 Good afternoon and welcome to today's Energy Seminar. It's my great pleasure to introduce our own Sally Benson, who most of you know, particularly we've been here longer than two years. She is a professor in the Department of Energy Science and Engineering. But for the last two years, mostly, I guess, summer 2020 to summer, sorry, 2021 to summer 2023, she was the Deputy Director for Energy and Lead Energy Transition Strategist at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. And today she's going to talk about that experience. It's actually no surprise that Sally was offered that job. Not sure why she accepted it. She could tell us that question in that she had a long career since 2007 in energy resources engineering, being the head of both the Global Climate Energy Project for a while, and director and co-director with Dean, now Dean Arun Bajumdar of the Precourt Institute for Energy. Before that, a whole other illustrious career at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, where she was a grad student, I guess, initially, but then worked up to being the director of the Division of Earth Sciences, and then the deputy lab director for energy sciences, and along the way was deputy director of the whole Lawrence Berkeley National Labs. So I could go through all her honors and advisory boards, but that would take the rest of our time here. So the way we're going to proceed to Sally will talk about one of her main projects during her time in the White House for roughly 20 minutes. Then I'll do a little fireside talk with a few hopefully interesting questions for you all, and then we'll open it up for the last 10, 15 minutes to questions from the audience, which as usual, preference given to students. So without further ado, Sally, please take it away. OK. Well, thank you, John. So the job that you didn't talk about that I had is I used to, for many years, be the director of this energy seminar. Anyway, so I'm a big fan. That was a really important one. Most important. Anyway, it's really great to be here and see you all. I'm going to try to be brief, because I wanted us to be able to have a chat and answer any questions you might have. But I think it's just really important to also understand the context for the moment we're in and why it's such an exciting time and why it's such an important time in terms of climate change. So to step back for a moment, I think we need to look back over the last two years and recognize that these have been the most consequential years in the history of climate change policy in the US ever by far times in order of magnitude. So if you recall back when the president was elected and within the first week basically had us rejoin Paris, the Paris Agreement, and established climate goals for the United States. So you're probably familiar, but it's worth just recalling. So 50% to 52% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. Zero emission electric power grid by 2035. Incredibly aggressive. And then economy wide net zero by 2050. Basically putting us in alignment with many of the other leading nations in the world who have made climate commitments that will keep us on a pathway to limit warming to less than 2 degrees C and ideally get much closer to 1.5 degrees C. So these were the big goals. But right away, in addition to beginning to work on the legislation that I'll talk about in a minute that the president and the team looked across the energy transition landscape and realized that the United States was lagging behind with regard to supply chain security with things like solar panels, batteries, all the materials that go into making those things, heat pumps, and so forth. And he asked each of their or tasked each of the agencies in the government to develop a strategy to identify, first, what are the vulnerabilities in our supply chains? And second, how do we go about remedying those? So particularly focusing things like critical minerals for the energy transition and semiconductors. And if you're interested in any of these, these are all public documents. So I really encourage you to take a look at them because they were very, very thorough. So next thing is saying, OK, well, if the government is going to create nationwide targets and so forth, it needs to be in a position to lead by example. So it developed its own sustainability plan for all of the agencies to make sure that the government was on track not only to meet the targets, these large federal targets, but also to be able to lead in these. In particular, to think about things like the buying power of the federal government. So for example, it is the largest procureur of electricity in the United States. And it set itself a goal of 24, 7, 365 clean power. Now, how many people know what that is? 24, 7, 365? Yeah? One. OK. All right. Some of you. OK. Well, what that means is that it's not just enough to say, oh, I have procured 100% clean energy to run my economy. It says, I'm going to guarantee that the energy that I procure in every single hour of every single day over the year is actually clean. So it's a much more challenging target and really technology forcing in so many ways because it says, OK, you can't just build a bunch of solar plants and wind turbines. You also need to think about energy storage. You need to think about reliability and so forth. So that was the next thing that was done. 2021 comes the bipartisan infrastructure law. Again, huge investment in all kinds of infrastructure, but particularly including basically building new transmission capabilities, building a nationwide network of electric vehicle charging and pipelines for transporting carbon dioxide and so forth. And very important included in this were some very large-scale demonstration projects of technologies that were sort of on the cusp of readiness but