 It's nice to be here. I just came from winter. Nice to come to a nice warm sunny My kids are emailing me asking me. How is it to be in the warm sun? I can't break their hearts and tell them that It's been raining I'm gonna talk a bit about the climate change issue and some of the arguments in my book the climate fix Let me introduce it the book By by explaining the title to you The title is a bit of an ink blot It's inspired by Mike Mike Hume, and I'll talk about him in a few minutes But in the English language And I think it's the same in Australia as it is in the US the word fix has many meanings Fix can be a solution fix can be a difficult problem. It can be an addiction It can be a technological fix and part of the issue of climate change is we tend to map on to the issue our hopes our dreams our aspirations our fears and For me when I talk to people about my book in the title It tells me a little bit where people are coming from how they interpret the title I don't have any one of those meetings. I mean the mall for the issue when I was in Italy last fall Italy fall I gave a talk that was Translated simultaneous Italian English translation and they translated the title as the climate mess So with that as introduction, let me tell you my argument and then I'll get into it So if you're paying attention to this issue and it seems to me that if you live in Australia It's kind of hard to avoid this issue But here's some of the current context the recent climate negotiations under the framework Convention on climate change in Durban ended in a historic decision to keep talking But they decided to put off decisions till 2015 or later and since that meeting India and China have said well, no we we didn't really change our positions. We have the same positions we had before Europe in the US are narrowly focused on economic issues jobs the euro Elections and so on the climate change seems to have completely dropped off the agenda of Germany of the UK the US It's really amazing. I've had a lot of Fun watching what's going on in Australia over many years the political leadership and the issue of climate change and how it's become really wrapped up in You know forget about climate politics just politics politics And it is very much. I would call it a carbon drama, and I think it's hasn't ended yet Japan and Germany Due to the really the horrific tragedy in Japan after the tsunami and the Fukushima disaster Have decided to abandon nuclear power, which means in both cases the carbon emissions have already increased dramatically at Germany is ironically enough relying on Increased building of coal-fired power plants, and they're actually importing Energy from nuclear power plants in the Czech Republic in France Japan has seen its oil imports go up and correspondingly their their carbon dioxide emissions Which you might take as a signal that at least for now Publix in these countries have decided that the risks of nuclear power Are are more frightening more threatening more real more tangible to them than the risks of climate change China and India keep growing India in their case has said that they are perfectly willing to talk about limiting their CO2 emissions But come back after 2025 and so on I mean It's not a very positive moment for those that were interested in climate policy after really the heights of optimism in 2006 2007 And and what one of the things I like to do in this presentation is to help I guess give you an interpretation of this context I think there's some common themes really world-wide We like to say that different countries different political parties have different positions But I'm going to make the argument that really all in the same boat politically and there's a very Straightforward explanation for why we are in the political situation. We are with respect to climate change Let me start with a Few words of wisdom from Mike Hume who's from the University of East Anglia. He's a good friend of mine He's climate scientist was the director of the Tyndall Center in the UK for a long time He's written on physical science social science even more cultural issues his book why we disagree about climate change is really outstanding I'd recommend it to you But let me just read a few passages from that book to start out Arguments about climate change are invested with powerful ideological instincts and interests solutions to climate change vary from market mechanisms and technology driven innovation To justice focused initiatives and low consumption localism as a form of lifestyle each carrying ideological commitments It is despairingly naive to reduce such intense and legitimate arguments to the polarities of belief or skepticism about science He continues the problem here is the tendency to reduce all these complexities into a simple litmus test of whether or not Someone believes orthodox scientific claims about the causes and consequences of climate change This is the dividing in the world into goodies and baddies believers and deniers Climate change demands of us something much more sophisticated than this So one of the things I'm going to try to do with this presentation is to rise to this challenge and give you what I Would say is a sophisticated analysis of the climate change issue Very often you could look at the climate change issue and see this this battle almost to the death between the Skeptics and the alarmist or whatever pejorative terms you'd like to lose And and get the impression that they really think that if they convince the other side, whichever The other side is if to understand the science as they see it They would just come to share their values and political preferences And I think we know from many different areas where facts aren't contested people have a wide range of values So what I'm going to try to do is to give you a sophisticated Presentation that gets us beyond what I think is a rather inane and long-term and somewhat self-destructive debate over the science Now let me start by talking about what I would call the mainstream approach the way that the climate change issue has Conventionally been framed in public discourse in the scientific community as a starting point to suggest a point of departure What what we do is we start with some Emissions projection that is this is this orange curve going into the future We plug those emissions into climate models which give us some scenarios for the future with global temperatures increasing We have decided through the political process and depending on whose story you believe it was invented on the back of a cocktail Napkin in Brussels, but that there's a target of two degrees above pre-industrial that we set as a target and then we look at the different probabilities of exceeding that we take that that and work our way backwards and come up with some emissions trajectory and These emissions reductions required to stay under two degrees. We then translate into Targets and timetables for emissions reductions and we say things like the science dictates that we have to reduce emissions According to this rate over this time period Now there's a few concerns I have with this particular framing one is that it says the science dictates that we do x y or z Science doesn't dictate anything. It's our values that dictate something but in a very real sense these sorts of arguments these slides They're beautiful slides They represent a lot of hard work by a lot of sincere people, but they're really nothing more than scientific performance art It's very difficult for me as an expert in the field and I would think for people who are not experts to actually understand What these mean what's behind these numbers? What do they mean in terms of policy commitments in terms of cost in terms of technology? so my interest in in kind of reframing rebuilding this this issue from the bottom up is to get a a intuitive understanding of the magnitude of the challenge that we're up against and