Climate Realism Initiative Launch

FROMAN: Good morning, everybody. My name is Mike Froman. I’m president of the Council. And it’s a great pleasure to welcome you here for the launch of our Climate Realism Initiative. This is an important endeavor that was born out of an effort to elevate a pragmatic U.S. foreign policy agenda around climate change while also advancing American competitiveness in global clean technologies and U.S. leadership on the clean energy transition. We’re delighted to have a full house here in person plus another hundred or so people online.

The Council launched a number of strategic initiatives over the last year or so: RealEcon, which is Reimagining American Economic Leadership, led by Matt Goodman; our China Strategy Initiative, led by Rush Doshi; and then today we’re delighted that Varun Sivaram has returned—he’s a recidivist here, back at the Council, as a senior fellow for energy and climate—to launch the Climate Realism Initiative. Because wherever you stand on the policy issues around climate change, there are a host of climate impacts that are already being felt at home and around the world. And there’s an increasing centrality of clean energy technologies in international trade and great-power competition. There’s a need to forge a bipartisan, pragmatic, fact-based approach to mobilizing the technology and finance necessary to deal with these challenges. And that’s what Climate Realism is all about.

This initiative will pursue three projects: navigating the geopolitics of risks of a warming world, accelerating clean technology innovation and U.S. competitiveness, and averting catastrophic climate change. And none of us can deal with all of these issues alone; it’s going to require bringing people together from different sectors—public, private, academic—different parts of the country, and different political perspectives. And that’s where the Council really excels—has been here for over a hundred years, is a nonpartisan institution that brings together people from multiple sectors all across, the country, and does so in a fact-based research agenda.

We’ve got a great day in store for you today with panels that touch on these various issues, and we’ve got an array of great speakers. I won’t name them all, but I see my old colleague—not old colleague; my former colleague Secretary of Energy Ernie Moniz, and we’re delighted to have him join us as well.

As a reminder, today’s discussions are on the record. We’re deeply grateful to the Sequoia and ClimateWorks Foundations for their support of this launch, as well as Dan Poneman and Susan and David Rockefeller Jr. for their support of Climate Realism more broadly.

And with that, we’ll turn it over to a launch video, and then Varun Sivaram will come up and continue the discussion. Thanks very much for being here.

(A video presentation is shown.)

(Applause.)

SIVARAM: Thank you. Thank you, David. Thank you, everybody. Good morning.

First and foremost, I am so deeply grateful to Mike Froman for giving me a shot to elevate Climate Realism among CFR’s four strategic initiatives.

We have a world-class team here at CFR. I want to thank my colleagues: Deputy Director Lindsay Iversen is somewhere, as are senior fellows David Hart, Alice Hill, Dan Poneman; our research teams—Mia, Priyanka, Max; and all the departments across CFR, from the digital team that made that video you just saw to the Meetings and the Communications and the Studies team. Thank you so much.

And of course, I’m so grateful to, as Mike said, our philanthropic supporters, from foundations like Sequoia and ClimateWorks, to generous individuals like Dan Poneman and Susan and David Rockefeller Jr. Thank you.

My family is here, too: Lakshmi (ph), Louthra (ph), Yogeni (ph). So let me strike a personal note. I created Climate Realism because throughout my career, the last fifteen years in climate and clean energy, I’ve heard magical fictions that one dare not refute. I’ve served as a climate diplomat. And all of us have spouted the fictions of a 1.5-degree target or net-zero emissions by 2050. These are not useful fictions; they’re damaging fictions. They get in the way of America seriously preparing for the disastrous three-degree future that is our most likely future.

So I’ve also served in C-suites at Fortune 500 clean energy companies and publicly listed ones. I can assure you that in the boardroom, particularly when economic conditions are tough like right now, shareholder value always trumps sustainability. It’s a magical fiction that climate disclosure rules, voluntary net-zero targets, offsets, or virtue signaling will materially advance decarbonization.

And finally, as many of you know, I spent multiple years living and work in India on its clean energy industry. I’m passionate about India’s economic development and lifting millions out of extreme poverty there and elsewhere. Climate change will ravage emerging economies and developing countries. So it’s deeply unfair that the West had a free pass to develop with fossil fuels, but it’s a magical fiction that advanced and emerging economies have aligned interests, and that we can negotiate a mutually acceptable deal on climate finance that papers over those disagreements.

Once we discard magical fictions, we can get on with the real work of assessing critical tradeoffs for American interests. The Climate Realism Initiative welcomes a diversity of opinions. You’ll see that from our phenomenal slate of speakers today. They’ll take on the toughest, most provocative questions.

Our keynote speaker, Secretary Ernie Moniz, is recognized by industry and those on both sides of the aisle as someone who brings realism to fanciful climate proposals.

We’ll also have three panels which I’ve ordered in order of least to most speculative. Let’s start with the one I consider the most certain backdrop, a future where the world misses its climate targets, forcing us to ask how America should prepare for such a shock. Look, today we’re looking at a $10 trillion wipeout of market value over the last three days, let’s say, from the stock market. Just last week, a board member of Allianz posted the following statement, the global insurer: Markets will reprice rapidly and brutally in a three-degree world. Whole regions will become uninsurable. And when insurance disappears, it’s a systemic risk for the entire financial sector. We may see an order-of-magnitude greater financial wipeout, or two orders of magnitude, than what we’ve just seen.

After the keynote, we’ll move to panel two, on how the United States can compete with China and others in clean technologies. This is more speculative. We have failed dismally at this so far. But we’ll take up whether we already have the tools, the key enablers of American competitiveness through the Inflation Reduction Act, or if we’re just on track to spend a trillion dollars on existing technologies China has already won without fundamentally changing our competitive structure through next-generation innovations.

And our final panel, panel three, will be the most speculative of all: How do we avert truly cataclysmic and runaway climate change beyond the three degrees of warming we’re likely locked into given America’s limited tools in significant emissions and the daunting complexity of either a net-zero transition on the one hand or, as David Keith will tell us, planetary-scale geoengineering on the other? We’ll explore questions like should the United States pursue deep, free, and intensive trade with China and the world to accelerate a global clean energy transition, or should we marshal or trade leverage to pressure China and other emerging economies to decarbonize? We’ve learned a thing or two about how much trade leverage we have.

Finally, let me address the elephant in the room. Climate fell off the radar of the 2024 U.S. electorate, and now the agendas of policymakers in 2025. No, I don’t hold the magical fiction, naively, that by launching Climate Realism today we’ll immediately elevate climate change and climate to the top of foreign policymakers’ radar, particularly given the expanding trade war. But my aspiration, building on Mike’s comments, is that over the next four years CFR’s Climate Realism initiative will be the marquee venue to discuss these issues without the partisan branding. You can be realistic about the national security climate threat to the homeland from foreign emissions without being labeled as someone who wants to see the oil and gas industry in the United States shrivel. That could pave the way for climate and energy to one day become a true top foreign policy priority for the United States, just as among the four strategic initiatives of CFR.

So, with that, I’m excited to introduce the first panel of today, focused on navigating the geopolitics and risks of a warming world. Let me invite to the stage our three speakers. Please come and join me up onstage, and then we’ll introduce you.

(Pause.)

Thanks, everybody. I am just delighted to kick off today’s session with a panel focused, again, on what I consider the least speculative of the three topics. And we’re joined by some expert panelists here.

I will say we have a full program today. We’ll run from right now all the way through five p.m. We’ll close with a reception. And we’ll have breaks in between each panel for networking. I urge you to stay with us all the way through, because as we go from panel to panel you will hear things you probably haven’t heard before. And that’s even considering many of you have spent a lot of time in the climate field.

I’m excited to introduce our panel here. To my right we have David Wallace-Wells, opinion writer at the New York Times and a columnist at the New York Times Magazine, and the author of the bestselling Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. When I met David at our recent prep call I introduced myself as a David Wallace-Wells superfan. I think many of you might be as well.

To David’s right we have Alice Hill, one of my colleagues and co-conspirators on the Climate Realism Initiative, along with David Hart and Dan Poneman, as well as the David M. Rubenstein senior fellow for energy and the environment here at the Council on Foreign Relations. Thank you, Alice.

HILL: Thank you.

SIVARAM: And finally we have my dear friend Sherri Goodman, who has an extraordinary career. Formerly at the military undersecretary of defense, and now the senior fellow at the Polar Institute, and Environmental Change and Security Program at the Wilson Center as well, and a proud CFR member. And most excitingly, the author of the recent book Threat Multiplier—which, by the way, is a term Sherri invented—Climate, Military Leadership & the Fight for Global Security. A real stalwart member, founder of the climate and security movement.

So these are three fantastic panelists. Let’s jump right in. One of the things I want to discuss in this—in the first few minutes is how catastrophic should we really be considering the potential impacts of climate change? There’s no one better equipped to answer this than David. And, David, I hope you will tell us a little bit about what the median expectation might be, but really what the tail risks are, and why we should focus on those tail risks.

WALLACE-WELLS: Well, first, let me say it’s great to be here speaking with you on this occasion. And great to be sharing the stage with both of you.

You know, I think when we talk about where we’re heading it’s useful to pull back a little bit in time. And I don’t want to pull us all the way back to, you know, the Rio Earth Summit, since which time—at which point, you know, carbon emissions globally were only about half of what they are today—or Kyoto, or—you know, just a few years back into the past, when we were talking about the targets that were agreed to in Paris, and using those targets to frame our understanding of the future to come—1.5 degrees, two degrees. And there was an awful lot of research that came out, you know, in the second half of the last decade mapping out exactly what the difference of—you know, the differences between a world warmed by 1.5 degrees and warmed by two degrees would be. Most notably contained in the IPCC report which came out in the fall of 2018.

And that information, when it was shared broadly with the public through the news media in the fall of 2018, was like an earthquake on climate consciousness for almost anyone paying attention. The particulars were horrifying. You may remember a lot of these projections we might be talking about, just between those two thresholds, 150 million additional lives lost to air pollution produced from the burning of fossil fuels. You could see in many parts of the world flooding events that used to hit once a century hitting every year, in some cases multiple times a year. Many parts of South Asia and the Middle East becoming so hot that during summer it would be a risk to your health to go around outside for long stretches.

But more important than that, I would say, is that the world took a look at the big picture produced by that science, which was describing the world of two degrees, and said—not universally, but quite broadly—that is terrifying. We need to take action. We need to avoid that future. So much of the climate awakening that you’ve seen over the last five or eight years, climate protests, all the way up to, you know, prime ministers, and presidents, and conversations at climate summits, was given an extra urgency by that science. And just to reiterate, that is the science that we have to best describe the world of two degrees of warming.

So that level of warming really freaked us out about five years ago. And now we know almost certainly we are heading north of that level. Now exactly where that leaves us in terms of, you know, the impacts on the landscape, the impact on human livelihoods, are very much—it’s very much an open question, in part because it’s not just a scientific question. It’s also a policy question about adaptation, which I’m sure we’re all going to get into later on in this panel.

But one aspect of that future that I think is especially concerning is the one that you mentioned, which is that especially—you know, in my world, speaking to often lay readers, we talk about these futures using anchors that are median projections based on modeled emissions trajectories. And there’s a lot of assumptions built into those emissions trajectories, but it’s also the case that simply talking about median warming levels is an incredibly narrow way of looking at the risk that we’re facing. We may end up in a future with emissions levels of the year 2100 that we are today expecting to produce two degrees of warming and still get three degrees of warming. We could get emissions levels that we would expect to produce three (degrees) and still get four-and-a-half (degrees).

There’s been an awful lot of good news over the last few years. We do think to some degree the emissions curve is bending, although maybe not as quickly or as dramatically as it seemed, you know, would be the case a couple of years ago. Nevertheless, heading in the right direction. And yet, this whole question of the way we’ll be living and how we’ll be navigating this future defined by warming is shadowed by huge amounts of uncertainty that almost no one has had the clarity, or really the courage, to look squarely at. And these are not vanishing unlikelihoods. It’s not 0.0001 percent, although probably will be worth looking at those scenarios even if it was just that little.

We’re talking about, you know, what is the ninetieth percentile outcome, from a certain emissions level? What is in the eightieth percentile outcome, from a certain emissions level? And if those futures are different enough from the median outcomes, then we’ve really, really done ourselves a disservice by narrowing the scope of our projections to those median futures. And I hope that today marks, you know, a step into a new kind of realism in which we don’t just think about blowing past those targets in terms of, you know, median projections, but also think a lot more seriously about, you know, the tail risks there.

SIVARAM: Let me draw that out for one more question, then I want to come to Alice. So, first of all, we’re stipulating in this panel that we’re going to blow through the climate targets. Let’s say we’re in a three-degree world. And as you said, David, two degrees really freaked us out. Now we’re in a three-degree world. And then let me ask you, based on what you just said, what are the risks at the 10 or 20 percent potential likelihood level that, you know, just to give some kind of comparator is, like, our naïve estimate of whether Donald Trump would have been elected in 2016 right? That probability, chance 10 or 20 percent, what does that mean for the American homeland?

WALLACE-WELLS: (Laughs.) Well, I mean, I think it means that, you know, the American homeland will not be dealing with three degrees of warming. It will be dealing with something like—(laughs)—you know, especially on land, which is warmer than the planet as a whole—something far north of there. And that means that it pulls back into play a lot of the things that have been long described as somewhat worst-case scenario projections. So when we talk about four or five degrees, you know, the effect on crops will be probably quite significant. The effect on heat-related stress and heat illness will be quite dramatic, on economic productivity. You know, all of these things are non-linear stories, which means that, you know, going up by 1 degree isn’t just, you know, a—doesn’t make things just 50 percent worse than they would be at two degrees. It could be considerably worse than that.

And I think we also have, unfortunately, much less science about those future warming levels than we have at some of these lower levels, which we’re not going to be living with. And I think that—you know, the big picture is not—it’s not as important—I feel like it’s less important to focus on particular projections, particular models, and more just to reckon with the deep uncertainty about the way the future will unfold and how different parts of the country will be affected. And I think about, you know, something like the L.A. fires that we saw, you know, at the beginning of this year. These are not narrowly a climate event, but they are, you know, made more likely by climate change. And they were a scale of devastation that most Californians, even those quite accustomed to life with fire, recognize as something, like, unimaginable.

And yet, already, you know, whatever it is, three months later, they’re already part of the background noise of the way that we think about the new world that we’re living in. (Laughs.) And I think that that dynamic is going to play out on many levels in many places in the decades to come, whether we’re dealing with two degrees, three degrees or four degrees of warming. We’re going to be constantly confronted with things we believed were unthinkable, and then very quickly normalizing them so that we don’t even see clearly how many disjunctures we’ve, ourselves, lived through.

SIVARAM: I want to go to Alice now and come back to a conversation we were having in the small room before this conversation. We talked about the Congressional Budget Office’s projection of a 6 percent hit to American GDP in the baseline case. And let’s assume here our baseline case is three degrees of warming or worse. That seems manageable. The hit to property insurance, it’s painful for all of us. We all are paying a few extra thousand dollars. But it seems manageable. Alice, step us forward a decade, two decades, the second half of this century. In a three-degrees world, is the United States inhabitable? How does this compare to other foreign policy threats we often talk about here at the Council on Foreign Relations—a tactical nuclear weapon striking a city? Give us some imagery.

HILL: Well, the short answer, there will be places in the United States that will be habitable. I don’t think that the United States will disappear off the map. And I am very excited to be here for the Climate Realism, and have a chance to talk about what’s ahead. And, to David’s point, the modeling here is very difficult for us to grasp. I see an old friend here, Rafe Pomerance, and a former—a colleague. I don’t know how to say that, Mike. And we wrote an article about how 1.5 degrees is just meaningless to most people. They cannot figure out whether it’s Fahrenheit. I lived in L.A. for a long time. 1.5 degrees, you know, that’s a normal day. That’s how we live. Why do I need to worry about that?

So we’ve—through the climate negotiations, and we needed a default to hang our hats on, we used that. But it turns out it does not resonate with the public. And with this, as we’ve been talking about it, needs imagination, because by definition what we experience with climate change is the unimaginable. These are events that no human societies have experienced at this level of ferocity. And that will continue as we get hotter. That’s very difficult, as it turns out, the social scientists will tell us, for humans to accurately calculate. And that’s why we talk about medians. We talk about 2100. There’s also a delay in the time that these will unfold. So we are very occupied with our immediate problems.

And then, to your point on related international threats, with climate change there’s no one pushing a button. There’s no one who’s going to say: I want a nuclear strike. You know, let’s wipe out this, or we’re going to have a release of the pathogen from a lab, or we’re not going to vaccinate people. It’s just going to happen. And that’s very difficult to rally and marshal political will to address it, because the causes of it feel attenuated. And we are highly dependent on one of the primary causes, energy from fossil fuels. So that gets discounted. And I will also say that the economic modeling—I’m not an economist by training, but intuitively, the economic modeling on this seems to me to be way off.

And I’ll leave you with an example. William Nordhaus won the Nobel Prize for economics for his early modeling of the costs of climate change. Very important work. He was really trying to get at the issue, how much will this cost GDP if we continue to heat up? And what you want trying to do with that is balance how much heat can we tolerate as a society, and in the meantime we’ll be growing wealthier, and that will help us be able to tolerate this heat. Through the work of other economists, they dug into the models. And, of course, all models rely on assumptions. That’s just the way they work. And we don’t have a computer that can pull in all the factors that climate change affects.

He was looking at heat. He looked at outside workers in the United States—or, excuse me, the hit to workers in the United States to GDP from heat. He concluded that because 87 percent of our GDP was generated from work that occurred indoors, mining and offices, that we really didn’t need to worry about heat. And, of course, that meant he projected a lower loss to GDP. Of course, people have pointed out, well, heat affects our infrastructure. You see that we can’t transmit electricity as efficiently when there are hot conditions. We can’t cool the nuclear plants. We can’t run hydropower. It affects public health. Your workers aren’t going to be able to show up. They’ve been bitten by a tick-borne disease. They’ve got problems with heat and respiratory issues from the pollution.

Then we have—can move on to factors that kids don’t learn as well in school, and there’s a—so that affects our long-term workforce. You just can’t model all these factors. But then we pick this number that gives us confidence that we’ve got this under control, and we are using the median levels. And we’re not, as you’ve said, Varun, looking at the massive tail risks. And to the report that David mentioned, one of the tail risks is tipping points. So at two degrees—and this really frightens people—we lose most of the world’s coral reefs. Now, if you’re a scuba diving that’s really important, but for us—some of us are, like, what’s the big deal? Well over a billion people in the world rely on fish for protein. Our marine ecology is highly dependent on coral reefs. They’re very important for tourism, and they’re just very important for the health of the oceans.

But at two degrees, which we all acknowledge we are highly likely to blow past, we’re going to see that. Now, we’ve got some exciting things. I read today in the paper in Florida they’re sinking a ship to create an artificial coral reef. So, yeah, that’s cool. But we are not doing anything on the level of scale to deal with kind of transformational change that is already underway. And that’s why it’s so important to try to figure out ways to help people understand this risk and then make better choices today that will keep all of us safer in the future.

SIVARAM: Thanks. Thanks. Alice.

I want to come—first, I want to crystallize this, then come to Sherri. Look, this panel is all about how would we act differently if we just assumed we were headed for three degrees? And it starts with acknowledging that a three-degree world poses a grave national security threat to the United States homeland on the same level as some of the major other foreign policy threats that this CFR community considers, from global terrorism, Alice, you mentioned a global pandemic. Alice, you also mentioned, you know, decisions that folks take to put their finger on a button to launch a missile. This is one of those major, grave threats.

Sherri, I want to come to you as we pivot to, so what do we do about this? You know, you have been just such an important figure in the climate and security community. And I’d love to hear from you, if the United States were to assume we are headed for this extraordinarily grim future, how do we prepare at home and abroad? And ideally, how do we position ourselves for advantage in an evolving geopolitical landscape in areas such as the Arctic?

GOODMAN: OK. Just a small question there, Varun. (Laughter.) OK. First, I want to thank Mike for his leadership here at the Council on Foreign Relations, and for really taking this on. Mike and I were law school classmates. And really this is so important. And I’m so grateful for your framing this. And, Varun, there couldn’t be a better leader on this than you. So you’re really turning a new chapter now in climate security. And, David and Alice, thank you very much. And to so many of you in the room and online here, I know many of you have been working in and around this field for many years now. And your work is invaluable. And I want to herald it. And I want to say, it continues to be vitally important.

