 Does the world need to rapidly convert to using renewable energy to save the planet from global warming? That was the topic of a SOHO forum debate, held at the Sheen Center in New York City on Monday, August 15, 2022. Andrew Desler, the director of the Texas Center for Climate Studies at Texas A&M University, argued that fossil fuels are endangering life on the planet by causing global warming through greenhouse gas emissions. He contended that solar and wind represent a safe, reliable and cost-effective means to decarbonize the electric grid. Stephen Coonan, who served as Undersecretary for Science at the Department of Energy during the Obama Administration, argued that making large and rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions aren't necessary to protect the Earth. He also contended that doing so isn't cost-effective and that it's immoral. The debate was moderated by SOHO forum director Gene Epstein. The affirmative resolution reads, climate science compels us to make large and rapid reductions in climate emissions. Andrew Desler for the affirmative. Andrew, please come to the stage. Speaking for the negative, Stephen Coonan. Stephen, please come to the stage. Jane, please close the voting. Andrew, you have 17 and a half minutes to speak for the resolution. Take it away, Andrew. Thank you, and if you have a crinkly loss, it won't bother me, so feel free to pop it out. Can you see my slides? Okay, so as I was saying, this is 30,000 years of history, the last 20,000, the next 10,000. This is the last glacial maximum, so that's ice sheets, mastodons, thousands of feet thick over North America, and then you warm up out of it into their glacial, and then this pink band is the fossil fuel era. In the long span of Earth's history, fossil fuels are going to be this brief spark in our history. So it's only a couple hundred years, you know, maybe we'll stop burning fossil fuels in a few decades, maybe in a few centuries, but we're not going to be burning fossil fuels in a few thousand years. There just really aren't enough recoverable fossil fuels. So it's a couple hundred years and you see the temperature is going to spike, and then emissions will end and the temperature will not cool off very quickly. It'll take 100,000 years for temperatures to come back down. So what we do during this pink band is going to be irreversible, basically. Now, my argument here is that this is a tremendous amount of warming that should scare the crap out of you. All right, now let me explain why I think that. So the difference between an ice age and interglacials, 10 degrees Fahrenheit, and there's really no dispute about this number. Lots of people have worked on it. We really understand it. If you cool the planet by 10 degrees Fahrenheit, global average, you end up with thousands of feet of ice over North America, sea levels 300 feet lower. Now, if you look at what we might do, six degrees, 60% of an ice age. Now, it's not in the same direction. We're not cooling towards an ice age, but we're warming past an ice age, and it's going to remake the planet. And many of you, I see a lot of young people in the audience, you're going to live through this. Okay, so you have skin in the game. I don't have as much skin in the game. I don't plan on living through the 21st century, but my kids do and a lot of you all do. Now, so this is enough to basically reshape the planet. When you walk out your front door in 2100, a six degree warmer planet, you're not going to recognize it. So how do we know this? First of all, we've already warmed about two degrees. This black dot is where we are now. This is a little ice age. We're about two degrees above that. And we can already see extremely big impacts just from two degrees, one third of the ultimate warming. Oh, and I should say, when I talk about six degrees, that's kind of a business as usual. If we decide we want to burn lots of fossil fuels, it's going to be more than that. And if we're wise, it can be a lot less than that. And that's essentially what we're trying to decide in this debate. Now, this is what we already see with two degrees. You know, you see the US Southwest, Lake Mead, Lake Powell's running out of water, literally. Hurricane Harvey, unbelievable. I lived through that in college station about 90 miles from Houston. I can tell you it was an unbelievable rainstorm. Now, oh, in the Pacific Northwest heat wave, lit in Canada, 121 degrees, and next day it burned down. Now, there's an entire field of science called extreme event attribution where they can go into these events and they can ask the question, did climate change play a role? Because climate change doesn't cause an event. Hurricane Harvey wasn't caused by climate change. But climate change was essentially like steroids for Hurricane Harvey. It made it worse. It's like a steroids can turn a regular fly ball into a home run. Steroids turned Hurricane Harvey, which would have been a severe storm and all likelihood into a catastrophe. And we can go in and we can ask, what fraction of Hurricane Harvey did climate change cause? And a bunch of people have done this and the answer you basically get is something like 20% of the rainfall was due to climate change. So it turned what would have been a serious storm into a catastrophe. And because the impacts are non-linear, the last inch does a lot more damage than the first inch of rain. It's responsible for a lot more than 20% of the damage. And this is, again, with two degrees of warming. Now, it's easy to look at this and say, well, you know, we'll deal with it. But let me, and so I'm going to do, I'm going to violate SCICOM rule 101. I'm going to show you a slide that has a lot of words on it. This is a paragraph from a article from a Rolling Stone article by Jeff Goddell called Can We Survive Extreme Heat? I want to read this because I think it's powerful. And when I read it, it had a big impact on me. And this is what climate change looks like at the individual level. So on hot days, Juarez's small apartment feels like a cave. Because she has poor credit, her utility has given her a card reader that plugs into an outlet that she has to feed like a jukebox to keep the power on. Juarez turns on her AC only a few hours a day. Still, her electric bill can run $500 a month during the summer, which is more than she pays for rent. She shows me the meter on her card reader. She has $49 worth of credit on it, enough for a few more days of power. And when that runs out, I am in trouble. This is what climate change adaptation looks like. When people say, oh, we'll deal with climate change, this is what it looks like. And it's essentially normalizing suffering. Her liberty has been stripped from her. All she does is work to survive. She can't do anything to improve her life. And if you say, well, you know, we'll deal with climate change, you're normalizing this the same way we normalized a million Americans dying during COVID. You know, during COVID, you know, someone over here dies like, oh, well, that person was old. It's a shame, but you know, what are you going to do? And someone over here dies. Well, they were obese. You know, what are you going to do? And you know, when it comes to adaptation, when people say we'll adapt to climate change, they look at situations like this, like, oh, well, you know, you know, she has, she's essentially gotten her electricity turned off and she died because of extreme heat. What are you going to do? And if a town runs out of water, you know, what are you going to do? We need power. And you know, there's a strong moral component to looking at climate change adaptation in this way. And you've got to look at the individuals here. Now, let me summarize sort of the climate change adaptation situation with this slide right here. So this is a probability distribution and it runs from, oops, sorry about that. It runs from really bad over here to really good over here and the y-axis is the probability distribution. And I've drawn this curve right here because my estimate of what the probability of a good versus bad outcome if we don't deal with climate change, we just let it run and say we'll adapt to it. And the way to read this again is if you pick some value on the x-axis, you ask what's the probability of this occurring? It's sort of this value on the axis. Now, this is my schematic I drew. It's not quantitative, but it's consistent with my reading of the literature in economics and in climate impacts. And there's a couple important things to note about this, two important things. First one is that there's no probability of a good outcome with climate change. Decades of work on this has shown concretely that climate change is going to make you worse off than a world without climate change. You're going to be worse off. The only question is how much worse off? And that's something that I doubt Dr. Kuna will argue with. Perhaps he will, but I doubt he will. Climate change is going to make us worse off. And if you ask the question, how much worse off? This is sort of my reading of the most recent literature on this. Now, about 15 years ago, there were a bunch of economists who said climate change won't be that bad, a few percent of GDP. That's really no longer a mainstream view, although there are some economists who still say that. I think on average, it's going to be pretty bad. But, and this is important, there's a non-negligible chance that it's going to be terrible. And by terrible, I mean all of us are not in case to me, but my kids and my grandkids, they're going to be war as. They're going to be spending their life just trying to stay alive, you know, trying to run their air conditioner, trying to pay for seawalls, trying to pay for freshwater infrastructure. That's the world they're going to live in. They're going to be stripped of their liberty. If you care about liberty, this is not a free world. The world of worst case scenario of climate change is not a world where people have liberty to succeed. Now, let me show you a quote from William Nordhaus, who's a Nobel Prize winning economist. And in his Nobel Prize acceptance talk, he said, technological change raised humans out of stone age living conditions. Climate change threatens in the most extreme scenarios to return us economically once we came. And that's the risk of climate change. It is