national and foreign policy experience, it's hard not to say that Sarah Palin is the least experienced vice presidential nominee in modern times.  She didn't have a passport until a couple of years ago.  She has done almost no foreign travel.  She had very little connection to big national questions.  She is, in some ways, the anti-Cheney.  McCain made it very clear during the campaign that he did not want a vice president with that much power.  He said that it needs to be very clear who the president is.  And he even joked that the vice president's main job is to come into the office every day and inquire as to the health of the president.  He got a pretty good laugh from Republican audiences on that.  The sad thing for Cheney is that he is repudiated by the electorate, even by his own party, in a way that also is unprecedented in modern times.  His disapproval ratings surpassed Dan Quayle's quite some time ago!

NPR:  One of John McCain's top political advisers within his campaign is Steve Schmidt who was Vice President Cheney's communications director.  I don't know how much you know about Steve Schmidt.  What are some of the things that he accomplished for Vice President Cheney?

BG:  Steve Schmidt was not a familiar name within the Bush administration to most people in the public, but he was very important in the White House and in Cheney's office.  Cheney had enormous influence, among other things, on Supreme Court appointments.  When Bush selected Roberts and Alito, Cheney told Schmidt:  "You're going to be in charge of the confirmation campaign."  He was the one who shepherded those two nominees through Congress and the media.  Not, for example, Dan Bartlett who had the parallel job for President Bush. 

NPR:  Steve Schmidt is also someone who used to work with Karl Rove.  Have you been following his role in the McCain campaign, since he has this Cheney connection?

BG:  Well, I've noticed the very influential role he's had for John McCain and he's described as the driving force behind the transformation of McCain's campaign style from the open, "come ask me questions whenever you want, ride along in the bus" style which McCain has had as his trademark to highly scripted appearances, very few interviews, and a very aggressive pushback against news organizations who write things the candidate doesn't like.

NPR:  So right now how would you describe Dick Cheney's power within the White House?

BG:  Cheney's influence moved over time from someone who could drive policy to someone who could block it.  Blocking power is still very important.  He has managed to keep up the rope-a-dope strategy -- for example, in negotiations with North Korea and Iran even though the president has authorized greater and greater concessions.  The talks haven't gone anywhere in part because he's helping draw lines that the other side can't or won't cross.  He has been very successful in slow-rolling the president's desire to close Guantanamo Bay.  He has salvaged the harsh interrogation methods that he did so much to bring about, even though Congress and the courts had seemed to repudiate them.  When you look at the fine print of the Detainee Treatment Act or the Military Commissions Act, and then you connect that with executive orders that the president then signed, you have a situation in which formally and, I'd say, in terms of nomenclature, the president is constrained to treat detainees humanely and not to violate the Geneva Convention ban on cruelty.  But Congress was persuaded to say that the president would decide what was cruel and what was humane.  The president reasserted that even in stronger terms in an executive order that was prepared under Addington's direction.  So, de facto, because of Cheney, Bush retains just about the same discretion he's always claimed to order harsh interrogations.

NPR:  Have you been thinking about how history will judge Vice President Cheney?

BG:  Well, I've been trying!  I know, more importantly, that Dick Cheney has been thinking about that.  He talks about it openly.  He has a model of democracy and of representation that assigns a fairly restricted role to voters and the public in his own times.  He says a leader can't be governed by the polls.  He makes polls sound a little bit like a dirty word.  And that only history will judge the quality and impact of the work that he and Bush did.  The odd thing to me is that, for a man who is invoking history and the judgments of posterity, he is working quite hard to conceal some of the records from national memory.  This will make it very hard for future historians to get at the papers and deliberations in this administration -- even well into the future -- by taking care not to write some things down, by making up a new form of classification that's not anywhere in the statutes or in executive orders that will make it hard for the National Archives to release records and by being the driving force behind an executive order which says that both for presidents and vice presidents, there's a possibility of a broad exemption for records relating to national security, relating to legal advice, relating to internal deliberations.  These tend to be some of the main things that historians are interested in!  So the judgment of history is going to be a little bit more blindered than it would have been had Cheney not done these things.