So climate as a national security risk came into view about twenty years ago now. The first group of generals and admirals to assess the national security implications of climate change through the Military Advisory Board at CNA in 2007 characterized climate change as a “threat multiplier,” the title also of my book, Climate, Military Leadership, and the Fight for Global Security. And at the time, we understood that to be leading to instability in volatile regions of the world, and maybe have impact on the homeland. I would say, you know, now we’re going to actually—we’re leading to a world where we’re going to flip that, because we’re going to have as much impact here on the homeland as instability around the world.

Now, at the time we looked at it through the lens of the catastrophic risk we faced during the Cold War, which was the threat of nuclear annihilation by the Soviet Union. And we talked about that as a low probability but high consequence risk, which was worth investing billions of Americans’ GDP to defend and deter. Climate change, of course, as we now know, is both a high probability and now, as we’ve heard, a very high consequence risk, particularly as we’re leading—we’re heading now into a three-degree world. I think there were those in the climate community twenty years ago who thought that the national security assessments of climate change would lead to more action than we have seen. And we’re still on the way to a three-degree world. And I’d say so the urgency now is in many ways even greater.

As we look at what could happen, both at our homeland—which includes the Arctic; we are an Arctic nation—and as we look around the world—and, Varun, you ask about the Arctic. So, you know, in the Arctic temperatures are leading—are rising more than four degrees, the global average. So we’re already at that—in many ways—that three-degree-C world. We see rising temperatures, sea ice retreating and melting. And we see a whole new ocean that’s really opened in our lifetimes. We see a Russia that wants to transform the northern sea route into a toll road for transportation from ports in Asia to ports in Europe. China also eyeing the polar silk road and ambitions not only for transport, energy, but perhaps in the future fish, as fish stocks move more towards the poles with warmer temperatures and over and illegal fishing elsewhere around the world. And we have our own Arctic in Alaska, in which we have underinvested, with claims of maybe having other parts of the Arctic at the same time.

So we’re heading into a world now of, you know, more tension, more disruption, that is in part climate driven, in part driven by the new geopolitics of focusing on minerals and energy resources, and descending into spheres of influence. We have been on a path of having climate-informed decision making throughout our national security structure. The assessments still continue to be valid, even if they are not as widely recognized or prioritized in this administration. And what deeply, I’d say, concerns me is that without having climate-informed decision making, we will not be prepared and ready for the next level of climate disruption that is inevitably going to face us.

So, for example, we now—and we track, through the Center for Climate and Security, through something called the Military Response to Climate Hazards Tracker, the number of times that militaries are deploying in response to fires, floods, hurricanes, other climate-driven hazards. And in the last year, it was 240 military deployments around the world, from fires in Greece to floods in Spain, with 113 times in the United States alone. So that means that we are responding to those climate threats that face Americans. Think of Hurricanes Milton and Helene, the fires in California. Increasingly our National Guard and our active-duty forces have to be the backup response to our emergency first responders.

And so we find now ourselves where we could be in the future faced not only with a Superstorm Sandy in New York, or devastating floods and hurricanes in the southeast, but all of these cascading risks occurring at—potentially overlapping each other. The Texas grid outage, the fires in California. So we could have multiple and cascading risks that really stress the ability of our infrastructure, our human infrastructure, as well as our military response to be prepared. And nonetheless, our forces have to be ready to deploy around the world.

And China, for example, is still very much aware. They are taking advantage, for example, of the opportunity that’s been created by the discord in global climate negotiations to actually fill some of those vacuums around the world and provide that humanitarian assistance and disaster relief that has traditionally been provided by American forces.

SIVARAM: Thank you, Sherri. And just to let everyone know, in a couple minutes we are going to go to questions from the audience. So I urge you to think about what you’d like to ask. But let me just ask a couple more, as we get particularly provocative. I’ll try to make these rapid-fire, lightning round ones. The first one is, Sherri, you talked a lot about the race for geopolitical advantage in the reshaping Arctic in front of our eyes. Setting aside for a moment whether the annexation of Greenland would be a blow to the international rules-based order and an unmitigated disaster for our alliances—setting that aside—(laughter)—what would that do for America’s race for geopolitical advantage in the Arctic?

GOODMAN: Well, on the one hand, you look at Greenland, and it is part—if you look at the map, it is clearly part of the North American continent. Some have said—my colleague, the director of the Polar Institute, Rebecca Pinkus, said, you know, we’ve got—Alaska is the ten and Greenland is the two on the North American map. So if you think in terms of spheres of influence, then it has been. And there’s a history. Of course, we do have a very—we already have a defense arrangement with Denmark and Greenland. We’ve had that since the end of World War II. We have a military base at Pituffik Air Force Base in the northwest of Greenland. We are providing defense against incoming missile threats, space-launched and other space-based or air-launched threats in the region. So we do already have that base. And it is one that is important for American security.

What would it provide us to have that? Well, I mean, the claims have been made about minerals and the opportunities there. And, yes, the U.S. does need, in the race of the clean energy future, a more secure clean energy mineral supply chain. There are—and Greenland is interested in those economic opportunities. First of all, it is—there are a lot of challenges economically in developing that in Greenland. And, second of all, that’s—I don’t know that that in itself would solve America’s challenges. I should also note that, having had the privilege of going to Greenland last summer to see—be on the front lines of the changing climate, because you see vividly, you hear and feel, you experience that the great Greenland ice sheet, which could, along with the melting of the Antarctic ice sheets, produce feet of sea level rise that will threaten global cities in our lifetime.

It is really the front lines of climate change. When you go to see the glacier you can no longer get right onto the glacier because where the helicopter lands the glacier has already receded so much. And in fact, it’s more complicated to navigate along the coastal regions, which is how you get around in Greenland. It only has a few—you know, a few miles of actual roads. Most of it you travel along the coastline. And there’s actually more ice in the waterways now, as the great Greenland icesheet melts and releases more ice into it. So I think that, you know, it isn’t—it’s important to recognize where it stands geographically, and also to recognize the security that we already have through our presence in Greenland. Thank you.

WALLACE-WELLS: I would just say very briefly, you know, I think it also illustrates powerfully, sometimes we talk about, you know, geopolitics over here, climate over here. Sometimes we worry about the ways in which geopolitics are undermining our action on climate. But this also illustrates the way that climate change changes geopolitical considerations, that we may well not be talking about this prospect of the U.S. thinking about taking over Greenland if it were not for what climate change has in store for the Arctic. I think it’s just big picture, something to keep in mind.

GOODMAN: Good point, David. Good point.

SIVARAM: It’s a fantastic point. It’s a fantastic point. And that’s going to bring me to my second lightning-ish question before we go to—(laughter)—before we go to questions.

WALLACE-WELLS: We’ll do a little better. (Laughs.)

SIVARAM: And, Alice, I’m particularly thinking of you, although, David, you may also want to weigh in here. So let’s stipulate, for the sake of argument, that the United States is able to prepare domestically. And it’s hard to domestically prepare, as we’ve heard, if every other week you have an L.A. wildfire-sized event. It’s as if a bomb wiped out a big part of a city. And that happens every couple weeks later this century. It’s hard to prepare for that. It’s hard to evacuate the state of Florida. And if you listen to—I’m going to pick on you, David. David, later on in the session today we’ll have a discussion about, hey, what are our break-glass options? And maybe we will choose not to get beyond two degrees of Celsius of warming by deploying technology such as geoengineering.

But stipulating, as we do in this panel, that we are headed for three degrees, and stipulating that we solved the domestic challenges, I want to ask about the foreign policy challenges. Because we’re here at the Council on Foreign Relations. We talked about the Arctic, Sherri. Now let’s talk about hundreds of millions or billions of climate refugees, humanitarian disasters that dwarf the United States’ own domestic disasters in loss of life, if not economic damage—just because American property tends to be quite expensive—and the rise of political elements, populist parties, and difficult politics around the world as it goes up in flames. I want to ask you, Alice, first, and then come to you, David, what are the best ways for the United States to prepare for that foreign policy future with those consequences around the world?

HILL: Well, migration is typically one of the first things that’s addressed, Varun—the threat of uncontrolled migration as a result of climate change. In 2023 we saw 26 million people displaced by natural hazards, and that’s anticipated that that will continue. Most people stay in their home—stay near their home if they’re displaced, and then they might come back. That’s true in the United States and elsewhere. But eventually people do cross borders when it gets really tough.

And I believe that the pressures we’ve seen on our southern border have been driven in part because of climate disasters in different areas. For example, Hurricane Mitch in Honduras caused a collapse in agriculture and had long-lasting implications. Gangs were able to take hold. And that pattern is reflected across the world. In Pakistan there was massive floodings, and during that time the government did a poor job on emergency management. The Taliban used that opportunity to recruit.

During the pandemic, you might have seen that one of the cartels was stamping the picture of a cartel leader on boxes of sanitary supplies and other basic needs, sending the message the government won’t take care of you, we will, in a disaster. And, of course, we have heightened criminal activity as a result of people being on the move. Human trafficking is a very common occurrence. Women and girls are highly vulnerable in those moments, as are men.

So we know that migration will occur. What has been the solution that most have articulated? It’s the soft-power solutions. It’s having—helping people stay at home and thrive at home and so they’re not thinking they’ll move. Right now we’re seeing, as you mentioned, Varun, a lack of willingness to pay, those countries that don’t have the kind of resources that the United States and the developed world have to respond to these events. So when their population is displaced, it’s more likely to be a permanent displacement, and they have far fewer resources to keep people fed, housed.

So that’s investments in USAID. That’s investments—the European Union has been a leader in this. Many countries have been a leader in this. And I believe China’s Belt and Road is, in part, also accomplishing this.

And I just want to say, I’m going to—my lightning round—I do not think we can safely assume that the United States will be prepared. Compared to some nations, including China and in Europe, we are not prepared. I don’t think you can say we’re safely prepared now for what’s occurring, much less what’s ahead. We have no signals that that kind of massive transformational change is under way, either by the federal government or at the state and local, territorial level.

SIVARAM: Thank you, Alice.

Do you want to add anything?

WALLACE-WELLS: Just quickly, I would say I think you were speaking there broadly about our adaptive capacity in the U.S. and what we’ve done to build resilience. But just narrowly on the question of migration, I mean, I think we can all see very clearly that migration has been a hugely destabilizing political force. This is another human feedback loop which is going to make it more difficult to adapt in the future. And we can’t treat it as a silo issue.

This is all very messy, and it’s affecting the whole world. It concerns me, you know, quite significantly just to see the way that even relatively small migration flows have really, really destabilized many of the fundamental assumptions about liberal internationalism that I would like to have seen promoted, rather than, you know, taking the other path, which is what so many countries are doing now.

SIVARAM: Thank you, David.

Please.

GOODMAN: And if I could just—I mean, we’ve long thought of and in the intelligence community thought of—understood climate change as a catalyst for conflict and included assessments of climate risk as destabilizing across borders with increasing migration flows, as Alice and Dave have just mentioned, both within countries and between countries. And so having those intelligence assessments and understanding that has been critically important for us to be prepared for those risks that are coming. And we could be entering an era where we’re underassessing those risks.

SIVARAM: Thank you, Sherri.

So with that, we’re going to open up to this full house. I’m going to request that everybody say who you are, what’s your name, what’s your affiliation. Keep your questions really brief or I’ll have to cut you off. I apologize.

We’re going to go first over to Noah over there. And a mic will come to you. Thanks.

Q: Hi. Thanks. I’m Noah Gordon from the Carnegie Endowment.

I actually have a provocative question for my friend Varun. I appreciate the initiative and the willingness to say the 1.5 (degrees Celsius) is dead. You know, we’re going past it, committed to infrastructure and emissions. And the reserves take us well past it. But are we excessively lowering our ambition when we jump ahead to, say, three degrees is happening?

So I think if you had done this event ten years ago, or even when David wrote his book, the median outcome was more like four degrees. And we had technological progress to get us closer to three. And now we need the political ambition we did—we had when we decided to abolish slavery at the point of a gun or built 50,000 planes a year to defeat Nazism. So even if we stop clinging to 1.5 (degrees Celsius), must we concede three?

SIVARAM: Look, I believe we can walk and chew gum. It is one thing to hold, as your median estimate, what you think is going to happen, and it’s another thing to aspirationally aim for something else and to have ambitions.

I fear that in the climate discourse, the two-degrees-C ambition, or the one-point-C extreme aspiration, have been misinterpreted as realities. And I’ll give you an example of why I think this is true. I did this Easter egg hunt, like, crazy wild-goose chase, to try and find emission scenarios and projections from now until 2100 where we didn’t have the world remaining to two degrees or two and a half degrees, to try and figure out just what would every country’s emissions be. You’ll see the results of my wild-goose chase in that video. You saw the graphic. It took me weeks to find that. And the reason is because almost every researcher today does not bake in what I believe is the correct reference baseline, business-as-usual projection.

America, as we plan on our foreign policy and our responses to threats, needs to focus on, first and foremost, what’s my most likely outcome? And then, as David and Alice and Sherri have mentioned, there are tales on both sides. There’s a tale on one side that says we go to four, five, six, seven degrees. That’s really bad. And there’s a tale on the other side that says maybe there’s a tiny, tiny percent chance that we get to 1.5 (degrees Celsius) or 2 percent—two degrees—and let’s do everything we can.

Look, I’ve spent my career in clean energy trying to get there. But climate realism is all about being realistic. That’s why we’re talking in this panel, I think for the first time, about how should the United States do a major war-gaming exercise, just as we did in the Cold War, we did for nuclear war, we do for pandemics. Let’s do a major war-gaming exercise for a three-degrees future and how we secure advantage.

Thanks, Noah.

All right, we’re going to go over here, sir. And then we’ll go over there to the left.

Q: Thank you. My name is Rafe Pomerance. It’s always good to have friends on the panel, you know. We’ve talked about some of this.

But I wanted to raise an issue that I have to say, I’ve been in the climate field for decades, and I am truly sitting here shocked by the assumption that we have to examine three degrees. I don’t think it’s wrong, but having some knowledge of the implications of three degrees sort of goes right through me. And, I mean, we’re talking about return to paleo-climate epoch, you know, with loss of the icesheets and so on.

Anyway, I’m part of an effort to create a second metric. I’d like to know what the panel thinks of this. As you said, the temperature metric has not really succeeded sufficiently in motivating the world. Now, will another metric do that?

Our idea is to create a second metric of an upper-limit-to-sea-level rise, which would force governments to declare where they stand on this. How high are you willing to let it go? Which is a much more—is better tied to local impacts.

Now, another element of this has shown up, which is the Greenland piece. I would argue the real U.S. security issue in Greenland is the fate of the icesheet. The icesheet has twenty-three feet of sea level once it goes. And I think at three degrees we’d be well past the tipping point for that.

So what about a second metric? Is that a valuable idea to introduce? Now, Alice and I did quite a bit of work on this. But I’d like to see what the panel thinks. Thank you.

SIVARAM: Who wants to take this first?

WALLACE-WELLS: I’m all for more metrics. What I would worry about with an upper limit for sea-level rise is just that there’s so much scientific uncertainty about that. So what it means in terms of what it requires of us would be hugely ambiguous and may be more confusing than clarifying.

HILL: Well, no surprise, I support having a variety of metrics. And I think sea-level rise for coastal nations is a particularly salient one, because you can visualize that easily. Part of this is we just need to have some way for people to visualize what this looks like. Heat is harder to visualize other than showing people who are, you know, prone and tired with water lacking. So I’m in support of it.

SIVARAM: Sherri, do you want to comment?

GOODMAN: Well, you know, Rafe, I think, you know, I don’t disagree with anything that’s been said here. But if you’re talking about sort of mobilizing, you know, global opinion and action around that and we look back on the reflection what’s happened over the last decade or more where it hasn’t, you know, that hasn’t enabled us as a planet, as a society, to really move the needle on it.

I think, you know, there’s nothing wrong with it. But we need a lot of other action and decision-making to focus on resilience and adaptation and then as well.

SIVARAM: We’re going to go over here to the left.

Q: Frances Flannery, BioEarth. Thank you for the invitation and thank you for forming this.

Since it’s the launch, I wanted to look at some of the assumptions that are built in to make sure I’m hearing it correctly. And I’m wondering—I’m going to jump on the three-degrees-isn’t-that-realistic bandwagon by pointing to the IPCC 6 report, which, of course, was issued before the United States has pulled out of the Paris climate treaty again, et cetera. And so that’s already a quite conservative report.

And I want to ask about the dangers of using language like how do we avoid catastrophic climate change when there’s already 1 billion people on the planet suffering water scarcity already for part of the year? We’re in catastrophic effects of climate change, and that’s why the IPCC report changed—which I think is still the gold standard, even though it takes forever to come out—but, you know, they’ve changed their language and they no longer speak about the possibility of avoiding catastrophic climate change. They speak in terms of securing a survivable future for most of humanity.

And I think that that is important, because when we speak about how do we avoid tipping points without acknowledging tipping points are happening now, they’re already starting and under way, and they lead to other tipping points.

Three degrees is quite, I think, conservative. And also we’re not even talking about the far end of the century. We’re talking about hitting two degrees, which we once considered to be catastrophic, in about twenty-five years. That’s something I think even, you know, my college students can understand.

And so, really quickly, as part of that, my question is another assumption. And I do recognize I’m at the Council on Foreign Relations and that America’s positioning is at the core of CFR’s mission. But I question—and I would just raise the question—since climate change knows no borders and this is an unprecedented event in our history as a species, since some think tanks think we’re even at risk of surviving till the end of the century as a species—most of us, that is—given all of that, it’s going to take unprecedented cooperation like we’ve never experienced before.

So my question is, can systems that have as their center self-interest, and even negotiated national self-interest, like at the COP meetings, can this work to avoid disaster for most people on the planet in time? Or do we need to rethink the paradigm?

SIVARAM: That’s a fantastic question. I have lots of thoughts, but I want to invite our panelists to come in first, if anyone wants to jump in on that.

WALLACE-WELLS: I would just underline what you said at the start, which is that we are already living in a world in which many people are burdened in really profound ways. Many societies are under, you know, extreme pressure because of these factors. So, yeah, there’s no avoiding that.

And I do worry, similarly, that—this is something that I think Noah was talking about earlier, just the bullet-pointing of these futures does allow us to kind of segment different societies that are in probably a misleading way. But I don’t want to speak for, Varun, the initiative here, but it would seem to me that the project is to try to pull those blinders off and just try to see the world a little more cleanly.

And one of the things that, at least for a moment, focusing on three degrees helps us do is to put aside a lot of the sort of small debates we’ve had about 1.5 (degrees Celsius) and two (degrees Celsius), and ask us to think more expansively about what a much warmer world requires of us at whatever level of warming that is.

SIVARAM: Yeah.

Were you going to jump in?

HILL: I would agree. It’s put into question certainly the international climate negotiations. And certainly the turn in our nation to isolationism is affecting, I believe, what the outcome will be with regard to climate change.

But I will say that collective action does have promise. Sherri and I have been familiar with efforts, for example, at NATO to bake in strategic consideration of climate change into their planning in a way more systematic way than the United States military has, at least publicly, and also that we’ve seen other—the EU continuing to step up and promise that it will take climate action; agreed, a little shaky, but certainly better than what’s occurring here in the United States.

And we saw that many countries haven’t submitted their nationally determined contributions as required under the climate accords. Those were due in February. And there are many, many nations still with those commitments outstanding. We’ve made a commitment at the United States, but unlikely we will honor that. It was made by a prior administration.

So, yes, real questions. The issue is we don’t have a better alternative. So we may see that insurance companies will be sending us a signal. Property insurance probably at a three- to four-degree world, I’ve been told by a reinsurer, will not be available. It’s just—that isn’t insurable risk at a price anyone’s willing to pay. And so we’ll see the corporations moving out. We will see also far more activity in our courts. We are already seeing that. Climate litigation has exploded in the last five years.

WALLACE-WELLS: Just to slightly repeat maybe or underscore something you were saying. It’s not an either-or here. So we’re not talking about choosing a path of global climate governance versus total national self-interest.

HILL: Yes.

WALLACE-WELLS: We’re living in that messy middle, as we are on so many of these other questions. And we want to push things in one direction, but it’s not a binary choice.

HILL: I disagree. (Laughs.)

SIVARAM: I’ll say just three quick things. First, Rafe first said, oh, my God, three degrees—unthinkable. And then, Frances, you said three degrees, too conservative. I think we’re probably doing something right here, which is making the assumption that we’re headed for at least three degrees is the correct way for America to correctly conceptualize the risks we face going forward.

