Later was chief counselor of the Senate Agriculture committee. In 1988 he founded the wellknown Government Relations firm with his brother tony. He served president clinton as to be the chief of staff and then as white house chief of staff until 2001. He was cochairman of obamas Transition Team in 2008. He is the proud father of air force captain gabe podesta. So much for prior review. Now to the process portion of our program. Anga a gas alliance is sponsoring todays breakfast. Our thanks to them, for sitting at the table back there keeping me from the pain of premature retirement. Sponsors or not, we are on the record here. No live blogging and no filing of any kind while the breakfast is underway to give us time to listen to what the guest says. There will be no embargo at the end. As regular attendees know the monitor breakfast is one of the last bastions of fusty folkways. Do the traditional thing and send me a subtle nonthreatening signal, and i will happily call on everyone with the time we have available. We will move to questions around the table. I would like to thank them again for doing this. Good to be here. I want to start and talk for two minutes. Lots has been going on in washington this week, what one of the things i have been focused on is the rollout of the proposal to reduce Carbon Pollution from power plants across the United States, which Gina Mccarthy announced on monday. I raise that because one of my principal duties now at the white house is to coordinate our activity on Climate Change and energy, and put this in a little bit of context. Power plants are accounting for about 40 of the co2 pollution in the u. S. , 1 3 of the overall Greenhouse Gas emissions. It is the largest source of Carbon Dioxide emissions in the United States. It is important to reduce the level of pollution. The president began to discuss this proposal when he went to Childrens Hospital to tape his weekly address a week ago today, which aired last saturday. The reason he did that is because there are Huge Public Health benefits that will attend and come from this rule. More than 130,000 asthma attacks amongst children avoided, 2800 heart attacks avoided, 2700 to 6600 premature deaths, visits to hospital emergency rooms, lost workdays. Today we will release a report that links the effects of Climate Change to Public Health. Many of the benefits that i just discussed come from that coal benefit from reducing traditional pollutants, so2, nox, and pm2. 5 emissions. Climate change itself will increasingly be a problem for our Public Health, and the report we will be releasing goes to the National Climate assessment as well as the ipcc report to show how the effects of Climate Change will have effect on groundlevel ozone, which is predicted to raise, for example, the emergency room visits in Suffolk County by 10 over the next decade. There are more frostfree days, which means there are more plantbased allergens in the upper midwest, which will lead to more lost workdays. Carbon pollution enhances the urban heat effects, and it has a particular effect on the elderly who are living in environments where they can be affected by it in stronger way, some in the distribution of diseases from west nile virus or lyme disease that are being affected in the United States. Particularly, dealing with this rule, reducing Carbon Pollution, will have the effect on asthma. It is the third leading cause of hospitalization for children. Africanamericans are twice as likely to be hospitalized for asthma than whites. Latino children are 40 more likely to be hospitalized. In 2004 u. S. Spent 5 billion on medicaid on asthmarelated illnesses. We tend to get the job done, but we have created a flexible rule that can be implemented, but it will have enormous Health Benefits. I wanted to start with that because it has been what i have been up to this week. I would note that the jobs report came out this morning. We have a rule in the white house we do not talk about until 9 30, so i will watch the clock here and if anybody wants to ask me about that, when the Witching Hour hits, i will be happy to talk about it. We will start with kate and then david. Coverage of the power plant rules listed four hurdles that could stand in the way of getting it implemented. A court challenge, action by coaldependent states, action by congress under the congressional review act, or action by the next president , since the states have until 2018 to file plans. Which of those risks do you consider the greatest, and what are you doing to counter it . We are committed to getting this done. That is why we released it now. We have a year to finalize the rule. We are taking comments for 120 days. We have requested the Comment Period to be extended. I said when i came into my position in january my job to do was make sure that that direction to epa that the president gave last summer as part of the overall Climate Action plan was to propose this rule by june 1. When i said that, i did not realize that june 1 was a sunday. We managed to get it in on june 2, and we are committed to finishing the rule by next june. It gives the states one year to create plans that will then be reviewed by epa. You know, dave, that some states can move that back, particularly if they get together in regional arrangements, which is the most costeffective way that states might come together to get the reductions that will be required once the rule is finalized. And if they choose to go that route, as the northeast states have done, or as california has done, to go