Breakthrough | Ted Nordhaus & Michael Shellenberger | Talks at Google

Good afternoon and I'm delighted to welcome Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger here to Google. I imagine many of you have heard of them from the. I guess it was an essay on the death environmentalism two years ago, maybe, I'm not sure, 2004.

2004.

So four years ago almost raised quite a stir in the environmental community. And they now have a book looking beyond that to what we could actually do to make change for the better. And that's what they're going to focus on today.

So welcome.

Thanks for coming.

Thanks for having us. Well, thanks everybody for showing up. I'm Michael Shellenberger, this is Ted Nordhaus. I think we'll just do brief introductions and then dive in. So those of you that were lucky enough to sit in the first couple rows have access to the book. Those of you that want to get it later can. The book is called Breakthrough. And the book is about creating a new politics that is capable of dealing with the big ecological crises we face. And there's a lot in this book that is not about climate change. There's a chapter, for example, about the different ways in which we're making community with each other. There's a chapter about how people feel more insecure even though we're more wealthy at a material level. But today we're mostly going to focus on climate. And we're going to Talk for about 30 minutes and go through a few slides and make an argument about why we think we need a radically different approach to. To dealing with climate change than the dominant approach that really the world has been pursuing for the last 20 years. So just by way of introduction, I came out of. I've been working in the environmental movement really my whole professional life. I was working on climate change in the late 1990s, and I asked a client of mine whether it was true, what I had been hearing, that if we do anything about global warming, it will destroy the economy. And. And I was in the process of publicizing a big report about the threats of global warming, and he said to me, he said, you know, it's not true at all if we do this right. Innovation, technology, innovation, the job creations, the new businesses and profits we'll get from the clean energy sector will be like what we did with Silicon Valley. And it had a very powerful and lasting impression on me. And at that very moment, when he said it, I even asked him, I was like, well, why is it that we don't ever talk about that? Why is it that we have a politics so much about gloom and Doom. So with that, let me have Ted introduce himself and then we'll jump in.

Yeah, and my name is Ted Nordhaus, and like Michael, I spent my pretty much my entire adult life, entire professional career, working in the environmental movement. Actually over 20 years now. I've been working on these issues since I was 18 years old back in 1984, knocking on doors in northern suburban northern Virginia, trying to talk to people about recycling their bottles and cans. But I. And over the last 20 years, have worked in, you know, as a grassroots organizer, running campaigns, as a consultant to environmental groups. Michael and I over the last 15 years have worked as consultants to virtually every major national environmental group and most a whole lot of small local and regional ones as well. Right around 2000, I made the transition sort of out of doing kind of campaign consulting to actually being a pollster and really working on the sort of public opinion side, understanding how Americans were sort of thinking about and reasoning about a whole variety of issues, including environmental issues. And Michael and I had worked back in the 90s saving old growth forests here in California. But in 2003, started working together again on something called the Apollo alliance, which was a project to really try to jumpstart the transition to the clean energy economy. And it was out of the sort of lessons learned and also some of the frustrations with the effort to kind of really kind of create a policy that would help us make a quantum leap forward in making the transition to a clean energy economy that we wrote our original essay, Death of Environmentalism. As we became clearer and clearer that the sort of environmental politics of the day, and largely still the environmental politics that we have today, really wasn't very well suited to pushing the kind of agenda that was necessary to make the transition we need to make. So that's when we wrote the essay. And obviously the book is a major expansion of the argument in the. So I think what we're going to do now is sort of talk, mostly because we know that particularly here at Google, you all have been so involved in sort of thinking about sort of clean energy and how we make that transition. We're really going to focus a lot on that and climate change and how we think we get from here to where we need to go.

Great. So before I advance to the next slide, I'll just. In a nutshell, one of the core arguments that we make about environmentalism is that environmentalism did a pretty good job dealing with problems like smog in Los Angeles, acid rain, through what we call a politics of limits, focused on restricting pollution, restricting These environmental challenges, you know, preventing these environmental challenges through restricting pollution and sort of constraining certain human activities. Global warming, on the other hand, requires something very different. It requires what we call a politics of possibility. So the argument that we made in the essay and we extend in the book, is that environmentalism needs to die, so to speak, so that something new can be born. Something that's much more oriented towards unleashing human power and potential rather than restricting it. And we come to that through a look at some pretty hard empirical evidence on this. It's a little blurry, but on this chart you can see this is just China. This is China in 2000. You know, China's emissions in 2006 in blue. And then over the next four years, you can see China is going to add to its total emissions the same amount of emissions that are brought on, that are contributed every year in total by Japan, Germany, Canada and the United Kingdom, all of which are Kyoto ratifiers. And we point this out to say that whatever we do has to keep the China challenge in mind, that even if we were to stop emitting all greenhouse gases tomorrow, we would still have a massive climate challenge just due to a single country, which is China, not to mention all of Europe, the rest of Asia, Latin America, and so many other countries.