The second thing I’ll say is, you know, when I recently pitched this panel—the three pillars to Shannon here, our head of studies, Shannon said I don’t get it. Panel one seems pretty bad. What do you mean by pillar three is averting catastrophic climate change? Same question you asked, Frances.

I struggled with the superlatives. The three-degree future is pretty darn bad. And preventing four, five, six and seven is also absolutely imperative. So that’s what I mean when I say we’re navigating—blowing through targets in panel one and in pillar one. And in panel three and pillar three of the Climate Realism Initiative, we’re averting the absolute apocalypse. Maybe I could have used that.

Q: (Off mic.)

SIVARAM: Don’t use that. OK.

Q: (Off mic.)

SIVARAM: Don’t use that one. OK.

And then the last thing I’ll say to you is you’ve asked a perfect question, which is does a politics of national self-interest make sense for solving climate change? Later in panel three—this is my third advertisement for staying all the way through to panel three—panel three, you’re going to hear David Victor, who is a deep expert on the subject, professor of international relations, talk about why the incentives may actually shift—I don’t want to speak for him, but they may actually shift from a prisoner’s-dilemma game in game theory to a different kind of game, an assurance game, or, for those of you into parlance, the stag-hunt game.

I am a dismal cynic, though, and my personal belief is national interest is the correct lens to view this. Climate realism does not make a moral claim that that is the correct moral way to look at this. It makes the positivist claim that we are, in fact, in a world where countries will act in their self-interest. And the realist way for American foreign policymakers to confront that world is to assume India and Saudi Arabia are after their own interests and they may be wise to follow their own self-interest based on what American voters want. (Inaudible.)

We have room for just one, maybe two lightning questions. I’m going to go to the gentleman right here in the front.

Q: (Off mic.) Thank you. Michael Gfoeller. I’m on the board of directors of an AI company called Potentia Analytics.

And my question is this. Is it realistic to be planning, as we are right now in the United States and in India and China, for a dramatic expansion of AI universe while confronting climate change at the same time? Because nothing increases demand for electric power as much as AI expansion does, as long as we stick to the current paradigm of using large-language models running neural networks. It’s incredibly intensive in terms of calculation to end state and in terms of power demand.

Can we do both at the same time, square the climate-change circle, and have a dramatic expansion of AI, especially in places like China and India, where the additional power is going to have to come from coal-powered fire plants—coal-fired power plants?

Thank you.

SIVARAM: Literally my favorite topic to discuss. (Laughter.) Who wants to—who wants to take this up?

GOODMAN: Well, Varun, I know you’re also an expert on that, but, you know, first of all, AI in everything, we’re going to be doing that regardless of how we power it. So there are going to be ways—you know, of course we’re thinking about adding new nuclear, cleaner energy source. We’re thinking about optimization. Varun is an expert, you know, on that, and can speak to that. I also think we have to—we talk a lot about AI in various sectors of society now, and in energy. I think we also have to talk about it in—and understand how it’s going to be useful in climate and weather prediction, because there it’s going to be very useful. And we need to be able to integrate that into our science-based advances in understanding what you might call extended weather, some seasonal forecasting, and improved climate prediction in the—in the six to one year timeframe.

SIVARAM: We’ve actually got a lot of questions so I’m going to hold my own tongue. We’ll take these two together. So, yeah, and then—and then we’ll do a quick final round, and we’ll close this out.

Q: Hi. I’m Eileen O’Connor. And I’m actually on the board of the Earth Public Information Campaign.

And I want to ask you, from a fundamental point of view, shouldn’t we start by talking about the politicization of science and how badly that is—how do we solve that first? (Laughs.) And don’t we need to solve that first, in order to even get the public to recognize the science behind climate change? And how do we get policymakers, who just defunded NOAA, NIH, the climate section of that, what do we do on that?

SIVARAM: Eileen, thank you. OK, and then one more. And then that’s the last question we can take.

Q: Thank you. Macani Toungara at Dell.

A big incentive for businesses to get on board is regulatory. So when the SEC was considering—was weighing Scope 1 and 2 and 3 declarations in the 10-Ks, that got a lot of companies on board in terms of concerns about greenwashing and doing more to decarbonize their businesses. So what would you want to see, from a regulatory point of view—probably not in the United States—that would create that incentive in light of some of the retrenchment that’s happening domestically?

SIVARAM: Thank you. Let’s do politicization of science, if anyone wants to take it, and we’ll quickly do regulatory as well. But that’ll be the next panel as well.

HILL: Sure. Well, the politicization of science, very serious here in the United States, in my opinion. And the departure of terrific scientists—I was the beneficiary of those scientists. I was formerly a judge. I got an assignment when I came to DHS to work on climate change. I was educated by scientists from the Navy, and meteorologists from NOAA, from NASA. We have some of the finest climate scientists in the world. We have informed the IPCC reports, which we’ve heard are the gold standard. And now some of those people are losing their jobs. They’re losing funding. And the universities that support all that effort is also losing that science.

I don’t think necessarily that science will not occur. I think some of those people will go elsewhere. We’re already seeing that China, the EU, and others, Canada, are interested in benefiting from that, because that’s fueled our innovation here in the United States. So that is a loss to us. And, actually, I’ll just say, I think similarly the neglect of regulation here in the United States means we’re ceding that to the EU, and Japan, and other regulatory regimes. And so our multinational corporations that operate here will be answering to those regimes, whereas typically we’re the standard setters in the world. But we will not be on that issue for ESG, so it’s—to me, it’s just a further loss of our international power.

SIVARAM: Any lightning responses, either on regulatory needs or politicization, to David and Sherri?

WALLACE-WELLS: I’ll just say quickly about politicization. I mean, I worry about an enormous amount as well. But I do think it’s worth keeping in mind that while other countries do not—are not dealing with quite the same issues that we are on that front, very few are racing towards decarbonization at the speed that I think some of us on this panel would like. And so we have to think about the problem set there is bigger than just misinformation.

SIVARAM: OK, fantastic. We are at time. Quickly, I’m going to give some instructions. We’re going to break. Please network, enjoy the refreshments. We’ll see you back here at 1:45, and don’t be late because Secretary Ernie Moniz and Mary Louise Kelly of NPR are going to be doing the keynote fireside chat. And from there, we’ll continue on with the following two panels, again, on how America competes in the emerging transition and then, finally, how do we avert—not apocalypse, Francis—but cataclysm? (Laughter.) With that, we’re off with a bang. Thank you everybody for joining the launch today. (Applause.)

(END)

This is an uncorrected transcript.

 

KELLY: All right. Welcome back, everybody, to our keynote today. I’m Mary Louise Kelly. I host All Things Considered on NPR. I’m a proud member of the Council on Foreign Relations. And honored to be here today on stage with our keynote speaker known to many of you, Secretary Ernest Moniz.

MONIZ: Known to you. (Laughs.)

KELLY: Yes, indeed. Known for his role at the Department of Energy. longtime faculty at MIT. I got to know you through your work at the Nuclear Threat Initiative. Also, founder of the Energy Futures Initiative Foundation and worth noting that unlike many of us in the room you not only approach these issues from a policy background in government but as a scientist—as a nuclear physicist.

So welcome.

MONIZ: Thank you.

KELLY: I think I will adjust where I was planning to start and just pick up with one of the threads that stood out to me from the session that we just heard. Start with a little bit of a gut check on one of the key conclusions of this initiative.

How settled is it? To what degree is it contested that the world is on track to blow past the two-degree Centigrade target?

MONIZ: Well, thanks, Mary Louise.

And also let me just say, first of all, that I think the Council—Mike and Varun picking up this climate realism is a welcomed initiative. Of course, after it’s executed we’ll come back and offer some comment.

But I think it’s very important. The idea of realism and pragmatism has not been a characteristic of a lot of the discussion and in my view that pertains as well to the question about 1.2 degrees, two degrees.

Look, I do think that we are—unfortunately, we’re certainly—going beyond 1.5 degrees is not an issue. Going beyond two (degrees Celsius) it looks pretty unlikely that we’ll be able to stave that off as well.

But, you know, I’d really like to go back and say that I think the focus on these numbers has been counterproductive because it’s led—especially with something like 1.5 degrees that we’ve been hearing so often now, basically, since the Paris COP that it leads to lectures, and I won’t name names but lectures on what we need to do to avoid unreachable goals.

It’d be much more sensible to talk about what we can do to achieve real progress and, frankly, so, for example, like, the 1.5-degree discussion, for example, I think it’s been very, very negative with regard to how we in the industrialized world approach climate issues in the developing world where, you know, the differentiation between how a rich country and a poor country can approach these issues is so different and it kind of puts everybody into the same silo and it doesn’t work. So—

KELLY: Before we go there to the developing world and developed world is there a better metric? I mean, we heard a lot about it’s hard for most people, probably most people in this room, to wrap their head around what a difference of a couple degrees or five degrees would mean. It’s the difference between 70 (degrees Fahrenheit) and 75 degrees. Both sound within the realm of possibility.

What’s the better route?

MONIZ: I’m going to give an unsatisfactory nonsound bite. I mean, I think the real temperature goal is to fight like hell for every damn tenth of a degree. That’s really what we have to do. Now, I think—

KELLY: It’s not about a sound bite, by the way.

MONIZ: Sorry?

KELLY: It’s not about sound bites.

MONIZ: It’s not? Oh, OK. Well, you’re an expert so—(laughter)—so I’m encouraged.

But I do think that it’s often ignored that there is a very strong feedback effect, that as the world warms, et cetera, extreme weather gets worse and worse and worse. It impacts people directly like insurance or inability to insure, or I could tell you about the insurance request to the change in my cabin in the woods. It was not pleasant. That these things affect real people and I think that’s the feedback loop that, in the end, will control at some level the average global warming increase.

I fear it’s—I fear—I fully expect that to be beyond two degrees. But there’s lots of feedback loops in terms of mitigation, adaptation. Going to hear about geoengineering later. Lots of things that we don’t do now that I think we will feel more and more pressure to do in a kind of a self-regulating system. But, unfortunately, we tend to have too much resilience to major change to make that—to make those changes fast enough.

KELLY: I want to make sure I understand what you’re saying. You’re talking about extreme weather affecting, you know, where we live, our ability to get insurance. Is what you’re saying—and one could see hope in this, actually—that extreme weather will force our hand? We’re not talking about life for our hypothetical great grandchildren. We’re talking about now—impacting us now.

MONIZ: Mary Louise, I think you put your finger right on it, that we do, indeed, love our grandchildren and children but we love ourselves more. I think that has been evident by the lack of serious reaction for future generations whereas getting hit in the pocketbook right now is moving the dial on public opinion.

I hate to be so cynical but I think it’s just an observation of the facts, and I do think—and I have said it’s—you know, it’s overly one dimensional but I do think extreme weather is ultimately the tipping point in—will be the tipping point in the political willingness of populations to pressure the political leadership to make real change. But it’s slow.

KELLY: So I wasn’t planning to get into politics quite so early but we are gathered in Washington on yet another day when the U.S. appears to be turning away from, indeed, actively working to upend the global world order as we have understood it for generations.

I suspect that whatever one’s politics in this room we’re all twitching to check our 401(k)s as this afternoon proceeds.

On the climate front, since returning to office in January Trump and his administration have slashed funding for clean energy. His administration is prioritizing the production of fossil fuels—oil, gas, coal—part of an agenda that he calls energy dominance.

How big a reversal is that? How big a deal is it?

MONIZ: Well, it’s a very big reversal but I’ll put it in a slightly different context.

I think that we have collectively made a mistake in not viewing climate, clean energy, security—energy and national security, social equity, affordability as one conversation and not a set of siloed conversations.

KELLY: An either/or—(inaudible).

MONIZ: Yes. Now, look, the reality is if I take those four as an example—climate, security, equity, affordability—I would argue that the Biden administration chose to focus on two of those, climate and equity. This administration chooses to focus on two of those, security and affordability, and we’re supposed to make some progress where we just lurch between choosing different conversations.

So I think, and that’s why I like the Climate Realism Initiative so far in principle, at least—(laughter)—that I think it leads naturally towards that more integrated conversation, recognizing you got to build coalitions who may have, you know, stronger motivations along one or the other of those dimensions but recognizing you got to—if you want to make progress on any of them you’ve got to build the coalitions that are going to, I think, advance all of them.

I’ll give you an example—a non-U.S. example. I know—I want to get away from your politics there, you know.

KELLY: Yeah. I’ll bring you back.

MONIZ: By the way, buy low, sell high is my advice on your 401(k). (Laughter.)

But if you go back some years now to the gilets jaunes in France, President Macron announced he was making a climate initiative. I think he’s never recovered from that in terms of climate because the equity component was not part of that same integrated discussion and I think, you know, that we’re just going to keep having headwinds in multiple dimensions if we try to get one tailwind in this strange metaphor that I tried. (Laughter.)

The other thing also, Mary Louise, you mentioned energy dominance, a term that I still choke over when I try to say it. But I think there’s a—the idea of singling out oil and gas is a very, very fundamental mistake in the context of energy dominance.

So the fact that we are the number-one producer of oil in the world, the fact that we are the number-one producer of gas in the world, the fact that we are the number-one exporter of LNG, those are facts, and it’s also a fact that those are going to be important parts of global markets for decades.

However, it doesn’t help to put your head in the sand and not recognize that clean energy markets are going to be dominant global markets for decades.

Well, if you want to decide to say, OK, I’m going to be dominant in one part of the market for a country as big as the United States with the largest economy in the world still—the largest internal market—I don’t get that.

Why wouldn’t I be trying to emphasize across the board being a leader—I’m not going to use the word dominant but at least a leadership role across the board?

And, secondly, I would welcome anyone to educate me because I cannot think of a single case in which the United States has a major export market, major position in the global market, without having a very strong domestic market as the foundation.

And so, therefore, I think the current mantra is counterproductive to its own goal of having leadership across the energy markets.

KELLY: I was going to ask, why do you choke on the phrase energy dominance?

MONIZ: Well, dominance is not exactly a great coalition building word—(laughter)—and I think we need coalitions. We certainly need our allies and friends.

Look, on the security side, for example, as I mentioned it’s not only about climate. It’s climate, security, equity, affordability. On the security side, in 2014—I was secretary at the time—that’s when the Russian invasion of Ukraine started. It wasn’t 2022. It was 2014. Immediately after that—Dan, you were still deputy secretary at that time but I didn’t blame you for it. (Laughter.)

Immediately after that the United States took a leadership role with the G-7 and the EU to take kind of a modern view of energy security and the chapeau of the entire initiative was energy security is a collective responsibility among allies and friends. That’s why I don’t like the word dominance.

Now, furthermore, I’ll just add, if I may, just one word—

KELLY: Please.

MONIZ: —on China as well. Look, the reality is—and Varun has said this—the reality is that when it comes to the clean energy space by choice China has become the leader.

Does that have to be true forever? No, but it’s going to be true forever unless we take a proactive stance and, frankly, use words that until recently were not allowed in polite company, industrial policy. Now we call it industrial strategy.

I mean, we’re going to have to have a coherent effort if we want to be a major player in those markets with China.

KELLY: To try to pin you down a little bit on this, because it does strike me we are having a fundamentally different conversation than we might have on this stage a year ago in terms of what is realistic, particularly regarding U.S. policy.

So I want to put to you a couple of things. Your successor is Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who also calls himself a climate realist, by the way, who does not deny that the planet is warming. A couple things he said in Houston last month at a big conference. He argued that everything involves tradeoffs and he was talking about the global economy and what is good for the planet.

Is he wrong? Are there not tradeoffs in terms of what is good for the economy and what is good for the planet in this emerging transition to clean energy if that is in fact where we’re going?

MONIZ: I think he is certainly correct that there are tradeoffs, if you want to use that term. That’s what I mean by having one conversation around climate, security, equity, affordability.

However, I don’t think his prescriptions are particularly on the mark and, for example, one thing that he said and the CFR climate realism also said, I believe incorrectly, is that the United States’ emissions, quote, “don’t matter” because they are becoming so small.

Every individual country’s emissions are not going to be, you know, a majority of global emissions but the idea that a country of our wealth would not be part of the leadership and taking advantage of that leadership, frankly, in terms of the energy market discussion we had earlier I think is fundamentally incorrect.

So if Chris Wright—

KELLY: On that point if I may just interject. I believe the initiative didn’t say what the U.S. does doesn’t matter but that it’s increasingly irrelevant shaping the future of the planet because emissions from China and India are so much bigger.

MONIZ: And I accept your rephrasing and draw the same conclusion. (Laughter.)

And it does matter. It does, whatever it is, reshape, or whatever—however you phrase it nicely. But I think, again, Chris Wright—you know, Chris—first of all, I do think the media have not done the best job in terms of characterizing where Chris Wright comes from because he has a direct history.

In addition to, obviously, making a lot of money fracking he has a direct history in solar, in geothermal, in nuclear energy. So I think he does share a broader nearly all of the above if not quite all of the above approach.

But on the other hand, I don’t think—and by the way, also another thing that I really appreciate Chris has been very, very strong for a long time in terms of things like the importance of clean cooking. So addressing some of these equity issues has always been part of his agenda.

Clearly, security is part of his agenda. He’s a bit—he’s kind of narrowed the field in terms of some of the energy options, I think, in a way that is not helpful to the goal of market leadership globally.

KELLY: Now, do you know him?

MONIZ: No, I don’t really know him well. I’ve met him but I don’t really know him well, no.

KELLY: I mean, I’m going to throw in one more and then I want to open it to the room for questions.

This is a—it’s a bigger question than climate. It applies to all U.S. foreign policy. But as we talk about what this administration is doing and how they may be approaching things differently from Biden and from Trump before that and Obama before that, is there any way—because climate is so long term and the results you can’t undo is there any way to insulate climate from the pendulum of U.S. domestic politics where one administration comes in and signs on to the Paris Accord and then the next one comes in and unjoins and then we go here, there, and back and forth?

MONIZ: Well, first of all, let me answer a slightly different question and then answer your question. It’s related in the sense that if you go back to President Trump’s first term I think one would be challenged to find a lot of deviation in the carbon emissions trajectory from his policies.

I mean, frankly, withdrawing from Paris did not result in a change in the trajectory. A second time around it may have more of an impact, actually. But I think if you go back to that first term there were at least three stabilizing factors. I would say one, of course, is the states and major cities also in red states were very aggressive in terms of, you know, renewable portfolio standards and the like.

Secondly—

KELLY: So local initiatives? States, local—

MONIZ: So local regional initiatives, and those are very, very important for one thing because the regional ways of successfully approaching the climate challenge are very, very different within our country and, certainly, in different parts of the world. And that’s another—that was another part of our manifesto back in 2019 when we published the guiding principles we felt for addressing climate successfully. One was recognizing regional differences. Another was building coalitions, as we discussed.

So I think that those regional efforts were very important. A second element was the private sector did not really deviate from where it was going. You know, in the energy business large-scale capital allocations don’t have a four-year time horizon. They have a couple of decades at least time horizon and the companies stayed the course. We can argue whether it was enough, fast enough, et cetera, but I think they basically stayed the course.

The third element was that Congress, despite all of their rhetoric, when it came to things like the innovation agenda—the innovation budget—people forget that every year the administration budget proposed a huge cut in all the energy programs and every year the Congress overrode that.

Now, that’s not to say all three factors are going to play in the same way now. I think the first will to a large extent, even though there are pressures against some of the regional initiatives. I think the private sector is a little bit intimidated and may not be quite as aggressive as they were. And, third, I think the congressional stabilization probably will not be there and the reason it will not be there, in my view, is less ideological and more just plain fiscal pressure.

I’ll remind you in Trump 1.0 we did not have a deficit that was a third of the budget. We did not have a national debt that was a third larger than the GDP. And so there are some tricks, as we are seeing right now, in which magically the extension of tax cuts are no longer considered a contribution to the deficit.

OK. Fine. Congress can wave their magic wand and do that. It’s not going to change the debt. The national debt isn’t going to be changed by Congress doing something exactly counter to what it did previously in terms of its scoring.

So scoring and reality should not be confused and that’s what’s happening. So I’m afraid that I think that the stabilizing elements are going to be weaker this time around than they were in the first Trump administration.

