Cornell University: Does real climate science require rapid reductions in greenhouse gases?

foreign [Music] thank you [Music] foreign I would like to recognize the new heterodox Academy chapter here at Cornell as well as our co-host you'll be hearing from here in just a few minutes the Cornell Free Speech Alliance the addition of these two groups to your Campus Community shows that Cornell is a place where students and faculty can engage in free and open inquiry and expression without fear of being shamed or intimidated into silence and you should be very proud of that the resolution being debated tonight is one of the most hotly contested topics of our time and that resolution is climate science compels us to make large and Rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions now we invite all of our audience members both those with us in person and by the way the 1200 or so people who are watching live from all over the country tonight we invite you to respond with your views on this resolution you should have received a text or email when you signed up for this event and this is for the people in the room and those watching online so you can vote on this resolution yes no or maybe or undecided yes no or undecided and then we will take another poll after the debate is over to see if your opinions have changed so please be sure you're voting now before the debate begins we will um be displaying the poll up here I believe um in just a minute so you can actually see how the polling is changing as you are voting so before we begin this evening's debate I would like to tell you just a little bit more about Steamboat Institute and our campus Liberty tour debates and why who we are and why we do this we started this debate Series in April of 2018 with a debate tour featuring Nigel farage the architect of the the brexit movement and Vicente Fox who of course was former president of Mexico they were debating nationalism versus globalism we visited four campuses in five days including two University of Colorado campuses the University of Maryland and Lafayette College 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regardless of your political ideology as long as you're willing to engage in civilized debate and discourse with respect for differing points of view in planning our series of debates on climate change and energy policy which began last year we found it very difficult to find climate experts willing to debate Dr Stephen coonan so I would just like to say we applaud both Dr coonan and and Dr sokolo for participating in this debate tonight it takes courage to get onto debate stage how many of you would want to do it um so let's let's think about that and give them our respect tonight Steamboat Institute will continue to give both sides of critical issues a fair and balanced platform to make their case because folks we can't maintain our Democratic Republic without citizens and leaders who are capable of critical thinking and civilized debate and discourse as a 501c3 non-profit nonpartisan organization Steamboat Institute depends on the support of many generous generous individuals 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campuses so please notice those logos we'll probably have them up again later but it really shows a broad array of support from across the country and that is proof of the sea change that we are observing that's happening on college campuses All Over America cancel culture is being replaced by challenge culture free and open inquiring debate challenging students especially students you should never be afraid to to challenge ideas and and to engage in robust debate finally very quickly and then I want you to hear from the Cornell Free Speech Alliance before we introduce our Debaters in addition to our campus Liberty tour debates Steamboat Institute also hosts our annual Freedom conference in Colorado in August if you're between the ages of 20 and 30 listen to this because we offer scholarships to come out to Colorado for this amazing event you can find more information about that steamboatinstitute.org we'll be opening the scholarship application for the freedom conference Scholarships in early April so we have lots of opportunities for young leaders young journalists that we support and now before I introduce our Debaters I want you to hear from a representative of the new Cornell Free Speech Alliance very exciting for this campus to have this organization here Steve baginski is here and Steve would like to tell you about the Cornell Free Speech Alliance uh thank you Jennifer thank you Steamboat uh thank you Randy Wayne for uh what you do and especially for sponsoring uh this event tonight uh Cornell Free Speech Alliance uh cfsa it's a rapidly growing relatively new organization it's a non-partisan but we do have 13 000 followers and subscribers these are drawn mostly from uh oh I'm told almost 300 000 living Cornell alumni and we really haven't thoroughly networked our way through the alumni group so we think we're going to have a pretty large organization um uh fairly soon um uh what's our interest our interest is in more or you might even say significantly more uh freedom of thought expression and especially Dialogue on college campuses and especially uh here at Cornell we are part of something called alumni Free Speech Alliance which includes groups like cfsa at 15 leading U.S universities um we also welcome by the way uh the participation of Faculty staff and students so we're not just an alumni organization you know we welcome anyone with a Cornell affiliation uh to be part of our group um today like Jennifer mentioned there are over 1200 people watching remotely and they'll be even more than that of course that eventually watch as time goes by on the recorded version of this but the 1200 or so viewers right now are drawn in large part from Cornell FSA uh followers but also um the followers of these 20 other participating sponsors tonight and I guess I'll follow Jennifer's lead and not read off the names of all these participating sponsors but these are some great organizations and we appreciate uh their support uh just one last thing um we have coined a phrase University open inquiry form which you can see up on the screen here and this is cfsa and uh like groups at other universities uh sponsoring um Events maybe not like this but either presentations or debates on various topics where we feel that there is a need for open discourse uh the next installment of such a thing will be at MIT on April 4th the topic is going to be Dei and MFE diversity equity and inclusion and Merit fairness inequality that's on April 4th uh and details uh are forthcoming uh thank you very much we'll have a great debate tonight thank you okay and now this is what you all came here for is to hear a great debate let me introduce our speakers arguing the affirmative for nights tonight's debate and do we can we get the resolution up on the screen and show the voting we want to remind people that they need to be voting if they haven't already um arguing the affirmative for tonight's debate is Robert sokolo professor emeritus and Department of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University Dr sokolo earned his PhD from Harvard in theoretical high energy physics in 1964 was an assistant professor of physics at Yale from 1966 to 71 and joined the Princeton University faculty in 1971 with the assignment of inventing interdisciplinary Environmental Research from 2000 to 2019 Dr sokolo and Steve pakala were the co-principal investigators of Princeton's carbon mitigation initiative which was a 25-year project supported by BP Dr sokolo was a member of the grand challenges for engineering Committee of the National Academy of engineering and the national academies committees on America's climate choices and on America's Energy Future he was the editor of the annual review of energy and the annual review of energy in the environment and served on the board of the national Audubon Society the Deutsche Bank climate change Advisory Board and The Advisory Board of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory from 2013 to 2019 Dr sokolo led the distillate project at Princeton's and linger Center for Energy and the environment which has produced monographs on wind on wind power solar power nuclear fusion small modular nuclear fission reactors and grid scale storage of electricity he also co-chaired the 2011 American physical Society technology assessment direct air capture of CO2 with chemicals let's give a warm welcome to Dr Rob sokolo but come on up arguing the negative on tonight's resolution is Stephen coonan Dr coonan is a leader in science policy having served as under secretary for science in the U.S department of energy under