The Climate Challenge, With Alice Hill and Varun Sivaram (Election 2024, Episode 2)

LINDSAY:
Welcome to The President's Inbox. I'm Jim Lindsay, the Mary and David Boies distinguished senior fellow in U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. This is the second episode in a special 2024 U.S. election series here on The President's Inbox. From now until election day, I will be sitting down with experts to unpack some of the most pressing challenges in the next president's foreign policy inbox. Today's topic is the climate change challenge.

With me to discuss what the United States has done and might do to respond to a changing climate are Alice Hill and Varun Sivaram. Alice is the David M. Rubenstein senior fellow for energy in the environment here at the Council. Alice's work focuses on the risks, consequences in responses associated with climate change. Before joining the Council in 2017, she was special assistant to President Barack Obama and senior director for resilience policy on the staff of the National Security Council, where she led the development of national policy to build resilience to catastrophic risks including climate change in biological threats. Her most recent book is The Fight for Climate After COVID-19.

Varun is a senior fellow for energy and climate here at the council. Scientist by training, he holds a Ph.D. in condensed matter of physics. He has experience working in the corporate policymaking and think tank worlds. From 2021 to 2023, he was the managing director for clean energy and senior advisor to Secretary John F. Kerry, the U.S. special presidential envoy for climate. Varun then served as chief strategy officer at Ørsted, a Fortune Global 500 company that is the world's largest producer of offshore wind energy. The Financial Times is named Varun's 2018 book, Taming The Sun, which examines the future of solar energy, as one of the best books of the decade. Alice and Varun, thank you for joining me on The President's Inbox.

HILL:
Thank you.

SIVARAM:
Thank you for having us.

LINDSAY:
Now, first question, are either one of you advising either the Harris campaign or the Trump campaign?

HILL:
I am not.

SIVARAM:
I am not.

LINDSAY:
Let's dive in then to the question of climate change. Let me begin by confessing my age. I went to my first conference on climate change more than three decades ago. The Kyoto Protocol was adopted in 1997, which was twenty-seven years ago. So let me ask you and I'll begin with you, Alice. How have we done in blunting the emission of the heat-trapping gases that are changing the climate?

HILL:
We've made progress. We've bent the curve downward, but I'm a former judge. If I look at the evidence, the evidence is not favorable. At the top of Mauna Loa Mountain in Hawaii, we have an observatory established by the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration in 1958. They've been measuring ever since the concentrations of carbon in our atmosphere, and of course that concentration of carbon and other greenhouse gases forms this blanket that traps the heat that causes surface temperatures and ocean temperatures to climb.

So in the pre-industrial era, it was about 280 parts per million. When they started measuring in 1958, it was 315. This year, we saw 425 parts per million. That's likely the most carbon since more than three million years ago, when seas were much higher. We've also seen much greater and faster accumulation of methane major component of natural gas and the methane molecules trap more heat than a carbon molecule. So we see more rapid heating over short term with methane.

So we're heating up quickly and the records are being broken across the globe. Last year was the hottest year ever. This year, we'll probably beat that and the nine prior years were the hottest years ever in recorded history.

LINDSAY:
Varun, let me ask first if you disagree in the main with what Alice just said, but beyond that, why should we be concerned if the climate is changing? I hear a lot of people who say, well, my winters are going to be less hot. No problem with that. How do you respond?

SIVARAM:
I entirely agree with Alice that the evidence is not promising. Alice was charitable, I'd say, in saying that we've bent the emissions curve. We have in fact bent the emissions curve, but emissions are not going down. They continue to go up in 2023. Around the world, emissions increased. There's some good news embedded in that, which is advanced economies and its states among the G7 nations, the emissions of the advanced economies hit their lowest level in fifty years since 1973. That's good news. The bad news is the rest of the world. China, the emerging and developing economies, had sharp emissions increases. China at about 6 percent, India at about 7 percent. Indonesia was a large contributor.

You ask, why should we care about this if we, potentially, get nicer winters, which by the way, the science of climate change is nuanced and in many cases, you may have more extreme weather, colder or warmer, but there are many reasons that Americans, during this election season, should care deeply. The effects will be profound. We talk a lot about sea level rise over the next fifty to a hundred to a hundred fifty years about potentially cities being inundated. You already see some of those impacts, but the worst impacts will be in the decades to come. Beyond that, there's an increasing scientific consensus, as Alice has mentioned, on the increasing incidence of natural disasters, and we've seen at home: wildfires, floods, natural catastrophes that have driven up property insurance prices for ordinary Americans.

