Ken Salazar: Water a ‘ticking time bomb’ for California
The U.S. Interior secretary discusses water infrastructure and climate change legislation with Times editors and reporters.
March 22, 2010
Below are excerpts from a conversation Monday morning between U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Times reporters and editorial board members. Dan Turner, L.A. Times: I know that you’ve been involved in the climate bill talks. All I hear about that is they’ve jettisoned cap and trade and they’re looking for some other way of pricing carbon. Can you talk at all about what the prospects are? Ken Salazar: Nothing is easy. I mean, the votes you saw yesterday on healthcare show how difficult it is to get things done in Washington these days. So we don’t underestimate the kind of challenge that we have, but the president has been very clear from the first day — which I have been a part of his team helping pull this together — is we need to address energy and climate change and do it in a comprehensive manner. And the principals that really drive us are ones that are old but timeless, and they are national security — we need to find a way of moving forward to a new energy future, we can’t be as dependent as we have been on the Middle East and Venezuela and other places where we get our oil from. Secondly, the economics of it. We are sending 700 billion to $1 trillion overseas for the oil that we’re buying. It creates an economic dislocation as we transfer all this wealth from America to those places. So a new energy future will help us, in our view, create jobs here, as we’re seeing already here in places in California. And third, it’s about clean air and dangers of pollution and what that’s doing to our plant. As I see from that last point from the perch that I have as the secretary of the Interior, I know Glacier National Park will not have any glaciers by the year 2020; I know that Pelican Island, the first wildlife refuge which President Roosevelt declared in 1903, is now almost totally submerged by the rising sea; I know that in the Great Lakes, Lake Superior and the Apostle Islands, which is one of our national parks, is now seeing the surface of that lake on average being five degrees warmer than it was even 30 years ago. So the issue is not going to go away, and there are compelling imperatives for us to address it. …