Once you understand the magnitude of a problem I think that's the first step in actually taking steps to deal with it now Let me say some of my work has been criticized by people who say things like Why in the world would you want people to truly understand the magnitude of this problem? Are you against action? So my view is that we're not going to make any progress if we don't understand the nature of the problem So what I'm going to present to you is not going to be comfortable. It's not going to be comforting Maybe a bit depressing But in my view understanding the scope of a problem is the first step towards taking steps towards resolving it And so that's the journey. I'm going to take you on Now let me start at the very beginning and I'm sure for many of you particularly if you're engaged in this issue This is stuff you understand. Well, but let me work my way through it just to tell you where I'm coming from the problem of accumulating carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a little bit like water building up in a bathtub and Let me say from the outset that the issue of climate change is not the same thing as the issue of accumulating carbon dioxide There's a lot of human forcings of the climate system We could deal with the carbon dioxide problem and still have a human cause climate change problem, but For many reasons scientists and policymakers have decided that carbon dioxide is the primary Forcing element that we ought to be focused on. That's why I'm going to focus on it in this talk We're putting Carbon dioxide into the atmosphere mainly by the burning of fossil fuels some land-use changes And from the perspective of policy That carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere Might as well be forever. It's not forever, but it's a little bit like saying, you know The water you put in your bathtub doesn't stay there forever either it evaporates eventually But on the time scale of the bathtub filling up that doesn't help you very much We measure the amount of Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere according to it's parts per million molecules per million We're about 390 parts per million now one of the questions that the scientific community has debated is how high is our bathtub? When when does it overflow and cause damage to our home? And that two-degree number that I referenced that comes from the European Union climate policy it has been equated to 450 parts per million and Not long ago a number of advocates a number of scientists said well if you tell people that danger occurs at 450 and we're at 390 many people will just say okay. Give me a call when it's 449 More recently you've had people focused on the number 350 Jim Hansen the NASA scientist I'm Bill McKibbin in the US has started a group called 350 org But there's a debate about whether our bathtub is Overflows at 450 or 350 one of the points of my talk is going to be to try to convince you that that threshold is largely irrelevant Or should be irrelevant to climate policy There's some good news and bad news There's a hole in the bottom of our bathtub Some of the carbon dioxide that we're putting in the atmosphere is being taken up by the land surface by soils by trees And but a lot of it's being taken up by the oceans And so if from the perspective of the atmosphere that's good news because the atmosphere concentrations are rising lower than they might otherwise be From the perspective of the oceans that might be bad news because we're changing the chemistry of the oceans Which could have negative consequences So the mathematics of the bathtub are really straightforward If you want your water in the bathtub to stop rising you don't want it to overflow Then the amount going in has to equal the amount going out that'll stabilize the water in the bathtub If you don't want to use The oceans as a giant sponge to take up co2 then the amount going in has to essentially go down to zero Very close to zero so the amount of emissions we're putting into the atmosphere has to go down very close to zero now By the time that we do that will dictate How high this water gets in the bathtub and so the question is how quickly can we stop? The water increasing in the bathtub and that's the simple math I want to go through in my presentation and talk about the policy options for limiting the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere Now let's start looking at some data. So this is emissions the black dots are observations. This is gigatons of carbon I'll explain the colorful lines here in a second one of the things you see is this dip emissions went down during the global financial crisis and immediately thereafter the largest single year-on-year increase in carbon dioxide Emissions worldwide when we're back on this line You'll notice that the observations the black line are at the upper end of these colorful curves in 2000 The intergovernmental panel on climate change put out a number of scenarios for future emissions And we are running at the near the upper end not exceeding the upper but near the upper end of those scenarios I'm for a number of reasons which I'll discuss But one thing I want to point out if you if you can look at this graph and think about the slopes of the lines You'll see that the line is a little bit steeper after About 2002 than it was before during the era that we are Most concerned about climate change during the Kyoto protocol era where policymakers are paying the most attention the most legislation has been passed The rate of increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has gone up not down So this is Suggesting that for all the talk for all the rhetoric for all the supposed action We are not bending the curve so to speak on emissions So I'm going to give you a framework for thinking about policy related to dealing with emissions and I mean this when I say this that in this simple sentence I have here is every possible policy option for for stopping that water increasing in the bathtub You can amaze your friends go to cocktail parties dazzle people Because you can encompass every single tool in the toolbox with this sentence People engage in economic activity that uses energy from carbon emitting generation So I put this sentence on four lines for a reason Here's the sentence we can turn it into variables Population GDP, which is just economic activity per capita the energy intensity of our economy So it's the total energy we consume There's the very total energy divided by our GDP divided by our economic activity and the carbon intensity of energy So how much carbon or carbon dioxide is emitted? per unit of energy consumption out there now These terms together are what's called the kaya identity. It's named after the Japanese scientist. Yoichi kaya who first formulated it He put he put it together in the late 1980s To come up with emission scenarios to feed into climate models If you want to know what the future climate is going to do you have to know something about emissions If you want to know something about emissions, you have to know something about population wealth energy consumption carbon intensity So it's an identity. It's a little bit like saying bread is made up of flour water Yeast little oil It doesn't give you anything prescriptive, but it does tell you where carbon emissions come from In an identity, it's always nice that the units match up You can google the kaya identity. It's the subject of an increasing number of academic studies Not just for producing scenarios of future emissions, but for policy analysis And it from where I sit as a policy scholar the kaya identity is an incredibly powerful tool For doing policy analysis related to carbon dioxide The kaya identity tells us what tools we have in the toolbox So you take these four variables and it tells us what levers we have to influence carbon dioxide emissions Now let me be very clear This is it if you want to influence carbon