"Global weirding": Thomas Friedman on our "hot, flat, and crowded" world

In a half hour interview, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman talks with old friend, Terry Gross of WHYY's Fresh Air, about the revelations in his new book, "Hot, Flat, and Crowded."  Terry Gross describes the book:

"Hot" refers to global warming, "flat" to the global economy that has put the American middle class in competition with workers around the world, and "crowded" refers to rapid population growth.  Friedman says hot, flat, and crowded have converged to tighten energy supplies, expand the extinction of plants and animals, deepen energy poverty, strengthen petro-dictatorships, and accelerate climate change.

This interview is being transcribed in a somewhat abbreviated form, and Terry Gross's questions are turned into subject headings. 

"Drill, baby, drill!":  the chant at the Republican National Convention

I started to imagine a column where the Saudi, Russian, and Venezuelan observers at the Republican convention were watching this.  What would they be saying to each other?  They would be up there in one of those sky boxes, high-fivin' each other.  It is happy days are here again!  Drill, baby, drill!  Because what Giuliani was leading that crowd into saying was, "Let's stay addicted to oil!"  And boy, that is the best news in the world for the Venezuelan, Russian and Saudi delegates.  They couldn't have scripted a chant like that better themselves.

What is it that they want?  They're looking for the US to remain focused on fossil fuels and not throw everything -- and I mean everything! -- into innovation around clean energy technologies and a clean energy system.  When I think about that "drill, baby, drill" mantra, you know what I think of?  It's if that Republican convention, on the eve of the personal computer, had been up chanting, "Let's stick with IBM Selectric typewriters!"  "IBM Selectrics forever!"  "Type, type, type!" 

We're on the eve of a new technological revolution.  It's as if on the eve of the PC and the internet the entire convention was standing up and and chanting for IBM Selectrics.  What a wonderful bridge to the 20th century!

Where the candidates stand on energy:  John McCain

I'm very disappointed in John McCain.  He's someone I've respected as a leader, as a political figure, and someone who, as I thought about this campaign before it began...  I thought, "Wow, this is great!  For the first time we're going to have two green candidates."  I don't think that anymore.  There has been a bill pending before the US Senate for the past year that they've attempted to pass eight times.  This gets a little technical, but it's very important.  It's a bill to extend the production and investment tax credits for wind and solar energy.  So if someone wants to start a company to put solar panels up, you'd get a tax credit which would be enormously beneficial to do that.  Or to start a wind company, you'd get a production credit.  What's happening is that on December 31st the existing tax credits are going to expire.  For the last year the US Senate has been trying to pass an extension of these tax credits and it has failed, now, eight times!  All eight times that bill was voted on, John McCain failed to show up.  Including one time when he was actually in Washington,D.C., and wouldn't come to vote.  The bill failed by one vote. 

That is very disappointing to me especially since the biggest concentrated solar project in the world right now is on paper, ready to go, and outside of where?  Phoenix, Arizona!  It involved between 1500 and 2000 jobs, as much steel -- in this big, manufacturing, blue-collar project -- as the Golden Gate bridge.  And yet John McCain did not show up one time.  Obama showed up three times and voted in favor.  McCain did not show up once.  That's one disappointment I have.

The second disappointment?  He supported a lifting of the federal gasoline tax for the summer driving season.  Which such an absurd, ridiculous give-away of federal tax dollars to encourage the worst kind of behavior.  Summer driving would only drive up demand for oil and make us more addicted. 

Lastly, he has been really misleading the American people -- making them stupid by telling them that if we just drill, drill, drill today, your gasoline price at the pump will come down today.  And therefore if Obama doesn't say drill-drill-drill too, Obama is for raising your price at the pump today.  It is bloody dishonest.  It is making people stupid and frankly I find it disgusting at this critical moment.

What about Barack Obama?

What I feel comes from Obama -- all the right words are there.  I've read his website and his energy platform.  When he speaks, he does speak in these terms of a transformative energy revolution and having it be the foundation of a new American industry with more jobs.   But I don't feel it's the core of what he's about.  I don't feel it's really central. I feel like it's a box he's checked along with health care and immigration.  So I give him high marks for understanding the importance of the issue, but I don't give him very high marks for real passion or talking honestly about what we're really going to need to do if we're going to lead this revolution.

