- Well, welcome, everyone.
Thank you very much for coming out
in the slightly chilly weather.
My name is Alyssa Goodman.
And I'm the co-director for science
here at the Radcliffe Institute.
And so I welcome you also on behalf of Radcliffe.
Some of you may have been here earlier this year
for our annual--
well, last year now for our Annual Science
Symposium on the Undiscovered.
And the theme of the undiscovered,
for those of you who were not here,
has to do it's not completely by accident or serendipitous
scientific discoveries, but discoveries
that are made when you have a plan for what kind of science
you want to do.
But then you find something you didn't exactly expect,
but you are very prepared.
And so Dan Kammen, who you're going to hear from today,
will talk about that kind of work a bit in the context
of energy research and potentially,
hopefully, saving the earth.
And so, it falls to me to tell you
about Dan, which I will do in just a minute.
But also to mention that there are
two more talks coming up well within a week in this series.
So, we have one on Friday and one on Monday.
And they both have a life science bend.
And the information is on the Radcliffe website.
And so if you haven't registered for those, two more
talks in the undiscovered series-- one Friday and one
Monday.
I should also mention that the first few rows here are filled
with people-- the reason I'm wearing a name tag today,
is that as another activity at Radcliffe,
we're having a two-day seminar, small seminar on trying
to marry data science approaches and climate research across all
fields--
law, business, economics, earth science, health.
And we'll let you know how that comes out hopefully
at another event in the future.
But one of our participants for that is my friend Dan Kammen.
And so, Dan Kammen and I first met
when we were both graduate students here
in physics in the late 1980s.
And-- yeah, Dan looks younger than me, though.
But anyway, so Dan, like I said, we both got degrees in physics.
And then Dan's path diverged fairly quickly,
where he got more and more interested
in energy and energy policy.
So, he has also an undergraduate degree in physics from Cornell.
And then he went on and did postdocs at Caltech,
and came back to Harvard.
And then he went to Princeton as an assistant professor.
But for the last 20 years, he's been at UC Berkeley.
And the list of titles that Dan has
doesn't even fit on the page that I have in front of me.
So I just selected some to give you some taste of what he does.
He's currently the class of 1935 Distinguished Professor
of Energy, the chair of the energy and resources group
there.
He's also appointed in the Goldman
School of Public Policy in the Department of Nuclear
Engineering.
He's the founding director of the Renewable and Appropriate
Energy Laboratory, the co-director of the Berkeley
Institute of the Environment, the director
of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center.
I left some off.
He's very lazy, as you can see.
And he's founded or is on the board
of more than 10 companies.
And some of you may remember his name
from the newspapers and the news because he
has advised the Obama administration, and the World
Bank, and extremely briefly the Trump administration on energy
and sustainability issues.
He also was the coordinating lead author
for one of the IPCC reports, the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change.
And you may remember that Al Gore and the rest of the panel
won the Nobel Prize for their work in 2007.
So, because Dan shared that prize
with so many other authors in addition
to Al Gore, who got half the prize,
he told me I'm allowed to call him a micro Gore.
So, also you may have seen Dan.
When you see him, he might look familiar.
He's been on many, many television programs.
And in particular, he hosted a six-part series
for the Discovery Channel called Eco Opulus.
And so, I'm going to stop taking Dan's time away.
And just say that I'm really excited to hear him tell us
about an energy plan that the earth can live with.
And the plan is that we'll hear from Dan.
And then we'll take questions at the end.
And there'll be a microphone in the aisle.
And when you'd like to ask a question,
please do come to the microphone.
And thank you very much.
And thank you for coming, Dan.
[APPLAUSE]
- Well, thank you all for being here on what for,
now a Californian, feels like a very, very cold evening.
So, I really appreciate everyone getting here.
I have to say though that I feel even more of attuned
with the undiscovered path because you
can tell a fairly good story about what
I've done afterwards.
But at the time, I came to Harvard to do cosmology.
I actually transferred here.
I won't get into that right now.
But I got here.
And then I got seduced into studying neuroscience
and the evolution of the brain.
And it's actually the complex systems part
that I feel like has been the most useful
in the work I've done.
And I hope that that kind of appears as we go.
But it's a story you can tell the ties afterwards.
But I sure cannot tell a coherent story at the time.
It was a interesting wander through a lot
of very nice, benevolent neglect along the way.
And so right now, we're at a point
though when we need to do much more than benevolently neglect
the planet.
And so I'm hoping these will tie together a little bit.
I mean what I'll try to do is to give a bit of an introduction
to my laboratory because the way that it functions is
critical to the mixture between basic science, applied science,
and engagement with a variety of non-governmental groups,
and governments, and others along the way.
And I'll use that to really look at how quickly the energy
system of the world not only is changing--
not always for the better--
but the ways in which we critically need it to change.
And so this is the part that will
bore the experts in the room.
And I apologize just a little bit.
But really, to use that to look at what
are we learning about how to guide and steer innovation
for a decarbonised world.
And that's really when I get at.
What I find exciting is that we, like all academics say,
all hard problems we haven't solved,
we are waiting for the younger generation to solve.
And I do remember when I felt like I
was one of those younger generation
folks-- which I do not anymore.
And right now, we are at a point where
the 15-year-old Swedish school children,
and young 29-year-old members of the US
House of Representatives, and a variety of others
are absolutely doing exactly what we say,
in a very casual way, those sorts of changes.
So, I'll end with this call for a just transition, which
is probably a more accurate title than Energy Plan
that the World Can Live With.
Because it's not clear that the world is
going to be too happy with the energy
plans that we are creating.
So, I'll jump into our lab for a second just
to give a feel for it.
It's quite a diverse group of individuals,
lots of different backgrounds and interests.
And it's quite international.
It's really quite diverse.
And so, there's a lot of approaches.
Most of the people that find their way to this energy
and resources group came out of a STEM background.
But increasingly, we have people from philosophy,
and rhetoric, and a variety of other areas as part of the mix.
And it's been really heartwarming
to see the number of people who feel
like they have a huge input on how we
think about energy innovation.
And it's not just the kind of the material science,
and physics, and chemistry world that I sort of
assumed when I founded the lab would be the main pieces of it.
So, anything that I'll talk about today--
the slides from today's talk, the papers,
and things that I'll mention, the video clips--
they're all available on the RAEL website, Renewable
and Appropriate Energy Laboratory.
And you do need to type into Google more than just RAEL.
Because if you just put it in RAEL,
you will get the RAELians, who claim to have cloned a human 10
years ago in Florida.
Haven't heard a lot from them since.
So, my name, or Berkeley, or something like that.
And then the Twitter is not vacation pictures.
We try to post about one tweet today.
Today was a bit heavy, for reasons
I'll get to in a little bit, about the work
from the laboratory.