yet had not yet been demonstrated at commercial scale. So incredibly important piece of legislation. And on the right-hand side, you can see this map of locations all over the United States where major new factories and infrastructure to support clean energy are being built. So not only do we have these in place, but we're working very quickly to implement them. So the next one came along, the Inflation Reduction Act. And you might go, well, what does this have to do with climate? But actually, it has a huge amount. As a matter of fact, it's really about climate and health care. And basically provides all kinds of incentives and subsidies that will allow us to build more solar panels, more wind turbines, build offshore wind turbines, have more subsidies for electric vehicles, just tremendous amount of support across the board for everything that we know how to do today that we can deploy, provide incentives that will help buy down those costs, gain more experience, and really prepare us for the next decade to get to this 2030 target. And then there are also strategies beyond this decade. So those two pieces of legislation are primarily focused on how do we get to 2030. But then after that, we're beginning to think about how do we transition from an incentive-based system to a system that would require us to use clean energy technologies. And there are two very important pieces of work that the EPA has done. These are not finalized. These are proposed rulings that would, in the case of the CAFE standards, drive very, very aggressive increases in the efficiency and really drive electrification of the light-duty fleet, but also put in place requirements for the heavy-duty fleet as well. And then for the draft power plant rules, there is a new strategy that would help us decarbonize the existing or potentially new fossil fuel generation, which would require it either use carbon capture and storage, or it would require the use of hydrogen, so a different type of fuel. So together, these really set the stage for deploying things that are either ready today or will soon be ready first through an incentive-based program and then in terms of regulations that would require this. So I had just the incredible privilege to be working in the White House during the time when all of this impactful legislation was being developed. So how do we get all this done? And I grew up on the West Coast. I think I didn't do very well in my civics class. So I don't really think I understood very much about how the government works, or I didn't. And one of the things that immediately impressed me is with this legislation that it really was a whole-of-government approach. Well, what does that mean? Well, we've got the executive branch, of course. So we've got the president, the vice president. We've got all the cabinet agencies. Those are shown on the right. And there are other departments and agencies and boards that are also an important part of the executive branch. And then in addition to that, we have the legislative branch. So we have the House of Representatives, the Senate. Of course, they were key to passing all that legislation I just mentioned. And then there's the judicial branch, which also weighs in on the legality of some of the requirements, in particular, thinking about the EPA regulations. It's likely at some point that they will weigh in on those as well. So I could go through a long discussion about how each of these agencies is working on the implementation of the legislation, but also doing R&D, also thinking about new and ongoing policies that would continue to drive us towards this net zero by 2050. So I just want to say a little bit more about the executive branch, again, because that's where I was working. And there are a number of traditional organizations that are part of the executive branch. There's the Council of Economic Advisers that deal with issues on the economy and jobs and so forth. There's the Council on Environmental Quality, which in this case was really the primary steward of the environmental justice work that was so central to strategies. There's the National Economic Council, where Brian Dees was leading this at the time, who really laid out the grand vision for a national industrial policy, something that the US has not engaged with for many, many decades. Actually, my entire life, there was a very different view that the government should be hands off, that the market should drive the economy. And this administration said, no, that the energy transition is so consequential, we need to be much more deliberate about how we're thinking about growing our economy, making sure that we have good jobs. So that was their role. And of course, there's so much opportunity associated with the energy transition. There's the National Security Council. Lots of issues about international trade that are consequential for this, and also with regard to things like nuclear power and non-proliferation. And then looking here at the bottom, of course, there's Office of Management and Budget. Basically develops and stewards the President's budget. And then the Office of Science and Technology Policy, really stewards for science policy in the United Science and Technology Policy in the US. So that's where I was. So I was the Deputy Director for Energy, and I reported to the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, who is the President's science advisor, and as of this last administration, also a cabinet member. So those are the things that have been around for a long time. And there were new things added to the executive branch as part of the important climate work that was taking place. The first one is the addition of something called the Climate Policy Office. Gina McCarthy led this activity and a longtime environmental advocate and leader of EPA, as