dioxide emissions. These are all the tools in the toolbox I'm not hiding anything behind the screen. There's nothing that's hidden. These are all the tools that we have So here's here's what we could do So less people all else equal means lower emissions A smaller economy all else equal means less emissions. We could increase efficiency So that means doing the same or more with less energy It's important to know this doesn't mean doing less If you decide not to go to work one day and stay in bed You might be conserving energy, but you're not making anything more efficient And then the fourth tool in the toolbox is Is improving our carbon intensity, which is switching energy sources We could go from a very carbon intensive coal fired power plant to gas you go from gas to To wind or solar or nuclear But this is it. These are the four different levers we have in the toolbox Now for the purpose of analysis and for our discussion here today, I'm going to make it even simpler I'm going to combine population and per capita wealth. This is just gdp This is just our economic activity and I'm going to combine energy intensity and carbon intensity And call this technology. These are technologies of energy Production power plants solar panels and so on and technologies of energy consumption Lights power point projectors cars airplanes and so on Now in my book I introduce A concept that has kind of Taken off and people talk about it a lot, which I think is actually key to understanding Why we are where we are with respect to climate policy and I call it, you know, a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but But there's some seriousness here the iron wall of climate policy And it's illustrated with this graph, which is from an opinion poll taken of u.s citizens After the waxman marky cap and trade bill passed the house of representatives in the summer of 2009 And they basically asked people would you would you support a generic climate bill If the annual cost per household was $80 175 $770 And what you see here is a characteristic curve that exists everywhere in the world In varying degrees that at a relatively low price. There's More support and in the u.s. There was a majority of support at $80 per year and at a higher price. There's less support at About 10 at $770 And the iron law of climate policy Simply says that people are willing to pay some amount for environmental objectives including climate change But that willingness has its limits And everywhere I give talks about this I asked the audience I said, you know, if it was $1 a year for climate policy How many of you would support it? Let's see your hands All right, look look around a lot of people. All right, if it was a million dollars a year How many of you would support it or could support it? Come come see me about my center in Delman Obviously much less And people often say well people in Europe pay a lot more for petrol than they do in the United States and And so on and of course the numbers vary but the shape of this curve I would say is the same everywhere and not just because of preferences But because people have certain ability to pay Now if there's one ideological commitment I would say that is shared around the world in different cultures people of different religions and different political systems It's a commitment to economic growth And this is an empirical observation Efforts to Contract GDP Noticeably slow it down Are not policy options that you see very many policy makers openly Advocating in fact, I would argue that policy makers Everywhere in the world are focused these days on how do we get GDP growth? Back up to where it was before the global financial crisis And they see that very much as the key to keeping their citizens happy winning re-election and so on So one of the things that I argue is that a boundary condition for policy design If we're going to deal with carbon dioxide emissions is that climate policies must not cost too much And better yet, they should actually foster economic growth There is a lot of talk about trade-offs between environment and economy And I think the only way we deal with this problem is in fact if environment and economy move in the same direction Now let me let me make this a little bit more complicated if I was giving a talk about development And global poverty I might put this slide up in which I would show that With respect to the millennium development goals of poverty around the world Which is measured on the number of people who live on a dollar 25 a day or less or a dollar a day There has been great progress. We are ahead of goal with respect to the millennium development goal There are less people living in poverty Today than there were even a decade or two decades ago. Why is this according to the brookings institution? These new estimates of global poverty presented in this brief Serves a reminder of just how powerful high growth can be in freeing people from poverty High growth in the context of carbon dioxide emissions is a bane. It's a it's causing more emissions in the context of poverty It's reducing poverty Right away. You can see we have a situation where The material demands wants needs however you want to characterize it of so-called developing countries Are squarely up against the desire by many people in rich countries to limit emissions Because of that kaya identity GDP is a key factor there. It's no wonder that china and india are steadfast in their refusal to reduce emissions Because they very much see GDP growth as their priority Now this curve. This is one of the more interesting graphs I've seen in my career and I you know, you can look at it for a long time But what it shows is estimate from the u.n. It was part of the millennium development goal project It shows a pretty I would say rough estimate of the distribution of income around the world for three points in time This dark curve is 1970 We have 2000 the dotted line and the blue curve. It's 2015 Shows for different kind of normalized income levels. One of the things that you see in this curve is A movement from the left to the right The world is getting wealthier people have more income. Again, if you're in development poverty reduction, you say this is success This is good news If you're in climate change you say wow, we're we're working against a headwind So the question I ask people is is where do you think this curve is going to be? In the future five years from now 10 years from now 20 years from now And what do you what steps do you think policymakers are going to be taking to shape this curve? Um The argument I would make just based on an empirical observation Is that policymakers and publics around the world are going to be working very hard to try to push this curve to the right To continue to accumulate wealth A few markers for you 80 percent of the world lives on less than 10 dollars a day So that's 90 of the so-called developing world now when I go talk at university campuses And I've talked at university campuses across north america across europe Elsewhere Faculty members always want to talk about the need to reduce consumption The need to limit gdp growth as a tool of climate policy. And let me say It's very easy to have those sorts of discussions when you are way out on the front of the curve And if you think about the mathematics here that to reduce emissions appreciably To stabilize that water in the bath. We're talking about you know, 80 percent or more reduction in emissions How much poorer would you be willing to be to achieve that goal? 5 percent 10 percent 80 percent The reality is that gdp modulating gdp Is not a tool for reducing emissions much less stabilizing them And again, I say that as an empirical observation people love to debate it. I'm happy to debate it I don't see very many people out there running for office on a platform of gdp contraction If people would like to try it they can report back to me how successful they