KELLY: Questions. As we did after the first panel, I would love for you to tell us briefly who you are. And if you could actually make your question a question, that would be much appreciated. (Laughter.) I saw a hand back here in the middle of the room against the wall first. Yes, sir.

Q: Well, thank you. Ramon Cruz. Used to head the Sierra Club until a year ago, and then Princeton University.

I was wondering—well, Martin Luther King used to say to his lieutenants, you know, if your coalition—if you’re too comfortable in your coalition, then your coalition is too small. And so I agree with your point of view that, you know, we need unlikely coalitions that are big enough to win. So I was wondering if you could go deeper into that—into your point and offer any advice? Because, you know, I—you know, basically, you know, can the Sierra Club and the American Petroleum Institute ever be—you know, join, you know, forces into a point? You know, so can you go deeper into what are these coalitions that you think can make us win?

MONIZ: Well, quite relevant to the Sierra Club. (Laughs.) So using that as a pivot point, as you kind of suggested, for example, we have a lot of polarization over vilifying incumbent energy companies. It accomplishes nothing. It sets us back. We have to—we have to, in my view, embrace the incumbent energy companies as part of the solution, and help lead them to more aggressive solutions. The same way we have to embrace a lot of environmental groups that are not necessarily building coalitions effectively. In fact, often, to be blunt, fracturing coalitions. I’ll give you—and I’ll give you one example, just recently. There was a lot of sturm und drang over the 45V tax credits. Just to put everybody in the same stage here, 45V was the section of the IRA that gave tax credits for hydrogen development. And hydrogen is a rough—kind of rough path of cost reduction, and yet it holds promise to possibly be hugely important across the board.

So to be honest, and we were—we wrote about this publicly. So I’m not saying anything, you know, that we didn’t say publicly at the time. That that the letter that was written by a number of environmental organizations together on 45V having what I consider to be a very narrow interpretation—to be honest, I called it anal retentive—that it would defeat the objective of building the hydrogen demand side while decarbonizing the electricity grid, so that down the road we’d have the best of both worlds. And I think what’s playing out is exactly as predicted. It’s providing an enormous obstacle to hydrogen demand creation, of course, now being—and that’s, of course, amplified dramatically by what is rumored to be the next step of the administration, in probably undercutting a lot of those hydrogen hubs that were to build demand.

So that’s an example where there was—there was a simple solution of a little give on both sides to follow our traditional methods. For example, we don’t require the very strange requirements of 45V for hydrogen—we don’t require that for electric vehicle charging. Why do we do it here? I mean, it’s just—if there was a different mindset—I can bring the environmental groups, the energy groups, the NGOs together around a rule—a rulemaking, that rule would have gone through easily because everybody—Congress, the administration. When they can get quotes opposites saying we agree on something, they just want to pocket it as quickly as possible and do that.

I’ll give you an example of what did happen. This is a different area, but, as you know, when it comes to things like small hydro and rivers, et cetera, people in the energy business, people in the environmental business, people in the fishing—trout fishing business, et cetera, all have very, very different views. So one of my colleagues at DOE back in the Clinton years, Dan Reicher, kind of was a principal leader in something called an uncommon dialog, to put them all in the same room. And then they all went together to Congress and say, we can all live with this. You got to give us $2 billion. Congress said, done. Here’s $2 billion—(laughs)—because it took a big problem off the table.

So, you know, the reality is—we may not get—everybody may not get quite everything they want, but if everybody has their own values embedded in a coalition, I just think we’ll make much faster progress, in particular on the climate issue.

KELLY: I’d seen one up front. Yes, Dan. Mic coming to you.

Q: Thank you. Dan Poneman, Council on Foreign Relations.

To take some of the commentary about the last panel about metrics that don’t resonate, and therefore drive change, and to take some of what you’re talking about, about pragmatism and doing what you can given economic interests. Question, whether things like property insurance and its unavailability, or rising premiums, and/or corporations that have to because they’re going to incur financial losses, get clean audit opinions by saying what their activities are going to do, or get ratings agencies to mark them in a favorable way, that avoids politics. Are those, Ernie, drivers that could be leveraged to create more progress than we’re now seeing through the political process?

MONIZ: Well, absolutely. And, as I said, I mean, I would—just to focus on the insurance example—look, these are—these are insurers and reinsurers who are just doing business. They’re doing their calculations. And the reality is that they’re going to lose a lot of money if they kept writing insurance in the same way. And it’s gotten—it’s gotten extreme so fast, where now we have so many homeowners in the United States, quote, the nice term is, “self-insuring.” (Laughs.)

KELLY: Not insured.

MONIZ: Yeah. Not insured. And in fact, I’ll just tell an anecdote, since—I referred to it earlier, but I’ll just say it. Until recently my wife and I had a place way up high in the mountains and in the forest. And suddenly, after more than twenty years, we get a letter. Your insurance coverage is over. We’re out of the business. I said, OK. So I called the broker in the nearest town, fifty miles away. And I said, OK. Get me another insurer. She did. My $2,000 bill was proposed to go to $9,000. (Laughs.) I mean, that’s the kind of thing that, you know, you got to pay attention to.

So just as that one example the on the insurance industry, I think this is going to be a huge driver. And it’s not only coastal. Coastal are clearly, with sea level rise, I think Rafe mentioned that, is the issue. But for me it was forest fires. Other places it’s drought, et cetera, hurricanes, you know, New Orleans, et cetera. So, yeah. No, so I think these real world—look, climate change is happening. Extreme weather is happening. It’s going to get worse. And that is, I think, in the end, as I said earlier, going to be the regulator, through people’s pocketbooks. That’s the reality.

KELLY: We have a question in the middle. I’ll come to you, sir, and then we’ll go back for the next one.

Q: Hi. Galen Carey with the National Association of Evangelicals.

The sound bite that I really was struck by is that we love our grandkids, but we love ourselves more. At the—

MONIZ: Don’t forget children. We love our children too. (Laughter.)

Q: OK, and our children also. So at the National Association of Evangelicals we published a document called Loving the Least of These, which tries to get people interested in helping the poorest people in the world who are most impacted by climate. So I guess my question is, what kind of make mix of self-interest, and national interest, and altruism, and so on do you think will be most powerful in moving the climate solutions forward?

MONIZ: Well, I think it’s a mixture. I mean, for example, I think the—more global interest in, for example, especially addressing the underserved, ending energy poverty. For example, there’s—I think there’s no doubt that there’s a very strong philanthropic thrust in that direction. And so I think there’s a mix. But I would say the reality is, in the end, the full solution is going to come not from philanthropists, not from national governments. I think it’s got to be organizing huge amounts of private capital. And huge amounts of private capital, I think, we are seeing some interesting developments towards, call it what you will, catalytic capital, somehow lowering the risk for some, you know, equity investor, let’s say. But, in the end these are going to have to be bankable projects.

Now, bankability will depend upon policy. For example, do you or do you not price carbon emissions, et cetera. But it also—again, I will be critical of all of us that I don’t think we’ve done a very good job in building the toolkit that will make projects, let’s say in developing countries, really bankable. For example, we need a much more serious way of approaching carbon accounting. And it should not be a carbon accounting method developed to serve a policy. It should be a tool, just like financial accounting, that then gets applied in many, many different kind of contexts, in an affordable way, in an implementable way. Without that, how can you expect people to know what’s bankable? How do you expect to have a carbon border adjustment without a system with real integrity and those tools? So the answer is I think we got to get private capital—when all is said and done, private capital has to flow. And we need to collectively do a better job in terms of providing the tools to allow that to happen.

KELLY: Just to quickly follow on the question, private capital, huge amounts of private capital, is the answer. To do what? Like, specifically, what do you want private capital to do?

MONIZ: Well, for example—and this may not be universally popular, but from where we are today—I think the old idea of allowing, let’s say, companies in Europe and the United States to satisfy carbon—low-carbon objectives by investing in real projects in the developing world, let’s say, should be allowed. But it should be allowed only in a system in which you have a real way of counting, so that you know that it’s real and not fake. And I don’t think we’re there. And we’re talking about huge amounts of capital. I mean, you know, the IEA has certainly estimated $2-3 trillion per year of additional capital. That’s as much capital as the world generates for all investments across all sectors every year. How are you going to have that all focused on clean energy? Well, you’re certainly not if you don’t develop the toolkit to do it. Even then it’s going to be hard, obviously. But it’s huge.

KELLY: There was a young woman toward the back here with her hand up. Thank you.

Q: Hi. Sara Anderson, at SEEC Institute.

I was wondering, you mentioned that regional parties and Congress play a big role in insulating climate change against the administration. I’m curious how you think they can do that now? Like, what is their role moving forward?

MONIZ: You mean, like, states?

Q: States, regional parties. You said “local and regional parties,” so as broad or as narrow as you’d prefer.

MONIZ: Well, I think the—obviously, there’s a bit of a red state/blue state difference at the state level. But many states—I don’t know how—I mean, many states have come forward, and I think they will continue to come forward. There will be challenges. Like, for example, the issue around the California waiver, for example, in the EPA, you know, is a big, contentious issue. The Senate parliamentarian just ruled that the Congressional Review Act cannot be used to remove that waiver. Whether that is going to happen, we will see. But I think they’re going to be—there are going to be more fights of that type.

But fundamentally, I don’t see why states are not going to just keep pursuing the course that they’ve been doing. I think in—I think a more interesting question, in some sense, is whether the states where they are not pursuing those steps will try to put pressure on the large cities within their states that are trying to move out in climate, and did in President Trump’s first administration.

KELLY: Is there a state you have in mind?

MONIZ: Texas would be an example, where you had big cities very much leaning forward. And we know there the state government in the investment sphere, in terms of where they allocate their capital, has put pressure on various investors. I don’t see why they won’t be putting pressure in the same way on some of the cities. And then it’s a question of the mayors and the governors, you know—(laughs)—having a little discussion, shall we say. (Laughter.)

KELLY: I know there are—

MONIZ: Of course, in New York—not on energy—but in New York state you’ve had a historic tension between New York City and the state government.

KELLY: I’m going to exercise moderator prerogative and take the last question back for myself, because I suspect we will hear a lot throughout the day, we have already heard a lot, about the worst case scenario for how—where did we land, Varun? Cataclysmic, is that where we landed? This could be—

MONIZ: Apocalyptic gave way—gave way to cataclysmic, I think.

KELLY: Apocalyptic. We’re not going—give us hope. What gives you hope? When we reconvene five, ten years from now and you’re updating us with where things have landed, there may well be progress.

MONIZ: OK. First of all, let me say that—because you mentioned earlier a discussion last year would have been different. I would have liked to have had the same discussion last year, actually. But now going forward five years or ten years, I think there is a huge hope in the innovation/cost reduction space. And in the end, cost reduction is going to be absent. That’s the affordability part. We’re going to need cost reduction. We can’t have eFuels costing $20 a gallon and expect them to be used. We can’t remove carbon from the atmosphere at $1,000 a ton, you know, et cetera. So, we’re going to need that. And I think we will have it. You know, there may be bumps in the road, but I think it’s—you know, it’s a secular trend that will—that will continue. And that is extremely important.

Maybe to end. Mary Louise, I’ll give an imperfect example. If you look back at the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990—this is to prove that Mike Froman was right in calling me his old friend—there had been a debate, a big debate, throughout the ’80s on acid rain and sulfur emissions, now a much narrower problem than carbon emissions, obviously. But there was a big debate. The science was there, the science wasn’t there, dot, dot, dot. The science kept, of course, making inroads on one side of the argument. And in 1990, I would say those who were objecting to new regulations to address acid rain kind of folded their hand very quickly, rushed to the negotiating table to capture as much rent as they could. But—and that’s a well-known story. And that led to the Clean Air Act Amendments, which got sulfur trading and all of that put in place.

But I think there’s another side of the story that’s not emphasized enough, which is the analog to what we were just talking about. Namely, in the 1980s the Department of Energy was investing in the demonstration projects that by 1990 had established the economic baseline of what it would take to address that problem. Technology, cost reduction, I think, was a key enabler to allow the policymakers to reach their condominium. And I think we will see some of that right now. We are seeing it right now, I think, in climate. It’s a much broader space. Huge array of technologies. Some have already made it into the economic realm. Some have got a ways to go. But I think, you know, ten years from now you’re going to see a lot more population in that space of competitive costs. And then it’s going to be a lot easier to move the policy.

KELLY: Are you personally hopeful, optimistic, given you have the long view?

MONIZ: Yeah, I am. I’m not optimistic from the point of view that we—as we said earlier, we’re clearly going to be in a realm of more extreme weather than we see today. It’s going to cost us. We’re going to have a lot more adaptation requirements. But fundamentally, it’s slow. Pace and scale, not what I would like. But, you know, I’ve always said we should not confuse going as fast as we would like with going as fast as we can. And what I’m interested in is going as fast as we can. And on that, I’m fairly optimistic.

KELLY: I’m about to release you all to coffee. I want to—I am honor bound to tell you to please be back in your seats at 2:45. We’ve got the next session coming up, Accelerating Clean Technology Innovation and U.S. Competitiveness. So I know we look forward to that. To all of you who joined us here and online, thank you. (Applause.) Secretary, buy low, sell high.

MONIZ: Thank you. Thank you. Cheers.

KELLY: Thank you.

(END)

This is an uncorrected transcript.

HART: All right. Well, welcome back. Let me thank everybody in the room and online who has stuck around, which is a fantastic feat of endurance already. We have another great panel to go, and then some networking at the end of today. I’m really excited to chair this panel with Neil, and Rachel, and David, and Josh, on the topic of “Accelerating Clean Technology Innovation and U.S. Competitiveness”—or, as I like to call it, the hope panel. (Laughter.) It’s been a lot of gloom and doom. We ended with Secretary Moniz’s hopeful perspective. And we’re going to, I hope, continue that with this panel. And then we’ll let the last panel be back down in the gloom and doom zone. (Laughter.)

So before I turn it over to the panelists, I’m going to just make a few framing remarks. And I wanted to just set this in the context—this topic in the context of climate realism. So, to me, realism is about countries following their self-interest. So I’m a political scientist. That’s where I get my definition of it. And it’s very rare, perhaps unknown, for countries to act altruistically. So if we’re going to address clean energy and climate globally, we’re going to need countries to act in their self-interest. And I think that’s a big part of the explanation for why progress is limited. And we heard something about that already today.

But innovation is exciting because it’s a way of creating interest, right? If you’re a country you have certain mineral resources, you may have renewable resources, you have sun, you have wind, or you don’t. But innovation is a way to create a resource and then act on that as an interest internationally. And you don’t have to look any further than China to see how this can happen. So China has accelerated its investments in solar, in lithium-ion batteries, in electric vehicles—what President Xi calls the new three export industries. And they are now exporting like crazy. That didn’t exist twenty-five years ago, right? China still has the same renewable resources it had then, still has the same mineral resources it had then. But it has this new industry that it’s pursuing.

So the question for the panel, at least in part, is what’s the U.S. going to do? So Secretary Moniz said unless we do something, you know, it’s not going to change. We do have enormous potential here. The United States has the most robust innovation ecosystem in the world, in my view. But we have to mobilize that and focus it. It’s partly about money, for sure. We have to make investments. But we also have to make smart investments. We have to have a strategy. At least that’s my perspective, and we’ll see what the panelists think.

And I also think we need to change our institutions to some degree. And there’s been some experimentation with that in recent years. Some of that is really on the table right now, as the U.S. debates its next move in energy policy. But that also pertains to our foreign engagements as well. We’re going to need some combination of competition, on the one hand, and collaboration, both with our allies and our adversaries. Maybe not in exactly the same mix with allies and adversaries. But we need investment. We need reform. And we need institution building. At least, that’s my idea.

So I’ll let the panelists take those themes up. But let me introduce them first.

So, to my immediate right, Neil Chatterjee. Currently the chief government affairs officer at Palmetto, but formerly the chair of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. So all regulatory questions will be directed at Neil. (Laughter.)

Next to him is Rachel Pritzker. Rachel is the president and founder of the Pritzker Innovation Fund. If you haven’t ever heard of the Ecomodernist Manifesto, it’s kind of a pillar of climate realism before it was climate realism. But she has been a driving force in this community and this way of thinking for a long time.

Next to Rachel is David Livingston. Glad to have at least one other David on the panel. I felt sorry for that earlier panel. It only had one David. This panel has two. The next one will have two. So you get your full share of Davids here. So this particular David, chief strategy officer at Galvanize Climate Solutions. Before that, worked for the special envoy for climate with Varun in the Biden administration, and in the Obama administration served in the U.S. Trade Representative’s Office.

And then, furthest to my right although though kind of metaphorically not in the right position, Josh Freed, senior vice president for climate and energy at Third Way. A long-time leader in linking national responses to the climate challenge to innovation and competitiveness. So he’s an ideal person to have. And nobody garners more respect in the community, I think, than Josh—other than the other members of the panel. (Laughter.)

So I’m going to start with Rachel. So, Rachel, I wonder if you could just open us up with some initial thoughts from your perspective as a philanthropist. Where are we at? So this is, in a sense, the mitigation pillar of our three-part initiative. Where are we at in the mitigation challenge? And if we think about China and the U.S., you know, as examples of countries that are pursuing mitigation, you know, how do we build coalitions that can last and, you know, pursue what is a challenging agenda?

PRITZKER: How are we doing? Yeah. I mean, this is—that’s a big question. But first, I want to start by just saying I appreciate this climate realism frame quite a lot. I’ve long felt that the U.S. really hasn’t had a terribly consistent, let alone big enough, strategy to match the scale of this challenge. And certainly hasn’t had the politics to get us there. So, yeah. I think this is an important conversation to be kicking off. I also—I think green groups and environmental philanthropy haven’t been terribly helpful in this—making sure we’re in a realistic frame also. So I’m hopeful that we can encourage them on that score. And finally, I think the climate realism frame is really important because the geopolitics as it relates to this climate transition is a real challenge. And I think it needs to be taken more seriously in weighing sort of these tradeoffs.

So what’s a realistic strategy? I guess I would echo Moniz and say that any progress is going to be constrained by economic realities. And so, you know, this—I don’t know if you have all heard of the Roger Pielke Jr.’s iron law of climate policy, which is that: When policies on emissions reductions come in conflict with policies on economic growth, economic growth will always win. And I haven’t seen an example of it being disproven, so I think it’s worth taking quite seriously. But then the way you get out of that is, again, as Moniz said, technological innovation. You have to make the clean energy cheaper. Which is, you know, something that we said in 2015 in the Ecomodernist Manifesto. And certainly, we’re not the only ones. But so I think focusing on innovation is key.

But I also fund in both climate and democracy. And I am deeply concerned about the fact that while autocracies like China are essentially doing it all—they’re investing in dirty energy, they’re investing in clean energy, they’re exporting, and capturing markets—we in the developed nations are often constraining ourselves in a variety of ways, including in terms of which energy options we’re willing to invest in. And we’re constraining others sometimes as well. And the other way that I think we are not taking these sort of conflicts between democracy and climate mitigation seriously is at home in our own democracies. And this is in part because, as we’ve seen, driving up the costs of energy or making our energy supply less reliable can have this effect of lowering support—or, I should say, raising support for illiberal parties, illiberal policies. And it is a concern that we’ve seen within democratic nations.

So a realistic policy, I guess, is we have to acknowledge the daunting math. You know, we’re basically having to remake not just our economy, but, like, all the core systems of modernity. So we should be a little humble about that. We should also see clearly that the U.S.’s, I think, most important role in achieving good climate outcomes is probably not just in lowering our own emissions, but in exporting better, cheaper clean technologies. And finally, that, you know, we take into consideration the economic, political, geopolitical priorities, and balance them with the environmental priorities. So I would leave it there.

HART: Thanks very much. Neil, I saw you nodding your head a little bit on economic growth versus environmental priorities. Maybe you could pick up that theme.

CHATTERJEE: Yeah. Look, I loved everything Rachel just laid out. I thought it was a very straightforward, kind of, candid assessment of what we face. And she laid out some pretty tough points about what happens when decarbonization goals and economic priorities, you know, kind of collide. This is not the doom and gloom panel. This is the optimistic panel. So I’m going to start with a degree of optimism. Look, I actually feel pretty good about the direction that we are going to go, because I think economic and national security realities are going to drive decisions that will ultimately have a positive impact on climate policy. What do I mean by that?

