Climate Change Realism on Earth Day 2025, With Varun Sivaram

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 week's topic is climate change realism. With me to discuss whether and how the United States can meet the challenge that climate change poses is Varun Sivaram. Varun is a senior fellow for energy and climate here at CFR and the director of the council's Climate Realism Initiative. A Rhodes Scholar, he holds a PhD in condensed matter of physics. From 2021 to 2023, he was the managing director for clean energy and senior advisor to John F. Kerry, the U.S. special presidential envoy for climate.
Varun then served as chief strategy officer at Orsted, a Fortune Global 500 company that is the world's largest producer of offshore wind energy. An accomplished author, his 2018 book, Taming the Sun, which examines the future of solar energy, was named by The Financial Times as one of the best books of the decade. Varun's latest piece for CFR.org is titled, We Need a Fresh Approach to Climate Policy. It's Time for Climate Realism. Varun, thank you for joining me on the President's Inbox.

SIVARAM:
Jim, thank you so much for having me.

LINDSAY:
Today, Varun, is Earth Day, which is why I wanted to have you on to talk about where we stand in the effort to combat climate change. Tell me where do we stand.

SIVARAM:
Jim, happy Earth Day, or perhaps I should say not a very happy Earth Day to you because we don't stand in a particularly good situation when it comes to the state of the planet, and that's the reason that we launched this climate realism initiative. It was first and foremost to end what I call magical thinking about the state of our efforts to confront climate change. Today, humanity is on track to blow through our climate targets. The targets that we agreed to in the 2015 Paris Agreement. Those targets which set two degrees Celsius as the warming limit that we would tolerate for the average temperature increase around the world or to make best efforts to achieve just a 1.5 degree rise.
Those targets are entirely unrealistic given the pace at which humanity continues to burn fossil fuels. Today, we're on track more realistically for a global average temperature rise of three degrees Celsius or more by the end of the century, which could lead to disastrous impacts at home and abroad.

LINDSAY:
Help me understand that, Varun, because I think for most people, these numbers don't have any meaning. Three degrees doesn't seem that significant when you live, as we do in Washington DC where you can have highs in the summer of a hundred degrees, in cold temperatures in the winter, getting down to single digits. So when we're talking about a three degree change in the global average temperature, I think that's what we're talking about here. What are these things that you think are going to be unleashed?

SIVARAM:
Exactly. First of all, because we have an American audience, at least in part today, three degrees Celsius of average temperature increase translates more to 5.4 degrees in Fahrenheit, which is more understandable to folks. But you might say correctly, Jim, "Hey, on a spring day, if we go from seventy degrees to seventy-five degrees, what do I care?" The problem is that number reflects an average across the Earth's surface. It's most accurate near the equator. As you go toward the poles where we are in the Northern Hemisphere, for example, the divergences start to grow. We could see catastrophic impacts in the United States. Heat waves, for example, we've already seen heat waves, the number of a hundred and twenty degree days, in the dozens in Arizona last summer.
We could see heat waves that last for weeks. Near the poles, you could see vast new changes to the landscape. A three degree Celsius average temperature rise around the world is no trifling matter. It could mean fundamental changes to society as we know it.

LINDSAY:
So I think that's part of what is difficult to grasp in this conversation, talking about how many degrees things might change because it's not simply what the mean global temperature is. You could see much greater variation in temperatures, higher highs, lower lows. You could also have changes in where rain is and where rain isn't. So for example, I lived a good portion of life in the Midwest of the United States, which is blessed not just with great soil, but it has very good rainfall for the kind of crops you grow there. If all of a sudden rainfall shifts somewhere else, it can have very, very big consequences.

SIVARAM:
That's right. It's almost more intuitive to think about impacts. Think about three degrees average global temperature increase as resulting in far more intense wildfires, intensifying hurricanes and storms, intensifying precipitation and droughts in other parts of the country. All of these.

LINDSAY:
Too much rain, not enough rain.

SIVARAM:
Exactly.

LINDSAY:
Too much rain in too short a period of time or at the wrong period of time. I know again, living in Iowa, one of the things farmers hated was when they get torrential rains just in planting season because that could wipe out your crop. Question I have for you, Varun, is scientists have been talking about climate change for decades. I went to my first meeting conference on climate change in 1988. You may not have been born yet. If you were born, you were just learning how to ride a tricycle. Why is it that we haven't made more progress in meeting the challenge when everyone knew this challenge was coming down the road?