So what is it going to take to reduce our emissions to the levels that climate scientists say we need to reduce them to stabilize the climate? Well, a useful starting point. There's a lot of talk about getting our cutting our emissions, global emissions, in half by 2050. And you can see this chart. This was actually presented by. Is this what was presented by the iea? Yeah, this was presented by the iea, International Energy Agency at Bali. So as the world was gathering in Bali to attempt to negotiate a successor to the Kyoto Accord, which proposed to make much greater reductions in emissions, the International Energy Agency sort of prepared some numbers to help the delegates get their heads around the scale of the challenge we're faced with. So you can see just to cut those emissions in half, what would be necessary. Replacing all of China's coal power plants with nuclear, solar or hydroelectric plants. You see, you can get about half of the emissions reductions that we need. Replacing all of India's coal plants gets you another significant reduction. And then you can see as we get into the US replacing all of our coal plants. And then, you know, when we start talking about a lot of the things that people tend to focus on in terms of trying to play their role in reducing emissions, things like replacing your light bulbs with Compact fluorescence. Well, you can't even really kind of see that wedge on this chart. So obviously, the challenge is enormous, and I think you want to go to the next slide.

Sure.

In that last chunk, there was nothing to do. You ran out of stuff after 25%.

We ran out of stuff after.

You see, just to get. Well, this gets you to half that halfway point.

Oh, okay. Okay.

Yeah. So this is. That's total global emissions. This is 50% emissions reductions. In other words, the little line is.

Pointing at the bottom of the column right here.

Okay.

You got the 50%, you're saying?

Yeah, yeah. The only thing Ted didn't mention was that if you planted 10 trees for every human being, that would take. That would take 135 metric tons.

Well, I mean, the steps that are listed there, where you've got reduction amounts associated with them, add up to, you know, 7,000. It's half of what we need for reductions. So I think you're right that of the 14,000 metric tons we need, you get about half of those from the. Doing all of that gets you halfway there.

Right?

Halfway there. So we need another. Another 7,000.

Here's another way to put it in a sort of an engineering framework. This is also part of this now sort of famous IEA presentation. If you want to get to 50% emissions reductions, you would need to build 30 new nuclear plants around the world, 17,000 wind turbines, 400 biomass plants, two hydroelectric dams the size of China's Three Gorges Dam. I don't know if you've all seen photos of this dam. It's just enormous. And then 42 sort of advanced coal and natural gas plants that capture the carbon emissions and store them either in the ground or in the oceans. A fairly untested technology, but a promising one. And then you have to do that every year between 2013 and 2030. Yeah.

Are you saying you have to do.

All of those every year? Yes, all of them.

It's really. It's like one of those things where it just requires a minute of sort of silent meditation on those numbers to really appreciate. Yeah, go ahead.

Do you believe that 50%, by. What is it, 2050? Do you believe that's enough? It's a good question.

Yeah. I mean, we don't know. I mean, I don't think any. I mean, the truth is. I mean, I think nobody knows. I mean, you're dealing with these incredibly complex models that are trying to model what are nonlinear, you know, nonlinear systems.

Right. I think, you know, for instance, some of you may have seen recently, both Dr. James Hansen, the very famous climate scientist, and Bill McKibben, the environmental writer, have both said that they believe that the target for sort of stabilization is not 450 parts per million, which is the number that everybody's been focused on when we talk about, you know, 50% or 80% by 2050, but is actually 350 parts per billion, which we're actually in excess of. That number is inconceivable when you factor in the sort of feedback loops. For instance, the amount of carbon that is already being sequestered in the world's Oceans. Getting to 350 would not only take even more radical steps than, than what we see here, but probably would require very substantial geoengineering, air capture, and a variety of other fairly extreme steps. You know, so I think, you know, if 350 really is the number, you know, it suggests that a whole lot of adaptation, even with making a pretty dramatic and rapid transition to a clean energy economy going to be necessary. And that's. We don't have a lot up there on that here. But that's another sort of one of the big arguments in our book is that we need to take preparedness and adaptation as seriously as we take, you know, sort of making the transition and reducing our emissions. Because even if we stopped emitting everything right now, we are going to see substantial impacts from climate change probably over the next century or the next couple of centuries.

And I'll just say one other thing about this. We'll come to it later in the presentation, but this is all with current technology. So one of the mantras that we've challenged and we've been very controversial around in the publicity around the book, is that the environmental community often says we have all the technology we need in order to deal with this problem. And that's a little bit like saying in 1960, we have all the technology we need to have a World Wide Web. Well, yes, there was sort of this rudimentary technology, but none of it is as cheap or as easily commercializable or easy to sort of get into widespread use as it needs to be.

