 Well, thank you, John, and let's thank John and Ryan for joining us today to discuss your outstanding and timely plan to combat climate change in the book, Speed and Scale, an action plan for solving a climate crisis now. There is a lot to unpack today. As you can see, I have lots of, you know, these posted pads and learned a lot. I read the book. Yes, I read the book. But let's just step back for a moment. And I want to start off first by acknowledging the devastating news in Uvaldi, Texas yesterday. We're heartbroken for the families, the survivors, and the Uvaldi community. We mourn today with the educators and the students across the country over this horrific tragedy. The nation needs to take action to stop this senseless violence and madness. So let's start this by stacking arms, holding hands, and joining in a moment of silence to honor those affected in Uvaldi and Buffalo and others. Thank you. Against this backdrop of this unthinkable situation, you know, we gather here today to discuss the future of a planet, the future of humanity. The mission of the Stanford Dore School of Sustainability is to address the defining challenge of the 21st century. And with an ambition to creating a future where humanity and the planet thrives, I want to obviously take this opportunity to thank John and Andor for their, and other donors for the incredible generosity and trust in Stanford. And also to thank Cam Moller and Steve Graham for the exceptional leadership to get us here. Are they here perhaps? Yes. Steve. Right there. Stand up. We're going to talk about the book, but I also want to acknowledge the elephant in the room. And if there's an elephant in the room, it's worth introducing that elephant. I heard and had the opportunity to hear from many of you and about the school. And there's a lot of positive energy and a lot of opinions. That's good. The issue of fossil fuels have come up. A few hours ago, I sent out a letter to the community, school community, where I stand on this issue. And I'm inviting others to weigh in and to address their concerns and to come up with a shared set of values at Stanford. And in that letter, you will find, I'm not going to go through the letter, that I ask for your open-mindedness, your inclusion, if you truly believe in diversity and inclusion, to have the courage to speak to others who don't always agree with you. If everyone agrees with everyone, no progress is ever made. And so talk to them to find out their points of view. I also want to clarify that the fossil fuel funding is not for school general funds. It is really for some of the affiliate programs and pooled resources because faculty have the option to get funding with their academic freedom as long as they comply with the campus policies. And I've stated my letter. Let me just state it again very briefly. But there are companies that deny the existence of climate change, that undermine and misrepresent the understanding of science of climate change, undermine sensible government policies to reduce emissions, and at times misuse their partnership with Stanford to undermine such policies. And those are there against my values. But I also believe it's unwise to paint the whole industry with a single brush. We should be asking the questions that I've laid out in my letter. Are the company's climate commitments aligned with the goals of the Paris agreement? Is it devoting sufficient human and financial resources to meet its commitments? Is it supporting and promoting government policies that would create the business imperatives for transition to clean economy? And the last point is very important. A fossil fuel company may be asked to produce oil and gas to avoid significant disruption to human welfare. Need not be in Palo Alto. Could be in Tanzania. Could be in Calcutta where I was born. To the economy and national security in the short term. One should then ask the question, does the company still intend to meet its climate commitments in the long term? Now that's commitment. So I invite all of you to weigh in on this. I'll be having a lot of open forums to discuss this with students, with the faculty and the staff. But we are here today about the book. So let me start with John and Ryan. And John and Ryan, this is an exceptional book. Thank you for your intensity that you bring to the subject and your, of course, resources. But in knowledge as well, you have a point of view in your book on fossil fuel. Tell us about your views. So the book, as you'll hear, is not a book. It's an action plan. It's a website. It's a platform. And I'll be transparent with you. My goal is to sign you up for this manifesto. This plan or your version of it that will solve the climate crisis at speed and at scale. Now, not to dodge your question to be 100% clear, I'm fighting every day for a future that's free from fossil fuels. We're witnessing the world right now fund both sides of a war over fossil fuels. Putin's income from oil is greater now than when he launched his attack on the Ukraine. And of course, the US Congress in rapid order deployed $40 billion, I think, on top of another $25 billion. Very little debate or discussion to fight for an existential value. That's democracy on our planet. We have another existential flight on our hands. And that's to create a sustainable planet to take the emissions of carbon greenhouse gases down by 50% by 2030 and get them to net zero by 2050. So the plan, forget what John Dorr believes, calls for no new coal or gas plants after 2021. And that existing plants will be retired and out of commission by 2025 for coal and 2035 for gas. And those are global goals. We give developing countries 10 more years