So right now we’re two months into a new administration which is still very much in the ethos of the first administration, and the campaign of drill, baby drill, and heavy emphasis on fossil fuels, and kind of discrediting clean energy resources as the green new scam, and other kinds of, you know, kind of rhetorical things that drive headlines. But when you actually take a step back and look at what President Trump has said about energy policy, he essentially made two commitments to the American people. One was to win the AI race against China for national security purposes, with an understanding that will require a tremendous amount of electricity. And, two, was to significantly bring down the cost of electricity for consumers.

Well, in order to achieve those two objectives—the collision of kind of economic policy with energy reality—I actually think it’s going to upend the politics that have kind of interfered with energy policy for the past two decades. We’ve gotten kind of entrenched in this antiquated notion that if you’re for fossil fuels you’re of the political right and if you’re for clean energy and climate solutions you’re of the political left. And I think both sides are going to have to reevaluate the positioning going forward. I think on the political left there has to be a recognition that we cannot possibly meet the coming surge in demand for energy—and it’s not just being driven by datacenters necessary to support AI. It’s being driven by vehicle electrification, building electrification, quantum computing, cloud computing, streaming services, Bitcoin and crypto mining, a reshoring of manufacturing, semiconductor manufacturing. All of these things are incredibly energy intense endeavors.

And the reason that we’ve sort of been locked into this antiquated notion in the last two decades is because we’ve been the beneficiaries of relatively flat demand. That era is over. We are now entering an era in which demand is going to surge. And I think the left needs to recognize we cannot possibly meet this coming surge in demand without fossil fuels, at least in the short term. And I think the right needs to recognize we cannot possibly meet this coming surge in demand and win the AI race against China for national security purposes with fossil fuels alone. We’re going to need every available electron. And that means solar. That means storage. That means wind. That means geothermal. That means hydrogen. That means nuclear. You know what? It also means negawatts. It means demand response, energy efficiency, VPPs, distributed energy resources. This is the path forward.

And I think that as people get seated in this new administration and start to actually look at their portfolios, and what their mandate is, and what their mission is, I actually am genuinely optimistic that the economic and national security realities are going to have a positive impact on climate policy. Now, again, this is all about climate realism. Is the administration going to say, “climate change” or “decarbonization”? They absolutely will not. But that’s OK, if the result of the policies that they have to pursue in order to win the AI race have a positive impact on decarbonization and the climate. I’m fine with that, if they don’t want to call it decarbonization or climate. I think these interests, as Rachel really eloquently laid out, are intertwined. And that is why I’m not on the doom and gloom panel. I feel pretty optimistic that we’re going to nail this.

HART: Thanks, Josh. Sorry. Thanks, Neil. (Laughter.)

Josh, so beyond left and right, in the long run is there a durable consensus to be had on innovation and energy?

FREED: So I’m going to try to add a little friction to the panel, even though I think across all of us right now there’s a lot of agreement amongst us on what this looks like. We focus a lot on separating the signal from the noise in policy. And I think Varun has laid out an excellent way to do that in terms of how do you formulate what climate realism looks like. And we saw that in a lot of ways in a continuum between the actions of the first Trump administration and the Biden administration. So fossil fuel production continued to grow under both. Record production under President Biden towards the end of his term. You saw innovation investments continue to grow led by a Republican Congress but signed into law by President Trump throughout his term. You can pick a lot of innovation and energy policies where there was building across both in terms of what was actually done. Enabling legislation, the Energy Act of 2020, which really set up investments in a lot of the programs that became part of the bipartisan infrastructure law and the inflation Reduction Act.

So you have an interesting drive in the right direction that ended up being really the industrial policy that emerged in the latter half of the Biden administration, that included some protectionism, a true all-of-the-above energy agenda that included nuclear, hydro, fossil fuels, and on and on. So there was a consensus. There wasn’t a consensus, and still isn’t, amongst a lot of the groups on both the left and the right, in terms of both how they talk about it, and also the politics that they think can win, either for themselves—even though they’d never admit that—or win in terms of their coalitional politics and getting more of the people they want into office.

The key thing for all of this that we believe motivated what policy should be in the United States, and particularly what the private businesses and the capital who were investing it were, was access to global markets. That the global market for clean energy is going to be in the trillions and trillions of dollars. I mean, that’s what’s motivating a lot of what China is doing to invest in both clean tech as well as continue to consume and use coal and fossil fuels. It’s what’s driving so much of the demand in all of the different technologies we’re seeing, and the fact that you’re having now an enormous boom not just in the production of electric vehicles in China, but also the different types. They have a new model of electric vehicle rolled out in China every two days.

The thing that—to add the friction to this—the real challenge we have now is the policies that the second Trump administration are rolling out is not consistent with the first Trump administration. Whether it’s—DOGE is now within the Department of Energy, and we’re likely to see dramatic, dramatic cuts into a lot of programs that had carried through some of the goals that they had set out themselves in the first administration. And the tariff policies which are roiling our markets and markets around the world in real time—it may have changed in the last half an hour, in the last fifteen minutes since we started—really does raise concerns about what are American companies and American investors going to do? What kind of access will they have to other markets? And whether they’ll be able to continue to build the projects, invest in the R&D, and have the kind of access that they need to continue to move forward with innovation and competitiveness.

HART: David, maybe you can pick up on the theme of global markets, the U.S.’s position relative to its allies and its adversaries in clean tech. What does that look like, from your perspective, now that you’re outside of government? I don’t know if you’re in the investment directly, but kind of being part of that world.

LIVINGSTON: Well, thank you, David. And yeah, I mean, I share your concern about David-flation and think we need to get it—(laughter)—

HART: David inflation, yeah. Too many.

LIVINGSTON: First—and let me also congratulate CFR for the launch of the Climate Realism Project. Let me congratulate Varun on a really excellent paper and a thoughtful set of other discussions this morning.

A lot has already been said, but not everyone has said it so let me—let me have a go at it. (Laughter.) No, I would—I would reiterate—I would iterate on everything that’s been said. I really love the way that that that everyone up here on the panel has laid it out. And I would just reiterate, I think we need to make an explicit effort to expand the landing zone where we can meet people who come at this issue with different priorities and different perspectives in the middle without having to welcome them as saying, thanks for coming to my side. Thanks for seeing the light. Instead, you should meet them where they are and say, your priorities are as legitimate as mine, and we welcome meeting in this common space, right?

And that means that we’re not always going to need to even have the word “climate” in it. I mean, look, I think that—I believe that over the—over the long-to-medium term we’ll see the Republican Party, this administration, continue to try and find its own voice and its own voice and its own approach on climate change. I think it is a party that believes that climate is an issue in large part, and is trying to find its own approach and, again, its own voice on the issue. And I think that’s actually a very important process for it to go through.

At the same time, you see a Democratic Party on the other side that’s now, in the wake of this last election, trying to find its own voice in articulating that a future that is—you know, to borrow the word of the moment—an abundant future, a future that can be more affordable, offer more options, offer freedom rather than a diminishment of choice, right? Offer abundance rather than scarcity by scaling up every possible viable electron, every possible viable molecule. And as quickly as possible, making sure that we’re getting those electrons and molecules to be as clean as possible as well.

I am optimistic, now sitting in the private sector, because I think that so much of the innovation engine and the deployment engine that is needed to deliver that abundance agenda sits right here in the United States. So, you know, whether we’re talking about the leading enhanced geothermal company, Fervo, that has a largely American supply chain and, by the way, with smart, bipartisan policy, by, let’s say, bringing geothermal under the 45X tax credit for, you know, inputs into the geothermal supply chain, we can make sure that this is an almost exclusively U.S.-made baseload, clean, secure, affordable energy solution. Where we are, you know, under—when we are drilling, right, we’re drilling for clean electrons, in addition to traditional hydrocarbon molecules.

That revolution—that clean energy, clean geothermal revolution, is at our fingertips to be unleashed. So much nuclear expertise and innovation still sits within the United States. When we think about like QuantumScape, the leading, you know, solid state battery company that’s on the verge of disrupting the next generation of energy storage technology, that is a U.S. company.

So we think about the companies that are also working to—I love that Neil mentioned that negawatts are the cheapest megawatt out there. So much of this is not just about how do we commercialize the next technology that’s going to help in hard to abate sectors. There’s almost—there’s also so much low-hanging fruit that exists right in front of corporates that just has to be brought to their attention in terms of easy, no-regret decisions that are value accretive to the corporate, to the employees, and to, ultimately, shareholder value in that company.

And there are companies out there like Watershed, for example, that are helping companies not just to track, report their emissions for compliance purposes but also actually helping to unearth solutions that pay for themselves in year one that are helping them to run leaner, meaner businesses that capture greater market share.

So, you know, the message that I would put out there is just that from a private sector perspective there is actually still so much energy, so much excitement, in the next stage of the energy transition, going forward, and we need to detach this energy transition from culture wars and the ideological battles that take place here in this city.

Unleash the best of American ingenuity, American industrial capacity, and industrial capability and recognize that just as the Biden administration was building on some positive strains of what started in the Trump administration that itself was probably building on some things in the Obama administration, the Trump Administration II has an opportunity to not rip up things and start from scratch but take the progress we made on nuclear in the last administration, take the progress we made on geothermal in the last administration, take the progress we made on carbon capture in the last administration—take that baton and run with it and we need to be ready, regardless of our ideological stripe, to celebrate that when it happens.

So I think, you know, if we can all turn down the temperature and just focus a little bit on the future we need to create we’ll be in a good place.

HART: All right. Now you guys are way too happy for me. Too much happy talk. So let me be the voice of maybe a little darkness here and push back, and we’re going to open it up to questions in a few minutes but I want to get one more round here briefly.

So we know that attention is limited. We know that resources are limited. We know that patience is limited. I think the last few years have—maybe the last few minutes have proven that.

So can the United States afford to try to be a global leader in everything? I think twenty years ago that was standard. You know, if you read National Academy’s Rising Above the Gathering Storm report they’re, like, global leadership across the board.

Is that still a realistic objective for the United States or do we have to choose? And then we could get to the harder questions about how we choose and what we choose.

But let’s just ask the question, do we have to choose? Are there some things we say China’s too far ahead or whoever—another country is too far ahead? Let’s focus our bets on this—not all of the above. Half of the above or something.

Josh, do you want to—

FREED: Yeah.

So three years ago, in part inspired by some suggestions of Varun and David, Third Way worked with Boston Consulting Group and Breakthrough Energy to commission a report to ask that exact question, and the great news is across ten different clean energy sectors they identified a huge number of subsectors and value chains for nuclear, for geothermal, for long-duration storage and on and on where the United States can be competitive, and they looked at it in the context of what has China already done, where are they, and where are other countries.

And the important thing is to really understand it’s not just a specific technology but it is the subsectors within that technology that we need to really look at and decide not only can we compete but also even if we’re behind is there a national security imperative for us to own part of that supply chain.

And so part of the goal of industrial strategy, which both administrations Biden and Trump have employed, is that it really does help tease both of those questions out—is there subsectors of a specific technology where the U.S. has competitive advantage or could have that, and whether we do or not is there a national security imperative to lean into.

And there’s a real roadmap. We have both of those reports on our website. They spell out a lot of it. Others have been doing excellent work in this as well.

LIVINGSTON: Can I just—can I jump on that, though? Because I actually want to say this is an issue area where I completely agree with the work that—the great work that was done by you in coordination with us when we were in government.

But my thinking has even personally evolved on this a little bit, as I think we should all make an effort to try and do more of, keep an open mind and evolve our thinking as the times change. If anything, the speed and scale at which—you know, what is clearly the speed and scale of AI infrastructure deployment and the—and the demand pull—the energy demand pull, as Neil was referencing, right, that’s taken us out of decades of stagnant electricity growth into a period of sustained structural secular demand tailwinds in the electricity sector, I think also underscored that what—by picking out sectors in which we can be particularly competitive, I think there’s a danger in juxtaposing those against general support for getting more cheap, clean, fast electrons on the grid. And I think now more than ever, and even more so than three or four years ago, there is a premium on getting cheap, fast, clean, secure electrons onto the grid.

And so none of this should, personally, I think, should be construed as in opposition to just baseline investment and production tax credits that are not just about the energy sector. The thing that we have to recognize now is that if AI sovereignty or AI dominance or whatever you want to call it is a national security imperative for the United States and if that becomes essentially a derivative function of access to cheap, reliable, you know, clean, affordable power, everything that we do in the energy sector to bring those cheap electrons on faster is also essentially a stimulus to a broader set of sectors across the economy.

And so we cannot think about it only in the silo of, oh, this is just one sectoral support, you know, platform. It’s, like—you know, I see my friend Dan Poneman here in the front, right? He’s doing incredible things with Centrus Energy to make sure that we’re not just leaders in the current and next generation of nuclear technology but also to make sure that we’ve got American leadership in the nuclear fuel cycle and the nuclear supply chain, right?

In a way, cheap electrons—cheap clean electrons are the fuel cycle for AI sovereignty and AI dominance and AI leadership so we need to make sure that we’re investing in that supply chain as well even if we are talking about deploying more mature technologies in which the United States may not have as much of a natural or defensible comparative advantage.

That is still an underlying important, I think, foundation of what we do even as we lean in even more to the areas of growing, you know, next-generation technologies where we can have true, you know, capture of market share and true, defensible leadership over time.

PRITZKER: Just to follow up on your—both your excellent comments, I think—and also because, obviously, I have been abundance pilled also—(laughter)—one way of saying what I think we need to do if we want to build a lot and eventually compete in the rest of the world is I think on the left side of our politics we need to get over our sort of process fetish which is standing in the way of actually building a lot of things, and on the right side of our politics we have to get over our distrust of scientific expertise and a lot of scientific institutions if we want to actually innovate in a bunch of areas because we need, obviously, to both innovate and build.

But to throw a little cold water on how we’re doing in some of the sectors that I do think we still could be competitive on, I recently saw the fact that in the last five years the only nuclear power plants that have begun construction were either Russian or Chinese designs.

We are, basically, AWOL globally and at home on competing in that sector that—you know, we actually have a lot of great innovative startups and, obviously, it’s something that we originally created as a sector. So that is something we should be fighting for and one of the things we need to do to compete is figure out what would be a more efficient, goal-oriented way of doing development finance.

I know this is a strange time to say that when a bunch of our tools are coming under assault. But, to be honest, we needed to kind of rethink. We have these capacities sprinkled all throughout the government. It’s not obvious how they’re being held accountable. We could come up with something more efficient and more targeted.

And so here is my chance to give a plug to the—about the Energy for Growth Hub, which has recently proposed something called energy security compacts that I think could be a useful framework whenever, hopefully, we get to rebuild some of this capacity.

And I’ll leave it there.

CHATTERJEE: I know you’re trying to inject doom and gloom into this panel.

HART: I’m doing my best.

CHATTERJEE: Sorry. (Laughter.) I’m going to keep it on the positive.

Look, when I first took my seat at a domestic energy market regulator I didn’t think I would have much exposure in the international arena, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that our allies around the world wanted to meet with me not to discuss liquefied natural gas exports or other trading of commodities.

They look at the U.S. and they look at our grid in particular with envy. I know it’s very easy. We are all hyper self-critical here in America and we are constantly in a doom and gloom perspective about the state of our policy and our politics.

The rest of the world wants to learn from us, and I spent my tenure as chairman of FERC traveling the world, meeting with our allies, and educating them on what has worked and what hasn’t worked for us in our experiment with competitive wholesale power markets and our ability to maintain a reliable and affordable grid while squeezing carbon out of the U.S. power sector. So there was a good story to be told here.

The doom and gloom part is, like, this stuff is hard. If it were easy I’d have done it when I was chair of FERC and we wouldn’t even be here today. (Laughter.) But it’s hard. Building things in this country is very challenging, and I was actually screaming this from the rooftops during my waning days at the commission that we have this irony that the historical opponents of building energy infrastructure because it was, largely, fossil infrastructure have now become the proponents of building transmission lines to get clean energy onto the grid.

The problem is you can’t tie up the approval and certification process for natural gas pipelines under the NGA on one side and not expect those same hurdles to appear under the Federal Power Act side when it comes to building transmission because the reality is that nimbyism, not in my backyardism, is not political. It’s not ideological.

Americans don’t want energy infrastructure coming through their backyards whether it’s a transmission line to deliver clean energy or a pipeline to deliver gas. It’s too hard to build things in this country.

So I think this is the primary area that we need to tackle if we’re going to compete and be leaders, and we have to be. It’s not an option, to your question. We have to continue to be leaders in this space and in driving decarbonization. But there’s some tough calls that have to be made and someone just has to make them.

So when it comes to building transmission lines the easiest thing to do would be to use existing right of ways where we’ve already got existing infrastructure. Build new transmission along that right of way.

Here’s the challenge. If you’re in a community that was subject to a previous round of infrastructure build out you’re saying, why are you coming through my backyard again?

Now, as an academic exercise I think I could make a credible case that in this instance we’ll be building a transmission line that will displace a more polluting source of generation and over the course of time your air and your water will get cleaner. So it’s in your interest to have this transmission line come through your community.

As an academic exercise maybe that works but as a real-world exercise that is a really hard sell to tell this community, why are our neighbors preserved again? Because they can lawyer up? Because they can fight this? Why do you have to come through our community again?

That’s a tough moral call. I have had state commissioners—my former state colleagues—come up to me and say, Neil, we would love for FERC to roll us because that’s the only way we’ll get this project built in our community.

And I’m sitting here, like, I like to go on vacation. Like, I might want to come to your community. Like, why do I have to be the bad guy to do this? (Laughter.) Like, you make the tough calls.

Nobody wants to make those tough calls. There are other issues that are just complex here that rise above politics. They’re just tricky, thorny issues. The biggest one to me is around cost allocation. So you have state A that has a ton of renewable capacity. You have state C that has huge demand for energy. What happens to ratepayers in state B?

Now, again, as an academic exercise I think I could make a very clear case that ratepayers in state B will receive a genuine benefit in the form of alleviated transmission congestion, which is very real. Transmission congestion is one of the biggest problems that we have on our grid today.

So as an academic exercise I’m, like, yeah, state B, you’re kind of benefiting from this. But as a real-life exercise going to ratepayers in state B and saying, you’re benefiting from neither the generation nor the consumption of the power—we’re going to build a transmission line through your backyard that you don’t want and we’re going to make you pay for it—for part of it. That’s a really, really hard sell.

So these are tough and challenging questions. But at the end of the day, to bring it back to the optimistic, the reason I am in the positive mood that I am is these are all math problems and you know who can solve math problems? Engineers.

And so, to me, people ask me all the time, you know, what—like, you paint this picture of the challenges we have in our energy and climate landscape. Like, this seems untenable. How do we solve this?

And I don’t say this to be flippant or funny. Like, I mean it. We need to make energy policy boring again. Bad for seminars and webinars like this but good for America, because when energy policy is boring and you allow the nerds to construct it, nerds are really good at this and they can do it without any of the kind of ancillary distractions.

What has, unfortunately, happened the last couple of decades is everyone from, you know, politicians to celebrities to CEOs to entrepreneurs have gotten interested in energy and energy policy, and we are, therefore, now making decisions about complex things like resource adequacy that used to be left to engineers.

I want to re-empower the engineers. I don’t want politicians or celebrities making calls about resource adequacy. I want the engineers and the economists to sort it out. Re-empower the nerds and we solve this whole thing. (Laughter.)

HART: All right. So before we get before we get—(laughter)—before we get boring again—

PRITZKER: Can I just—can I just add one second to that?

HART: One second.

PRITZKER: Because I think actually I have a call that would follow your point to climate philanthropy and NGOs, which is to please stop raising awareness. I’m not sure this is helping. I don’t think all the climate messaging actually is doing what you think it’s doing.

I think it could, in fact, be further polarizing the issue entirely because it’s not popular. Things we’re selling to the public right now labeled climate it’s not their top priority. I’m not sure it’s ever going to be their top priority because what I continue to remind myself and my philanthropic partners and, frankly, I’m sure all of us who really care about climate would be in this bucket, we are the weird ones. The voters are not the same as we are. They don’t care as much about climate.

HART: Thank you.

So before we get too boring I would invite your questions on the theme of clean tech, innovation, and competitiveness. We can take questions from online. We’ll start here in the room, and I’d just remind you that it’s on the record.

And we have one very persistent questioner right there.

Q: Hi. My name is Courtney Winterhill, Department of State.

First of all, as a trained engineer really appreciate that call to empower the nerds. So I had the privilege to go on a climate and energy-themed term member trip through CFR a couple weeks ago and we heard a member of the private sector say that in order to meet, you know, the climate pressures but also energy demand that we need kind of a Manhattan Project for energy in the United States.