"It's more important to change your leaders than your light bulbs!" Friedman

We need to solve this problem.  It's like the IT revolution.  We need 100,000 innovators in 100,000 garages trying 100,000 things, 100 of which will be really promising, 10 will be workable, and three will be the next Google!  How do you trigger that?  Well, the only way you trigger that, in my view, is if you have a market.  And we have a market, but that market's got to be shaped with the right price signals and the right standards, the right rules and regulations.  Basically, my argument is that it's leaders who write the rules.  They're the ones who pass the tax law, the carbon tax, the gasoline tax.  They raise it or lower it.  They're the ones who write the rules on energy standards and efficiency.  Only if you get the rules right for the market, so it produced fuels from heaven -- that is clean fuels, not fuels from hell! -- you're not going to have this explosion of innovation that we need.   

Individuals are not enough.  Leadership is needed.

It goes back to one of the central arguments.  This is a huge-scale problem.  This is the biggest industrial project -- to try to move from a dirty fuel system.  That's what we have now.  We have a dirty-fuel system based on coal, oil, and natural gas. It's a system that works really well.  Six blocks from this studio there's a gasoline station that will fill up your call for $3 a gallon or $4 a gallon or whatever it is today.  That system works really well.  If we want to replace that, it's a huge-scale project.  If you don't shape the market to give you the kind of innovation and scale that we need, you've really just got a hobby.  I have hobbies.  I used to build model airplanes.  I play golf.  I don't see working with others to save the world as a hobby.

The gas tax as burden on the working class

That's why it should be revenue-neutral:  we should tax what we don't want, such as people using fossil fuels, raising taxes on that, and lower taxes on what we do want, which is people working.  Which is why whatever tax increase we impose on oil, coal, or natural gas we should then take off on the other side from people's weekly payroll deduction.  To me, it should be revenue neutral for all but the wealthiest Americans. 

Denmark

After the  1973 war and the first Arab oil shock, look at what America did and what Denmark did.  What we did was say, "Wow! We've got to really take on this issue."  So beginning with President Ford and President Carter we said we were going to double the fuel efficiency of American cars from about 13 mpg then to I think it was 27.5.  We were going to do it over ten years and we did it.  We were so successful doing that we helped break OPEC in the late '70's and early '80's and crater the price of oil. 

That worked out so well that Ronald Reagan, when he came along, said, "That's enough of that!"  He ripped off the solar panels that Jimmy Carter had put on the White House roof -- they were recently auctioned online.  And he put a stop to all that regulatory efficiency.  So we just kind of stopped.  In fact, we have not raised our fuel efficiency standards for basically thirty-odd years until just last year.  Denmark, by contrast, well, they fortunately found some oil and gas in the North Sea, but that wasn't the key.  They put a tax on gasoline and for a while they said people couldn't even drive on Sunday.  They imposed a CO2 tax.  On an electric bill in Denmark, you can actually see a CO2 tax on there.  They invested in huge amounts of energy efficiency systems to capture the heat from coal and from incinerating waste products and used it for home heating.  They took a whole series of efficiency steps and taxes and incentives.  The net result of which was what?  Their economy must have been crushed, right?

Unemployment in Denmark today?  1.6%. 

Oh, but their companies must have absolutely been hammered!  The leading wind company in the world today, Vestas -- one of three wind turbines in the world  today built in Denmark.  Novazymes and Denesco are the two leading ethanol enzymetic companies in the world are out of Denmark.  In other words, what these rules, prices and taxes did was shape the market in Denmark, stimulating all this innovation around energy efficiency, producing new Danish companies to do this, and then went global, ending up buy the American wind companies that went bust in the '80's when Reagan took the subsidies away from wind.  And the US Congress, Democrats included.  They were bought by Denmark and today are major Denmark companies.  By the way, some of those solar companies that we spawned in the '70's and '80's -- they went bust also when we removed our subsidies and taxes. They were bought by Japan. 

