Energy and the Current Narrative: Fireside Chat with Chris Wright and Dr. Steven Koonin

welcome back um so what is climate science how does the science shape our view towards energy towards energy access the two men on stage here need no introduction but let me just share a little bit about our guest today dr stephen coonan so dr coonan is a leader in science policy in the u.s he served as a second under secretary for science at the u.s department of energy in the obama administration prior to that dr coonan spent five years as as chief scientist at bp where he played a central role in establishing energy biosciences institute dr coonan was professor of theoretical physics at the california institute of technology and served as the institute's provost during his tenure he is currently a university professor at nyu and he holds a bs in physics in caltech at a phd in theoretical physics from mit so with that i will turn it over to chris thanks ange and look the idea for this is truly just a dialogue there's no rehearsal there's no script steve doesn't know what he's gonna ask and heck he might be shooting arrows at me as well um but i want to start out the one thing i do want to do is i want to start out and have steve tell us his story you know we're i think he's a tech nerd like me where'd you grow up how'd you how did your career unfold sure so i grew up the eldest child of three a family middle class or perhaps even lower middle class in brooklyn new york from a very early age i was fascinated with science and how the world worked measuring things and had the benefit of one of the extraordinary public schools in in new york stuyvesant high school which focuses on science and math uh had a great time there and because it was the late 60s it was the time to go to california and and so uh i went to caltech not only because it was in california but also because uh it had a reputation as the hardest science in math school i know we share in mit heritage uh but i like to think about caltech as the best fifth of mit and i know both institutions very well and uh four wonderful years at caltech graduate school at mit did a phd uh in theoretical physics nuclear physics uh then back at caltech on the faculty teaching uh graduate students and doing research in the course of my time there i supervised about 30 or 40 phd students wrote lots of papers and about in the late 80s i started to get a taste for the input of science to practical matters and as you may know this is what physicists do so one of my mentors once said a license a degree in theoretical physics is a license to poke your nose into anybody's business and physicists have done this for a decade i'm sorry centuries or so and so i got interested and exposed to national security matters both dod and the intelligence community did a lot of consulting with a group called jason which is a group i'm still involved with and saw how you provide technical input into non-expert decision makers the uh you tell the story transparently completely these are the options these are the risks and so on about that same time uh i was asked to be provost at caltech and learned about running large organizations uh roughly a half a billion dollar budget leaving a part jpl which is a nasa lab that caltech also wants and and i think after about nine years of provosting i got kind of bored with that uh it was a lot of fun but you know you've been there you've done that time to move on john brown asked me to come be chief scientist at bp i said i don't know anything about energy except that it's conserved and he said don't worry you'll learn and i like to joke that i was for a couple years uh the highest paid graduate student on the planet as i learned the energy business and that was just great they didn't need me for oil and gas but i did i think help them learn how to think about the bigger energy picture and move them into some interesting alternatives and renewables particularly bioenergy as as was mentioned in the introduction after five years of that my wife says we've got to get back to the u.s london is just a little bit too much for me to take anymore steve chu my friend became secretary of energy and he said come help out i did that for two and a half years which is a longest time for a senate confirmed appointment uh help guide the government in its investments in energy technologies and also push back within the department against uh secretary chu a nobel prize winner uh has a lot of confidence and a lot of knowledge but steve needed somebody in the department to challenge him a bit on the technical issues a lot of fun doing that um and then i went to nyu uh to start a center on big data for big cities so it was very interesting to see how big data is being applied in in your organization uh did that for six years you know there's a famous physicist in the early 20th century leo zallard who's famous for having drafted or written the letter that einstein sent to roosevelt to get the manhattan project kicked off and zorrad was quite a character if you read the biographies he had his own ten commandments and the ninth one is something like reinvent yourself every six years unless you become captive to the environment that you're in and so i've taken that to heart after six years starting the center for urban science and progress at nyu i stepped down and am now just a professor teaching alternatively climate and energy courses at the master's level to mbas and engineers so that's a little bit about me personal life i've been married to the same woman for 45 years we have three grown kids and apart from my professional life my real dream job would be playing lounge piano somewhere in a bar all right maybe the liberty bar okay so stephen in my case that company pinnacle technologies i mentioned we had some technologies for mapping the motion of fluid underground so the national labs came to us 20 plus years ago said we're gonna do these demonstrations sequester co2 underground can you measure that we need to see if it stays underground so this is potential new business line i just starting a shale gas company and wow coal to shale this is like a golden opportunity to lower greenhouse gas emissions so for business reasons i almost drove into the study of climate change 20 plus years ago thinking hey this is going to be a big deal it's going to be awesome for two of the businesses i'm in but i want to understand it and pretty shocking my road along that path and my interactions but way more important mine didn't mine didn't result in a book uh yours resulted in a book but talk us through that you know we're you're a rational technical guy this is sort of a technical issue with a lot of trade-offs tell me your view on climate change and and why is it not aligned with the general view or is there even a general view so increasingly and particularly in the last year or two you hear many politicians increasingly people in industry finance and certainly ngos talking about the existential climate threat and in fact a couple weeks ago a month ago the secretary of defense said this is the biggest