to a more marketbased system and get together to find the most costeffective reductions, then they will have until 2018 to finalize those plans. I am confident we will get our job done. I am confident we will resist any i have no doubt that there will be an attempt to try to overturn this to the congressional review act, but i am certain we have the votes to uphold the rule once it is finalized. There is a long history of litigation starting in 2007 that recognizes that co2 is a dangerous pollutant and that epa has the authority to regulate it. Theres no doubt going to be legal challenges to this, legal challenges to almost anything the epa does. But they have had a stunning string of success just this spring in terms of upholding their authority to tackle these major causes of pollution and major causes of illness in our country. Last one, about the politics of this. The president has been quoted to say i do not care to be president without the senate, but it was written in the post, in a contest between president ial legacy and senate control, obama has chosen legacy. He has exposed some Democratic Senate candidates to Political Risk he refused to take himself. I wonder if anything is wrong with that analysis . As some of you may remember me from my Previous Service of the white house, where i banned the word legacy, what the president is thinking about is he has an obligation to the American People, children, grandchildren, people who are making decisions today to build a cleaner, Brighter Future them, to build a Strong Economy based on a cleanenergy future, to tackle the problem of Climate Change. We are seeing the costs of that already from increased droughts and heat waves to storm surges, sea level rise. Across the country we are seeing the effects of Climate Change. We are seeing in the Public Health, as i mentioned earlier. The president s obligation is to do what he needs to do under the legal authorities that he has been granted by congress, through the clean air act, to ensure that we tackle this most important, really almost existential, problem. And i think if you think about it from a political perspective, a poll came out this week that shows there is a broad support for aching action to reduce Carbon Pollution. Roughly 70 cross the country. In red states and blue states, amongst republicans, independents, democrats, strong support for taking action to reduce Carbon Pollution. Theres no doubt some states where this is an issue that presents a different sort of political challenge, particularly coalproducing states. They will try to attack it and try to knock down that rating, and they will try to put it squarely in the context of the political campaigns that are ongoing in 2014. But i think anyone who wants to go out and talk about the benefits from this rule, do what the president did, visit Childrens Hospital in their home state. I think they will find that the politics is such that you can defend taking action here and the public will support that. I think we think that people who deny the existence of Climate Change, who want to try to run, suggesting they really are not scientists and they do not really get it, and cannot see what is going on around them, and they want to deny the Public Health effects that the pollution is having on our families and children in the country, i think that is the losing side of the argument. I am certain that if you think about this in the cycle coming forward, anybody who tries to be a climate denier in 2016 will have a hard time running on that nationally. But people need to put together the resources to fight back against Advertising Campaign from Koch Brothers and others, i think that is politics that people have to decide on their own and a statebystate or districtbydistrict basis. [indiscernible] i think it is a hard choice. [laughter] but i think i have no doubt that the narrative she tells in the book from her experience of secretary of state albright, and she will lay the fact is out as she saw them. I am anxious to read it. I have read some of the excerpts of the book, and i saw a little bit, a couple of passages of it earlier. Like most of you, im still catching up with the excerpts that are now being printed. I am sure it will be interesting for the public to see what it is like to have to take on those tough problems that she took on quite successfully, and i think as secretary of state, and i think the public is awaiting being able to line up at the bookstore in manhattan, i guess, tuesday, and get copies of the book. What is a complicated epa rule [indiscernible] one thing that you mentioned earlier was about how some states have until as late as 2018 to finalize how theyre going to do this. As you know that was used to the next administration. You run the risk of possibly ceding too much ground to that next what house, especially if a republican is there . Well, you know, i think again that the country needs to tackle this problem. I think with the deadline of 2018, it exists for states that want to join together to try to reduce emissions in the most costeffective way possible. I think states that choose that option will make a commitment to do that and Carry Forward with making those reductions. The rule will have been finalized. So the need for states to reduce their emissions will have been finalized by the end of the obama administration. They will be under legal obligation to try to take those reductions down. I think states that decide whether they want to join with california, and i know there are some