we're rolling the dice. Now, I think I'd be remiss if I didn't point out all of the other problems with fossil fuels. And I talked to Gene about if I could deviate from the resolution and he said that was fine. But let me just say that air pollution from fossil fuels kills millions of people, millions of people every year. Now, we've normalized this just the way we normalize all other disasters because it's mainly poor communities that are getting hammered by this. So, you know, a poor community lives downwind of a coal-fired power plant. So yeah, what you gonna do? You know, they don't put coal-fired power plants upwind of rich communities. In addition, because fossil fuels are a globally priced commodity, we are subject to whipsaws in price. And again, this is extremely economically painful, especially to people at the bottom of the economic ladder who spend the biggest fraction of their money on energy. And lastly, because of the importance of keeping stable prices, the U.S. has torqued our foreign policy in order to try to stabilize the price of fossil fuels at enormous cost, both in prestige and in money and in lives. I mean, you know, we've invaded the Middle East twice in the last 30 years. And you know, Joe Biden had to go to Saudi Arabia and beg them to increase production. I mean, no American president should have to do that. And yet fossil fuels make us do that. All right, now, to be clear, I don't want people to use less energy. We have billions of people that need to increase their energy usage. So the real question comes down to, is there a plausible alternative to this? You can't just say, let's not use fossil fuels. You have to say, let's not use fossil fuels and let's use something else. Now, something else is going to be wind and solar. So there are three questions you need to ask here. First, is there enough wind and solar to power our society? I'm not going to talk anymore about that and to say yes. There's 100,000 terawatts of solar energy, you know, thousands of times more than we need. Can you produce a reliable grid with wind and solar? Now, one of the big myths, I can't tell you how many times I run into it, people say, well, you know, the sun doesn't shine at night. How can you possibly produce a grid that produces reliable energy, you know, with intermittent power? And the answer is you can do that. And I'm not going to talk too much about it, but feel free to ask me questions. But I would say that there's been an enormous amount of research done on this. So Google these reports. They explain how you do that. And just briefly, what you do is you basically electrify everything for almost every activity we can electrify it. You use mainly wind and solar. Feel free to ask me why I don't say you can use nuclear. You do have some dispatchable power to counterbalance the intermittency. Use demand response, which also counterbalances the intermittency. That just means you ask people to like not do that run their dishwasher when there's when you don't have excess power. You also have long-term storage. If we don't really have now we're developing and you have to enhance transmission. But anyway, I'm not going to talk about it in detail, but feel free to ask me about that. So then how much will it cost? So this is really the question it comes down to. And let me just start out by saying, and this shocks people, today's cheapest power is wind and solar. So this is from a Lazard levelized cost of energy analysis from 2019. And you see that natural gas is $56 per megawatt hour and then onshore wind and solar is about 40. And this was several years old. Wind and solar are cheaper today. And natural gas is much more expensive because of the Ukrainian war. Again, this is part of the variability of the cost of fossil fuels I was talking about. And yeah, I'll show this. I'll skip the next one. So this shows a plot of what's being connected to the grid in Texas. And ERCOT, who runs the Texas grid, they publish this information. You can see solar is the dominant amount of energy that's being connected to the grid and batteries a second. And again, the people in Texas that are generating energy, they're not Burke and Stock wearing hippies. They're people who want to make money. And you make money with solar energy. It is now the cheapest power in the history of the world. And so, and there are other reasons, the systemic reasons for why you do solar over wind in Texas now. So it is the cheapest energy. And I'll just sort of say that with natural gas prices so expensive, wind and solar are saving Texans. This is from the Rocky Mountain Institute, saving Texas $20 million a day. So in some sense, the energy transitions are already happening and it's already saving us money. Whereas climate change is already happening and it's already costing us money. So these things are already happening. All right, so, and I'll skip China. China is going full bore with renewables. Ask me about China if people are interested. It's actually quite an interesting story there. All right, so this is my last slide and let me kind of summarize our choice. So we are, I talked about climate change. So climate change is a losing bet. If we decide to do nothing about climate change and roll the dice, we're going to be worse off. Now we can argue about how much worse off. You can't really argue we're going to be worse off. And we can already see the negative impacts. We already see them. Switching renewable energy is almost a win, is almost certainly going to be a win. Okay, we, it's already the cheapest energy. We're already transitioning. It's already saving us money. So I suppose you could come up with some plot, some storyline where, well, it's saving us money now and it's the cheapest energy now, but in the future it won't be. And, you know, maybe that's true, but let me point this out. Climate change is irreversible. You showed that in the first plot. Once the emissions stop, the temperature doesn't come down. If we roll the dice with climate change and it turns out to be really bad, we're screwed, okay? There's nothing we can do about it. We have to, we have to ride it out. But with renewable energy, if we decide that we're, if we decide we're not going, you know, in 10 years, if we say, well, you know, it's really not working out like we thought it was. It's more expensive than we thought it was. In that environment, you just stop doing it and you go back to fossil fuels. You're really not out of anything. In fact, you're probably still better off because you've cleaned up the air. You're not reliant on fossil fuels which have price variability and things like that. And you've helped the climate. So, so it seems to me that in order for Dr. Kuna to win this debate, he either has to argue that climate change will be really good for us or has to make the argument that switching to fossil fuels will be really bad for us. Neither of those is there any evidence for that. And so let me wrap up. I see if 30 seconds, I'll do my last thing. This is a quote from William Nordhaus again which I think really sums up the situation. He says, I have used the metaphor that climate change is like a vast casino. We are rolling the climatic dice. The outcome will produce surprises and some of them are likely to be perilous. The message is that we need not roll the dice, that there is time to turn around and walk back out of the casino. And that is why I feel that we must work as most exponentially as possible to switch to renewable energy. Thank you. Stephen Kunein for the negative. Take it away, Steve. Well, rapid and large reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, why not? Surely everyone wants to prevent the worst aspects of climate change, but it's not black and white. We have to balance the uncertainties and certainties of climate science against the world's growing demand for reliable and affordable energy. And when you consider that balance, the proposition fails dramatically. The word compels makes the proposition unjustified. Us makes the proposition immoral and large and rapid makes it a techno-economic fantasy. More succinctly, we don't need to do it. We shouldn't do it and we can't do it. Let me begin with why we need not make large and rapid reductions. Since the proposition says science compels, let's look at what the official science says about one important bottom line, the projected economic impact of warming. I'm going to quote the IPCC, the UN's climate panel, and not Rolling Stone. The UN's fifth assessment report in 2014 said that for most economic sectors, the impact of climate change will be small relative to the impacts of other drivers. And their most recent report issued in February expressed low confidence that economic impacts would be any larger than their prior estimates. The U.S. economy will possibly grow 2% per year to be four times larger in 2090 than it is today as shown by the blue line. This chart from the U.S. government's 2018 assessment shows how future warming is expected to reduce that growth. For future warming, say of nine degrees during the century, that's a lot more than Andy was talking about. The future U.S. economy would be only 4% smaller than it might have been as shown by that green line. And the impact of that on the growth is shown by the green line on the left, minimal. It's a similar story for the global economy. So the best advice from the best scientist says that the aggregate economic impact of warming three times the Paris goal is minimal, a few percent for a few degrees. In other words, warming will hardly be a catastrophe or crisis. I was flabbergasted when I found that out by reading the report, but it's hard to deny. Why do you believe these projections when the climate models themselves are so deficient? One reason is that every U.N. scenario for the future, whatever the emissions, assumes substantial economic growth. Another is that damage projections using very different robust models give similar results. It doesn't matter exactly what the impacts are, just that they're small, a few percent, not tens of percent. But most importantly, the few percent for a few degrees is in accord with experience. The world is two degrees warmer today than in 1900, as Andy showed you. Even so, we've seen the greatest improvement ever in the human condition. Although the population has