I can't tell you how grateful the innovators and corporate leaders of Japan and Denmark are today for all the money America invested in research in wind and solar, spawning companies here which went bust in the '80's when we removed the subsidies from them.  ...One of the leading wind innovators in America, in fact, was given a medal of honor by the government of Denmark!  All his technology ended up there.  Have a nice day!

Political implications of US oil addiction

Look at Russia and Europe since 1989.  We thought the fall of the Berlin wall was going to herald a new irreversible era in democracy and peace in Europe.   And for the first 15 years it really did that. But those 15 years coincided with oil in the $20 to $50 a barrel range.  As we exploded out of that range all the way up to $140, it basically has galvanized, enriched and empowered a whole group of petro-dictatorships that are now forming a counter-tide -- a petro-dictatorship tide -- to the free-market-democracy tide after the fall of the Berlin wall.  You can see that in Putin's Russia today. 

I coined in my book what I call the first law of  what I call "petro-politics."  It argues that the price of oil and the pace of freedom operate in inverse relation.  What I did was to simply grab the price of oil from the late 1970's and then then 2oo5.  If you do that, it looks at rough numbers like $80 and fell in the '90's down to as low as $10 and then back up to $80 in the early 2000's.  It looks like a "V" if you do that.  Then I went to Freedom House and got the indexes for Russia, Venezuela, Iran and Nigeria, and I overlaid the Freedom House index -- indexes of parliaments open, free and fair elections, womens' groups begun, NGO's, etc. -- and if I overlaid it on top of that, what it looks just the opposite.  So you see that the price of oil and freedom have an inverse correlation. 

Reagan's "downfall of the Soviet Union" was really about the price of oil

I believe that.  It's not just me saying it, I'm quoting Russian economists ...  I gave a talk in Moscow a couple of years ago at the US embassy about this issue.  In the talk, I said that it was -- with all due respect to Ronald Reagan -- $10/barrel of oil that brought down the Soviet Union which, after all, was the world's biggest oil producer.  After the talk, I was talking to the economist Vladimir Mau, and I said to him that it was $10/barrel oil that brought down the Soviet Union and he said, "No, Tom, you're wrong.  It was $80/barrel oil followed by $10/barrel oil that brought down the Soviet Union."  And what he meant was that what $80/barrel oil did in the '70's was to really sucker the Soviet state into thinking it was stronger than it was.  It extended itself into all kinds of areas of subsidies and imports and then when $10/barrel oil came and they had to withdraw from all those areas, the whole system collapsed.  By the way, Iran is ripe for the exact same phenomenon! 

A couple of years ago, Iran exported $44 billion worth of oil.  That was probably 80% or 90% of all Iranian exports and foreign currency earnings.  The rest were probably carpets and pistachios!  In the same year, Iran's government spent $25 billion on subsidies -- subsidies of fuel, gasoline in Tehran was like 30 cents a gallon; subsidies of housing, education, all kinds of building; subsidies of food, etc.  Now, imagine if the price of oil were cut in half.  Suddenly Iran's total amount of subsides was the same amount as the entire government budget.  There's a term for that in economics.  It's called "unsustainable"!  So Iran, which has about 12% unemployment today at $110/barrel oil, imagine what happens to that regime -- which is basically just using this oil money to buy off its people -- imagine if that regime suddenly has to deal with $40 or $50/barrel oil! 

Imagine what it does to Hezbollah!  Hezbollah launched a war against Israel a couple of years ago with an attack across the border.  The Israel came in and bombed all the Shiite neighborhoods in Beirut and smashed up the place.  Suddenly the morning after the war, Hezbollah, and Iranian-backed militia, was out there telling its people, "No problem!  We'll rebuild your homes!"  They reminded me of a group of rich college students who rent a house on the beach for a weekend, smash up the place completely, then tell the landlord, they flip him the keys and say, "No problem! Dad will pay!"  Well, Iran was "dad" and dad had tons of our oil money.  So Hezbollah could launch a war, get their housing areas completely ravaged and then say to people, "No problem!"