So, RAEL has existed since I moved from Princeton
to Berkeley 20 years ago.
It's actually when John Holdren had departed here to Harvard.
And so there was a spot available for an ex,
or former, or something sort of physicist.
So, we've been working since.
And the big project we worked on for the first couple of years,
and Lisa mentioned, was that I've
been part of the IPCC team.
It actually started when I was here at Harvard
under a NIGEC Northeast Regional Center for Climate Change
fellowship in the 80s.
And then in the 90s who worked really hard
on a lot of the climate assessment,
detection of climate change work.
The big benefit was that we got this wonderful--
I got to share in the Nobel Peace
Prize, which was wonderful.
But I don't know how critical it is here
at Harvard, but at Berkeley getting the check is great.
But as you know, if you're part of a big team,
you don't get the Nobel Prize check.
You get this nice plaque.
But you do get something much more valuable at Berkeley,
and that is a parking space with a big large "NL" on it
for Nobel Laureate.
And I was really waiting for my parking space
to impress my friends and and sort of annoy my enemies.
Nothing happened the first year, 2007, 2008, 2009, nothing,
nothing, nothing.
Finally, a couple of years ago, they
said oh, we're going to act on this finally.
At Berkeley, there were four members
of the IPCC team, Inez Fong, Kirk Smith,
Bill Collins we're all part of the core team on campus
and the Lawrence Berkeley Lab.
And so we were told, yeah, you're about to get the award.
You're going to get the parking space.
And it's totally Berkeley.
And they absolutely delivered what they said.
We got a parking space.
Nobel laureate bike parking.
And you got to read the fine print,
parking not reserved for IPCC contributors.
So the very few times I go there,
there's like 16 student bikes in a huge heap.
It looks like some sort of twisted metal thing
from The Matrix.
But it is very Berkeley-specific.
And so, Berkeley did us proud.
Our lab is sort of generally thinking as interdisciplinary
as possible, as we can about climate issues.
But we still come from a technical perspective.
And so every now and then, our forays into--
I'm not going to call it economics.
I don't want to even claim that--
but sort of financial engineering, I would describe.
And so one of the things that we came up with
was a way to finance energy efficiency and renewables
something called PACE, Property Assessed Clean Energy.
It's basically pirating the simplest idea out there,
that municipalities around the United States
often lend money to property owners
to underground transmission lines and repair sidewalks.
And so we borrowed this idea, set up a company.
16 states passed laws to enable PACE financing.
And it's worked relatively well.
But it has a critical flaw.
And that is, to get municipal money,
to invest in renewables and efficiency, both things that
make sense, you have to own property.
And that means it is inherently a regressive policy.
It borrows money from all of us to pay off
those who are better off because they own something.
And I'll come back at the end to the halting
steps towards this just transition,
or a socially equitable version of a change in this really
critical problem.
Since then, our lab has expanded the work
we've done with governments around the world
to help them think through how to do planning for an energy
transition.
And this has really been the most interesting feature
for me.
My kind of complex systems background,
interest in basic materials science,
be it for new batteries, or heat pumps,
or whatever the technology fuel cells
as we're looking at the time.
But it's really how to synthesize
that into complex enough models, but also models
that can be translated for work by governments,
by nonprofit groups, by activist groups, by the private sector.
And I'll give a few flavors of that as we go.
And we've worked with a whole range of governments--
I just put some flags of a few of them up there--
in places that have made interesting strides.
And I should highlight that, it may not be obvious,
we hear a lot about China.
And I'll come back to China.
And we have Mike Danielson and others
in the room who have real expertise.
But in terms of places like Kenya you don't hear about,
Kenya is, in some ways, the Silicon Valley of East Africa.
Morocco is the only country that legitimately
went to the climate conference this past December in Poland
and we're on target to meet their 2050
goals-- the only country.
And why it's in Africa, it's an interesting story.
And Malaysia has a really interesting story
around decentralized energy.
So, there are some really curious leaders
emerging in this field.
And that will get me into kind of the core part of the talk.
And that is we have to make this great energy transition.
But we are moving too slowly.
And the things that have caused some
of the most interesting and most rapid progress, some of them
are obvious.
But I will do sort of a take on them.
But even though I assume that no one here who came to this talk
in the first place-- who is in Cambridge, at Harvard, MIT,
and various places--
needs any kind of a primer on climate change.
But we all have somewhere in our family tree, that crazy uncle
or aunt, who doesn't believe climate change
and has 9,000 arguments that they'll
trot out over Thanksgiving dinner
until you pass out from tryptophan poisoning.
And it's their argument why climate change isn't happening.
And one of the interesting aspects of that
is that the climate community on the science and engineering
side is very dedicated to our models and our increasingly
complex models.
And while I'm as guilty as anyone, one of the challenges
is to try to be able to encapsulate climate
change in a model-free way.
And you can look at a given heat wave, or this, or that.
But you can always say, well, 80 years ago,
100 years ago there was a similarly bad event.
And so, one thing that I use and urge
anyone who has that sort of troublesome aunt or uncle
in your family is a wonderful NASA--
you can download this from the NASA website.
And what it's going to show, in I think 28 seconds or so,
is a series of synthetic images taken each point
during one image per year when the sea ice over the North Pole
hit its minimum.
And that means it could be late August or early
September, depending on that coldest moment.
And so, this is a critical part of the story.
Because these are simply images taken, no modeling involved.
And what you're going to see is not only this,
but a graph and millions of square kilometers showing
the amount of ice.
And so, those of you who have watched Chasing Ice and now
Chasing Coral, I highly recommend both of those.
But, you see, there's some fluctuations.
But starting out in the late 80s,
a little bit less than 7 million square kilometers of ice
at its minimum in the late summer.
There are some warmer years, colder years.
I think I debated Bjorn Lomborg in '96 at a kind of a peak.
But you see, we have, in a very steady, secular way,
lost about 50% of the ice cover.
And for those of you who have seen Chasing Ice know--
very graphically and it should make sense physically--
you don't just lose area.
You compact volume.
So you're losing a dramatic amount of ice.
And again, in a modeling-free way,
that's a pretty good slide set to just play back
to that annoying relative who insists
that they're going to tell you all the reasons why climate
change is due to other things.
In my world view, though, one of the hallmark events that I
think will go down in history even though the recent history
we've seen has been a little challenging,
is the fact that we've had so far 24
of these COPS, these Climate Conference of the Party
meetings.
But before the Paris one, this is called the famous event
where we got this wonderful agreement.
In 2014, President Obama and Premier Xi met.
And they essentially said, this 189-country negotiation, this
is a pain in the blank.
And we're just going to do a two-party conference.
After all, we are the G2 of messing up the planet.
We are 40% of global energy use, 40% of global pollution.
If we come to an agreement, it will really change things.