quintupled since 1900, longevity, literacy, nutrition, and economic activity have all increased dramatically, and the fraction of the globe in extreme poverty has plummeted. And by the way, today's death rate from extreme weather is one-fiftieth of what it was in 1900. It beggars belief to think that another few degrees of warming over the next 100 years will significantly derail that progress, let alone reverse it. The proposition is also unjustified because large and rapid reductions in emissions are disruptive. Bill Nordhaus' Nobel Prize-winning work, which was already cited, shows that there's an optimal pace to reduce emissions. Moving too quickly causes turmoil and deploys immature technologies. His Nobel lecture in 2018 stated that an economically optimal path for decarbonization could let the global temperature rise by up to six degrees in 2100. Of course, that's based on assumptions that can be challenged, but Nordhaus' main takeaway is don't panic. If you're going to reduce emissions, take the time to do it gracefully. In sum, the official science assessments, as well as common sense, do not at all justify large and rapid greenhouse gas emissions reductions. The proposition is immoral because of the word us. In fact, if most of the world were listening tonight, they'd be asking, what do you mean by us? Let me explain. This chart shows energy consumption against GDP. It shows that people are generally better off as they use more energy. The one and a half billion of us in the developed world in the upper right here with a high GDP enjoy abundant and affordable energy. We can't imagine life without it. But the globes of the six and a half billion people down toward the left and the bottom here are energy starved. The inequalities are astounding. People in the US consume 30 times more energy than anyone in Nigeria and 3 billion of the world's 8 billion people use less electricity every year than the average US refrigerator. Energy poverty means cooking with wood and dung. The smoke in the kitchen kills some 2 million people each year. And while dining by candlelight is romantic, studying by candlelight is not. The development of most of the world and some increase in population will drive a 50% increase in global energy demand by the middle of the century with most of that growth in Asia. Reliable and affordable energy is the overwhelming priority for those developing nations. Minimizing local pollution comes next while reducing greenhouse gas emissions comes in last. Nice to have, but by no means essential. Since fossil fuels are currently the most effective way for developing nations to get their energy. Total carbon dioxide emissions are expected to increase in coming decades, even as the developed world's emissions shown in blue here decline slowly. Remember to stabilize not even reduce warming influences at an allegedly safe level. This curve has to go to zero at the end of the century. If anyone believes that'll happen. There's a bridge about a mile south of here that I'm willing to sell you. Anthony Downs was an economist working at UCLA in the late 1960s. As he watched the proliferation of automobiles worsen the smog, he had a fundamental insight. The elites environmental deterioration is often the common man's improved standard of living. So when the proposition says compels us, the response from the developing world is what do you mean us? The Indian prime minister protests that the path for development is being closed to developing nations while the Nigerian president says Africa is being punished by Western decisions and will fight to exploit the fossil fuels they have. It is a moral for the developed world to deny the developing nations the energy they need and it's the height of eco colonialism to restrain their development by mandating ineffective energy systems, especially when the developed world has neither the will nor that capacity to pay their green premium. The proposition is also immoral because continued exaggerations like science compels induce a pernicious eco anxiety. Some 60% of young people globally feel very worried about climate change and more than 45% say it affects their daily lives. Eco anxiety also plays a role in some suicides and is making young people reluctant to have children. Miley Cyrus says that she doesn't want to bring another person on to a quote piece of shit planet. The prominent climate scientist Michael Mann correctly said climate do moreism can be harmful because it robs us of agency, the agency we still have in determining our future. Maybe any media description of a catastrophic climate future based upon demonstrably efficient models should come with a de Paco like warning caution. This can be hazardous to your mental health. The facts and figures about climate and energy that I've laid out show that the world can't get to net zero by mid century and that net zero by 2100 would be an heroic achievement. But they also show that the world isn't facing climate catastrophe if we can continue to exaggerate the importance and urgency of reducing emissions at the expense of more immediate and tangible societal needs. What will the public think as the world continues to fall short of its emissions goals yet continues to prosper. Finally, let me turn to the fantasy of large and rapid reductions. Energy systems are recalcitrant for a good reason. They involve massive investment in assets that last decades. Their parts need to work together. For example, the cars, the fuel and the fueling infrastructure only to be compatible. And there are many stakeholders who whose interests don't often align. It also takes time to refine the hardware and the operating procedures that ensure reliability. So energy systems are best changed slowly and steadily over decades more like orthodontia than the tooth extraction implied by large and rapid. As Andy said, the decarbonization strategy is to electrify most of transportation and heat while transmission transitioning to a zero emissions electrical grid. Although electric vehicles and industrial heat pose their own challenges. I want to focus on decarbonizing the grid since it's the linchpin of the strategy and we depend upon it every minute of every day. The electrical grid has to reliably deliver electricity. The wind turbines and the solar panels that Andy is so enamored with are indeed the cheapest way of producing electricity now. Unfortunately, solar doesn't produce at night and the wind comes and goes hourly. So you need a backup system for when the renewables fail. Technologies like natural gas with carbon capture or nuclear or some form of storage like giant batteries. Reliable backup isn't too expensive in day-to-day operations. But there are rare occasions up to two weeks long when neither wind nor solar will generate much. Those times are so important the Germans coined a word for them. Dunkelfrauten, which means dark stillness. You can see a few Dunkelfrauten in this graph, which is six months of daily wind generation in the UK. There is an 11-day period at the end of this time when wind generation averaged only 11% of capacity, a once in 20-year event. We've seen similar stretches in Texas, California and Europe. To ride through those long droughts, the backup system has to be at least as capable as the wind and solar alone and hence at least as expensive. In other words, the most expensive part of a renewables heavy grid is the reliability and it becomes more and more expensive as you demand higher reliability. Here are the costs of electricity from a study that demanded 99.99% cost reliability, which is the federal standard in the US. It model grids with an optimal mix of gas, nuclear, wind, solar and various methods of storage. Importantly, they used 40 years of real hour-by-hour weather data across the continental US. The other studies that Professor Destler showed you, Net Zero America and 2035 used simulated weather data of one sort or another that severely underestimates the problem of Dunkelfrauten. You can see that natural gas with or without carbon capture is the cheapest and grids without gas but with various forms of storage are two to three times more costly. By the way, these costs do not include building transmission to bring renewable energy from remote areas to demand centers. So it is incorrect and entirely misleading to assert that a renewables grid will be cheaper unless you're okay with poor reliability. Solar and wind have other drawbacks. They need a lot more land because sunlight and wind are much less concentrated than fossil and nuclear energy. To produce the same electricity, wind takes four times as much land as gas, seven times as much as coal, and 30 times as much as nuclear. And you need to cover that land with enormous structures. To produce the same amount of electricity, wind takes 10 times as much concrete and steel as nuclear. Renewable energy technologies also use a lot more high-value materials like copper, molybdenum and dysprosium because they need to be very efficient. An electric car uses almost seven times as much high-value materials as a conventional car. An onshore wind generation uses almost nine times as much as gas. Unfortunately, those high-value materials and their processing are concentrated in inconvenient countries. The Democratic Republic of the Congo produces 75% of the world's cobalt. While China is a major player in extracting rare earths and graphite and in processing an array of critical materials. And although China uses less than 40% of the world's solar panels, it makes 75% of all panels, 97% of the wafers, 85% of the cells, and 79% of the polysilicon. Chinese manufacturing costs are lower due to cheap coal-fired electricity, loose environmental standards, and forced labor. In fact, the U.S. government lets you impose sanctions on some Chinese materials for solar panels, which has driven up the costs. So how much environmental degradation and forced labor in China would be okay to keep those panels cheap? The drawbacks of fossil fuels that's so disturbing would still be there in a high-renewables world. There will still be international trade to lower commodities costs, and there will still be pollution from extracting and processing the enormous quantities of materials that renewables require. In addition, renewables may not remain the cheapest form of generation. If