I’m curious about your thoughts on that, and then any thoughts on what such a project would look like.

CHATTERJEE: Can I—can I jump in there?

HART: I’m going to—I’m going to take that one first.

CHATTERJEE: Oh, yeah, go ahead. You can go first and I’ll go second.

HART: So—yeah. So as a somewhat historian—not an engineer but a sometime historian, I don’t think the metaphor is very good. The Manhattan Project was to meet a very specific challenge in a very specific time frame under wartime mobilization conditions.

Now, that doesn’t mean we should not be concerned and we should be building big stuff, and the Manhattan Project is still out there. We don’t have anybody from DOE here, but about 20 percent of their budget is still cleaning up that mess that was left. So, hopefully, we could do big stuff but not as hastily and I just don’t think the will is there.

Neil?

CHATTERJEE: I actually don’t even think it’s necessary.

So in my view right now, we have to look at time to market, right? We have this huge surge in demand that is coming, and my former colleagues at FERC are kind of wrestling with this because they’re left with a no-win situation.

People are pursuing data center co-location deals. I’m not going to bore you with all the details. It goes completely contrary to my last response. (Laughter.)

Generally, what we’re talking about here is going to existing sources of generation like nuclear generators and plugging a data center into that existing generator, the reason being you can get immediate power and it’s carbon-free generation.

The problem with that is we have limited capacity in this country and by taking capacity—limited capacity at a time when prices are already high behind the meter you’re, therefore, spreading out even higher costs amongst fewer ratepayers and that causes consternation.

And then theoretically if we allocated all of these megawatts to data centers you might have a challenge to resource adequacy. So the reality is we need more supply. I don’t think we need a Manhattan Project to drive that growth in supply. It’s there.

Look, new gas with our shortage of gas turbines we’re probably looking 2029, 2030 at the earliest before we can get new gas online. While former Secretary Poneman and others are working in the nuclear space I, for one, think the timeline for advanced nuclear—new nuclear coming online is even longer than that.

The quickest thing we can do is solar plus storage with gas peakers to balance the grid, and we can do that in the next twelve months. That’s not going to require some massive wholesale change in policy. It’s there.

Our interconnection queues are backed up right now throughout the wholesale markets in the country. There is tons of clean, high-capacity factor generation ready to be deployed that just can’t get plugged in because of regulatory bottlenecks. That’s a solvable math problem.

So I actually think we can get there without having to kind of completely revamp our energy economy.

HART: A question in the front here.

Q: Thank you all very much. Sherri Goodman. Great, great panel.

So assume Secretary of Energy Chris Wright comes to you and he says, OK, energy dominance. I get that we’re dominant in all the conventional incumbent fuels and China is beating us in solar and EVs and in lithium ion batteries. But we’ve got to win the next generation of clean energy in nuclear and next-gen batteries, solid state, geothermal, and we’ve got to solve our transmission problems. What three things are you going to tell him to do?

FREED: So, I mean, I’ll start particularly with the nuclear side of it.

HART: So spoken like a true public policy professor. This is, like, the classic public policy professor question. Three things.

FREED: Yeah. For fission and fusion we need to ensure there’s regulatory certainty. So if there is a company that applies to the NRC they need to know that the timeline will be met by the NRC to evaluate it and that they will also have a transparent way that the project gets licensed. So that’s one.

Financing, financing, financing is the second. We need to help support these companies, especially advanced nuclear, so that they can have an order book of the ten to twelve of these novel technologies so they can get to the other side of the innovation cycle and you can get private capital to really invest in the entire company. Supply chains are built up and everything else there.

And Dan’s favorite is fuel. The United States outsourced fuel manufacturing to Russia for decades. We’ve all known that it was an awful decision and an awful policy. We’re still not to the point where we’re making either enough sufficient fuel for the existing reactors or the HALEU fuel that advanced reactors are going to need.

We need to accelerate that. The Department of Energy has been way too slow, for example, for developing that policy.

Q: Dan and I co-chaired—

FREED: Yes, so I’m preaching to the choir about that.

Q: When you said that, I just don’t see it happening in that administration, and likewise—

FREED: No.

Q: —happening yet in this administration.

FREED: And we need to do it—so, unfortunately, it’s another example of a bipartisan failure and it’s a place where this isn’t about partisan politics. It’s about the sort of stasis of the bureaucracy that’s causing these problems regardless of who’s in power.

HART: All right. I had one in the back there. Yeah?

Q: Hi. Good afternoon. Rob Edwards, Jr., with Hamilton Clark Sustainable Capital and a two-time senior appointee at the DOE.

Building on Rachel’s comments about nuclear as well as your comments about nuclear, when Dan Poneman and I were at the DOE under President Obama we did the Plant Vogtle power plant conditional commitment. It started out as a $2 billion conditional commitment and it grew to $12 billion. But units three and four at Plant Vogtle were built, which were the most recent examples of AP-1000s being built in the United States.

So, Rachel, I say to you and everybody on this panel can we do that again under this LPO to, perhaps, build a new plant at Calvert Cliffs?

PRITZKER: I have no idea. I would love to see that happen. I have no idea. I mean—

Q: I believe we can do it. I do have an—(off mic). Yes. The answer is yes. (Laughter.)

PRITZKER: OK. I’ll take your word for it but I’m not holding my breath. But I hope you’re right.

HART: Let me just build on that, if I could, to talk about the tools involved, right?

So you’re talking about the Loan Program Office—I’m not sure everybody listening is familiar with that office—and that’s an office that helps the market—private investors be confident but isn’t providing money directly.

Then we have other tools that were developed more recently—the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations is the one I’m thinking of specifically where the public and private sector both put money into projects which are meant to make follow-on investors feel more confident.

So they’re investing in experimental nuclear plants. But, hopefully, if that one is proven then the next one can be a hundred percent and I think those kinds of tools really are on the chopping block right now.

PRITZKER: Yeah. That’s what I worry about.

CHATTERJEE: I think we need to rename Dan Poneman David Poneman—(laughter)—put him on the panel, and then we’ll be fine.

PRITZKER: Get him a mic. (Laughter.)

HART: Dan, do you want to comment?

Hold on one sec. Yeah. Yeah, you’re name-checked enough that you deserve it.

Q: I’ve been name-checked multiple times.

By the way, for the record, my brother’s name is David Poneman, so. (Laughter.)

HART: Oh, thank you.

Q: And I’m often confused—

HART: Could you bring him next time?

Q: I will bring him. He’s much smarter.

I am in violent agreement with almost everything that’s been said and I want to have a—I’ll call it a friendly amendment to my dear friend Neil that brings in what Josh said.

I think Josh’s—and I will have a question, I promise, at the end—I think Josh’s three steps are critical but, as has been acknowledged, not happening. The secretary of energy was in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the birthplace of the Manhattan Project, and he called for a Manhattan Project II. So I say, take it.

And it does not gainsay what Neil said can happen in the shorter term and I think all of us would wish to accelerate the time line, but I think on these things that have been so hard—getting the federal government to provide that level of finance, getting the fuel thing fixed that we wrecked over so many years—I think Manhattan Project is a good metaphor and it brings people together and I think it’d be motivating.

The question is on one of Josh’s specifics. Actually, I think it’s absolutely right but it’s like many things in government harder than it looks. Regulatory reform—I think there was a lot of joy at the revised mission statement that came out of the NRC.

But one swallow does not make a summer, as Shakespeare or someone said. So the question I have to the panel is what will it take and is it feasible, given the DNA and what we now have in the NRC, which is a great organization—don’t get me wrong—to make the kind of changes to meet the spec that I think Josh properly articulated is critical.

And I’ll just throw out there is there any chance of the LNT threshold going away, et cetera, et cetera?

FREED: So, I mean, look, I’m an optimist with this. I think that it takes direction and leadership. We’ve got the direction from Congress to start. There’s the change in the mission statement. I think the leaders of the NRC are committed to changing the culture there.

And, you know, we’ve had a situation where they were mostly spending their time regulating existing plants that were operating and, unfortunately, decommissioning a lot of plants. So they hadn’t had much demand or practice evaluating novel technologies, getting it through the system.

They are doing that, and what we’re seeing right now is that they’re actually continuing to surpass what expectations they’ve set with the applicants, and so they’re getting approvals through faster than the deadlines they’ve set and agreed upon.

They need to double and triple down on that and you need to see that from leadership. They also need to make sure they have sufficient budget and they get the next generation of really talented staff because it is—like many agencies particularly involved with nuclear it hasn’t been refreshed in a while and they’re facing a lot more competition from a number of companies to get in talented young nuclear engineers and other people into this space.

So they’re still facing some challenges.

PRITZKER: And just a two-finger on that to bring it back to climate philanthropy.

There are very few think tanks, including Third Way and the Breakthrough Institute and a handful of others, who have been working on things like these changes at the NRC, and climate philanthropy has mostly not engaged at all in what I think could be transformative and could really help unlock an important technology.

And I think there are political benefits to having a broader strategy that includes more technologies and more policy pathways to create a more bipartisan and a more durable climate strategy that climate philanthropy really needs to take seriously. So that would be my climate realism for philanthropy pitch.

HART: All right. So one more brief question and then we’re going to have a lightning round where you tell me realistically what gives you hope.

Q: Thanks, David. Nat Keohane from C2ES.

I will make my question brief. I don’t know if the answer is going to be—

HART: Also, you can’t mention Dan Poneman. (Laughter.)

Q: I won’t mention Dan. Oh, I’m sorry.

So here’s the question, and I don’t envy you. I mean, we’re up on—you know, as Josh said, things are changing kind of by the minute and so I always think of, you know, I know what I would have said if I were on a panel a week ago but I don’t know what I would say now.

So I’m going to ask you all a tough—maybe not a tough but a big picture question. Suppose we’re thinking three or four years ahead and this administration has really dismantled a lot of the current—I don’t mean this in a partisan way, just factually has dismantled a lot of the regulatory agencies, the DOE. OCED has been pulled back. You can imagine the sort of addition.

What does the next—in your view, what is or what should the next administration do, maybe a chance to rebuild something new? What would it look like starting from scratch to build something that would really drive U.S. innovation and competitiveness in the energy space?

HART: David, take it on.

LIVINGSTON: OK. Great. And I’m not allowed to use Dan Poneman’s name in vain either?

HART: Only once. You just did it. You just used your quota.

LIVINGSTON: We already used our phone-a-friend.

It’s a great question, Nat. My best—I’ll give you a high-level stylistic answer but I’d have to think about this more to give a more thoughtful answer.

But I’m a deep believer that there’s hysteresis in this system. We’re not going back. Even if you had a different administration in four years’ time it’s not that you just go back to the way things were. You don’t go out and rehire a bunch of people.

I mean, I presume that we will be starting from a place in which we’ve either by whatever metric is used achieved or will be close to having achieved AGI and there will be—the cuts in some of the efficiency measures, let’s say, that are going on now will have been digested.

And so there will be a chance to build back up from a regulatory and kind of government implementation and governance perspective, essentially, an AI-first sort of approach to everything from, you know, permitting to—you know, to regulatory streamlining, et cetera, et cetera, that, again, should be helpful in debottlenecking that queue of—you know, of clean firms waiting in the interconnection queue and allows us to build, baby, build faster and more effectively and more efficiently.

I also think that there will be—it’ll be interesting to see where the relationship between government and big tech is at the end of this four-year period. I don’t want to predict where it’ll be but I just think that is one of the narratives that will be interesting to watch, and I think that these are systemically important American firms with a complex relationship with the broader civil shared, you know, kind of social public interest. But they’re also indispensable and unavoidable, and we’ll have a lot of cash on hand and we’ll have an ascendant role, even more ascendant role, presumably, in the global economy as AI continues to diffuse outwards.

So that also seems to me like it’s a really interesting question of what role do they play in some of these issues and some of these questions considering that they’re interwoven with the fabric of our energy system more and more now.

Those are just two initial pieces of food for thought.

HART: Pretty good job on the cold call. Well done. (Laughter.)

All right. So I’m going to start with Neil. Thirty seconds each. What gives you hope realistically?

CHATTERJEE: You know, look, the markets are working and we saw in the first Trump term he pulled us out of Paris. EPA regs were gutted. He had pro-fossil fuel, anti-renewable rhetoric and, yet, year over year carbon emissions declined in the U.S. power sector because Americans are now more aware of the opportunities they have in this space.

The business case for clean energy improves every hour every day. Decarbonization is the greatest monetary opportunity of our lifetime, maybe second to digitization. But in combination with digitization is the greatest monetary opportunity of our lifetime.

I don’t think politics is going to be able to deter this momentum so I’m actually not worried about it. I think four years from now, eight years from now, if we have a third or fourth Trump term it’s still going to be fine. (Laughter.)

HART: OK. I meant—I said realistically.

Rachel?

PRITZKER: OK. I’ll keep it to thirty seconds.

Unpopular autocrats don’t have the power that popular autocrats have. So if you crash the global economy, I don’t know—that’s my silver lining. I’m not very optimistic. I don’t know if you can tell. Today is a hard day. (Laughter.) I’m usually optimistic.

HART: David?

LIVINGSTON: Mine will be a variation on everything that’s been said, which is just that my deep belief and conviction is that the—despite the ennui, despite the angst, despite the polarization and the media environment we live in, the vast majority of Americans may not use the same words or rhetoric for it and we overly code the words and rhetoric, but we all want the same thing.

There’s a vast constituency for affordable, abundant, cheap, clean energy and there is a narrow, narrow, narrow constituency that actually opposes it at some, you know, far end of the spectrum on the other side.

And so that if we can kind of expand our vocabulary, expand our minds, open our minds, we’re going to be able to actually achieve a lot and that the United States still has to this day the special sauce, the secret ingredients that are kind of needed to be at the forefront of that innovation.

CHATTERJEE: Ninety-nine point nine percent of Americans have no idea what ennui means, including myself. (Laughter.)

FREED: It’s like if France had a word for entrepreneur, right? (Laughter.)

LIVINGSTON: But, Neil, this is in the spirit of make resource adequacy unsexy again. So—

HART: I think that’s—we’ve already achieved that. Last question.

FREED: I’ll give you three quick things.

One is just the United States is the private capital investment engine for innovation and that will still exist even after what happened late last week and this week. It can drive innovation both domestically and globally, and I think we have the resources to do that.

Number two, as a Democrat we are seeing a real shift and return to have government do less but do it much better. I think we lost that over the last several decades and it is becoming a really potent force again.

And the third, which I think has—we’ll see how long the unfortunate effects are, but as someone who believes that free and fair trade is very important the American public is, unfortunately, going through a horrible crash education in the importance of free and fair trade.

I think when we get to the other side of it hopefully we’ll have a return to that and we will be able to restore solid bonds with the countries that we need to work with.

PRITZKER: I know. Exactly.

HART: All right. Well, thank you, guys, so much.

I hope the Climate Realism Initiative gives you hope, and we will reconvene with two more Davids, I believe, in the final panel at 4:00. Thank you again for joining us and thank the panelists very much. (Applause.)

(END)

This is an uncorrected transcript.

SIVARAM: I am impressed. We have great turnout for the last session of the day. Please give all of yourselves a round of applause. (Applause.)

And I see David Victor has joined us. Fantastic. Hey, David, hello from rainy D.C. to sunny San Diego.
Look, let me just give us all a little bit of a recap of where we have been and where we’ve come today. I loved Secretary Moniz’s soundbite—actually I think it’s a scary soundbite, but the soundbite was, we love our kids and our grandkids perhaps not as much as we focus on our self-interest. I’ve really messed up his quote. (Laughter.)

The point was it’s a microcosm: Our individual interest drives our individual decision-making just as in climate realism, the realist take is that a nation’s self-interest drives a nation’s decision-making. And that’s the frame for the Climate Realism Initiative.

In panel one, we talked about the new baseline that we should assume maybe the case going forward for U.S. planning purposes—a three-degree-C future. It is a terrifying future, and it’s certainly not one we should aspire to, but it is one we should plan for.

We talked then in the second panel that we just heard about how the United States in the emerging energy transition can compete most notably with China. We talked about the need to build, an abundance agenda, and also a need to pick industries where the United States can truly be globally competitive.

And now, as we go to this third session, I want to reiterate a terminological point. Session number one, where we assumed that we were headed for a three-degrees-Celsius temperature rise is itself catastrophic, and one of the questions appropriately pointed this out. This panel is about averting risks that are even worse than the baseline that we are headed toward. I called that catastrophe, but perhaps we use a different word. We talked about cataclysm.

This panel is about what the United States, with its limited influence and our limited emissions, can do in order to prevent a four-, five-, six-, seven-degree world; a world of thirty-feet sea level rise; a world where tipping points cause runaway climate change. And for that we’ve got a fantastic set of participants.

Over to my right we have Maureen Hinman, co-founder and executive chair of the Silverado Policy Accelerator and former director for environment and natural resources at the office of the United States Trade Representative.

To her right we have Professor David Keith, professor and founding faculty director of the Climate Systems Engineering initiative at the University of Chicago; also a decorated career at Harvard University and in the entrepreneurial and corporate world.

And finally, all the way to his right, David in San Diego. David Victor, one of my personal mentors, professor of innovation and public policy, director of the Deep Decarbonization Initiative at the University of California, San Diego. Proud to share that David’s a CFR member. And we’ll be going actually, David, to you first.

Let me just set a little bit of the scene here. The way I think about it, in climate realism—again, when nations act in their own self-interest, it is difficult to skin this cat of getting nations to solve this problem of climate change. There are kind of two buckets of approaches we’ll talk about in this panel.

Bucket number one is where the world achieves net-zero emissions at some point. I’ve stipulated as a premise, it won’t happen by 2050, but by some point. And I want us to talk about what the United States might do in order to get the world to that point. Again, the cynical, sharp-edged climate realism would say that the United States and developed-country allies will use every tool in their disposal, from economic statecraft to diplomatic coercion to even military means, to get the vast majority of emissions from China and emerging economies to follow.

There is another approach—and David Keith in particular is an expert at this—another approach called geoengineering, and we’ll talk a little bit about that. And then we’ll talk about whether a combination of the two approaches, one or the other, is the one the United States should most strategically plan for.

So I’m going to start by going over to David—David Victor, one of the two Davids here. David, love for you to tell us a little bit about—you know, we ended the last panel by talking about hope. Love for you to tell us a little bit about what does in fact give you hope, even in—amid this bleak picture where the nations of the world don’t seem to be following the Paris climate targets. What does give you hope, and where would you go for the United States, with its limited influence, to try and avert the most cataclysmic climate change?

VICTOR: Thank you very much. It’s great to be with you. Sorry I’m only there virtually. I don’t know what’s in the water supply there but it seems like a lot of gloom and doom. (Laughs.)

I’m—you know, we have to be cautious here, but I guess I’d say four things, very briefly.

First is, fifteen years ago we were on track for maybe five (degrees Celsius) or six degrees C of climate change; now we’re on track for two-and-a-half (degrees Celsius) or three (degrees Celsius)—I guess three is a focal number right now. We don’t really know, but it’s not five (degrees Celsius) or six (degrees Celsius). And that’s not guaranteed, but that’s the right way to measure progress.

And the goals in Paris, you know, well below two degrees—these were collective goals. They were never achievable. So, you know, why we continue to use those as the metric of progress, I don’t know. But that’s partly the reason I’m optimistic here—not recklessly optimistic. And the reason we’ve come down from five (degrees Celsius) or six (degrees Celsius) to maybe three (degrees Celsius) or less than three (degrees Celsius) is—a bunch of different things have happened in the global economy, but part of it is that countries have rethought their interests. They’ve put greater value on action on climate; costs of controlling emissions have come down—that’s made things that previously were expensive and politically challenging easier, and so on. So that’s the first point. I think the overall picture is encouraging, and I’m glad to see though we’re focusing on the implications of the warming that’s leftover.

Second is, how do you make—continue to make progress here? We have a lot of capital flowing into clean energy, but it’s flowing into places where the business model makes sense. It’s not altruism; it’s where the cost of technologies line up, where the policies are stable. And what we’re seeing happening around the global economy is this hunt for that business case and stability. And so part of what the United States needs to be doing is creating those zones of stability—I’m not sure that’s happening right now in Washington—but creating those zones of stability for the investment environment. And it’s across the board; it’s everything that’s earning money. So I think that’s actually really important.