Our oil addiction indirectly funds terrorism

It's absolutely doing so.  It's funding just about every bad trend in the world today.  If we could find a way to truly get off our addiction to oil... It isn't just win/win.  It's win! win! win! win! win!  Our trade deficit dramatically improves; our dollar strengthens.  We weaken the worst regimes in the world.  We  mitigate global warming.  We clean up our air.  We become healthier, more secure, more economically strong, competitive, and respected in the world.  And there are people out there saying "drill, baby, drill"?  What planet are these people inhabiting? What am I missing here?

Who are the enablers of the addiction? Why aren't we changing?

Well, the oil companies are the enablers number one.  Huge campaign contributors to all parties frankly but certainly longtime and deep contributors to the Republican party.  Does it strike you as odd that here we have this bill before the Senate -- just a simple thing -- for extending the renewable energy tax credits for wind and solar.  By the way, for solar it was eight years, but for wind it was one year.  And in the solar and wind industries, they are completely frozen now because the tax credits haven't been extended.  People are finishing projects covered by this year's tax credit and virtually no one  is starting project.  Unless you're T. Boone Pickens and have $4 billion.   

You couldn't make that up -- that in this key time in America we are basically grinding down our wind and solar industries.  Now we had a president named George Bush who told us we're addicted to oil.  So don't you think that president might lift a finger -- just one little pinkie! -- to invite the people in Congress, Democrats and Republicans, after eight times trying to pass these extenders for wind and solar ... might invite them to Camp David for the weekend and say, "Guys, gals, can't we work this out?"  Have you heard the president slamming the table for that?  No.  It's "drill, baby, drill"!  It's crazy!

Bottom line:  Why isn't a bill like that getting passed?

It's two things. It's the oil companies.  You also have the Republicans in the Senate who have not wanted this bill to be passed because they don't want the Democrats to get a victory in this election year.  So you have some really interesting things going on here. Our premier solar company, First Solar, is in Toledo, Ohio. And their own senator -- Voinivich -- voted against extending solar tax credits.  So what did First Solar do? I'm watching this campaign and all this stuff and Ohio and everyone denouncing NAFTA -- but while everybody was out there denouncing NAFTA, talking about working class jobs being lost in Ohio, First Solar was opening its first factory in East Germany because the East Germans were providing the tax credits and the market for a solar industry.  So 300 great engineering jobs went from Ohio to East Germany and their own senator voted against them. 

[Senator] Sununu from New Hampshire voted to defeat the solar energy tax credit when the best solar equipment company maybe in the world -- GT Solar -- is in New Hampshire, his own state.  How many times do you think oil senators vote against oil companies in America?  Never!  When it comes to solar or wind?  No problem.  They don't give campaign contributions.  They can't twist your arm.  They can't fly you on their airplane.  They're not big enough yet.

How do you shatter the boring, "granola" image of the green energy industry?

That's what the book is about.  The problem is the term "green" was really owned by its opponents.  To name something is to own it.  The people who named it "green" named it a "liberal, tree-hugging, girlie-man, sissy, unpatriotic, vaguely French! 

What I'm out to do in this book is to rename green.  Geo-political.  Geo-strategic.  Geo-economic.  Innovative.  Competitive.  Patriotic.  "Green" is the new red, white and blue.  Because this is all of those things.  To conservatives, I say, "Look, this book is a plan to make America stronger, more energy and nationally secure, more competitive and entrepreneurial, more economically healthy and more respected in the world.  (Oh, and by the way, all that stuff Al Gore talks about?  We'll take care of that as a by-product!)  To liberals and  "greens" I say it's a plan to make America greener. (Oh, and by the way, all that stuff Dick Cheney talks about? We'll take care of that as a by-product.) 

I'm doing it because I honestly believe this is an issue joining both of those things.  It not only does it intellectually, but it must.  Because if you don't -- if "green" is owned as a kind of Birkenstock-wearing hippie wine-and-cheese-eating issue and isn't seen as an issue about national security and growth and making American stronger, healthier, more competitive ... then we'll never have scale.  Until you have scale on this issue, you really have nothing.

What can we do as individuals?

What I argue in the book for is a clean energy system. Because only a system will allow ordinary people to do extraordinary things.  Ordinary people are struggling with a mortgage and just get through their day.  They can't think of the 205 easy ways to go green!  We need a system that turns off the lights when you leave the room.  We need a system that will create all this energy efficiency for you automatically.  That's why a system is so important. 

