 Good afternoon, my name is Alex Reich and it is my pleasure to welcome you to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and to the first event of our new webinar series, Climate Conversations, Pathways to Action. The National Academies provide independent objective advice to inform policy with evidence, spark progress and innovation, and confront challenging issues for the benefit of society. In keeping with this mission, we are excited to host these conversations about issues relevant to national policy action on climate change. Today, we won't be taking questions from the audience. However, we would like to hear your feedback and your ideas for future conversations, which you can share after the event in the survey linked just above this video. The conversation will be recorded and made available on this webpage as well. Today, we'll focus on decarbonization and policy solutions for equitably achieving net zero carbon emissions in the US by 2050. We're thrilled to be joined by Mariette de Cristina, Dean of the College of Communication at Boston University and former editor-in-chief of Scientific American, who will introduce our guests and moderate the event. Thank you again for joining the National Academies for Climate Conversations. Mariette, the floor is yours. Thank you so much, Alex, and thank you to everyone for joining us today. I'm really excited about today's inaugural edition of Climate Conversations. Our topic today has been mentioned as decarbonization, and while the topic is complex, the format is pretty simple. Over the next hour, we'll talk about how we can transform our energy systems in ways that could build the economy, promote equality and inclusion, and support communities, businesses, and workers. That social dimension, as you'll learn more about, is very important to our collective success, and where we also can identify some clear lessons and recommendations to benefit our nation's future. With me are two very distinguished experts in climate mitigation. I'd like to first welcome Stephen Pecala, who's Frederick D. Petrie Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Director of the Carbon Mitigation Initiative at Princeton University. Steve also chairs the National Academies Committee on Accelerating Decarbonization in the United States. Technology, Policy, and Societal Dimensions. Welcome there, Steve. Welcome. Happy to be here. I'm so glad you're here, and I'm so delighted also to say that we are joined today by Benjamin Preston, who is a Senior Policy Researcher and Director of Community Health and Environmental Policy at the Rand Corporation, as well as co-editor and Chief of the Elsevier Journal of Climate Risk Management. Ben, thanks so much for being with us here today. My pleasure. It'll be fun. Ben, let's speak with you for just a minute here. I just used what my dad would have called a $9 word, decarbonization, and I've also heard the term net zero associated with it. Could you just give us a quick brief on what do we do? Yeah, I'll try and break those down. I mean, obviously, the recently released port on decarbonization probably goes into this in more detail, but fundamentally, we currently have a largely a fossil fuel economy. When we burn fossil fuels, they release carbon, and various forms of carbon end up being greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide, the primary one, but methane is another. When I first started in climate change, we didn't really talk about decarbonization. We talked about reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But over time, we realized that to stabilize the climate, essentially, you have to get to a position of removing not just some of the carbon emissions from human sources, but effectively all of it. And so that really led to this term of actually decarbonizing energy systems, decarbonizing our economy and society. And net zero is an important aspect of that from my perspective, because it doesn't mean that decarbonization doesn't necessarily mean that we cannot emit any carbon. It just means that whatever we emit as through human activities has to be removed through some mechanism, either other types of human activities or using the natural environment as another means of taking that carbon back out of the atmosphere. So at the end of the day, on net, we're having no net impact on the atmosphere, which is the way the carbon cycle effectively worked before we came along and started the industrial revolution. I think this is an important concept that a lot of people maybe don't fully understand or appreciate, but it's not that we'll never emit any carbon. It's that we have to be mindful of how that carbon is going into the ecosystem and how to maybe balance it out to net zero. If I got that about right. Yeah, I think the emphasis here is on balance, right? There are, you know, an easy way of saying this is what goes up must come back down in some form. Thank you, Ben. And Steve, there was a report very quite recently, just a couple of weeks ago from the National Academies and the committee that you chaired. Can you tell us a bit more about accelerating decarbonization and what that report was talking about? So the committee was put together to figure out how the nation could reach net zero over a 30-year period, the entire economy. And this is the first of two reports. And what it does is to provide a technological blueprint for how we can, during the next 10 years, can put ourselves on this 30-year path. And also, which technological sort of research do we have to do to make sure we can finish the job? The set of policies that would enact those technologies over the next 10 years. But also, it turns out that if you transform an entire economy, of course, there is a lot of social disruption, as well as lots and lots, in this case even more winners. And the societal acceptance of the transition is going to require that we take care of people, that we have a fair and equitable transition. And so ours is the first report to provide a comprehensive blueprint with a policy portfolio to manage the just and fair transition, to make sure that that transition is fair and just. So it has both the technological stuff and the social stuff in it. I'd like to talk a little more about that social stuff, Steve, I'll be to mind. So, a lot of times when people talk about climate, if I talk to my kids for an