to meet these aggressive accords. But there should be no doubt about where Ryan, I, or this plan stand with respect to fossil fuels. We need a fossil fuel free future. Thank you, John. I want to go into your personal journeys into this in this area and climate change and sustainability. What got you interested and what inspired you to write this book or plan? Let me connect with our group. How many of us here are undergrads? How many graduate students? Wow. How many engineers? How many faculty? And how many parents? How many of you have children? OK, the answer to this question is what got me going in climate. How many of you remember seeing Al Gore's 2006 movie, An Inconvenient Truth? I'll never forget it. I went with my friends to a movie theater. We came home, had a dinner conversation. And I had a family with an inconvenient youth. Her name's Mary. It blocks COVID and audio. That's a high quality mask. We went around the table and I asked people what they thought. This is 2006. And some of my Republican friends said, well, it looks like the world's warming. Not sure it's man-made. You know, that was a debatable scientific proposition in some minds. And so we went around. Came to Mary. The room went quiet. She said, dad? I'm scared. And I'm angry. She said, forgive me. Your generation created this problem. You better fix it. And I didn't know what to do. I didn't know what to say to her. So with my partners and I, I set out to learn about climate crisis. I even hired Al Gore to be a partner at the Kleiner Perkins. But we traveled the world. We learned about biofuels. We went to the Mojave Desert. We saw wind turbines. And we set out over three funds to invest a billion dollars in 70 clean tech 1.0 ventures. And learn along the way some hard and important and valuable lessons. For those of you interested in the return on investment, those investments, if held, are worth $3 billion today. Not well appreciated. But the real win was in creating companies that were leaders in moving forward some aspects of this revolution and providing opportunity to meet Mary's challenge, to deal with her anger and her fear. More recently, I've become re-energized because, frankly, we need more speed and scale. As encouraging as the progress is in lowering costs of energy systems or unlocking improved ways of doing regenerative agriculture, the problem is growing faster than the solutions. So we are in trouble. We need the full force and might of Stanford University, all the departments, all the undergraduates, all the graduate students and faculty where they choose to join forces to tackle the problem of our generation. That's how I got involved in climate. Thank you, John, for sharing that. Clearly, your intensity and emotional engagement is critical and it's an inspiration to all of us. Thank you for that, Ryan. My journey in climate started just recently. I think in a lot of these kind of events, there are people who have been at this for a very long time. If we tackle this crisis 30 years ago, sorry, in the 70s when we noticed CO2 is actually warming up the atmosphere, we don't only have to cut emissions by 10% every decade. It would have been doable if we approached this when Al Gore conceded to George Bush being president. It'd be 25% every decade, harder, but still doable. Now we're on this path where we have to cut emissions in half in the next seven and a half years and then completely by 2050. And so the urgency of the moment as an engineer, as an investor having the privilege of working at Kleiner, I got pulled in three years ago on this. And so that's where my journey started to ruin more recently. And I think for a lot of us, realigning, thinking about the skills we have and challenging it toward this problem, but then also realizing this problem touches every part of society. So the way we move, the things we eat, how we power. And so it's not too far of a delta of what I was trying to do before. How does this affect your view of your son? I have a three and a half year old. And it's weird. For all the parents, I think in that moment you hold your kid for the first time, things seem finite. Time, at least for me, felt very infinite before that. And then all of a sudden I'm holding my kid. And you think about all the time you spend away from them, what are you doing? What are you working on? Is it meaningful? Is it worth it? And so this all happened, right? He's three and a half, three years ago. Like maybe, maybe, John, you're pointing out why this became such an obvious transition, at least where I'm spending my time. Thank you. When I read the book as an engineer, it seemed like it took an engineering approach to problem solving. And if you could just elaborate for us, what's the plan? The plan is to transform society. No kidding. It's that ambitious. And for the engineer in me, a student of Andy Groves, who taught famously at the business school about objectives and key results, a mentor of mine, we boiled the plan down to six big, hairy-ass objectives. Electrified transportation, decarbonized the grid, fixed our food systems, both adjust what we eat, not by mandate, but voluntarily, and how we grow our food, and how we waste food. Fourth, protect nature. I'm talking about deforestation and the seabeds, great natural reservoirs that we're destroying. Clean up industry, how we make cement and concrete. The world will not stop using cement and concrete. And then finally, after we've done those five great big, hairy-ass objectives, remove the stubborn carbon that remains that we're not able to eliminate by direct air capture or deforestation or other such means. Those are the six big elements of the plan. And so that's