well as many other important things, including most recently before this at the National Resources Defense Council. So all of the client's policy strategy was really driven out of her office together with the State Department, John Kerry, the special envoy for climate who dealt with the international dimensions of this. And then there were two very other important positions set up. So I talked about that legislation. We're talking about a half a trillion dollar investment over a decade that needs to be strategically invested so that it leverages private sector capital, but also really gets the job done that we need to get done so that we meet our 2030 targets. So shortly after the infrastructure law was passed, Mitch Landrieu became the senior advisor to the president on implementation of the bipartisan infrastructure law. He had been the mayor of New Orleans during the terrible hurricane there and had lots of experience with infrastructure projects. And then finally, when the Inflation Reduction Act was passed, John Podesta, a longtime influential figure in the Democratic Party, who was brought in to lead that. And a lot of that had to basically do with thinking about all the tax policy that was going to underpin all of these incentives. So all of these in red were new to the administration and again, I really had the incredible privilege of working with all these organizations in this whole of government strategy to address climate change. So in addition to making the commitments, it was a requirement and a desire to develop a long-term strategy. So it's not just good enough to say, oh, by 2050 we'll be at zero. You have to have a plan. And the special envoy John Kerry and Gina McCarthy worked together with the Department of Energy and many other agencies to develop this long-range strategy. It deals with transportation, buildings, industry, electricity. Those are the traditional four when we think of the energy system, but also added this extra component of carbon dioxide removal. And there's a lot going on in this area. How many people are involved in carbon dioxide removal? OK, a couple of you. There's a class being offered on that right now. Anyway, it's a new area that was put into place in recognition of the fact that in addition to reducing emissions from energy, we were also going to have to start thinking about restoring the atmosphere by removing carbon dioxide and even ideally other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. So just looking into this in a little bit more detail, it's really an all-of-the-above plan for achieving net zero. So looking here, so we have this is our current emissions, 2005 emissions, that there are basically a very, very big effort also on managing natural lands to either preserve the carbon stores in those lands or to take degraded lands and make them available to enhance carbon sinks by changed management practices. Second area is in the area of energy efficiency, so both transportation, buildings, and industry. Moving over to the next one, incredibly important is decarbonizing electricity and a number of different strategies from zero carbon generation, such as wind and solar, backed up by storage, but also nuclear power and fossil fuels with carbon capture and storage. Next, moving over to a set of new fuels that would help provide our demand for energy, particularly in the area of industry, heavy-duty transport, aircraft, shipping, and so forth, so hydrogen, low-carbon fuels, and electrification of the transport sector in particular. Moving over there, non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions, largely from the agricultural sector, but also methane, incredibly important, releases from the fossil fuel industry. Next one over is trying to improve our managed land, so our agricultural lands. Can we start tilling the fields? Can we start adding new practices that will not take carbon out of the soil but will in fact restore them? And then finally, in the far end there, carbon dioxide removal. So it's got all of these things and there are strategies and financial support for all of these elements in the legislation and other programs I've discussed. So we have a plan, 2050, but I can't not talk about the urgency of meeting this plan. We have no time to waste at all, no false steps. And the way I like to think about this is in terms of the remaining global carbon budget. How many of you, the carbon budget is a familiar term to you? Pretty much everybody, yay. That's progress, that the IPCC AR5 report, I thought, not the most recent one, the one before really set the stage for this. And people like Rob Jackson are also very, have been instrumental in tracking this budget over time through the global carbon project. So basically, if we want to limit warming to 1.5 degrees C, we have a very small budget left, only about 380 gigatons of carbon dioxide, 1.7, 732 degrees C is about 1,230, but the time frames for these are nine years, 17, 30 years, just incredibly quick. And I know that for those of you who are students, particularly any undergrads, 30 years might sound like a long time, but in infrastructure years, this is really just a blink of an eye, so we really need to move quickly. If we go back a decade, or certainly two decades, but even a decade, if you were talking about climate change, you'd show pictures of polar bears on icebergs, and you'd show pictures of forests that were being eaten by bark beetles. So it's always like climate change is something very far away. It's happening in other places, and to other people, or ecosystem, remote ecosystems, but I think we all now know that climate change has become personal, local, painful, and expensive, and I'm kind of guessing every one of you here has had some experience in the last couple of years that you have directly felt the