 We're all in one group, and two of them got positive, and I never got positive. In fact, I did a record test. Do you know what they're doing at all? All this excessive international problem. I have a lot of TISO antibodies for general coronaviruses mixed from all over the world. And that saves me. My family doesn't even know me. We have everything from freshmen to mid-career professionals. Law school students, MBAs. We describe it as a quintessential, very short, general audience. Unfortunately, if you do zoom, you can set up a webinar and submit questions. For some reason, we haven't got that. We keep switching. They seem like a small audience, but compared to the athletes, they're justifying for the 10,000. What you need to do is what they do is they cut out the family members for the ones that can't make it. Good afternoon and welcome to this afternoon's energy seminar. I'm John Deutsch, professor of chemistry emeritus and institute professor at MIT. Prior to COVID was coming out and visiting us every winter quarter for two or three in a row, and then COVID, and he hasn't been able to do it until now. And here he is back again. If you've read his bio, he's one of the world's experts on national security and energy and related topics, like level government positions and advisory board positions. So he's one of the most prominent strategic thinkers across this landscape, adding in nowadays international competitiveness and sustainability, I guess. And he's picked a very provocative subject for his talk to you. He'll be around giving other lectures until the end of March. And that is the emerging revolution in U.S., United States, industrial policy. So I think it's an extremely timely topic, and I'm sure he's going to draw the links to energy, which are all around us on people. So, John, take it away. Thank you so much. I hope everybody can hear me. Good. And I want to say that I prefer this to be kind of a discussion. I'm open to comments, inquiries, congratulations at any time during the... Just lift your hand and I'll call on you. We can have a discussion here and perhaps make it a little bit more stimulating than just having me go on. I should tell you that I've been coming to Stanford as a guest since the early 1980s. So I've been here a lot. In fact, I believe that I first met John Wyatt when he was here as a graduate student. When he was a sophomore back, I'd go. And the second thing is, as he says, I come from MIT. I've been at MIT for half a century, more or less. And I love MIT, but I also love Stanford. Now, you're going to be hearing from me today a lot about, or not a lot, something about the strategic challenge that we have from China. But I come from MIT and I really think that the strategic challenge for MIT is not for China. So what I'm going to speak to you about is the tremendous change that has taken place in the traditional industrial policy of this country of the United States. And that traditional view, which has been hammered for a long time, is that the federal government's responsibility is basically for growth, employment, stability, that means not too much deficits, not too much inflation. But it needs its taxes in order to support the underlying infrastructure of the country, roads, airports, railroad stations, public health, environment, and things which involve the whole commerce of the country or national security. The government gets really involved in the business and the activities of the country if there's a war like there was a Second World War with the War Production Board coming in and really running all the production of the country for the period of the war. In other times, where there is not an absolute war going on, there's a great suspicion about the federal government's ability, great suspicion about how the federal government's ability to direct private corporations to do things, their investments, or to run investments themselves, suspicions which are based on the fact that the government does not have inside the government the skills or the experience to do that properly. Great, great suspicion. Today that situation is completely changed. And I believe that most of my friends around this country do not realize, even as they read in the newspapers what bills are being considered by the Congress, they do not realize what a revolutionary change we are experiencing at this moment about how the United States government is going to handle its industrial policy going forward. It's a very aggressive new policy. It's got enormous, enormous scope and enormous amount of money going into it. There are three extra zeros in the bills that are being passed by Congress. You're getting either trillions or hundreds of billions in different efforts to do industrial policy, where there used to be just a few tens of millions. So it's a complete change and it is also very important to notice that it is supported quite strongly by both Republicans and Democrats in both the House and the Senate, although the weighting that they give to different parts of the industrial policy are quite different. It is amazingly strong bipartisan support, which is one of the reasons why these bills in one form or another are going to pass into the country. The key feature that I want to tell you which is even more surprising is that there is a massive, massive protectionist element in these bills. There are pages after pages. These bills are hundreds of pages long. You have to spend hundreds of billions of dollars, you better lay it out in hundreds of pages. But there are massive sections about what we should do to meet the Chinese threat to the United States and to the American people. It is really quite, quite dramatically strong and I might say not all together, either in my mind rational or certainly sympathetic in any way. So I put at the bottom of this slide just as an example, the Wall Street Journal editorial last week about a bill, which we will talk about in a moment, which just scathingly attacked the bill for the amount of industrial policy that was in it. And the way their headline said, it says, be more