President Obama in this role he was the lead author of the department strategic plan and the inaugural quad quadrennial technology review in 2011. with more than 200 peer-reviewed papers in the fields of physics and astrophysics scientific computation energy technology and climate science Dr coonam was a professor of theoretical physics at Caltech also serving as caltech's vice president and Provost for nearly a decade Dr coonan is currently a professor at New York University with appointments in the stern School of Business the Tandon School of Engineering and the department of physics Dr coonan's memberships include the U.S National Academy of Sciences the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Jason group of scientists who solve technical problems for the US government he is the author of unsettled what climate science tells us what it doesn't and why it matters and since the book's release in April of 2021 more than 200 000 copies have been sold let's give a warm welcome to Dr Stephen coonan our moderator for tonight's debate is Sarah Westwood Sarah is a political and investigative reporter at the Washington examiner where she writes on a range of pressing political issues prior to joining The Examiner Sarah was a White House reporter for CNN Robert Novak journalism fellow at the fund for American studies and a graduate of the national journalism Center fellowship program and last August we were very proud to award Sarah with Steamboat institute's 10th Annual Tony blankly Fellowship for public policy and American exceptional and exceptionalism awarded to outstanding young journalists welcome Sarah foreign for being here today uh we really appreciate everyone being here as you know by now we have Dr Robert sokolo and Dr C here tonight uh I think one thing that's going to be unique about tonight's discussion is the extent to which our two Debaters here agree on so much of the science and where the science should lead us policy wise of course we will also get into the areas in which they have drawn different conclusions about just how large and how rapid productions and greenhouse gases should be so before we get started uh please remember that everyone has QR codes please be submitting your questions throughout this if either of our experts says jumps out to you and you would like to get into that later in the debate in the back hospital we will be going to questions so first each debater is going to have 10 minutes to deliver an opening statement followed by five minutes each to deliver a rebuttal to what the other said and tonight we're going to start with Dr simply that's my cover slide and here we go um I would like you to vote at least in the sense of deciding which of these four quadrants you are most comfortable in by answering two yes no questions the first is is are fossil fuels hard to displace and the second is is climate change and Urgent matter I've been showing this this slide for quite a while answers differ I'll give you about 20 seconds to decide which quadrant you belong in okay you're most comfortable in okay can I just see how many are in the first top left raise your hand top right a few bottom left only a handful and bottom right majority okay so why do I do this because it seems to me the core of this is that we have problems answering these two questions in a consistent fashion the top left is pretty uninteresting although once upon a time I would say when I started my career there were people who thought we would be all nuclear power by now and climate change wasn't the reason top right is where I think Steve is although he can disagree bottom left is where a lot of the uh a lot of the strongest statements about how fast we should move The Advocates of those are located there they see fossil fuels able to be swept away and the bottom right is what I inhabit and what I believe we should be as an accurate representation of the problem if you're in the top right or the bottom left you sleep better at night there is no conflict that is under that is driving you and if you're hearing about the problem for the first time you want to move to the top right or the bottom left that's the natural place to want to be um and frankly I think that they're they're dangerous places to be because they both essentially say we're going to be okay but they're betting on if people follow their recommendations they're essentially betting on a happy outcome the military doesn't bet on Happy outcomes businesses don't bet on Happy outcomes so I think that's a a scary thing to do rather I think we want to have movement toward the bottom right and I feel as if the rest of my career I want to try to make that happen an awful lot pushes in the opposite direction in both on both arrows um and I think the bottom right is where you get an attention to risk minimization to buying more insurance I mean the question really is how much Insurance to buy I think when it comes down to it's a similar question you can buy too much you can buy too little and that we could be wrong with whatever we start out with Steve's book is uh mostly about how we're going to be okay climate change is going to be mild but here and there he shares my concern that there is a real there is a chance because we don't understand the planet all that well that we could have some pretty dangerous outcomes and if we do we have to be more more active and if we think we could now could imagine bad outcomes I think that means we have to work harder so what do we if we want to be in the right bottom right bottom right we have to make some concessions to people we don't agree with and we have to build and my main point is we have to build alliances and build what I call middle building in general um sorry for first the first this slide I'm one side ahead of myself the phrase large unwrap it is in the debate statement and I made it clear that I don't mean by large and Rapid what I think was presumed by the organizers and maybe by Steve because so many people do mean this large and rapid means uh basically a pretty extreme positions of um decarbonization remove fossil fuels and so I'm saying large and Rapid is building a building a constituency that is much broader than the current one because the depolar polarization at the present time is thwarting serious action um and that we rapid means that we actually go in One Direction we can go fast but go round and round so I'm I'm defining defining large and Rapid for this for this debate to mean coherent and large and much more depolarized than at the present time um I talk about what would it so the rest of my talk is essentially how do we build uh that bottom quadrant and first of all we actually have to develop the mental capacity to be in the bottom quadrant which is meaning to be adult it's complicated John Keats called it negative capability you hold two ideas in your head at once which are somewhat incompatible the resistible force meets the immovable object I remember as a seven-year-old or something funny or 12 year old finding that very interesting as a concept and then gather there's a song about it now that's what that's what it's about and if you're an environmentalist you you outgrow the idea that you can demonize the that is productive to demonize the fossil energy world and if you're in the fossil energy world you realize that it's productive and useful to accept that the risks of the hightail of the dangerous outcomes need to be addressed an aggressive aggressive aggressively um so I've tried you can build a list as well as I of the things that we don't talk about very much that would build a consensus and um there's a long list on my part that start with science it is a startling fact that with all of the attention to larger budgets to deal with climate change there's virtually no discussion of building a stronger science effort more probes in the ocean more studies of ice more work on the tundra the climate science Community is healthy but it's not growing and it's not being infused with other disciplines I know but Steve has written quite strongly in his book about the very same thing more climate science but I would argue I will argue that Steve personally could be playing a bigger role I wish you would I'm here partly to persuade him to do that um and then and then when it comes to other aspect aspects of the problem lots of ideas the business Community is going to be challenged to make to welcome inspection of the that they're actually achieving what they say there are there's not much trust so you have to have a lot of third-party work uh in in the business progress uh there is there is the weaknesses of low carbon and solutions of which I'll say a few things later but we really do worry about I worry that the solutions of