impact from climate change. Is there anybody, yeah, would you agree with that? Do you all feel like somehow you've been, yeah? Anyone who was here during the fires, that was just really devastating that's a little, a couple of years ago. So speaking of fires, here is Australia in 2019, just unprecedented fires. Actually, I just read something in the New York Times. They've already started early and now they aren't just on the east coast of Australia, but they're also having huge fires on the west coast much earlier than anticipated. I was in Washington DC over the summer and there were the very large Canadian fires and the whole northeast was literally blanketed in smoke and it wasn't quite as bad as California was in say the 2020 and 2021 time frames, but really devastating and it just really drove home that this can happen anywhere and it's devastating. But it's not just for us again, that there are the billions of dollars that are now being put on the economy associated with this. So this is a new chart. This is the NOAA, the National Ocean, Atmospheric Administration, National Oceans and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA. Yes, they've started collecting this data. So what this is, this is the number of events in a year that cost over a billion dollars associated with things like extreme weather and this is the year here. And they're also color coded by the nature of the event. So you see many, many associated with these severe storms. And we can see that these have grown from several a year to now over 20 a year of these kind of events. And what's incredibly shocking is the cost to our economy and to the people associated with these, getting to the point where nearly half a trillion dollars a year. And this is just in the United States. Is that these events are costing our economy. So we've got to go quickly. So the question is, how do we get this job done quickly? Well, in my mind, there are really three things we need to do. And these are what largely underpin the current strategy of the US government to work on this. So the first one is in the famous words of Secretary Jennifer Grant Holm, absolutely amazing leader of the Department of Energy, deploy, deploy, deploy. So solar, wind, electric vehicles, heat pumps, grid scale storage, anything that can be deployed that's cost effective, that's mature, that's at scale. We just need to go as fast as we can. And the inflation reduction act basically provides the support to get this work done. The second part is for all these technologies that are just emerging that we know how to do. For example, we know how to produce hydrogen from electrolysis. We know how to do carbon capture and storage. There are prototypes of advanced nuclear. We know how to do carbon removal. But all of these are more costly than the competitive technologies would be. And there's very, very limited experience. So investors, industries, who need to run reliable process like cement manufacturing, for example, they need to produce the cement, right? So when you say, okay, well, how about switching to hydrogen? It's like, well, who's ever done that before? So we need to get out. We need to demonstrate these technologies so we can show how it works. We can show how it can be economical. So that's the second leg of this three-legged stool and the infrastructure law provides support. About $25 billion worth of support to implement these technologies, to demonstrate these technologies, including a very, very large investment in hydrogen, about $8 billion worth of investment to develop hydrogen hubs so we can develop a critical mass of hydrogen production, hydrogen use, and also begin to work out the kinks on the distribution and storage systems so that we can really make this work at scale. So that's that. And then finally, the last leg of this stool has to do with the fact that 50% of the technologies today that are needed to reach net zero by 2050 are either in prototype or in early demonstration phases. So we need to continue to innovate. We need to continue to do technology development so that by 2030, that these new technologies that we're going to need are ready to scale. So that's the last leg of the stool. And that's what I spend a great deal of my time working on is to develop the first ever whole of government innovation strategy for getting to net zero, to support our efforts to get to net zero. So there's a report available online that describes all of this work and it was developed with all of these agencies here, so the usual suspects, the Department of Energy Transportation and EPA, but also a very heavy involvement of USDA, the Department of Defense, Department of State, of course, the National Science Foundation, GSA, lots of facilities where they can do demonstration projects, NOAA that I just mentioned, HUD, NASA, and so forth. So all of these agencies came together and said today we are involved in one element or the other of innovation related to climate technologies, but it's no longer enough to sort of take a piecemeal approach. We need to develop a national strategy around this. So the effort was co-led by three teams my team in the Office of Science and Technology Policy together with the Climate Policy Office and the Office of Management and Budget. So okay, so where do you start, right? When you're trying to develop a national innovation strategy? Well, we started by looking at all of the emissions across the entire economy broken down into very, very granular groups. Okay, so for example, looking at transportation, looking at all the modes of transportation and what were the emissions associated with those. But we did this for the entire economy and we said, okay, well, what do we know how to do today and what are all the things we don't know how to do? And so this was a list of 37 different