LINDSAY:
If you can get property insurance.

SIVARAM:
If you can get property insurance. It's not just Florida phenomenon. You go to Iowa and you're going to struggle to get property insurance. But here at the Council on Foreign Relations, we look at foreign policy, and there are important consequences there as well in addition to the natural disasters at home. You're going to see increased migration from areas that are stricken with drought and facing heat waves. The problems that afflict countries around the world will eventually affect American interests, whether that is immigration into Europe, contributing to the rise of these far right parties, immigration affecting the United States, the rise of increased great power competition in the Arctic as the Arctic ice melts. There's a range of potentially difficult geopolitical consequences that will face as climate change continues. We should take this very seriously.

LINDSAY:
I take your point that we've had some success in bending the curve in terms of emissions, but the metaphor I often hear or maybe it's an analogy, like water filling up the bathtub, water continues to go into the bathtub though perhaps not as rapidly as before, and there is, at the end, a limit to how much water the bathtub can hold. On that particular question, I want to ask you, Alice, do you think that we're going to be able to continue to bend that curve, even if slowly? And I ask because you're right, there's certainly evidence to suggest major changes. I note that the great state of Texas now gets, I'm told, 40 percent of its electricity from renewable sources like solar and wind, and Texas, of course, is the home to America's fossil fuel industry. At the same time, I'm reading that artificial intelligence is growing in such a rapacious appetite for electricity that people are talking about bringing back decommissioned coal plants to be able to provide the energy needed to fuel artificial intelligence. So do you think we can continue to bend that curve?

HILL:
It's looking very challenging. Certainly, there's good news on renewables for every dollar spent on expanding fossil fuels, analysis shows $2 is being spent on renewables. We've got promise with green hydrogen battery storage. We have the Inflation Reduction Act, but your question, does it all add up? Very unclear, and unfortunately, the scientists have agreed on a consensus basis that every fraction of additional heating causes not exponentially bigger harm, but definitely bigger harm. It's non-linear. We simply haven't appreciated what these harms look like.

Just in recent reporting, we've seen that kidney disease is likely up because with more heat, you see more kidney problems, but you also have more trouble delivering dialysis. In addition to the competition from AI for power, dialysis machines are huge competition for power and water. We have seen that we haven't appreciated wildfire smoke. Recent scientific evidence is that wildfire smoke, the particles are so large that when they lodge in our lungs it can be a contributor to dementia. We don't have a plan for that. We have many people located in those areas. Heat degrades mail-order drugs.

All of these consequences we haven't appreciated to date. We're just learning as we experience these events and then we are not seeing sufficient action on cutting back. We're seeing Wall Street roll back some of its commitments. We're seeing fossil fuels companies roll back their commitments for clean energy and doubling down in some instances on fossil fuel extraction to benefit their shareholders. We have seen that even with all the commitments to the Paris Agreement, many countries have not put forward plans that will meet the goal that was set forth of trying to keep heating below 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. We are on our way to being above 2ºC at this point and well beyond that if we don't see much more urgent action, which there isn't an identified path forward yet on the global scene as far as I can determine.

LINDSAY:
Let me ask you about that, Varun. I often hear talk about, "We have to act before we reach the point of no return." Does a "point of no return" actually exist? If it does, how close are we to it or have we already passed it?

SIVARAM:
It's a great question. I'll first quickly just mention on your previous question. You're absolutely right. AI is both an extraordinary economic opportunity and also a very scary thing for the climate. In the United States, we're experiencing electricity demand growth for the first time in a decade, principally from both factory construction as well as in addition to the manufacturing renaissance, it's this AI not renaissance, but naissance. AI now is projected to account for between 8 and 10 percent of American power demand up from 4 percent by the end of this decade and 60 to 90 percent is going to be powered by fossil fuels on current course and speed. That adds to the set of woes that Alice just mentioned.

But to your question just now, is there a breaking point? I reject that model because it's cognitively intuitive, but unlikely to track reality. I don't think there will be a cliff moment before which no action will happen and after which, we will have a surge of climate action in a coordinated fashion, rather I think we'll just see a steadily increasing drumbeat of disasters. You can imagine these wildfires and hurricanes and typhoons, etc. will continue to increase in severity, potentially in frequency. It's more like the frog in boiling water that the water will continue to get warmer, but there won't be a single moment at which that frog says, "Oh my goodness, the water is boiling." That's what scares me so much.