It's also a reminder that the things that are going to drive climate—or what we call action on climate are mostly outside of climate policy. They’re not divorced completely, but they’re interest rates, they’re contractual stability, they’re reliability of policy, and so on.

Third is, I think your paper is too colorful in saying the U.S. emissions don’t matter. U.S. emissions do matter. All countries matter. Everybody is above-average, I guess—(laughter). But the U.S. matters because what’s important here is not just leadership but it’s followership, it’s how do you take leading markets—of which the United States is one, but China is one, and so on—how do you make sure the innovations in those markets—you know, it’s the opposite of Vegas rules—they don’t stay at home; they travel through the global economy. And that requires, you know, openness to trade; that requires investment rules, and so on. That’s my big worry about what’s going on right now. I get the politics of onshoring and so on, but it’s easy to overstate that and not pay attention to what then other trading partners do, which is close down markets and make that harder.

And the last thing I’ll say is, it’s very easy these days to trash Paris, and I just want to make a brief case for why Paris is still part of the hope here. The role of international institutions here is not some kind of reckless, you know, everyone joining at the hip, forcing through binding contracts all countries to follow common rules. We’ve tried that; it failed. We knew it was going to fail. Just by logic it was going to fail.

Instead what Paris is, is an umbrella under which lots of things happen and there’s lots of flexibility, and so it gives license for that to happen. And so we need to find a way to have that umbrella—right now the U.S. is out of Paris; frankly it would be better for the U.S. to be out of Paris if they’re going to be causing trouble—but for other countries to kind of reinforce that framework, not rely on the framework itself to get all the work done, but it’s the umbrella under which legitimate action happens. And I think we just can’t forget that because otherwise we’re going to have total chaos, and that will make it harder around the world to do the kinds of things that are needed.

SIVARAM: David, this is a super helpful point. I will tell you I advertised something like this early on in the session. I said, David Victor is going to come and tell us why we turn prisoner’s dilemma into stag hunt. So here’s my question to you, David: You are I think correct to call me colorful when I say the United States’ emissions don’t matter. And I don’t think you disagree with my mathematical point that the U.S. will account for 5 percent of future cumulative emissions—that’s mathematically insignificant. I think what you object to is that the United States has this opportunity to drive followership, and that through U.S. leadership you can affect much more than 5 percent of future cumulative emissions. Can you give this audience just one more step of detail on, look, if Paris doesn’t fundamentally change the prisoner’s dilemma incentives but it provides a little bit of coordination, how far does it really get us? Does it get us 10 percent of the way toward a new game? Is it 50 percent of the way toward a new game? Can you talk us through what Paris gets us, and then what’s left?

VICTOR: Yeah. And to turn this into plain English, if you think of the global cooperation problem as a huge contract that all countries need to sign up for, and everyone has a strong incentive to cheat on the contract, that’s a prisoner’s dilemma kind of problem. The incentives are overdetermined to fail. And those kinds of cooperation agreements usually fail, especially if they involve large numbers of countries.

If you think about the problem as—you know, as you say, a stag hunt or insurance problem, meaning what you’re trying to do is create cover and some coordination, and then most of the actions happening inside markets, sector by sector—that’s an easier problem because you don’t need to have quite such strong international enforcement and so on.

Will that get us to net-zero promptly? No. But technological change is what’s going to make that possible. And in the sectors where we’ve seen a lot of technological change, we’re starting to see emissions come down. The electric power sector—the largest emitter globally—the electric power sector is a great example. And by doing that it changes the politics. Like, we saw a lot of U.S. power companies wary about action on climate change fifteen years ago; now almost all of them have realized in various ways—not all but almost all of them have realized that this is an infrastructure game and we’re trying to invest in infrastructure, and we need to build more stuff. And all of that’s consistent with their business model, to varying degrees.

So that’s an example where it gets you pointed in the right direction. It doesn’t get you quickly to zero, but that was never the right way of measuring progress.

SIVARAM: Super helpful, David. We’ll come back to that in a moment.

I want to go to Maureen next.

Maureen, we are in an exceptional moment right now. We should look it in the eye. Trade is at the top of our agenda.

HINMAN: Why? (Laughter.)

SIVARAM: Can you tell us, Maureen, what role can trade have for the United States and our developed-economy allies and friends—what role can trade have in accomplishing the outcomes we seek, which is, in this panel, averting what we’ll call cataclysm, the stuff that’s even worse than the baseline that we’re on? (Laughter.)

HINMAN: OK. Well, thank you.

So, jokes aside, I do think the moment we’re in right now with tariffs is very instructive, because we are in a moment, whether we like it or not, of economic realpolitik. And that is underpinned—that is one of the—one of the theaters of battle and an outgrowth of a new cold war.

Now, we can ignore that, or we can embrace it when we’re talking about climate and trade, and climate more generally. And how you embrace that is by making climate a competitive factor in the cold war race inside that theater of economic competition.

So there’s some ways that you can deal with climate and trade that make sense, right? So talk about Paris; everyone talks about technology transfer. Well, it turns out trade has lots of tools for technology transfer. You can lower tariffs. I used to work—it’s very—it feels very quaint now—I used to be a tariff negotiator, and we used to try to eliminate tariffs on environmental technologies. (Laughs.) So now it feels very durable, but you can eliminate tariffs and other barriers. President Trump is correct in his assessment that there are onerous and unreasonable barriers on a lot of technical exports that we should be making it just super easy to put engineers and technologies anywhere in the world that countries can afford them, and we should be making those technologies more affordable. We should be transferring that technology. That’s about—ultimately about lowering trade barriers but doing so in a way that good rules are protected so we can all share the benefits of a cleaner economy, and that means protecting intellectual property, not using slave labor, making sure that there are high standards for workforce, and so—and also frankly just acknowledging that there’s tradeoffs, right? There is not an environmental policy on the planet that does not have a tradeoff that’s environmental in nature. There is also not an economic policy, including a trade policy, on the planet that does not have a tradeoff. And I think part of the problem is we don’t acknowledge those tradeoffs.

Now, one of the most potent things we can do is just think about ways that we can adjust for pollution in embedded manufacturers at the border. That has the effect of rising the demand and a rising tide for clean products. It also raises demand for clean manufacturing machinery and expertise. That’s one way to make sure that we’re all kind of—that the economic incentives are aligned with our heartfelt desire to make sure our grandkids don’t inherit an uninhabitable Earth.

SIVARAM: Take that one step further, Maureen. I’m curious because—and David, we’ll come to you in a moment. And then David K. will spend much of our time talking about geoengineering. So we will come to that in a second.

David Victor has written often about the benefits of a relatively open trading system for keeping clean energy costs down. We are embroiled right now in a 50-plus percent tariff situation with China—34 percent back and potential additional retaliation.

What is the right way to handle trade with China in the context of the climate situation, where our goal is to get China to aggressively reduce their emissions?

HINMAN: So, I think the trade question often gets conflated with how things are supposed to be versus how they are, that I think there’s a little bit of magical thinking going on. So if you are talking about, you know, WTO rules, let’s say—first of all, those rules are old. They were made in an economy that doesn’t look like our economy today, but—and, you know, there’s a need to update those rules.

But second, those rules are really made for market economies and, to a lesser extent, democracies. All the pain points—if you ever need to go to sleep and you can’t, go ahead and read the GATT agreement. (Laughter.) But all the pain points—all the pain points are designed to—for free societies, more or less. And so when you have a very large nonmarket actor that has very—is very comfortable with making commitments because they feel no domestic or international need to follow through with those commitments, you can’t really have the same set of rules. And the problem compounds around the issue that once you have that actor in the global—in a very globalized market, the benefits that those free societies promised their people around that free trade don’t get accrued to them. And so there’s this sense of getting a raw deal because in that sense, it’s real, right? And it’s not the policies that were bad; it’s the fact that you’ve got an actor that’s not doing what they’re supposed to be doing.

And so that actor in that context—you have to have a different set of rules for them than you have for friends and allies and countries that intend to use the rules as intended. And I think that that not only is true for trade policies and environmental trade policies or climate trade policies; I think it’s also true for global climate policy. And so the question is really, like, how do you bring—build a big enough consortia of countries to develop a functional set of rules that are values-based, that can yield economic benefits, that can deliver on the remit to populations, while also making sure that you’re protecting those economies from the worst excesses of the market manipulator, and also, you know, making sure that the membership benefits are attractive enough to align the benefits and get the market manipulator to move in the right direction. There are tremendous economic opportunities in every economic transition. I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to say that the climate transition—the climate economy transition is probably record-breaking in modern history in terms of the economic benefits that are there, but we have to make sure that there is some level of rising tide, and I think that’s how you do it. You’ve got to have an A-team and then manage your B-team.

SIVARAM: Thanks. Thanks, Maureen.

I want to take us to geoengineering and David Keith. Thank you for joining us. You know, you are probably the most recognized expert in this field. Before we dive into the merits of demerits of geoengineering—I should mention before I say this—this is kind of the Mike Froman panel because we first—spent the first half talking about trade; the second half—Mike and I have had this long-running discussion about how important geoengineering should be, and I feel like I’m moving toward you, Mike. This seems like an absolutely critical subject.

So, David, tell us a little bit about the options we have on the table when it comes to averting the most cataclysmic climate change using geoengineering, and then we’ll dive into some of the merits.

KEITH: I’m happy to do that, but I really want to start by maybe disagreeing with the premise a little bit.

So I don’t actually think about this as the most cataclysmic climate—managing the most cataclysmic climate. I think of it as kind of managing the mean effect and just reducing some of the harms to especially some of the poorest people in the developing world in a way that accelerates development and reduces a kind of inequities. And I also really don’t share the kind of gloom and doom of your article so much, although I love it and I think it’s really important to kind of inject some realism.

So I want to step way back. It’s a quarter of a millennia since Watt invented that steam engine that was three times better than the previous one. And of course it was used to pump water out of a coal mine, which allowed you to mine more coal faster, which is the definition of a chain reaction. And in that quarter-millennia we’ve seen economic growth spin around the world in this amazing way, and CO2 emissions rise like crazy—lockstep.

We’re very likely at the peak. This year perhaps with an economic downturn will be the peak. It’s right about now. And economic growth will continue, but emissions will start to go down—not as fast as the environmental community wants, but they will. And I think that’s an enormous thing to celebrate. And so I don’t see this as such a loss. I see this as the first great turning point of the climate fight.

I’ve been—known David Victor and been working on this for thirty-eight years or so, and I think the business of getting to the peak is a really big deal. We spent 2 percent of the entire world’s economy on clean energy last year. That is really different than the world we were in just a few years ago.

So nobody knows what’ll happen, but I personally think forgetting solar geoengineering, which would obviously allow you to stop it warming when you want more or less, I think that it’s pretty unlikely we’d be over three (degrees Celsius), personally. I think that the winds of clean energy are real. And to be clear, I’ve been a skeptic of solar power. There’s lots of stuff I’ve been—I don’t think this will all be easy, but I also think it’s doable and there are some big forces that make it happen.

And one more thing on the politics—I know this wasn’t what you asked, but I see Paris as strangely successful. To me, when my friends were negotiating it, I think they knew there was no chance it could be 1.5 (degrees Celsius). I think the political idea was you put the feed bag right in front of the donkey’s nose so that as soon as you negotiate it, the environmental community could start beating politicians over the head to try and get more action, and we did get more action. That’s the 2 trillion (dollars) we’re spending on clean energy, which had something to do with that.

If you thought Paris literally meant we should stop at 1.5 (degrees Celsius), of course it was a joke. But if you thought Paris was, we should accelerate action and begin to have this review process, which is what we have, I think it’s actually a reasonable thing. Could be better, but it’s there. So that’s my kind of different view about it.

So I’m happy to talk about climate engineering, but I think it’s in the context of something that’s actually going pretty well, and I think that’s really important, that climate engineering cannot solve the problem alone. It’s not an alternative. If you do not bring emissions to net-zero, the climate will keep walking off towards being Venus. It’s basic math.

So the best you can say is that a combination of emissions cuts and solar geoengineering or sunlight reflection will be less risky than emissions cuts alone. But this is not a substitute—this isn’t plan B. This is a substitute to plan A.

So what are we talking about? There’s a whole bunch of different technologies, from mirrors in space to making clouds brighter, but the only thing that we really in a pragmatic way know how to do, in the sense that it’s technically feasible now, is to put sulfuric acid droplets in the stratosphere with high-flying airplanes. And that’s actually surprisingly easy and I think surprisingly better understood than you might think.

So just to be specific about it—and then we’ll come back—if you wanted to cool the world half-a-degree C—so make it from maybe, you know, two-and-three-quarters degrees to two-and-a-quarter degree, or whatever it is—you wanted to cool the world half-a-degree C, you’d be talking about a million or a million-and-a-half tons of sulfur per year put into the atmosphere, and that could be done with like a hundred aircraft that would cost a few billion dollars a year, including monitoring. That’s the kind of thing—there’s no—this is not any new technology. It’s stuff that we basically have and understand.

I think what really will I think surprise many of you is that the way at least I and many other people in the middle of this now talk about it is much more maybe positive than we used to. So in that limited half-a-degree C cooling and balancing across the hemispheres—in that world, I think it’s actually surprisingly well understood, and we can quantitatively assess many of the risks and side effects—which are real; there would be harmful side effects and risks, but we actually know a lot about them. And the reason is that we have this immense experience with sulfur.

So your first reaction should be, what? He’s talking about putting sulfuric acid in the stratosphere? It just seems crazy. You should say, you know, W-T-F?

But here—maybe two numbers and then I’ll stop—to give you a sense of why we know something about it. Maybe I’ll give you four numbers. So I said one-and-a-half million tons a year. That probably won’t mean much, but at the peak of 1970s pollution, we put almost 100 million tons a year in the lower atmosphere. So this is 2 percent of that. And that means we have immense knowledge about the environmental impacts of all that sulfur. There were more than 10,000 papers published on aerosols and climates—one of the core things we know about climate. And if you’re talking about putting sulfur in the stratosphere, this is something where the amount I just said, one-and-a-half million tons—that’s about a fifth of the pulse we saw in the Pinatubo volcano in 1991, and we correctly predicted the climate response to Pinatubo before it was observed, even back with our 1991 climate model. So this is stuff we know a lot about.

And that doesn’t mean we know it all. We need more research. Governance is a big deal we’ll get to in a second—lots of individual uncertainties. But, you know, in your piece I think you called this highly speculative and untested, and I think—of course there’s a way in which that’s true, but I don’t think if you go talk to core climate scientists, the idea that aerosols cool the planet is a really basic fact of climate science. It’s not speculative. It’s at the core of how we understand the climate. And it’s true, it’s untested. It can’t really be tested. But in some way it doesn’t really need to be tested because we know aerosols cool the climate. We’ve put a lot of aerosols in the climate and cooled it already.

SIVARAM: I have a follow-up here, but I’m actually going to—David Victor, the question I’m going to ask you next I’m just going to preview for you now, and then I’m going to ask David Keith a question.
The question I’m going to ask you, David Victor, as an expert in political science and international relations, is, can you construct two futures—one in which we, the United States, unilaterally ends up deploying geoengineering or SRM; and another in which the world decides to adopt geoengineering in some kind of coordinated way with coordinated governance? What are the necessary preconditions that would achieve either of these two futures—is going to be my question to you.

But to David Keith, I would love to know—you hinted that we need more research; we need more governance. What is the actual concrete path that it could look like over the next one, two, five, ten years?

KEITH: Yeah.

SIVARAM: And what would the cost look like once we actually decide to cool the Earth by half-a-degree?

KEITH: So I think the most important single thing we need is trusted assessments. I’d like to do a lot more science. I’m doing science, I love it; I think there are a lot of questions that are worth answering. But I think the most important thing is trusted assessments of the science we have. Because the whole point of what I said is there’s this deep body of science. The first review paper on stratospheric sulfates was published in 1961, and that—you may say, why am I saying that? That’s because that shows that there’s a real confident scientific knowledge about these things, but there’s still uncertainties. So we need that assessed in a way that’s policy-relevant that people can trust. That’s the number one thing.

The cost appears to be so cheap that cost isn’t the issue. This is a risk-risk decision. So the cost is a few billion dollars a year at half-a-degree cooling.

SIVARAM: A few billion.

KEITH: Billion. But you wouldn’t start at half-a-degree cooling. That would be crazy. I would oppose that. The only sensible way to start this would be to ramp up slowly, start at maybe a tenth-of-a-million tons a year, which would be just a tiny bit of cooling, and then you observe, watch what happens, monitor carefully, and then you make the decision to go up or down. The big question is who is making that decision—we’ll get to that in a second. But I think in that context, the cost to start is really quite low. Cost is not the issue here. The issue is risk, perception of risk, and questions of governance and kind of confidence in the science.

SIVARAM: And as you and I talked about, the death toll is quite lopsided. We’re talking 5(,000) to 10,000 deaths from the sulfur dioxide, and hundreds of thousands of deaths from the climate damages you’d avoid.

KEITH: Yeah. I mean, exactly. This is a risk-risk tradeoff. So it’s for sure true that if you put a million tons a year of sulfur in the stratosphere, it will come down to the lower atmosphere and it will be an air pollutant. And it’s for sure true there will be harms from that.

But the good thing is, we actually know how to quantify those harms really well because of all the sulfur air pollutant we made over centuries.

And we also now know a lot about the fact that if you do it evenly in the stratosphere, which is easy—you bring down global temperatures very evenly, and we can use the best current econometric measures to say what that would do in terms of reducing deaths from heat.

So we just published one paper, but there’s—don’t ever trust one paper, but it showed that about half-degree-C cooling, you get about 200,000 less deaths a year from heat, mostly in the poorer, hotter parts of the world. And that’s a conservative figure, including a bunch of adaptation. We could easily have got a bigger one. And with that 200,000 heat deaths reduction, the increased deaths from air pollution—also loss of ozone-causing UV—is an order of 5,000. So it’s an order of ten- or 100-to-one kind of ratio.

It's not nothing, but you know, there’s no public policies that don’t have harms. This is a risk-risk thing, and it’s a risk-risk thing where we actually know a lot.

SIVARAM: So now we’re going to David Victor.

Look, a few billion compared to 10 trillion a year for net-zero seems like a large difference in orders of magnitude. David, what are the preconditions where we actually get to net-zero versus unilateral geoengineering versus collective geoengineering?

VICTOR: Well, let me focus on the unilateral and collective geoengineering, because I think that net-zero will get there at some point, but it depends on costs and political interests and so on. And frankly I think the overall picture is actually encouraging—not net-zero by 2050. But I think the questions that David Keith has just teed up—by the way, I guess it has been thirty-eight years—pretty impressive. (Laughter.)

KEITH: I was just doing the math, man. (Laughter.)

VICTOR: I think it might be thirty-six, but—

KEITH: We’re both a little older.

VICTOR: We’re both old. Well, me and my cane here. (Laughter.)

So I can see unilateral scenarios. Maybe less on the United States or countries that have functional democracies with lots of checks and balances—it’s kind of hard to do a big program like this and not have enough people upset about it that they would block it. But you could imagine another country, especially at these cost numbers, thinking that it makes sense to spend a few percent of GDP to deal with extreme heat. And whether or not they’re going to reap all those benefits, you can—countries all the time do things unilaterally where they think they’re going to gain those benefits.

This is not a new problem in international relations. It’s a little bit like the nuclear breakout problem and a variety of other problems. And so you create regimes that either prevent that or slow that down, and so on. And I think that’s the hope in geoengineering.

In terms of coordinated action, I think that global collective action is the wrong standard. We’re not going to have—we couldn’t get a global agreement that today is Monday. (Laughter.)

But we could get—we could get an agreement where enough major players said, here’s what a deployment—here’s what a testing—a research and testing regime looks like. There’s been already a lot of discussions—David Keith and others have been heavily involved with those; I’ve written some stuff on this over the years—and then shading into a deployment program where you start small and you measure the impacts. And crucially you do all that research openly, and you publish all the results, you do the risk assessments openly. It’s vitally important, because what you’re trying to do is not get cooperation by bludgeoning people but by setting norms of good behavior. And then cooperation emerges not quite tacitly, but emerges that way.

That I think is quite possible. And one of my big concerns is that Western countries have been sitting on their hands on this topic—you know, there’s now some experiments being done here and there—but it’s been hard to get them done. And David Keith has lots of battle scars from trying to do this. And that makes it harder for us to set the norms of responsible behavior, out of which cooperation is going to emerge.