are So you can see right away. Here's the problem that we have that that We often in the climate debate we talk about emissions We talk about emissions as if they're abstracted from everything else In in the world, but emissions are tied to economic activity and technology But what I've just told you what I've just argued is that If we want to make emissions go down We don't have gdp as an option In fact, I would argue that if We're trying to get gdp to go up, which I think policymakers are doing doing around the world And at the same time they're trying to get emissions to go down It's it's no wonder emissions keep going up because if there is a battle between gdp and emissions Then gdp will win every single time So to to deal with this I suggest Analytically we use the magic of mathematics and get our incentives all lined up As a starting point for analysis And by that I mean that the only way we're going to deal with the emissions issue and stabilize emissions is through technology And the proper measure of our progress with respect to Technology in so far as carbon dioxide is concerned is this ratio of emissions to gdp We want that ratio to go down It's we want emissions to go down gdp to go up That puts our incentives all together. That's a sign that we're advancing technology Now it's not enough to simply say this ratio has to go down. Remember that water in the bathtub It's it's mathematically possible. You can just believe me on this that this ratio goes down and emissions go up forever So we have some targets. We want to stabilize at a certain level So let me let me present some some real world data On this ratio and use that as the basis for talking about the magnitude of the problem and the different options We have for dealing with it So when I wrote the book the latest data that was available when apples to apples basis was through 2006 Which actually proved kind of fortunate for my analysis not for the world because after the global financial crisis We were right back at 2006 levels in about 2009 Um, so what we want to do is we want to decarbonize our economy. So I'm going to introduce this term decarbonization In 2006 we were about 0.62 tons of carbon dioxide per thousand dollars of global gdp And we want to reduce this to a level that's consistent with our stabilization targets and by stabilization target 450 parts per million 350 parts per million You might be a pre-industrial 280 parts per million person I'm going to argue from a policy perspective. It doesn't matter Because the the actions we would take to try to achieve any of those Stabilization targets are essentially the same if we can stabilize at 450 I would argue we're we're most of the way to stabilize into 350 So the numbers that I use here are consistent with an 80 percent reduction by 2050 which is Um consistent with a 350 parts per million certainly consistent with 450 So let me give you some good news. This may be the last good news of the talk The global economy has been decarbonizing all on its own For more than a century We are producing energy with less carbon content We are becoming more efficient and the amount of carbon dioxide per unit of gdp has gone down dramatically and significantly For about a hundred years maybe a little bit over a hundred years now The good news ends because at some point In the last decade you can see if you're paying close attention that it flattened out a bit and What's a little worrisome is in the last two years? Certainly, it's actually gone back up As countries in europe the united states china have become more carbon intensive But what we're talking about with decarbonizing our economy is accelerating a process that has been in place for a long time We're not talking about doing something fundamentally new If there is a very bright upside to the the new Penetration of coal seam gas or shale gas Into the global energy mix is that it will Displace a lot of coal particularly in the united states and perhaps get this trend Moving in the right direction again So here's 2006.62 So we can ask a policy analysis question We can say what would this curve have to look like if we want to reduce emissions by 80 by 2050 And if you like 90 percent or 95 percent or even 50 percent It's not going to make a difference to where I end up. It's my analysis is insensitive to that So i'm going to use 80 percent. It's an aggressive number Um and I pick it because it's used in international discussions Now you know already from the kaya identity To answer this question. We have to specify Some rate of future gdp growth. I don't know what future gdp growth will be If I did I probably wouldn't be a college professor But what i'll do is i'll give you three different or five different numbers from 1 percent to 5 percent I'll give you an anchor point So from 1980 to 2006. It was about three and a half percent per year The projections going forward are somewhere around three and a half percent globally But in one sense, it doesn't matter All of the values wind up below point one In an in an absolute sense it absolutely does matter because the top one's about five times the bottom one But the question then is what is it being to to get our decarbonization rate down below point one? These are just abstractions. They're just numbers. What does it actually mean? This is no better than that Integrated assessment model performance art picture I put up at the beginning So what I'd like to do is walk you through an exercise to get an intuitive understanding for what these numbers actually mean And then how it translates back into technology So here's the historical decarbonization rate the black curve with a little hiccup at the end With just stapling stapling on the the midpoint of the future rate I'm going to start with the United Kingdom as a case study and we'll work out globally from there I picked the United Kingdom because the UK has the most aggressive national legislation of any large economy for emissions reductions And it provides a a a useful starting point if you are a a leader in Policy you often get applauded in international negotiations in the climate community But you also find policy analysts looking at what you're doing and evaluating it. And so that's what I'm going to do So here's the same numbers for the United Kingdom. This is the historical decarbonization of the UK economy You see this characteristic downward curve that you see in most advanced large industrial economies The UK is actually one of the more carbon efficient economies Worldwide they're about 50 percent better than the global average. They're at 0.42 tons of carbon dioxide for $1,000 of GDP Now some of the reason for that is that The UK has lost a lot of its manufacturing They've offshored their emissions. So this is the the contribution of manufacturing to the UK economy Dropping from about 33 percent to about 12 percent From 1970 to 2007. This is the employment that's followed that same path So I would argue that if in fact the offshoring of manufacturing is responsible for the continued Decrease in the carbon intensity of the UK economy. That's not a particularly sustainable Approach to reducing emissions and it just displaces them from one place to another The climate change act of 2008 was passed in december 2008 in the UK Mandates that the UK has to reduce its aggregate emissions from a 1990 level by 34 percent by 2022 We can take that number And it's all right if we reduce emissions by 34 for different rates of GDP What would the decarbonization curve have to be for the united kingdom? Here's the the decarbonization curves for the UK going from the 0.42 Down somewhere between 0.2 and 0.15 Now I should say the UK hasn't cooperated with my analysis that they've had actually GDP contraction In a number of years since I first did this study I can tell you that david Cameron would be doing backflips of joy for positive GDP growth It is quite possible that if the UK economy