The other thing that scares me, by the way, is even if there were to be some truly cataclysmic event and five million people died, God forbid, and there's an intense migration event, the actions we could take at that point to decarbonize our energy mix might pay dividends decades in the future. So there is no quick-fix, silver bullet in that moment, and therefore the rational path right now in order to avert the worst effects in the future is, in fact, a plan for decades ahead. That's hard to do that. We don't do very well planning, for example, America's fiscal burden decades ahead by reducing our deficits today. Similarly, we don't do well protecting generations, my son's generation, his son's generation by reducing emissions today, but that's absolutely the rational thing to do.

LINDSAY:
Let's talk a bit about that, Alice. As Varun mentioned, heat-trapping gases are being emitted not just by the United States or by the West, but by countries all around the world, and the leading growth in emissions is coming in places like India and China, Indonesia, but this is an episode we're talking what's happening in the context of the U.S. presidential election. If you could just briefly sketch out for me what you think either President Trump or President Harris would do on climate change should they be elected in November?

HILL:
Well we have a pretty good playbook for President Trump since almost immediately after he was elected to the first term, he withdrew the United States with great flair from the Paris Agreement. He then undid a number of the executive orders that President Obama had put into place, including those focused on, for example, flood risk mitigation to reduce the amount of damage to homes in the United States that were federally insured or had a federal mortgage. But beyond that, we've also seen Project 2025 now President Trump has publicly distanced himself from that playbook, but if you open that and look at the authors and look at what it says, it's a broad swipe against all environmental action in the United States. I would say it's quite alarming for those who have spent many years trying to put in place guardrails to keep degradation of land, to make sure that our water is clean, that we are avoiding unnecessary pollution.

With President Harris, if she were to be elected, it's a little less clear where she would stand, obviously very publicly, she has reversed herself on the fracking position and she has, interestingly, in the only question during the debate that was held between President Trump and Vice President Harris, when asked about climate change, she didn't call it an existential threat. She didn't talk about oil and gas. She talked about property insurance. Again, to Varun's point, trying to get perhaps at voters who are feeling this in the pocketbook, a disaster happens and it becomes harder to find insurance at a price they're willing to pay or any insurance at all. So she's a little more opaque, but given that she's been part of the Biden administration, she cast the decisive vote for the Inflation Reduction Act. Environmentalists are confident that she will bring a lot more energy to the climate fight certainly than a President Trump, but even a President Biden.

LINDSAY:
I have to ask you the question, Varun, since you worked in the Biden administration and President Biden called climate change an existential threat. It comes as no surprise to a lot of people who are active in fighting to reduce the emission of heat trapping gases argued that the Biden administration didn't go far enough fast enough, and they will point out, for example, that under President Biden's leadership, American production of oil and gas went up contrary to what Donald Trump has said on the campaign trail. And today, the United States is the world's largest producer of both oil and gas. Help me understand maybe some of the challenges any administration would find in terms of this journey toward decarbonization.

SIVARAM:
To be clear, and forgive you for sounding defensive here, but President Biden's administration was probably the most consequential administration on climate in history. President Biden shepherded the Inflation Reduction Act through Congress, the act, when it was first passed, had a budgetary estimate of about $400 billion. In reality, because the incentives are uncapped, that act could spend, according to Goldman Sachs, more than a trillion dollars on climate change, easily on clean energy investments. Easily, the most consequential legislation, probably not in the United States' history, but in the world's history.

You mentioned the U.S. is increasing its production of oil and gas, and I think this is an entirely coherent part of the U.S.'s energy strategy. America is the world's leading producer of oil and gas. It affords us great geopolitical leverage and economic benefit at home to produce oil and gas. When Russia invaded Ukraine, it was American liquefied natural gas exports that could help Europe wean themselves off of Russian natural gas. It's coherent both for America to be a conventional energy superpower and to aspire to be a new clean energy superpower. By the way, the biggest impacts of the Inflation Reduction Act will not be reducing America's emissions. I already mentioned to you advanced economies are back near their fifty years ago emissions levels, advanced economies are not the ones that are going to drive climate change. I know that will drive a lot of activists crazy for me to say that, but it's emerging economies in China that will drive climate change.