like China Act. That is, it seemed like with all of this China, China, China throughout the bill, it was really a call for the United States industry to be like China, which of course is quite impossible for a series of long series of reasons, that that was the purpose of the bill. And they also said that the bill had in it very much of what was mixed with, you know, basically welfare, welfare for the private corporations of the country. Very, very critical bill. That bill is the House of Representatives bill. It is not, so it's the one which is still very much, I won't say largely, but slightly controlled by the Democratic Party. So it's a dramatic change, and I want to describe that change to you and its different aspects and its implications. And with that out, does anybody here have a question or comment, or everybody else set? Ah, I've got to do this myself. So what is causing this dramatic change? And there are three reasons that are causing it, three drivers. The first, as I said, is this concern about China and how China is behaving in the world. Now we're talking about in the economic world, both globally and with respect to the United States. In 2015, China published for everybody to read a plan which they called China 2025, which was a plan about how China was going to, in China's industry, was going to reach global technology leadership over the United States by the year 2025. And they didn't say this only, first of all, they mentioned the United States explicitly. They said that is our goal. We are going to displace the United States from its technological leadership and it explained how it was going to do it. And because it's China, there were many, many subsidiary plans from different agencies to support that strategic picture which was placed by the original China 2025 report. It's really quite a compelling report. It says, here's what we're going to do and we're going to do it because we want to have economic dominance around the globe and especially with respect to the United States. What it reflects is that China has, over the last couple of decades, really dramatically improved its technical performance as a country. Its engineering has really gotten better and better. It's able to produce goods, especially manufactured goods, at great speed and innovation, lower cost and higher quality. So the first thing that one has to admit, which is, of course, nowhere admitted in the Congress of the United States, is China is just getting better and better because they're working harder and harder and doing well. But the gap between China and the United States is inexorably closing, both with regard to the economic competitiveness in the markets of the world but also intellectually with respect to innovation in their country. So my first trip to China was in 1978. I was the Director of Energy Research of the Department of Energy. I went with a secretary, Jim Schlesinger, met with Don Xiaoping. When you walked across the Beijing, you could not see a car, not a single car in all of Beijing. It's certainly no private vehicles whatsoever. There were some limos for us. So the amount of progress is truly dramatic and it's substantial progress, real progress. So there's a tremendous amount of concern in Congress about illicit Chinese activities. Now, there's no question about the fact, I can tell you this with some certainty, that there is Chinese behavior, there is some theft of U.S. technology from corporations, from the government and from others. That's not a surprise. It's always there. But there's tremendous concern about that theft, concern especially among our political leaders. Again, I want to underscore of both parties. Now, in fact, China doesn't behave with such crudity. What China has done, it's seen that the United States is an open, an open, has an open innovation system, especially at the front end, at the idea of idea generation in universities. And so what it's done is it's constructed a way of taking advantage of the openness of the U.S. system completely legally. I'll give you one example of this. Huawei, I don't know whether they're pronouncing that right. They have this program where they sponsor open research by a Huawei technical person and a faculty person at a U.S. university. Gives them grants for three or four years. All the publications are open, all the material is open. But these two individuals, one from Huawei, the university work together. And that information goes back to China, of course. And it does, in fact, have a great ability to improve their early stage innovation, which is quite, quite not as well advanced as their engineering and manufacturing capability. So when you hear these concerns about China, I'll come back to this as it applies to universities such as Stanford. It is really not so much that they're behaving illicitly. They do plenty of that, you know, with trade problems, things like that. But they're doing it by taking advantage of our open system. So that's something to keep in mind. The concern really started very seriously with the enormous growth of photovoltaics installed in utilities and homes around the United States. When the photovoltaic arrays that were being put either in arrays to a grid or on a home roof, all of those arrays were actually manufactured in China or more recently as Tom went on in other Asian nations that were imported to the United States. And the United States put those arrays in China on U.S. buildings, factories and homes. They did the same thing in Europe. There's a lot of discussion about whether they did this at a fair price or whether they were dumping the arrays. But the fact of the matter is it took jobs from American firms which would be manufacturing these arrays. And that creates universal, universal opposition when something like that happens from all members of Congress. So that concern about photovoltaics and the very significant story that it tells led the United States political leaders, our political leaders to be concerned about batteries, about electric vehicles, about a host of other things. And also in the course of this, the