climate change are full of their own problems and you mustn't underestimate them which is why I don't think we should go as fast as we possibly could we want the fossil energy Industries involved carbon capture and storage has fascinated me for a quarter Century because it is away with the fossil energy industry can be constructive toward low-carbon Solutions it's not very it's it's losing popularity and it shouldn't uh leapfrogging in developing countries I'll say a little bit more about that too but we really have a lot of focus need to have a lot of focus as Steve and I both agree on what's Happening the developing countries far more focused than we have right now and and things like the the industry taking responsibility for the products they make in ways um and let's jump to the last one it's terrible that poor people that young people are feeling futureless that's a word I learned quite recently many of them are feeling that they're something that there's a doom ahead of them and that is a side effect that I think is extraordinarily unfortunate of the way in which we're talking about climate change today um I'm going to skip that slide I'm going to skip that slide and come back to it and figure out just time for one more slide although I'm not saying where the timer is um it's time to move on my real sense is this debate is okay but we really have more important things to do we have to find the ways of not debating but working side by side which is why I've tried to move so much myself to the middle not just I mean for that's that's who I am it's not just for tonight um and I'm going to tell Steve that I'm I happen to have as an at working at Princeton an institution next door which is one of the leading climate modeling centers of the world folded unfortunate name the geophysical fluid dynamics Laboratory it models the atmosphere and the oceans and the forests and it's a spectacular replacement has some of the smartest of the young people and they share Steve's frustration with the conversation with the with the I call it noun inflation that brings about words like apocalypse and I'm again an existential destruction and so forth that's not good for anybody including for the young people who start feeling Doom and we don't have to go there but they won't follow Steve until Steve moves from which he's perfectly capable of doing um and Steve moves to say we do need action on climate change we have so many things we can do that are useful I was showing a list of them industry is now assuming that's going to be busy it's not going to be persuaded anymore that we would we're going to slow down the government responses so how are they going to do things they need help what's what are the priorities what are the risks of the solutions as I keep coming back to it yes and um we have to build new alliances and one of them is the one between Steve and me so we can generate a larger and more rapid response wider response not 51 votes in the Senate but 75 over and over again in the comparable boats in other countries in other countries we have to get but this is a combat this is a part of our Human Condition is that we are overwhelming a planet that isn't very big we're doing it with Fisheries we're doing it with Timber we're doing it in so many ways and this ozone hole was another example and it says one more where one way or another we can't we shouldn't assume we're going to be lucky we're putting putting large increases of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and there's going to be something that results in it that we're going to care about that's going to hurt us thank you Dr coonan okay if we could get my first shot up that would be great um let me say uh you know I have known Rob for 20 years and have enormous respect for him as a scientist and thinker about climate and energy and so I applaud his suggestion that we build a constructive middle and I will come to that in my remarks but this is a debate and I first want to tell you why the proposition is a terrible idea when you read it it sounds great follow the science but the real world has to balance scientific certainties and uncertainties against the growing demand for Reliable and affordable energy and in that light the proposition fails dramatically large and Rapid reductions are unjustified immoral and fantastical so I want to begin with the word compels which as you'll see makes the proposition unjustified the U.N estimates that we'll see as much warming in the next hundred years as we've already seen since 1900 some 1.3 degrees Celsius during or perhaps despite that prior warming we have seen the greatest Improvement ever in The Human Condition lifespan literacy nutrition and economic activity all increased dramatically even as the population quintupled and the rate of extreme poverty plummeted from 70 to 10 percent significantly today's death rate from extreme weather is 1 50th of what it was in 1900. so at Beggar's belief to believe that a comparable warming over the next hundred years would significantly derail that progress or even reverse it even though the climate varies a lot on its own many people allege that we've broken the climate in past decades but the ipcc says it's hard to find long-term Global Trends in most types of extreme weather events including storms droughts and floods so economic loss rates have actually declined slightly over the past 30 years averaging about two tenths of a percent of global GDP a wealthier world is a more resilient world now maybe the future will be a lot worse but the U.N projects substantial economic growth even for an emissions heavy future in 2014 they said for most economic sectors the impact of climate change will be small relative to the impacts of other drivers subsequent researchers confirmed that warming is expected to be a minor hindrance to growth a few degrees by the end of the century would make the growing economy a few percent smaller than it might have been of course there are uncertainties in these projections GDP is not the only measure of well-being and the rich will fare better than the poor but the term existential crisis is hardly Justified even by the official science one might fret still about severe but unlikely climate impacts the fat Tails as people say so we hear things like something very bad might happen we don't know what or when or just how bad but we'd better Act the will to do might clutch their pearls over that but it's hardly compelling for most of the world which has many more impactful immediate and soluble problems and so the word us makes the proposition immoral the one and a half billion of us in the developed World enjoy abundant and affordable energy but the globe's other six and a half billion people are energy poor and the inequalities are astounding we Americans consume 30 times more energy per capita than Nigerians and three billion of the world's eight billion people use less electricity every year than does the average U.S refrigerator energy poverty means cooking with wood and dunk smoke in kitchens kills two million people a year around the world and while dining by candlelight is romantic studying by candlelight is not Global energy demand will increase 50 percent by mid-century as most of the world develops fossil fuels are the most reliable and convenient way for developing nations to get that energy as they long have been for everyone in the world and so Global emissions will grow in the coming decades even as the developed world's emissions decline slowly and remember just to stabilize not even reduce warming influences to an allegedly safe level emissions have to vanish by the latter half of this century and that's what I mean by and large and rapid reliable and affordable energy is the overwhelming priority for developing nations and so when the proposition says science compels us the response from the developing world is what do you mean us the Indian Prime Minister protests that the path for development is being posed to developing nations while the Nigerian president says Africa is being punished by Western decisions and will fight to exploit the fossil fuels it has they're right it is immoral for the developed world to deny the developing world the energy that they need and it's the height of carbon colonialism to restrain development by mandating costly and ineffective Energy Systems if we in the developed world are not going to pay the extra costs and I can tell you that we're not the proposition is also immoral because continue exaggerations like science compels induce Echo anxiety some 60 percent of young people globally are very worried about climate change and many are reluctant to have children Net Zero by even 2100 would be an heroic achievement but the world isn't facing climate