The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World

welcome everyone if I could please bring us to attention you're making your way through the food line we're gonna go ahead and try to get started more or less on schedule my name is Doug Kaiser and it's my privilege to introduce you to our speaker for this evenings event before I begin let me first acknowledge the co-sponsoring organizations for the event the Yale climate and energy Institute and the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy this talk is part of our climate and energy bookshelf series in which were featuring speakers who published recent or forthcoming books in the areas of climate change and energy policy the remaining events in this series include a talk by Jedidiah heard Purdy next week on April 5th and by Sarah Craig off on April 18th I hope you'll be able to join us for those events as well tonight we're extraordinarily delighted to welcome dr. Daniel Yergin back to the Yale campus dr. Jurgen is a highly respected authority on energy international politics and economics in selecting him as one of the hundred people who matter worldwide Time magazine said if there's one person whose opinion matters more than any other on global energy markets it's Daniel Yergin the New York Times described him as America's most influential energy pundit fortune said he's one of the planet's foremost thinkers about energy and its implications he is known around the world for his book the prize the epic quest for oil money and power which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize it became a number one New York Times bestseller it was translated into 17 languages and it became the basis for an eight-hour PBS BBC television series his new bestseller which he will talk to us tonight about is called the quest energy security and the remaking of the modern world the book has been called a masterly piece of work by The Economist it's been hailed by the Financial Times as a triumph the New York Times said the book is necessary reading for CEOs conservationists lawmakers generals spies tech geeks thriller writers and many others any spies in the audience tonight Bill Gates summed up his review by simply saying this is a bent dick book and during a recent appearance to discuss the book on The Colbert Report doctor Jurgen was lauded for helping Stephen Colbert understand why peak wind and running out of Sun were not serious impediments to the deployment of clean energy educated at Yale and at Cambridge University where he received his PhD dr. Jurgen is vice chairman of IHS and founder of IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates one of the leading energy of advisory firms in the world he's been awarded the United States Energy Award for lifelong achievements in energy and the promotion of international understanding the International Association for energy economics honored dr. Jurgen for his outstanding contributions to the profession of energy economics and to its literature he serves on the US Secretary of Energy advisory board and he chaired the US Department of Energy's Task Force on strategic energy research and development I could go on and on in fact I spent most of this afternoon trying to winnow his achievements down to just that list that I gave you let me instead conclude simply by saying that all of us here today are fortunate to be able to hear one of the leading thinkers in the world talk about the leading issues driving the world please join me in welcoming dr. Daniel you're gonna thank you thank you very much for that more than kind and generous introduction I appreciate it I'm very glad to be here I've learned something that it's much better to have the food at the beginning of the event then at the end of the event and impressed to see that you did mention the Colbert Report and those I bet most people know the Colbert Report it's a terrifying show to go on because you know he's going to make fun of you and but I did one thing they told me before I go on is remember he's the comedian and you're not so don't make any jokes and I was fine on everything until he as you pointed out expressed grave concern about peak wind and what to do about it and that that's kind of the point where I lost it thank you very much for the opportunity to be here to have this discussion with you I want to thank the Center for Environmental Law and Policy and also the energy the climate and energy Institute at Yale which I'm pleased to be on the advisory board of and it's and I really want to thank Dean Robert post who I've known for a very long time who very graciously invited me last autumn and said it would be a great thing to come up and really this has been the centerpiece of my visit to Yale so thank you about very much and also although he's not here I've known Dan Esty for a very long time and I know keep part of the program so this is an opportunity and I thought what I would do this evening is use kind of the quest to talk about some of the major issues in energy but start talking you know use frame a little bit what I was trying to do in the book when I finished the prize which Doug referred to I wrote it was right at the time of the Gulf crisis and I wrote that you know the modern and mesmerizing alchemy of petroleum would continue and we would continue to be in the age of oil but that was a couple of decades ago and with the passage of time was evident how so had changed since then when I finished that book there was something called the Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore China was an oil exporter using oil exports to help finance its economic revolution under dong-chil paying climate change had no traction as a political issue it really was hardly an issue at all no one had ever heard of shale gas if it had any name at all it was known as an economic gas because it would never be economic and oh by the way oil prices were gonna be $20 a barrel so much kept changing and indeed right up as I was finishing the book Fukushima happened the nuclear accident that changed what was going to be a nuclear Renaissance into kind of nuclear patchwork in terms of development and the era what people call the Arab Spring and now call the Arab upheaval unfolding upsetting the strategic balance in the Middle East and still very unclear in terms of