what goes from 59 billion tons to zero, but we've got to move quicker. Our time frame is short. And so we lean on a set of accelerants. We've got to win the politics and policy. All these commitments that are made very publicly at COP and in these international forums need to actually be translated into law back home. We've got to turn movements into action. This is everywhere from the ballot box, getting people elected that care about the climate, but also in the boardroom. Companies can make commitments more aggressive than these Paris goals. We've got to innovate. And the real measure of innovation is can the green, cleaner thing be cost-competitive? So all of our energies around innovation are driving down the costs of clean technologies. And then we've got to invest. We've got to invest like our lives depend on it because they do. A lot of the investment will come from shifting existing ways of spending, but we track five key results that are around R&D dollars, philanthropic dollars, venture capital dollars, as well as project financing. This exercise to create these objectives and key results really came from this moment that Christmas, 2019, where John posed, sorry, Christmas before COVID, yeah, 2019, asked if we're going to channel our time and go for what matters, we should craft OKRs around it. And so how do you craft an OKR for the climate crisis? And what we did was we reached out to everyone we knew, scientists, activists, founders. And because it was COVID, most of these conversations were over Zoom. And in these recordings, we were learning so much. And this book is not John and I. It's 100 different people with 35 stories sharing how this future can happen. It is going to be hard. The road and hill is incredibly steep, but these are the folks that give us hope. So for a long time, the climate agenda and movement has had goals, lots of goals, international conferences, pledges, and so forth. But goals are not a plan. And so what we set out to do was to take these 10 objectives and support each of them by three to five time-bound specific measurable key results. I learned about this from Andy Grove, who some of you had as a professor, and also a famous baseball player, Yogi Berra, who said, if you don't know where you're going, you might not get there. So for every one of these objectives, you'll see specific time-bound measurable key results. Do you want to share some of those with us, Ryan? Yeah. So if we're talking about electrifying transportation, getting all the miles that we go on the road, electric, or at least emission-free, you've got KR1.1 that has to be true. The cost of a fossil fuel vehicle needs to be more expensive than the electric one. So the electric price actually matters. And so we track that. And we set a target, a goal. By 2024, EVs should be cheaper than the ICE's equivalent, whether by cost reductions or through incentives. So I see some of you are pulling out the plan. That's a good thing to do. I encourage you to grab it from the fly leaf tucked in the front of your book right now. But for every one of these objectives, the magic's on the reverse. There's 55 of these key results. And my challenge to you is to identify one or two of these that really capture your head and your heart. What part of this massively important, massively parallel problem do you want to take, your personal power, your leadership skills, your communication skills, your entrepreneurial skills, and apply against this noble work? Because this is the plan. I would suggest you pick two and put both of them on your walls and one the other so that you get to see both sides at the same time. Oh, get two of these posters. Two of these posters. You have as many of the posters as you want. They're available for free now on the website, which is undergoing a transformation of its own in just two weeks, right? Yeah, so these key results, by the way, the 55, about half of them, we've actually pulled the data for them. Because if we're running a company and we set the OKRs, they have to be measurable, you have to actually share them with folks. So in two weeks' time, you'll be able to go to speed and scale and click in and actually see how many miles that are driven that are electric. You'll be able to click in and see which companies have made commitments to getting and reaching that zero by 2040. Hint, it's actually not our secret. It's not a lot. It's only like 7% that have a 2040 target. So we have a lot of work to do. We're not here today to say that this is the perfect plan or even that it's the only plan. And it's not a permanent plan. It'll change and be adjusted as we fight our way to 2030 or even in newer term goals. But it's a plan where the scientists and the experts that pulled together to make this agree the numbers add up. This is one way to get to net zero and halfway there by 2030. One of the things I learned from the terminology is green discount, that is make the clean things cheaper so that there's an economic imperative to actually go that direction. And I think that's certainly businesses shown that that has worked. The two key words, speed and scale, explain scale. What do you mean by that? Well, in March of 1942, General Hap Walker, I believe it was, had a meeting with FDR. And the battle to defeat the Nazi invasions of Europe and likely the Western world was not going very well. And so he wanted to know of the president, what's the plan? And I was deeply inspired when I saw what FDR's response was. He pulled out that napkin, which he showed you, and wrote just three key objectives for winning World War II. What it translated to in terms of key results was we stopped making for four years