SIVARAM:
I'm going to invoke the words of our keynote speaker at the CFR Climate Realism Initiative Launch, Secretary Ernie Moniz, former Secretary of Energy, and he said-

LINDSAY:
Professor at MIT, right?

SIVARAM:
Yes, exactly.

LINDSAY:
Very bright guy.

SIVARAM:
Very, very bright guy, nuclear physicist. He said, "Of course, we love our children and we love our grandchildren. Just not enough." And that fundamental point is so profound when it comes to trying to understand why is the case that we have not taken action to combat climate change? Because self-interest is the best explanation for human behavior, but it is our children and our grandchildren who will be far more affected by climate change than we ourselves will be. The economists will use a term called the discount rate. That is a mathematical measure that measures how much you value future years, how much you value your own welfare in future years, and how much you value the welfare of your descendants.
If you have a high discount rate, which is implicitly what we as humanity have been demonstrating, you really don't care that much about what happens to you thirty years from now, what happens to your kids fifty years from now. Our kids, I have a fifteen-month-old son. It's one of the reasons I care even more now, and I've devoted my whole career to climate change. I care even more today. My kid in fifty years faces a desolate world. But the reason that we probably haven't gotten our act together is because of that steep discount rate that we fail to look at what the future holds. And there's a second reason, and this reason comes from the scholarly literature on international relations. It's a collective action problem.
Every country on its own doesn't have the ability to unilaterally stop climate change because collectively it's all of our emissions that's causing it, and every country on its own has incentives to develop using the means available to it, which often has meant cheap fossil fuels. As a result, every country has in the parlance of international relations, defected in this game, this tragedy of the commons game. Therefore, we see countries continue to emit far more greenhouse gas emissions than would be collectively optimal.

LINDSAY:
So let's talk about the current state of the debate. In your recent piece for cfr.org, you talked about four fallacies in the current political debate in the United States, so walk me through each of them.

SIVARAM:
Sure, and again, the reason I created the Climate Realism Initiative was to reset the discourse on energy and climate in the United States.

LINDSAY:
Discourse meaning conversation?

SIVARAM:
Conversation. To reset the conversation, I found that it's overly stilted. It has these four elements of magical thinking, and therefore we are subject to voters either not caring about climate, not taking it seriously, not quite understanding what's going on and ignoring it every four years. That's where we are right now.

LINDSAY:
You talk about four fallacies. First fallacy is that the world's climate targets are achievable.

SIVARAM:
I argue, Jim, that we will not achieve those targets. There is no future scenario-

LINDSAY:
You're talking about targets in the Paris Accord and things like that.

SIVARAM:
I'm talking about the two degrees Celsius target. Another target that's been thrown around is net-zero emissions by 2050.

LINDSAY:
What does that mean?

SIVARAM:
That means that we take the world's greenhouse gas emissions, predominantly carbon dioxide, but also methane for example, from releasing natural gas, chlorofluorocarbons, etc. That we take those emissions either to zero or to a low level that they can be counteracted by sucking greenhouse gas emissions out of the atmosphere to counteract the ones that we still do emit. Net-zero emissions is wickedly difficult. Net-zero emissions by mid-century simply will not happen. It would require ten trillion dollars a year in investment. Much of it, by the way, profitable investment, but nevertheless, an intense mobilization, a massive mobilization that simply isn't going to happen.

LINDSAY:
And how much are we doing a year right now? Ten trillion is what we need to do. We're talking realistically right now-

SIVARAM:
The world's crossed two trillion dollars in investment in the energy transition. However, much of it is in what I call the easy stuff, things that we already know how to do. For example, investing in solar and wind power, which is economical, starting to invest in electric vehicles, investing in electric grids. Some of the really hard stuff, for example, long-distance transportation, heavy industries. These will require substantial investments that are unprofitable at least today with today's technology.

LINDSAY:
Second fallacy you point to is the idea that reducing U.S. domestic greenhouse emissions can make a meaningful difference. Tell me more.

SIVARAM:
This is the one that's gotten me in by far the most trouble, including from Secretary Moniz, who along with many others reasonably say, it is a dangerous, dangerous statement to say that American emissions don't matter.

LINDSAY:
Is it dangerous because it's wrong or is it dangerous because it undercuts the political will to do something?