What can individuals do?  There are things you want to do personally and things you want to do politically. Be a work in progress.  Nobody's perfect.  I've got plenty of energy hoggery in my life.  But we're trying to be a work in progress.  When I can afford to buy a hybrid car, I buy a hybrid car.  When I can afford to install a solar system, I do that.  Everyone can find something.  Maybe they'll take the subway once a week.  Maybe they'll ride to work when they can. Maybe their kids will (god!) walk to school or maybe not have mom or dad drive them in an SUV and sit in the parking lot idling for thirty minutes waiting for them to get out.  I once asked Amory Lovins, "How do you be environmentally energy conscious?"  He just said, "Pay attention." 

So that's on the personal level.  On the political level, what you want to hear from a politician is, "Are you ready to impose a tax on carbon and gasoline and offset it with a reduction of payroll taxes, so we're incentivizing people to work more and consume few dirty fuels.  Are you ready to do that? Are you ready to support these production and tax credits and make it a no-brainer to invest in alternative energy?  And are you ready to support what are called "renewable portfolio standards"?  Those are the standards that say to your utility in your state that by the year 2025 you have to have produced 30% of your energy from renewable power.  Why is that important?  Because it creates a huge market. The EU today -- the European Union -- already has a renewable portfolio standard for all of Europe.  That's why all the renewable energy companies are going over there to try to do business and start companies. 

What do we have?  We have 26 states that have renewable portfolio standards and another 24 that don't.  So we have a completely balkanized market which doesn't then attract the companies.  The next thing you have to do is change the bargain between you and your utility.  For 100 years, our electric companies have gotten rich by getting you to consume more energy.  Remember when your mom and dad, when you left the lights on, came into your room and said, "Excuse me!  Do you own stock in the electric company?"  There was a reason.  If the lights were on, the electric company's stock went up.  We need to change that bargain.  It's already begun in California and Idaho: your electric company gets rich doing the right thing.  It gets rich in terms of how much energy its customers save years after year, rather than how much electricity it gets them to consume.  We need to change that bargain for every utility in the country.  So those are the things I focus on in terms of legislation. 

In your personal life?  Do what ever you can.  Whatever you do -- when you buy different light bulbs, when you buy a different car, when you demand different insulation, when you look for energy-efficient products -- you're creating another little opening and widening of the market for those goods.  That's a really good thing.

What went through your mind when you heard that Sarah Palin, a vice-presidential nominee, doesn't believe in the connection between human activity and climate change?

The northern edge of Alaska is melting off into the ocean and she doesn't believe mankind has anything to do with climate change.  I'd just have to ask her a very simple question:  "Have you studied this issue?  Have you read the literature?  Have you talked to a climatologist in your own state about it? Or is this simply a political mantra that you've gotten because it's convenient and fits with your expedient political needs of the moment?  On what basis are you making that claim? We have the intergovernment panel on climate, the world's 2500 top climatologists who have concluded that mankind is indeed interfering with the climate.  Do you have science to the contrary?"

The point is not global warming.  The chapter in the book on climate is called "global weirding," which is a term coined by Lovins, because I think that's a much better description of what's going to go on.  The weather is going to get weird! It isn't just going to get warm.  What happens with climate change is that you get extremes:  hotter hots, longer droughts, wetter wets, more frequent and forceful hurricanes, tornadoes showing up in cities where they've never shown up before... That's what's going to happen.  To this it's this gentle, little global warming -- that's not what's going to go on.  The weather's going to get weird and, in case you haven't noticed, the weather's getting weird!  To me the really unnerving thing about this moment -- and I relate this discussion I have in the book with Nate Lewis' energy chemist at CalTech ... I came to Nate one day and said, "Nate, what is it about Katrina that bothered us so much?"  He rolled that idea around in his head for a moment and said, "Who made it hot?"  And I said, "What?"  And he said, "What's going on now is we've introduced so much CO2 into Mother Nature's operating system, we don't know anymore the difference between an act of god and an act of man."

Who made it hot?  We don't know anymore.