what the consequences are for the region and therefore the energy supplies of the region so so much it changed so it seemed like you know good idea to write a book and the other thing I wanted to do was look at the whole energy spectrum and try and understand how these things all fit together and so it was really a learning process for me to undertake this book as the prize is really a process of discovery of seeing how things fit together now I find that when you write a book like this it's very helpful to find what I call the to myself at least the emblematic personalities the people who help carry the story and in the prize there were more sort of swashbuckling entrepreneurs and risk takers I have certainly some of those in this book but this is a geekier book actually among the many heroes of the scientists or the heroes of this book and there's one person in the book to kind of give you an example a chemist at Caltech named Arry Hagan Schmitt I checked with the two chemists in the room because I want to say no one has heard of him and I chat wanted to check to see if they had heard of him they hadn't heard of him so I feel fairly confident saying nobody had heard of him at this point but once a very distinguished professor won many awards a great chemist his particular interest was understanding flavours so we figured out where the flavour for garlic came from wine onions he's the man who figured out the active agent in marijuana and it's alleged as a statue to him somewhere in California for that effect but he was obsessed actually with the pineapple and understanding the flavor of pineapple and he was working away in his laboratory at Caltech at the end of the 1940s and he went outside probably for a smoke but into what was supposed to be that beautiful California air that Bob and I remember from our childhood which he saw sometimes saw but instead he encountered what he called that stinking cloud of smog and at that time there's a huge debate as to where if smog came from and he said you know I'm a chemist and I can figure it out and he said he figured it out in the first nickel he figured out that he came from the improperly combusted gasoline and automobile engines and so out of that then started a process to regulate emissions that well-known environmentalist Ronald Reagan set up the California Air Resources Board which is probably the most powerful agency that most people have never heard of since it sort of regulates the world automobile industry and the first chairman was era Hagan Smith and started this process that led to the institution of the requirement for zero emission vehicles ie electric cars and so you know if you look at the Chevy Volts that are coming on the road today you kind of find that they connect all the way back to air E Hagins MIT and understanding where smog came from and kind of what I was doing in this book is throughout is trying to understand how things happened how they came about another one another example was a young scientists who actually graduate it was quite a good degree in science but the market you know young people today know it's hard to get jobs and the market for academics in his field was not good he started doing tutoring to try and earn some money didn't get any customers he advertised free tutoring as free samples of children didn't get any customers his father wrote a letter to a scientist said you know my son grows more unhappy day by day and he believes that his career has been permanently derailed that of course was Albert Einstein he did get a job in the Patent Office and Bern and in that remarkable summer 1905 wrote five papers that changed the world one of them about the photoelectric effect so he really laid out the the the theory of solar energy of photoelectric of solar panels and so forth it took the space race with the Soviet Union in 1958 to actually get them put to use for the first time as an alternative to the batteries that were going up in the satellites after the Sputnik and so that was 1958 and here we are today in 2013 more than a hundred years after Einstein's paper and solar has clearly made great progress costs to come down the largest solar company in the world just went bankrupt in the last few days as noted I even on the front page of the Yale Daily News and it's growing but it's still a small business and so kind of driving home the fact that it takes a long time in the energy business for things to change it doesn't happen quickly just a couple of other examples of the personalities who are important those who have read the book will know that this is the only book on energy that's ever been written and that ever will be written I'm sure that talks about the worst moment in Ronald Reagan's career as an actor yes I'll tell you about it he after his head of the screen guilty couldn't get work and so you know he was sort of washed up and so the only work he could get was doing stand-up comedy fronting for a singing group called the Continentals in Las Vegas it was pretty good at the stroke telling but actually couldn't he hated it thought his careers over comes back to Los Angeles phone rings it's his agent Ronny and he has this job for him as some in the audience will remember as the spokesman for General Electric he signs this contract which today would be the equivalent of a million dollars a year to go around just give speeches for General Electric in his contract by the way it says he will not fly because he writes at the time I'm one of those prehistoric people have a fear of flying he overcame doubt when he got Air Force One it made it easier to to deal with but he the reason I write about it is because at that point the United States electricity demand was growing in the way that Chinese energy demand or Indian energy demand is growing at 10 or 11 percent a year and it was very challenging for the United States to meet that and one of the reasons that we had the development of nuclear power to try and cope with it and the the relevance is what we see in the emerging markets today the kind of challenges that assured that they have the electric power that they need is now something that's not only of national importance but has global impact I'll just mention two other people that had helped tell the story one is I sort of said well where did wind come from where