instance, there's a feeling of deep concern that it is such a large and complicated problem. Can we possibly manage it? It feels like we're talking in a language of loss, but it really struck me around the report that your committee issued that while there are hurdles and serious challenges, there are also seriously sound ways to address those. I wonder if you could paint for us a little bit more of a picture of how can it be that we're just not solving a climate crisis, but also building an economy and growing high quality jobs and avoiding those social injustices? What are some of the ways we do that? Well, so I should say first that even four years ago, if you use four year old data, you would think that the transition to a net zero economy would be really expensive. And the reason that that's no longer true is the dramatic drop in the cost of wind and solar and lithium ion batteries. So wind and solar electricity, solar has dropped 90% in the last 10 years. Wind has dropped 70% or so and lithium ion batteries 85%. So even four years ago, they would have been twice expensive. And so that's the sort of cornerstone of the transition to a net zero electricity system and a net zero transport system, which are like two of the big, that's a big piece of the energy system as a whole. So all of a sudden, that's relatively inexpensive. So we estimate in the Academy's report that the transition would cost less during the 2020s than just the health benefits from the closure of the coal-fired power plants. So in other words, even if you didn't care about climate change, you should sort of want to do this on economic grounds. Secondly, you have to build a lot of stuff to do this. And we reviewed everything that was written on this. And there's just no question about it. There's just broad consensus that you create more jobs than you destroy. All right. So like a million or more new jobs conservatively, and they're good jobs, right? They're jobs that are high paying relative to American averages and they're primarily blue collar jobs. The difficulty is though, that those jobs aren't necessarily in the same place as the fossil jobs today. And so therein lies the rub. And that's the problem, the social problem, one of the biggest social problems we really have to manage. It's one of two social problems. The other one is we've looked at the environmental injustice that's built into the energy system we have today. And there is a lot of it. I mean, I'm a climate and energy guy and I was just shocked and appalled at how much injustice is built into our energy system, how much energy poverty there is, how much communities that are low income and communities of color suffer disproportionate effects of fossil pollution and get a disproportionately low share of the benefits. And so that has to be addressed as well. Thank you, Steve. I think energy is on a lot of our minds now with the extreme weather that we're seeing in the center of the country and the disruptions in power in Texas. And I'd like to actually ask you to chime in on this as well. I wonder if you could speak a little bit to the winter storms that have been experienced, the power outages. Why is this happening and people have accused renewables of having some intrinsic problems? Can you tell us a little bit more about that? I mean, this is a societal issue we're dealing with right this minute with energy. Yeah. And you know, it's pretty easy to look this up and to find it out, right? So the Texas power grid failed across the board, all right? So thermal power generation was reduced something like 40% and renewable power generation like wind was reduced like 33%, a little bit less, but not materially different. It was across the board. So thermal being nukes and gas-fired power plants and coal plants, they all failed at, you know, very roughly the same rates, right? With wind power. But of course, the majority of the power system there, especially in winter, is fossil and the nukes. And so most of the problem was actually created by the failure, the cold failure of those thermal units. So that was one problem. The second problem is Texas for political and ideological reasons has insulated itself so that it's got almost an island grid. It's not really connected. So it's really hard to move power there. And if we're going to build a net zero energy system in this country, we've got to be able to move power from places the sun shines all the time to places where it doesn't. And so we're going to have to build a lot more transmission and that will make our grids also more resilient to these kinds of events, okay? And so it's not a failure of renewables. It's a failure of a power grid across the board. Power producers weren't resilient to these effects and it was a failure of transmission. Both of those things went down. And Ben, I'd love your, thank you, Steve. Ben, I'd love your further thoughts on this. And how do we manage risks outside of normal like that with multiple stakeholders? Yeah, so because this is a National Academies event, I have to put my science hat on and say, you know, the California wildfires have been attributed by peer-reviewed science to climate change. This kind of sagging of the circumpolar vortex that resulted in that really cold temperatures in Texas is a subject of active research now inside climate science. And so there are a lot of people who think there's a smoking gun there, but the science is not fully in on whether or not this is an event that is likely to have been caused by climate change, the way there is for a lot of them, but make no mistake. Extreme events happen a lot more frequently as some kinds of extreme events under climate change than without it. And it's counterintuitive. You know, you can get a little one-degree change in climate that can cause a hundred or a thousand-fold increase in the probability of some extreme event. So we are going to have to armor ourselves because of that. Thank you, Steve. Yeah, I'm going to jump in on that. I think circling back on the Texas situation, I think it's important to point out that all the generation technologies that exist in Texas exist elsewhere in the country and other countries and colder climates and perform just fine, right? So it has nothing to do with the technology or the portfolio, and it's all about whether or not you've planned for, as Steve was saying, the extremes of weather