So, you know, in one form or another, most of the current focus, both domestically and internationally to address climate change has been focused on establishing what economists call a price for carbon. And when you hear people talk about whether it's carbon taxes or carbon caps or carbon cap and trade policies as the sort of underlying and sort of central feature of a strategy to address climate change, we. What all of those strategies are attempting to do is to establish a price for carbon. In other words, essentially to make polluting forms of energy cost substantially more to drive both use and investment and private and public sort of planning for energy needs towards renewable alternatives. Now one of the challenges with this approach is that even today, with all of the progress that we have made in sort of improving the alternative technologies that will be needed to replace carbon based fuels and other energy sources, they are still in real deployed terms even here in the US and even much more so when we look at places like China and India and elsewhere in the developing world, much more expensive than the current polluting alternatives. And this chart here sort of shows what the price of CO2. This is the price for CO2 or carbon CO2, okay. The price for CO2 necessary to make different energy sources cost competitive with sort of basic polluting pulverized coal. And you can see the price per kilowatt hour for each of these. And, and I don't want anyone to glaze over here. We won't spend a lot of time getting into the specific numbers, but you can see the price. For instance, to make current solar photovoltaic technology competitive with coal, the price for carbon you would need to establish would be $219, actually. 200, about $220 per ton. That is wildly in excess of any carbon price that has been proposed in the US Congress. Wildly in excess of any carbon price that has been proposed internationally.

Yeah.

So a ton of CO2, about say.

How many gallons of gas do I have to burn in my car to produce one ton? So how would this translate to in pump prices is what I'm sort of thinking.

I believe at carbon price like that would probably about, I'm not sure on gasoline, but it would probably in the US roughly double electricity bills. I think that's right.

Yeah.

I see different projections on it.

Yeah.

But, but I think the point is, and you know, in the US arguably you could make a case that we can afford to do that. But the reality politically, and we'll talk a lot more about this in terms of public sensitivity to energy prices, is that even in wealthy nations, where arguably people are better able to afford it, doubling energy prices is pretty much politically a non starter and is likely to continue to be for a very long time, much less in the developing world where you know, literally they are still attempting to move huge. You know, China still has, for all the progress that has been made there economically, China still has half a billion people living in agrarian poverty. So the developing world has made very clear that they are not willing to establish a price for carbon not only at all, much less at levels approaching what we see here, which are what would be necessary to drive the kind of transition that we're looking at with given the current cost and performance of renewable energy alternatives.

So even with coal being that cheap.

India and China find that price point challenging as well.

Could you repeat the question?

Do China and you asked, do China and India find this same challenge around.

Prices you're asking is that even coal at the price that we see right now is sort of too expensive for a lot of Chinese to have energy to the energy that they need. And that's, you know, it's a little bit more complicated than that. In that sort of energy use is extremely closely tied to living standards, is extremely sort of closely tied to sort of the kind of production that's happening in the economy, a whole set of other things. But the reality is that for China to develop, they need as much cheap energy as they can get as quickly as possible. And that's the case in India and much of the rest of the developing world as well. So, you know, they look at 4 cents a kilowatt hour and kind of go, you know, that's the baseline and we're going to be interested in alternatives to that when they start to approach that kind of price.

Now, Nate Lewis, who's an energy scientist at Caltech, told the New York Times last year that that in China he estimates that Solar is about 50 times more expensive than coal. In the United States, they have wide change in estimates with the price of solar coming down, but, you know, generally is somewhere between three and five times more expensive.

And just before we move on, I think this may be later in the show as well, but it's relevant here when we talk, we talk a lot about the real deployed costs of these energy technologies as opposed to sort of the theoretical cost of, say, photovoltaic, because there are a whole set of things necessary to bring those technologies to scale beyond just how much it costs to produce energy from that energy source. You know, in a laboratory, you know, a grid storage technologies, there's a whole set of infrastructure and other technologies that are necessary to bring things like solar and even wind anywhere close to the kind of scales that we need to bring them to.

So I think I'll just run through Kyoto pretty quickly, given the time. So question has Kyoto worked in Europe? Most of the people that we talk to think it has and suggest that the only problem with Kyoto is that George W. Bush has been against it. Well, in fact, there is a whole set of countries, Europe obviously, but also Canada and Japan, that have ratified Kyoto and have not made the progress that I think we in the United States often think they have. So among those wealthy nations that ratified Kyoto, they saw their emissions go up 4% from 2000 to 2004. Germany and Britain saw their emissions go down, but they were for reasons that had nothing to do with Kyoto. Thatcher broke the coal miners union, Britain moved to natural gas. Germany reunified. And after the collapse of communism, they took a lot of the older, more polluting coal fired power plants offline. And when you remove Germany and Britain from the equation, European emissions actually rose 10% between 1990 and 2005. Yeah, yeah, but the Kyoto budget period doesn't run.