threat that the country faces and when i listen to those people and they of course use the science to justify what they're saying the science is absolutely certain said ambassador kerry president says we're going to follow the science i listen to all of that and i'm thinking about the movie the princess bride where one character vizzini keeps using the word inconceivable and the main character inigo montoya says you keep using that word i do not think it means what you think it means and i'm thinking the science does not say what these people think it says and i can guarantee you that essentially none of them have read the government or u.n assessment reports maybe they've read the summaries for policy makers otherwise they're getting it from the media and when you really read those reports the picture you get is very different than the popular and political dialogue both in terms of what's happened with the weather and climate over the last century and also our ability to project what might be happening in the future let me give you just some surprises that you find when you read those reports over the last century heat waves are no more common today than they were in 1900 across the u.s and the warmest temperatures despite the heat wave we're having now across the southwest the warmest temperatures across the country have not gone up in more than 60 years there's a lot of year-to-year variability of course but climate is a 30-year average of things another is that there is no detectable influence on hurricanes from human forces over almost a century think about that every time you hear the coverage of hurricanes on cnn for example another is that the projected impact of warming of let's say six degrees celsius that's four times the paris goal if the globe warms six degrees by the end of the century the economic impact on the u.s would be a few percent of the gdp and the same is true for the world those statements are not my science they're not my spin on the science they're what's there in the report although sometimes buried in the report and you've got to read them carefully and my goal in writing the book was to kind of pull back the curtain a little bit and circumvent this long chain of information that goes from the research literature and the data to the assessment reports to the summaries to the media and what people see of course with references exactly what those reports are saying and why don't the scientists that are behind these reports i visited them and speak with them in universities why don't they speak out more if say we were in another era say we were working in theoretical physics and we had a certain model of how you know how a particle behaved and then everyone said something dramatically different about it wouldn't wouldn't you speak up and say hey that's not what i said that's not it and in theoretical physics says you know people do that yeah and that's part of the sport is to both challenge and rebut the challenges the problem here is that the subject of climate is first of all not as clear as theoretical physics and so it's much more difficult to establish truth and falsity in part because we have poor observations complicated modeling limited data but also because it's strikes at the heart of human existence the changing climate degradation allegedly of our environment uh if we responded to it as some people would like it would entail massive changes in society and we can get onto those i hope in a while um but there's a lot of peer pressure look i wrote this book all right publish everyone's going to get a copy of the book signed by stephen they're they're we held them till after lunch they're in the back i tried to stick to exactly what's in the reports okay and just tell people here's what the real science says and i've already gotten trashed in ways you would not believe by some reputable scientists some of whom used to be friends actually in the media because i think there is a narrative that people are trying to enforce in order to stimulate action and any deviation from that narrative is punished and i'm far enough along in my career and i've got enough experience giving advice and portraying science to non-experts i really don't care uh i'm just trying to get the truth out there because i think it will result in better societal decisions absolutely now you worked uh for five years in london at bp when when that was beyond petroleum so five years world top scientist um where's the beyond petroleum future i read the analysts in our own industry telling me the energy transitions happening faster than we thought and oh my god we're going to be out of business in 10 years i i can't believe the stuff is written by analysts in our own industry but what what's your view on that is it hard to redo the world energy so what you really let's talk about the goal first okay if you really want to reduce human influences on the climate we need to zero out greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 to stay below one and a half degrees of warming we've already seen one degree of warming uh or by 2075 to stay below two degrees and when you look at the growing demand for energy due to the development of most of humanity as you nicely outlined uh this morning and you look at the fact that fossil fuels particularly coal and gas are the most convenient way and reliable way of satisfying that demand and right now we have no alternative to oil for mobility that's viable we can talk about electric cars in a little bit uh and given the time scales that you have to do this transition with i have said in the book it's practically impossible we are not going to do this right given all those competing tendencies now the administration has put forward some bold plans for decarbonizing the u.s and we can talk about those in a bit as well but even if the u.s went to zero the u.s is only 15 percent of global emissions and so whatever reduction we managed to make would be wiped out by a decade's worth of growth in the rest of the world so i don't see how this is going to happen right and we're going to be using fossil fuels at least till mid-century and i would say very likely till the end of this century in significant ways what and you're looking at energy technologies what was the most promising thing that could grow market share in world in the world energy system are we talking from a technical perspective or from an economic perspective or from a psychological perspective because as you know people's perceptions about energy technologies are really important as well right well that leads to government subsidies and investments but ultimately i i don't think that's enough to drive meaningful additional energy so so i guess the balance between it's got economic prospects that may attract some capital and and 30 or 40 years from now it may have many percent more market share and global energy if if the world places a lower priority on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and we know that more than half the world is still just trying to get energy never mind where it's coming from uh i