and climate. And I think we see this again and again and again whenever we have sort of large-scale failures of infrastructure systems. I actually sent an email to a colleague yesterday saying, I've only had a dollar for every time our quote-unquote worst case scenario proved to not be the worst case. I'd be able to buy myself lunch tomorrow or something like that. But the point is in order to build resilience, and that's been a topic and a concept that's really been championed in this country and elsewhere in the world for going on 15 years, a lot of that has to do with planning, preparedness, and the difficult challenge of expecting the unexpected. And I think what's a little bit disturbing at all these events is it's not like we couldn't foresee them. I mean, yes, it's an abnormally cold spell for Texas, but it gets cold in Texas and so does in Texas. So that's not necessarily anything new that we can't anticipate. And so the real question comes down to what level of resilience are we willing to pay for? And my sense is probably more than what we're getting right now. Ben, I'd like to stick with you for another minute on this. We were talking earlier about this idea of top-down thinking and bottom-up thinking and individual actions. How should we best harness those conversations to make sure we're preparing for the challenges of expecting the unexpected? Yeah, well, here's what I try and do right when I think about issues of climate change. What does it mean? How do we make progress on policy, on understanding of the problem and its nuances? And so often, I've been working on climate change for 20 years, so often it comes down to for broad national or global emissions trajectories and pathways or debates about radiative forcing. And it's all sort of at the mile-high level. And I think let's put ourselves in the shoes of others. So pick a spot on a map, plop yourself down there in a street corner or a small business and think about what does climate change look like from that vantage point and what are the opportunities sort of in risk look like from that vantage point. And when you do that, I think you start to get a little bit of an appreciation for why it is this seems to be a challenging issue for the country to deal with, but you also get a sense for the opportunities that exist at the local level and above to move forward. And when you're working at that level, you also get to have these sort of one-on-one conversations with people who are trying to get their own heads around what is climate change? Why does it matter to me? Why does it matter to our nation? And having those one-on-one discussions, I find is really it's almost essential, I think, for bringing people along on what's going to be a significant but possible task. So important to bring folks together continually on engaging, which is why I'm so happy to have this conversation with you both today. I'd like to jump tracks a tiny bit, because we haven't yet talked about a little bit about the U.S.'s own beginning journey to decarbonization. We talked a little bit about it, but I'd like to come back to it. How fast have we begun to do that already? And what needs to happen to continue the speed we'll need? Steve, you mentioned within 10 years, we got to get things together to make a transition over 30. How do we push that innovation along? I'd love to hear from both of you on that. Yeah. So I can start to reach net zero in 2050. By 2030, our electric grid should be 75% not emitting. And a business as usual trajectory is just about half that, 37%. The reason that it's that high is that wind and solar now offer the cheapest levelized cost of electricity of any technology. And the reason for that is public investment in wind and solar worldwide for the last 30 years that have subsidized it, created markets where individual firms all of a sudden could compete with one another in a marketplace that existed only because of the subsidized price and they did what capitalism does well, drove the cost down. So I sort of view that as the triumph of subsidies, working with capitalism really worked. And so we're in that great position there, but we need to double the pace, which means we need to sort of install wind and solar at the all-time record pace in the country for the next couple of years. And then we need to start beating records. And we kind of need to be at double the records by the end of the decades. It's pretty challenging. Electric cars, we think you need to get to something like 50% of light duty sales by 2030. That sounded like a lot when we were doing it. And then GM came out with this unilateral announcement that they're going to be 100% in 2035. And so they know something we don't know, I guess. And then there are a whole bunch of others that are smaller potatoes. We do recommend an economy-wide price on carbon, but not one that's large enough to do the job by itself. But as a cost-efficiency measure, it finds every corner of the economy. The policies that the portfolio would recommend in the report would still decarbonize the economy without that, which is kind of, you know, and that's by design. But with it, it's going to cost less. I'll leave it at that for now. There's obviously a lot more, but those are the two biggest sectors that where you make really material headway over the next 10 years. And your thoughts on further headway? Yeah, I mean, I agree with everything that's even just laid on the table. I mean, again, I think the big point is there's a lot of different levers that we can pull and a lot of different levers that we have to pull. But some of them are bigger than others, right? So I think the economy-wide price on carbon that really pushes signals down throughout the economy is helpful for triggering action across these different portfolios that we have to tackle, buildings, industry, transportation. At the same time, we're really interested in looking at what can you achieve working from the bottom up, particularly at the state and local level. And in some ways, it's a bigger challenge, because there's not just one big carbon price lever that you have to pull. You have to pull a lot of different things. But really interested in the role of cities and the role that they can play in sort of driving change and incentivizing change and providing leadership and models for moving forward. And what's the role of sort of emerging