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Leo DiCaprio, uncut
Editor's note:When actor Leonardo DiCaprio interviewed President Clinton for an ABC Earth Day special, a furor ensued within ABC News that, as of last week, had still not calmed down. Saturday, viewers got only a few minutes of the DiCaprio/Clinton interview, but the White House Sunday released the entire transcript from the 30-minute interview, which appears below.
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April 23, 2000 | Oval Office patio March 31, 2000, 1:15 p.m.(EST)
DiCaprio: Mr. President, I want to thank you very much for your time. And as you know, I'm neither a politician, nor a journalist, but being given the opportunity to sit down with you here and talk about an issue like global warming was an opportunity as a concerned citizen that I couldn't pass up. So my first question is, global warming is obviously a controversial topic among scientists and politicians. What is your understanding of what the effects of climate change will have on our future if preventative steps aren't taken immediately? Clinton: Well, let me, first of all, thank you for your interest in this because I think it's important that we get citizens more involved in it; and secondly say, I don't think it's all that controversial a topic among scientists. There are a few who say that it's not proven, but we know that the hottest years in recorded history, and certainly in the last 600 years, that nine of the hottest 11 years have occurred in the last decade. So the climate is changing and the globe is warming at an unsustainable rate. And if it is not slowed and ultimately reversed, what will happen is the polar ice caps will melt more rapidly; sea levels will rise; you will have the danger of flooding in places like the precious Florida Everglades, or the sugarcane fields of Louisiana; island nations could literally be buried; the whole climate of the United States, for example, could be changed where you would have more flooding, more heat waves, more storms, more extreme weather events generally. And then you'll have some public health consequences. For example, we're already seeing in Africa, for example, malaria being found at higher and higher altitudes where it used to be too cool for the mosquitoes. So there will be a lot of very bad, more dramatic weather events. There will be a shift in the patterns of agricultural production. There will be flooding that will quite bad, and there will be more public health crises. DiCaprio: While growing up, I always felt that environmental issues were constantly overlooked, and I watched people band together for various causes which seemed to come and go, and it was almost like they were going in and out of style. So how do we take a misunderstood issue like climate change and not only raise awareness, but make its prevention an ongoing commitment? Clinton: Well, I think we have to make climate change a local and a personal matter in the same way other successful environmental issues are. You know, since I've been here, we've been able to strengthen the quality of our air, strengthen the quality of our water. We've set aside more land for protection and protected more forests than virtually any administration in history, except those of the two Roosevelts, because they were things people could understand and identify with, and they knew how to advocate for, and they understood the benefits. So I think we have to bring this down to practical applications and convince people that they can do something about it, No. 1, and No. 2, we have to talk about the first question you asked me -- what are the consequences of not doing anything. But there's so much we can do. We started a project here at the White House called the Greening of the White House. Just by changing the lighting in this whole building we lowered our electric bills by $100,000 a year. Then we put in a different sort of roofing system which kept out more heat and cold. Then we put in a more energy-efficient heating system and water system. We brought more energy-efficient equipment -- copiers, computers -- all with the Energy Star label, which is a totally voluntary thing the Department of Energy provides. Now, these are things that businesses all across America could be doing. They're things that homes all across America could be doing. We've worked with the home builders to help build lower-cost housing that will cut energy use by 50 percent. There's one housing development built in the Inland Empire out in Southern California, east of L.A., for lower-income working people where the average utility bills are 65 percent lower than in houses of comparable size in the rest of California -- just by putting the most modern, thin solar panels on the roofs, by having sensible insulation, by having energy-efficient lighting and by taking new windows that let in more light and keep out more heat and cold. These things are out there now, and I think when people know there's actually something they can do, as well as what the consequences of our not acting and not pushing Congress and other countries to act are, then I think you'll see action. DiCaprio: Well, my other question pertaining to that is, if there was a profit incentive there, would that make us pay more attention? Clinton: Yes, there should be more of a profit incentive. I mean, right now, for example, if you take the most energy-efficient lighting, it costs you more now, up front, but it lasts so much longer, eventually you turn a profit. And this is true in many processes in all the energy fields. So what I have proposed to the Congress is that we do basically two things. First of all, we give significant tax breaks to consumers to buy energy-efficient products of all kinds; and that we also give tax breaks for people to manufacture and develop them. And then, that we spend more money on research, like the project we've had that the vice president headed for new-generation vehicles, that we work with the auto companies and the auto workers union to develop more energy-efficient vehicles and to develop alternative forms of fuel, including biofuels, which could dramatically change the whole future with regard to the greenhouse gases we've put into the atmosphere. So there's a lot more we can do and we ought to provide tax incentives to the private sector to help us. But what I want to drive home is that right now it is no longer necessary in order to grow our economy to put more greenhouse gases, which cause global warming, into the atmosphere. You don't have to burn more oil and coal to get richer now. Not in America; not anywhere else. DiCaprio: Now, in Kyoto, in the 1997 Global Conference on Climate Change, it asked industrialized countries to drastically reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. And when we tried to enforce such protocols in developing countries, they came right back to us and said that the U.S. is responsible for a quarter of the greenhouse gases that are going into the atmosphere. How can we not practice what we preach? Clinton: Well, first, I think we should practice what we preach. And that's why I think it's so important that the Congress pass the budget that I recommended that would dramatically increase our investment in developing the kinds of technologies and alternative fuels that would cut our greenhouse gas emissions. But I also believe that we have a big stake in working with other countries to convince them that they, too, can grow without increasing greenhouse gas emissions. For example, no matter how much we cut emissions in the United States, since this is a global problem, unless we also get China and India and the countries that have the big rain forests to work with us, we're going to be in real trouble. So, for example, when I was in Bangladesh recently I announced a debt-for-nature swap that we were going to help finance with them. I signed a bill to do the same thing with the South American rain forest last year. In India, we signed an agreement by which they committed that as they continue to grow and need more power, that they'll have more and more coming from natural and renewable sources in the future, so that we can work together, because it is a global problem. But we should lead the way. And since we have already so much technology, and since, as I've just explained, just with these minor things we cut the power bills here at the White House by $100,000, and we're going to do it across the federal government -- if the federal government alone will do what we did at the White House, we'll save $750 million a year, and it will be the equivalent in terms of greenhouse gases and climate change of taking 1.7 million cars off the road. We should be doing that. But we should also work with other countries. I tell other countries, the developing countries, I'm not asking you to give up your growth; I'm not asking you to give jobs up. I'm asking you to pursue a different pattern of energy use, which will give you more growth, more jobs, and a healthier population over the long run. So I think this really is a win-win issue here. This is not the way it used to be 30, 40 years ago. You can grow an economy and use less energy if you do it right.
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