think it's going to be gas coal has got its own downsides but gas gas gas particularly here in in the u.s for reasons you all know much better than i gas is wonderful we can talk about its climate impact in a minute that's an interesting side note but um if we care uh you've got to electrify the transportation system can't produce enough biofuels i think to satisfy the demand and you're going to have to make that electricity emissions-free and yes wind and solar are wonderful but for every megawatt of wind or solar you put in you got to provide backup in some way because the electricity grid has to be extraordinarily reliable and the only way right now to provide that backup is through fission uh or eventually if other storage technologies get to be uh economic and scalable we're not there yet with those at all so we've got to build nuclear all right yep and we haven't built a nuclear plant in this country in 20 years we've got a couple trying to build big ones but when i was in the department i think many people have a lot of optimism that small modular nuclear reactors will be beneficial both from an economic point of view and of course reduce greenhouse gases and the nuclear regulatory commission is currently considering licenses or at least looking at designs for i think two small modular reactors yeah i'm a huge fan of nuclear and and so you've worked inside the government and you advised the government do you think the political climate can change that we can see nuclear get some growth in the next 10 or 20 years i do and and here's why and and this is maybe a more general comment about the climate energy scene in the us and in europe the policies that are being proposed and regulations and you can look at the biden administration's plans would entail rapid and large-scale transformations of our energy system and by nature i think you said it energy changes slowly it takes decades and there are good reasons for that the facilities last a long time we need reliability in the systems you know it's not just a windmill but you need the whole system that integrates that windmill together with the other sources of power similarly you can't have automobiles without having the right kind of fuel and so on so these are systems that have to change and they have to be extraordinarily reliable if you start monkeying with them too much too rapidly you're going to lose reliability costs are going to go up um you're going to reduce consumer choice because i won't be able to buy an internal combustion engine in this country after 2035 if the regulations come in and you're going to degrade u.s geopolitical stature because we will be more dependent on imported oil and perhaps even imported gas again than we were before the fracking revolution and and so i think as this starts to bite for ordinary consumers there's going to be pushback and we've already seen it the yellow vests in france the backing off of the uk government for mandatory installation of heat pumps and other protests about electricity and fuel costs around the the world and so people are going to ask i predict within about three or four years tell me again why we're doing this and there's going to be a much greater scrutiny of the science which i as i write in the book i think is solely needed and a much greater look at the efficacy of the policies that are being proposed so just give it a couple of years and uh we'll be back to injecting some rationality in both the climate and energy discussions fantastic yeah i said switzerland just voted down a carbon tax in switzerland um so yeah that my perspective has been as energy gets more expensive and less reliable that'll be the start of swing back so steve does that go further do people do we ever get a public discourse about honestly what we know or even project about climate science that's why i wrote that section in our esg report i talk to politicians i talk to climate activists they they never engage in even understanding the basics yeah and you had a point in your book when is the public gonna you know uh some meaningful percent of the public be aware of the fact that if we met biden's goal of a 30 percent with no chance of that happening but say we get 30 drop in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 net zero by 2050 net zero for the rest of the century at presumably enormous cost the benefit right is seven one hundredths of a degree cooler immeasurably small change at the end of this century yeah like the benefit doesn't the cost we see is is high and people may push back about that but is everyone going to be discouraged about the benefit yeah i well the numbers are what they are and i'm pleased and and i think you were unusual in the oil and gas business of laying it out as you did in the esg report um you know i i could sense you mentioned smell in there i could i could see smils thinking in there uh as i think if people read my book they will see it as well just factual logical don't try to extrapolate too much these are the numbers these are what they imply and now let's talk about what we should do all right and yes i think there are a lot of people who are receptive to that uh as i've gotten feedback from the book from many scientists who are not or engineers who have not looked deeply into climate or people who've been responsible for running some of the large named universities we shall not talk about names they now the response has been thanks for writing this book i had not realized many of these things and i've now got the basis on which to ask smarter questions for the people who are pushing us to go in this particular direction so i think that's what we need to do we're not going to win over everybody but we've got to stand up for a factual logical discussion and frankly on i think the oil and gas industry particularly the big ones have been remiss in some of the legal proceedings i've been following and so on in standing up and challenging the science with here's what actually the data says and so why you can so concerned about sea level rise but it's been only going up at less than a foot a century for the last hundred years and the projections that you're making are just so wildly discordant with experience so please explain and i think we need more of that kind of discussion yeah i i agree with you very disappointing to see our industry not do that everyone accepts the narrative and then shows how they're part of the solution yeah so in the again the book i i and again in lines with vaclav smil this fanta probably the best energy thinker in the world and he writes a ton of books they're very nerdy but they're just sober and he's very smart and they're very good but he doesn't have a wide audience i mean your book's gonna out sale probably all is combined but but with your book and and your background and credentials are just so perfect to speak to this are you getting invitations to speak at the national labs at universities who wants to engage with you and who who doesn't want you talking out loud so i just back on smile for one second and then i'll answer that i wanted to do for