catastrophe so it's pernicious to exaggerate the importance and urgency of reducing emissions at the expense of more immediate and impactful societal needs finally the fantasy of large and rapid rejections Energy Systems change slowly for fundamental reasons their infrastructure lasts for decades their parts have to work together as a system and there are many stakeholders whose interests don't often align it also takes time to refine the hardware and operating procedures that Ensure High reliability so large and Rapid is really problematic a zero emission electrical grid is Central to decarbonization strategies solar panels and wind turbines are the current fashion and they are today's cheapest ways of generating electricity but you need a backup system for when there's no sun or wind Technologies like natural gas with carbon capture or nuclear or some form of storage like giant batteries that reliability is the costliest aspect of a renewable's heavy grid ensuring High reliability such as we enjoyed today would more than double the cost of electricity with current technology but reliability is one of only many oops issues as we Karine taught a Renewables heavy all-electric world so when we need an order of magnitude more land than other Technologies they also need a lot more stuff wind takes 10 times more concrete and steel than nuclear and Renewables used 10 times more high value materials like copper molybdenum and dysprosium unfortunately those high value materials and their processings are today concentrated in inconvenient countries the Democratic Republic of the Congo produces 75 percent of the world's Cobalt while China is a major player in extracting rare Earths and processing many critical materials China also manufactures most of the world's solar panels their costs are lower due to cheap coal-fired energy loose environmental standards and forced labor all that means a tremendous increase in Mining and Manufacturing as new Energy Technologies are deployed and an increase in their environmental impacts Renewables will not Remain the cheapest form of generation mineral surprise will have a hard time keeping up with large and Rapid reductions finally we'll have to more than double the capacity of Transformers and cables to deliver extra power for vehicles and heat in short we'll need an expensive and disruptive remake of the entire Energy System a hard look at its cost and benefit is long overdue so to sum up the proposition is unjustified there is no imminent climate catastrophe the proposition is also immoral we cannot condemn most of humanity to expensive and inadequate energy and finally the proposition is Fantastical techno-economic realities mean that large and rapid changes in energy systems are just not going to happen these three points warrant a sound rejection of the proposition but even as you vote for its rejection I suspect you're also wondering well Steve what should we do and I'll cover that in my closing remarks thank you Dr suckle you're a rebuttal you have five minutes so let me say again large and Rapid compared to what and large and Rapid compared to the current impasse means coherent consensual aggressive forward movement it doesn't mean drop everything else it could mean drop everything else some people do mean drop everything else but I don't mean drop everything else voting for put large and Rapid is compared to spinning wheels uh and being incoherent and divisive and deep and polarized and so forth that's what my vision of large and Rapid is um am I still here am I still here with my slides yes well but I'm going to have to go through all of them which is okay okay so I'm going to talk just about the developing countries I've spent some time thinking about them of course you all that most of you have uh the first thing is there's lots of opportunity in the developing countries we don't want to patronize they have we have new techno globally we have new technology options it used to be that the developing countries looked at leapfrogging and said no thanks do it first in your country after you've proved it out we'll do it the elites were saying that for much of the kind that I've been involved in this subject and they don't anymore for the most part they say we can solve our own problems we'll take advantage of we can do things an example of the high voltage transmission lines in China is the one I have on them solar panels that Veer almost zero cost has transformed The Villages of the world and continue to do so one panel two panels can give you a refrigeration and and cell phone charging and and a few lights and it makes an enormous difference so we don't underestimate the new the new opportunities associated with it with them uh development developing countries and then don't underestimate the importance of what it was called is called lock-in that we that where there is New Capital Construction there is determination for 50 hundred years of what kind of emissions are going to come so there is an enormous Global interest in low carbon development to the extent that that we want to have not just go up and up and up and I think some of the highest growth scenarios are not impossible if we pay no attention to some of this I wrote a paper with Steve Davis a few years ago called committed emissions where we worked out if you built a power plant charge all of the 50 years of opera or 40 Years of operation to today and and figure out how much how much additional commitment is coming and when you build buildings like this like this off building complex I know that that is not a well-built system because nobody is trying to break ground relative to the Norms of the construction of Office Buildings and multi-family housing that's been going on there everywhere we can do it so much better we know we can they're not and and and uh that should be this is where the building the buildings like this are being built in far greater numbers in developing countries and there's no emphasis anywhere in the climate conversation on these buildings I've tried and again and again to inject it and then I I want to make sure we don't misunderstand uh poverty that's because there's something important going on this is this is the usual way in which people talk about poverty uh in climate the per capita emissions of countries and and the Us is around 15 Tons of carbon per person carbon dioxide per person per year the world averages about five China went from about two to about ten you're and and much of the world of great big tale there is very poor countries however it isn't easy but with effort I'm going to show you a slide that's a little bit complicated uh we took the we tried to say to the to take the whole world population forget about where people live and but use income distributions estimate per capita not per capita individual emissions and it turns out that when you've been that you can take this number 10 10 take previous graph I guess I showed the lines for ten and two tons of carbon dioxide per person per year and if you do it this way there's about a billion people with this kind of emissions um and they are all over the world and more than half will be in the developing countries it is rich people in developing countries which are producing is additional missions not poor people and so we are talking about people like ourselves Lifestyles like ours and and and we are in it together about a billion of us they will grow in numbers but it's it's wealthy people in developing countries it's not poor people in developing countries that are whose emissions are at are available for for modification at this time but let me first deal with the statement that Rob made that he's not advocating large and rapid um that may be but there's a great bulk of prominent people in society who are doing just that the U.N Secretary General the financial world the current Administration are all claiming to go to Net Zero or Amy to go to Net Zero by 2100 we're going to ban internal combustion engines in the U.S for the sale of them by 2035 those steps will be enormously disruptive and as I've I've mentioned there is no crisis and even if the U.S were to go to zero tomorrow that's only a 13 reduction in global emissions which would be eaten up by the growth in the rest of the world and believe me the rest of the world may be leapfrogging but they're not getting very far we've got coal consumption booming in China and India so not much leapfrogging going on there and even Germany perhaps the most developed country that has made the strongest commitment to reduce its emissions is building dozens of gas-fired plants so I think we need Rob to temper strongly this precipitous rush to Net Zero which will be a much greater disrupter than anything you can imagine climate change