did the modern wind business come from and I kind of asked around a lot and everything triangulated on this one guy named Jim Nelson and so I tracked him down and and asked him about it and he told the story of how he spent Chris New Year's Eve 1981 atop a wind turbine tower in the Tehachapi pass in a blizzard in California trying to get this wind turbine up by midnight and the reason it needed to be up by midnight is because that's when the tax credits expired so he gets it up and then it falls apart but he got the tax credit but he says there's got to be a better way of doing this so he goes off to Europe he thinks you know the the Dutch have had windmills for a long time so he says what we'll find him in Holland but in fact he ends up in Denmark and discovers is this industry the sturdy Danish agricultural machinery industry makes much stronger wind turbines he starts to import them to California California becomes the epicenter as well as the birthplace of the modern wind industry 90% of the wind turbines at one point are in California and so that's where the industry begins and generous tax credits and everything and so you know the question of where did the modern wind industry come from the answer is it's kind of the result of the marriage of the sturdy Danish agricultural machinery industry with California tax credits that's why we have a wind industry one well I'll save that one other personality because there's one other who's very important but so those are some of the ways I tell this story but you know those who have you and their many here who labor on books or even writing your your papers know that the you have to stand back and say what's it all about and the challenge you know in a way I was finding they're kind of both the easiest of the hardest thing to write are the introduction to conclusions because you have to decide what is it all about and what do you carry away and so really I realized from this whole enterprise I think it's really about what seemed to me the three big questions about energy today the first is the question about growth that is there we go through these cycles where we're running out of energy where we have abundance of energy and we've seen that again and again five years ago Peak Oil the notion we were kind of running out of oil was dominant and and and I think that that belief system kind of fed on itself in terms of the markets today there's more confidence about the physical supply not necessarily what happens above ground but on the other hand we know that there's a challenge and the challenge is a economic growth of the emerging markets of these nations of income and their need for energy and the challenge of meeting it that probably two decades from now the world would be using somewhere between thirty and forty percent more energy and how's that going to be achieved and what's that's going to be a mix and that of course is a subject that for a lot of people as to what that mix will be in the future but so that first question is just are the the abundance of supplies or the shortage of supplies and you know I would was struck when people talked about peak oil a few years ago we're running out said it's true we're running out of oil it's actually the fifth time that we've run out of oil first time would run out of oil was in the 1880s when the head of Standard Oil of New Jersey said I will drink every barrel of oil you find west of the Mississippi they found oil in Texas Oklahoma he forgot the promise he moved on from that but nevertheless we've seen these cycles that we've gone through again and again and then things like technology and price and new areas adjust and that's what we've seen in the last five years the second big question if that's the question is there enough the second big question is energy secure and I realized actually sort of in one of the sessions I had with undergraduates here that in a way what I mean I was brought into the energy field by crisis by geopolitical crisis and that probably has shaped my view the question of energy security and the traditional issues of energy security are still very much on the agenda the same questions that burst onto the scene decades ago are still there today with the confrontation and the standoff with Iran and the question of what's going to happen there and it's the same question again is the Strait of Hormuz going to be shut or not and not long ago the Chairman the US Joint Chiefs of Staff said yes the Iranians can shut the Strait of Hormuz and then we can open it I mean in other words you know every both sides have been through that a great deal and you know for the last several years people said each year is going to be the critical year on Iran I still find that people who are deeply engaged think this probably might be we're more or less than the critical getting close to the endgame one way or the other so the traditional energy security issues are there but they're kind of three new dimensions to it one is just physical security in terms of terrorism and things like that and what happened about six weeks ago in the deep in the Sahara Desert in Algeria where the gas plant was taken hostage by jihadis and a number of people were really executed and but the aim of those people was to actually blow up this plant and create you know just a huge fireball of disaster and I know that what that has done is lifted the concern about physical security everywhere in the world about the energy system and energy infrastructure the second aspect of it is kind of what call into what I call an integrated energy shock and the first one I think that we had at least in this country was Katrina and Rita in 2004 and we just had it again with superstorm superstorm sandy in in the mid-atlantic and the Northeast and that's a situation where everything is down at the same time you don't have power you don't have fuel you mergency vehicles can't get fuels from gasoline stations because the gasoline stations don't have electric power to get the fuel out and you have the immobilization of a region and I kind of regard these as kind of warnings of what can happen and so this question of preparing for these integrated shocks so that when they do happen there's a greater resilience I have a former colleague who was one of the key people in the city of New York dealing