climate what smell did for energy okay and maybe make it a little bit less nerdy as you said so there are some anecdotes in there about my experiences and so on uh yes so uh i'm hoping to do a large number of talks at universities think tanks and public forums over the next year i've got i did just a couple weeks ago a talk at lawrence livermore national lab right by the way the national labs which are a wonderful complex of research institutions is with both um you know non-defense or non-national acuity but also national security research they need to get smarter about climate because the secretary of defense and the odni the uh the director of national intelligence has said this is a major threat so let's apply the same rigor to analyzing climate and energy that we do to other national security threats so national labs i did one at livermore about a month ago uh great reception wonderful questions i'm not sure i won many people over but the book is there um i've got um let me not name the particular universities yet since they haven't been announced but um universities in the top tier of this country's um higher education operation uh and i hope to get on the stage and tell the story a bit but then ask some of the experts who are at these universities you know how come it says minimal economic impact that but you're still either saying yourself or tolerating others to say that there's a climate crisis and we've only got 10 years left and so on where is the scientific establishment pushing back against the inaccuracies in the public dialogue yes so disappointing and so so steve let's talk about that i i think i think in our original dialogue we shared this same view one of one of my problems with the the the sort of climate mania is it's pushing kids in school away from science because it's this authoritarian enforcement of orthodoxy that's not what science is so talk to us about the science versus science science um you know i mean the assessment reports so for those of you who don't know the un puts out every six or seven years a big report assessing the state of the science and making recommendations to policy makers uh the next one is due out this summer in the end of july early august the u.s government is mandated to put out a report every four years the next one will come out in 2023 and activists and people who want to move the country and the world in a certain direction and you know they have perhaps legitimate reasons for wanting to do that use these reports and particularly the more inflammatory statements in them uh as um uh a vehicle for saying the science is settled that it's been peer-reviewed etc etc and there's no reason to challenge it um and of course that's a wonderful stepping stone then to teaching or convincing non-experts and young people um that hey the world is going to end in in a decade and we had better do something i think that's really immoral and it's a moral in several ways of course discouraging young people absolutely but also it tarnishes science and we can talk a little bit about the covid examples where this kind of thing has also happened or happening but it also usurps from the public we are a democracy the public really needs to know what the science actually says and if organizations obscure that or hype it then you're usurping from the public the right to make fully informed decisions about how much risk to tolerate how much economic growth you want to balance against environment north-south equity geographical equity all of those values things that you have to weigh with the science and then finally we've got so many other problems in this country right now and placing this one which is frankly a vague distant and uncertain threat at the priority at the top of the priority list really incur so much opportunity cost that i think it incurred as i said it's just immoral to be representing the science as more certain than it is yes and so d do you hear like when you spoke at livermore you get no details right did they engage in this dialogue of the science versus science no because the audience was all scientists and engineers and they understood exactly what i was saying i gave them the references and the reports if they didn't know it you know page 327 in the ipcc report says no detectable human influences on tropical cyclones hurricanes and were they not aware of that most people are not even at those nationals yeah because most of them are not involved in climate science some of them are one of the premier to give you an example of how much the dialogue has degraded and i'll use names this time ben santer is a senior climate modeler at livermore and he is i would say in his public face a foremost defender of the faith yes and when one part of the lab invited me the center for global security research because this is a national security issue uh and it was announced ben immediately wrote an article um i think in the bolton for atomic scientists uh he said when i retire in september so that's a few months away i will have nothing more to do with the lab because they chose to give a platform to this i don't know if he used the word denier but it's probably that he did yeah and i'm just quoting what's in the reports all right it's unbelievable it's unbelievable unbelievable all right and i i think the way to fix that is by educating fellow scientists and engineers who've not looked at this they will then have the ammunition to ask the right kinds of questions and also we'll see how the information flow has been corrupted by the media and the public dialogue yes yes i think in the way you've done it in the book if you present logically the facts and not you know there's as i say you never want to be the anti-al gore we just like i've spoke at universities a number of times on climate change and actually the reaction's incredibly positive you know there's a small number of activists that you know do you have demonstrations for your talks that anybody i have for my testimony in front of the climate crisis committee the extinction rebellion held a funeral for the earth when i showed up in i thought think of all these college kids in these black suits i mean they get all the girls dressed in black and faces painted white and the lipstick and they were holding roses for a funeral for the earth as i walked in but for climate change talks maybe the news doesn't get out of muff i find the reaction um pretty pretty positive you know because i think you know 10 or 20 of people they don't care about the facts but most people just they've never heard anything but it's really giant problem we have to act if they see the data and then they realize yeah no one actually showed me the data on the other side and you showed me the data most of them i think i think they're very open to getting a more realistic perspective i think the public as a whole probably is but we just don't have the avenue to engage with that yeah you know the politicians have taken about half of the power maybe more than half have taken this up as a cause celebrity and i think that's another part of the problem i i quote in