technology? I mean, sort of the clean tech industry is sort of linking up with traditional energy generation energy services, linking up with the Internet of Things. So it's this sort of frothy, bubbly, really sort of fascinating space that will probably be part of the solution moving forward. Not to say we can't do a lot with current technologies, but any help we can get from new emerging technologies would be interesting. And so I think thinking about the role of some of the small scale local innovation, creating additional solutions, expanding our toolkit and scaling that up to get to some of these big numbers of emissions reduction that's all going to be important. Thanks, Ben. So even the first 25 minutes or so covered a lot of ground, and I just want to pause for a second. And what Ben just said, there are a lot of different levers that we can and have to pull some at different levels. And we're going to step into that next. But we talked a bit about what do we mean by decarbonization and net zero. We talked about this recent report that provides a tech blueprint for how to try to grapple with that over a period of 30 years or so, including policies that would be enacted and very importantly, how to address potential societal disruptions. We talked about how it doesn't necessarily have to be expensive, how technology can be a driver along the way, but how we have to, in cyclical fashion, continue to support the advance of technology as well. When we touched on the particular of the moment situation in Texas, which potentially offers some lessons for us to think about as well as we grapple with our energy infrastructure. So I'd like to do a little deeper dive in some of the topics that we've been talking about and look at some of the other enablers. We haven't talked too much yet in detail about policy. We talked about the triumph of subsidies, maybe some other levers as well. I would love to hear about what do you see the role, for instance, of federal policy here and to Ben's point and bottom up thinking, how about state and local or tribal levels and other stakeholders? What about the private sector and individuals? How do we work those conversations across? So I should say that the Academy's report that was just released on February 2nd is one of two from the same committee. We had to produce it quickly. It started in March and it was released in February, which is fast for a whole economy. And we did that in part because of the election cycle and the possibility that the receptivity to the report would be different and that the academies do things in the nation service and that this was a way to provide timely advice. But the second report is still to come and the first one we focused only on federal actions. So we did not specifically look at state and municipal and that sort of thing, actions to take place. So that was something that we had to do to triage and get to the finish line in time, but we will be looking at it later. That said, the policies for implementing the technological pieces are the usual mix. There's the price on carbon I mentioned, but there's also a bunch of standards. So there's a clean energy standard. There's a zero emissions car standard. There's an appliance standard, which would hit people in their houses in part because people don't respond to price signals very well. That's why we had to make a manufacturing appliance standard for zero CFC air conditioners. Eventually you just couldn't buy anything else. So we have all of those sorts of things in there. And we also have a whole bunch of policies that again are targeting the just and fair transition. And there the integration with state and local and municipal actors is really pretty well fleshed out. And that's because that's where the action is. So there are a few places that lose lots of jobs and get hollowed out the way cold towns are getting hollowed out across the country now. And then there are many places where things get better. And it's in the few places, the comparatively few places, it's still many in absolute terms where you have to focus your action. And those are local communities. That's a town that had a coal fired power plant and it is the dominant employer that's now gone all of a sudden, right? So that really is a much more local focus. But in some sense, financed by the federal government. And how can that bottom up thinking if you don't mind? So I think of the towns that are affected. And what are some ways we can have those conversations to inform the policy of how we do that? Yeah, so what we envision is first of all a task force, an immediate task force to try to figure out where is the injustice in the current energy system. There's no good systematic survey that shows us. So we want to have that first. And then and also that takes a look forward. Then we've got 10 regional centers each connected to the state offices that would be created inside their jurisdiction. And those serve as meeting places for governors and representatives and mayors and county officials to come in and learn about what's likely to happen in their area and what the options are to do something about it. And then administer a series of community block grants where you can apply like anything from a city of Los Angeles could apply for a humongous one to a little town could apply for a community block grant with the people necessary to figure out what's going to happen, what they're likely to lose, and when and what their options are. There's also a program in there for technical assistance to be developed within the DOE, almost like an extension service, right, to help them. And then once they figured out what to do, then the question is, what are you going to do about it? And the two primary instruments there are an independent corporation called a national transition corporation that would be the primary deliverer of funds working in connection with the green bank, which was also constructed to work with community banks. And that corporation is independent to insulate it from the ups and downs of the political process in a transition that has to last 30 years. And so there, what would you do? Well, you would apply for funds to attract new industries. You'd apply for funds to help attract new industries, right, and the capital to build them. You'd apply for funds to retrain workers for those new industries and for other