all cars and all appliances. We turned America's manufacturing muscle and the allies over to making 268,000 fighter aircraft, 60,000 Navy frigates, billions of rounds of ammunition. And so it was marketing muscle together with courageous leadership in a united nation that defeated that existential threat. My view is that transforming society, this mission to create a new clean energy economy, is even harder. It's more ambitious. And it has those sorts of ramifications in terms of the world that we'll leave behind. So that's what scale means to me. Ryan, any thoughts? Oh, on the speed side. So scale is the one word on speed. I think the advice here is what, at least I've learned in the two worlds, the now versus the new. We've got to be doing both at the same time. And when I think about the now, what are the actions and things we can do to cut emissions in half by the end of this decade? Like that frames the problem. And if we're thinking about speed, what are the easy things that we can do? Getting our grids cleaner, getting people out of ice vehicles into EVs and protected. There's so much we can do urgently on the now. But we've also have to start investing in the new. The technologies that we need from 2030 and beyond in concrete and steel and alternative plastics and aviation. Like think about all those hard things that we need to invest in today. And think about the new school. And I think about its role in playing on both of those things, the now and the new. And so when you're thinking about speed, keep thinking about both drum beats, the things that are before 2030, the things we can do today, and then the stuff that we need to invest in for later. Just to do a little bit of Rice University math here. If we had to cut emissions by 50% by 2030 and a growing planet with growing demand, turns out we got to cut emissions 8% per year compounded. That's what the numbers add up to. Show of hands, how many people think we'll cut emissions 8% this next year? Well, then we're going to have to try even harder. The year after that, that's the way in which this is a wicked and compounding problem. And one worthy of the amazing talents and resources that Stanford University, the whole of the university, possesses. One message we put in the book, which is if that question was asked, do we think the US or Europe could cut by 8%? Actually, maybe ask it. Does anyone here think that Europe can cut its emissions by 8%? And yeah, there's a few hands, some hands, right? That becomes more practical. We have this really carefully crafted line, which is the United States, Europe, and China must lead. Without a doubt, the US and Europe must go first as the alpha emitters. We have to show the world it's possible. For selfish reasons, too, if we're the ones that are creating these industries, of course, that's where the businesses get created and so forth. But it's to really drive down the cost for the rest of the world to that green discount point that Arun shared. If the green, clean thing is truly cheaper, market forces will. But what you're also saying is that the onus on addressing climate change should not be put on Angola. Let's be very clear. The emissions, the aggregate emissions are mainly from the United States, Europe, Japan, and China, et cetera. And we bear the responsibility of cleaning up the atmosphere. And the next, I think, your urgency part, we all agree, the next decade is the most consequential decade in terms of addressing climate change. Because it's like COVID, if you don't address it early enough, it's going to come back to bite you. And we are trying to figure out, what's the vaccination? And here's the vaccination, this book, and the vaccination delivery, vaccination plan, or the delivery of the vaccination, which is a different issue, not just the technical, but a social issue as well. And I think you brought this out beautifully in this book. Common side effects, too. Headaches and long COVID. So if you speed and scale by itself is daunting enough, and you combine them, and we have a significant challenge in front of us, which is, I think, reflected in some of the responses we got. The IEA and the International Energy Agency estimates that the world needs $4 trillion per year of investment for the next 30 years, till 2050, which is a total of $120 trillion to transform the world. Clearly, the governments alone cannot provide all that funding, and we need the private sector to be engaged. And my question to you is, what are the right incentives for the private sector to see a return on that investment? Otherwise, it'll be very hard for them to invest. We will not solve this problem unless we harness markets. And I'm an engineer from St. Louis, Missouri, and a patriotic, grateful American for all the investments people have made, the great education that I got. I'm a capitalist, but if we don't make the right outcome, the profitable outcome, it won't be the probable outcome. More money flows through markets in a day than all the governments in the world in a year in transactions, so we've got to harness markets. And there's a variety of policy measures that need to be taken. We will put a price on carbon. We will have trans-border adjustments to create incentives. But the problem isn't more challenging than even a new tax regime. We have to get this clean energy deployed. We have to get electric vehicles adopted and internal combustion vehicles off the road. We have to cite these new plans. We have to find funding for them. And parts of the world where governments are unstable. We need a cookie-cutter-like regime so that every clean energy deployment is not a bespoke negotiation