SIVARAM:
I happen to believe it's the latter. I think it's not wrong. I think it is mathematically obvious that American emissions are relatively trivial on the scale of all of the future emissions that will be emitted. Now, I define this metric... I may be one of the only ones in the climate literature who does this. I define the relevant metric as the cumulative future emissions from 2025 to 2100. Of those cumulative emissions, eighty-seven percent will come from outside of the United States and advanced economies. All of the United States and G7 allies and advanced economies, almost thirty of them, account for thirteen percent of future emissions.
Now, why do I pick future emissions as the relevant metric? Well, because that's the variable under humanity's control. It's the variable that we can meaningfully alter in order to alter the trajectory of climate change. The past emissions we can't control anymore. Therefore, there isn't much use talking about them. Most in the climate discourse, however, only talk about the historical emissions.

LINDSAY:
Well, let's talk about that because my guess is a critic of your position, and certainly someone sitting in Beijing or Brasilia or Delhi or Jakarta talking about their future emissions will say, "But we got into this position we are right now, not because of what we did, but because of what the United States and the advanced industrialized economies did. Essentially, you've filled up the pool and now we're going to add the last couple of inches and you're coming and complaining about us."

SIVARAM:
And this, by the way, I wholeheartedly agree with this point, so just to be clear, the eighty-seven percent of future emissions that will come from China and emerging economies, as you mentioned, Brazil, South Africa, India, Indonesia, Vietnam. It is absolutely the case that they were not responsible for a large portion of the historical emissions and they may say, "Morally, I should be allowed the opportunity to develop and the rich countries should take a hit. They should be the ones fronting all of the investment."

LINDSAY:
Well, that has driven much of the international debate, certainly going back to the Kyoto Accord.

SIVARAM:
Absolutely for the last thirty years we have been in international U.N. meetings, and this has been the discourse and I happen to think it is probably morally accurate and largely irrelevant for the conduct of American foreign policy. I don't say that lightly or flippantly. I think that American foreign policymakers have a duty to serve the interests of American voters and American voters have demonstrated time and time again that they don't have the political appetite to send trillions of dollars abroad.
American voters spend trillions of dollars on domestic priorities such as social security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the U.S. military and interest on the debt. American voters have not demonstrated the willingness to send trillions abroad. Therefore, I don't think foreign policymakers have within their reasonable array of choices and option to go and rectify historical inequities.

LINDSAY:
Let's talk about the third fallacy. That climate change poses a manageable risk to U.S. economic prosperity and national security.

SIVARAM:
It may be the case that climate change is a risk that we just get through. That with three degrees or more of global warming on average, the United States because of its position as a very wealthy country, is able to naturally adapt and the effects don't affect our economy that much and don't cause profound loss of life.

LINDSAY:
It's everybody else's problem, not really ours.

SIVARAM:
I think that may actually be a case where our climate models were overestimating the impacts and that certainly could happen around the world or the United States, but I think it's a bad idea to bank on it. And the analogy I tend to use is imagine there is a lightning storm going on outside and you've got your family and you've set up a camping trip. Would you really go out into the storm, put your family into the metal tent and say, "Let's take our chances? We might be okay?" That's what the United States finds itself in. We're headed into a lightning storm. We know climate change is happening.
The models tell us that real catastrophic events could happen and there's more than a five percent chance of truly terrible stuff happening when the world warms at least three degrees. Do we want to assume that we'll be okay that it's manageable? I think that would be very imprudent. I don't think we plan for any other national security risk that way. We shouldn't plan for climate that way.

LINDSAY:
People certainly don't do that as individuals. Most people certainly if they have families buy life insurance, not because they're anticipating they're going to die in a given year, but they want to have protection in the event that it happens.

SIVARAM:
Exactly, and so therefore you plan for what we call tail risks and you don't just plan for what we call the median outcome. The median outcome from climate change might be okay. The Congressional budget office, a nonpartisan shop says we might take a six percent hit on average to GDP at the end of the century, totally manageable from climate change, but that's the median estimate. The tail risk estimate, which is something you should seriously consider, it's the reason you take out life insurance is far, far worse, an order of magnitude worse, and that could mean the end of American society as we know it.

LINDSAY:
So let's talk about the fourth fallacy, which is that the clean energy transition is necessarily a win-win for U.S. interests in climate action. What do you mean?