Chinese described with some of their 11 key technologies that they really cared about that they thought would be act as platforms for future technical growth. I've mentioned a few of them here in this chart, but they only mentioned ones which they knew they were more likely to be able to do than some others. Like, for example, they don't say anything about biology problems or about synthetic biology, for example. There are areas where the United States still has a profoundly great advantage over China. But the concern of these particular technologies, we'll be talking a bit more about semiconductors, is one of the key concerns that shows up in the legislation that we're in. And the third driver of this new revolution is the awareness that the world is going too slowly at cutting greenhouse gas emissions, not going to achieve the goal of staying under two degrees by the end of the century as a global temperature increase. And that in order to do that one had to adopt a different point of view and what they've done is Europe and the United States and other countries as well have adopted specific years, like in the case of the United States, 2050, when our economy will be net zero in carbon emissions. Now, you may later on in conversations want to talk about how likely is that or is it a proper or intelligent government instruction to say that we want to point certain a specific year, 2050, where we will then be net zero. You're driving for a year as a goal before you know that you can achieve it or have a plan for achieving it. But that notion that there was aggressive, that there was need for aggressive action to reach these net zero goals correctly was joined with the notion that we have to do a lot more, the government has to do a lot more in investing in industry, infrastructure and especially innovation if these goals are going to be reached. So these are the three drivers of change for U.S. industry policy. Very, very strong and they're there today. So let me go on to the next slide. So here I'm going to just briefly go through four or I guess five different pieces of legislation and where they're at. These are all less than six months old. I hope they're all less than six months old. At any event, these six describe how much energy and singleness of purpose there is in both the executive branch and in Congress on these questions. It comes first with the very ambitious Build Back Better Act proposed by a President Biden that included huge amounts of money, $550 billion for infrastructure and energy and climate, but lots of other measures for socially important U.S. goals, extending childcare credits and the like. And that Build Back Better Act was $1.7 trillion. It passed the House. It could not pass the Senate, famously known because of the opposition of one Democratic Senator, Joe Manchin, and so it just failed. I'll come back to what some of the contents of that ambitious bill were. The Senate in its place passed the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, just a mere $250 billion. And I just draw your attention here to two of this hundreds and hundreds of stages in this bill, two different aspects of it that might interest you. First thing they said is the National Science Foundation should, in addition to doing its support of basic research, if fundamental research, early stage research, that the National Science Foundation should develop a new directorate for technology. So the story here is if it's not broken, you shouldn't try and fix it. So one of the things the National Science Foundation does very well is to support fundamental research across science and engineering disciplines in the United States. It has no experience in technology development or managing technology transfer to the private sector. The idea that there's going to be a new technology branch to do this in the NSF, you might celebrate this as meaning that the National Science Foundation will be more concerned with introducing technologies into the United States, introducing innovation. I think you might worry, you might say, well, listen, if they're good at fundamental research, early new ideas, why don't we let them stay and do that and not try and paste something on top of it? More strikingly and more important for universities and certainly for Stanford and for MIT is included in here was a provision which asked SIFIUS, what is SIFIUS? The Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States is a Department of Defense Committee, an interagency committee run by the Department of Defense. Its original purpose was to make sure that there weren't foreign investments into military, military firms in the United States. And if there were, there would be certain conditions under which that would be allowed to proceed or not. Now the Act says that universities must report to SIFIUS, SIFIUS must review, should review all gifts or contracts from the People's Republic of China, which are over a million dollars annually. It's a remarkable provision. It basically says we're going to have, you know, I worked in the Department of Defense for a long time and I know SIFIUS quite well. These are not, you know, world-class athletes. They're narrowly focused. To ask them to start reviewing gifts and contracts from universities like that's really a far, a long bridge away. Interestingly, interestingly, Congress really didn't have the courage to do what it said that they wanted to do. They didn't give SIFIUS the authority to do anything. The word here is review. And elsewhere it says they don't have authority to stop any of this. They're just a traffic cop who is getting information, storing it, and keeping it. So we know what the, and in this sense, unless they have a great sympathy with congressional members, the greed of leaders of universities about acquiring more resources both for their endowments and for the support of their research from Chinese firms and individuals is really quite significant. So you could understand on the one hand, presidents of universities have to raise dough. On the other hand, it does open the avenue for a much