wind, solar, EVs, and the like are deployed at the envisioned pace, mineral supplies will have a hard time keeping up. We've already seen increases in EV prices due to growing battery costs. The price of lithium surged 750% since the beginning of last year. And by the middle of the next decade, copper demand is expected to double, but the supply will be 20 to 25% short because new mines will have lower quality ore and they take 16 years to start up. To sum up, I've shown you that the proposition is unjustified. There is no imminent climate catastrophe. We do not need to make large and rapid reductions in emissions. The proposition is also immoral. We cannot condemn 3 quarters of the world's population to live with inadequate energy and we should not be scaring the wits out of young people. So we shouldn't do it. And finally, the proposition is fantastical. Techno-economic realities mean large and rapid changes to energy systems that will be expensive, disruptive, and counterproductive so we can't do it. These three points, unjustified, immoral, and fantastical warrant a sound rejection of the proposition. Thank you. Thank you. Yes, thank you. Thank you, Andy. And five minutes to rebuttal. Yes, Andy. Okay, so this is actually out of the report and it says, recent global estimates of the economic cost of climate change exhibit significant spread and generally increase of global average temperature. The wide variation across disparate methodologies does not allow a robust range of damage estimates to be identified with confidence. And that's what I said and that's what William Nordhaus said. We don't know how bad it's going to be. Now, what Dr. Kuhnen quoted, I believe was just like a fraction. I think this parenthetical right here, low confidence. If you look at this quote, it's something like new estimates are higher than the other five range indicates that global aggregate economic impacts could be higher than previously assessed low confidence due to lack of robustness and comparability across methodologies. I mean, that doesn't mean at all what he said. Okay, it's quite clear. If you look at this paragraph, we have no idea what the economic costs are going to be. Okay, so I don't. And if you talk to economists, they will tell you that there's absolutely no way he's correct on this point. Okay, can you go to slide 33? There is thank you. This is the Berkeley 2035 report which shows the price of energy under one scenario. Now, I think Dr. Kuhnen said you can't believe this because they're using simulated weather. I mean, that's a very bogus argument. I mean, we can use models from reanalyses or actual observations. They're quite good. They tell you the same material. And this shows you that a 90% clean grid is about as expensive as a grid that uses fossil fuels. That's a dirty grid. And this doesn't include all the externalities. So when we talk about cost, Dr. Kuhnen is not including the millions of people that die from air pollution. He's not including the costs of national security costs for the U.S., not including those other costs. If you include just the healthcare costs, you see this right here. All of a sudden, the clean grid is actually much, much cheaper than the more expensive grid. So, you know, you don't need... So it is quite clear that a renewable grid is going to be cheaper. And as far as China goes, let me just talk a bit about China. If you go to slide 27, so China understands the cheapest energy source. Okay? So now to be clear, they're still burning fossil fuels because in 2014, they said they were going to peak emissions in 2030. And we can talk more about this. I encourage you to ask me questions about this. This is actually very interesting. So they're still building coal-fired power plants and they're still burning coal, but they're going to peak in 2030 because they understand that cheapest energy is solar and they are cranking out solar power. Now, in 2015, China had 360 gigawatts of power. In 2020, they have 536 gigawatts. In the next five years, they're going to build another 500 gigawatts of power. For point of comparison, the U.S. consumes an average of 450 gigawatts. So they already have a U.S. of solar energy and they're going to be our wind plus solar and they're going to build another one because they understand that that's the cheapest energy. Now, as far... I've been hearing this thing about slave labor, et cetera. There's no evidence. And I encourage Dr. Coon to show some evidence that that's materially impacting the price of solar panels. Clearly, slave labor is bad and we need to clean up the supply cost. But everyone who has an Apple iPhone or a Samsung realize you've got supply chain issues in your pocket. So China understands this and developing countries, if you want to give them energy, you want to give them the cheapest energy possible. That is renewable energy. Fossil fuels are expensive. Okay, they're expensive. Just the price is expensive. The climate they cause is expensive. The national security implications are expensive. The air quality implications are expensive. If you can't afford renewable power, you cannot afford fossil fuels. Let's see, is there anything else? I'm sure there's something else. Oh, you talked about that there may be problems with the supply chain. You know, nobody knows. Now, this is the kind of thing the market should fix. But if the market doesn't, then you stop trying to transition. I said before, you know, we don't know about the future of the market of renewable energy. All the evidence suggests if you look at what's going on right now, it's going to seamlessly increase amount of time. But I'll just say, you know, the problem with climate change is irreversible. If he's wrong, we're cooked. With climate, with renewable energy, we can just stop doing it if we decide that it's not going the way we want to. Thank you. Five minutes for rebuttals. Professor Kunin, take it away. Can we go to my slide 26, please? Okay. This shows the impact globally of extreme weather events from 1990 up to 2020, 30 years. And what you see is that it's a few tenths of a percent of GDP globally and it's actually declining a bit over the 30 years. So the notion that climate change today is costing us a tremendous amount of money is just not borne out by the statistics and the peer-reviewed literature. And then there's this wonderful quote from a paper. By the way, my charts all have links to the references. Global average mortality and economic loss rates have dropped by six and a half and nearly five times from 1980 to more or less the present, all right? So, mortality is going down from extreme weather and the economic loss rate is also going down. And I see the next slide, please. Okay, here are some quotes and I can't read it. Basically from the most recent UN report, there's no trend in long-term trend in hurricanes, in mid-latitude storms, et cetera, et cetera. There's a long list of phenomena beyond heat and temperature in which we see very little, if any, evidence for something changing on a multi-decade scale. I go to the next chart, please. All right, here is the graph that the quote about economic impacts that Andy put up. What is shown here is the same graph I showed you with the beginning, temperature rise and impact on GDP. And what you see is that the real outliers are this set of green points. They are associated with one author named Mr. Burke. Basically, he gives things that are just completely absurd in the projections like Mongolia becomes richer per capita than the U.S. does in 2100. Iceland becomes 400 times richer than it is today. Absurdities like that. As Professor Desko well knows, when you look at the climate models, the IPCC chooses to disregard climate models that are deemed to be absurd, that they want to rapidly. Unfortunately, the economists did not do that. They took all of the projections together, and that's why they say we don't know. But if you look at them in detail, the crazy ones are the ones that cause them to say, now maybe it could be higher. Pollution, right? Okay, so here's the paper that I believe Professor Desko has cited in the past. Exposure to particulate matter from fossil fuels in 2018 accounted for 8.7 million deaths around the globe, 18% of the total. China was 2.4 million of those deaths and India 5.6 or 55% of those deaths happened in India and China. But fossil fuels have been overwhelmingly positive in those two countries. India's life expectancy increased by 16 years, even as fossil fuel increase went up seven times. And China's life expectancy increased almost 10 years even as they used six times more fossil fuels. So whatever the pollution was that was killing people, it was more than outweighed by the benefits of the fossil fuels. Developing countries need to make their own trade-offs between reliable energy and local pollution. We did that in the US in the beginning. In the US, particulate pollution has declined 70% in the last 35 years because we decided to clean up our act. China is slowly cleaning up its act. Their concentrations dropped 30 to 50% from 2013 to 2018. And so fossil fuels don't have to pollute. You can clean them up. And that will presumably result in far fewer deaths in China and India and other places around the world. Can we try the next chart, please? Temperature-related deaths. 