industries. You'd apply for funds for remediation of legacy infrastructure and so on. And the goal then is to provide all of the workers in those towns with multiple options, both inside their town and elsewhere with the understanding that there is a big increase in net jobs overall, right? And any further thoughts on this you'd like to share? Yeah. Well, I think a couple of things. One, and I brought this up in an interview I did a couple of weeks ago. I think we had this opportunity to learn from past mistakes and not repeat them, right? So the U.S. industrial past is filled with examples where industries left were off-shored, shut down, and there wasn't much of a safety net in place to protect communities, retrain people, protect livelihoods, and to protect well-being. And so I think a lot of what's this report that we're talking about, a lot of what's great about it is it actually sort of digs into those issues. And Steve's gave a lot of examples of the policies you can implement to help prevent those kinds of local scale disruptions. But I think the other thing that's sorely needed, particularly, and this is thinking about from the context of equity, is how do we actually measure this, right? So we're quite explicitly now designing policies in anticipation of some of these potential dislocations, impacts, and we're trying to steer off exacerbating existing vulnerabilities or inequalities. Fine, okay. So how do we measure that? What are the metrics that we use? Are we measuring outcomes? Or are we looking at, we're really interested in how do you measure fair processes around just transitions, right? If you're doing community engagement, trying to bring the community along, are you doing that engagement? Are you inviting the right people? Who shows up? Are they representative of the community? And I think making sure that when we measure and evaluate the policies that we're pursuing and trying to implement, that we have an end goal in mind. And one of those, for proximal ones, is addressing the climate change challenge, reaching that zero. But there's an ultimate goal, which is protecting human and ecological well-being, right? And I think we need to, that's sort of what I use as sort of the rubric against which I judge whether or not a policy or an intervention is or is not equitable. But again, thinking about how we measure those, so as we start to move forward with policies and programs to address these issues, we actually have some kind of a barometer for determining whether or not we're actually heading in the right direction. I want to just double down on that. We have a proposal for a White House office that would both develop energy indicators with a grants program to, I'm sorry, equity indicators with a grants program. So a way to measure this and that would measure it every year and then do a comprehensive one every three years and whose job it is to keep track on where it's working and where it isn't and what works and what doesn't sort of at the national level. So I really believe in what you say is absolutely critical and want to endorse that we don't know how to do it yet, right? And the second thing I want to endorse is the need for local community involvement, participation. There need to be lots of voices at the table that have always been excluded from the table. And so when you have a community grant block, a grant block grant, it's absolutely essential that the community block grant, the awarding of it is contingent on a plan to engage across the diversity present within the community and to have people involved in the decision making. So it isn't just one group deciding for everybody what's going to happen. I'm going to jump in and push this because I think there's just to make sure it gets put on the table. So a lot of the past few minutes have sort of been talking about how do we avoid sort of exacerbating inequities or our existing society as we make this transition and it's sort of like how do we minimize harm, right? But the flip side of this is also on the opportunity front. And so, you know, the decarbonization report is fantastic and really highlighting that there are lots and lots of opportunities for people, for jobs, for the economy and moving down this pathway. And that raises the question of, okay, who benefits from all of those opportunities, right? So certain jobs go away, greater number of jobs come online. Who do those go to both in terms of demography, in terms of age, in terms of education, in terms of geography. So, you know, so I think that's, and that might be sort of the next frontier is making sure that not just the risks are equitably distributed, but also that the opportunities are equitably distributed. And I'm so glad to hear you saying this because, you know, I think a lot of us are concerned about the challenges of bringing everybody to the table, the level of polarization and concern that is around issues like climate. And I think, you know, for it to be successful, the things you're pointing out are absolutely vital. What are the opportunities? How can, you know, we grow some great jobs for the nation. And I just wonder are there other areas that maybe you haven't had a chance to touch on as far as building a social contract for 30 years? Ben, I'd love to hear them as well. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think, you know, I think those of us, and I'm sure Stephen feels the same way that I've sort of worked on climate for a long time. We've been frustrated for a long time about the sort of level of polarization, you know, on the issue, right? And I think the, I think when we, what we're starting to do now is really link climate to a lot of other issues that are sort of core to, you know, society's concerns about sort of, you know, the future of the nation or the future of the world, right? So moving climate change away from just being an environmental problem of interest to, you know, an environmental community, which is, you know, let's face it, has sort of been seen as a fairly elite crowd for quite some time. So now we're engaging with environmental justice. So the people have been fighting for environmental justice for decades are saying, well, hey, okay, you know, welcome to the party. Those who have been fighting for, you know, quality jobs, fair pay, jobs that provide benefits for people are now saying, okay, we'll always start