behind, that's very clear from your book, secretary chu says it all the time, are we ever -- >> guest: well, i don't think, i don't think, i don't think we're behind. i think we're at the forefront. we're at the forefront technologically. china has the manufacturing, you know, low-cost manufacturing and driving down the cost. so that's why they're moving so fast. it's not like they have some great insights that we don't. they also have, you know, some very important wind sources. the government officials talking about the winds in the northwest, we used to regard them as a natural disaster, now we regard them as a precious resource. i don't think whether china has x number of wind turbines and -- i don't think we're winning or losing in that race. i think at the heart of it is what's happened in innovation. and i think that we continue to be, we're there, we have great universities. i think there is -- and we have something else, we have more players coming into the game, you know, venture capitalists and others. so there's just more going on. i don't think we're going to lose. i do think that what's kind of on the horizon right now or coming down the road would be a better way to put it is a kind of an electric car race or a race for an electric car. and that is, that certainly has strategic elements to it. >> host: one of the other things i was really struck with, and again, this is me linking what you say in your book to some more current events. um, the kyoto protocol, eisenstadt was working for the clinton administration at the time pushed using markets just like we did for so2, just like we did for lead which, by the way, whenever i've written about emissions trading and market pricing pollution, if you want to say it, i've never -- >> guest: exactly. [laughter] yeah. and it's another ronald reagan story. >> host: absolutely. >> guest: reagan in his cabinet meeting said, you know, when i was a young man and gasoline was considered this great technological advance, and now we're going to get rid of it. you all remember? and he looked around his cabinet room, and he said, none of you are old enough to remember. [laughter] >> host: right. so when he was arguing against the europeans, basically, he wanted to have a mandate -- [inaudible conversations] >> host: yeah, yeah. command and control. he said there are three issues; cost, cost, and cost. and the cost of mitigating climate change without a system would be far too expensive for any economy to bear. do you agree with that? because as we know, our attempt in the u.s. to set up a market system via legislation, um, is permanently stalled. >> guest: right. >> host: with no hope. is the clean air act too expensive? do you think the clean air act's too expensive to bear? >> >> guest: well, it is interesting because the whole development of using markets to solve environmental problems was, you know, sort of a development of 1980s and 1990s as a much more efficient way. you department have the command and control -- you didn't have the command and control doing it -- >> host: it was a republican idea. >> guest: that's right. it goes back to george h.w. bush's administration. indeed, it goes back to ronald reagan's administration. and it meant the cost reductions for reducing so2 from coal-electric generation was much slow or than had been anticipated. and what i find when i was listening to people talk about cap and trade, and that narrative always went back to what had happened in the early 1990s. i was just fascinated. i kind of wanted to get the story of, indeed, how did that happen. and then we just found out that cap and trade for a society is much harder to do than something that's fairly focused on a number of -- [inaudible conversations] >> guest: yeah. so i think it's -- so i would say, you know, what are we doing about climate policy today, getting cars to 54 miles a gallon, renewable standards, you know, one-third of california's electricity is talking about from renew ables. you know, that's climate policy. >> host: we can do this transition from a fossil fuel-based electricity to a -- [inaudible] >> guest: well, i think others would say you have to have some form of a rice on carbon, and that would change everything. but, you know, that becomes, you know, a complex political, very complex political question in the united states. but i think what i was trying to -- and, also, i think we have to realize these energy transitions actually take a long time. wind is a big business today, but it's still small compared to the overall energy business, but it's going to grow. >> host: there's one quote, and we have a minute left, and i'm going to paraphrase it because i don't want -- oh, no, here it is. um, but i wanted to ask you about it because it really struck me n. a massive book when one quote kind of -- >> guest: okay. i'm bracing myself now. >> host: so you were talking about, um, an indian scientist, the head of the environment ministry, his last name is ramesn okay. he sawferred an unusual -- he offered an unusual perspective. the climate atheists, the climate agnostics and the climate evangelicals. i think we could probably put people that are in the public into some categories. which one are you? >> guest: well, i think that i look on climate as, i mean, it's clear the whole story about measuring carbon, carbon is going up in the atmosphere, and, you know, the impacts on climate. what the timing is, what the models are going to