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Symposium

Climate Realism Initiative Launch

Event date



From Climate Realism.

The United States‘ historical approach to climate change is failing. American clean technology industries lag dangerously behind their international competitors, threatening U.S. geopolitical and economic influence, and climate change is on track to exceed internationally agreed targets, endangering U.S. national security. CFR’s new Climate Realism Initiative, led by Senior Fellow Varun Sivaram, will chart a fundamentally new course for U.S. climate and energy policy—one that is both realistic in its assessment of the world’s climate trajectory fueled by rising emissions outside U.S. borders and realist in its expectation that the United States and other countries will work to advance their own interests in the emerging energy transition.

The launch event will bring together leading experts, policymakers, and industry leaders to examine how the United States can prepare for the geopolitical and security consequences of accelerating climate change, build globally competitive and innovative American clean technology industries, and pursue novel approaches—from coordinating strategic trade actions to exploring geoengineering—to prevent the most catastrophic potential climate impacts from endangering U.S. interests.

The Climate Realism Initiative Launch is made possible by the generous support of the ClimateWorks Foundation.

DC In-Person Plenary One: Navigating Climate Change: Implications for U.S. National Security

Panelists explore the scale and severity of likely climate impacts over the course of this century, their effects on the United States and its key relationships, and consequences that may ensue for U.S. national security.

Speakers

  • Sherri Goodman
    Author, Threat Multiplier: Climate, Military Leadership & the Fight for Global Security; Senior Fellow, Polar Institute and Environmental Change and Security Program, Wilson Center; CFR Member
  • Alice C. HillCFR Expert
    David M. Rubenstein Senior Fellow for Energy and the Environment, Council on Foreign Relations
  • David Wallace-Wells
    Opinion Writer, New York Times; Columnist, New York Times Magazine; Author, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

Presider

  • Varun SivaramCFR Expert
    Senior Fellow for Energy and Climate, Council on Foreign Relations

Introductory Remarks

  • Varun SivaramCFR Expert
    Senior Fellow for Energy and Climate and Director, Climate Realism Initiative, Council on Foreign Relations

Transcript

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...

DC In-Person Keynote Session

Speaker

  • Ernest J. Moniz
    Founder and CEO, Energy Futures Initiative Foundation; Former U.S. Secretary of Energy (2013-17); CFR Member

Presider

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...

DC In-Person Plenary Two: Accelerating Clean Technology Innovation and U.S. Competitiveness

Panelists discuss priorities for improving American competitiveness in clean energy industries, especially relative to China, and explore the trade and industrial policies that could help achieve that goal, as well as the economic tradeoffs that go along with those policies.

Speakers

  • Neil Chatterjee
  • Joshua Freed
    Senior Vice President for the Climate and Energy Program, Third Way

Presider

  • David M. HartCFR Expert
    Senior Fellow for Climate and Energy, Council on Foreign Relations

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...

DC In-Person Plenary Three: Averting Catastrophic Climate Change

Panelists discuss the ways the United States can influence climate and energy policies abroad, especially in major emerging economies, and explore the scientific and policy ramifications of last resort approaches like geoengineering.

Speakers

  • Maureen Hinman
    Cofounder and Executive Chair, Silverado Policy Accelerator; Former Director for Environment and Natural Resources, Office of the United States Trade Representative (2018-21)
  • David Keith
    Professor and Founding Faculty Director, Climate Systems Engineering Initiative, University of Chicago
  • David G. Victor
    Professor of Innovation and Public Policy; Director, Deep Decarbonization Initiative; University of California San Diego; CFR Member (speaking virtually)

Presider

  • Varun SivaramCFR Expert
    Senior Fellow for Energy and Climate and Director, Climate Realism Initiative, Council on Foreign Relations

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...