to see ourselves maybe being in the capitalize on this opportunity. The sort of technology frontier sort of wide open. So now you see a lot of, you know, energy entrepreneurialism sort of emerging across the country. So there's I think a lot more entry points for a much, you know, more diverse sort of community of stakeholders to engage on this topic. And I think that's essential for moving this away from being just, you know, an environmental challenge to being a societal challenge to being a societal opportunity. But, you know, as we've seen in the past week, the sort of the political polarization continues. You know, it ran we're kind of fascinated by this phenomenon, we do a lot of work on sort of on truth decay as we refer to it. And I think that's an important element of just being able to have honest conversations about some of these topics. But I mean, I think that's that's perhaps one of the the biggest hurdles we're going to have to overcome as we move forward with this transition is being able to have sort of honest conversations about the reality to opportunity that's in front of us and steering away from some of these sort of negative narratives that often aren't grounded in truth. So that was admittedly a bit of a waffle answer to your question. But hopefully I set up Steve to come in and provide a more eloquent answer. No, my answer is not going to be eloquent, but it's going to be at least on the flip side. It will be about something else. And that is that, that, you know, one of the hopeful signs is it doesn't actually come out of the Academy's report, it comes out of multiple reports, the single most intensive one is a thing called the Princeton Net Zero America project where you've got real geographic granularity about what the build would look like. And there the interesting thing is that red states make out like bandits relative to blue states as you transition to net zero. And this is extremely robust. They do it really granularly, but everybody who studies this problem comes up with the same thing. And it's because it's pretty simple. We're taking resources where there's an enormous amount of energy stored in the ground in one place, like a coal mine or an oil field. And we're taking it out. And then we're putting it in a highly concentrated, you know, like generation facility where a huge amount of energy is processed, right? And that's the economy. And so it only benefits a few, but they're concentrated. I mean, it's a large number in national terms, but it's a small fraction of the population in the small fraction of the area to a system where you've got wind and solar and everybody who owns a square meter owns the wind blowing over it and the photons that hit it. And, you know, with wind, you're only harvesting four watts per square meter. And with solar, it's more, but you need an immense amount of area covered by these things. And everybody who owns that land benefits, including municipalities and states and others. All right. And so the places with low population density are the ones that have the suitable land and they're disproportionately red states. The same is also true of the biomass industry we're going to need to provide carbon molecules for the fuels that we'll still need. And that biomass industry is also centered in red states. And so if you can just get this thing started, right, then I think that the economic self-interest turns it into a red state issue. Yeah. And we've seen examples of this, I think, with ethanol, for example, right, which is an alternative fuel that's derived from corn. All of a sudden, you've got a new market for, you know, corn growers in the Midwest. It turns out there. They're kind of happy with that policy. No, no, you've taken away over their dead body. Okay. Yeah. So exactly. It's sort of finding these incentives and let them do the work, right? Sort of let the economic opportunities do the work. You know, sitting around having debates about magnitudes of climate change and whether or not it's real, you know, we can spend a lot of time that we don't have sort of engaging in that. It's like, let's find the pressure points. Let's find what it takes to motivate people to act. And whether that's, you know, finding agricultural solutions to sequester more carbon that, you know, the agricultural community buys into or, you know, opportunities elsewhere. That's what works. If it's like, you know, addressing air quality as a problem, as opposed to addressing climate change as a problem. If that's what works, it allows us to move forward with this sort of full portfolio of policies. Great. Yeah, I think finding the right language, ways to connect and having, as you said earlier, Ben, having honest conversations is really vital. Let's take them, put the lens back out a little bit. We've been focused on US concerns. But, you know, as I understand US, you know, the Paris agreement will officially enter a divorce tomorrow. I wonder if we might just take a quick look at the decarbonization picture internationally. Are there, you know, policies of practices in other countries that we can learn from and kind of embrace from that? Who do you want first? Either. Ben, go ahead, Steve. Okay. The technological mix we have now is universal. And it represents an island of certainty over the next 10 years about actions that we could take if we want to get to net zero. All right. And so, for instance, you do approximately the same deployment of wind and solar, no matter what the final destination of your energy system is, whether or not it's comparatively fossil and nuke heavy at the end, fossil decarbonized fossil and nuke heavy, or if it's 100% renewable. All right. And that means that any nation that has a plan, you know, there's just a lot of overlap between the plans. They're all going for new renewables and they're all going for electrification and transport. Those are the two big, biggest items early on. And then there's a bunch of smaller stuff. The policy portfolio is interesting because it does vary from place to place. China famously has, you know, command and control economy. And they've announced a net zero program. It, you know, India has announced a net zero by 2050 program. Everybody is sort of getting on that bandwagon. And so we've got a great experiment that's being run about what works, right? And, and here in this country, my guess is we have