the book and i think is a very powerful quote uh from h.l menken who was a journalist in the early 20th century very pithy remarks and one of his quotes is that the purpose of practical politics is to keep the public alarmed by a series of mostly imaginary threats so that they can be clamoring to be led to safety and whether it is um climate whether it is immigration on the other side or whether it is kovid and that's an evolving and somewhat more complicated story i mean you see that playing out all right and somebody's got to just stand up and and say you know stop that nonsense because here are what the facts say as you said we saw it with covid too right you remember the two doctors in bakersfield talking about it and their video was taken down yeah i did a bunch of panels business panels here some with our governor here in colorado and i just talked about the numbers but it was the same thing that everything in life to me has a cost and a benefit and we want to find things where the benefits are much greater than the happy value the happy value right okay but on climate we sometimes talk about making the cost smaller we never mention the benefits of course because there isn't much there but in covet it was the same way you know there was the fear of people dying which of course is very real that's a big cost but there's there's a cost of what we were doing too that also involved human health and economic well-being and all that and i was this weird guy in polite company talking about stuff that yeah was the world always that way when we were kids was it that way no i i think the media have heightened this i think the internet because so much information is now available a lot of it bad information that uh i think it has heightened it and again i i think people are well no let me let me just go back to this trade-off for a minute we saw that in kovid in almost real time you had the governors and many other people clamoring to open up the economy acknowledging that there were risks and you had the public health people saying here you know if you do that people are going to die well yes some people are going to die anyway and you have to set that balance and i would fault the trump administration for not promoting that kind of dialogue and making those choices kind of evident um they were very confused and in what they said to the public but you did have fauci on one side and then you had the economists and the business people on the other side eventually we sorted it out i think things are better now because we've got the vaccines and and cases are going down but it is a great analog to the climate discussion where there are costs to reducing emissions not only internal costs but as you again mentioned this morning the three billion people in the world who don't have adequate energy and the uh detriment of of conventional wood and dung being burned so there are costs i think part of it also is that the young people are looking for a greater cause and they've taken this on the protection of the environment and local environment obviously pollution plastics etc but also they've taken on the global climate as a great challenge and i wonder if we couldn't redirect them somehow to improving the lives of the three or four billion people of whatever cut you want to use yeah uh who don't have adequate energy yeah but i've been a board member environmental group for a good chunk of my life i'm an outdoor wilderness guy we're a wealthy society so we can we can do these great things but i think the interest in what would have been environmentalism when you and i were young is so different today like kids today i see you know see the protesters without they have no idea that earth the air in denver is just monstrously cleaner than it was 30 or 40 years ago so it's mostly global it's mostly climate change and so to me yeah i think it's less tangible but i i do think most of it is it's it gives a meaning in life you know the planet is going to die and i'm going to fade to save it and then there's these demons that are i'm fighting against but that i mean yeah it seems to have a very strong emotional appeal with no data or facts people don't even bother to learn them i think it just sort of fits right and so society is running with it it's like you know one of my friends who's a both a physicist but a great historian also a student of history it's like the crusades you know if you look back in medieval europe the king mounted a great army of people to go off to the holy land at great cost but also with uncertain and distant and probably unachievable goals you know i think the cure to a lot of this and you've certainly been involved with that and i have as well is both climate literacy and energy literacy and things that are accessible to people not only at a technical level where we talk numbers uh but also at a more visceral level and i'll put in a plug you probably know scott tinker and scott's films both switch and switch on switch about the energy system and switch on about um uh energy poverty i think are really good for people who are not quite as numerate or quantitatively thinking as uh we are oh scott does great stuff and he's he's all around speaking he's such a kind generous yeah he's very credible i'm a huge fan and supporter of what scott's doing um and so yeah maybe just other ways to spread it again as we both said a little disappointed in our own industry engagement of that and then i think of reporters right people energy reporters tend to write about energy and they tend to write about climate right so there was some interest in this report that we released i've done three interviews with major print publications and what was shocking to me two things one all three of them were like why did you write this you know it's everyone's saying that why why did you write this and then i got that right up front from all three and then the most disappointing thing i learned pretty quickly was none of them had read it i read the summary up front and i glanced through it yeah you know i'm like you know so what are the takeaways to me it wasn't like five bullet points right you and your books are more in depth that's right if you're going to credibly make a case we try we got to put some data out there we try to make it as digestible as possible but if the press that writes on these things won't won't read that i don't know if when you read interview for your book did they if people read your book some have most not and certainly the people who criticized me have not read the book i know that because i asked one of them did you read the book and he said no but what they do instead is to criticize what was written in a review of the book which of course is necessarily less precise and nuanced than what's in the book itself it's crazy it's just completely crazy um did you when you put out the esg report how many people said oh it's just your own self-interest you're in the business and clearly you have an interest in perpetuating fossil fuels so i haven't got that feedback yet because i'm betting those people haven't read it you