America's contribution on climate change is largely going to be developing technologies that can be adopted around the world and enabling the deployment and development of these clean technologies in the emerging economies and in China. Insofar as the IRA, the Inflation Reduction Act, helps us to do that. That's one of America's most signal contributions to the fight against climate change. And in today's election, Alice is absolutely right. The pocketbook matters more to voters right now. Polling done by Third Way has shown that voters care way more about costs and inflation than they do about climate. By the way, notable exception is among eighteen to twenty-nine year olds. The top foreign policy priority is climate change. Climate change is not in the top three for any other demographic, but eighteen to twenty-nine year olds, they really care because it's their future.

So in this election, we are, in fact, having both candidates proudly say that American oil and gas production is up and that they're going to protect energy costs that the pump in the economy. I think that's, frankly, if you ask me, a consistent policy for American national interest alongside trying to win the great race for the next generation of clean technologies.

LINDSAY:
I want to come back to that in a moment. Varun, I think it's an important point, but before I do, I want to put on the table the question of the extent to which there are technological solutions to the problem of the emission of heat-trapping gases, and let me mention several of them. One I've heard a lot about is we should resort more to nuclear energy. Nuclear energy provides a way to generate a lot of electricity without having the issue of carbon emissions. Something else I've heard a lot about is carbon sequestration. The idea that you're somehow going to suck carbon out of the atmosphere, typically inject it in underground caverns and essence, reduce the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The third thing I've heard about goes by the rather anodyne name of solar radiation management, which is essentially blocking the sun's rays, and I'd like to get the sense from both of you as to how practical you think a technological solution to our problem is. Maybe you could go first, Alice.

HILL:
Certainly, technology is very promising and new ideas keep emerging. Focusing on the ones that you have mentioned. I believe that nuclear should be part of the solution. I just want to put out a footnote here that there is talk about extending the licensing of existing nuclear plants. The plants that we have are, largely in the United States, old—forty, fifty years old. They were designed before the time of climate change as part of public discourse. Their designers did not consider the climate impacts: the flooding, the heating up of the waters needed to cool the plants, the wildfires. In fact, the GAO recently came out with a report criticizing the federal government for its lack of attention to the threat to plants from emerging climate issues. Big problem if there aren't sufficient protections in place, we've seen shutdowns in France because the cooling waters got too hot. Here in the United States as well, and we've seen wildfires approach plants. If it's our solution, we need to now couple understanding of climate impacts to the operation of nuclear power plants.

Carbon capture and storage primarily thought of in terms of for oil and gas. That has become a little bit suspect certainly among environmentalists after the president of Occidental announced, "This gives us a license to operate that we're going to invest further in that." You didn't mention direct air capture, which I think is that's the sucking of carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it in either underground or in silica, various deposits across the world. Scientists uniformly, and the IPCC process have said we need that. The challenge is that we cannot yet do it at a scale, at a price that is of interest...Remains a focus and a continued focus because we have too much carbon up there we need to pull out and we are still producing carbon.

As to geoengineering, more and more talk about that, whether it's solar radiation management or putting some iron into the oceans to absorb heat there. Questions of course, are governance. Is anyone watching? The threat that a billionaire or even a millionaire will try to do it on their own. We have some examples of scientists being shut down when they decided to run their own private experiments. And then, do we really understand what the consequences are? We are interfering with our atmosphere and there is no escape if we get this wrong. I do think it is on the table and will continue to be on the table as we see the temperatures rise and greater and greater cascading impacts from that heat.

LINDSAY:
How do you think about the technology question? Varun, you spent a good portion of your career thinking about this. You've done pioneering work on solar capture. Are you an optimist in terms of where we can go going forward, a pessimist somewhere in between?

SIVARAM:
I'm definitely an optimist. You might go so far as to call me a techno-optimist. The International Energy Agency argues that half of the emissions reductions to get to net-zero by 2050, which by the way, I actually don't believe we'll get there, but half of those reductions must be accounted for by new technologies that have not yet reached commercial markets, and there's so many that are on drawing boards in laboratories but have not yet scaled. I'm thinking, for example, of advanced batteries, solid-state batteries that will last longer on a single charge and have no safety problems compared to today's lithium ion batteries that catch fire. I'm thinking of long duration energy storage that's a fraction of the cost of today's storage so that you can have lots of solar and wind on power grids.