with respect to the developed world and what they choose to do I I think your discussion so far Rob has been a very developed World perspective the developing countries have very certain immediate and soluble problems which are asking them to deal with in a more difficult way in favor of some vague uncertain and distant problems associated with climate change in the future you know it's a little bit like telling a starving person that you better not eat that because of the cholesterol involved all right let us deal with the immediate problems they need energy to have a better quality of life but also to be more resilient and capable of dealing with the changing climate I'm not at all opposed to telling development actually not telling developing countries what they should do but we should stick with that and if they choose to go with fossil fuels as the economics and the technology tell them they should be doing if they want to solve their immediate problems we should not inhibit them from doing that and I think that's about all I want to say right now we can have some extra time for discussion and questions and I'll come back again at the end saying what I think we should do thank you thank you Dr Hunan for that this first question I'm going to post first to Dr Sokolova I'd like you both to sort of discuss this with us and just a reminder to everyone in the audience you do have your QR codes please continue to submit those questions um the people who are typically proposed is portrayed as being climate deniers sort of focus on two things right one of them is the uncertainty within the climate science and the other one is the sort of economic pain that would be associated with any sort of effective energy transition so my question to both of you starting with Dr sokola is what do you each think is the appropriate balance between the economic sacrifices that would need to be made and I'm talking now about through a domestic lens here in the U.S and we'll get to developing countries later the balance between that and the sort of need to address climate change well uncertainty and pain uncertainty I've never understood the way the argument is made it seems to me to go the other way that the more we are uncertain the more we have to be risk-averse and therefore the more insurance we need to buy so if we if we knew we would we we were going to be lucky we would do very different things and I hope we will actually learn the climate better fairly soon so we could reduce this risk premium that I think we feel we ought to be paying as far as pain some of that goes the other way too uh it's been enormously stimulating to technology to have this new challenge of climate and the wind and solar and Battery responses have been dramatic and they have reduced the cost of many of the things we would we would we were doing before so before I'm convinced that there are certainly things that are going to be very very expensive and fool already to do but there's a cost curve Dr Canon well you know that's a question that my first inclination is it's above my pay grade okay because in fact I think the proper role for for scientists is to lay out the scientific certainties and uncertainties the likely costs benefits and drawbacks of different strategies but really in the end the decision is societies and will involve values priorities culture way you sit in the global order and so I generally try to stay away from a normative discussion you should do X Y or Z except in this debate where I have to take some extreme position because we need to lay out for you the extremes it is a political discussion and we have not had that political discussion fully informed in the U.S we have exaggerations by politicians by the government even by some in the scientific Community meant to skew the ballots and we as an electorate should be pretty angry about that there needs to be an informed discussion debate about trade-offs Dr coonan talking about I'm going to start with you for this next one talking about the the alarmism that we hear in some of the the climate change discussions um focusing on the rapid part of the resolution some climate activists and politicians that champion a climate agenda do really focus on the urgency of the need to fight climate change and and sometimes that sort of turns people off to engaging productively with the climate debate what do you think the balance should be in terms of conveying that there could be some sort of urgent threat with climate and and not sounding so alarmist I I think part of the problem with talking to the public or non-experts about climate change is that the historical record is distorted or um corrupted and so for example you might see just to take a real example the Pakistani environmental Minister after this Summer's terrible floods in Pakistan said these are the worst floods since 1961. and she was right but the scientist in me says let's look back before 1961 and in fact you discover that there were monsoons that were equally powerful way back to 1850. so there's that Distortion of not including the full historical record the second is the ipcc says for many severe weather phenomena tropical Cyclones hail storms mid-latitude storms there is no detectable Trend what concern there might be in the future is based upon models that are demonstrably unfit to project at that level of precision Dr sokolo do you have a yeah again if rapid is relative to do nothing we can understand it the the environmental movement looks at that stall and says how do we change it and they are they have come upon this uh Net Zero as and it has it has actually jump started the conversation done what they were seeking to do businesses which were really putting off at somebody else's problem a low carbon low-carbon Solutions all over the all over the industrial space uh got have gotten serious have taken that somehow they get it whether they should get it or not is another question but they they in terms of description they're saying this is part of our future there will be policies which will make all kinds of new things profitable we've got to get on top of it we've got to understand the vocabulary and the numbers and so forth so it if you think of Net Zero as jump starting rather than the what really people are going to try to do jumps all the fossil energy is gone by by 2050 I don't think so but I wonder how many people who say Net Zero believe it 2050 believe it either they know that it got something underway and so it is more rapid than before part of the Crux of the debate both of you touched on this and your opening statements is the question of what should be required of developing countries that haven't had a chance to achieve the same economic Prosperity as as the rest of the world to to use an example to sort of illustrate this debate in Uganda and and Tanzania there is right now a major pipeline being constructed that has proven somewhat controversial the European Parliament has weighed in and said they don't agree that this pipeline should be built and Uganda says this is creating thousands of jobs for our citizens who need them so you talk about leap frogging we talk about this discussion that needs to be had do other countries have the right to tell Uganda they can't build that pipeline well I think some of this is done by global institutions that are financing pipeline so they have a right to talk about what they spend their money on um even if it may be Colonial but it will be the sort of the way the institution is set up right coal power plants have where they have been on the list of of a very controversial category and and with periods of time in the world Bank was against financing them on the ground that this was going backwards in climate change and arguing that and presumably needing to finance all alternatives there is I I think if there is this it the issue of of um stranded assets if you build some of these things and the world really does care more about about climate change these will get more expensive to operate um I don't know the Uganda pipeline story directly I have to say I won't try to guess so I'd know a little bit about you again I read the World Bank has said no um I think that is wrong for two reasons one is you're denying them the opportunity to exploit their natural resources but perhaps more importantly the World Bank says no fine China's just going to step in and do it anyway and so I think the world is going to need more oil even the president said uh we're going to need more oil for the next 10 years uh he he's wrong we're going to need it for the next 40 or 50 years at least and so I'm not too worried about stranded assets uh with respect to the pipeline but again and I would ask Rob directly suppose you were running India