It runs from 2008 to 2012.

Correct targets haven't even taken effect.

Yeah, the compliance, the formal compliance period just started. However they, you know, they ratified the. Given the levels at which those emissions are hitting their Kyoto targets, domestically will be almost certainly be impossible. They had a trial period that just finished and, you know, very famously gave out way too many allocations. And everyone kind of goes, well, they'll correct that in the next period. But the challenge right now to assume that this was not the result of a miscalculation on the part of EU bureaucrats, it was a result of political pressures from key industries that were going to be put at a competitive disadvantage. That dynamic is now playing in the new period, and I'm trying to confirm it. I believe I've seen quite a few reports that suggest that they're going to do the same thing again, which is that the way in which they're going to issue the allocations is not going to result in significant reductions. And so the result is that you see them purchasing what are sort of increasingly pretty questionable sort of paper reductions from China and Russia and elsewhere that don't appear to have much relationship to the trajectory of global emissions whatsoever. So this is the problem that the Kyoto framework has already sort of uncovered in terms of how we're going about this, and we'll see what gets negotiated in its stead in the next round of negotiations. But as you'll see, we're sort of fairly skeptical about the, about the capability of this entire conceptual framework to do what we need it to do.

And actually, to your point too, you know, we often always think we think of the United States as really being the climate outlaw, but in fact, our emissions grew at half the pace that they grew in Europe between 2000 and 2005. Emissions in Canada actually grew five times faster than they have in the United States. And when you take into consideration, so we tend to, you know, so if China produces stuff for us that we buy, those emissions that they produce are counted as China's emissions. But of course, if you count them as our emissions, in other words, if you count emissions according to consumption rather than production, you find that just in one case, Britain, because it's often pointed to as an example of a country that's taking climate seriously, their emissions actually went up 19% rather than declining 15% since 2000.

So as we said, we think that part of the problem with Kyoto is that we just used the wrong models. So really, the three models that really were sort of the mental models for how we went and did Kyoto were the Montreal Protocol to phase out chlorofluorocarbons, the acid rain legislation that was passed in the US in 1990, which set up a trading system for SO2 sulfur dioxide emissions, and the START nuclear reduction talks, actually, which was sort of a mutually verifiable drawing down of nuclear stocks. And it's our contention that all three, and we're not the only ones who've made this case, that all three of those models are just flawed models for again, the problem we're faced with. So, interestingly, the Montreal Protocol was not negotiated, successfully negotiated, until there was already a low cost alternative to CFCs. In fact, an earlier round of negotiation failed and then Dupont discovered a low cost replacement for CFCs, which enabled global agreement. START was negotiated between two countries, the US and Russia, which controlled almost all of the nuclear weapons in the world. That then gets extended to an attempt to negotiate a global agreement with 180 nations, of which 20 are responsible for almost all of the emissions of global emissions. And that's the case into the foreseeable future as well. And as opposed to the nuclear weapons agreement and the SO2 trading system, which focused on one chemical and among a very small number of players, and in the case of the acid rain agreement, a small number of, a relatively small number of companies. Here you were negotiating a global agreement among many countries and attempting to set up a trading system top down globally, across a whole variety of chemicals. Something that has never in the sort of history of markets been done. Markets tend to work when they get built up from the ground up, first regionally, then nationally, and then working their way up to a global system. But you make them work regionally and with say, a single chemical first. So all of these models, we would argue, are sort of not terribly appropriate and that's why we get Kyoto, which we think has sort of already demonstrated a whole set of problems. And again, we think as long as that's the framework, we're going to kind of continue to see similar failure. You can go on to the next slide. I think covered that.

I think we sort of touched on this earlier, but briefly. A lot of excitement, a lot of investment going into clean energy. Obviously, Google's, you know, we think that the paradigm is right, bringing renewable energy down lower than the price of coal. Recently there was an announcement by Nano Solar that they've come up with a very inexpensive solar technology. But there's a number of reasons to be cautious that, that we are actually seeing the beginning of a widespread energy revolution. The first is that renewables, renewables are generally at an installed cost, much higher than coal and natural gas. The second is that coal and natural gas and gasoline and oil obviously are subsidized in a whole set of ways. There are exploration, obviously, there's national security investments that are made to protect or go get those assets. Those similar large investments and subsidies obviously have not gone into clean energy technologies.

We also have a storage problem.

Obviously. The sun doesn't always shine, the wind doesn't always blow. So you have to have some way of storing renewable energy for use later. And there's just a number of other large commercialization obstacles. In the world of technology innovation. They call it the technology valley of death. The technology valley of death is from having a prototype to actually getting your product to be in widespread use. And from there, you know, trying to cross that technology valley of death, as we've argued, requires much more than just some pollution limits that create a cost for carbon dioxide.