show, i'm not a climate scientist, that's not what i'm doing, so i try to explain how the scientific consensus turned into a political consensus -- >> host: are you an agnostic? >> guest: well -- >> host: you don't want to label yourself? [laughter] >> guest: what i wanted to do was tell the story and help people have a framework when all these issues come along, to see them in perspective. and i wanted to do it in a very narrative way. >> host: thank you very much. >> guest: thank you. >>s that was "after words," booktv's signature program in which authors of the latest nonfiction books are interviewed by journalists, public policymakers, legislators and others familiar with their material. after words airs at 10 p.m. on saturday, 12 and 9 p.m. on sunday and 12 a.m. on monday. you can also watch "after words "online. go to booktv.org and click on "after words" in the book and series topic list on the upper right side to have page. >> recently, booktv visited george mason university to interview several professors who have written new books. over the last few sundays, we've spoke to meredith ware and several others. this weekend we talked to christopher hamner, author of "enduring battle: american soldiers in three wars, 1776-1945." and steven barnes, author of "depth and redemption: the gulag and shaping of modern society." all of the interview there is the george mason college series are available online at booktv.org. >> this is booktv on c-span2, and we're on the campus of george mason university in fairfax, virginia, doing our university professors series where we have the chance to talk to professors from different universities about the books they've published. maybe you haven't heard of them, maybe they're not going on tour. we get a chance to talk with them. now joining us is professor christopher hamner, history professor here at george mason. and his newest book is called "enduring battle: american soldiers in three wars, 1776-1945." professor hamner, what three wars did you choose and why? >> guest: the book looks at the experience of american history soldiers in the war for independence, the civil war and the second world war. and i picked those three because i wanted to survey broadly the experience of soldiers fighting in three different centuries. so what was similar about their experiences of being on the ground and fighting and what the differences in that experience was, were and how and why they evolved over time. >> host: what consistencies did you find from the revolutionary war to world war ii? >> guest: well, for soldiers in battle there are some very profound commonalities, obviously. the presence of danger, the smothering appearance of death, the threat of injury, disfigurement, the confusion, the chaos, the noise. those things change very little. in fact, i think we could go back, you know, thousands of years ago from ancient times and find those exact qualities just as you would find in the 21st century combat zone. >> host: so there's a constant. what about dissimilarities? >> guest: the dissimilarities are often overlooked. sometimes by the veterans themselves. a number of the soldiers that i performed research on, 20th century, often remarked that they imagined their experience had been very much like their predecessors. you'll have a world war ii soldier comparing hi training to the experiences to predecessors. i found a soldier in the second world war who's standing in the midst of a wrecked german town, looked around and was reminded of the famous photograph of civil war battlefields and remarked in his memoir that he imagined that war was a universal experience and that the only thing that changed was the uniforms. if you look carefully at these experiences, however, much more than the uniform changes. the experience of a continental soldier in the war of independence in 1777 had some really significant differences than, say, a world war ii g.i. fighting in northwest europe in 1944. >> host: such as? >> guest: well, continental soldiers like their successors in civil war armies went into battle in linear formations. they were packed shoulder to shoulder and elbow to elbow. a soldier maybe in the midst of a formation and find a row of comrades in front of him and rows behind him, a fellow at each shoulder or each elbow. they went into battle in a very conspicuous fashion; brightly-colored uniforms, waving banners and flags often accompanied by drums, by trumpets, by the shouted commands of officers. and in that linear system of tactics, combat for the ground soldier resembled two armed mobs crashing into each other. it was noisy, it was chaotic, it happened in the midst of a crowd. in the 20th century, advances in weapons technology had made those linear formations all but suicidal. it was impossible to march hundreds of soldiers elbow to elbow and shoulder to shoulder into battle because one enemy machine gun position or one high explosive artillery shell could liquidate an entire formation. the solution to the tactical problem that these new technologies presented was to disperse the soldiers, to camouflage them, to make use of cover and concealment so that they were hidden from enemies and not clumped together where, you know, a single machine gun position or single shell could destroy an entire company. but that simple fact of dispersion, camouflage and cover has some very profound implications for the way soldiers experience combat on the ground. >> host: christopher