And in fact, that's exactly what happened.
The agreement was bizarrely asymmetric
from a political science perspective.
President Obama pledged to cut emissions by a third by 2025.
China promised to peak emissions-- d emissions,
DT is equal to zero.
But they didn't say if that was going to be a 2% or 200%
over the current level.
And of course, the US has now backed off,
to put it mildly, the Clean Power Plan that Obama proposed.
China, on the other hand, that gave itself until 2030
to peak emissions, is going to peak emissions sometime
probably in the next six to seven years.
So China's going to meet its target much earlier and much
lower than anyone forecast.
And so, a really interesting mix.
Of course, these promises that were made at the Paris Climate
Conference are things that we've committed to
and haven't done yet.
And that's part of the problem.
But what happened is that I then evolved
the work I was doing from just at Berkeley
to a larger federal role, first under Secretary Clinton
and then under Secretary Kerry.
And so, we worked in a variety of capacities, in my case,
as science envoy working with North African, sub-Saharan
Africa, and East African, and Middle East
countries on their energy plans.
It was a wonderful time.
At the end of it, you get kind of a wonderful letter
from the president thanking you for trying
to be a liaison for good planning
and bringing science to bear on the problem.
But then of course, the US, we had a little election.
And that election didn't go well,
certainly from my own perspective on things.
And so, it was time for me to depart the administration.
And I, at home, said you know, I'm
not going to keep serving under this new president.
And my wife said, well does that mean you'll
be around the house more?
Which I wasn't sure was a good or bad thing from perspective.
But my kids said, well, dad if you're going to do it,
there's only one way to do it.
You have to tweet it out.
And you have to tweet it out in ways that I
learned from my children.
So, my younger child said, well, if you're going to tweet,
you have to tweet 6 AM California time, 9 AM East
Coast time, middle of the day in Europe.
And you have to tweet your message out
in a way that will have a few interesting features.
So, I tweeted out my message.
I'm the son of a historian.
And so I had quotes from various presidents of both parties.
I thought I was being pretty clever.
No one read the letter at all because I
didn't have a little cross tick embedded in my message.
And that's when I started to really listen to my kids.
Not only should I do it early in the morning,
but then my younger daughter challenged me.
Said, you have to have your most famous friend retweet it
within a few minutes.
So that got more tricky.
I thought and thought, who do I dare approach?
Who do I ask?
And so, I did ask my most famous friend if she could retweet it.
And she did.
And, you know, by the end of the first day
according to my daughter, I was trending for nine nanoseconds.
Taylor Swift, by the end of the first day,
it was just kind of an interesting process.
And so, that put me back into my day job at Berkeley.
And thankfully, a number of other parts of the world
have moved on very steadily.
It's really hard to meet our climate targets
without the US engaged.
Because if we look at business as usual path for emissions,
if there is the business as usual line,
you can just see if the US and China collectively
don't get their houses in order, we are not going to make it.
There's lots of arguments about how you can have the treaty
work, and blah, blah, blah.
But in the end, these two major players
are going to have to really make progress.
And what was agreed to in Paris wasn't just fueled
by a lot of good wine-- although it helped.
It was a remarkable transition, and the idea
that we were on a pathway in terms of billions of tons
emitted and in terms of the temperature change we were
on a pace for, the orange, or red,
or whatever that color up there is,
that's what the commitments made by the US, China, EU,
and everyone else were going to shave off.
Now, those are pledges made in 2015.
And as I said before, only one country, Morocco,
is actually on pace to get anywhere.
So, talk is certainly cheap and paper, apparently,
is even cheaper.
But that was what we all committed to, shaving a degree
right off the top.
And remember, we have already warmed the planet
by one degree.
So it's not that we have two degrees of room.
That was the negotiated, we must cut our emissions
by 80% or more to keep emission rise
less than two degrees given that we've already
warmed by one degree.
And so, we were there.
And really, what countries committed
to were the so-called national commitments, the NDCs.
And they add up to this.
Some countries pledged to be much more energy efficient,
some to do renewable energy, others to protect forests,
wetlands, a whole variety of very eclectic things
were proposed.
And the job of the Conference of the Parties
is to really hold us to that fire
and hold us to those targets.
And right now we are not doing so well.
But the Paris climate meeting also did something else.
And that is the--
the red is what we committed to.
But it was such an enthusiastic meeting
that a very unlikely set of some European, and the United
States, and many developing nations
said this two-degree number, that's not enough.
We need to keep emissions lower still.
And one real failing of the science community-- and I'm
as guilty as many colleagues-- is
that we didn't go to this Paris meeting
with models for how to go much lower in hand.
A few groups had them.
And people trotted out proposals that they
had written to agencies that didn't get funded,
or whatever else, and to say well,
we were thinking about going lower
than that 80% cut in emissions.
Very few of the academic community
was ready to step up while world leaders got together and said
two degrees, that's the goal.
But we're really after one and a half degrees,
the so-called High Ambition Coalition.
Because that sounds better than Low Ambition Coalition.
And in fact, what happened was we
need to do everything in the gray.
Those are all additions.
We need new science, technology, in a whole variety
of areas, new policy mechanisms, new behavioral tools.
But six months after the Paris Climate Accord,
my boss, Secretary Kerry at the State Department,
led the US effort to pass the so-called Kigali
Accords that were signed remarkably fast
and then ratified right away.
And those called for about another half degree
to be cut largely through refrigerants
and some industrial processes.
But it shows you how quickly this whole system
can change, at least on paper.
And you have to make good on it.
Now, you don't have to be too technical to note
that if two degrees requires getting emissions
very near zero, getting to one and a half degrees
is going to require scenarios that go carbon negative.
And this has opened up all kinds of dialogue around,
do we invest in geoengineering, do
we invest in smarter agriculture,
do we invest in healthier soils, rivers, ecosystems
so that the natural world can suck carbon down?
So, there's a fascinating and very complex
discussion about how to actually do this.
But it's a really critical story.
And so, if I stop there, I would have not
done any of the details.
But that's what we all promised.
Of course, the US backed out, which is
why I resigned my federal job.
But what gave us hope that you could get there?
And for me living in California, it's
really this remarkable story that if you
look at electricity use per person in the United States,
it's been rising in California, not
so different than the rest of the country.
And of course where California took that dip and the US
took that little hiatus, that was the OPEC crisis.
And the engineering-savvy folks will say well, wait,
an OPEC crisis is about oil.
But we don't run our power plants on oil.
We run on coal, natural gas, nuclear power,
and some renewables.
And so, what happened?
In fact, the economic slowdown resulted in less demand.
But the real thing that happened, in my view
in California right during that little plateau,
is that California set up a new state agency to start planning
around energy transitions modeled
very much after some work that had taken place in Europe.
The Energy Commission took off.