with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank over whether or not they're going to take on first country risk. In fact, we need to retool those institutions so they do a better job for the world in these deployments. The opportunities, everywhere you turn, there's opportunity. Whether you're a policymaker, a policy entrepreneur, a tech entrepreneur, a social scientist, an expert in communications. Whether you're the next Elon Musk. And if you are, I want to see you right after this meeting. But I believe that to deal with this at scale, we're going to need to get the boardrooms, the business leaders, the nonprofit leaders, the policymakers, all pulling together against this plan. Thank you. John, let me continue with you. You have said publicly that climate and sustainability is a new computer science. Given that you've helped create some of the most successful companies based on computer science, let me push you a little bit on that. Is that a fair comparison? Is this bigger? Isn't this bigger than computer science? There's always this balance you try to strive between being outrageous enough to get attention, incredible enough. And in the early days of the internet revolution, some of you know I ran around saying it had been underhyped. And I kicked up quite a storm. And with retrospect, I think the internet was underhyped. I deeply believe, Arun, that you were right that the building of a new clean energy economy for the world is the largest economic opportunity of the 21st century. We'll talk in a moment about why it's a moral imperative. But from an economic point of view, between now and 2030, the estimates are there's 25 million new jobs in a clean energy economy. That's more than the combined construction workforces of Europe and the US combined. The market for batteries in electric vehicles is estimated to be $400 billion per year for the next 30 years. I want to tell you the size of the market that Facebook and Google are fighting over online advertising today is only $80 billion. So these are monster markets. I call them the mothers of all markets. And they will not automatically happen. They'll only happen with sustained innovation and engineering. Already some six battery companies have come out of Stanford. And I look for there to be six more many times over as we figure out how to recycle these materials, make them more economic, make them higher performance. And while I might think batteries are the holy grail, the harder and more human problems are how we fix food, for example. Let me continue. You mentioned Andy Grove. And he wrote this very famous book, Only the Paranoid Survive. And in that book, which was a must read at ARPA-E, he coined the term strategic inflection point when the strategy of a business or an industry has to go to an inflection point because the fundamentals of that business changes. And you got to get the cues correctly to be able to pivot because the fundamentals change so much that all data is irrelevant. And you got to experiment and then try things out and then pivot. So are we in that moment for strategic inflection point? And can you tell us a story of Orsted? Yes, we are in that moment. And I do believe if Andy Grove was with us today, he'd be smiling to see his OKRs applied against this problem. I know he cared about it while he was alive. He had conversations about, why don't we prioritize long-haul trucking, John, instead of light duty vehicles? It's a more predictable, accessible marketplace. But the Orsted story in this book, one of 30 profiles, is really worth reading because they were the Danish, I believe isn't that right? Large developer of natural gas energy. And they found that the fracking revolution really destroyed their whole value proposition. They brought in new leadership from Lego of all things, looked at their assets, strong engineering, able to do projects at scale, and focused all of their energies and efforts. And today, Orsted is the second largest provider of offshore wind energy. It's quite a remarkable story. Market cap today $30 billion was bankrupt, was going out of business. So businesses can and must reinvent themselves. This climate sustainability program is not some kind of kumbaya party. We're not going to have a great green revolution. In real revolutions, there are winners and there are losers. And it's incumbent that we use market forces in the ingenuity of innovators both in policy and in technology to get this done right. One thing I'll add on the Orsted story, it's like one of my favorite in this book, because it's a fossil fuel giant. 10 years ago, 80% of the revenue was from natural gas. Today, 80% is through their wind business. 100% of their investments is in clean energy. I think that's the bar you have to use to measure a fossil fuel company and their commitment to this. If you look at Exxon and Chevron, they spend barely a percent on their investments in capex and the clean green thing. Shell and Equinor spend about 15%. What's the right number there? Really make people follow through with what they are actually doing now, not their commitments always for the future. I mean, it's all the number of hands of parents in the room, right? I'm not saying here by 2030, I'm going to be a good dad. Take my word for it, right? My kid's going to judge me literally on what I'm going to do today, this year, how much time I'm spending with them. And so I think in a lot of our work around who do you take seriously, see where they're investing. They're making boatloads of money right now, creating energy security for the world, which is a good thing. But where are they going to invest that? For a lot of the fossil fuel majors, they may choose this