collapses and they Disappear they may meet their emissions reductions targets, but for any Positive GDP growth, this is the range in which they would have to be For decarbonization so 0.15 to 0.2 What I'd like to do is to present to you what this actually means from the standpoint of technology Now here's a number of different countries You can see who the winner is there in terms of carbon intensity It's France France is at 0.3 and why is France have such a low carbon intensity? Nuclear power. Why does France have nuclear power? It has something to do with the Suez crisis and the reliance on Fossil fuels that have to come from the east has to do with Germany has to do with national security Has to do with a lot of things. It doesn't have anything to do with climate change, but they have this very low Carbon intensity and the point I'd like to make is that if the UK is going to go from their 0.42 down below 0.2 They have to go through 0.3 So so France is a milestone on the way for the UK to achieve its carbon reduction Targets in terms of decarbonization and allows us to ask well, what would it take? For the united kingdom to be as carbon efficient as France Here's the french decarbonization curve. It's downward much smaller slope And if you ask the question well, how long did it take France to go from 0.42 to 0.3 the answer is 20 years So we know empirically it is possible for a large economy to go from 0.42 to 0.3 It took 20 years. The question is is it possible for the uk to do it in a shorter time period? Um What if we're worried about climate change and we want to modulate carbon intensity? Can we do that? What would that take? So in this graph what I have is I have the french The french Point three here. Here's the decarbonization curves for the uk What i'm gonna do is i'm gonna put france in motion to answer the question By when would the uk have to be as carbon efficient as france? So far along so we take france over to where it intersects the curve. I'm gonna be generous here drop it down And if you squint and make it blurry, you can say 2015. Let's say 2015 so in the next Three years less than three years now The uk would have to become as carbon efficient as france to be on target to meeting the provisions of the 2008 climate change act What does that mean in terms of technology? One of the things I try to do um My work is to provide an intuitive understanding Of of what these numbers actually mean if I tell you that to be as carbon efficient as france Sorry, that tells you something, but it doesn't tell you something that you intuitively understand. Certainly. I don't intuitively understand it So what i'm going to do is give you a measuring stick This is the dungeon is being nuclear power plant in kent In the southeast coast of england It's a one gigawatt nuclear power plant And what i'm going to do is ask the question how many Dungeons be nuclear power plants equivalent Would have to be built and deployed in the uk Displacing an equivalent amount of energy produced by coal In order to be as carbon efficient as france in the next three years Now I want to make something very clear because sometimes when I talk about nuclear power plants People don't hear anything I say for the rest of my talk This is simply a measuring stick. I'm not saying anything about nuclear power We all understand intuitively the size of a nuclear power plant. So I will present some numbers in terms of solar Solar farms shortly in the context of australia I when I first several years ago presented some of this analysis early analysis In australia I had a comment from the audience someone said well Obviously your analysis doesn't make sense because we don't do nuclear power in australia So so just to be clear. I'm not saying anything about nuclear power So you're all sitting down you guys might want to sit down for the answer Here's the answer The answer is The equivalent amount of energy of 40 dungeons being nuclear power plants have to be deployed by 2015 Now I presented this in the uk and the climate change committee a few members of the climate change committee Said you know they criticize this analysis. They say well, you're not being fair We have a report that's this thick that says all the things we can do in the uk with Insulation with changing to electric cars with efficiency improvements with wind farms onshore and offshore My reply to that That's fine The magnitude of effort is the same whether you express it in nuclear power plants or giant thick reports this thick It's like it's like kilograms and pounds. You could say I lost you know I lost 22 pounds and to say well, I was only 10 kilograms. That's not The mag this is a measuring stick and so I have gone out on a limb in my work And I've said the uk is going to fail Miserably in meeting their emissions reductions targets For any positive GDP growth Now I gave this talk in 2009 actually almost three years ago to today At a big talk in Birmingham and one of the advantages of giving a Prominent talk is that it gets covered by the media and they ask actually people who matter what they think about it So I asked Colin Chalon, who's a member of the uk parliament at the time in charge of the climate change committee And he actually read my paper He said as you know Peltke's analysis raises questions Which I do not think have been factored into the thinking behind the climate change acts The task of cutting emissions is already staggeringly huge as we have seen well beyond our current political capacity to deliver So that's good. He understood what I was saying and the implications Then he talks about Heathrow. I'll get back to Heathrow in a minute But here's where I think we have some problems in our discussions about climate change Is that when we get to the point where information becomes uncomfortable or unwelcome We have an almost an antibody approach. We kind of reject the information This goes on the climate science. We see people who are skeptical of even the idea of human caused climate change But we also see it in the policy realm also So when that same bbc article We see this statement professor pelkies intervention was rejected by economist terry barker a lead author for the intergovernmental panel for climate change Those of you who followed my work will know that I have been critical of the ipcc On a number of fronts, which has earned me the great distinction of climate skeptic Um, I will point out that just several months ago. This was in the guardian Britain will miss government carbon targets by increasingly wide margins over the next 20 years argues cambridge econometrics a private company owned by a charity and chaired by cambridge university academic terry barker so I think There are things we may wish to be the case It would be great if climate change were a hoax and it wasn't real It's not it would be great if we had easy solutions to the problem. We don't They're difficult. Um Let me present a couple slides to give you some context beyond the uk. I just did this last week You'll see the this is dated 23rd of january. The u.s. Government put out its projection of u.s. emissions This just came out last week out to 2030 And the u.s. Has these targets for emissions reductions 17 percent the red line 30 percent the blue line 42 percent Is the green line and what I did is I simply calculated the number of nuclear power plants equivalent in the same manner as I did for the uk For the us to meet its targets us has a much bigger economy To meet its 2020 emissions reductions. It's 103 nuclear power plants equivalent. It's not going to happen The u.s. Government no longer talks about emissions reduction Targets in fact it is perfectly willing to put out projections that don't even come close to meeting the targets And no one even criticizes them in the us anymore. It's it's so commonly accepted This would be 13 plants annually To 2020 if you really want to reduce For the 2030 target that's 20 nuclear