and you had all the constraints that the Indian pm has wants to get reelected but you can't about climate change what would you do well it's clear it's it's what's happening in India I think is in all the above kind of response uh in fact I think the data are clear that there's more solar built in a country that is building coal plants than one that isn't um so uh it used to be they would have no solar at all and India is a pretty sunny country um and it's it's going to be they're going to be land challenges because it's a crowded country as well but I think I would I would build uh I would definitely also explore carbon capture and storage I know that it's not obvious how that works in India because of some of the geology but I got interested in carbon capture in store 25 years ago because it brought the fossil energy industry into the low-carbon world it seemed to me this was a broader Alliance that would be more likely to succeed than the ones that would be constructed without the fossil energy industry so India would build a Coal Power Plant and the additional 25 to 50 percent cost born somehow maybe by the Richer countries to capture the CO2 which either goes underground in India or even conceivably and goes into a ship that it in compressed form goes across to this across the Indian Ocean to the to the Saudi Arabia to put in the under its into its depleted oil fields we could have it's it's a cost that that of a world that moves CO2 around a lot captures and moves it around a lot keeps the fossil in Industry engaged I think we haven't explored this option enough so just one thing about India or China building more Renewables as you well know new Energy Technologies usually do not supplant old ones but simply add on top of them particularly in the developing phases of countries and so yeah great to have more wind and solar not particularly reliable but okay but they're still going to keep burning coal and natural gas and in fact emissions from India and China have been going up strongly yeah and they've also built an intern in particular colossal amounts of solar yeah and are doing it still I mean they obviously have they run country run by Engineers fascinated by technology and getting all kinds of stuff built and lowering the cost on yeah but the coal is still growing strongly in China can only take a long time to phase out the call which is why the CCS carbon capture and storage option for the fossil Industries I think is still important that is a perfect segue actually into my next question for Dr coonan it has been sort of a conservative refrain for decades now that the free market will provide the solutions to climate change and therefore there's no need for excessive government subsidies government intervention you both just sort of mentioned that hasn't really happened there the free market has not yet produced a technology that has inspired Universal adoption or supplanted traditional energy supplies is that not an argument in favor of more government intervention I you know the the government intervenes in the energy system in two ways the most I think the way in which most people on both sides of the political Spectrum in this country would agree is to do the early stage ND research and development of Energy Technologies and to help with the demonstration of the first of a Kind Technologies and the department of energy does that of varying degrees of success I was involved in that whether it's small modular nuclear reactors carbon capture and storage the early days of solar cells and and so on hydrogen these days of course batteries um where and you know there is some debate about exactly how far the government should go into deployment of things stimulating deployments but by and large I think most people agree research development demonstration is an appropriate role for the government the other way in which the government intervenes is by setting standards mandates and so on if it really wants to reduce carbon emissions it needs to set a predictable price on carbon whether it's through tax or cap and trade we could have a discussion uh and stick with that over some number of decades because that's how long it takes the energy system to change and we have not been able to do that in this country and again even in Europe where there's a greater commitment there's backsliding in the case of uh say Germany and gas-fired plants or the UK and and gas or nuclear so um it the energy time scales are a decade of or the political time scales of two years or four years and there's just a mismatch right I find it hard to I mean economics 101 teaches you that the free market does not solve problems which are unpriced and that the that the carbon dioxide the climate problem is a problem that is not in the in the price system until you put it there and you put it there but public policy it will never be cheaper to put CO2 in the ground than vent it and you know if you're going to promote the idea that CO2 could go underground after you've captured it you're going to have to put a price for the person who does it that pays for it so free market cannot solve by itself a problem uh where which is which is called an externality in the economics literature that's what we have government for how much we should spend on it depends on how much we think it is a damaging externality and the price of carbon is is a substitute for that if it really weren't very important ten dollars a ton of carbon dioxide would and lots of things wouldn't happen if it's very important a hundred dollars a ton and then lots of additional things do happen my last question before we start taking questions from our audience you know so much of the public conversation around climate science um especially in the political Sphere for years has been focused on raising awareness of the climate challenge I think you both have acknowledged that a lot of the climate conversation in the public sphere has become unproductive at this point do you think the the Greta thunbergs of the world are they counterproductive sorry the who of the world Greta doonberg she said she's a very young climate activist are they starting to become counterproductive to the climate change debate Okay so what I think Greta Thunder has done is make more Vivid the concept of future Generations for a very long time the climate change discussion among people who really cared about it was about future generations and they were abstract people they were 50 to 100 they were they were 100 years out or they were 50 years out but you were 75 and you didn't know anybody in that who's going to be you weren't going to be alive then credit number said this is how dare you take this away from us and you were Stephen me and most of you in here so she changed the conversation and the young people picked up on it said it is actually an intergenerational for people alive today for Better or For Worse the conversation is new and I give her considerable credit for making that happen and it's harder to look at the college freshman or herself there aren't as many students in years I hope they would be with some of you you can speak up it's your future that you feel as if we are compromising and once that's the conversation it's more normative and I think it's more powerful I think the public at least in the developed world the U.S the EU Japan and so on uh have gotten a bit numb to um claims of future catastrophe because it just hasn't happened you can go back to Al Gore in the 90s I just read that greater just deleted a tweet that she made in 2018 saying the world would end this year unless we got off of fossil fuels so the public I think is smarter than that the young people need to be educated when I talk to the undergraduates at NYU or other places talk about the science and the facts uh They Come Away with a very different impression than they come in with so I've got a fair Bit of Faith in the sensibilities of young people so we'll start with our audience questions now uh here's one for for each of you Dr Sako you can start if you'd like do you think it is important to distinguish between these two statements human activity causes global warming and climate change or human activity contributes to global warming and climate change so if there were no human activity would the planet get be getting warmer right now is one way to take that question and I don't think we know um Steve emphasizes that there is a lot of natural variability and we could be in a warming period for reasons related to the deeper uh ocean and Atmospheric currents I don't think it's very likely my guess is we would not be warming and so the warming would be nearly entirely due to our activity but the shorter the time period the less you can be confident of that the way I