I'm thinking, in addition to the technologies you mentioned, I'm a big fan of nuclear, big fan of carbon capture, if we can do it cost effectively. I'm also thinking of decarbonizing heavy industry like steel and cement through new processes or clean fuels for ships in aviation, the largest sources of new emissions growth last year in 2023. All of these are technologies that we need, dozens of technologies, to bring from laboratories and early pilot scales to large scale deployment because, remember as we mentioned, it's the emerging economies in the developing countries where we really need to bend that emissions curve.

Industrial emissions, for example, are growing right alongside the use of coal power, which most people talk about much more often. We need two times as much investment in clean energy technologies than we have today to meet our climate goals and four times as many in emerging markets and developing countries. And today only 15 percent of investment goes to those emerging markets. I'm very optimistic. I also believe, by the way, it's cheaper to develop and commercialize technologies than it is to deploy at the trillion dollar scale mature technologies. So this is a tractable problem. We can solve much of it through innovation.

LINDSAY:
Just to be clear, Varun, batteries are important because wind and solar can generate electricity, but if you don't use it and can't store it's wasted or its benefits keeping captured.

SIVARAM:
I mentioned two different kinds of batteries, let me be explicit. One kind of battery, what I call long duration energy storage that can store economically energy for several hours or days or even weeks. That battery that can store for a hundred hours is helpful for exactly what you just said, which is solar and wind only generate when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing and therefore, you want to be able to store and use that energy when people actually, let's say, come home from work when the sun is set.

But the other kind of battery I mentioned, the solid-state battery, this is a battery that's probably not going to be deployed on the grid, but it's very useful for electric vehicles that will be compelling to consumers, convince them to ditch their fossil-fueled cars. It also, by the way, will be compelling for uses way outside of the energy economy. Every cell phone, every wearable device, every military-grade drone, or military equipment for a warfighter should run on more advanced batteries. So there's lots of reasons to do energy innovation, not all of them related to climate.

LINDSAY:
Alice, I want to ask you a question particularly because you spent a lot of time thinking about resilience, and I'd put it this way. Can we just adapt to climate change? Let the climate change and simply change the way we live and deal with whether it's more fires or warmer oceans or more extreme weather events?

HILL:
The short answer is no. Will humanity survive? Yes, but we will see some areas of the globe become uninhabitable. They'll simply disappear, a lot of land erosion. As you've mentioned, coastal cities, particularly in Asia, are great risk of losing landmass. We'll find temperatures that are intolerable either because of the heat itself or the heat combined with humidity, and we will find that it's very difficult to ensure food security; crops will fail. We have bread grasses around the world, but all of them are affected by climate change, water security, difficult to obtain fresh water. All the agreements that we have amongst different nations on how to share waterways, pretty much still don't account for climate change. So we have many problems ahead in just assuring that we have the access to the basics for human life in a hotter world.

Could we do better on adaptation? Absolutely. I think it's fair to say we really haven't advanced very far on the adaptation journey. Adaptation is now required. As Varun said, we have the carbon that's already in the atmosphere and it will continue to force methane, force heating even if we dropped off of fossil fuels today. We would continue to see some of these baked-in events, sea level rise and hotter temperatures, more intense storms. So the feeling in the international community is that we need transformational change that is changing the fundamentals of how humans live where we live, and we just aren't seeing that at anywhere near any kind of scale in the world.

LINDSAY:
I would imagine that adapting to climate change would come with a pretty hefty price tag. If you have to relocate cities from seaside inland, that's a mighty big expense.

HILL:
Yes. We talk about the costs of the energy transition. I think they pale in the terms of the costs of adaptation. Our challenge is that we do not have good economic modeling of all those costs, threw out a handful: kidney disease, dementia, kids not going to school, missed ball games, what have you.

LINDSAY:
Crop insurance.

HILL:
Crop insurance. We don't have models that capture those downward cascading impacts from climate change. When we compare the cost of the transition to the anticipated cost of adaptation, it's not a fair comparison. Even William Nordhaus, who was the pioneer on economic modeling, has backpedaled from the early economic modeling he was doing. He assumed interestingly that humans would just work indoors if it got too hot. Well, of course that doesn't talk about the construction workers, all the people who are taking care of agriculture. People are outdoors to work, and so he has recognized that the modeling has not captured the risks and there's growing recognition in the insurance industry and other areas who focus on risk that this risk will be enormously expensive. Swiss Re estimates that could be a 10 percent drop in GDP by 2050 if we don't get a handle on our pollution.