greater relationship between technology creation in the United States and technology transfer to China. By the way, none of it illegal, but it expresses Congress's concern about this exchange at the university level. Now, the next piece of legislation was this HR 451, which is the bill that the House passed just a couple of weeks ago to be the replacement for the break, build back better bill that did not pass, and was going to be the bill which represented the House's view to go with the Senate, Senate's bill on innovation and competition to go to a conference and to produce one bill to reach the President Biden's desk presumably early in the spring. That's the bill that caused my great Wall Street Journal, people to go drop off the roof and say, this is too much. There's all that's in this bill is making us look like China and also subsidies for everybody in the private sector. That's what raised back the old and well-established view the United States government should not be in the business of dealing with private commerce. So that bill is the partner for build back better which didn't pass. And the final bill is that I would have mentioned to you is the Infrastructure and Investment Jobs Act which has passed. It's not only passed, money has been appropriated over multiple years to carry out this 1.4 trillion. Now, you know, if you said to most experienced people in the government, what is the chance that Congress will vote you that much money without doing an annual review? So this is not a money which is just authorized. This is money, it's authorized, and you now have the authority to go out and spend it at this level is very, very unusual, very unusual. And we'll come back to some of these. Interestingly, the one little line in there said, excuse me, the Department of Energy should set up an office for clean energy demonstrations. Because even Congress, if we're going to give these billions of dollars to the Department of Energy and other agencies, there has to be some knowledge, there has to be some capability in those agencies to actually implement the programs that we're directing them to. To a due to. And point of fact, these agencies have little, have no historical experience in doing it. And so to say that you can, in a period of months or a little time, implement these huge programs, it's just silly. Authorizing an office is one thing, but making sure that it gets the capability of the people, the experience to actually carry out these programs and implement them as desired is a completely different thing. It shows that implementation, that'll be my final point to you, is really key here. I don't know why I'm coughing so much. Well, we have the new Biden administration and a new head of the National Security Council and a new head of the National Economic Council. And in January, just after he was inaugurated, he told them to submit a report for foreign government agencies to talk about the manufacturing and what was needed to be done in four different areas of the country's economy. And they produced a 250-page report with the following different sectors looked at. The Department of Energy for large-format batteries. These are batteries which were appropriate for electric vehicles. The second one was critical materials. Was there going to be enough cobalt or nickel or lithium to build the batteries that were required for this and other things and for the semiconductors that were going to be built? The Department of Commerce for the semiconductors which we seem to be doing very badly compared to other countries. And finally for pharmaceuticals where we probably still do have a substantial advantage in the world's marketplace. So these were detailed administration-led roadmaps of areas that required policy by the federal government to advance themselves, to be advanced. So now we now have congresses pass the bills. The administration has at least started the process of indicating where they're going to go in four key areas and there we are. Now I want to give you some examples of what is in the bills in which now the administration has got money for and intends to pursue. First, I'm not only talking about the infrastructure and jobs bill which is one which has been passed and all the money has been appropriated. $8 billion over five years to provide for the development of at least four hydrogen hubs across the United States. Hubs which will be providing hydrogen for an undefined purpose for use by the industrial and transportation sector and power sector. Congress then says to the agency, the Department of Agency, they have 180 days to enact a process and select at least these four regional hubs. There's not a person in the Department of Energy who has done this, has been prepared for this. Spending that level of money with any degree of responsibility takes a lot of time and thought even if it's done by talented and experienced individuals. And they have to select within one year four of these hubs for the $8 billion. That's really pushing the system quite a bit. In the breakthrough, the Better America bill which did not pass, there were other proposals for hydrogen which are really quite startling. You might reflect on this, you might say, well maybe this is the right thing to do. I actually think it is a very correct thing to do if it's done right and properly and carefully. They proposed $3 per kilogram tax credit for hydrogen was produced basically from electrolysis or from fuel cells with no carbon emissions at all. That $3 per kilogram tax credit is equivalent to saying that they're paying $23 per metric ton of CO2 avoided. Because presumably the hydrogen when it's produced is backing out, in the case of this calculation I used here as an example, natural gas, and therefore the equivalent sign energy basis is they're backing out $23 per metric ton of CO2. It also says that if they give this tax that hydrogen now becomes competitive with natural gas for electricity generation. If the methane, the natural gas is $3 per 1,000 cubic feet which is about its price today. So it is a regulatory demand pull regulation