innovations identified by this interagency effort that really just sort of laid out here's the opportunity landscape. So we can look at this, we have the transportation related ones, so things like advanced batteries, thinking about the future of transportation when we'll have electrified, shared, connected and autonomous vehicles that can provide much better public transportation, decarbonized public transportation services. We have electrified and hybrid aircraft and so forth, shipping, heavy duty transportation and so forth. So that was this. We also have generation. So we have things like advanced nuclear fission, advanced solar energy, advanced wind, enhanced geothermal and fusion energy. And I just wanna spend like a moment here. So if you think about any of the energy systems that we have today, the amount of research just because like if you, let's just imagine, let's go back to the first engines, the first engines were like 1% efficient, right? Well, what happened? Well, people continued to invest in engines and make them better and better and better and now we have engines that can be 70% efficient. So just because we have solar panels that work today, just because silicon is a good technology doesn't mean that we can stop innovating there because we need to continue to lower the cost, improve life cycle emissions and so forth. So moving over to the next area of industrial processes, so things like aluminum, chemicals, concrete, industrial heat, clean water, low-carbon steel. All of these are areas with very significant emissions. 25% of all emissions basically fall into this area and this is one that just hasn't received the attention yet. So we focused on those. There's a whole issue of building infrastructure, how we build our roads and so forth. And then moving on to the agricultural area, greenhouse gas reducing cropping practices, livestock facilities without emissions and so forth. And then finally, this area of carbon dioxide removal and we decided to break this into two major categories. One is engineered removal and that could be things like direct air capture. It could be also marine-based engineered removal like growing kelp in the oceans and sinking it so that you can bury carbon. But the second one is there also nature-based carbon dioxide removal, which would basically be involving using natural lands in ways that simply enhance the processes that are taking place today. So these were sectoral innovations but there are also things that we found that were just incredibly important sort of as the foundation for the new energy system. So really thinking about a net zero power grid. And certainly we have solar panels today, we have wind turbines, we have storage we can add but how you fit this all together to provide 24-7, 365 clean energy is going to and with the reliability that electricity will become our primary energy source. So only 20% of our end-use energy today comes from electricity, right? Well in the future we want that to be 50%, 60%, 70% so reliability is going to be even more important than ever. The second part of that is the distribution systems. So the small wires that come into your communities that connect the power grid to your homes. They're going to be tremendous changes. We're going to have massive electrification of vehicles, we're going to have massive electrification of heating. In addition to that houses will have solar panels and storage and so our distribution grid needs to be much more intelligent than the one we have today and we need to learn how to plan for that. So that as we add all this new capacity to the distribution systems we don't lag behind and simply say well we're sorry we just can't meet that additional demand. There are other things like existing rights of way. We have highways all over the United States and right now that's what they're primarily used for. At the same time we know we need massive expansion of our transmission system. We would like new transportation corridors that could provide multimodal transportation. So how could we think cleverly about that? And could we think about embedding charging coils in road beds so that by the time you drove along the road you weren't depleting your battery but in fact you would get off the highway with a full battery. So how could we do that? Other things associated with fuel. So efficient and alternative biofuel production. Net zero electric fuels to go directly from electricity to a fuel itself. And also net zero hydrogen and potentially ammonia that could be used both for fertilizer but also very importantly could be used for long distance shipping. Also as we think to the future right now we have lots of pipelines for oil and gas. You know would it be possible instead of to having to build a brand new infrastructure to support a hydrogen economy or a CO2 capture could we repurpose these pipelines and finally carbon capture utilization and storage. And one that I think is incredibly important for long term sustainability is a circular economy and thinking about supply chains that will be more secure if we're able to reduce the needs for continual and ever increasing extraction of materials from the earth but that we can keep them circulating in the economy. So this was sort of the big grand view. So the question is what do you do with a list of 37? So how do you prioritize? Well the way we did it is we said okay well there are climate benefits that we wanna consider. There are environmental benefits that are not necessarily related to climate, related to air, water, impact to ecosystems. Very importantly, equity and justice. How do we reduce pollution and marginalized and communities of color and how do we improve the justice procedural and distributional justice of our energy system? There are economic issues with cost of energy, job