power plants annually to 2030 right now the us has plans for two So they're about 353 short So how about australia this figure comes from the official uh most recent government document projecting australian emissions with respect to the emissions reductions targets in australia Which you can see are quite a bit more severe the us says 17 percent, but that's 17 percent below 2005 australia says five percent, but that's five percent below 1990 you have to keep your eye on the p um We can do the same sort of analysis for australia So the number of 750 megawatt nuclear power plants equivalent to meet australia's 2020 targets five percent below It's 25 nuclear power plants equivalent It's not going to happen australia is not going to meet its emission reductions goal Now it's possible that there's some dodgy thing called offsets And a few billion dollars might be spent to have an accounting success But that's not the same as decarbonizing the economy now in the spirit that australia doesn't do nuclear power I have a solar energy example In my book when I read it I one of the things I wanted to do was to Use technologies that exist as my intuitive examples. So I used the clonkery solar thermal Plant that was a 10 megawatt plant that by all indications it was going to go forward it didn't um So australia's example doesn't exist. So I recently looked up And saw that the clonkery Solar thermal plant has been turned into a wind Or sorry a solar farm It has 7600 solar panels There's here's an example of what those panels look like and we could ask how many of these solar farms Would australia have to deploy again replacing an equivalent amount of a coal energy to meet the 5 15 25 target Here's the answer So about 10 of these solar farms per day Between now and 2020 would be enough to hit that 5 percent target By my estimate the australia is going to be about 29,860 short The the point here is to give you a very real and intuitive sense for the magnitude of what we've signed up for Um The point isn't to make you optimistic or pessimistic. That's that's When you wake up in the morning, you're either optimistic or pessimistic. I don't have control over that My view as a policy analyst is that we are never going to make progress on difficult policy problems unless we understand what we're up against And so these are daunting numbers. They're huge numbers My view very much is that the answer to the question How do we stabilize carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? The only appropriate answer is We don't know But we might know enough to get started in the right direction So let me start moving out again and start talking about how we start moving in the right direction There's a debate there was a debate in the uk over building a third runway at Heathrow if you've been through Heathrow You know, it's not really the most effective airport Here are some green piece campaigners in the back of a ba jet climate emergency no third runway Why don't they want a third runway? More economic activity more airplanes more emissions Um, I think David Cameron has solved this by saying i'm he's going to build another airport somewhere else But the point here is there's a lot of well-meaning people with the best of intentions on the climate issue Who are spending time doing things like this to absolutely no effect and perhaps even generating some ill will towards The cause of reducing emissions. I'm sure the people who are looking out these windows are not too amused That their flight's going to be delayed because there's a bunch of guys on the wing Now while this is happening in the uk here's what's happening in china China is building by 2020 a hundred new airports Heathrow size and larger In a in a very real sense. It does not matter what happens to that third runway at Heathrow It is irrelevant Let's see it go even broader here's China's emissions in 2006 1.7 gigatons of carbon what i've done here is have the estimated 2010 emissions With each year's increments. You can see how fast it's growing and what i've done here is put the annual emissions for a bunch of countries There's austria at the very top So you can compare how they compare to to what's going on in china The uk is about three weeks worth of china's annual emissions or about A third of their annual increment austria might be a week worth of china's emissions Again mathematically you could say well it doesn't really matter what happens in the uk At all either now the response to that is well every little bit helps And certainly that's true in one sense, but if you need 20,000 29,868 solar farms Putting up one at a time you may say every little bit helps, but it doesn't get you anywhere near the scale of the problem Now what i'm presenting here is not new What might be new here is an intuitive way to to comprehend it in an unavoidable way to comprehend it This is from ken caldera. I'm already hofferton colleagues in science in 2003 They wrote to achieve stabilization at a two degree warming. We need to install 900 plus or minus 500 megawatts So that's a nuclear power plant of carbon emissions free power generating capacity each day over the next 50 years every day This is roughly the equivalent of a large carbon emissions free power plant becoming functional somewhere in the world every day We are not doing this. So what i'm presenting should not be viewed as heretical or Not consistent with the literature that's out there Now there's a wild card While i'm talking about this there are 1.5 billion people who lack access to electricity and probably another billion who lack access to reliable electricity One of the the why we call dirty little secrets of the climate change issue is that Almost all of the so-called success scenarios the stabilization scenarios at 450 parts per million or 350 parts per million Keep almost all of these people in the dark Why is that because if you were to add 1.5 billion people to the global economy with full energy access It blows up our carbon budgets We cannot do that. So if you look at integrated assessment models from the IPCC from the IEA and other groups And you look at the what the numbers say in the fine print In 2030, there's still 1.3 billion people without access to electricity Now if you're in india And you're a scholar you're in the climate issue and you look at this Is that something you're going to sign on for? Probably not right now. There's an a quiet debate that's probably going to emerge full-throated soon That this year you may or may not know this this is the the international year of sustainable energy for all It used to be the international year of energy for all There's a big debate over The sustainable part What if it's possible to give energy access to 600 million indians? But they require fossil fuels Is that appropriate? Is that not appropriate? How does that work? So this is the trade-off that is is out there If anything the estimates for how much energy the world will need in the coming decades have been underestimated Making this problem even worse In terms of the amount of energy that needs to be provided So I would argue that we have gone down the wrong path on the climate change issue The narrative the very common narrative is that we use too much energy And fossil fuels are too cheap If that's how you define the problem then the solution follows from that We need to use less energy and we need to make fossil fuels more expensive What about if we looked at it a different way and we said well if you look at the world There's going to be continued economic growth. It's a lot of people who don't have access to energy But just like us deserve that energy access to it. What about we need vastly more energy vastly more energy in years to come And part of the problem with providing more energy is that fossil fuels Are too expensive We need alternatives to fossil fuels that are cheaper That makes us more efficient helps with economic growth So the question you might ask is how fast can decarbonization of the economy occur? And as I suggest nobody knows if you look historically Around the world there has been these rates. Would you might call background rates of one to two percent? Decarbonization per year. I had my students a while back Canvass the globe look at Decarbonization rates in every country around the world and asked for for large developed economies What's the fastest rate of decarbonization over a five year or longer period? Was 1981 through 1986 in japan? 