know obviously first win in our industry it has spread i mean i've heard from some politicians and some people in cultural things feedback today it's been the feedback today has all been positive but it's just because i think there's got to be negative feedback i'm just not hearing it i i'm dying to get some or hear that um i did write it partially for the general public you know you know my wife's sister you know who's got an issue which was tried to be digestible enough but full of enough data and pointing to enough references that hopefully it'd make you scratch your head yeah yeah you know i think again i come back to trying to educate our fellow scientists and engineers because they will understand um i tell you one anecdote which is in the book i was invited to give a talk now about six or seven years ago it was shortly after i had written a wall street journal op-ed which is the first time i came out with my skepticism in 2014 and it got 2 000 plus online comments all positive basically i was saying our understanding is not what you think it is and so i gave a talk on the basis of that at some top 10 university with a primo earth sciences department shall remain nameless uh and as i'm getting ready to go give the talk the chairman of the department says to me privately you know i agree with just about everything you wrote in that report but i dare not say it in public all right and so we've got to crack through that i think if the energy transition starts to impact people directly in the way that it will then more people will be encouraged to speak up also we've got to break so i am deeply involved in the national academy's uh report writing process for those of you who don't know the national academies of science engineering and medicine are an objective advisor to the government and they do studies on all kinds of things tobacco use kovid they've been very instrumental in advising the government uh but also of course on energy and they recently put out a report on pathways to decarbonization written by 20 people who understand energy but almost all of them and i'm going to say all but i haven't checked one or two of the people who wrote this report have no experience in the real energy business they've never had to provide electricity 24 7 or fuels at a low cost or extract gas out of the ground and so it's all an academic exercise to them and i don't think have any sense of what the disruption will be if we go down too rapidly this pathway of decarbonization i have friends in another part of my life who ran big utility companies in metropolitan areas names you would know in the east coast west coast and they're you know every bit as responsible as everybody else uh but they look at the plans and they say that just isn't going to happen for both technical and economic reasons so i think we're going to eventually get real about this stuff and and and i'll end my last question with that you know i look at the united kingdom and you lived there five years right i there was they harmed a lot of people they've made energy expensive but they've almost completely de-industrialized the nation and where are they today both of the major parties are on the climate crusade so so my worry there is well-off people the cost of energy is not as important they've always got reliable energy hey it feels good and that the people that are not so politically powerful or even visible in the politicians eyes are getting crushed and in the u.s i think that's a more vocal population i hope we get a pushback sooner but it's very disheartening to me to see to the extent to which the the birthplace of the industrial revolution has de-industrialized its country impoverished the bottom half of the population and they're still charging on yeah and it's crazy and maybe you know you talk about the dean industrialization that's worth the remark also uh a theme when i was in the obama administration and now again in the binding administration is innovation the invention of new technologies will improve the economic prospects of the country what people forget is that there's a difference between where a technology is invented versus where it gets manufactured where is it where it gets deployed and yes the u.s is great at inventing and demonstrating things and i'm all for us doing that with low emissions technologies but unless this country becomes a premier manufacturing venue and that's cost of labor regulation cost of energy unless we do that we're not going to reap the full economic benefit of any of this yes yes why don't we open it up um i could i could have this dialogue till till happy hour but why don't we maybe maybe turn the turn the lights up and why don't we open it up and we've got another 15 minutes or so with steve and i'd love to hear questions from anyone in the room and online but we got to reward the people that made the trek here first so anybody have a question uh for steve i see one right there sky to your left or the mic over here to the left microphone is coming okay i think that's frank under that hat thank you for being here i think you made a good point about the politicians payoff and how they can create some drama and then lead people out of it good point about younger people and how they just want something to rally around what's the payoff for the guy that wrote that said that you were a denier what's the payoff for the pal for the scientists that should know better what do they get out of this climate activism um i think it's several things when you're an academic you become fully invested in your work and if you have made a 20-year career on trying to quantify and mitigate the dangers of greenhouse gas emissions it's pretty hard to turn around but that's true in all fields of science as somebody said you know paradigms change only by one funeral at a time when people drop out of the field the older people but second is there are a good number of young people in the field who've gone into it with the expectation that they're saving the planet and the third is that there is a course funding and fame and prominence associated with it so i think all those are at play with the academics we have a couple questions over here you uh roger reed wells fargo um question i have for you mentioned you know when this starts to bite i guess is one of the ways to phrase it people may start to push back or people who could should know better will will start to speak out i mean we are starting to see issues with the electric grid california texas um i mean are those the first signs and i mean how bad does it have to get before people actually you know change their tune on it i guess i i think you know beyond texas i would add the colonial pipeline hacking uh not because it's got anything to do with the energy transition but it makes people realize how important reliable energy is to the functioning of society we can go into the causes of why california is having so much trouble or why texas had the trouble that it did it's not only renewables but it's failure of regulation to build a capacity market for example in texas but i think