some hodgepodge of market based incentives and, and command and control, you know, mandates and standards. That's what I think, I think it's going to happen. I also just want to point out that in the US, we are better resourced for a net zero transition than just about any nation in the world. We've got great wind and solar resources. But we also have the world's best geologic reservoirs to put captured CO2 in if we choose to do so. The only place really where we've got a great set of reservoirs that could be tooled up like in five years, we could be ready to go at fantastic scale. Okay. We've also got a huge agricultural and forestry base for such a rich country that already produces a sink of 700 megatons. So as Ben was saying, you know, it's net zero. It means we can produce about a billion metric tons of negative emissions just with forestry and agriculture, whereas other nations with higher population densities could not. And finally, we've got a, an entrepreneurial culture that should allow us to invent things quickly, like a low-cost electrolysis machine, you know, that will make fuels from renewable electricity. And so for competitive reasons, one can argue that the US is a more competitive economy in a decarbonized world than it is today. Yeah. I mean, a couple of things on the international front. I mean, one is, you know, I think it's, we always talk about these sort of energy transitions that language we've used for a while. And, you know, years ago, it was like, how do we start the transition? And it's pretty clear, like it's already started. It's already underway, not just here in the US, but, but elsewhere. And we see, and I think, you know, it's even just pointed out, I mean, a lot of countries are moving fairly aggressively and making commitments, not are making commitments, maybe not 10 years out necessarily, but 20 or 30 years out. But, you know, as you pointed out, like when you have China and India basically saying, yeah, we're going to, we're going to hit this net zero target by the middle of the century. How are they going to get there? And how are they counting net zero? You know, we can quibble about that because they probably don't know how they're going to get there. I mean, let's be honest. But I think it's, it's the commitment that's important because what that does is enable persistence. And I think that's what we see again and again in other countries is persistence pays off. And if you're able to make investments and policy decisions over the long term, you know, despite, you know, policy cycles and political cycles and different parties coming in and out of office, if you can make those long term commitments and follow a pathway, you know, this, you know, the cost become, you know, quite manageable. Your economy continues to grow and you make, you know, continual steady process progress on, on, you know, addressing the problem. The other thing that's interesting when we look beyond our borders is, you know, this, this stuff's getting real in part because of, you know, where Europe in particular is going. So, you know, you know, the moving forward with, you know, border carbon taxes and carbon tariffs, that's going to hit international trade pretty darn soon, as far as I can gather. And that means where, you know, imports and exports and the movement of goods around the world is going to increasingly be subjected to, you know, consideration for carbon footprints of goods and services are being produced. That affects costs and that affects, you know, competition. And as soon as that starts to kick in more holistically, that, again, becomes a major driver that can move toward decarbonizing, you know, entire supply chains, you know, potentially. So I think it's really important we raise this question because, you know, we can talk a lot about what the U.S. is doing and decarbonization in the U.S., but it's not, you know, disconnected from the rest of the world environmentally or, you know, economically. And there's a lot that the U.S. can do to sort of push the rest of the world and capitalize on the opportunities. But the U.S. is probably going to get pulled in some areas as well. Yeah, thank you. So we've just been talking a little bit about, you know, there's a second report coming with further information on pricing standards, clean energy policies, and many others. We talked about the idea of setting up a task force, the opportunity to learn from past mistakes, the fact that this is an opportunity rather than, you know, necessarily a, you know, a problem for us to moving forward, the power of having honest conversations. And, you know, we've just been chatting a little bit about the international picture that a lot of countries like China and India are making net zero decarbonization commitments. So, but the U.S., fortunately for us, is better resourced than many. And as Ben just put it, this stuff is getting real. You know, we, you know, other changes and choices in the world will affect us as well. And we are certainly part of it. So I'd like to just pull, we have a few more minutes. I'd like to pull a little bit more on the broader picture. And, you know, we've, I know the report, Steve, that we've been talking about really addresses the energy sector, but could we at least touch on how you, you and Ben too, if you like, might decarbonize other sectors such as agricultural steel and cement and those. Yeah, so, so on agriculture, agriculture and forestry. I also chaired a national academy study on negative emissions technologies that came out in 2018. So, well, in the calendar math just about two years ago, so it's still relatively current. And the, the land sinks, so-called nature-based climate solutions, right, planting trees, managing forests differently, and then treating agricultural practices that cause soils to recapture the carbon backbone that they've lost through ill treatment over the last couple of centuries, which pulls CO2 out of the atmosphere and into the, into the agricultural soils where it does good to agriculture. Those technologies can in the US approximately cancel the non-CO2 greenhouse gases. So nitrous oxide and methane and industrial fluorocarbons. And so you should think about that system, that non-industrial system together with the non-CO2 greenhouse gases as something that itself comes to net zero. And then the industrial system is something that