5 million people per year died because of nonoptimal temperatures. That was about 9% of global deaths. Most of those deaths will link to cold temperatures rather than warm temperatures. Okay. And I think I've run out of time at that point. Thank you. Thank you. We now go to the Q&A part of the evening. And I'm going to be entertaining questions from the live streamers. And also, there is a mic over there. I gather. So line up to ask your questions. And there is a mic up on the balcony as well. And both debaters have the opportunity to ask each other a question at any time. You can exercise that option right now. We'll waive the option and see what the questions from the audience are and decide later. And I want to begin by taking moderator's prerogative to ask Andy Desler a question. The focus has often been just on electricity usage in the US. And so are you saying that first that given the fact that energy consumption is more than just electricity on the grid, that it comes from industrial uses, transportation, home heating, much larger consumption of energy from those other sources, first are you saying that the grid can double and triple its capacity to accommodate all of that, that everything then could be on the grid with energy consumption? And are you also saying that countries like China, India, poor countries of the world can follow suit and put all of those aspects of energy on the grid with solar and wind as the basis within 20 years, 30 years? Yeah, so I think the answer that is yes. I mean, you need to rapidly ramp up the amount of power you have in the grid and you need to convert the industrial uses to electricity. And there are always some edge cases where that's going to be hard. I think international airline flights or long distance trucking. But for lots of things, we can electrify them. If you talk about developing countries, the good news for them is they haven't invested in all this fossil fuel infrastructure. So going forward, if they decide to invest, they should be investing in renewable energy because it's the cheapest energy. I mean, why would you not invest in the cheapest energy? Also, it increases our national security. They don't have to worry about oil price variations, et cetera like that. China is already doing that. China is very concerned about their national security. They import coal from Australia. They don't want to do that. And so they are pushing whole hog going towards renewables. And people talk about them building their coal-fired power plants. I have a slide. I won't pull it up because I don't want to bore everybody. We'll take things into a bit. It shows the coal utilization rate is going down. So even as they build coal-fired power plants, they're running them less and less because it's not cheap energy. Cheap energy is the wind and the solar. And so that is the future. And if you lock these developing countries into expensive fossil fuels, they're not going to be flourishing. Come in from you, Steve. You know, the grid is not just about energy. It's about reliability. I understand that you all in Texas might think an unreliable grid is okay. But in fact, for the rest of us, 99.99% is what we want. And that's what's expensive. Yeah, I mean, people study this. And certainly, I understand Dr. Cunin's point about you have these periods with low wind. But that's why you have multiple energy sources. Nobody designs a grid that's 100% wind. Okay, that's insane. You have wind and solar in Texas, not everywhere. But in Texas, they're anti-correlated. When wind is low, solar tends to be high. And so you have to design the grid. You can't let a free market design the grid. You actually have to have the government come in and actually decide, set up the grid in a way that delivers reliable power. But you can do this. And I did say, remember my slide, you have to have some dispatchable power like nuclear. So the cheapest way to produce a reliable grid is a grid that has dispatchable power that counterbalances. So I'm in agreement with Dr. Cunin on these points. You have to design reliably the grid. And in Texas, trust me, I live through the blackout. Having reliable power is so important to me. I installed a battery to go with my solar panels. So I had power when the grid goes down. And the grid, we have a very unstable grid. I can go on and on about the problems of the grid. It's not renewable energy, though. Let me emphasize that. It's not windmills. You know, your general point is right. By the way, Generac sales, home generators are soaring in Texas and California. After the blackout, I started getting mailings from right. But you know, you still have to pay for those backup facilities. And when you do it quantitatively with real weather data and real demand data, you need a lot more backup than you might imagine from a back of the envelope or even a few years' worth of weather data. Because when the don't go frown and happen, you're in big trouble. Yeah, I mean, look, I would have to look at, I have to admit I haven't looked at that study that you pointed. I need to look at that in detail. The studies I have looked at explicitly include all of those things. Maybe that's something that we need to discuss. Yeah. Yeah. A question, just please, again, of course, please phrase your question as a question. No need to identify yourself. Just if necessary, say who your question is addressed to. Take it away, sir. Well, my question I think should start with Mr. Dessler, but I'm interested in Mr. Coonan's comments also. And it really follows up on just where you were. So Professor Dessler, you cited for your proposition that wind and solar are the cheapest form of power what's called the Lazard levelized cost of energy study. And I actually saw that on your chart. So isn't it the fact that those Lazard studies explicitly do not include the cost of backup and storage for the solar? So that's first. And then if you add in the cost of backup and storage, what is your calculation for how much it's going to cost? And how do you explain how suddenly the price of electricity bills are multiplying by five in the UK? OK, so let me explain to you how grids work and how you integrate renewables to explain why the backup cost is actually zero. So let's imagine you have a grid that runs on gas and coal and it's 100% gas and coal. And so let's add 10% wind. All right, now if you look at the grid right now, there are some parts of the grid we call baseload power. It means they run all the time. And then there's other parts of the grid which we call load following, which means that as the demand goes up in the afternoon, they ramp up. And as demand goes down in the middle of the night, they ramp out. So that's the way a fossil fuel grid works. You have your baseload. You have your load falling power. Now let's add 10% of wind. OK, so temperature and wind. When the wind blows, the wind is the cheapest energy. So you crank up your wind and you turn down your load following power and then maybe the wind subsides a little bit. You turn up your load following power. So what have you done? You've saved consumers money because the wind is the cheapest power. You're not burning fuel when the wind doesn't blow. Now that's 10% of your power. OK, so you don't have to buy backup. You're not buying batteries. You're not buying another plant. You're just using the existing load following capacity of the grid when the wind doesn't blow. So now let's go to 20%. Same thing. You save consumers more money. 30%. That's where Texas is now. You're saving consumers money. 40%, 50%, 60%. You save consumers money. 70% things change. Once you get to 70% renewables, now you've got a problem where now you do have to have backup. OK, and so that's why the optimal grid. I mean, you can look at these studies that basically all come up with the same answer. The optimal grid and they don't all. Some of them say you can do 100% wind and solar. Most of them though come up with this idea that you need to have mainly wind and solar but some other dispatchable power. It could be nuclear, could be geothermal, could be hydro. So you do need to have that power. But as of right now where we are in the US, there is no cost to backup. OK, if you add renewable energy to the grid, it doesn't increase the price. In fact, each dot is a state. The x-axis is retail price. The y-axis is a fraction of wind and solar. And you see there's no correlation between here. It's not the case that states with more renewable energy are more expensive. And it's because there is no need for backup. I can't emphasize this enough. You don't have to pay for backup until you get to really high levels of renewable penetration. This has been worked out ad infinitum in the literature. OK, this has been worked out in great detail. Coming from you, Steve Conan. You know, you're still paying for backup because while you generate, there are two classes of expenses. There's CAPEX and there's OPEX. And the capital costs you still have to pay for, even if you're not using fuel. In a nuclear plant, for example, which is one of the backups, it's almost all CAPEX. The OPEX is very small. Gas plant, it's about 50-50. So you're not saving all that much if you want to use renewables to supplement the existing grid, but they cannot supply it. Yeah, so I have several responses to that. So number one, in Texas, it depends on how your market is set. In Texas, you don't pay. You know, that's pushed on the generator cost. And what that's done in Texas is all the coal-fired power plants are shutting down. So what ends up happening, you can see that happening in other places as well. Now, the studies that I showed before, they include those costs. In this case, there's some non-depreciated cost of the assets and they work that into the cost of the renewable system. So that is actually included. Obviously, there's some policy questions about how you push that cost out. But certainly, you know, those costs are generally included in these studies. Yes. I want to exercise my raise per octave and ask Dr. Cooner the question. Steve, rather, Andy Destler has pointed out that, Dr. Cooner, Andy Destler has pointed out that if you have a combination of solar and wind, then sort of like the unreliability of the wind is compensated for by the solar and vice versa. Now, you mentioned some kind of an 11-year problem that happens, but could you tell us how reliable, unreliable is solar or wind nationwide, say, over the course of a single 12-month period? What do you face? I don't have those statistics at my fingertips, so I'm not going to make them up, okay? But what I can tell you is if you take a grid with solar and wind only, obviously, the best you can do is 50% on the solar, the best you could do, because the sun shines only half the time. And the wind really varies a lot. It's seasonal, it's hourly. If you want to run with just wind and solar, you have to overbuild. Build a lot more solar and wind than you would think you would need. And even then, you can't get the full reliability if you look at the real weather statistics. There's a reason the Germans invented that word because it happens. And when it does, they got to either burn coal or burn gas that they don't have these days and they're shutting down their nuclear plants. So the answer is you cannot have a grid that's just wind and solar