SIVARAM:
Well, I think that for too long, those of us and I count myself in the climate community have said, "Well, naturally there's a win-win. We can have clean energy jobs, clean energy technologies and help to fight climate change. It's all good for America." So far the global clean energy transition has not shaped up to be that way. First of all, there isn't a global clean energy transition. There's what we call a global energy addition.
There's addition of all sources, of fossil fuels, of clean energy. In the electric power sector, for example, where clean energy has grown the fastest, clean energy just achieved a record forty percent share of the global electricity market, but fossil fuels grew at that time as well because overall energy was growing so quickly. Nevertheless, if we achieve-

LINDSAY:
The United States pumps more oil and gas today than it did thirty years ago, correct?

SIVARAM:
Not only that, that's true, Jim, but the United States is also now the world's largest oil and gas producer, and that's central to why I think that a global energy transition when we start as a world to move from oil and gas toward clean energy, it won't necessarily be a good thing for the United States. And here's the scenario why, the most likely scenario. The energy transition is likely to be too slow to avert catastrophic climate change, but it could continue to happen as China continues to churn out solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries to meet the world's growing demand for clean energy sources.
Therefore, the United States loses its geopolitical leverage and economic prosperity from being the world's largest oil and gas producer in controlling one of the world's largest and most consequential energy sources, while at the same time not benefiting as much as we need to from averting climate disasters. The only way, Jim, that we can align American benefits from stopping climate change and American economic prosperity from the clean energy transition is if America, ourselves, if we develop globally competitive, clean technology industries. Technologies where we can compete with China and compete with the rest of the world, we have done a miserable job of that so far.

LINDSAY:
Here's where I want to draw you out, Varun. You're trained as a scientist, I was trained as a political scientist, and I think the second word in that title is a bit of a misnomer, but one thing I understand about politics is that you can have winners and losers. And that losers tend to fight in a political system very hard to keep what they have. What you're describing sounds like even if you can map out something that would benefit the United States as a whole, there are going to be winners and there are going to be losers in the American domestic political scene.

SIVARAM:
So I couldn't agree more with you, Jim. That when we talk about U.S. interests, we should be very careful. There are some things by the way, that genuinely affect every American. Every American is better off if we just have fewer hurricanes. But there are some things, as you say, which affect some Americans in a good way and other Americans in a bad way. If you imagine that the American taxpayer decides to shift resources from a tax deduction for oil and gas to a tax deduction for clean energy that helps one segment and hurts another segment, and it may end up either helping or hurting the American economy on net.
Therefore, I believe that American economic policy when it comes to the energy transition needs to be very, very intentional. We have to intentionally develop globally competitive clean energy industries in an efficient way while also investing resources in the economically productive oil and gas sector, both to continue to maintain our competitiveness, but also slowly transition that sector in a way that's equitable and just for our workers in that sector.

LINDSAY:
So with all of this background about where we are, what the reality is of climate change, all of the political and economic obstacles that lie ahead, what are your policy recommendations? What should people in the United States be asking their political leaders to do?

SIVARAM:
That is precisely what the Climate Realism Initiative sets out to do. It takes as a premise first that we should be realistic and we've just dispensed with four examples of magical thinking. And second, that we should be realist. We should assume that everyone's out for their own self-interest and America needs to be out for our own interests. Here are three pillars from the Climate Realism Initiative of what we should do. Pillar number one is recognizing that we're going to miss our climate targets.
America should prepare in a clear-eyed way for a world that blows through those targets and is at least three degrees warmer on average, and I can walk through those implications.

LINDSAY:
And that's three degrees Celsius?

SIVARAM:
Celsius, 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit. Thank you, Jim. Second, how can America compete with China in the emerging energy transition by building globally competitive and innovative industries? And third, how can America with its very limited tools since our emissions are trivial, how can America and its allies seek to avert the absolute worst, most catastrophic consequences of climate change? Recognizing that we're headed for three degrees of climate change, averting four, five, six, and seven degrees.

LINDSAY:
But what does that mean in practical terms?