with it and he said you know when superstorm sandy struck New York he said we were in the fog of war we had no information we didn't understand what was happening I know New Haven was affected and then of course the blizzard and this just is a big warning when a region is done that the third thing that's new is the cyber threat and it's been recognized certainly for the last few years but it's now at a higher level and what happened in Saudi Arabia last summer when 35,000 computers were wiped clean probably from Iran was a huge warning the isolation the wall worked it did not affect production but it could have been if it affected production it would have created a panic in the world and I think for for the energy industry this was a real wake-up call former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warned of the risk of a cyber Pearl Harbor and then in the in a State of the Union address President Obama the number one issue and that he cited in terms of cyber threat was the threats to the grid so there is I think this kind of sense that you know that that there's this vulnerability there in the system and and I know the electric power industry the oil and gas industry trying to cope and prepare but there is a sense of great alarm about this and the nature of the risk the third big question is of course the environment question the climate change question and it seems to me that climate change did not really gain political traction I mean there was a Kyoto treaty in the late 1990s but really not until the turn of this century that it really gained the kind of political traction that we now see where it has become such a key defining issue for the entire energy sector so it's those three questions that that kind of are the three prisms that I guess I look at energy through and then you can look at the kind of specific developments that are happening in the world that fit into that and there are a couple that a few that I want to kind of site that are really important you know we have when people move into an office building they have something to call the build-out and the build-out is you decide where the windows will be and where the Xerox room will be and where the offices will be in all those things I know we have here from China I think China is going through something that's never happened before the build out of a whole country that is 20 million people a year moving from countryside to city and when you do that that means you need energy you need energy for transportation you need energy for work you need energy for building and so that kind of creates the this this embodies what's happening with rising incomes and emerging markets and for me what kind of the simple numbers that tell the difference of how things are changing is automobile sales in China versus the United States in 2017 million new cars were sold in China in the United States and two million in China ten years later 17 million in China and 12 million in the United States and that kind of change is being replicated across the world and is where the real demand growth is and so we all know the phrase globalization but I think one of the things that I focus on is the globalization of demand it used to be when you would look at energy balances people would write about oacd and then they had ro w and ro w was the rest of the world well now the rest of the world is actually using more oil than the OECD countries and that's the kind of shift that's happening the second area where this shows up is in terms on is on the geopolitics and the security issues and despite the growth of supplies elsewhere in the world the Middle East is still the kind of the center of world supplies and there are many factors there that create question marks for it as I said obviously the unfolding of the Arab and evil in the region the youth bulge the distribution of population I have a chart in the book that compares the distribution of population in industrial countries and the Middle East and it's you know it's very dramatic where you see this large young population that doesn't have jobs and doesn't have opportunities and is a huge source of uncertainty in those countries clearly al Qaeda it's affiliates and that's what was at work in Algeria and then Syria which not an important oil producer itself but what happens in Syria the results there will affect the whole region beginning with Iraq Turkey Israel but perhaps the Gulf as well and then the question of Iran is as I said we have sanctions that are in place on Iran they've worked more successfully than was thought but that doesn't mean that there's going to be a some kind of settlement to address the issue of Iran's nuclear ambitions and so I think that just kind of hangs over the whole region it goes in and out of the news so the geopolitics I want to turn to the technology side of it you know because I think for me as I think about kind of other themes and takeaways I mean the two things that I feel that I've learned from this is one you know from this whole enterprise on energy one is that price really matters I had lunch today with a group of economists and they thought that was a really good conclusion to come to it took me a while to get there and the other is technology really matters and so you know wind and solar are when we talk about renewables it's wind solar and biofuels those are the main things out there right now in terms of electricity it's wind and solar and I describe the birth of the wind industry then the Renewable industry really went through something that people who are part of that industry referred to as the valley of death in the late 1990s where people hung on by their fingernails and then this rebirth occurred and the rebirth came about partly because of climate change concerns partly because the need for energy to meet growing energy needs and partly technological progress because you just realized that those industries of the 1970s 1980s and 1990s were very immature industries so and then Germany was really the country that stimulated the rebirth of renewables and it's a it's a big business now last year was a hundred and sixty seven billion dollar business however with that said it's gone through it's had a period of great optimism and I think it's now under more pressure in an age of austerity because while costs