which makes hydrogen economically competitive with natural gas. Instead of a subsidy for building hydrogen plants it is a way of rewarding people who produce the hydrogen on a kilogram basis. The last thing I want to mention as an example of these three is in the Senate bill and in the Administration Department of Commerce submission there is a requirement for $52 billion to subsidize the United States semiconductor industry. Most of that money is going to end up within a few miles of a Stanford, but that's okay. I don't resent that too much, but there it is. $52 million. The title of this bill, CHIPS is what it's called. Everybody refers to it as CHIPS creating helpful incentives to produce semiconductors for America. Now I couldn't think of a phrase which better illustrates this new industrial policy than to say Congress, the Administration are showing picking out industries, specific industries for significant subsidies because they believe they need that to be competitive in the future in a critical technology, in this case semiconductors. And their target here is entirely China. There are two points of scale here which I ask you to note. The first is they're given $52 billion. China is said to, I don't know if this is true or not, it is said you're spending $500 billion on semiconductors. A factor of 100. Is it 100 or 10? 10. I occasionally make small mathematical mistakes which should not threaten the force of my arguments. When I was a little boy, we did something called sematech. We set up at a time when we thought that Japan was going to drive us into the world, into the ground. We set up something called sematech, regrettably in Texas. And sematech was there to make sure that we did much better and advanced our technology in flat panel displays, high resolution flat panel displays and certain kinds of microelectronics. The size of that whole investment in sematech was, I'm going to try again, a factor of 10 less. $5 billion. So you can see how much the numbers have changed here. However, there's another little problem. If you ask, well, what is the best, technically best, and from a business point of view, best semiconductor, highest, you know, I guess, thinnest wine divisions, company of the world, turns out to be a Taiwanese company, TSMC, by a lot. And then the next best is probably in Korea. It's not in China. This bill and chips, of course, completely overlooks the fact that while they're trying to help the United States become competitive and really do it to overcome China, it may in fact be creating really quite significant disadvantages for countries which are much more friendly and much more freer like the United States in Taiwan and in Korea, South Korea. So there's some, whatever you're trying to do, these kinds of radical surgery at massive scale in the United States, in Washington, D.C., try and stay away because it doesn't always turn out so well. So I come back to a point I mentioned earlier. I don't have to dwell much on it. It's called carrots and sticks. Are you going to try and move your private sector, your industry, by giving carrots, that is, subsidies, like the chips? Or are you going to do it by sticks, by which I mean regulatory demand pull efforts? And the best place to look at this is about carbon emissions. We keep on giving great subsidies to companies to try and develop lower carbon-emitting technologies. And the result is that if you look in the United States, the cost of buying a carbon right for emission is, I think, around $30 today. And here in California, you've got a much more smaller effort in Massachusetts. There's a regional consortium, which I guess California's part of, $35,000. In Europe, they've made a very strong schedule of reducing the amount of carbon they're allowed to emit throughout Europe, throughout the European Union. And that's resulted in the price over time of an emission, right? It's gone up to about $100. This chart I think shows 80, but it's now gone up to $100. So you're now saying, in Europe, when you make an investment decision because of this pull, this stick, you have either to pay $100 and can you continue to use natural gas, or you can develop another technology which is carbon-free. It's a huge incentive to push you over. It's a very, very important choice that a government has to make. Now, in the United States, we have had several efforts. Actually, the first effort was in the Nixon administration about setting a charge for energy or for carbon use. In each case, it's failed. Three different occasions. The most recent occasion was the Waxman-Markey bill in 2009, which was passed by the House but which not passed the Senate. And the reason these bills come in trouble is every... I hope I'm saying this properly. You don't correct me. Economists like a carbon tax. It could be a cap and trade system or it could be a tax. It could be made equivalent. The idea is if you put a charge on it which internalizes the external costs of damage from CO2 emissions, that's the way to efficiently move to the place you want to be, which is to say carbon emissions cost the economy something and need to be introduced into private sectors thinking as they make investments. However, as a political matter, you've got to make sure that when you have a carbon tax, the first thing anybody who's had experience will tell you if you want to pass a tax in the United States Congress, you better tell them how you're spending the revenue because you're going to need the help and support of the people who are going to benefit from the revenue of the tax if you're going to have any chance of being able to impose a tax on another group. It's really very, very important. And of course, in the Waxman-Markey, in order to get the support in the Congress, they didn't have it really be a tax. There was an auction of the available emission rights. They really had a period of time for quite some time where they were allocated to different groups that had the political juice to get Congress to agree to give them some time. And finally, you have to remember that when you have a carbon tax, different