discussions on the west coast of not only washington and oregon, but other states, perhaps, combining with ab32 system that california has implemented or other standards wanted to join rggi, new jersey, depending on what the election in pennsylvania, you might see that happening. There are other states that might decide that path forward. But i think once you made that decision, then i think there will be a legal obligation to move forward with it. There will be a political commitment to move forward with it. I think this will be implemented. President bush tried to overturn a number of rules that president clinton issued at the end of his term. I believe none were successful, many in the environmental arena, a few that president bush finally, when they did go into effect, took credit for, if my memory serves me correctly, including the diesel rule and others, but he tried to reverse others, and they were the courts finalized them under the laws that were prevailing at the time. People could try to roll it back. Im fairly confident. I am fairly confident we will have a president who embraces the cause of tackling Climate Change and reducing emissions. I think if you think about a challenge in the 2016 context and the politics of this in the 2016 politics, if you are a climate denier trying to run nationally, you will have a hard road to hoe getting elected in the United States. The Climate Action plan, the rules, is that the peak . Do you hope to accomplish more in the Obama Presidency . The Climate Action plan that was put out last summer is based on three pillars. Mitigation, of which this is the crown jewel, but other elements, including implementing efficiency rules for heavyduty truck and more deployment of renewables. We are doubling the amount of renewables on publicpermitted lands. We just had a successful solar summit. The president was out in california recently expanding both the commitment to distribute solar as well to more building efficiency. One is mitigation. The second is resilience. This is the First Administration that has focused on the fact that were looking at a significant amount of Climate Change baked into the system and that communities are going to have to react to that, plan for that, and build more resilient economies Going Forward, so that there is a whole work stream Going Forward on that. The president has proposed 1 billion in the current budget gives states and communities the resources they need to begin to plan for the bakedin the effects of Climate Change. The third is on the international front. We have a strong dialogue going at both the multilateral level. The president was just at the g7. This was a serious topic, and all the g7 leaders recommitted themselves to try to move forward towards positive outcome in negotiations that will culminate in paris in 2015, and are all committed to put forward significant reduction strategies in the post2020 period at that time. They spent a lot of time talking about Building Energy security, particularly in the european system, as a result of the aggressive actions the russians have taken in ukraine. So there is a lot to do at the international side. One of the principal places we are in dialogue is the with the chinese. Theres news coming out of china, but it is mostly from academic advisors to the government, about what they intend to do in this post2020 period, but theres movement in china to take on a commitment to have their emissions peak and reduce them. There is a lot to do. I think this is the most important element, but it is one element of a multipronged strategy. [indiscernible] as opposed to medicare. Why not do it permanently . Why not just turn it into a voucher, . The veteran system, and i think people who you have seen in the press recently has served veterans well when they are getting care. This has been a problem of being able to get into the system. I think the bill that senator sanders and senator mccain just agreed upon night is a much better way to go than privatizing our Veterans Health care. We have a sacred obligation to our veterans to provide Health Benefits that they have been promised, and i think resources that are contained in the sandersmccain bill will focus on getting more primary care doctors into the system, the focus on improving the facilities that would come from the resources that are contained in that bill would be a much better way to go than simply privatizing the system. And that bill is on the president s commitment, which sometimes gets lost in the recent conversations, of having expanding access for pts for agent orange, for taking care of veterans, the babyboomer veterans that are now entering the system, as well as the post 9 11 veterans who need care and need quality of care that the veterans system is capable of delivering, but we obviously have problems in the structure of how that service was being performed. And, you know, the acting secretary has not taken action, as he announced in phoenix yesterday, you improve that, but i think it is going to take the kind of legislation that is not moving on a bipartisan aces to the senate to really improve the delivery of health care in the system. We also obviously are looking for someone to lead the v. A. , who can lead the Veterans Health system, who can perform the kind of reinvention that will be necessary to get those improvements in place. George . There is a lot of democratic unhappiness with the level of the president s engagement in the congressional campaigns. They are happy with how effective he is at rais