have come down dramatically it still does depend upon government budgets and kind of there was kind of a green bubble that started around 2004 or 2005 and I was very struck by a comment this week that the head of CalPERS the largest pension fund in the United States said because they had a really aggressive program to invest in renewables and the chief investment officer said it's turned out for them to be a noble way to lose money kind of a stark phrase about it Teli so you know we're in another period and I think a lot of the things that have been launched now at the technology frontiers and some of you are involved in they're gonna take ten or twenty years to come to fruition but so I think it's a period of kind of consolidation and pressure for the Renewable industry those industries were born in the 70s and 80s if you said what was the biggest technological the biggest innovation in energy since 2000 is shale gas you know it's just in terms of its scale and its impact if you're measuring it just by its impact and this is another really remarkable story of how it came about and again it's sort of one man sort of a Steve Jobs of hydrocarbons I guess we'd say this man named George P Mitchell who is a Texas not an oilman but a gas man and he believed in natural gas and in the early about 1982-83 he read an article as I understand it that suggested that you couldn't extract shale gas from shale rock and this was considered crazy but he also had a contract he had to deliver gas to Chicago and his fields were running out so he had an economic incentive as well and he kind of had enough control over his company to kind of his a very stubborn man and so the guys working from said George you're wasting your time you're wasting your money he said it's money I'm gonna do it and he continued to do it but took 15 years to get the breakthrough 15 years to get the breakthrough in hydraulic fracturing and then it took they needed capital so the business got then purchased by another company called Devon which had another technology which was horizontal drilling and the two things came together in 2003 sort of proof of concept and from there it grew but it wasn't very visible people thought we were the United States was going to import large amounts of LNG and spend a hundred billion dollars a year to do it lo and behold 2008 suddenly instead of continuing to go down US gas production goes up and people say you know my goodness this is uh this is not what we expected and that's when the large companies enter the field so today it's really it's gone from being 2% of our gas supply in a decade ago to 37% it's changed the economics it's brought down gas prices dramatically it's brought down electricity prices as well it has also well I should maybe I'll pause in the environmental aspect so as it's kind of as everybody knows it started become a subject of environmental controversy so President Obama had a commission set up to look at the environmental side of it and I was on it as chaired by John Deutsche had been the Provost of MIT and Deputy Secretary of Defense etc and we look at the different environmental questions we have hold lots of hearings site visits and everything and come to the conclusion that that the concern about chemicals as a scientist on it say is extremely unlikely to have any effect that the three main environmental questions are what do you do with wastewater what about air pollution air quality and what about Community Impact lots of you know trucks coming into community and say that each of these is subject to remediation each of them is subject to regulation each of them is subject to best practices and technology and kind of that's what's unfolding as we talk now there's a big argument about whether the state should regulate regulate this or the federal government should rate like this and that to me at least to the Americans in the audience it kind of reminds me as I sitting in all these hearings two years ago I kept thinking of the Federalist Papers we talked about there was a role of the national government and the states and I think it's kind of that argument goes on but so there has been a lot of addressing a lot of effort some companies along with the Environmental Defense Fund have now set up a center just a week ago for sustainable shale development I think it's called to kind of focus on best practices what you need to do about water what you need to do about air quality what you need to do about your diesel engines trying to address this range of questions but that develops in but then there's once people see it's working for sure shale gas they said well what about oil so they go they go to this place called the Bakken in North Dakota which is just you know just a few barrels of oil and start developing it and suddenly we see that the same technology is really dramatically changing the position of the US in terms of oil in ways that would not have been thought of five years ago just wouldn't have been thought of US oil production is up 40 percent since 2008 40 percent what does that mean that's as much as Nigeria produces in its entirety so this is a big number and is starting to you know we're seeing a rebalancing of world oil as a result of that as well as other developments and I'll talk about in the Western Hemisphere but it's interesting from a political point of view and an economic point of view to see the kind of shift that's gone on because the focus and I can see it in Washington and I can see it it was very evident in the in the presidential campaign the narrative has changed to focus on the economic significance of what's unfolding because the numbers 1.7 million jobs supported by what's happening in this unconventional oil and gas revolution the United States becoming more competitive I know when I was in Europe and you talked to you know leaders of European business very concerned about their ability to compete now and and very loath to make new investments in Europe there are other reasons too but partly because of also this loss of competitiveness as the u.s. because of low-cost energy so it's kind of having this impact on the global economy now the question is is this unconventional revolution just a North American Revolution I think it varies around the world and some countries I think I'd see my my observation is