like to answer that question is that humans are exerting a warming influence on the climate and the climate response to that influence but there are other influences both external solar activity human and uh natural influences natural variability associated with changes in the deep ocean that also influence the climate and to which it responds and that could be cooling the planet too right and and in fact it's not so easy to disentangle them that's one of the main challenges in climate science is to disentangle the response to human influences from the response to other influences including natural variability but we actually have no reason to think that we that the natural variability is warming the planet it's as far as I know we are completely ignorant well although you know we have for example coming out of the little ice age I say in Century the planet did warn yes and the planet did cool be for that and then warm again so there are natural changes on a Century or two time scale the issue is the recent warming uh people will say is more rapid than we have seen uh due to Natural influences in the past right fair enough that's one of the arguments doctor can in this next one we can start with you when assessing the efficiency of renewable energy sources proponents often fail to include in calculations the enormous energy input like sourcing in production needed to manufacture and later recycle components such as solar cells turbine blades and so on should this be a larger part of the conversation in terms of their contributions to climate change so so this is under the guise of energy return on investment or eroi I think for solar cells they will pay back themselves in some number of years I'm not too worried about that but the broader question is you know it's not the amount of energy it's the kind of energy so to give you an example we routinely burn coal or gas throw away a half or two-thirds of the thermal energy to make electricity and we do that we intentionally waste the energy we prefer not to but we do because we want the electrical energy rather than the thermal energy the electrical energy has got lots of wonderful qualities that we want and so I'm not too concerned about the fact that we might be turning uh coal into wind turbines and do that inefficiently because we want the electricity rather than the thermal energy from the call I think this is an we do need to keep track of net carbon net energy net dollars and we price mechanisms do some of that but um one of the ones I'm concerned about is there's been a fascination with to do out of the atmosphere uh while we have a fossil Energy System and if we use fossil energy to take CO2 out of the atmosphere we will actually go backwards we will put more CO2 into the atmosphere than we'll take out for most of the capture systems that I'm air capture systems I'm aware of and so they implicitly require a decarbonized Energy System to make any sense in which case they're not which shouldn't be on the uh expected to expand at this at this stage of the global economy that you know the same argument is true to some extent for carbon sequestration uh the world most of the carbon dioxide that the world uses now is used for enhanced oil recovery and so you put the carbon dioxide in the ground in the hope that you're going to push more carbon in the form of the oil out of the ground and it's a net win in terms of emissions if you push out less carbon than you put in but in fact the people doing this hope that they're going to push out more carbon and at least in some Fields you get twice as much carbon out as you're pushed into the ground so it's subtle and it depends on the details yes it's presumably a stepping stone to a different kind of carbon capture and storage where there is no longer major oil production at the same time so probably the last question that we have time for but I think it's a good one to end on it's about trust in the scientific community and how it's trusted in the scientific community and how it's been eroded dire predictions from climate change models are the primary impetus for reducing fossil fuels yet these models are developed with sometimes the same methodology and by the same types of people who brought forward covid models those models ultimately failed they missed on hospitalization levels and deaths despite being a vastly simpler problem with better known variables so why should people trust climate models oh Lord I'm alive because of the science that was done in the last five years and so are probably some of you we have had the vaccines that have saved so many people's lives and they came because we had warp speed I wish people would get more credit and put it in place and the idea that covet is a story that of anti-science story really just makes me angry we have lost trust in I don't know where this comes from why it wasn't regarded as a Triumph of science that we have the vaccines that we have so the idea that we've somehow misled people it was a murky story there's a right covert arose and there was a question of whether it can be spread by by touching surfaces or by through the air and of course it was through the air and there was there's a whole story there about the history of Public Health we and it wasn't brilliant but overall it was human human response to a very complicated problem overall the science came through and and the quality of the science in the climate change world is very high it's very high one of the things I respect about Steve's book is that he has never gone after the scientists and said you're you're corrupt or you're you're you're you're you're you're you're you're you're a sloppy they aren't some of the people who have been anti-clack action on climate change have attacked the scientists then that's been a terrible thing science is all we've got to solve the major problems of the world it's a privileged way of knowing we have to keep defending it if anybody goes after it in politics they need to be voted out um I I think let me deal with the covet issue first you know there are two sides to that the the biochemistry the medicine I agree with Rob first class and the world is much better off for the 30 or 40 Years of investment in modern biotechnology that let us develop the vaccines as rapidly as we did that said the epidemiological models had real problems with them and the politicians perhaps trusted them too much you know there's a famous statement by George box who was a statistician I think in Michigan all models are wrong but some are useful and the models give us just a very fuzzy hazy picture of what's going to happen uh sympathize with the politicians who had to make decisions about uh the Practical aspects of lockdowns and so on the climate problem to turn to that now why should we trust those models is even harder I would submit than the epidemiological model we're looking for small changes the response to physically small influences over many decades we have pretty poor data compared to the Precision we're trying to achieve uh the oceans are a very important part and we don't have very good data at all about the oceans the system is chaotic etc etc so I think the modelers are doing about as well as one can but one should not minimize at all the difficulties or the uncertainties in their results all right Dr coonan it's time for you to begin your five-minute closing statement followed by Dr sokolo and if you all as you listen to these closing debates could vote in the post-debate poll after both are done speaking we'll go ahead and we'll put those results I hope we can pull up my last slide if you you could okay nope maybe it's maybe it's the one before that yeah here we go okay good so I hope I've made my case against the proposition that a dispassionate look at the trends in demographics development energy technology shows that Global Net Zero by 2050 is a fantasy and it's quite unlikely even by 2100. but also that the consequences of missing that goal will not be catastrophic that doesn't mean that the world or we in the U.S shouldn't do anything here's what I think we should do first we have to sustain and improve climate science for our knowledge is not what it should be paleoclimate studies tell us how and why the climate change in the past current observations with improved courage coverage precision and continuity will tell us what the climate system is doing today and models give a sense of what it might happen in the future there's a particular need for greater statistical rigor in the analyzes and for more focused modeling efforts to reduce uncertainties second we have to improve Communications to the public we need to cancel the climate crisis even as we acknowledge that human influences on the climate are growing and we