alone. Yeah, I 100% agree with that. So you absolutely do need that. And I would just, and I think Dr. Kuhn and a lot of what he says is right, but one thing I would point out is that you don't have wind going to zero everywhere across, for example, the continental U.S. So the size of weather events tends to be a few hundred kilometers across. And that's why enhanced transmission is so important to building reliable grid because the wind can be blowing in Iowa, not in Texas and you just wheel the power down. And so that's a crucial part of any reliable, renewable based energy system. It's lots of transmission in addition to all the other things I talked about. So there's a Harvard study that came out in February that estimated the transmission cost, the additional transmission cost at $2.4 trillion through the middle of the century. Yeah, I mean, so I have to say, you hear people throw around huge numbers like that, 2.4 trillion, that's a lot of money. I mean, don't give me rocks, more than I get paid. But the point, the thing you have to understand is that energy is expensive. We spend, I think it's $8 trillion a year on energy. Okay, so spending 2.4 trillion over the next several decades is nothing. I mean, that is the very definition of a de minimis expense when it comes to energy. Energy is a multi-multi-multi-multi-trillion dollar problem. And so, you know, I mean, I often hear this and you just have to understand the scale of what we're talking about when it comes to the cost. You said $8 trillion in the U.S.? No, that's worldwide. It's an 8 trillion, that's of world GDP. It's about $8 trillion. But the estimate was... I think it's about 6% in the U.S. for about $1.2 trillion a year on energy. So, but that was an estimate for the U.S. in terms of the transmission line. So, so it's one... So I'm sorry, you, was your estimate... Oh, I see, okay, you're saying. Yeah, I think, you know, to be honest, I have not seen that study. I would have to look at it. I do think that when you're talking about these things over decades, you have to be very suspicious of the cost because of innovation. Let me just talk about solar energy. If you go back 10 years, they were estimating in the shared socioeconomic pathway reports, they were estimating the cost of solar energy to be higher than it actually is today in 2050. So I think these long timescale estimates, we really don't know what the cost of these things are going to be and that's why I think we need to take a heroic jump on renewable energy. And if it turns out to be a bad decision, then you stop doing it. I don't think it will be because I think one thing that's true about all of these energy estimates is the price always comes in lower than you think it's going to. Could I get, Spide, and since Andy put up a Spide, I'd like to put one up. Well, we have a... Okay, well, while we're doing that, put up Spide 14. Quick question for the audience, please take it away, sir. So my question is, do the panelists believe that members of the audience have invested in LED light bulbs, have invested in stocks, do not currently have that money in their pocket so they don't call it a cost, they call it an investment because they believe over time that it's going to make them money. Do you believe that's true? I'm not... Are you clear with what the... Let me... Would you, if you understand the question... Yeah, let me... I think I can... Could you summarize the question before you answer? So I'm not going to talk about what the audience thinks because they look attractive and intelligent for here, but... Well, I think the question is, are these... Can you make investments that cost a lot now but pay off over the long term? Things like LED lights... Yes, the word cost is the problem. Yeah, and so Mackenzie had a study that came out about what the cost is, and they had a really eye-popping number of a transition to renewable energy would be $9 trillion a year. And if you dug into the report, you saw that actually a lot of that, say 70, 80% of the stuff you were already going to have to spend, but we've just spend it on fossil fuel infrastructure or infrastructure you're going to have to, you know, transmission lines you got to build anyway. And the real issue was we were moving up about $1 trillion a year from say 2030 or 2040 would get moved up into... And that was... That's really the cost of this. It's we're moving up costs that otherwise would be occurring later. And so it's... You know, we are certainly going to spend more money in the short run to do this, but it will recruit these benefits of less climate change, less air pollution. We're not going to have to have a carrier task force ready to strike in the Persian Gulf. You know, we have that now and it costs us hundreds of billions of dollars a year. You know, just to protect the price of oil, you know, we're not going to have Russia invading Ukraine, which many experts will tell you is a fossil fuel driven war because Putin didn't think we would retaliate because of the price of fossil fuel. So I do think that that's an important point you make about investing money now that pays off later. Thank you for the question, sir. Comment for that. I mean, it's easy for institutions, not always, but it's somewhat easy to think about long term and paybacks. The US government usually doesn't have such a good track record on that. And for individuals, it's even harder. You have to be trained to think like that and you have to have the upfront capital or be able to issue a bond or get a loan or something in order to do it. So it isn't so easy, even for things that obviously payback. Yeah, that's actually an excellent point that Dr. Cooner makes. In fact, if you want to know what drives housing investments in the US, it's Fannie Mae and other things where the government moves in to the financial markets to help people pay for things. And you know, when we electrified the US, the TVA and the federal government helped people pay for electric appliances. And so, I mean, I think Dr. Cooner is absolutely right that a lot of these things like electric cars, heat pumps are going to be hard for people to afford, but the government can pay a role with low cost financing for things that will pay off. You know, electric cars are cheaper than, you know, cheaper to own than a gasoline car. But the upfront cost can be painful for some people. And again, you think that that's affordable for the countries of Africa. It's affordable for India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, China. All of that is, it's affordable for the US and also affordable for all these four countries of the world. Well, certainly you have to look at each country's situation. I mean, in Bangladesh, they're not buying cars at all. If they are going to buy cars, they should buy electric cars. I mean, it's not, I'm not, I in no way am arguing that, you know, we should stop them from buying automobiles or anything. But if they're having trouble buying, buying cars, buying an electric car because of the higher upfront cost, then I think there's a role for, maybe for Bangladesh, not for government, but for international organizations to move in. In Africa too. Okay. Next question, please. Yeah. Of all electricity sources by average capacity factor, including fossil fuels, nuclear is the most reliable. And of zero emission sources, nuclear uses the least amount of land, materials and imports per electricity unit generated, as well as significantly fewer transmission lines and battery storage for new reactors. In addition, the nuclear industry is the highest average wages, the highest union membership of any electric utility sector. The majority of Republicans are in favor of it. More and more Democrats are in favor of it. It's been around for over 60 years. It exists in over 30 countries around the world. We understand the question. So I think you want, you want to know if nuclear is good. So my question is, why don't both of you support the rapid expansion of nuclear to provide a majority and majority of our electricity in the U.S.? Let me have Dr. Cooning take that first. I mean, yeah. So I admit to having a bias. I'm trained as a nuclear physicist. I can tell you in great detail what goes on with fission and fusion, although I wouldn't trust myself to design a reactor. Okay. I'm a big fan of nuclear. I have said in many times that you're not going to reduce emissions significantly without a major reliance on fission. The problem is in this country, fission has basically been frozen because of the high costs involved. We're trying to build two reactors in Georgia and not doing very well, as you probably know, over budget, behind schedule. In contrast, the Chinese are going great guns. And also in contrast, the Chinese are starting to deploy small reactors at the 100 megawatt scale. We are, when I was in the Department of Energy, I helped get a program started to develop and hopefully soon deploy within a couple of years demonstration small module reactor. Their costs are projected right now to be no cheaper than the big ones per kilowatt. But the hope is that you can come down the learning curve because they're standardized. So please don't believe that I'm against nuclear. I'm all for it. You want to come in for residence, Desa? Yeah. I mean, I am also not anti-nuclear. The reason I said it's mainly wind and solar is cost. So nuclear now is about $6,000 a kilowatt. Wind and solar are about 1,400. And actually it comes down to, those are probably out of date. It's probably cheaper than that now. So you can build a lot of solar. And Dr. Kuhnen previously said correctly that you need to overbuild wind and solar. So you can build four times as much wind and solar as you can. So if you built 100% nuclear, you could build 400% wind and solar. You wouldn't want to do that, but you could. Now, I also am a fan of small modular nuclear. But the problem is they haven't built one. It's vaporware. You know, when they build one and it's running and we know the cost, then we can make a decision. But we need to move now. And so right now, I think we should be transitioning to wind and solar. And if we can get a price reduction for nuclear or if someone comes on nuclear, then you can reevaluate when that happens. But I think that it's just too expensive. I mean, you could do it, but your