One last comment here, which is I think all these issues of international cooperation, whether it’s cooperation around geoengineering as we’re discussing right now or cooperation, as Maureen was talking about with regard to trade—we have to play chess. We have to think, we do things in the United States, and then how are others going to respond? In the case of the international trading arrangements, we do too much onshoring and beat up and have too many tariffs and yada, yada, yada—guess what? Other countries respond, they do the same, and that’s bad for a bunch of things—the economy, the green energy revolution, and so on. The same is true in geoengineering. We have to think that what we’re doing by adopting an R&D program and an early deployment program is we’re setting norms that then change the incentives for others to act.

So the more we don’t play chess and we play tiddlywinks in this area, the more we don’t use the potential power of the United States.

SIVARAM: I want to drill into this, and maybe, David and Maureen, you’ll come in on this.

Play out the 3-D chess on U.S.-China. We have a multifaceted set of objectives. We have great power competition with China. We have technological competition with China on AI and other fronts. We have military and security issues with China. And we also are currently the top two emitters, and China will remain the largest emitter for a long time.

Do we go path A, the deep, intensive trade relations, both with China and the rest of the world, to advance a clean energy future with the lowest clean energy goods; or a high-barrier, very decoupled future with China? Which advances our multifaceted goals and best handles the tradeoff?

Maybe I’ll go to you first, Maureen, and then we’ll go to David Victor.

HINMAN: Yeah, I mean, I don’t think it’s necessarily—you know, in terms of scenario A, we have the last twenty years to look at as evidence of how it cannot work—just doesn’t work. But I don’t think there’s any—any reasonable person thinks that an autarky scenario, even like an autarky with a few friends scenario, is realistic either.

I do think that it’s important for policymakers to sit down and think about the world that their constituents and that they want, right, and who we want at the table in that world, and go from there. And I think it starts with, you know, doing more trade progression on values that matter, like the embedded carbon in goods, the free trade of environmental technologies, and in trade just deciding what things are actually not that important, right? Like children’s shoes—we’re never going to make children’s shoes in the U.S. Why do we have a tax on them?

I’m thinking about kind of what sorts of other values matter, whether its intellectual property protection, whether it’s democracy, whether it is human rights, labor, and, you know, drawing new rules. We successfully blew up our WTO commitments this week. There could be some questions about, you know, whether that may or may not be true from a legal perspective, and we’ll let the—we’ll let the shop in Geneva figure that out at some later date. But we do think about, you know, what the terms are of allyship, what the terms are of being a trade partner, what we expect on both sides of the table. And I would argue that that’s—it’s different today than it was even five years ago. Reciprocity means something different than it means five years ago, and we also—what does it mean to be ex-club, right? And so do you get—what access of common benefits do you get, and what are the noncommon benefits that you don’t get? And I think that’s—I think that’s a pretty complicated conversation in some spheres, and I think that conversation has become more complicated with some of our recent moves. But I don’t think there’s any reason that we can’t sit down and, you know, mark out, this is the ideal trade pact that we would like to have with our friends and allies, with the middle-income countries and developing countries.

And you know, frankly I wouldn’t confront China. I would probably reel in some of the excesses of the past few weeks. I think that there’s many things I would not reel in over the past couple years. (Laughter.) But I would actually go to other friends and allies first—which I know is a wild, you know, radical approach—and I’d also think about sort of, you know, what type of spherical friends and allies we need to be making now, because we’re not doing a very good sort of job of presenting a new model that’s going to work for everyone.

I don’t know. Did that answer your question?

SIVARAM: I think so. And we’re going to go to questions in the audience in just a moment. I want to give either Davids a chance to see if you have a different view on this?

Yes, go ahead, David V., and then David K., and then questions in the room.

David V.?

VICTOR: Well, I mean, Varun, you’ve got these polar scenarios that I think are, you know, bookends of extremity.

I’m a globalist by nature, which I think means I’m qualified for protection under the Endangered Species Act these days. (Laughter.) But—

SIVARAM: Not here at CFR. (Laughs.)

VICTOR: Well, soon. (Laughs.) Don’t tell anybody.

I think we have to—one model for thinking about this is what the United States did with Japan, as we were concerned about the rise of Japan, which is we finally sat down through the Plaza Accords and negotiated a whole series of arrangements that have to be done sector by sector and are going to involve a lot of things. It’s going to be a lot more complicated this time. But we need something like that. And maybe it will be not the Plaza but it will be Mar-a-Lago, and there will be red hats or whatever it is, but we need some kind of an arrangement that allows politically and economically the different sides to manage their domestic politics. But we really need to do this in a way that’s outward—oriented to some kind of outward global market. That’s really important for the clean tech revolution, and so on.

But one last comment on this, which is I’m very concerned. Never in my lifetime have I heard the United States reliably discussed as an adversary among all of our allies, and that’s now true. So it makes it hard to do all these other deals. And this idea that you kind of shock the whole system and then suddenly the ground is prepared for, you know, better deal-making—that’s one view of things. But the other view of things is that—one of the hottest ideas in the WTO right now are these open plurilateral agreements and various other kind of club agreements that are more or less WTO compatible but don’t involve the United States. And we have to worry about that because the more that takes off, the more people don’t know whether to believe the United States, the harder it is for the United States to the participate in framing this new order. It’s not going to happen overnight. We’re deeply embedded in the global trading system and vice-versa. But it’s a direction of travel that’s worrisome for an industry that’s long-dated, requires patient capital, lots of investment. Like, that’s bad news for that industry.

KEITH: Thanks. Thanks, David.

I mean, on clean energy, I think as clean energy exports becomes a bigger fraction of China’s total export mix, they become more and more incented to push the energy transformation to the developing world. They actually don’t export that much to Europe and the U.S. A fraction of that is clean energy. A lot of that’s going to the developing world, and I think they’ll have an incentive to push it more, and I think that’s an underappreciated really root change in climate policy.

Solar geoengineering or sonic reflection kind of breaks your brain because it’s just not obvious how it actually plays in international affairs. Clearly if both China and the U.S. want it to happen, it happens; if they both don’t want it to happen, it doesn’t happen. But if they don’t have clear opinions, it’s not obvious where the interests are—and this is where I think it’s so important to begin talking early, to begin actually having real conversations with leadership that allows people to kind of understand each other’s positions—not to say everybody’s going to hold hands and sing Kumbaya, but we have to understand each other’s positions in order to have any hope of negotiating something reasonable.

SIVARAM: Thanks to everybody.

We’re going to go to the audience now. I already see a question. So we’ll start over here on the left and then move our way over there.

Q: Thank you, everyone. Michael Weisberg, University of Pennsylvania.

It’s an SRM question, so who—you know, one of the Davids or Varun, yourself could answer. The sort of background assumptions seem to be that it would be China or the U.S. that would deploy, and it seems like maybe a middle power is even more likely, an Indonesia or an India or a Pakistan, I mean, especially given what the risks are to those countries. You could very easily imagine a thirty-five-degree wet bulb temperature event happening, you know, this year. And also that, as you said, David, it’s not—I mean, there’s some—obviously some questions about making the aerosols, but it’s actually not that complex. So I’m just wondering if you guys could think through the scenario where it’s actually not U.S. or China but rather India or Pakistan or Indonesia or a country like that that deploys, and then kind of what happens from there.

KEITH: In our sort of geoengineering clique of people who think about foreign policy, there have been lots of conversations like that and even books written that have it starting with India. I have no idea. I think it certainly is plausible. I mean, self-interest dictates a lot of what happens in the world, and the most acute damages go to the relative—the hot and relatively poor countries, and those countries that are both in that category and also have the technological capacity and kind of scale to begin to do this are obvious candidates where they might want to start.

But again, I think what—I mean, I can’t control what happens for deployment. I wouldn’t want to. I think what I can hope to do, what those of us who care about this can hope to do is to have some—a lot more research, better assessments, and something that looks like kind of a fuzzy moratoria that says—that tries to restrain any immediate erratic deployment while we build better scientific understanding, better assessment, and at least have the governance conversations to allow something to happen in a more coordinated way.

SIVARAM: I’m struck by David V.’s allusion to nuclear nonproliferation when we mentioned geoengineering. I’ll only say this paves the way for a new GPT—a geoengineering proliferation treaty.

We’ll go to the next question, unless anyone wanted to jump in on that question.

HINMAN: I mean, I would jump in real fast on David’s point on WTO and plurilaterals.

SIVARAM: Yeah.

HINMAN: I will buy you, David, a bottle of your very favorite champagne the day that the WTO closes an environmental plurilateral, because I will eat crow on that. I just don’t see a lot of—any—much momentum in that shop. And the problem is that everybody gets a veto. Even if you’re not in that agreement, you get a veto. It’s the MFN problem. So that’s why I argue that, you know, we need to move beyond this most favored nation model where, you know, in particular, speaking of India and South Africa, every time a small group of countries wants to kind of get something done and make some progress, they—you’ve got certain parties in WTO who decide unilaterally that it’s just not for the club.

VICTOR: Well, we have—I’ll send you a list. (Laughter.)

HINMAN: I want to buy you that champagne. It would make me so happy. (Laughter.)

VICTOR: I will say, this is not going to come from the WTO itself. It’s going to come from small groups of countries that want to go do something. I think MFN is already on life support to some degree, and that’s—you know, that’s just the nature of the world these days.

HINMAN: Two-hundred percent tariff on champagne right now, so—(laughter).

VICTOR: You said you were buying. (Laughter.)

SIVARAM: She had an angle.

All right, who else would like to—and I see there’s a little bit of a collective action problem here because—go ahead Rafe, and then we’ll go to Nat. I was going to say, if we end early you get to get the drinks earlier. But over to you, Rafe.

Q: The question I wanted to ask for a long time—what about the Russians? After all, the arctic is coming apart. Is it in their interest to do something about it or not? How do you approach them, or is it possible? I mean, you’ve probably thought about it. I can’t think about it. It’s just beyond me.

KEITH: Not clear. I’m certainly no expert. I can say I’m a Canadian, and I was in Ottawa a few weeks ago where there actually was some real interest by some senior government people on this topic, and in (silent ?) reflection were talking about what might happen post-election. But interestingly, people were talking—obviously Canadians are thinking very differently about their security as the U.S. suddenly seems like a threat to us, and thinking about the fact that in a melting arctic, it’s harder for us to defend sea lanes, and there’s talk about the Canadians kind of being more aggressive in building arctic bases. And I think one of the arguments we were making to people in whatever—it’s not called the Department of External Affairs anymore—Global Affairs Canada, it’s now called—was that if there was SRM and it wasn’t melting so fast, it would be less of a security threat. Because I think one of the security threats is that Russians push by, like, putting a little—you know, ten scientists on a little island as a little provocation to see what happens.

SIVARAM: Maureen?

HINMAN: I mean, Russia is interesting. Let’s say the war ends tomorrow, we have a peace agreement, we think it’s going to be durable. I think you then have to again go back to the geopolitical space with—the U.S. and China remain. And so—and you still need to carbonize. And so what do you do about that? And Donald Trump is still president. And you have to think about what’s in it for them, and what’s in it for them is a big gas economy. It’s a similar thing to what’s in it for us, right? Fuel-switching we know works; that’s where we’ve gained most of our climate gains is the natural gas economy because we’re here to talk about climate realism, and that’s a real fact, even if you feel uncomfortable with the idea that a fossil fuel is part of your benefits.

So I think the question is really, like, how do you get countries like Russia and the United States exporting more gas and switching to things like clean hydrogen at home, and then eventually making that transition. You’ve got to make the sort of drawdown economy really, really attractive for countries that frankly—you know, you could tell them all day long how miserable it’s going to be; if you’re in Russia, you’re like, you know what, summer in Siberia was beautiful. (Laughter.) I wore shorts. I mean, this is true. I’m married to a Russian. Like—

SIVARAM: Yeah. And this is, by the way, exactly the kind of realist national self-interest focused thinking that I want this initiative to pursue. It’s that line of thinking. It is almost certainly not in Russia’s interest to be remotely helpful, unless the case can be made in a much more convincing way.

Nat, you had a point or a question?

Q: Yeah. Thanks very much. And this may be best suited for David Victor, but also David and Maureen, since David Keith showed that he wanted to talk about more than just SRM.

So the question is really almost—gets to the heart of kind of what you mean by climate realism. There’s realistic—and a lot of it is, like, hard realism, in that sense, and I understand that. But there’s also—I think you were using it in the international relations context, so I’m going to champion my family here and say I think there’s—you can have countries operating with self-interest but also cooperating, right, because repeated games, because interaction among—on a bunch of dimensions.

And I want to—so I guess a two-part thing. One is to sort of challenge you a little bit on the realism, Varun, and so maybe if you can take the mic, I’d be interested in why you are so focused on sort of the realist model rather than thinking about modes of cooperation in international relations. It's a funny time to be talking about that, I realize, and maybe that’s the answer.

The other part is that even if we accept the point, and I certainly do, that national actions are grounded on self-interest—although that still allows for cooperation—interests change. And I think we’ve seen, David has mentioned this—both Davids have mentioned this—you know, interests have changed a lot as the clean economy has gotten much cheaper and we’ve—and I think the interests of China—David Keith mentioned a minute ago—and so interests change over time. We can try to change interests, right, as well, and perception of interests. So I’d be interested in the panel discussing that a bit. Thanks.

SIVARAM: It’s a fantastic question. I’ll come in after David Victor, and if either of you wants to come in.
David, go ahead.

VICTOR: OK, sure. I was looking forward to hearing you defend yourself first on the realism, but—

SIVARAM: Oh, I will. (Laughter.)

VICTOR: So I guess, let me say two things. First is I think climate realism should be about changing interest, about showing how changes in technology, investment, and so on change interests in ways that make action on climate sustainable. That’s the theory of change here. That’s actually the theory of change behind some of the big thinking about what was Paris and COP-26 in Glasgow and so on. So I just think actually that theory works. We have lots of examples of that, and that’s really important.

There is a tendency when we talk about climate realism to immediately talk about the goals being unachievable and so on. I wrote a paper in Nature in 2014 saying two degrees was not achievable and so on. That part of the climate realism discussion I think is boring. The climate realism discussion that’s about what changes interests, what matters—like, a lot of the climate policy matters a lot less than capital markets policies and trade and investment policies and so on. So we should be focusing on, you know, what knobs actually move things as opposed to these kind of shadow debates. So that’s one response there. And I think in that sense, climate realism is—and any other kind of realism—it’s about how do you really change the system, recognizing it’s going to take a long time to have the changes in technology and so on.

The other thing I’ll say is, let’s take the Russian example. Suppose the Russians are—have stopped voting themselves off the island and they start being more cooperative. We could imagine Russia being one of the early deployers of geoengineering. I’m actually more concerned about the China example or somebody coming out of left field. One of the reasons you need to do research is because you need to be able to tech that and know what it’s going—what’s going to happen, and so on.

The area of Russian behavior that I’m most focused on, though, is nuclear. As they reengage with the world, the Russians were the dominant exporter of nuclear reactors. The most interesting nuclear project on the planet in the last decade has been the Abu Dhabi nuclear electric corporation—those four giant Korean-designed reactors, the last of which came online about eighteen months ago, built to Western standards, built, you know, one after the other so that the last one was built faster than the first one. Like, if they can do—they can help do more followership on nuclear where you have non-Russian-designed reactors, then you have a competition in the global market around safety and cost and cleanliness. That’s good for the climate.

SIVARAM: That’s a fantastic point.

Did you want to come in?

KEITH: Yeah. Here’s my sort of take on climate realism and sunlight reflection. So it often is presented as two extreme cases—so one extreme case is that we can’t talk about it at all because as soon as we talk about it, we’ll forget to cut emissions. And that’s what a lot of the environmental left has thought, and it’s been taboo and we haven’t talked about it.

The other case is kind of one of the cases Varun made, that it’s a thing you only do to break glass in case of this total emergency. But if it’s an emergency, then you must have had the climate modeling wrong, so why would you trust SRM anyway? I just don’t see either of those extremes as being relevant.

I’d like to get some kind of blunt realism that doing a little bit of this actually might make sense—not be perfect. But the big worry is that we don’t want to kind of run away and do too much.

And so here is a kind of pragmatic, realist viewpoint: So we are already pumping aerosols into the atmosphere and cooling the planet. That’s the pollution we do in the lower atmosphere. It's quite an important planet-cooler. It’s killing a lot of people because aerosols in the lower atmosphere do that. We are gradually cleaning them up. Even China has dramatically cleaned up its sulfur air pollution, and so have we. The Clean Air Act added a year-and-a-half of life for average Americans. It’s amazing.

So one interesting piece of climate realism might be to say—to have some agreement of some major countries that we will do only and exactly as much sunlight reflection as to substitute for the fact that we’re going to keep cleaning up aerosols. So basically, as we keep cleaning up sulfur aerosols to save lives on the surface, cleaning up air pollution, we add a little bit of extra sulfur to the stratosphere, which has a thousand times less air pollution harm per unit cooling. We add a little bit of sulfur to the stratosphere but only to compensate for the fact that we’re removing the air pollution from the lower atmosphere. And what’s nice about that is it puts a kind of natural cap—it prevents a kind of runaway to just only doing SRM. It’s a natural cap, and it’s a cap that’s tied to something real. We actually are cleaning up the atmosphere and that is contributing to warming. So that’s to me a kind of pragmatic, real middle ground.

SIVARAM: Let me come in on that point. I think it’s a fantastic one. And I’ll say three things. The first is, Nat, I agree with you, and you and David and David Hart and all the Davids are deep experts on the international relations theories that are realist, that are constructivist, the ones that—the game theory solutions that have cooperation, the ones that only have defection. I have just found that, both in my experience as an actual climate diplomat and as an analyst of these situations, the base case that we tend to focus on tends to be the base case of cooperation. And I created climate realism because it seems to me like the base case we should study is the true realist, self-interested case, with cooperation as a deviation—a deviation I’d love to get to.

Cooperation is much rarer, I find in this space, than we would like it to be, and I’d like for us to assume first the base case on—what does every nation want? We often don’t study this very well. We’ve heard even today—David, you mentioned—David K., you mentioned China’s self-interest is increasingly in the domain of clean energy because it’s going to have this industrial base and export clean energy. In my opinion, by the way, it’s a little bit mixed right now; it has a lot of dirty energy interest as well.

KEITH: Yep.

SIVARAM: The United States’ self-interests—and Maureen mentioned this today—the United States’ self-interests right now are firmly grounded in oil and gas and hydrocarbons. It is a large source of American geopolitical and economic advantage.

I wanted, first of all, in climate realism to be honest about every—about what every country’s self-interests are. It may very well be the case that our self-interest is much closer to what you see Saudi Arabia represent in its climate negotiations—the desire to be the last nation left standing exporting a barrel of oil.

From that brutally realist standpoint, we are then better able in my opinion to outline the conditions where cooperation could realistically happen, because, Nat, you and I and David Victor and all the Davids all want to solve this problem. I just want to start from an analytically more sound starting point.

The second thing I’ll quickly say here is, look, I put out this article. Many of you have called it provocative; many of you have criticized me in different ways. But notice, the violent criticisms come from different directions. Some people say that the baseline should be less than three degrees; some people say the baseline should be more than three degrees. Some people say that geoengineering is a far better understood solution than we previously thought, and others say it remains a wildly speculative and untested solution. I’m closer to you, David Keith, on this one.

In every dimension the marker I’ve put out in that article today—which I agree is colorful and provocative—invites disagreement on many dimensions. And so therefore I encourage, as a starting point for this initiative, that all of us—all of the fellows here, the diversity of intellectual opinion—that we all start to lay out our intellectual project. We should study what every country’s individual interests are, like you started to do with Russia; you did with China; David Victor has done with many countries around the world—middle-income countries. We should play out the wargame, as I mentioned, in a three-degrees future, and let’s see where we land.

My hope is today is just a starting point, and over the course of weeks and months and years, the intellectual project will blossom to be far more fruitful than what I believe the last three decades of studying an aspirational future has led us to.

I don’t come to this lightly. I come to this, I believe, out of necessity. Nat, I hope that answers your question.

And I think we are right on time, which means—I want to thank everybody for being here to commemorate the launch of the Climate Realism Initiative. It’s controversial, it’s hard-edged, and it’s got lots of different opinions clamoring for a space on this intellectual stage. We’ve got space for you all.

Thank you all for coming. Refreshments and reception outside. I’m so grateful. Thanks. (Applause.)

(END)

This is an uncorrected transcript.