should be working to reduce them the public must have an accurate view of both climate and energy that gets Beyond slogans like we are on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator I didn't make that up that's what the Secretary General of the U.N said a few months ago non-experts I think are Savvy enough to dismiss unsupported scare stories and credibility will unroad erode the more that we tell those stories third we have to acknowledge that energy reliability and affordability take precedence over emissions reductions a good start is the president's recent admission that oil and gas will be necessary in the U.S for at least a decade actually it's going to be a lot longer than that Europe's current energy crisis is self-inflicted fossil fuel investments in domestic production were abandoned in favor of unreliable import partners and unreliable wind and solar generation it was easy to see and many people saw it and said it that this would lead to trouble but mitigation reducing emissions was deemed more important than reliability and affordability fourth governments have to embark on thoughtful and graceful decarbonization programs that incorporate technology economics regulation Behavior with estimates of cost time scales and actual impacts on the climate I've already talked about r d my favorites for r d are small fission reactors grid scale storage grid management non-carbon chemical fuels and carbon capture and mice and storage should be on the list today but programs that go beyond r d to meaningful deployment should not be scatter shot mandates and the incentives that are currently invoke energy is delivered by complex systems that touch to borrow a movie title everything everywhere all the time as I've explained those systems are recalcitrant for fundamental reasons and so the best changed slowly like orthodontia rather than tooth extraction and precipitous climate action is far more disruptive than any plausible impact of climate change fifth developed countries have to acknowledge inevitability if not the desirability of meeting the developing world's energy needs most of the world today is energy starved and fossil fuels today provide 80 percent of the world's energy generation now as they have for the past many decades I've asked many Advocates of Rapid Global decarbonization what they would do to meet the developing world's energy needs and I've yet to hear a satisfactory answer in light of all this there needs to be a greater focus on alternative strategies for dealing with a changing climate most important is adaptation adaptation is autonomous it's what we humans do and it's effective so governments need to work to facilitate adaptation to close I've shown you that large and Rapid reductions are an Overkill they risk far more damage to humanity than any conceivable impact from climate change but there is also a sensible path forward that will moderate human influences on the climate while simultaneously responding to the growing demand for Reliable and affordable energy thank you foreign I wrote a slide today for this as I was listening to um was back here could will should Steve's I got a very interesting few pages in which he talks about these three words um and I'm trying to understand why Steve's book has been so polarizing rather than consensus building and I'm afraid it's about these words um because Steve says most of my interest is in could the technologies that can happen that don't violate the laws of physics the Frontiers that would have to be traversed in order to make them happen but he fears into will and we probably will and the probably will statements are all defeatist for example that they will probably not they will probably not be aggressive mitigation we're going to probably have Rising carbon dioxide and and impacts that are tolerable and people say well why are you saying that it doesn't follow it isn't science it is guess and most of us want to make room for probably possibly could and truly shouldn't um and when I think about that I got an awful lot of negative probabilities in my head but they don't lead me to where this goes I'm afraid we probably could have Regional nuclear war before the end of the century that we probably are going to continue to build stupid downtowns in all over the world with classified glass skyscrapers and that we probably are going to in both in two areas of the developing World ravage the natural environment Brazil and and the Congo what are the chances that we'll actually do that well I don't think they're that high but that doesn't lead me to a message which was is in Steve's book which amounts to wait no more before you act and it'll be okay that's not the way Steve or I'd look at any real problems I don't know why you wrote it that way because we do want to get involved we want to change the probabilities we want to do something in our own lifetimes that make these things less probable and that's what we that's what gets us going that's what builds momentum that's what makes large and rapid mean compared to stagnation um we don't want to sit back and why encourage others because they read it as encouraging the the upper right Court we can take this and we can wait a while no big deal it is a big deal and people want to do something so the negativity that is an undercurrent of Steve's remarks is in the way of our getting somewhere on this problem Steve put it aside you've made that point start being more positive it's time it's really time well you you know I might say one more thing there are two adjectives that state two two um of verbs that Steve has in his slide and they're fascinating one is um formulate and the other is demonstrate they're not they're they're one half way to do formulate you know I can formulate but I don't do anything I can demonstrate but I'm not really deploying so why are you holding back on saying stronger words than that because if you act without thinking you can break the energy system and if there's anything that is essential to a function in society it's reliable and affordable energy and look at what happened in California what is happening as the state does more and more renewable energy without reliable backups look at what happened in Texas where for other reasons again perhaps concentrating too much on wind they forgot about reliable yeah but you experiment I mean of all people you know this you experiment you make mistakes you get better at it you keep going weight is not the same as experiment it isn't the same as formulate and demonstrate you know it's not going to get solved by us anyway this problem is really in the developing world and you've got to encourage them to experiment and absolutely you know if they don't have the capacity to do that I had a slime which I could show too which is very short the end of the that one I'm completely with Steve about the developing countries I think I'll say it more strongly if they don't think climate change is important if 50 years from now the dialogue in India and China and Nigerian is that Brazil is that you know this isn't worth paying money for we will have a lot of climate change so it depends on how they think about the risk to themselves to the global markets that they part of uh more than it does what we think and I agree with that and we can help we can nudge just a very useful word that's been become more popular and we can pay some of the cost and we can develop Alternatives that are globally useful because the people were the the tech the people in the poor countries to do it emitting CO2 or living like us so things that work for us will work for them in addition to some of the solutions that are specific to them so let's get on with it okay if we could get our free debates results and if you haven't voted in the public pool text that same number really really quick this is what everyone's perspectives were prior to the debate we should post debate poll now it's a little bit of movement um still going um but it was a great discussion very productive clearly changed some Minds here this evening so Dr sokolo Dr kunin thank you both so much for participating in our debate this evening good thank you again to our panelists if you enjoyed tonight's debate we hope you'll consider supporting the steamboat Institute and the Cornell Free Speech Alliance we have a reception for all of you who are here this evening so if you'd like to stick around and visit with our speakers enjoy the reception you're most welcome to join us thank you again for coming [Music] thank you foreign [Music] [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: Steamboat Institute

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Length: 92min 6sec (5526 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 23 2023