Most current global proposals and domestic proposals would price carbon dioxide at somewhere between seven and twelve dollars per ton. As we noted earlier, that is vastly insufficient to drive the transition, a global transition to clean energy alternatives. In fact, at those prices, what's likely to happen is it will provide economic incentives for energy efficiency and conservation, and it will drive a lot of what's sort of called conventional fuel switching, moving from things like coal to slightly more expensive, less polluting technologies or fuels like natural gas. And that is likely to drive, you know, in places like the US very modest emissions, somewhere in the 20% range, as opposed to the 80% reduction in emissions that we need to accomplish. And this is why we've argued, again, fairly controversially, that without really major breakthroughs in the cost and performance of renewable energy technologies, we're not going to get anywhere near the level of Reductions that we need even with a price for carbon.

And I would even just add the same thing is true for efficiency. There's a lot of energy efficiency that would pay for itself. Right now that doesn't happen and it doesn't happen for a lot of different reasons. The users of the electricity and buildings are often not the same people that pay for the electricity. If you're the CEO of a large company and you've got a whole set of billion dollar concerns, you may leave several million dollars on the table in terms of lost efficiency. You know, we have a phenomenon where when, when people retrofit their, their homes, install, installation and their energy costs go down, they often their energy use will then rise. So there's a whole set of challenges and obstacles that really get in the way even of gain efficiency implemented. Now we see one of them is just gasoline prices have almost doubled. And you haven't seen dramatic changes in behavior. You've seen some changes in terms of people moving from SUVs to hybrids, but not in terms of driving less. And this is pretty well reflected in the expert literature. This is a very good article that was done just recently in Scientific American by David Victor at Stanford Stanford, where he points out that the belief that prices alone will solve the climate problem is rooted in the fiction that investors in large scale and long lived energy infrastructure sit on a fence waiting for higher carbon prices to tip their decisions. And we know it's just much more complex than that and is going to require a much more complex response.

So where's the public on global warming? I'm going to just, why don't I just blow through these slides really quickly? So despite the notion that sort of everything has changed, and particularly with Inconvenient Truth and Al Gore won an Oscar and then he won a Nobel Prize and everybody's talking about global warming, public opinion has changed very little. In fact, you know, in a lot of cases you can go back not only to right before Inconvenient Truth, you can go back all the way to the mid-90s and in some cases all the way. For instance, Gallup has tracked a number of questions about global warming since the late 1990s and found that opinion has been relatively stable going all the way back to that point. Now the good news is that even going back into the late 1980s and early 1990s, significant majorities of Americans believed global warming was happening, believed it was human cause, believed we should do something about it. The problem is that it has never and even today continues to not be a particularly high priority for them. So this is actually a really interesting slide. This was right before Inconvenient Truth. Global warming as ranked by Democrats, Republicans and Independents. You see for all three groups, it is well down their list of sort of priorities as an issue. 13th for independents and Democrats and 19th for Republicans. By January of 2007, after the supposed tipping point on public opinion about global warming, we see that it is actually an even lower priority, remains the lowest priority for Republicans, and has actually dropped in importance to Democrats and Independents relative to other issues and concerns. And in fact, if you went and looked at polling right before the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries, Global warming among both Democrats and Republicans consistently ranked about dead last in the top sort of 10 to 15 issues that they cared about. If you ask people open ended versus giving them the option by asking them to rate how important global warming was, you just said what's the most important issue facing the country? Almost nobody in any survey will tell you that global warming is that kind of concern for them.

Sure. So one of the most quoted line in our 2004 essay was just that Martin Luther King didn't give the I have a nightmare speech. And we've made the argument that we really need to have a more positive vision of the future to motivate and excite people. And that when we leave people in a state of fear, it often has perverse unintended consequences. And yet it obviously from this cover on global warming, the messages that we hear are in fact that we should be afraid. The tagline for An Inconvenient Truth was this is the most terrifying movie you'll ever see. And yet we know, for example, in 2000 that the philanthropist Ted Turner, the CNN founder, did a study large number of focus groups. And the scientists concluded that the layering of dire consequences reinforces that this problem is too big to address. The likely response is adaptation to Mother Nature. Instead of supporting higher fuel economy standards, they're more likely to buy an SUV to help them through the erratic weather. So they would hold focus groups and they would show people all of the global warming disaster stuff again six years before An Inconvenient Truth. And then they would ask well, what did you think of that? And they'd say things like, boy, it really makes me think I'm going to need a bigger car to survive the coming hurricanes. We also much larger study not related specifically to global warming, but just social psychological studies done in labs. They find that resistance to change is triggered by fear of death and that it's also strongly associated with you know, fear of ambiguity. And so we see, for example, fear of death has been linked to system justifying forms of stereotyping, enhanced liking for stereotype consistent women and minority group members. It actually breeds a conservative reaction, the desire to not change things and an antipathy to people that are trying to reform things in a more progressive direction.