regions of the country, different communities, different people will be disadvantaged in different ways, take that into account or you're not being a good steward of the public interest. So this question is still not resolved in the United States, but eventually you're going to have to go to some carbon pricing policy but doing it in a politically astute way and in a socially responsible way. Okay. All of this is really driven by this government policy is a concern about innovation. How are we doing at economic competitiveness? How are we doing at manufacturing and distributing our goods and our services compared to others? And I don't want to spend a good deal of time on this, but it's really a subject which I actually believe I've actually spoken about at Stanford or at other times is how to think about innovation. And what innovation is, it's really a pathway. Anybody, any entity, any sector, any country, if they want to innovate something, they have to go through all these steps, these five steps that I've written out here, they're written out on the chart from idea creation all the way to deployment in the field. Sometimes you go back, you get feedback loops, that is you get to deployment and you find something that needs fundamental research from people who are usually involved in idea creation to come and solve your problem in deployment. Sometimes you go to a technology development, a technology demonstration phase and you see something which you have to go back to the idea creation level and say we need a different way to solve this problem. It won't work. It's not working well in technology development. So it's a complicated loop, but you've got to go through all those steps. Sometimes you do it quickly, sometimes it takes a long, long time. This early stage idea creation has been the absolute place where the United States has been the leader and you've been the leader because it's an open system. It's an open system with this great cooperation between private corporations and universities, great support from the government for research and education in our universities, a very good intellectual property system and plenty of venture capital. Why do we know this? Because for many years foreign students wanted to come to the United States, they wanted to come to the United States so they could learn how the American system innovates and many of them stay here but also many of them go back to their home countries to contribute there. The real problem with some of these actions that Congress is taking, this suspicion of the relationship of the open university to China, is that it threatens the openness of our system and the question has to be asked is the cost of putting constraints on the university worth the advantages you get from slowing the spread of ideas to other places. I certainly believe that we're on the verge, we've passed the place, we've made a smart assessment of how much the loss of information to China because of our open system, how much that's hurting us in relation to the benefits that keeping that system open conveys to our country and everybody still believes the US system is better than anyone else's. My final chart down there and another color is to say, look I've talked to you about the attitude towards innovation in the third column on that chart which we have today because of climate change and the other reasons China and innovation. How the different features, the different characteristics of what we're seeking from innovation in that today when we're dealing with climate change compared to the first column which was at the end of the Second World War when all kinds of new technology was sprouting out of the Defense Department, ARPANET, microelectronics, communications, digital electronics. So there's so much technology coming out that you could characterize the first post-war period as technology push and today we are very much in the third column of goal orientation to how we are managing our infrastructure activity. I believe this is my final chart. And what it says is, alright, we're going to do this seriously if we're going to have this period of industrial, serious industrial policy and great expansion. The important thing is it gets implemented properly. It's not just money. The trillions of dollars are obviously there that our leaders are willing to spend it. It has to be implemented properly. Legislation can't take care of that. The White House and implementation are contradictory ideas. So the question is what does the implementation require? So on this chart I don't tend to go through it in any detail. There are 10 items which are required to successfully implement an aggressive and ambitious industrial policy such as the one that has been provided to us by the Congress of the United States and the Biden administration. Now you can't pick and choose. You can't say I need three of them. All 10 are necessary in my judgment. All 10 to one degree or another must be in place if you're going to have a successful industrial policy implementation. So what happens too often to us is we turn to policy, especially public policy, and we forget that the policy has to be implemented, not only has to be implemented efficiently, it has to be implemented fairly. And that is the final message that I want to leave you with. When you hear these proposals on industrial policy, stop for a moment and reflect on whether we have in place in our agencies, in the public sector, the experience and the skills and the tools necessary to implement it properly. So with that I finish my comments. I look forward to hearing questions or comments or differences from any at all of you, so please. Thanks very much, John. So we do have some time for questions here. Any questions from the audience here? Yes, sir. Thanks for joining us again, John. You mentioned there's several threats posed to the United States from China. Can you help us understand what is exactly a threat? Is it privacy? Is it competition? Fairness? The questioner was regarding more detail about the threats the U.S. faced from China in this debate