clean green future. But for a lot of the others, just look at the public bank, their financial statements, they're not. Larry Fink of BlackRock is on record is saying he believes in the next two decades there will be 1,000 climate unicorns. That's private new companies worth more than a billion dollars. Elon Musk now, his company, Tesla, top 10 company, I think the seventh most valuable in the world. Kara Swisher, who I love to debate, is on record as saying she believes the world's first trillionaire will be a climate entrepreneur, a climate risk taker. It's on the basis of those that I'm being sort of modest and saying that I think climate science could well be the next computer science. And we need both those fields to work together. Ryan, if you figure out how to become a good dad, please let me know. I'm still trying to figure out. Maybe then I have Facebook. We're going to get to student questions, but just one thing, what I really loved about your book is not just the plan, but the human stories. And these are sort of global entrepreneurs, not just on commercial entrepreneurs, but social entrepreneurs, who are really taking action now. And these are global heroes. Can you share a little bit about those? Because we need to find those people out here and elsewhere around the world. We want to celebrate those stories, but one of them, my favorite is, and Ryan, I want you to do some, is of Lynn Jurick, who's a GSP grad who in 2006 said, we're going to deploy solar directly to people's homes. I'm not going to try to fight my way through the regulations and the incumbencies of the utilities. And Sun Run today is operating in more than 22 states, profitable, valuable company, setting the pace for solar deployment in the US. You want to tell the story of? James, absolutely. Kicking off our clean. Oh, Jerry? James is coming to mind because it's one of those really empowering things. James is from Kenya and he's a photographer, right? Not a policymaker, not a scientist or engineer, but he just noticed how much plastic was littering the fields, the ponds, and so forth. And he would just take a photo and put it on Twitter and just sharing with the world what was actually happening. He actually petitioned his local government to ban plastics and they said no. But someone from the Kenyan government saw what he was doing and Kenya actually now has one of the strictest bans on plastic because of this movement, right? Like when we talk about turning movements into action, think about the things you do and how they can lead to this collective outcome, right? Like in everything. Like we love to say go for the gigatons. It's expected to do the individual actions, but it's these collective ones that can really move the needle. 30 profiles, 30 really great stories of leaders of indigenous tribes, of policy makers, of entrepreneurs, success, failure, struggles, they're well worth reading. One of my favorite reviews of the book came in a conversation with an author from Business Insider. And after she put down the pen and turned off the microphones, she said, you know, John, I take a page of this book and I read it to my daughter every night and we talk about that aspect of her world, her future. And Arun brought to our announcement, really moving quote, I think it's from Native American Indians. It goes roughly as follows. We don't inherit the world from our ancestors. We're borrowing it from our children. That's terrific. I mean, I love that quote because that's exactly why we're here. We're here for the next generation and the grandchildren and the generations to come because if we don't get our act together, they will be, you know, they could be under risk. So I love the story about James Wachibia because I think that's exactly what I had out here because I think we need to find the James Wachibia and connect them to Stanford. We have an accelerator in the new school and by chance he bumped into a politician who actually listened to him. We cannot leave it to chance. We have to make those connections from here in the rest of the world. And we have a great proving ground here at Stanford. California is the fifth largest economy in the world. The state legislature in the Senate are pro-climate. The governor is pro-climate. What better place for us to prove to the world and shift the rest of the world the way California set emission standards for autos. Those ended up being for the US, for the world. So before we go into the question, your thoughts on equity, environmental justice and leaving no one behind in this global transition? There's three key results I'm gonna cite. I call your attention to 8.48.58.6. Education equity, the world needs to achieve universal primary and secondary education by 2040. That means educate the world's girls. And that's 85 gigatons of emissions besides being the morally smartest thing we could do as stewards of this planet. Health equity, 8.5, eliminate the gaps among racial and social economic groups in greenhouse gas related mortality rates. 