And instead of seeing electricity use
just simply rising per person--
and there were well thought out arguments
that if you wanted to grow your economy, energy use must rise.
In fact, a sort of unfortunate-- very famous, but unfortunate--
economist, anthropologist at the University of Michigan--
I won't name him, Leslie White--
he actually said that culture evolves as the amount of energy
consumed rises.
And in fact, you all on the east coast
may have your doubts about California in terms of culture,
but by doubling and tripling down
on residential, commercial, and individual home
energy efficiency, California stopped
electricity growth per person.
And it has remained that way for decades.
There are some interesting details
that are worth hashing out.
But that's a remarkable process.
Per capita we've leveled out.
But of course, we have a lot more capitas.
And so we need more power.
But that is a wholesale change in terms of economic thinking.
And it leads me to one of the first kind
of undiscovered observations for me.
And that is, this kind of data enables a whole bunch
of much more interesting planning.
But it also reveals one of the problems.
And that is that while we know that we
need to meet this climate target of reducing emissions,
one of the far two general observations for me
is that humans are very, very poor
at doing any decision-making that
doesn't seem to involve money.
And when I was in Princeton, I had
the office next to a now-Nobel laureate in economics.
He's not an economist.
But we had huge problems because on the Carter
there was Dan Kammen and Danny [? Koneman ?] side-by-side.
And we never got our own mail or messages or anything.
But he, among others in the behavioral economics world
really went on to think, how do we develop other metrics?
How do we think through how we're going to assess features?
And the fact that nature does not
care about money means this whole dialogue is incredibly
difficult. That doesn't mean that a carbon price alone
will solve our problems.
But it's incredibly difficult to get there
because what nature really cares about is carbon emissions
and suck-down, so the net flux of carbon and time.
And unfortunately, we are doing ourselves no favors
until we can find a way to translate
nature's currencies of carbon in time,
and perhaps land use and water into financial terms
or translate our financial terms into money--
I mean, into these natural units,
we're not going to get there.
So as an example, many places have
done strategies in California.
We set a target for 20% of our energy
to come from renewables by 2010.
We missed the goal through a party, got there
three years late.
Our next goal for 2020 was one-third of energy
coming from renewables.
And we are already over that.
California will probably in 2020 somewhere between 37% and 39%
powered by renewables.
That is amazing in itself.
And while every jurisdiction has a different definition,
California does not count large hydro or nuclear
as a renewable.
You can agree or disagree that's just the bookkeeping California
chose to.
Our 2030 goal was 50% powered by renewables by 2030.
But senator Kevin de Leon and others
worked to pass a bill, Senate Bill 100--
100% of our energy from clean sources by 2045
and 60% by 2030.
And California is certainly on path
to meet that incredibly lofty-sounding goal for 2030.
Now, this leads me to not only talk about these climate goals
that I've done most of the talk so far about, but also
about the real secret sauce in this.
And that is that a number of places
related to discussions that have now led to the Sunrise
Movement, to the Green New Deal, to a new bill that
now has Republican and Democratic support--
sponsors at least-- in the House and Senate,
to start having a revenue-neutral carbon price.
All of these have led to a much bigger discussion
not just about climate change, but about equity.
And I really want to sort of hammer on that as we go.
Because I actually am amazed we've
gotten as far as we have without making a more just version
of this transition possible.
So, some of the things that have happened in the California
process along the way are interesting.
Leading up to this, 10 years ago we started with an effort
to say all new homes built in California
after 2020 must generate as much energy as they consume.
So, some mixture of energy efficiency and rooftop solar
is kind of the poster child for it.
But it could be heat pumps.
It could be ownership share in a wind farm not on your property.
A whole variety of things have gone into this.
Which, when we initially proposed this nine years ago,
people thought were impossible, it
has passed its law in California.
And now we get construction companies
saying we only have 11 months to get to this target.
And we say, well, you could have come along
with the process and the discussion ever since.
And we're getting all kinds of clever proposals
for what to do in a home that simply can't have solar
on the roof because of trees or a place like Pacifica
with a lot of fog.
And we're finding interesting proposals.
Our equivalent of Star Market in California, Safeway,
has now proposed they would host solar.
Your home doesn't have it on the roof.
But you have an ownership share in that solar
they host on their building.
And it's part of your property.
So, there's lots of things going on there
to sort of think through how to do it differently.
At the same time that we pass this one, it is now law--
and it was considered a reach--
there was an even bigger reach.
We passed, at the same time, that by 2030 office buildings
of indeterminate height have to also be carbon neutral.
Now, we know how to do this one.
But we do not know how to do this one.
But in that go-along with an innovative strategy,
California's actually adopted this as well.
So it's a really interesting mix.
Another version of the story about how
do we convert our dialogue to think not just about money
is something that several places in the world
started to highlight.
The California version was to say,
let's not just have a quota system for clean energy.
Let's also do it for our fuels.
10 years ago we started to work on this.
Almost everyone who thought going
to clean fuels for vehicles were thinking biofuels.
I was certainly part of that.
I wrote a paper that was widely used to set a standard for it.
We went on 60 Minutes and a variety of things.
And that rule basically said, phase out gasoline.
Move to biofuels.
Except that you have to do the cradle to grave,
the lifecycle analysis of are those biofuels actually
sustainable?
Well, it turns out, of course if your biofuel comes
from urban waste from Boston, probably
it's a good thing to use it for fuel.
If it comes from cutting down Amazonian forest to then
grow soy, not so good.
And so, what California did was adopt something called the Low
Carbon Fuel Standard.
And it said that if gasoline is our benchmark in terms of grams
of carbon per megajoule we have to take
into account the source.
And so, if you move to Midwestern corn--
just look at the blue for a second--
it's somewhat better.
Sugar cane is quite a bit better,
ethanol that's made from dry materials are better.
But none of them are home runs.
They are a few percent better than gasoline in lifecycle.
They don't solve the story.
And in fact, there's a vicious debate
going on around the green, which is called the Indirect Land
Use.
And it's a very controversial economic part of the story.
But there are lots of fuels that are unambiguously better.
And so there is a future for biofuels.
But as we all know, there's been a push
into electricity, which has really changed the game.
And I'll come back to that in a little bit.
So, when I mentioned this timetable,
we need to get to roughly 80%, or 90%, or even
100% decarbonised, depending how sort of optimistic
you are by 2050, that's not the whole story.
The other story is encapsulated in this paper from which
Christina Figueres, who was the chair of the Climate Process
and now she's head of the European Climate Foundation,
highlighted.
And that is that every year we go by with increasing
emissions, that's the tan line.
Of course, it makes our peak higher,
so you have to reduce emissions more.
But that's not my worry.
I believe we can beat this down for the technologies
we'll be talking about in the next few minutes.