growth potential and the potential to re-onsure jobs that we no longer have here. And then finally national security, energy security and supply chain security. So if you look across all of this you'll find that there are certain technologies which really can have a huge contribution in many of these areas. And in that case we were able to separate this list of 37 into three broad categories. The first are having really transformational impact meaning that they were going to be the biggest levers for us driving down to net zero emissions. And so you can see things here like advanced distribution systems. I talked about the importance of that. Carbon capture, long duration energy storage. Lithium ion is an incredible technology that's dropped so much in price but it's not ideally suited for multi-day or even say 10 hour storage and certainly not suitable for seasonal storage. Then the net zero power grid I talked about. Advanced batteries, if we can get good enough batteries high enough energy density batteries we can even start thinking about electrified air transport particularly for shorter distance trips. Second area is heavy duty vehicles. This is a really challenging problem with today's batteries. We can't, it's going to be very difficult for those long haul heavy duty trucks. The batteries simply weigh too much. Other things like low cost away from home charging. This seems, sounds like an easy thing to do but I don't know if you were at Kareem's talk the couple of weeks ago. It is really quite challenging because the power draw from the grid is actually very large if you want things like fast charging. So how do we figure out how to do this? And another one, fusion energy. Everyone thought oh this was a technology so far in the future but it turns out that it's probably closer than we think and within a decade there are many companies now who are striving to have those first proof of concept power plants. If that can work it will be a fantastic complement to renewable generation from wind and solar in other renewable technologies. Low greenhouse gas, HVAC and refrigerants. So we have heat pumps today that's fantastic right? They're super efficient. On the other hand they still have, they still use working fluids with very high global warming potential. We do not have a solution for this and these systems they do leak. They don't leak a lot but they leak enough so that the buildup of greenhouse gases from them is consequential and as we begin to radically increase the number of heat pumps and the refrigeration kind of units around the world there's a very serious risk that if we don't find substitutes this will create a problem in and of itself. And then finally both the engineered and carbon dioxide removal and nature-based carbon dioxide removal are very important. These are both really very nascent technologies and almost every study suggests that we're going to need anywhere from five to 10 billion tons per year of CO2 removal. There are other folks who will say maybe up to 20. So very huge. So I'm not gonna go through this whole list because that would take too long but the point is that there's a tremendous amount of innovation needed and so for all of you who are here there's a very important and rewarding future in finding solutions to these issues. So just super briefly, oops, I just noticed there was a typo here. Anyway, so we picked five priorities. These were the power grid and electrification. That's right there. It's 50% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, net zero heating and cooling, net zero aviation, sorry about that typo fusion at scale and really thinking about are there new cross-cutting technologies that can help us with industry? So electrochemical processes for an example that if we imagine that we're living in the post-combustion world, what kind of industrial processes will be available to us when combustion is no longer the primary energy conversion technology that we rely on to meet our energy needs. So I'm just going to go to this last thing here. So another thing that I learned is that we can't just solve for climate. It's very easy, particularly out here on the West Coast to imagine this is our only and biggest issues but the reality is that we need to solve for a bunch of things at the same time. So we need to solve for climate. We need to solve for environment. We need to solve for environmental justice. We need to solve for jobs. We need to solve for economic competitiveness and we need to solve for national security. And if we don't do this, it's going to be really hard to get people on board in the first place and it's going to be, I think, even harder to keep them on board over this next several decades when we need to just be going as fast as we can. So some of my thoughts about how we do this is we really need to listen to people. We need to learn and respect other people's priorities and we need to figure out what are we for? It's like so often today we hear, what are we against? I'm against this, I'm against that. And when everyone's against something it's pretty hard to get anything done. So maybe we can just agree on what we're for and we can work together and collaborate on what we're for. And part of that is to avoid perfect being the enemy of the good. And I'll just give a little bit of an example on that. So electric vehicles, when we first started making electric vehicles in almost every part of the United States, if you plug them into the power grid, the carbon dioxide emissions were just about the same as burning gasoline in a moderately efficient car. Well fast forward the American power grid has really cleaned up a lot. Our fuel, our power generation from coal is dropped by more than 50%. We have a huge amount of renewables on the grid and so forth. So now if you look across the