SIVARAM:
Each of these pillars has policy recommendations associated with it. I want to first say that CFR's Climate Realism Initiative brings together a diverse set of scholars, each of whom has his or her own diverse views. But I can share some of my ideas for each of the pillars. For pillar one, which is preparing for that world. I think the United States should look abroad to seize geopolitical advantage. For example, in areas such as the melting arctic, where an entire new landscape is being forged or oceanscape, we might say. That's an area where we have to proactively compete with China and Russia and seek to build alliances to secure control over critical minerals and to secure our military assets.
We'll see hundreds of millions, if not billions of climate refugees later this century. The United States needs to prepare now to equip our military to respond to humanitarian disasters around the world, to improve and enhance our own border security given the influx of migration, and to be ready to assist our allies if and when they face destabilization as a result of all of this migration. And then third at home, this is still within pillar one, preparing. At home we need to be become resilient. There will be some fairly extreme things we may have to do. We may have to evacuate cities.

LINDSAY:
But let's go to the top of that list because I would say it's been at least a dozen years now when I've done episodes on climate change that people have mentioned the R word, but climate could change so many things. So there are really sort of two questions. Can we afford to become resilient? And if we can't do everything, which I think is the reality, there's a budget constraint. What are the most important aspects of resiliency to invest in?

SIVARAM:
It's such a good question. I just first want to highlight the premise you pointed out, Jim, which is there's a budget constraint. What can we afford to do? In my opinion, and this is a point that I don't think anybody has ever raised except me. The most compelling reason for fiscal prudence, for balancing the budget, for reducing our national debt and deficit is the specter of climate disaster in twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty years. And for America to have the dry powder we need to adapt. If we don't have fiscal space, we won't be able to invest in resilience.
Now getting our fiscal house in order aside, what is most valuable to invest in? You could say, "Well, we should spend trillions of dollars training firefighters and building seawalls and investing in infrastructure." That by the way is true, but in addition, we have to change the economic incentives about how America pursues economic development. For example, it should not be the case that it's super attractive to develop in areas that are hurricane prone, such as the coasts of Florida or areas that are highly prone to damaging wildfires. That should not be the locus of American economic development.

LINDSAY:
But politically the push is going to be to protect those places because those are people who have something and they don't want to lose it and will apply political pressure to government to help them keep it.

SIVARAM:
That's exactly right, and this is where the political economy is not in our favor. It's kind of a microcosm of the broader prisoner's dilemma game we face on the global stage. Domestically, you're right. The thing that people will militate for is more insurance and more socialized payouts and bailouts so that those who get hit by disasters on humanitarian grounds reasonably are paid back and they can rebuild in the same spot. The correct answer, by the way, an economist would tell you is insurance does its job when it's too expensive to go build a house in a place that's likely to get hit by a hurricane. You probably should not be building a house there.
Insurance reform in the states that have been relatively successful in deregulating it has led to different development patterns. And in those states such as California that have not been successful, that instead have had insurance regimes that prioritize building in places where you're insulated from insurance risk,. Those are the places that are going to get hit by more and more expensive disasters. We have to find a way around this. I don't have a political solution for you.

LINDSAY:
So what else should the United States government be doing as we look forward, your specific policy recommendations?

SIVARAM:
So let's go to pillar number two, which is how do we compete? Here's a really specific policy recommendation, focus on next generation technologies where America can have a comparative advantage, a competitive advantage. I'll give you an example of a policy that I thought was ill-advised under the previous administration, the one I served in. I think it was Ill-advised that we spent thirty billions dollars billion on batteries, of which the vast majority, more than ninety percent of that funding went to existing generation technology. A technology called lithium ion batteries that China has already won.
Next generation batteries such as solid state batteries are a technology class that America has an advantage in. It's our startups and our companies that have developed the technology in our universities. We sit today on an eighteen-month window that's rapidly narrowing to win this battle for the next generation battery, and yet we are spending no money on commercializing those technologies.

LINDSAY:
So two questions, Varun. Question number one, you were in the Biden administration. I'm going to assume that you made the case for essentially leapfrogging. That seems to me to be standard business school advice when you're looking at these sorts of things. Why didn't the Biden administration do the smart thing and basically try to get ahead of the Chinese?