4.4 per year Japan offshoreed its aluminum industry, which was a big energy hog which also wasn't too profitable and helped GDP also To take an example for the united states achieving a 17 percent reduction, which they're not going to hit While maintaining modest economic growth requires rates of decarbonization in excess of five percent a year We do not know how to do this I think policy wisdom starts with that That simple truth So what about the current policy options? The policy logic of targets and timetables is backwards. It doesn't make any sense whatsoever to set targets for things we don't know how to do Cap and trade cannot succeed the european experience should tell you that if you look in my book I have some numbers in there that compare The pre-kioto period to the post-kioto period for rates of decarbonization in europe There was no change in the last several years europe has actually recarbonized What cap and trade did in europe is it took this background rate of decarbonization? Which no one was paying attention to before climate policy We started paying attention to it and then called it climate policy, but it didn't change We were still achieving that background rate now carbon tax for the same reason can't do the job But I think a carbon tax is incredibly important if it's used wisely And just to give you a sense of of the policy recommendation that I have in the book which is Not original to me, but it's from a group of scholars that i'm associated with Is that if we put a low carbon tax and how low I don't know as high as politically possible Five dollars a ton two dollars a ton fifteen dollars a ton. I don't know But at some level And the good thing about the energy economy of the world is that it's enormous It's it's something like five to ten trillion dollars So a small carbon tax could be an oil tax raises an enormous amount of money You take that money and you invest in energy innovation with the goal of driving down the costs of alternatives to fossil fuels How do we deal with other so-called wicked problems? I'll just talk about one advancing human lifespans at the end of my book I have this Tongue-in-cheek smart alec little example and I said what if what if we wanted to Advance human lifespans one way we could do that is put a is put a limit on the number of deaths That each country is allowed They would then get permits for the number of deaths that they were allowed to have And if they exceeded then they would have to pay a price and they could trade their permits around the world And people laugh but That would motivate all sorts of research to advance Public health and disease. It's the same logic. We're applying to energy, but nobody laughs when you talk about energy We control emissions in the same way that we control human lifespans It's an outcome of other processes that we do control What we do control are the carbon intensity of energy that we generate and energy efficiency Just like we control progress on disease and public health so We do not know how fast we can decarbonize. There's no guarantees But if you think about carbon taxes and cap and trade In principle, they are supposed to motivate Investments in innovation that will revolutionize the energy sector The argument I would make is if we want to revolutionize the energy sector Let's Step aside from these convoluted politically contentious policies and just cut to the chase and figure out how to raise money to invest in tomorrow's energy I will conclude here and we maybe have time for a few questions This is a a map of the world from space from jesse ossebel And he asked the question. Well, what would this map look like this is at night? You see the lights What would this map look like if everyone around the world lived at the level of North americans europeans That's this world I show this to my students. We have a long discussion Somebody first starts out says what a nightmare think of all those co2 emissions Someone else says well, think of all the human potential freed up by energy access and sub-saharan africa and in india One thing i'm pretty convinced of Is that this is the world we're headed for One way or another and that we're going to go into this world intelligently Smart or not and energy is going to be a big part of that equation Here's how you can find me. I welcome feedback comments criticisms pelki at colorado.edu. There's a lot of papers at sciencepolicy.colorado.edu that You can download for free from our center website Right now i'm working on a book on motivated by where I wound up on the climate fix on innovation broadly how we Drive innovation how we control innovation how we deal with the downsides and so my blogging a lot these days is about innovation much less about climate policy Thank goodness But you can find me talking about different topics and you're welcome to participate there Thank you very much for your attention in this long talk Can I open the floor now for questions We've got two roving mics. So Thank you. I enjoyed that talk very much Um, I wanted to come back to the kair identity and the one variable that you didn't discuss which was population Does that in your analysis fall into the same basket as gdp? Which is just we don't want to go there or have you considered the population variable so in When you say that do you mean as as a Lever for addressing carbon dioxide as something that may have policy options attached to it. Yeah Do you ever see the movie logans run? I I folded the gdp because i mean there's several reasons in all seriousness one is that um the world particularly The us in europe has been down the path of trying to deal with population in the past and In terms of sheer numbers of people in the world you can say that it perhaps wasn't so successful Second is a lot of attention to population As far as advocacy and as an issue has diminished ever since uh, and these numbers could be wrong The the u.n. Now projects the population will peak mid-century and then decline after that A third reason is that there's really no indication that we can be successful in modulating population Other than at the margin. I'm a big supporter of family planning and empowering women I think that's important, but if you actually do the math And you say all right to stop the water increasing in our bath tub. We need to have an 80 percent reduction You will find that there is really no scenario in which Efforts to manage population contribute meaningfully to that number If the world's going to deal with this this is I mean, this is one of the hard realities of the kaya identity Is that we are going to have to produce 95 of our energy from carbon-free sources That's independent of if our energy doubles from today Triples from today or we increase it by 10 times from today 95 of that energy has to come from carbon-free sources So given the insensitivity of that conclusion there, I I do not touch any of the elements of the gdp part I'm interested in your Observation about the decarbonization of the economy Because if deindustrialization of the uk and having lived there and grown up there. I recognize exactly what you mean There's going on isn't it all they're doing is importing the energy in embodied in the goods that they import from china And that in fact is not Decarbonizing the economy at all Well, I mean this is where it's really important to to pay attention to the stocks and flows and what really