electricity bills would skyrocket. I have a question from a live streamer for Dr. Desler. Again, focus on China and what is happening there and you was inviting questions on that. We do read that they are massively investing in coal. Are they planning, for example, to build more coal-fired plants next year, the year they are after? Are they expanding their use of coal? And if so, why is that happening? Given your view that they are turning toward wind and solar. Right, right. So China has been reliant on coal for decades and because they don't have oil, they don't have natural gas, so they really are reliant on coal. So their grid was 100% coal. And then in 2014, they agreed with Obama to peak their emissions in 2030. And then a few years later, they said they would go zero in 2060. Now, you cannot do that instantly. I mean, China is a super tanker. You can't turn a super tanker immediately. And so they are still raising, their emissions are still going up and they are still building coal plants. I'm not 100% sure why. It may have to do with the load balancing. But as you can see from this plot, this shows the utilization rate of coal-fired power plants. And if you look at the second from the left, that's China. And you see, so over time, China is running their plants less and less. And that's because if there's wind and solar available, they turn off their coal. This is not, oh, okay. So, oh, I see, thank you. So they turn off their coal. So they're running their coal less less. So I don't really know why they're still building plants. It might have to do with the stability grid. It might have to do with the power of fossil fuels. You know, why in the U.S. do we still have coal-fired powers? Because of politics, not because it makes sense. And so China is still burning fossil fuels. They're still going to raise their emissions until late this decade. But then their emissions will peak. And you can see the amount of solar and wind they're building. It is enormous amounts. I visited Inner Mongolia a few years ago. And you would be, I was shocked with the dichotomy of a coal-fired power plant in front of me. And you can see wind turbines on the ridge behind you. You know, they are a coal-fired nation, but they are phasing it out. Coming from you, Doug. So two comments relative to that. One is you need only look at the Hong Kong situation to understand how much you can trust the promises of a government 30 years from now. Second, Europe, Germany, the U.K. are very glad they have coal plants still around right now. As is the U.S. Coal use is surging. Right. So I think when it comes to China, I think you can believe them because they understand the problems with coal, in particular air pollution. I mean, you know, if you visited Beijing or Shanghai in 2010, it was awful. And so they have very strong reasons to get rid of it. There's no question in my mind they're going to phase them out. Hopefully they'll, you know, I mean, I hope they succeed with nuclear. That would be great. As far as Germany and Europe right now, this is a problem with fossil fuels. It is not a problem with renewable energy. It's the war in Ukraine. Russia is cutting off their gas supply. So of course they are happy they have coal. And, you know, in a world without fossil fuels or world where Europe is not reliant on gas from Russia, they wouldn't be, you know, the war probably wouldn't take place and they wouldn't have to worry about that. I mean, this is really a fossil fuel problem, not a renewable problem. I think it's a Russian fossil fuel problem, not a fossil fuel problem. Well, that key is a question that I want to ask you, Professor Dessler. It's been said that there is vast potential for the U.S. to expand its production of fossil fuels if they opened up fracking in New York, if they let the oil companies drill for oil in all spaces. There is vast potential for France in particular to do fracking to produce gas and fossil fuels. Now, you might say that will produce pollution, but the question is with respect to your point about the issue of geopolitics, isn't it possible for the U.S. to become pretty self-sufficient in fossil fuels, especially given that Canada and Mexico are rich in it? And isn't it possible for Europe to be independent if it would only lift its restrictions on fossil fuel exploration, especially in France? Isn't why need it surrender to geopolitics? Doesn't it have the potential to overcome the problems that you cite? Well, certainly you could increase drilling a lot. I mean, the problem is that the companies don't really want to do that. If I have a slide, I won't show it to you. Basically, that they like the high prices. You know, if you ask the question, you know, why is oil prices so high? You know, one of the reasons is that the companies that lost a tremendous amount of money fracking in the 2010s, they're using all of the money they're getting now. They're not investing in more drilling. They could, but they're buying back shares. They're giving it to shareholders in dividends. And so I think the worry you would run into, if you open the taps, as you say, is that the price of oil would drop. It would drive all of these companies out of business. I mean, it creates this whipsaw where you have these bankruptcies, you have high prices. And I mean, it's... And then people stop doing it and then you've got international dependencies. Then there are some countries that don't have the resources. Having spent five years inside of a big oil company, I can tell you that the oil companies hate the price volatility, okay? The reason that we don't see as much production domestically is because this administration campaigned on a promise to eliminate fossil fuels. Pretty dumb, okay? That's why we're in the situation. We're in with respect to gas and oil prices. The last comment is not all fossil fuels are the same. Cold produces a lot of particulate matter, gas essentially none and oil somewhere in the middle. Yes. Well, what would you say about France expanding or Europe expanding its use so that it's less dependent on Russia? Isn't that part of the plan? That they put a clamp on their potential to fracking. What if they expanded that and lifted the clamps? Look, I think that increasing fossil fuel production in the short run to get through this shortfall because of the war in Ukraine. I think that makes sense. The thing I don't think makes sense is investing in infrastructure. It's going to last 50 years. And can you put up slide 48? I know I said I wouldn't do it. But just because Dr. Kuhn and said it's the Biden administration, I feel obligated to show this slide. Basically, it says U.S. oil producers defy calls to open taps and tame war-driven energy prices. And I can't read it from there. But it says executives say they remain under pressure for Wall Street to return the windfall to investors through dividend and share buybacks rather than spending heavily to increase production. This is not a problem with the Biden administration. The drillers, I can tell you from living in Texas, you see a lot of Rolexes when the prices are high. And then in the late 2010s, those shale producers lost a lot of money and now they're trying to get the money back. And they do not want to increase. They do not want to increase production. You often propose then the government should step in when there's a market failure. So maybe the government should step in in accordance with what you've argued for. There's a market failure. The government should do the drilling. Well, I mean, I wouldn't go that far to say the government should do the drilling. But I do think the government should encourage us, much like in the Inflation Reduction Act bill they're doing, they should encourage the transition renewables. I mean, I'm a believer in the free market, okay? Well, that's why the government should step in in this particular case. When there are market failure. Yeah, when they're, I agree, when they're market failure. You've isolated a market failure. They're not drilling. So they should do like Saudi Arabia and drill. And then they won't have to be dependent on foreign oil. Yeah, you know, I think that there, I guess I would oppose that because I think there are enough other problems with that solution. I think if you can increase it with existing infrastructure, you should do that temporarily. But I don't think you should invest in pipelines. Other infrastructure has to last 100 years. You're getting a lot of solutions. Okay, I know, I know, I've seen that. I'm going to allow one more question because we've got a lot of substance here and then we'll go to the summaries. Ask your question, sir. So this is a question for Andrew, but I'd be interested in Steve's comments as well. Andrew, in your rebuttal to Steve, you threw up this quote from IPCC that said, we basically don't know what the long-term economic costs of climate change will be. That seems to suggest that the scenario of negligible net economic costs is just as probable as a scenario of very bad net economic costs. Now, if the scenario is the former negligible economic costs, that seems to me like a good outcome by any reasonable definition. On the other hand, in your talk, you had this slide that had this range of good and bad and neither of that scenario. And you said the probability of a good scenario is zero. So these two statements seem to mean logical contradiction. Can you clarify? Absolutely. So everybody agrees. I think if you look at the literature, there is 100% agreement that the net impact is going to be bad. And in fact, Dr. Kuhnen said that in his talk. He said the loss of GDP in 2100 would only be 2% or something, some number like that. I don't know the exact number he used, but it's still a loss. It's still bad. I mean, losing GDP is still bad. And that's widely agreed upon. Now, it is true, as I said in my thing, that it's possible that that's correct, that in 100 years, I think it's implausible, but I acknowledge that there are economists who say that. But it's also possible that it's actually much higher than that. And in fact, the main stream economic view as espoused in the IPCC is that we don't really know. And you sort of have to look at all of these probabilities. And so you have to do, the question is how risk averse are. If I tell you there's a 50% chance, if you jump