SIVARAM:
Because the Biden administration did not follow the climate realism doctrine, which is laser focused on what the goal should be with clean energy policy. It's to develop globally competitive American industries. It's not to reduce American emissions in the near term, relatively trivial impact on climate change. It's not to create good well-paying jobs domestically, which is a wonderful thing to have, but often is orthogonal to actually creating globally competitive industries. If you're laser focused on globally competitive industries, you ignore the technologies where you're going to lose and you focus your resources on areas where we have a comparative advantage.
And so going forward, whether you're a Democratic administration or a Republican administration, it's going to be so important to be laser focused on your goals and climate realism says pick the goals that are meaningful. Again, Jim, you're a political scientist, which means you're probably laughing in your head at me saying, "You can't be laser focused on building globally competitive industries alone. You have to find a worker welfare angle. You have to find an equity and justice angle because those are the kinds of attributes that bring votes."
And I agree that there has to be a political strategy, but I find that too often the left, the Democratic Party has forgotten what the actual objective is and then what the political strategy is to achieve that objective. They have decided to adopt the overstuffed political agenda as the ultimate objective, and that has been to their detriment.

LINDSAY:
We'll put aside the question of how best to get people to focus on a long-term strategy. That's a whole nother separate conversation. I do think it can be done, but it can be very challenging. But there's a second question here in which comes up all the time in my conversation with people and they'll say, "But government shouldn't be investing in these things. The free market should be doing it." I'll go back to Obama. When he invested with Solyndra, I forget what Solyndra did, but it went bankrupt and everybody had a fit, and the argument is we should actually leave it to the free market to create these things. The government gets it wrong more often than it gets it right, and you respond how?

SIVARAM:
First of all, I agree with a lot of these statements. Government is going to get it wrong a lot. The government's a worse venture capitalist than a venture capitalist.

LINDSAY:
But venture capitalists get it wrong a lot. Their whole model is not having a high batting average. It's when you have a hit, it's a home run.

SIVARAM:
More than a home run. You need one of your hits to-

LINDSAY:
Grand slam.

SIVARAM:
It's a grand slam. One of your hits has to return the nine failures so that that ten percent success rate is a real home run.

LINDSAY:
But if we were to try to run government like a business, like VC do, politically people would have a fit because they couldn't handle having so many failures.

SIVARAM:
That's true. And so you did see the Biden administration react accordingly. A lot of what the Biden administration invested in was what we call large scale deployment. Again, this isn't a bad thing. I think that there is an important role for that. I just think the mix should be a lot more fifty-fifty large scale deployment and next generation innovation and not ninety five-five. And that's what it felt like. For much of the administration, it was ninety five-five. We were under investing in next generation innovation.

LINDSAY:
But then the counter to that would be the Biden administration may have had the balance wrong, but the Trump administration doesn't believe that climate change is a real problem. President Trump has said repeatedly that climate change is a hoax, and so the United States is going to go in exactly the opposite the direction that you want the country to go.

SIVARAM:
Correct. And so I should have been upfront and said, although the Biden administration may not have had its tactics, or to be honest, even its goals correct. The Trump administration has denied the premise of climate change, and that is an offense far greater. I do agree with this. However, the goal with the Climate Realism Initiative is not to simply point fingers. It is to offer a constructive space for solutions. And I think both Republicans and Democrats can come together under a program, under an umbrella that says, "Look, we believe that climate is a serious national security threat. We also believe there's not very much that we can do about it by virtue signaling.
We believe that the United States has lots of tools at its disposal, and we also believe that America's oil and gas industry is a source of our strength today." I believe that under this new initiative, Republicans from the Hill and eventually the Trump administration can talk about meaningful solutions both on competing with China and as what I mentioned, that third pillar. How do we avert the most cataclysmic consequences of climate change? Because folks on both sides of the aisle, anybody with a child or a grandchild can agree cataclysm is not something we want to court.

LINDSAY:
But it's also an issue as you pointed out, that's going to happen in the future. If I can borrow the term you borrowed from economists, people have a discount rate and people aren't focused about what's going to happen in 2037 or 2043 because they're worried about what's going to happen next week or what's going to happen tomorrow.

SIVARAM:
It is nonetheless critical that those of us in the foreign policy establishment, like how you and me, and many of us here at the Council on Foreign Relations, is among that class, that we focus on that. Jim, I think you and I share a belief, an optimistic belief that long range planning is possible. We have folks who've devoted their careers to preventing nuclear war. It may not be the case that the average American spends a whole lot of time thinking about nuclear war, and nuclear war has not been on our radar in any material way for seventy-five years.
Nevertheless, the United States government still does very good work trying to prevent nuclear war. I think we could do good work trying to avert the worst consequences of climate change through long range planning.