matters is what's happening globally So yes, the uk is decarbonizing its economy According to these metrics, but china most likely is Is Recarbonizing theirs because a lot of their industrial production is from coal power What matters is what happens at the global level? One reason why I focus on technology rather than emissions is that you get into all these games So should our emissions accounting be production based or consumption based? Should the uk get some of china's emissions? These are very difficult political and politicized questions That if you realize a simple question that all of the energy produced everywhere has to be 95 carbon free I don't have to add up a single carbon molecule If you tell me we are producing 95 of our energy from carbon free sources. We're pretty close to stabilizing now Think about this. We spend an enormous amount of money and effort trying to count carbon and to account for carbon I would ask you go to the web Sometime in the next few days and try to find a site that will tell you one stop shop How much of the world's energy comes from carbon free sources? No one pays any attention to that. Yeah, there's some experts and you can go out and find it Depending on how you count hydro power. It's about 10 plus or minus 5 percent. We need to go up to 95 percent My view is that's the metric we ought to be paying attention to Not the output measure, which is the carbon measure Yeah, um look just one of let me start out by saying Support the kind of approach and analysis you've got and I think one of the things that we've had trouble with in Australia Is getting a handle on how big 5 percent is we've had obviously Quite a contentious debate about that and there are certainly people who would count themselves in their climate change Advocacy area who think that's a pathetically small number and it should be a lot bigger And obviously there there is an engineering challenge there Which you know many of us are aware of and your analysis shows quite dramatically that 5 percent is actually a huge number And there's absolutely no way we're going to meet it even with the carbon tax. Absolutely no way Um, so I mean some reflections on how you actually manage that kind of a debate might be useful and Perhaps also how how you can reflect on your experiences in this In this kind of analysis that you're presenting which basically says we're not doing technology innovation Nearly nearly fast enough to get anywhere near any of these targets And yet people keep talking about even more ambitious targets Yeah, I mean this is I mean Australia is a fascinating case for a lot of reasons I mean Australia shows that that You know the politics are difficult, but for now there's a carbon tax that's proposed and Maybe will be implemented I I wrote a critique of Julia Gillard's climate policy in abc news. You can google it. It's on our website With kind of a half and half appraisal the the idea of the carbon tax Good idea It should be done tying the carbon tax to tax policy and Refunding that money Probably not a good idea. Maybe politically a good idea. Maybe tax policy a good idea But from the standpoint of energy innovation The the pricing of the carbon tax will have marginal impacts on people's energy use If you've been to europe and you look at The kind of cars people drive in europe and how much they pay for petrol or even here in australia compared to the united states There's some differences, but there's not Highways full of electric cars in europe And they pay five six times the amount you might see in the u.s So the ability to use pricing as a mechanism of stimulating innovation runs into a problem You put a price on carbon it causes certain goods to become more expensive Which causes people then to motivate to search for other goods or stimulate innovation But it also pisses people off because they pay more money and they vote for somebody else So the the downside the critique of the australian climate policy is that the the money that was raised from the carbon tax Is not earmarked for energy innovation and that i would suspect in 2020 under a fully successful regime of a carbon tax australia is going to look a lot like it does now With a fossil fuel infrastructure So at some point we're going to have to build that energy bridge to the future And it's going to have to be paid for we do this in a lot of areas In the united states there's a highway tax a gasoline tax that people pay even then the tax Unfriendly u.s for the national highway system, which people love the national highway system Part of the reason is that it raises Half a trillion dollars every year that members of congress get to spend in their district for jobs to build highways And so if you were to say let's get rid of that gasoline tax There would be an outcry from people all across the u.s because they tie it to something they value if energy an energy tax a carbon tax were used to raise money that were in reinvested back into r&d Not just r&d, but broader innovation with this idea that There are countries around the world who need to buy a lot of kit to install a lot of goods for energy The countries that have that technology that capability will probably win contracts to do so that means jobs that means money I think there's there's a better way to To try to crack this nut than to simply say we're going to make energy more expensive and that will drive innovation Okay, we'll take one last question up the end over there and after which we'll bring the session to a close Can I encourage you all to stay back? We've got some light for light refreshments outside and interact with professor pilkey further Thank you Roger i'm going to draw not on your current book, but on your previous book the honest broker now um In your presentation tonight you've talked about changing the narrative and you're addressing an audience of university academics and a few sorrow academics as well scientists And the university Australian National University has a center for public awareness of science where they talk about Science to policy and one of the courses that they do there is a Science to policy course where you're trained to write letters to the editor And I see Frank Yotso is here and he's well accomplished at that But in our roles as scientists here In changing the narrative Can you offer any further advice in strategy? And how we might do that Well, I can't say i'm familiar with the the goings on here letters to the editor But I mean one of the the the Issues that gets me in a bit of hot water is I argue that the role of science in the climate policy debate has been overstated by people on all sides of the debate And this whole skeptic salamis One side the other side debate It is what it is It's part it's part of the cultural landscape in the u.s It's part of the cultural landscape the political landscape in australia in the uk And one of the things that the debate over science Um does is it distracts attention from talking about policy options There's a famous political commentator From the early 20th century in the u.s. Guy named walter lippman He has this great phrase that I use in my book and I repeat it as often as I can And he says that the goal of politics is not to get people to think alike The goal of politics is to get people who think differently to act alike And if I had one bit of advice to give to the scientific community it's to Recognize that people have different views on the science of climate change It's not reflection on you personally it has nothing to do with your authority But at some point we let it lie and we say you know you have your views But hey, would you like to have cheaper energy? I think that that's the way that you get people to coalesce around political ideas not this battle over What they should or don't believe or which I think is Actually hurting the scientific community and those fissures show up within the scientific community. Thank you