The worry, though, is that if we keep that 2050
goal as our serious goal, which it must be,
then the slope of these lines really becomes the worry.
The blue line, or whatever that turquoise color is,
a 3% decarbonisation sustained for decades.
The rust-colored one is 4% and the red is 5%.
And the problem is that we're talking about not just one
or two years.
We're talking about decade after decade of sustained innovation.
And the two best-documented examples
are that California for about seven years maintained 3%.
And while China's energy demand grew,
they cleaned their mix so dramatically that they also
averaged about 3%.
But no places averaged the 4% or 5%.
And so, the longer we wait to really start this in earnest,
the more the slope of this line becomes the real challenge
in the process.
And that's really the issue.
And so, the other far too general or sort of undiscovered
observation for me is that we used to think of the energy
system as a supertanker.
So it takes-- the analogy is not only oil,
but also takes miles and miles to turn.
But more and more, we need to think about it somehow
as a supertanker trying to be a startup.
And how do we mix the culture of this
is the biggest investment we have in terms of infrastructure
on the planet?
And we need to change it dramatically, quickly.
So, in the last 10 minutes I want
to highlight some examples.
And I'll do them very quickly in terms
of some of the waves of innovation
that have really given us some tools for decarbonisation.
The first one is my favorite most complicated graph
in the world--
maybe not the most complicated graph in the world,
we'll leave that for astrophysics--
but the most complicated graph in my field.
And that is a graph showing the progress in solar energy
on the material science side.
So, this incredibly busy picture just
shows, for the traditional big silicon cells
to smaller blue, the crystaline ones, to thin film,
new emerging technologies to the reds, new [INAUDIBLE] bytes,
and quantum dots, and organic cells.
You're seeing the best efficiency of a whole variety
of technologies with the laboratory group that
held that record at the time, and yes, the slope
of that line over time gives you one metric of innovation.
And thankfully, these newer entrants coming onto the scene
have higher slopes.
They're racing more rapidly.
Very exciting.
And it's this mixture of technology push, new innovation
funded by governments, by companies that gives us
a really diverse resource.
Meaning, there's many different solar technologies.
Back when I started this, when I started
working on this a long time back when
I did my first summer of work at the US National Renewable
Energy Laboratory, there was really only
in the purple and the blue that were seen as competitors.
Now all of these are looking interesting candidates.
That, plus increasing manufacturing largely in Asia
and markets growing around the world-- first in Japan,
and then Germany, and then California,
and now many places--
have led to kind of a famous picture.
And that is this thing called the Learning Curve.
And this is loved by people who think about applied energy.
I think it's loathed by some of my economics friends.
But the idea here is, notice this is a log-log plot.
No apologies made.
So, price on the y-axis and order of magnitude changes
and production on the x-axis, in log-log space you get
a so-called power law--
this is Moore's law--
where we see a very steady decline.
For most technologies that are mass produced,
you get about a 20% drop in price
every time you double the amount in manufacturing.
If you trust it, you can then forward price.
You can give subsidies.
You can give incentives so that we manufacture
and deploy more, banking on a lower cost.
And solar has done this remarkably well.
So, when I started working on this area,
solar was $0.40 to $0.60 per kilowatt hour,
depending where you are.
Now we have projects going in initially in the Middle East
and now elsewhere, solar at $0.03.
People said that was impossible.
Then in, first Saudi Arabia, and then New Mexico,
and now Mexico, and now Chile and the Atacama,
we have solar projects going in for under $0.20 a kilowatt
hour, commercial cost.
And this is just transformative.
And that diversity of technology I mentioned
means that there's all kinds of amazing innovations
to come if we keep deploying to give us demand pull,
and if we keep investing.
In fact, right now there are transparent solar,
there is solar that works off of the indoor light,
so you can have solar on your roof, general electricity,
recapture and solar inside a building.
We have thin and flexible solar.
We have technologies that are really interesting.
We just hired a professor at Berkeley,
and her specialty is wearable solar.
So, your jacket is solar.
You can charge up devices.
I mean, it's a fascinating world.
Almost none of it was forecast some decades ago.
So, these learning curves are wonderful.
They are heuristic.
There is a debate about them.
I'm writing a book right now called The Learning Curve
to look at the mix of technology push and aspirations.
And if we look at them, they're generally sloped.
You can see the photovoltaic, 1 PV.
There's wind, there's NOx controls.
And then there's this nuclear one.
And that's a problem.
So, if these are learning curves,
I don't know if you'd call that an unlearning
curve, a forgetting curve--
I'm going to get in trouble.
But that's the data for the US.
Now, you might posit that the next generation of molten salt
reactors, of traveling wave reactors,
of small modular reactors will change this entirely.
And it might.
And I am a professor of nuclear engineering.
But the actual data shows that in the last few decades
of US installation, nuclear prices have been rising.
And that is a huge worry.
In fact, I won't even go into the story
of when nuclear was first brought
to the market in the United States.
So, there was a campaign to make nuclear attractive
to homemakers, women.
That program had the awesome name, Atom and Eve.
I'm just going to move right along past Atom and Eve.
The new player on the world of energy is in fact, storage.
And storage, while it's much newer in terms
of the diversity, has the same interesting range
of learning curves, from lead acid, batteries, and cars,
to nickel metal hydride, to lithium ion batteries.
And we spend a lot of time with our colleagues
at Imperial College, and Cambridge,
and elsewhere examining these learning curves.
And actually today, storage is improving
as fast as solar ever did.
And that brings me to the last part of the talk.
And that is that we now work with governments
to build models of their power systems
to think about what investments in new transmission
lines, in energy storage, in energy efficiency
will you need to reach a variety of targets?
And so right now, the green are places
where we have active models in use by governments.
And the blue are places where we've promised and committed
to building a model of the power system.
And for the electrical engineers,
this is a so-called capacity expansion model.
It is a beast in terms of computation.
I won't get into any of that here.
But we've had some really interesting lessons come out
of this process.
And the biggest one is that as these new technologies have
emerged, we have discovered a whole variety
of interesting new ways to do things.
So, for those who have have been to Kenya,
this is the Ngong Hills Wind Farm.
This wind farm was the first wind farm in Kenya.
There's lots of good wind sites.
It was placed here because the Ngong Hills,
you can see them from Nairobi.
And specifically, you can see them
from the offices of the state-run utility.
And so, you can see them in operation.
There was real learning and experience.
And Kenya has now progressed to be this incredible climate
leader.
Of course, with some investment support
by countries I won't mention--
United States and China--
there is now an effort to build a coal plant in China.
And so, we will see about that.
The other interesting feature of this history of mass production
and technology innovation evolution
is that there are lots of areas where
we didn't plan for solar to be the opportunity that it's now
become.
So, sub-Saharan Africa, a $25 billion dollar a year industry.
Very expensive over its lifetime,
but very inexpensive to bring home a little lantern.