as more energy incidents happen people will become as i said more sensitive to the importance of energy and will be less willing to tolerate a rapid large large-scale transformation you know i think a real turning point also will be when you won't be able to buy an internal combustion engine light vehicle in this country anymore i mean i'm all for electrification i think it's eventually going to happen but when so i live in a very metropolitan urbanized area i could easily drive an electric car but if i'm living in some of the less dense areas of the country electricity just isn't going to cut it you need those f-150s or silverados or whatever and you can't run those on batteries very well so i think that's when it's going to start to bite more it was a good segue into just another eevee question you mentioned the evs earlier and so we'd circle back to it now we kind of have but if you look at kind of the myriad of headwinds to getting evs where people project they'll be by 2030 whether it's the amount of mining we need to access the amount of batteries that go in those cars associated with all those sources infrastructure logistics the grid what do you view as the biggest impediment to penetration of evs and to kind of the rapid adoption of evs that people are embedding in their forecasts and declining gasoline forecasts over the next decade consumer choice i think um you know it's a an automobile is a big investment for somebody for some number of years i think there's concern about the charging infrastructure charging time is another issue grid capacity that's not a consumer issue but it is a real systems issue i think performance you know as the temperature goes down i wouldn't want to be driving in an ev across the midwest at 20 degrees fahrenheit i need the heater that's going to drain the battery the battery performance itself goes down and in warm weather the air conditioners drain whereas an internal combustion engine you've got all this extra heat parasitic heat that you can use to drive those systems um so i think that's probably the biggest impediment and i've no doubt that engineering will be able to mitigate some of those but you know to get to a hundred percent sales by 2035 when we've got about three or four percent sales right now i don't see how that's going to happen just don't [Music] all right so governments around the world have some aggressive targets about hydrogen growth eu has said that they want hydrogen to be 13 to 14 percent of energy mix by 2050 canada has a plan to be six percent of energy mix by uh 20 30 and almost 30 30 by 2050. how do you see the market growth for hydrogen do you see it to be a practical alternative uh for vehicles no um you know we have issues with the storage we have issues with the production you're going to first of all the way we make hydrogen now of course is steam reforming a gas unless you capture the co2 and sequester it you haven't done much good and the other way if you want to make it by electrolysis of water you're starting with electricity you're going to turn it into hydrogen and then you're going to turn it back into electricity in a vehicle come on all right why are we doing that uh i think hydrogen probably has some role in mixing into natural gas to cut down some of the carbon content but maybe this is a good place to say something about natural gas and climate either because it's not what people think it is uh so let me just play off of that so if you just look at the thermodynamics and the chemistry yes per unit energy natural gas has got about half the co2 emissions but what people forget is that methane itself is a potent natural gas and i'm sorry potent greenhouse gas it's a yes thank you um and the distribution systems even in uh developed countries leak they leak at one percent or something every time i talk to a gas person uh in the gas companies in new york and new york state i ask what's the leak rate in your distribution system and sometimes they'll fudge a little bit but eventually you can get a kind of one and one and a half percent number so if we go to more natural gas we're going to have more methane up in the atmosphere that's going to exert a warming influence and then if we get rid of coal in favor of natural gas which we've been doing in the u.s you lose the aerosols that the coal put up and yes they're a terrible thing for public health and we want to cut the aerosols down as much as we can but those aerosols exert a cooling influence and so the net effect of natural gas is not anywhere near as much as you would think it is right and there are again research papers i can cite that go through the arithmetic i actually as i talk about in the book that was one of the first calculations i did in bp when they were pushing gas as a bridge to a low carbon future and you can sort of do this on the back of an envelope and when i showed it to some of the senior executives they were not very happy that the flip side of that and in my early climate talks you know i'm a big in in hydraulic fracture we developed these models of how fractures grow even a while ago developed a different mathematical technique to combine surface integral for the edge of a crack and finite element we call the ciphy code and so we have a sophisticated stuff we think we're going to understand fracture growth but it turns out the models didn't work and they generally don't work because something not in the models dominates which is layer interfaces slip on pieces of rock we don't know how to model them we don't know the data on them so we got these very fancy math that calculates this stuff precisely but we miss the thing that matters client models is the same thing the dominant thing is clouds and what happens to water vapor and and they're 60 miles on the side cubes you know you're not going to get the dynamics of clouds with it with an element that's 60 miles on the side so they just got a cloud knob and um so these these problems are hard and so my thing is take predictions and then compare them to data if you have some reasonable record in your predictions versus data let's keep going that direction if your predictions never match the data maybe you go a different direction but climate science has never lived by that and so my early talks i would show they always put these projections of atmospheric methane back to this leak point here's the 5 to 95 confidence interval of the rate of rise of atmospheric methane and for the first like 18 years of their projections it was not one year within the 5 to 95 confidence interval that seems maybe that wasn't a 5 to 95 confidence interval but they didn't change it very much it just continually only in the recent data does it edge into the bottom um so to me it's follow the data so so and you're exactly right about what you said about climate models we could bash them forever um but they're useful for research all right but for making trillion dollar decisions not so sure another methane factoid uh so most people don't know only 25 percent of methane emissions come from fossil methane uh leaks and cobalt methane most of the