LINDSAY:
Varun, I want to close by picking your brain a little bit on the technology side of all this. I mentioned in the introduction that you have a Ph.D. in condensed matter physics. I have no idea what that means, but you do have that. What is your sense of the role that technology can play in getting us out of the jam that we have placed ourselves? And I'm struck because I talked to some people who are technologists and they say, "There are so many things happening in labs that are going to come forward that will really revolutionize things." And I talk other people say, "There's technology, but it's a long way off."
And what I have in the back of my mind is I just came back from being in Europe watching BBC International, which I think for two days in a row, ran a story about a British experiment thinking Weymouth, England, which is taking carbon dioxide out of water. And the BBC presenter was very enthusiastic about this, but it wasn't at all clear to me how feasible this was, whether it could be scaled up or what other problems it might actually create as you solve the existing problems. How do you think about technology because you actually understand it?

SIVARAM:
No, it's kind of you, Jim. I can't tell you how excited I am. I'm going to list four things, and I'll start with an anecdote. Four weeks ago, I got an odd email from Oxford University. They said, "One of your patents..." It's one of the satellite patents that-

LINDSAY:
You have a patent?

SIVARAM:
Well, one of the satellite patents that I'm on for this technology related to solar called Perovskite, they said it's going to pay out. My goodness, it's been over a decade since I filed that patent. Why is this paying out? And four weeks later, the news just dropped that a company that spun out of our laboratory in Oxford has just entered into a major deal with, you guessed it, a Chinese solar company to license that IP. Now I understand where the royalty stream was coming from. The reason that was the canary in the coal mine, which is a literally backwards pun, is next generation clean technologies are about to make commercial waves.
Solar Perovskites, just imagine a magical wonder material, a semiconductor that could be far more efficient at capturing the sun's light and turning it into electricity that could replace today's silicon solar panels, which by themselves, by the way, are quite good. I believe that that technology is about ready for prime time, this decade. Solid state batteries I mentioned earlier are another exciting innovation. Imagine a battery, whether it's in your phone or in a military drone or in an electric vehicle that charges far faster. It holds far more energy. Your car goes hundreds of miles longer. It works in cold weather. It can't blow up, and it lasts far longer.
It's a superior battery, and American companies have it, and they're about to be commercially ready, or the advent of AI enables us to discover and use new materials far more quickly. As we tap that, just as AI has enabled protein discovery and protein configuration understanding to be accelerated. Similarly, we'll develop materials that can capture carbon dioxide from smokestacks or enable new green fuels that will enable us to go long distances on clean energy. And finally, the fourth technology that is both exciting and very scary is a technology called geoengineering. A way of helping to regulate the Earth's thermostat by reflecting sunlight from the atmosphere without actually reducing our emissions.
There's a real risk of moral hazard, but that's a technology that I think is going to be critical.

LINDSAY:
Explain what a moral hazard is.

SIVARAM:
Well, the moral hazard is if we develop a technology to regulate Earth's temperature without reducing fossil fuels, the world won't reduce its fossil fuels. And so there's a perverse risk that the net-zero transition grinds to a halt if geoengineering gets too good. That's why most have said, "Don't even research geoengineering." I think that's a risk that the world can't afford to take. Geoengineering speculative as it is, does have decades worth of data behind it, and therefore could be our best bet at averting the worst impacts of catastrophic climate change.

LINDSAY:
Well, Varun, you've really stuck your finger in the hornet's nest there. I know there's a lot of controversy surrounding geoengineering, a whole issue of solar radiation management. Many people argue that not only is there the moral hazard issue, but that it could have sort of uneven consequences benefiting some countries, hurting others. Obviously, some real big potential global governance issues, but probably not we have time to get to today. So maybe sometime in the future I'll have you back and we can sort of do a deep dive on whether it makes sense to put stuff in the atmosphere to reflect the sun's radiation.

SIVARAM:
I can't wait. Love to come back. Thank you, Jim.

LINDSAY:
On that note, I'll close up this episode of the President's Inbox. My guest has been Varun Sivaram, senior fellow for energy and climate here at the Council and director of the Council's Climate Realism Initiative. Varun, it's always a delight to chat.

SIVARAM:
Thank you so much, Jim.

LINDSAY:
Please subscribe to The President's Inbox on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you listen and leave us a review. We love the feedback. The publications mentioned in this episode and 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 Justin Schuster with recording engineer Eli Gonzalez and director of podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. This is Jim Lindsay. Thanks for listening.