LINDSAY:
Varun, I want to come back to a point you raised earlier, which is when you think about climate change and the steps that you could take to deal with it, that those steps have consequences that may alarm people threaten their way of life. It also is geopolitical consequences in terms of countries gaining advantages over others. I note that many workers in the U.S. automobile industry are skeptical of building electric vehicles because they worry that that will mean fewer jobs for autoworkers. Likewise, China seems to dominate the solar and wind industries along with the critical minerals needed in their production, which creates a strategic vulnerability for the United States and others. So how do you think about this issue of tradeoffs, of weighing one risk against another, one cost against another benefit?

SIVARAM:
First of all, tradeoffs is the right way to think about it and not enough people do that kind of thinking. I'm glad you brought that up. To our listeners, they couldn't see when you raise an eyebrow me when I gave my last answer. First, I said, it's highly rational for the world to stop climate change because, as Alice has mentioned, it will be cataclysmic for all of us. And then the next breath, I said, the United States in its national interest probably ought to continue producing oil and gas. That's not very consistent because if we are, in fact, to get to net-zero by 2050 can have no new oil investments starting today, and we need to reduce our natural gas consumption by 80 percent in 2040. So all of this is to say, is there a coherent American policy that advances our national interests and that enables us to tackle climate change?

I think it's a very tricky tightrope to walk to balance your near-term interests and your long-term interest, and that is a trade-off one of many. So for example, in the very near-term, we remain an oil and gas producer, the world's biggest. It is in our interest to continue to keep that geopolitical leverage. I personally believe that the energy transition has gained enough momentum that around the world, for example, electric vehicles will continue to gain traction, no pun intended, and the United States risks being left behind in the industries of the future. You mentioned China's dominance. I'll give you a couple of statistics. China today has 80 to 95 percent market share in the entire supply chain of solar and batteries, 60 to 70 percent wind turbines and hydrogen electrolyzers and electric vehicles. China is off to the races. Another pun.

But United States has a key advantage, and it's a question we just talked about innovation. It's American companies that are developing the next generation solid-state batteries that could dethrone China's dominance of the battery sector. So I believe that one way of aligning trade-offs for the United States to focus on competitive advantage in clean technology industries that kills so many birds with a stone. It meets our economic goals of building new industries. It meets global climate goals by helping other countries decarbonize with cheaper technology. And, it meets our geopolitical goals by competing with China in the new crop of industries that are burgeoning.

There aren't many other climate policies that have so many birds that you can kill with that single policy. Many others face intense trade-offs. For example, policies that raise the cost of conventional energy at home will create some winners and losers and you'll really have to balance whether you want to raise prices at the pump compared with meeting America's climate goals. So I just urge our listeners and policymakers to consider trade-offs in a clear-eyed way and then look for those rare multiple wins, and I think innovation's one of them.

LINDSAY:
I want to ask you the same question about trade-offs, Alice, but also add the extra element of how do you talk to people who are skeptics either about a changing climate or the need to do something about it?

HILL:
It's a difficult conversation, but I will start with trade-offs. I think in the trade-offs, one thing that we need to make sure we're focused on is who's paying, and if we look in the near term, it's all of us. But as Varun has said, if we look at the long term, it's future generations, and that's really the trade-off we're talking about here and what kind of planet do future generations have. It is a very thin line to walk. We live in a democracy. You have to be voted to power to make these kinds of choices, but ultimately, are the costs going to be shoved down the road as we are with social security or debt or is this a cost that those of us who are here today and are also causing part of the problem? Are we going to step up and avert catastrophe at a lower cost to future generations as we heat up, we just impose more and more on them.

LINDSAY:
Pay me now or pay me later as the old-

HILL:
And pay a lot more later. So as to how speak to audiences, it's a tough one when it comes to science. I am not a scientist, but I have been a judge. And I can tell you that in no courtroom in the United States is there any discussion about whether climate change is happening. The science is too clear. There are barriers or guidelines established by the Supreme Court to determine what's junk science and what should and should not be admitted. But the science is too well-established that IPCC report is agreed to by virtually all nations and it considers peer-reviewed science of the last five years and includes hundreds of scientists from around the world. The executive summary is a consensus statement by all nations, so I don't argue the science. I think it's completely settled. I also heard a great quip, which I have begun to use, and that is from the head of Lloyds. Of course, Lloyds has been reinsurer forever. I think they started in the coffee houses in London starting to insure ships.