hamner, what about training? you spent a lot of time in your book talking about the different training techniques. >> guest: the differences in training are very vivid. in the 18th and 19th centuries, soldiers spent most of their time in training engaged in drill. it's vitally important for an infantry formation to keep its integrity physically. the soldiers have to stay together, they have to march in lock step, they had to load and discharge and reload their weapons in perfect sin rony. as you can imagine, amidst the danger and the chaos and the confusion of combat, that became a very difficult task. and so the training regimens of the 18th and 19th centuries emphasized rote memorization, repetition of, you know, a small number of physical manipulations that would enable the soldiers to perform together effectively in combat. in the 20th century, psychologists refer to those terms, those kinds of manipulations as overlearned tasks. anyone who's played a sport or musical instrument is familiar with the phenomenon. things that you have ingrained in your, in your body through physical repetition become easier to perform in stressful situations. and so in the 18th and is is 19h centuries, much of the training regimen was focused on getting soldiers to perform this set of manipulations almost robotically. in fact, a number of military theorists at the 18th and 19th centuries suggested that in order for a human being to become an effective infantry soldier, he had to first be transformed into an automaten, someone who performed almost mechanically. by the 20th century, behaving as an automaton was no longer useful because soldiers could not move and fire in lock step because they were dispersed. they had to act with a great degree of autonomy. they had to make a number of very critical, snap decisions about what they would do and where they would go, where they would aim their fire. they had to be able to do that amid the stress and confusion of combat, and they had to be able to do it very quickly. and so while there was still a great deal of drill even in the 20th century combat training regimens, there was also a new emphasis on realistic training. this is the dawn of battle inoculation. put soldiers in live-fire exercises. put them in scenarios that mimic as closely as possible the actual danger and noise and confusion of battle so that they can become accustomed to the flood of accent lip and the temporary -- adrenaline and the temporary deafness. put them in live-fire drills, in realistic exercises. many stateside training facilities featured a mock village that soldiers could go through that had pop-up targets in the windows that they could break as nearly as possible some of the conditions they would encount when they deployed. there was very little in terms of learning to maneuver with a unit and to do so so consistently that even amidst the chaos of battle, soldiers would still be able to respond to commands. >> host: enduring battle is christopher hamner's first book. he's an associate professor of history, george mason university. the university press of kansas published this book. what about when it comes to so-called just cause? what about the glory of the cause that they're fighting for? >> guest: that's a really fascinating question and i think one that intrudes on the thoughts of soldiers from each century often before they go into battle and even more often after they leave battle. interestingly, the soldiers that i studied in my research when they were actually in combat, that is when the bullets are flying and the adrenaline is flowing through one's veins, many of them remarked that notions of cause, ideology, patriotism, those all receded fairly dramatically to the background. you can find colorful remarks from soldiers of each era commenting on that, one civil war soldier said in the heat of combat your interest extends no further than what you can see past your gun sights. a soldier from the mid 20th century in the united states army who said, you know, patriotism is well and good before we go into combat, but when the bullets are flying, you're thinking about saving your own skin. so ideology and cause undoubtedly, you know, incredibly important in motivating soldiers to enlist, keeping them with the army between battles. but seem to play a less, a less significant role when combat has actually been engaged simply because the circumstances are so urgent that they crowd out other more abstract concepts. >> host: where'd you come up with the idea of comparing these three wars? >> guest: i have had an abiding interest in human behavior particularly in the life-threatening or traumatic circumstances. my initial expectation was that the sort of orthodox explanation of soldier motivation, that is that they fight, you know, out of the bonds of cohesion and affection that form between soldiers would, would, in fact, be the case. and i wanted to select, um, three conflicts that happened in very different technological circumstances. in effect, to test that theory. the continental soldiers of the war of independence were using relatively inaccurate, slow-loading smooth bore single-shot muskets. by the 20th century american g.i.s had an incredibly impressive array of weaponry. the battlefield had changed very dramatically, and i wanted to put these experiences side by side and see what kinds of similarities and differences emerged. >> host: professor hamner, i want to go back to your