out of a plane, your parachute's going to fail. You could say, well, 50% is bad, but 50% it's good. I mean, the fact that it's 50% good, people really look at the, as Martin Weitzman says, the sting is in the tail. It's the very tail of the distribution that really motivates action for a lot of people. And I think I'm one of those people. Yeah, I think you briefly come in and then we'll go to the summations. Yeah, I'm going to be really fast. Let's look at the present, okay? For the last 30 years, the cost of extreme weather events has been 0.3% of the GDP globally, even as we've seen one and a half degrees of warming. Again, to think that another two degrees is going to suddenly boost that up to five, seven, eight percent, I think strains credibility. Okay, thank you. And we are now, thank you for your patience in the audience. Thank you for the questions from the streamers. We will now go to the summary portion of the evening. Dr. Dessler, you have seven and a half minutes to deliver your summary. You want to take the podium? No, I'll just talk from here. I don't have any slides. So again, I'll just sort of reiterate the points I made, which I think largely remain, you know, remain unchallenged. And that is that we're on track for warming that is comparable, 60%-ish, of an ice age. Now, Dr. Kuhnen says, you know, we haven't had a lot of damage now. And, you know, two degrees more, you know, how can you possibly believe it's going to be a lot worse than that? But the thing I realize is that damages are nonlinear. So when you get heavy rainfall, the first inch of rain doesn't do any damage. Second inch of rain doesn't do any damage. Third inch of rain doesn't do any damage. And then the fourth inch of rain pushes the water into your house. And it suddenly does $10,000 worth of damage. Now, we're at the point now where we're hitting tipping points in our social system. Not tipping points in the climate system. Climate seems to be quite linear. It's tipping points in the social system. So for example, look at the Southwest. When the water level in Hoover Dam goes below the intakes, your power generation goes to zero. When the water goes below the intakes for drinking water, your water goes to zero. That's an abrupt tipping point in the social system. We are approaching those. The warming of six degrees is 60% of an ice age. I mean, I would be shocked if Dr. Coonan really believes that's not going to be a tremendously powerful, negative force on our society. He may well believe that, but I think that most of the people that've looked at it would disagree with him and agree with me on that point. So that's number one. Number two, I think it's important to understand that we have an alternative. Okay, there's something we can do. We are already transitioning. Texas is already 30% on the annual average of renewable energy. And we've done that essentially with very little effort, just letting basically the market push us. And I will say, I will acknowledge that previously, while wind and solar are the cheapest energy now, previously there were subsidies when it was more expensive. And those helped drive the adoption. But right now, you know, you don't need the subsidies. It is the cheapest. Subsidies still exist. That's going to drive it even faster, but you really don't need them in order to push wind and solar into the majority of the power. So we have this alternative and we know how to generate a reliable grid. And it's not the case that it's going to be, a reliable grid is going to be that much more expensive. I showed you the Berkeley 2035 study. It showed a slightly more expensive. But again, that wasn't including all of the other costs. So I would say that you can't do what a friend of mine calls partial cost accounting, where you only count the costs of producing energy. You also have to count all the externalities. That's millions of deaths from air pollution. That's the economic problem of price variability for consumers. That's national security implications of price variability. I mean, those are all terrible, terrible things with extremely high costs. And we can get away from that with renewable energy. And again, the last thing I'll say is that climate change is fundamentally irreversible. So if you bet wrong, if we make a decision that we don't want to maximally transition to renewable energy and we discover in 50 or 20 years, like, wow, this sucks. You know, we're stuck. You can't undo once you've added carbon to the atmosphere. I mean, you can, but it's extremely expensive and extremely energy intensive. So your, but switch it, transition to renewables is reversible. You know, maybe you spend a little too much money here or there, but you just stop doing it and you still have all the fossil fuels to burn in the world. So it's really, I think it's extremely hard for me to understand the negative of an approach to reduce emissions as quickly as possible by transitioning to renewable energy. And I'll sum up there. Thank you. Thank you. And I didn't take you full time, but thank you. And you have seven and a half minutes. In April of last year, President Gada Paya Rajapaksa of Sri Lanka banned chemical fertilizers in that nation of 22 million people motivated by environmental considerations. And there are some sobering lessons to be learned from what ensued. In particular, it took less than a year for that ill-considered action to crash the Sri Lankan economy, ultimately leading to starvation, riots, and a change of government. A recent foreign policy piece described that crisis in Sri Lanka as a ferago of magical thinking, technocratic hubris, ideological delusion, self-dealing, and sheer short-sightedness. We have glimmerings of that same sort of thing happening in Germany, in the UK and California, and in Texas, where hasty and ill-conceived greening of the energy system has degraded reliability and increased costs in an ineffective effort to avoid vague and uncertain climate problems several generations hence. It would indeed be a crisis if that were to happen across the US. We should be very careful since precipitous emissions reductions are far more dangerous than climate change itself. We have time. Reducing emissions won't stop the climate from changing. It varies an awful lot on its own. In fact, rapidly reducing carbon dioxide emissions won't even reduce human influences on the climate anytime soon because, as Professor Desler said, CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere and persists for a century or more. At this point, I would like to inject a personal note. My book, Unsettled, was published in April of 2021. One month later, Professor Desler was one of a dozen co-authors of a Scientific American piece criticizing the book. You were. Your name is right on the... I'll show you the picture from the scientific headline. Your name is right there, Andy. Can we show that slide, please? Inexplicably, there it is, right there. And I see your name right there, right? Yeah? Okay. Inexplicably, the criticisms were based upon a review of the book, not what I'd actually written. They criticized three points I was alleged to have made. For example, they said I'd put trade sea level rises steady over time. Well, the entirety of Unsettled's Chapter 8, if you've read it, is devoted to variations over the past century. Since Scientific American refused to publish a detailed rebuttal, I posted one on my Medium page and it's worth checking out. But the great bulk of the 1,000 words from those dozen distinguished scientists were devoted to ad hominem attacks. For example, I was called a crank who's taken seriously only by far-right disinformation peddlers hungry for anything they can use to score political points. Really, Andy? Do you think I'm a crank? Do you really believe that? Yeah, I think I quoted me. I was not part of writing a piece like this. I think they probably quoted me and these are the quotes they use. I was trusting me. Do you disavow what's in that article now? I would have to look at it. I don't even remember what they said, but I think they did not. I have to say, I do not remember that. And I'm pretty sure they probably just quoted me. They probably sent me some questions. No, you're not quoted there. There's no quotation in there. They are just an author. I have to say, if I'm an author, then I apologize for that. If I'm an author, I don't remember that. Okay, it is unfortunately typical of public discussions of climate and energy. When senior academics engage in name-calling, they debase themselves and deny the public any real expertise that they have. It's the kind of thing people do when the facts aren't on their side. I hope I've shown you tonight that the facts are on my side. In particular, the proposition is unjustified. The official science of the government and U.N. reports, as well as common sense, believe that we have a crisis or that catastrophe is imminent. We clearly have time to think through any large-scale changes in our energy systems. The proposition is also immoral. All who advocate for rapid decarbonization somehow fail to mention how to alleviate the world's energy poverty without fossil fuels. And the proposition exaggerates the climate threat which depresses young people. Finally, the proposition is a techno-economic fantasy. It would take the energy system rapidly in an unnatural direction. That would degrade the quality of energy services, as we've already seen in California, in Texas, the U.K., and Germany. It would raise costs and would disrupt society even more than any climate change itself. Each of these three points, unjustified, immoral, and fantastical, would warrant rejection of the proposal. Taken together, they warrant a resounding rejection. Thank you. Jane, please open the voting. I have in my hand the so-formed Tutsi roll that goes to the winner of this debate, according to Oxford-style voting. Drum roll, please. We are okay. I love the way you people do it. Thank you for rising to the occasion of the drum roll. And again, this is the Tutsi roll that's at stake. The resolution climate science compels us. The yes votes started with 24 percent, and they declined by five percentage points. So we'll see if there was another time. The no votes started with 48 percent, and they gained 24 points. So again, the Tutsi roll goes to Dr. Stephen Cooper.