LINDSAY:
Like the sixteenth or seventeenth century.

HILL:
And he recently said, you will not find a single insurer who doubts climate change, and they have been at the forefront of making the clarion call that this is catastrophic and we need to get a hold of it now.

LINDSAY:
I'd like to close Varun by asking you first and then Alice. If there was one thing you would like to see the next administration do on climate change, what would that be?

SIVARAM:
Jim, as we've mentioned, this election is going to have seismic consequences on climate and the two different administrations are going to pass radically different policies and, if they have a friendly Congress, could do things as drastic as, for example, repeal the Inflation Reduction Act. So at a baseline, my hope is we don't roll back much of the climate progress that's been made over the last four years. And at a maximum, my hope is that the next administration takes climate seriously, not just as a niche topic that we talk about once a year at the COP convention, the climate summit annually, but that mainstream policymakers, national security policymakers, economic statecraft policymakers, in the Treasury Department, in the White House, the National Security Council take climate seriously as a threat along the lines of what Alice was mentioning that could cause consequences as diverse as kidney disease to dementia to serious geopolitical challenges the United States. That's what I want the next administration to do. Take it seriously in a clear-eyed way.

LINDSAY:
Varun, I'll just note on the Inflation Reduction Act that while every Republican member of Congress voted against its passage back in 2022, it has gained new support among Republican lawmakers, particularly in the states because the IRA is bringing money funds into their districts and into their states. So that may be a counterweight going forward.

SIVARAM:
51 percent of IRA benefits go to red states. 29 percent by the way, go to swing states. 20 precent go to blue states.

LINDSAY:
Okay, Alice, I'm going to ask you the same question. What is it that you would like to see the next administration do?

HILL:
I agree with everything Varun said. I would add an issue that I believe is bipartisan, nonpartisan, and that is preparing for the impacts of climate change. They are here, they will continue. We saw a record-breaking twenty-eight separate climate or extreme weather events that caused a billion dollars each last year. Now, NOAA has been keeping the statistics for over forty years. This year, we could well exceed that. Last year was record-breaking. What we're seeing is used to be something would happen maybe every three months. Now it's having every few weeks. Our emergency managers can't cope; our homeowners, our renters can't cope; cities can't cope. We need to plan for these events and prepare for them in a serious way. Unfortunately, the United States, we are exceptional in so many ways, but this is an unfortunate one. We do not have a national adaptation plan. We are a laggard among developed nations in failing to adequately address what's ahead.

Either administration should be looking at flood risk, wildfire risk, heat risk, drought, looking at how we can better prepare communities, individuals so that we can reduce the harm. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has said that for every dollar we invest in communities in risk reduction, we save $13. That's an easy win for the United States, given how much of our federal dollars are going to disaster recovery rather than disaster preparedness. In fact, we're losing so much money that the GAO consistently, the government accountability office, the watchdog for the federal government, has consistently put the risk of climate change impacts to the federal Treasury as a high risk. That's telling you something. We need to prepare now, and either administration could move mountains with very little effort to get us much farther along on this journey of preparedness.

LINDSAY:
On that note, I'll close up this special election 2024 episode of The President's Inbox. My guess have been Alice Hill and Varun Sivaram, senior fellows here at the Council on Foreign Relations. Alice and Varun, thank you very much for joining me.

HILL:
Thank you, Jim.

SIVARAM:
Thank you.

LINDSAY:
This special election 2024 series is supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, working to reduce political polarization through philanthropic support for education, democracy, and peace. More information at carnegie.org. If you would like to learn more about what the candidates have said about climate change in foreign policy more broadly, please visit the Council's 2024 election central site. You can find it at cfr.org/election2024 and election2024 is one word.

Please subscribe to The President's Inbox on Apple Podcast, YouTube, Spotify, wherever you listen and leave us a review. We love the feedback. The publications mentioned in this episode. In a transcript of our conversation are available on the podcast page for The President's Inbox on cfr.org. As always, opinions expressed on The President's Inbox are solely those of the host or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

Today's episode was produced by Ester Fang, with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. This is Jim Lindsay. Thanks for listening.