methane comes from biological processes uh bacteria in rice paddies um bovine flatulence uh or more generally enteric flatulence right the methane comes out from cattle as they digest cellulose oh sorry yeah decomposition wetlands right just generally dams when they flood and dry out uh tremendous sources of methane so um if you really want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions you got to deal with those non-energy things as well and the world hasn't really talked much about that last couple questions here we've got three minutes left one up front peter and then your second okay dick's up um i don't know much about this but i talked to these experts who say that the cost of electric car when you look at the oil and gas that goes into the pieces of an electric car what are the real economic consequences of building an electric car so there have been extensive studies on this um you can talk about what the situation is now versus what it might be in five years with better battery technology and so on but the total cost of ownership which is what uh is being measured lifetime fuel maintenance and so on um it works out to just about the same uh for electric so another story so i'm in the department of energy and trying to help formulate the technology strategy and we ran a workshop for the public on vehicle fuels and at one point in the workshop i had proponents of vehicle efficiency an internal combustion engines biofuels advanced biofuels hydrogen electricity and cng and they're all up there saying government if you just provide the fueling infrastructure we will be able to make the vehicles of the future and i reminded them uh you know that we can only support maybe two fueling infrastructures in the country as a whole just from practical economics and an interesting squabble ensued between those five different parties all right so um to zeroth order the costs are the same if you include the uncertainties in the projections there are advantages though an electric car runs on electricity the price is pretty stable because we have multiple sources of them and so you reduce that variability in gasoline cost the maintenance costs for an electric vehicle are very small you don't have the lube changes and tuning and so on that you have to do it's pretty quiet on the other hand you have all these sort of customer experience downsides of the vehicle so i think it's eventually going to happen but it's going to be a lot longer than 30 years for that to kick in at least in the u.s so there's trade-offs of course always happy valley find that i learned that phrase it's good very good that's great um we are right on time do we have one more question maybe we'll we'll sneak one in and we'll close it out thank you my name is joe brooker uh first and foremost thank you for this book it's fantastic i've referred it to 100 friends now and a guy with your stature your experience your bona fides we need a guy like you and thank you uh for writing this book in chris thank you for bringing dr in here this is this is something all of us have to read and understand and i've read it full disclosure and i wanted to tie in on the methane factoids you provided not to be too geeky here but i was wondering if you could just take a minute because i've tried to synthesize what you've written and share with folks that i talked to i'm one of the few oil and gas professionals that live in boulder county colorado so so so i have a i have a challenge ahead of me but as chris said people are thirsty to know more i've given more lectures on hydraulic fracturing on my back porch from folks from all over the country who appreciate it to the point where when i i'm asked the question my wife says oh god here it goes again i'm sorry but my but what i hoped you could spend a little bit of time and share with us and help me as i go out and spread the word is your chapter two is something like humble human influences or something like that it was very impactful to me to see data because we live in a world where facts matter we are on oil and gas well sites pumping fluids at high rates and high pressures and if facts get messed up people can die what i appreciate about your book is it gives us facts to go out and speak to people about so if if you could take a minute and help me synthesize my messages as well and hopefully others in in this this topic of uh humble human impacts or influences that would be very helpful thank you so humans influence the climate in several different ways but the two that are most relevant here are the emission of greenhouse gases mostly co2 but also methane and nitrous oxide and some more exotic stuff that's not so important and aerosols and the greenhouse gases enhance the ability of the atmosphere to intercept the heat that's coming off the planet the planet really runs by absorbing sunlight and then radiating almost an equal amount of heat back into space that has to be balanced to within better than a percent and the atmosphere helps warm the planet by intercepting some of that heat and re-radiating it before it finally gets out of here we add greenhouse gases the atmosphere and it improves the heat intercepting ability a little bit only one percent what we've done to date and you might ask how can a one percent thing make a difference it does because the temperature rises we're talking about of a few degrees are one percent of the temperature of the earth if you measure it in kelvin which is the right way to measure it for physicists but there are many other influences on the planet beyond the aerosols and the greenhouse gases variations in the solar output long-term cycles in the climate system el nino is the most famous example every couple years but there are longer ones that are 70 or 80 years and untangling all of that to understand what the response is of the planet to rising greenhouse gases is the challenge and it's really tough okay because it's a chaotic system it's got long-term cycles we have poor data both in time and space the ocean is where climate really happens because it's the long-term memory of the system we have terrible ocean data at depth it's starting to get better with floats so it's really a challenge and anybody who says i know what's going to go on is just to quote one number which is in the book there's a number called the equilibrium climate sensitivity which is how sensitive is the climate to doubling co2 and that number is uncertain in the last ipcc report seven years ago it was uncertain from one and a half degrees to four and a half degrees and the current generation of models it's like from one and a half up to six degrees so the models have gotten even less certain as they've gotten more sophisticated so this is a tough job it's a great scientific problem but i would not want to be making trillion dollar decisions on the basis of this all right thank you all right thank you round of applause for our wonderful guests

Channel: Liberty Energy

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Length: 64min 33sec (3873 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 29 2021