How high a priority is the public relations aspect: getting Americans to demand that those areas be saved?
It's an enormous priority.
We need to focus on the specific places [the drilling] is happening. People are not and should not be upset at the intrinsic idea of drilling for oil. It's the kinds of places they are going to drill for oil.
So, you tell the story. You tell the story in press releases. You tell the story by releasing reports. You tell the story by taking reporters to the places.
How do you explain the fact that the Senate voted to save ANWR, but defeated a bill that would have placed higher fuel efficiency standards on automakers?
[The issue of fuel standards] is rather central to what happened on Sept. 11. It is central to our being held hostage to the oil nations in the Middle East, and yet most senators, all but 36 of them, treated that vote as a vote about the auto show [what cars people could buy] instead of a vote about what's good for the nation. There was a real lack of statesmanship on that.
I think there are three reasons that the Bush administration supports drilling instead of conservation. The first one, and probably the most important, is that they've been handsomely paid to oppose those things. The second is that, ideologically, I think that the vice president and the president honestly believe that conservation may be a personal virtue, but it's not what real men do. Real men don't build windmills. Real men build oil wells. So there's the Texas thing.
And the third thing is that anything that Clinton and Gore were for, they're against. They have adolescent oppositional disorder.
Also, the bill's supporters skewed the public's perception of the debate by arguing that "Americans don't want to be told what car to drive," as if increased fuel standards would make it illegal for Americans to drive SUVs. How were they allowed to get away with that?
We are perplexed. They spent a lot of money very shrewdly. They were very cynical. We obviously made mistakes. When you get beaten that badly, you have to admit that you made mistakes.
I think the thing that Americans didn't understand, and that we failed to communicate adequately, and the media failed to communicate adequately, was that the issue is not about whether you drive an SUV, it's about whether you have the choice of buying a good SUV. If you take a Ford Explorer that now gets 19 miles per gallon and you put a better engine, a better transmission and better tires on it, you would get 34 miles per gallon. People don't know that.
They think you don't want them driving a Ford Explorer, period.
Right, and that is what the auto industry spent $15 million telling them. And we did not do an adequate job of explaining to them: Here's how your Ford Explorer can get 34 miles per gallon.
How would you have gotten the word out?
Well, there are the usual techniques: You buy newspaper ads, and you use mail and you use e-mail, but I'll tell you what we're going to do.
We are putting together something we call the Freedom Package. The Freedom Package is a package of options which right now, General Motors or Ford or Chrysler or Toyota could offer as an option package on their vehicles. And the Freedom Package would take a Ford Explorer from 19 miles per gallon to 34 miles per gallon and would cost you $950 on an Explorer. That would be the price of the package. And you would save $4,000 over the life of the car. And we are going to have a campaign in which we campaign to people what the Freedom Package is. And why it's patriotic.
But shouldn't the onus be on the automakers to be producing energy-efficient cars?
Well, the only problem is that you can't get the public to demand that the automakers be responsible, unless the public first understands that the automakers are being irresponsible.
Then what we want is for people to go into the showroom and say "I want an SUV with a Freedom Package," and I want the salesman to look them in the eye and say, "Well, we don't offer the Freedom Package."
Does this mean you've given up on passing a measure that would force automakers to change -- in other words, top-down change, instead of from the consumers on up?
No, no, we'll pass the measure. The first step is to have it offered as an option. We want the Freedom Package to be standard equipment, and to get it to be standard equipment, everyone has to do it. There has to be a law. Just like the reason seat belts are standard equipment is because there was a law.
But seat belts didn't happen because people went in and paid extra to have seat belts put on their cars; they happened because the change was made from the top down, on the grounds of safety.
Well, the change was actually made because people knew that seat belts existed. And then some companies started offering them.
I mean, I can say to you, yes, the American automobile industry should be patriotic, responsible and should actually be interested in making cars in the U.S. 25 or 30 years from now. I can want all those things. I can make a case for them. But they're not true. The U.S. auto industry has actually no particular desire to make cars in the U.S. in 20 years. They're getting ready to go to Mexico. So they don't want to invest in any new technology in U.S. plants. Because they don't want to be in the U.S.
We did a poll in Michigan. Eighty-eight percent of autoworkers in Michigan wanted mandatory 40 mile per gallon fuel economy standards. They knew that if that didn't happen, Americans were going to stop buying badly designed, badly engineered SUVs and were going to start buying well-designed, well-engineered and fuel-efficient Japanese SUVs.
Next page: "We have a tremendous amount of respect for what Julia Butterfly Hill did"