So you know, is sacrifice good politics? You know, we saw, you know, the inconvenient truth that Al Gore based his movie on was not that global warming was happening or that it was human caused. It was that we are quote, all going to have to change the way that we live our lives. So when folks say, well, no, we don't really talk about sacrifice anymore, we're past that. Well, actually, you know, just go read the transcript of the movie and in fact, you know, what we have succeeded in doing over the years of kind of hammering the public with this message is quite effectively convince them that we haven't convinced them that they should increase their energy costs, that they should fundamentally change their lives, but we have convinced them that addressing global warming would require that. So you see significant of those who believe that it's possible to address global warming at all, almost two thirds believe that will require major sacrifices in their way of life. Not surprising given that this is what we have been telling Americans for many years. Yet most oppose increasing gasoline taxes. By contrast, they do actually, at least on paper, say that they're willing to pay higher gas taxes to fund renewable energy research, to fund making the transition away from oil and gasoline. But I think the important takeaway here is that when we do, when we, one of the reasons that it remains such a low priority is that we have sort of so consistently told people that it was going to require sort of really dramatic, unpleasant changes in the way they live their life. The reality is that as I think we will point out moving forward, we're going to get there actually by improving people's lives, not making them worse. We're going to get there by innovating and inventing, not sort of sacrificing and constraining. And it's a much more makes for a much better politics in terms of getting people to embrace the kinds of changes and the kinds of investments that we need to make.

So we mentioned before, we'll just sort of put up here there is a widespread consensus that we are dramatically underfunding clean energy and that those investments, those public investments, those taxpayer investments need to be radically increased. Here's just a, here's, you can sort of see, here's total US Research and development investment and the decline that we've seen in. I'm sorry, this is total energy research and development and the decline that we saw mostly coming out of lower energy prices in the 1980s, moving policymakers to feel like it wasn't something urgent. Just to give you one statistic, the total US Investment in energy research and development last year was actually.

That's public and private combined.

No, just public. The total public US Investment in energy was actually less than Amgen, the biotechnology company spent on its research and development, less than $3 billion. And that's only a fraction of which goes to solar and wind. Most of it goes to nuclear, hydro, and advanced coal. This is a disconnect when we sort of. We came out of this, came out of a movement and sort of looked at kind of the things that we were working on and promoting as environmental strategists and campaigners, and then sort of thinking about what the experts were saying. This is the policy agenda of the environmental lobby in Washington. It's really focused on cap and auction, which is setting a price for carbon. Higher fuel economy standards, which just passed, that will have almost no impact on global emissions, renewable energy, or even U.S. emissions or U.S. renewable energy standard, which got pulled out of the last energy bill. Very modest tax credits for solar and wind. The big, big audacious demand of the solar lobby this year was to renew the 2005 Bush energy tax credits. It wasn't, for example, what we think it ought to be, which is something more like 20 billion a year to bring down the price of solar as quickly as possible, just in the same way that we did with microchips, an example we'll get to in a minute.

So what are there if kind of Kyoto cap and trade, at least as the sort of central mechanism for getting where we need to go, are not the right models? What are the right models? Well, you know, we have made huge visionary investments in this country in technology from practically the very beginning. First railroads, then the Internet, interstate highways, computer chips, the Internet, and internationally, you know, huge investment in the creation of the European Union, rebuilding Europe and Japan after World War II. Now, one of the things, when we look particularly at things like the technology revolution, which we think is the closest analog to the kind of innovation and investment that we need to make now. Well, you know, there is, we think, a little bit of mythology about, for instance, the birth of Silicon Valley that gets in the way of what we need to do. And that mythology sort of tends to focus on the sort of entrepreneurial individuals. Bill Hewlett in his garage and Steve Jobs and all who followed. But when we actually look at the history of Silicon Valley, there's some history here that kind of gets often sort of airbrushed out of the picture, which is the extraordinary role that the federal government played in creating Silicon Valley. Huge investments in radio, then microchips, then the Internet. Even Google got its start with federal funding, federal research grant. And for instance, in the 1950s and 60s and again in the 1980s, the federal government literally guaranteed the market for computer microchips. And in about, over about five or six years in the 1960s, for instance, the cost of a computer microchip came down from $1,000 per chip for a big slow chip to about $20 a chip for a much smaller, much faster chip. We think this is a very useful analog for thinking about another silicon based strategy, solar power. But the point is that we are right now sort of missing a key. We have a very effective carbon regulation lobby in Washington. We don't have a terribly effective clean energy investment lobby in Washington. And we believe that investment is, that investment is going to be as important, if not more important than regulation and carbon prices to make the transition that we need to make.