But then you're committed to buying fuel.
Well, the range of small solar products
that initially looked like just glorified flashlights that then
became flashlights that have built-in radios,
and flashlights that now get better and better
at a whole variety of tasks, mean
that we've taken those incredible costs decline
curves.
And the fastest form of new energy access,
not powering a whole home, but device by device,
is now-- we call Pay as You Go Solar.
So this, is basically you take the device home
with often no down payment.
On trusted mobile money, you make daily or weekly payments
online.
You bring the device home.
And the data science and IT aspects
have just become fascinating.
So, in a big project we did with the World Bank
we studied this process.
And as an example, this was an initial sample
of 1,000 homes that had these devices in them.
And we looked at what people were going to have to do.
They were going to have to pay about $0.50 a day on average
over a year to own the devices I just showed you.
So we started to gather the payment histories of people
and look at the state of charge of their batteries.
And we observed oh, here's one.
They're paying it off just fine.
But here's one where they don't seem to be using it at all.
So, we collected here were those financial histories
of the 1,000 or so dots on the graph.
The blue ones are all people who were paying off,
and at the end of the year they paid
enough to own their device.
The red ones are people who started to pay, whatever else,
but ultimately didn't pay enough.
And the company that provided it turned it off.
And some of these stories are just amazing.
What we started to do a few months in
was to send text messages to anyone
whose device wasn't working.
It said, can you tell us what's wrong?
And they would text back oh, yeah, it's not working.
And we asked where it is.
Well, it's actually under the mattress.
Well, you know, the solar panels don't work well
under the mattress.
Or it's outside, but it's covered with cow poop.
And so we send text messages back,
doubling the usage rate in six months.
And so they ramped up.
We still had about 8% failures.
But remarkably, ramped up.
The demand rose.
Companies began to build other products.
Now you can take home televisions,
DC-powered refrigerators, a whole variety of devices
to make the mixture of those solar panels, and LED lights,
and little batteries work.
And then there's big batteries.
To meet California's climate goal,
we used this model, this model called Switch I mentioned,
to examine what would be needed.
And we found in California is we're
going to need a lot of storage to come online, both long term
seasonal storage like reservoirs,
but also storage that works with you over the course of a day.
And through that, we wrote a requirement--
that now Germany has copied as well,
and now Denmark is writing one--
where this is a new type of battery.
There's actually an amazing professor
here at Harvard, Michael Aziz who works
on one of these flow batteries.
Unlike the several thousand cycles
in your cell phone, this flow battery,
it's a sulfuric acid liquid battery.
This one is powered by solar.
And this has millions of cycles.
And so, you can change the story to remarkably--
and this was one of these early installations
to provide storage under the California grid.
The other story of the grid is really interesting.
And that is as we install more and more solar,
we go from a demand curve from the middle of the night
that's pretty flat-- only students are awake, we think--
and then the more solar we install,
California's on a path to have a million solar rooftops
by the end of next year, which means roughly one 1
of 15 households.
But when you install more and more solar,
the net demand, or the demand left over, gets hollowed out.
So we now have a situation where there's very little demand
that we forecast to be on the grid during the afternoon.
But everyone comes home, and you turn devices on.
So you get this incredibly sharp ramp.
And this is called the duck curve,
where we will have this huge, not only need for power,
but over this short period of time.
Well, another way to look at that duck curve
is that every power engineer over about 40
knows that peak demand comes in the late afternoon
when devices are on at home and office,
and on the hottest summer days.
California now forecasts our peak demand
will be at night in the winter because of low solar.
And so when you look at this curve a little differently,
this is an excess of green during the afternoon
that if you have storage such as the commercial one I just
showed you or your electric vehicle,
you could sell power back and make that available later
in the day.
And so we're seeing this kind of remarkable thinking
about how to dual-use your electric vehicle.
And the economics, once the vehicle prices are the same,
are remarkable.
At three $3.50 a gallon, it's about $0.14 per mile to drive
your car.
But at rooftop solar, those commercial rates, it is $0.01.
So more than an order of magnitude
cheaper to drive your electric vehicle.
Now, the vehicles themselves need to be [INAUDIBLE]..
But we're getting pretty close to that.
And the last thing I'm going to highlight at the end
is that we not only have Tesla thinking they're going
not only sell you all cars, but electric trucks.
And we have things like charging lanes
where you inductively charge as you drive down the road.
And instead of parking places where
you must pull in, charging pads that
can be moved from car to car.
So, instead of running out to your car in the parking lot
at Google, or Amazon, wherever else,
the charging pads just simply move from vehicle to vehicle
to charge you up.
And if we don't do it, guess who will?
This is China's map not only of the 2.3 million
EVs they have and the 279,000 charging stations.
But on their national map they also track
the number of electric vehicles in the United States, EU,
and Japan.
So you can bet they are thinking hard about how
to make this happen.
Now, the last thing I want to say
because I'm right at the end is that one of the challenges
that I mentioned the beginning is
that if we don't make this transition one that's
much more inclusive, we make our job impossibly hard.
And the climate scientists, clean energy engineers
like myself, I think have done a terrible job
of making this inclusive.
And of course, if you provide subsidies for electric vehicles
or for solar, whether you can justify those learning curves
or not, you are subsidizing the rich with the poor
to put these technologies in place, right?
And when you have socialism for the rich
and capitalism for poor, that is not a recipe
for an inclusive process.
And so we've done a fair amount of work to look at this story.
And so we used a large 60-million rooftop data
from Google, did a lot of machine
learning that I won't get into the details,
to look at the roofs, to track the solar panels,
to look where they are, and to use census data to examine
which homes they're on.
And so the sad part of the story--
I'll just skip, I'll just go to the conclusion right
at the end--
is that even when you control for income,
solar is 30% to 40% more prevalent in neighborhoods that
are white, Caucasian-dominated and 30% to 70% less prevalent
in Latino and African-American neighborhoods,
even when income is controlled for.
And so, if we don't think about ways to do this better,
subsidies for community groups, ways
that landlords and renters can share the benefits of going
solar, we make this transition incredibly difficult.
We make this story about a green transition near impossible.
So, I'm going to leave you just at the end with the last part
of the story that came out of not only the IPCC and then
the climate conference in Poland,
but what has now becomed discussed as this Green New
Deal.
So, one of the things I was asked
to do by Governor Schwarzenegger was
to build a carbon footprint tool, a calculator, that will
allow you to look at your data.
And so we did that.
We built versions that are available for homes,
businesses, and schools.
It's called CoolClimate.Berkeley.edu.
The data sets are wonderful.
There's kilowatt hours used per for each zip code on average,
natural gas consumption, goods and services, transportation
and food.
And at the end of the day, what you discover
is that the ability to think differently
is kind of remarkable.