and your own opinion on this. It's a very good question. It does deserve a clear answer. I mean, some clear thinking about it, but let me just give you two or three. I do think that there is a real competition for global influence if the economic balance of power between our country, even in Asia, just let's strict it in Asia, shifts towards China even more. But I think you could make a significant correct argument that that shift of economic power would lead to much more difficult and constrained circumstances for the countries which are around China in Asia. And the recent formation of this, what is it called? Quad? Quad. The U.S., India, Australia, and Japan, forming to look at economic circumstances, market circumstances generally helps us. That's one. The irritating, continual, serious issue is Taiwan. That is not a solved problem, and there's much evidence and much speculation that it's unraveling a bit. The third, I've less, well, I won't say that, the third is the issue about how China is dealing with dissent within China or in Hong Kong or with the Uighurs, that it is not, quote, a democratic society. The Chinese, you know, they're just a lot, just a lot more historically sophisticated than we are. And there are places where they realize that it's important for them to have, for their world standing, close relationships with the United States. So for example, their cooperation with us on the issue of climate has been quite prominent, and the, I'm going to say this properly, the statement by Xi and Obama was really one of the great events. So there are places where we still cooperate with China. But it's very much more, there are many, many places where we're in competition. That's really what I should say about threat. I'm less concerned about their 200 intercontinental ballistic missiles, nuclear-nupos, of course. Good. Other questions from the audience? I have one. Did I understand correctly you were going to produce a book on this topic sometime soon, is that a rumor? Well, there are two remarks there. The sometime soon is certainly not anything I've said, but the answer to the first one is yes, that's certainly true. Another one the audience might be interested in, you have this local congressman, you may know that, Rokana. I think he has a book coming out, and it is kind of a very different perspective on some of the same issues that it really focuses on the distributional outcomes that you mentioned and solutions to those. So I think I saw him interviewed and he said, if you don't fix those problems, you're going to be in a position where you're going to have periodic popular revolts going on, quote, unquote. I mean I've said a couple of times, I know I've said in this brief set of comments here that you have to worry about community and regional impacts, but a quite interesting study has just been completed by MIT, by my friend Ernie Moniz, the former secretary of energy, and it's called the Roosevelt Project. And what they did, I was on the steering committee, divided the country into five regions, and asked what would be the effect, what is the effect on those five regions of moving towards a net zero carbon economy. And they looked at certain places like the Gulf Coast, and they looked at other places like Detroit, and they looked at New Mexico, and of course all of these regions have vastly different impacts from the net zero economy and how it's actually structured. And not hard to say that if you don't take this into account, you either are losing people who would really should be strong proponents of moving to net zero, or you're gaining enemies who say, look, this is going to impair me much, much worse than somebody who lives in Boston. And so making sure that all regions and different kinds of groups have a place at the table, and an opportunity to say what's in their interest and what isn't is a very important thing. I quite agree with that. I don't know the congressman. Great. We're just about out of time here. I'd like to remind the audience, I have a question, one more. I have a question about how do we mobilize the military to take more of an active role in advocating for climate policy given how the military historically has taken more of a not partisan approach to policy on climate? Well, first of all, I was deputy secretary of defense for a couple of years, and you have here at Stanford, my boss, Secretary of Defense Bill Perry, we might have different answers to this, but I'm not keen on having the Defense Department start advocating positions, important public policy positions. That's not their business. And historically, they've been very reluctant to, but there's no question that there are consequences for the military. But to have them speak out on it, if that was your question, I think would be a quite different thing, but there certainly is clearly consequences of climate change that they're well aware of as is the intelligence community. But you don't want to have the U.S. military lobbying on what will be seen as lobbying on important policy issues and by-judgment. So they could, just to clarify it, so one thing they could do is clarify some of the trade-offs they're facing amongst this set of objectives and many others that they face. Well, it's not a question that they're trading it off. They're just saying, look, if there's going to be climate change, there's going to be drought in, let's say, Africa. That means that there's going to be migration in Africa. That means that there's going to be conflict in Africa. That means we're going to have to be there. That's the implications. It's a threat assessment, essentially. It's a threat assessment, but it's not something where I think you say, and therefore, we need to spend more money on it. So we ought to shut down the public. Unfortunately, John will enter through the end of March. Correct? Right. And if you look on the Energy Seminar website, you'll see a couple of other talks that he's got queued up for the time that he'll be here. With that, thanks for that eye-opening and provocative talk. As usual, John Doge. Thank you. Thank you.