Michael, you want to. So globally, we start to think about what would it look like to have a global agreement that actually did something rather than what we've had in terms of Kyoto. So we think, why don't we start with a small number of countries, big emitters, maybe just the U.S. europe and China. Maybe it looks a lot more like what happened after World War II in Europe. And the focus, what if the focus was exactly what Google is focused on? Renewable energy, cheaper than coal. That was the goal. And think about if the United States did an investment of $50 billion a year over 10 years. Keep in mind, we spent about a trillion dollars on both the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, half a trillion just on helping veterans who were wounded. So I think about $50 billion a year, something that America could easily afford over 10 years. And then Europe matching it. You'd have about a trillion dollars on the table to then negotiate some sort of a global agreement. A lot of that manufacturing might happen in China. A lot of obviously engineering, whole sets of infrastructure needs to make that investment happen. And go ahead.

Well, you know, one other thing, we've heard a lot from climate scientists in the global warming debate. We haven't heard a lot from energy scientists. That's starting to change where the energy scientists are starting to step up and say, let's get really really clear about what it's going to take to make this transition. You know, going back to that IEA report that we started out with. And just this November, a very impressive and large group of leading energy scientists, Nobel laureates, some of the sort of biggest names in the field, called on Congress to invest no less than 30 billion a year in clean energy research, development and deployment. And really I think we're going to start to see this debate shift from a debate over is climate change happening, is it human caused, to what's it going to take to get where we need to go. And you know, I think that for those who have assumed that consensus on climate would lead to consensus on sort of regulation centered agenda to make this transition, I think they're going to be disappointed. I think that there is going to be a vigorous debate about exactly what the priorities need to be in terms of how we get where we need to go. We're going to need some regulation, we're going to going to need some carbon prices, but we're going to need big, big investments. And I think that's the, as we pointed out not only in this letter but elsewhere, that is really the consensus among mainstream energy scientists in terms of how we get to dramatic reductions in carbon emissions.

So this is our last slide and we can, we'll just open it up to questions. As you can see, we're arguing for somewhere between 30 to 80 billion a year. 30 billion is what these energy scientists called for last month. 80 billion is what an editorial in Nature called for. That's the amount that we invest in military R and D every year. We need a strategy to spend this money well so it's not spent on just big bridges to nowhere. And there's good models, often ones that come out of the Pentagon, for how to do good contracts with private firms that do what we want them to do. We think a carbon price that is consistent with the level of technology that we have. And that one of the most important things about that regulation, we believe is that it's an opportunity to raise money for the clean energy investments either through auctioning pollution allowances or through an outright tax on carbon. And then, you know, we're missing a political movement to do this. And in particular we're missing a lobby in Washington. We have a lobby in Washington that's focused on pollution regulation. We don't have anything approaching a lobby to push for these sizable investments in clean energy. And that means that we'll need an agenda that is focused not so much on global warming, which you See at the bottom of people's priorities, but, but really focused much more centrally on the top of that list that we showed, which is things like the economy and national security through energy independence. So thank you very much. Ready for questions.

Use the MIC if you could.

Testing. First off, thanks for your work. And at the Apollo alliance, it's really exciting to see challenging some of the taboos around public policy. One of the things I'd love to see is looking at some of the taboos around the basic energy science from a scientific standpoint. So what if it was possible to accelerate the half life of substances after going through the nuclear energy process? Technically it looks impossible, but no one's thinking that way. That would shift the terms of the debate from a technology perspective. So any other things you may have heard of like that? Love to hear that. And to get new choices in terms of technologies.

Sure. I mean, we absolutely agree obviously some of the big investments that the federal government made in accelerating the transition to sort of an Internet economy, an economy with personal computers, were big investments in computer sciences, everything from high school to post doctorate investments. And we think that that needs to happen with the energy sciences. We're sort of dramatically underinvesting in those sciences. Neither Ted or I are experts in the energy sciences field. We are sort of generalists and rely on what we read. But we're, you know, we think that obviously some of the most important scientific discoveries have been accidents and often by trying to do different things. So, you know, I think, you know, one of the things that we've had to really take seriously is this idea of actually pulling some of that carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and storing it on Earth. Those are very, that's a very tricky technological and scientific challenge. It's not obvious that we know how to do it yet, but we see an imperative to start making investments in things like that, including fusion, you know, that are often seen as pie in the sky.

You look at these charts and it's hard to, hard to see how you get there without, you know, next generation nuclear technologies, without cleaner coal burning technologies and carbon capture technologies, without geoengineering or air capture or some strategy. Especially if you start talking about getting to 350 parts per billion and not 450 parts per billion. That would require literally pulling an enormous amount of carbon out of the atmosphere at rates higher than it's going to come back into the atmosphere for the oceans, where a lot of that carbon, we've admitted is being stored now. So, and there's a set of taboos out there that, you know, these sort of much of the environmental movement still clings to that really are pretty inconsistent with actually addressing the problem we're faced with today, as opposed to sort of debates and attitudes around a lot of technologies that were formed in the system 70s and 80s.