9 million people a year die prematurely due to pollution from fossil fuels. Sixth, economic equity, that the global clean energy transition creates 65 million new jobs and they're equitably distributed. My closing interview in this book is with another GSB alum, Loreen Powell Jobs. It's majestic and she says, you know, John, humanity should look on the climate crisis as a great gift to redress longstanding inequities and opportunities for all. That says it all. Thank you, John. And thank you, Ryan. Let's open it up for student questions. We may exceed a little bit beyond the time given just the value, the valuable sort of words of advice out here. You wanna? Yeah, thank you very much for being here. I'm asking questions on behalf of the students as submitted questions to the forum. This is one about climate justice and remedies actually. So we need to move with speed and scale forward. How do we do that without forgetting and recognizing past legacies, harms, and if we're gonna partner, how do we do that demanding accountability too? Well, my answer is go with the plan. There are organizations that are proven at scale to improve universal education. We should highlight, find, and fund those. The engineer in me says, give me specific, measurable, time bound goals. Put them in the form of key results. I think the US as the largest historic emitter has the obligation to go first. China is now the largest emitter bigger than the US by a factor of two. But after the US as rapidly as possible proves we can decarbonize successfully. That shows the way for the other nations. And then the US and China and Europe have an obligation to fund these advances in the developing world that can't afford it. That's the plan. John and Ryan, we have quite a few climate entrepreneurs in the crowd today. Given the impending recessionary climate, would you advise climate tech founders to expedite fundraising or wait if they have the capital until more market certainty? Can I take that? Yeah, imagine most of you are in the process of fundraising. I would say right now is a great time to be building any company from any category, but particularly here because the transition is happening. There's a world of climate clean tech funds that have closed within the past year. So the momentum is still there, but expect on the other side, term sheets to be more reasonable, to be a bit more measured. I think if there was any high flying that you saw from the consumer and enterprise sectors, I think we've always been sort of more reasonable here in the clean tech area, but just that's something to look out for. If you have already raised money, I think you have to weigh, well, can we wait this out? I think for us, when we look across our portfolio, this 20 to 24 month kind of runways, a really strong one to have. If you don't have it, you should think about either how do you stretch it or can you go out and opportunistically fundraise? But markets have affected every industry. When we wrote the book, there was $16 billion a year of venture capital that went into climate. The latest number is 39. 57 now. 57 billion. So we've blown past the goal that we put in this plan. I will say to you as a climate entrepreneur, one of the lessons I learned from the first wave of these companies is you're constantly raising money. Get used to it. Get good at it. Let it be a competence of yours. Elon Musk is raising money even now as he's trying to buy Twitter, so. Distraction. Just focus on this, Elon, who you are. Yeah. Yeah. Next question. John, as one of the main donors for the new school, and also knowing that you acknowledge the importance of policy and movements, how do you see this vision of Stanford better influencing electric officials and policy makers so we can make sure they move in the right path when it comes to climate and the environment? So I think Stanford can be a strong advocate with data for smart policies that advance the climate agenda. And it certainly can lay out choices. Governor Newsom, if you choose to adjust solar panel subsidies by these amounts to meet the real needs of underserved, the effect on solar deployment will be such and such. I think Stanford is not a political advocacy organization, but it can bring really great value and insight to the kinds of policy choices our leaders have to make. There's a great Stanford alum named Hal Harvey, who really has mastered this technical support role for governments. He leads an organization called Climate Imperative that does great work. This is more than a U.S. question. It's a global question. And so how do you affect policy in China? This is an area where in fact there's wonderful cooperation that we need to accentuate between China and the U.S. on climate goals. How do you affect climate, how do you affect policy in India? I think these are really important topics. John and Ryan, your book briefly touches on climate adaptation. Given the inevitable challenges that we already have to face, how will you also support climate adaptation in the future? Climate adaptation, you could write a whole book about it, but I would say the reason why we didn't include much of it in the book is we need to cut emissions as fast as we can. That's sort of the North Star. For a lot of adaptation, it's gonna be very reactionary. And so it's kind of this unfortunate thing that we were gonna be living in the moment through adaptation. But I think if someone were to craft a set of OKRs around it, it'd be kind of an interesting exercise. I think we'd be open to hearing and promoting and supporting. But for now our eyes are on the target. Reduce those emissions, because we do have a budget, 400 gigatons, right? The IPCC report, the one right before this one said, that's kind of the sweet spot to keep things at one and a half degrees. You have on campus, on the faculty, I think an adjunct faculty member, Amory Lovens, who is worth paying attention to, we conserving, not wasting energy, is an important source of carbon emission reduction. He's teaching a course. He has a course. Extreme energy efficiency, that's what he calls it, yeah. In terms of adaptation, as we speak, there's the worst heat and humidity wave going on right now in India. Beyond what people had expected, beyond what people had predicted from climate models, it's actually ongoing. And it's the focus of