Remarks of Eileen Claussen President, Pew Center On Global Climate Change City Club of Portland Portland, Oregon December 14, 2001 Greetings and thank you very much.  It is wonderful to be here in Portland, and I want to thank the people at the City Club for inviting me to be a part of your Friday Forum.  I noticed on the club’s schedule that next week’s Friday Forum presenters will be the Oregon Repertory singers.   I sincerely hope that none of you got the dates mixed up.  I always try to be somewhat entertaining in my speeches, but singing a few holiday favorites definitely crosses the line.  Seriously, I’m glad to have the chance to be here today to talk to you about one of the most profound challenges of the 21st century.  That, of course, is the challenge of global climate change.  I’d like to tell you where we stand right now in the effort to deal with climate change, both here in the United States and internationally.  And I’d like to tell you where we are headed – the kind of world we will leave our children and grandchildren if we stick to business as usual.  But most importantly, I’d like to tell you where we need to be headed – the path that instead will allow us to pass to future generations a safer, healthier, more prosperous planet.  It is not a simple path.  For what is needed, I believe, is a second industrial revolution – one that takes us beyond oil and beyond coal to cleaner, more secure ways to power our global economy.  Government must have a hand, a strong hand, in launching this revolution.  But it can succeed only if our corporate leaders rise to the challenge as well.  For while government can set the goals, only the marketplace can spur the innovation and mobilize the resources needed to achieve them.  Fortunately, a growing number of forward-thinking companies already are leading the way. First, though, I’d like to tell you why the state of Oregon holds such a special place in my heart.   Some of you, I’m sure, remember back in the 70’ s when Oregon became the first state in the nation to require a deposit on bottles and cans.  At the time, I was a young staffer in EPA’s office of solid waste.  And I thought: Hey, they’ve got a great idea out there in Oregon.  We should let other people know about it.  So I put together a nifty little pamphlet describing Oregon’s groundbreaking program and EPA started distributing it.  Well, not everyone agreed that bottle bills were such a grand idea. The beverage industry was, shall I say, unhappy.  And they let my bosses know it.  I’m told, in fact, that the chairman of Pepsi raised the matter directly with the president.  Soon thereafter EPA decided to “loan” me to an obscure office in Congress where I couldn’t cause any more trouble.  And when I was finally allowed to return, I was assigned a new area of responsibility: sewage sludge. I’m pleased to say I was eventually able to rise above sewage sludge.  I’m also pleased to note that, all these years later, Oregon is still leading the way on the environment.  In fact, I know of no state that is doing more to meet the challenge of global warming.  Oregon was the first state to enact mandatory controls on carbon dioxide – requiring that all new power plants meet a tough new emissions standard.  The city of Portland and Multnomah County were the first local governments in the United States to adopt a plan for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.  And through your commitment to light rail and other smart growth strategies, you are demonstrating that protecting the climate goes hand in hand with preserving Oregon’s enviable quality of life.  These efforts really do reflect the spirit behind the Oregon state motto, “She flies with her own wings.”  May you soar higher and higher. But are others joining you in flight?  Climate change is by definition a global challenge.  And the best efforts of any one city, state or nation will come to naught unless, ultimately, we all act together.  We’re by no means there yet – not even close.  But it might surprise you to learn that we are in fact making headway.  The reason this might surprise you is that the one thing most people heard about climate change over the past year was that President Bush rejected the Kyoto Protocol.  His decision indeed was a setback.  But let’s look at what’s happened since. First, let’s look at the international picture.  For those of you new to this topic, the Kyoto Protocol is an agreement negotiated in 1997 that does two things: it sets targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from industrialized countries; and it allows them to meet those targets through market-based strategies like emissions trading.  Don’t worry. I’m not going to get too far into this.  But it’s worth taking a minute to understand why these market-based strategies are so important.  Basically, they put the market to work to cut emissions as cost-effectively as possible.  In other words, they deliver the greatest environmental benefit at the lowest possible cost.  And they create market incentives that drive companies to keep coming up with better and cheaper ways to cut emissions.  This is how we’ve tackled acid rain faster and cheaper than anyone ever imagined.  Emissions trading is a concept born here in America, and it was the United States that insisted it be part of the Kyoto Protocol. While Kyoto established a broad framework, the nitty-gritty rules still had to be negotiated before countries could ratify it.  A year ago, those negotiations were at a standstill.  Then President Bush rejected the Protocol.  Suddenly, the rest of the world was rallying to its defense.  In negotiations last July in Bonn, and then last month in Marrakech, nations made the tough compromises and worked out the rules.  They’re not perfect, but they do establish a workable international system for beginning to tackle this problem.  The agreements in Bonn and Marrakech have been rightly declared a triumph of multilateralism.  They represent a triumph as well for the principle of harnessing the global market to protect our global environment.  It’s true, Kyoto’s targets take us only a decade into the future, and provide only a small fraction of the emissions reductions we must ultimately achieve. But the bottom line is that we have to start somewhere, and much of the world has now established that starting point.  The priority now is to ensure