I just wanted to add one thing about the accelerating the half life. If you were able to make the half life of nuclear byproducts, rather than hundreds of thousands or millions of years, imagine if they were several years or several weeks. I mean, that's currently impossible. But that kind of thinking, that would shift the possibilities.

So.

Thanks.

Amen.

Hey, I get the sense that you feel that technology in its current form is not sufficient to meet the climate challenge, that we're almost on the lookout for this climate breakthrough or this breakthrough technology. How do you square that with idea of stabilization wedges that Sokolow has introduced? And he said, I have these 15 strategies, efficient cold storage and capture. And if you just make all these things more efficient, we can do this in 50 years. Admittedly, that's a really long timeframe, but still without looking for that breakthrough, which might never happen. Right.

Well, I mean, the thing to keep in mind about it is that there is a way in which we have a lot of, you know, you could argue we have all the technologies we need to get to those emissions reductions that we want. The argument that we're making though, is that the cost of doing so creates a political backlash that will prevent us from just implementing existing technologies and that the breakthroughs that we're looking for are technological breakthroughs with existing technologies that often are going to bring those technology, those prices down. So think of microchips at $1,000 a chip. The technological breakthroughs helps you to get to a $20 chip. And obviously today we've got way cheaper chips than that that are in everything. So it's again, what I sort of saying, it's like, yeah, we had computers in the 1950s. So in the one hand you kind of go, well, we had all the technology we needed. But on the other hand, it wasn't the technology we needed. We had to continue that process of advancing on the Princeton stabilization wedges. I mean, I think they're useful to kind of being able to imagine how we would get from here to there. I think there's been some recent criticisms of them that they assume they actually each of even those wedges assume a whole set of technological innovations that are not guaranteed. So some of the stuff we've seen is that they say you need seven wedges. You maybe need more like 18. And even the IPCC has come under criticism for assuming that the global energy economy has been moving towards what they call decarbonization, moving from coal to natural gas, when in fact the opposite now seems to be occurring in the case of China and India bringing on a lot of coal.

In quite. In much of these scenarios that have been done, the baseline, what they call the business as usual baseline actually has greater decarbonization built into its assumption than the level of decarbonization necessary to get from there to stabilization. So we, I think there's increasing evidence that a lot of the, both in the IPCC and Sokolo and Pakala, a lot of the, they dramatically understate the amount of sort of technological change that's of kind going to be necessary to get to climate stabilization. Cool, thanks.

Today you discussed less than in your book adaptation. I don't quite remember, but the first half of your talk says no matter what we do and how well we do it, there's going to have to be a huge amount of adaptation. So are there investments in that? And I guess a related topic is I went and I looked a lot at what the DoD was talking about since as you point out, they sort of saved us the last time. What the DOD seems to be talking a lot is saying, oh, we have to. Well, at least one, the famous memo said something might happen in the next 10 years and everybody in the world will come after us and try to take our stuff. So this is great business for the Pentagon. We're just going to have war after war after war, and that's what we have to prepare for. We don't have any, you know, so they have like the extreme version of adaptation in mind, not mitigation, but generally, I'm speaking what, you know, what's our adaptation strategy and investments in that.

I think the, you know, from what we have been able to look at, I mean, you probably need a level of global investment in adaptation comparable to the level of global investment you need in mitigation. And you know, I mean, the good news is that those are as if you do it right, the investments in mitigation, those are good investments to make because they have benefits in dealing with natural disasters and social resilience and resistance, you know, social resistance to disease that is really critical. And of course, you know, it's a little bit, we find it a little bit troubling that we spend in the global warming discussion so much time talking about all the people in the future who are going to die or suffer as a result of natural disasters and other climate driven disease and problems like that. Yet, you know, we have, you know, hundreds of millions of people suffering from those very same ills today, and we don't do much. So, you know, our hope is that a adaptation agenda, you know, not only makes us more resilient in the future, but actually helps, you know, deal with a whole set of social ills that we're faced with today. So, I know you asked me a little bit earlier about Lomborg, and one of the things that Lomborg kind of does is still sort of sets up a little bit of sort of zero sum. Either we spend money on making us on dealing with social ills today, or we spend it on mitigating climate change tomorrow. But there's a whole lot that we could be doing right now, particularly around adaptation that would both address current social problems and social ills that are killing or resulting in tremendous suffering for hundreds of millions of people or billions of people all over the world. That also would make us much more resilient to climate change in the long term. So.

All right, thanks, everybody.

Thank you.