So the last page when you go through one
of these online calculators, this one that we built,
is that it tells you your footprint.
That's the top part.
But then this take action page is the thing that's really
caught a lot of attention.
When we release a new version, we get like 100,000 hits a day.
So, this take action list tells you
all the things in our database that you, the homeowner,
or school, or business didn't do,
and what each one will cost you or save you
in money in carbon terms.
And so we have got this sort of hilarious process
where people will use the calculator.
And they quickly go and look at the most equivalent homes-- so,
this is called keeping up with the Joneses,
where you look at I have five people in my home,
it's a 3,000 square foot home.
And people look down the database
to see what do other homes that are equivalent to you,
both in terms of size, number of people, geographic location.
And then go look at what people did here
and look at the stories about which of these things
people really took advantage of.
And so, this process we now do for all of California.
We do it for Germany and Japan.
And zip code by zip code, this is actually
down to the parcel level.
We see all kinds of interesting dynamics
in terms of people learning from each other.
And I want to end with that one because one
of the critical things that's emerged from the climate
process is that as fast or as slow as we are in this process
is certainly a function of new technology
and of innovative policies-- hopefully
more progressive than regressive--
but policies that find a way to empower individuals to make
decisions, whether the individual is
a homeowner, a school, a business, or a municipality.
And if we don't find a way to really enable all of that,
we make this job of this just transition in this energy
process near impossible.
So, I know I raced at the end.
But I wanted to highlight the degree
to which this sort of information system
has really changed the story.
I would love to hear questions.
I'd also love to hear examples of things that have worked
and not worked in your own experience.
Was it hard or easy to do this or that, to weatherize, to buy
into this and that?
So, I hope that you'll share some of those.
And I want to thank you all for coming tonight.
Thanks very much.
[APPLAUSE]
- Hi, and thank you for your insightful talk.
And I would like to ask, since we mostly focused on California
and other countries, what do you think
the challenge will be for us to expand
to other states and the United States?
- So, great question.
We're actually in a better spot than one might think.
Over half of US states have these clean energy
targets, these RPSs.
President Trump did cancel the Clean Power Plan
that I thought was a wonderful piece of policy.
But we have seen coal use drop dramatically.
So coal that was over 60% of US electricity
is now down to the 30% range.
The entire value of the coal industry,
the Capex of all US coal, is under $50 billion.
Meaning that Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates could buy two of them
if they wanted.
So, the idea that we are wedded to coal
anymore is certainly not part of the story.
That opens up an interesting next part of the story.
And that is that in some parts of the country--
California as an example--
gas is the dirtiest fuel possible.
And it's one we know we need to phase out.
But in other places, the biggest change they can make
is to move from coal to gas.
And so, you get this interesting mix state by state.
The Clean Power Plan-- something that I would recommend whoever
decides they want to get the US back on track put back
into effect right away--
said each state needed to decarbonise by a third relative
to its own baseline.
It didn't require states that have started late to battle
with New York and California, that started earlier on.
But it's given us a mix.
And so, actually I think right now we were in a good spot.
If we do get the Clean Power Plan restarted in some form,
we'd really be there.
And the sad part of the story is that the Clean Power Plan
actually called for $8 billion dollars
to be provided as retraining and retirement money for people
in the coal industry.
And the sad fact is that I do not
believe the coal industry will ever get as good an offer
as it got under the Clean Power Plan, which
means that the retirements that will ultimately happen now
are going to be uglier and more painful for working class
Americans.
And so, I think the US could rapidly get back on this path.
But I fear that unless we really do get this kind of Green New
Deal mentality, we are going to stick it to the least able to
deal.
And that's the people who have been in coal mines for so long.
So, great question.
I'll go faster afterwards.
Sorry.
- I'm going to take you up on your offer.
This is the third iteration of my solar backpack.
And I suspect I'm the only person here
who is carrying solar?
- Nope, I am.
- Good.
What it is a $10 solar charger and light,
and a piece of plastic.
And I use this as my headlight on my bike as I bike home.
$10 retail, online, anywhere around the world.
What one billion plus people--
- Without access.
Retail price, $10 billion, which is less than a day's worth
of what we spend on the global military.
Right?
So, that's one thing.
- I'm asking you to jump to the question Just to--
I'm in agreement, but yeah.
- I will give you a question.
But I'll give you another resource.
Geotherapy, right, which is the marine carbon project
in one case, this is a way to bring down the carbon out
of the atmosphere.
And Boston Cambridge happens to be a hotbed of information
about this.
But it's not happening at Harvard and MIT.
- OK.
- I had an entirely different comment to make.
- OK.
- I was wondering where the long-term you thought it made
any sense to change the curriculum of free college
education-- and what stage is not quite clear to me--
to teach these things for the long term
and teach the teachers to produce?
- Right.
So, I mean, the obvious answer is yes.
And thankfully, Harvard has one of the most innovative
professors of science education, and that's Eric Mazur.
And I have seen just remarkable things come out
of the cooperation that they and many other groups,
but Eric's team in particular, has
done to think about how to integrate these programs.
One of the most interesting things at the climate
conference, and much of the sort of attention to this incredibly
eloquent and powerful Swedish 15-year-old
has been the real demand for schools striking
over not getting better climate action,
not getting better education.
And when the kids in schools are asking for it,
I mean I would say this is kind of perfect territory.
And so, I would absolutely think that's the case.
You know, every science museum, every school,
there's huge opportunities to really
make this a core part of the curriculum.
So I'm hoping-- and there are some really good efforts.
But they are individual pockets.
They have not become the ubiquitous, better,
environmental and science literacy
that many people have called for,
and so Pedro Noguera, and Eric Mazur, and a number of others
have been remarkable on this.
But I think this is absolutely critical to this process.
- Thank you very much.
Great talk.
Clearly you're doing wonderful things.
I do have a concern.
And I'm interested in your insight
into whether locally green policies in California
contribute to it being so expensive to live there
that no one can move there.
So they all move to Texas, where they're
forced to run their air conditioner for nine months out
of the year.
To locally green policies, is there
a risk that there's a net effect that they're globally brown?
- Yeah, so it's a really interesting question.
I mean, this is part of this whole doing a just transition.
And the story is not the same in every single neighborhood.
But the California data, the data
from Portugal, the data from Denmark
is very strongly indicating that high residential prices are not
due to higher cost electricity.
In fact, California has some of the most expensive electricity
in the country but some of the lowest electricity
bills in the country.
And that's largely because per kilowatt hour
is more expensive, but by being very aggressive on efficiency--
as is true in Florida, Wisconsin, New York,
it is not just a California thing--
that overall story has been a plus.
And that leads me to one other thing
that I cut out just because I obviously ran long.
And that is that the data is unequivocal
that clean energy technologies generate more
jobs than the fossil sector.