the school, right? I think we were just, I was answering in the context of the break, but the school's sustainability, that's definitely within scope. Any others? Yeah, we have one question on the initial subject of this conversation. When it comes to your thoughts on engaging and working with all the gas companies, what's the new school? Is there a criteria? Is there a system of accountability? How do you develop those partnerships so that we can follow the Orsted example better? I mean, that's a great question. I guess that's your question. I'm a donor, I'm not gonna influence the school. So I think this is a great question I alluded to earlier in my statements that, look, I mean, there are some companies that undermine the science of climate change or deny or undermine the partnership with, or misuse the partnership with Stanford to undermine policies, et cetera. So I'll tell you, those are against my values. And I don't think we should have institutional arrangements with them. Faculty can partner as the academic freedom. But I also think, as I said, I don't think we should use the same brush to paint the whole industry because there are companies that are trying to do the right things like Orsted. And I think we need to have some shared values on those. I've just stated my values and I'm open to a discussion. In fact, when I'm multiple open forums, to have to come up with a shared values, now we may not agree on everything, which is not a bad thing because that's where you make progress. But hopefully by the end of the fall, the autumn quarter, at least we can come to some shared values where people kind of agree. So I'm gonna be open to listening to students, all students, not the ones that are only vocal, but the people who are quiet. I wanna listen to them too. I wanna listen to the faculty and the students and the staff, et cetera. So yeah. Okay, I think we have time for one last question. I don't want the last word to be about fossil fuels. So in your book, you focus on mature technologies like wind and solar. How do you view the role of more emerging technologies like nuclear fusion, hydrogen, cultivated meat, and how do we balance short-term practicality against long-term breakthroughs? I'll start by saying, and I wanna hear from Aruna on this as well, that we need to invest in both. And we have the technologies today that we need to cut emissions by 50% by 2030. We can do that with what we have today. We don't have everything that we need to get us to 2050. And we basically shut down R&D in nuclear energy. That's a mistake. We need to invest in hydrogen. We need to invest in a wide range of breakthrough innovations. And Aruna, are you an advisor to breakthrough energy? Yes. I thought so. Your comment on this is? Absolutely. Well, I'm exactly right that I think we've fallen the trap of either or. I think we need the, that's a tyranny of or, it's often called, we need the harmony of and. We need both. We need to deploy today's technology, wind, solar batteries, et cetera. But that's unlikely to solve the food problem, okay, or some other problem. And we need the R&D to fusion. There's actually a huge amount of private sector money that's gone into fusion. And we are seeing that it may not be 30 years in the future, which was always the jargon that we could see something in the 2030s. Because we have to think, while the next decade is very important, critical, we have to think in a multi-decadal scale because this is a massive global transition. The piece that I would add in a closing thought is that we're talking a lot about innovation and engineering in this latter portion of the conversation. But remember the second part of the book puts innovation on the same pedestal as policy, the same pedestal as the activist, whether you're an activist on the street or in a company, as well as the person that's deploying and investing. We have all four levers that we can pull on. For those categories of things, nuclear, meat, and land use, it's gonna take all four working together. And so just something to keep in mind is who are your colleagues and partners that are in one of these four categories? The thing I love about the new school is that the accelerator itself has two arms, a policy one and a technology one. The school itself is bringing all these four levers under one roof and so it's very exciting. I'd like to invite you to continue the conversation. You can find me, I'm John at speedandscale.com. Ryan is Ryan at speedandscale.com. Go there, download free copies of the poster, put two of them up, we have two up in our family, one on the refrigerator, the other side and the other wall. And let's join together. I got a call from Kevin Chiki who is Michael Bloomberg's chief advisor, chief of staff on all things related to climate. After the Stanford School was announced, he said, John, I can't decide. Do I wanna go and give some talks or be a student again? And my answer to him was do both. I'm gonna step back from the discussion and the details by just giving my impression. And I'm gonna compare you all to music. My favorite musician, composer is Beethoven. And when you listen to a Beethoven symphony, you got the violin, you got the cello, you got drums sometimes. And the pieces of the puzzle, but they all have to work together to create magic. And what you have written out here is the master piece that Beethoven has written before that will live for the next not just 10 or 20 years, but for hundreds of years, because this is exactly what we need to address the biggest defining challenge of the 21st century and hopefully not the 22nd century. So let's give a big round of applause to John and Roy. Thank you.