China is a country that has greater resources in this than part of the United States won't happen overnight we'll go ahead interestingly Saudi Arabia is investing in shale gas so that they can use in electricity and have more oil to export Ukraine Mexico has great potential some countries have said no like France England has said yes but it's going to be slow to develop I think in the rest of the world but it is there's no reason that technology is going to stay here so there are three three things that are happening the Western Hemisphere that are changing oil and the changing and rebalancing of world oil in a very interesting way one is what I've already said what's happening in US oil and now you know I don't know if it's gonna happen but people are predicting 2017 2020 that the United States will be producing more oil than Russia more oil than Saudi Arabia I think it whether it gets there or not I don't know but it's going to be a horse race and you know that wasn't expected the second thing is the growth of oil sands the amount of oil sands in Canada now the output is greater than Libya was producing before the Civil War and maybe in the question period we'll have a word about the Keystone pipeline because I know it's on people's mind and the third is what's happening in Brazil with with the pre-salt and Brazil now has the capacity to be producing more oil than Venezuela and being the oil powerhouse so this rebalancing of world oil that's now happening has a lot of geostrategic connotations it's early but it's you know people are struggling to understand and what it might mean you know so these are some of the dimensions I talked about there's one other I want to talk about and it's something that has always been a huge focus for me which is the energy efficiency side of the equation what happens on the demand side and it's something that I've focused on over the years and in fact us like other countries has made a lot of progress the u.s. is twice as energy efficient as it was a few decades ago same for Japan other countries but and the potential I think is there we have tools that we didn't have before and I think of energy efficiency is really an energy source and it's just a competitive with others but there's one big problem with energy efficiency and it was brought home to me by the European energy commissioner when we're at a big renewable energy conference in Washington and he said you know renewables are great but boy we could sure get a lot of impacts quick from energy efficiencies that just there's just one problem and I said what's the problem he said there's no red ribbon to cut there's no photo opportunity you there's nothing you know beautiful windmill you can photograph you can photograph a plan there's nothing to photograph although I did actually in the quest put it in a picture of chrome Hall as an example of an energy-efficient building and it's very very handsome building so I think these are some of the to me kind of the major themes that are unfolding you know there's a big question for everybody what kind of cars will people drive in ten years will they be more efficient automobiles well there'd be hybrid will they be electric cars will they be will they be natural gas vehicles we had a conference a couple of weeks ago and I had the CEO of General Motors there asked him that question and his answers I don't know you know you got to invest in all of them because this is moving but I think the fact that our automobile fleet has to doubt about double fuel efficiency is a really huge thing in this country so I mentioned when I started that you know the issue figuring out how you want to what do you want to leave readers where then what do you want kind of leave yourself with and this issue of innovation is really the one that I find most compelling because when you look at this broad history of energy over the last couple centuries it's all about innovations that come along that aren't expected that changed things and I found a character to help held that story and his name is sadi carnot engineers will know the Carnot cycle but but he himself is not no known he died quite young in a cholera epidemic and his papers were burned because of that but he was a scientist and engineer and in 1824 he published a paper called the motive force of power and he wanted to explain how the steam engine worked he wanted to do it because he's the scientist and engineer he also wanted to do it because he was a soldier his father had actually been Napoleon's Minister of War and he thought that one region that Britain had defeated France and then the poliana quartz was because of its mastery of technology and he wanted to teach the French to bring them up the learning curve on this and so it's interesting that even then energy and geopolitics were entwined and I found this wonderful phrase in which he talked about what he said that what's happened unfolded with the steam engine what he called the heat machine and combustibles he said was a revolution in human affairs and revolution in human civilization and it seems to me that that really is in many ways the story of of energy in a way to look at it and it's one that actually fills me with optimism because of work that people here and many others who are here in this room and others are working on that the that we will that there's no reason that innovation is going to stop we're gonna see breakthroughs we're gonna see things differently and so that this and that we have something else going for us too that we didn't have before which is the globalization of innovation it's not just a u.s. project and maybe a Western your project it's a Chinese project it's an Indian project so there's a lot more talent involved in looking at these questions and this is talking to some you can work virtually around the world on these problems in a way that wasn't possible before so this kind of great revolution in human affairs I'm convinced will continue and it has to continue in order to meet the challenges of the future and the needs of a growing world economy Thanks

Channel: Yale University

Views: 26,598

Keywords: Global political and economic change and conflict, Energy Security, Computer Security (Industry)

Id: M_Y8Jy2JBf8

Length: 42min 3sec (2523 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 03 2013