Now, that's not because it is superior in any way.
That's because if you're building a new technology
base and one where you're not paying for fuel,
it's not surprising you get more jobs per dollar or RND
invested.
It's that you're building a new sector.
But the fact that you're not putting
a huge amount of the money into the fuel
means that you're investing in people and companies and IP.
And so, we have incredibly diverse data sets
that show hugely larger job creation.
And my worry is that places like California that have really
doubled down on it, where over 40%
of all US venture capital in clean tech
goes through California, are going to do well in this deal.
But when-- I won't name states, Mississippi--
and others that are not exactly on the leading edge finally
decide to go there, that green jobs dividend
will been eaten up by those who went early.
And so instead of being a penalty to go early,
there is a big benefit.
But this has to be more inclusive.
California is less than 1% of global emissions.
And so green in California but not spreading the policies
that we have, the policies from Bangladesh,
from Kenya, from Denmark, from places that are really
jumped way ahead, from Morocco, means
we're not going to get there.
And so, I think we are highlighting a key worry.
But the places that have acted actually
have done quite well in the deal on that basis.
California is too expensive for a lot of other reasons.
That is everyone chooses to live within--
myself included-- within 20 miles of the coast.
And the key residential hubs are also
the places for these booms of new companies.
Housing prices are crazy.
We have graduate students at Berkeley
on food stamps as a result of unaffordable housing.
But it's not due to clean energy.
The worry is proper.
- I just have a question.
You were talking about the Clean Power Plan.
I was wondering what you think about the Regional Greenhouse
Gas Initiative as compared to that.
- Yeah, so, you guys are under a program as well.
The challenge here has been that while RGGI is now
improving a fair amount, the carbon price is very low.
And the worry is that if we had started
this process of launching carbon prices early on,
a low price now that ramped up very slow would be fine.
And the contrast would be this new, bipartisan bill introduced
in the House and Senate is one that calls for the carbon price
to start higher than California's current price,
which is about $12 a ton.
Start more like $20 and go up $10 every year.
And that reflects how much we need
to move more quickly because we've really delayed.
And so, you know, RGGI is good.
The ETS, which has also had its ups and downs, figuratively
and literally, is also a good thing.
But I think that the lesson we've learned so far
is that a carbon price is critical
because we need to have this dialogue
between financial metrics and others.
But the places that have moved ahead globally
have not done so relying on a carbon price.
It is one arrow in the quiver.
It's silver buckshot, as Al Gore likes to say,
it's not a silver bullet unless the price
gets so high for which the politics may really
become challenging.
So it's a neat point.
- Thanks for coming and speaking with us.
A friend of mine, an economics grad,
is moved to Brazil to work on deforestation in the Amazon.
And I'm hoping to join her and learn a little more down there.
So, on a micro level, what are some strategies that can help
on the deforestation forefront?
And on a larger level, the election of Bolsonaro
is definitely a very bad news for the Amazon.
- Yeah.
- What can we do on that larger level other than shake
our heads?
- Well, so there is no silver bullet answer to that question,
right?
But I mean it is interesting that Brazil
got a huge amount of early, very positive press for investing
in sugar cane ethanol.
And the early sugar cane was largely
on land that had been that had pulled back from former rubber
production and others.
But it's become so profitable that sugar expansion
and related crops, digging into the Amazon
has become a huge issue.
And so when you look at that graph I went over
in terms of the carbon content of liquid fuels,
it's just striking.
If you really do use bio waste, then there
is no environmental penalty you should
add to that liter of biofuel.
But if you're cutting down rainforest,
it turns out that you would need to run your ethanol production
for over 100 years to pay back the carbon that
was standing in those trees in the rainforest.
And believe me, this is not a happy conversation.
So, if everyone in the front row is a current food farmer that
decides to go into biofuels and you decide
you're only going to collect [INAUDIBLE] waste,
and so you have no carbon penalty.
But Alyssa here says, you know, I'm
going to convert my current corn production into biofuels.
I'm going to do it sustainably.
I'm going to bless it, I'm going to-- all these /It's is going
to be great.
But someone elsewhere says well, she's no longer producing corn.
I'm going to get into that business.
And increasingly-- that's in Indonesia, Brazil, Congo,
Malaysia--
then you're cutting into forests that
had a much better value as forests then
as ethanol producers.
This conversation does not go well in Brazil.
And I have-- sort of my mentor is
the father of the Brazilian ethanol
industry, an amazing figure.
He was the host of the Rio Climate Conference.
And this is an area where we're on sensitive ground.
And so finding a way to lead with the facts
and the numbers is my physics tribe way to do things.
But this is a really hard conversation.
And so, working in the area, what you guys are supposed
to do is what I recommend.
But finding a way to compare the life
cycle, to cradle to grave analysis
is a critical part of it.
But that is that's a seed change,
and so we don't have a lot of years.
But that's a critical part of the process.
That's hard.
- My question was around corporate world.
When the CDP put out a report that
says that 71% of carbon emissions
are being generated by 100 companies,
and we're talking about in this sort of countries,
and governments, and things, what are you
or others in your field doing to help educate
and these companies transition away from this carbon emission?
- So, this is actually an area where
my economics colleagues can give much better answers than I do.
And this is the place where I would
argue that carbon pricing can have the most value.
The fact that carbon enters our economy through us
through so few spigots--
you mentioned the kind of, you know,
on the order of 100 companies-- that's
a remarkably small number.
So arguments to regulate carbon at the user end
may be the standard policymaking tool.
But doing it upstream makes much more sense
in terms of of efficiency, even if the increased price
gets passed down.
The challenge, of course, is that if you
increase the price for production for those companies
and don't find a way to give back to low income
people around the planet, then your policy
might be for the planet but it's not
part of this just or equitable transition.
And so, one of the features that I'm hoping the dialogue
around the bill--
I really like the bill in many ways
that's in front of the House and Senate--
is to not just rebate all of the revenues back
to all Californians equally--
I said Californians, sorry about that--
to all Americans equally.
But to actually say no, we're going
to give back an extra share to the lowest income Californian.
So, what I would do is a hybrid of the Ocasio-Cortez.
And that would be if you are within 200% of the poverty
line, I would give you back your share but also a share
taken from the top 0.01%, and use that money
both to give back to low income Americans.
And a part that's not in the bill,
there is no provision to harvest money
from the bill for research.
And I would argue if you want to do this, you give back a lot.
But you also need to hold a fund.
And we've seen this work President George Bush started
ARPA-E, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy,
modeled after DARPA.
It's been phenomenally successful.
But it's got a budget of $300 million a year.
And if you want to make a dent here, you know,
we need to at least get to the level of what
the US spends on pet food research, which
is over a billion dollars.
And that's just to start, right?
So, great question.
- Thank you for coming.
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