separately has to come to net zero. We can't rely on the natural climate solutions to, to solve a piece of the industrial problem. I would put cement with industry, right? So they were, the technology we have for a zero-emission cement plant right now is to capture the CO2, compress it, and inject it into a geologic reservoir, like the, like the kind of reservoir we got natural gas from. There are a bunch of new technologies that are really interesting for cement substitutes that might work the other way, actually takes CO2 rather than release it. But, you know, it is really tricky making a cement substitutes. And, and it's because the building industry is quite rightly interested in really long-term performance. And you've got to be able to prove, you know, all you have to do is go to the, to the pantheon and look at the concrete dome there that's 2000 years old, right? In Rome and realize how great concrete is. Okay. And so, you know, what are you going to stand up again? Yeah, this is the last 2000 years, I'm sure of it, right? It's a hard sell. And so, so there are all kinds of people working on cement substitutes and, and I'm a fan, but, but, but right now we can capture the CO2 from the old-fashioned concrete, the concrete. Yeah, I mean, I might, I might add, I think this, these, I think the industrial side is really the tough one. I mean, conversations that I've had with steel companies, the concrete firms, that one's tough, right? And so, this is where sort of innovation still is really important for, you know, helping those industries figure out how to decarbonize, how steel can electrify, for example, which is a non-trivial task and do it cost-effectively, right? So you can still compete in an international steel market. So this is where, you know, forward progress and innovation is critical. Again, an opportunity for the U.S. to be a leader in providing that innovation that really moves us forward. That's essential. So I think it's this interesting balance of there's so much you can do with sort of current technologies, but also some of these arenas where, you know, we still need to double down on R&D, we still need to push forward very, very hard to enable some of these technologies to scale, to provide additional assistance, and also, you know, to allow this country to sort of take advantage of that innovation. And I'd like to stick with, so we just have a couple more minutes left. I'd like to stick with you for the last question and then go to Steve after, if that's okay. We've covered a lot of ground in today's conversation, really, really a fascinating one. And while it's clear there's a lot to do, there's also a lot of reason for hope. So I just wonder, this is kind of a little unfair of a question for me to do to you, but, you know, moderators, privilege, facilitators, privilege, if you could say one thing that you would like our audience who are listening now or later to take away from today's conversation, what would you suggest to them? Yeah, I'm gonna, I mean, you know, given, well, I'm gonna double down on the equity thing, right? And so, you know, I raised this issue earlier that, you know, human and ecological well-being should be the sort of benchmark by which we measure progress. And I think that's, that's the message I would like to leave people with. So as you think about sort of risks and opportunities, think about those criteria as being ones used to measure what is a good technology, what is an appropriate pace for climate action. Because at the end of the day, we're trying, that's what we're trying to deliver. Thank you, Ben. I'd like to just give my endorsement to that as well, but then add one other thing. I just came from congressional testimony, and it's just remarkable how it's now impossible to talk about the energy transition without using words like justice and fairness and equity, all right? And that's, that wasn't true a year ago, all right? So there's been a sea change here, and that gives me real cause for hope. Second thing that gives me cause for hope is that all through my career, I didn't know how to solve the climate problem, how to get to net zero. I knew how to get started. Everybody was always talking about getting started, how to get the biggest marginal reduction for the lowest price and that sort of things, because we didn't have the technology to go to end game. And guess what? Human ingenuity came to the rescue, and now we know how to do it and we can do it with a cost that is roughly comparable to what we already have been paying. That's a triumph of humanity. We keep doing this. We'll make it cheaper and cheaper and cheaper and better and better and better. And so I say to all the young people of the world, invent something and have it. Thanks a lot, Ben and Steve. That was a terrific conversation. Alex, I want to bring this to a close and please pass over to you and thank you. Well, thank you again for joining the inaugural climate conversation from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. I want to thank Ben and Steve for sharing their perspectives and to give a special thank you to Mariette for her excellent moderation. The conversation was recorded and should be available for viewing on this same webpage starting tomorrow. For our March climate conversation, we'll talk about climate change and health almost exactly a year after the first lockdowns for the COVID-19 pandemic began in the U.S. If when you registered for this event, you indicated that you wanted updates, we'll make sure that you get updated information about the participants and date and time for the March event. We'll also share that information through our climate at the National Academies newsletter which you can also sign up for above this video. As a final reminder, to share your feedback on today's event or your ideas for future events, please see the survey link also just above the video. Thanks again to everyone who tuned in to join us today and again thanks to Mariette, Ben and Steve for sharing your expertise on this and more importantly, your time. We know how precious that is these days. Lastly, thank you to the climate communications team at the National Academies and to everyone behind the scenes who supported today's event. We're really excited to continue this conversation through more events like this in the future. Thanks for joining and have a great day.