United States in almost every state driving an EV has much lower carbon dioxide emissions, okay? But we made the decision that we wanted EVs long before we had a clean power grid. So we avoided perfect by being the enemy of the good as we said, well we know we're gonna have a cleaner power grid and we know we're gonna have EVs and if we work on them simultaneously there'll be a big net benefit. And this is an argument that's going on now today with hydrogen. There's a lot of concern if we make hydrogen using power from the grid and we don't account for the hourly emissions, this 24-7 thing, that it's gonna be a big, that we're gonna have too many emissions. So there's real slowing down of the ability to start to scale hydrogen while we wait for having more clean power. I personally think that that's an example where perfect is being the enemy of the good and that we really need to go fast on all dimensions of this. We can't wait until every solution is completely ready to implement in a way that it gives us zero emissions. Next one is seek practical solutions. A lot of times a day you'll see that, oh, we're gonna triple the transmission capacity of the power grid over the next two decades. Now I personally think that's incredibly difficult and so I think we need to seek solutions for getting a clean grid that don't require such a heroic effort in transmission expansion. I think that's a practical approach. So things like clean, firm power, like how do we back up renewable generation with clean, firm power? That could be renewable fuels, it could be nuclear power, it could be carbon capture on natural gas plants. So yeah, and those are much more practical and allow us to take advantage of the existing infrastructure we have. And then the final one, which I just think is so important, is we need to think about cost because if this begins to get too expensive, people are going to say, no, I'm not for this anymore because I'm having to make a choice between money for my energy or money for food or money for medicine or things that will help their children. So I think that that will also be key to sustaining the high level of progress we need. So yeah, we really need all hands on deck and we really need not only everybody on the boat, but we all need to be rowing together in the same direction if we need to get the speed and scale that we need. So thanks. Whoops, I talked for too long. Maybe we should just go to questions. Well, give it the timing, I'll just ask one question. It actually relates to your last chart and your first chart. So you kind of pulled off this report in a refreshing and surprising way. And it seemed like the real difference is to not just focus on the technologies, but all the institutional things that would have to come along with it before you actually get the technologies developed. And that's a way to accelerate things. But the question is, how much of your success was the mandate you were given versus the reorganization of the government, number two and number three, the goodness of the people if I could use that term that you got to work with. Yeah. Well, number one, the people were so talented, so dedicated for all of you who are students or postdocs. If you can find an opportunity to go to work there, there are lots of internship programs. I highly recommend it. I think it'll be life-changing for you. I think you'll be so much more encouraged about the future of the United States democracy as well as the future of solving the climate problem. So a lot of it was the people. And I think that in terms of mandate versus something else, I really think that it was people recognizing that we have so little time and so much to do and that there's room for everybody. There's room for deploy. It's not deploy or demonstrate or innovate. It's do all of those things at the same time at full speed, and that was recognized. And I think that's why people wanted to come together. And I think that people felt like we were doing something important. We are doing something important for the future of the planet. And I sense that every single day when I went to work and with all the people I've worked with. Great. Let's have it up for audience questions. Students given priority? No questions? No questions. Very good. So if you were president assuming you had no obstacles and your only goal was to transition from dirty energy to clean energy as quickly as possible, given the powers of the president, what would you do? I actually think that the approach that's being pursued by this administration is wise, effective. For all those reasons, we can't just solve for climate. We have a very heterogeneous country. We have different priorities in different parts of the countries. People need to earn a living. We need our national security. We need to address historical lack of equity. So we need to do all these things. So I think that the strategy is good. I think the key is to keep it up and find ways to go faster and don't stop continuing to develop new policies and new ways of investing in solutions. I do think that community-based solutions are really important. If we have to wait for every single person in every neighborhood to decide to switch to their EV and switch to electric appliances, I mean, it's going to be very chaotic. If we could go neighborhood by neighborhood. And say, OK, here's the financing. Here's the upgrades we're going to do to your electricity system. When this block is done, we'll move to the next block. And the next block, I think something like that would be very helpful. So I'd like to see that develop. Can I ask a follow-up? Is that OK? Sure. Yeah, so I totally understand that this is reality and active. I guess I'm wondering if there's any sort of out-of-the-box things you've wondered about, sort of like Kennedy saying, we're going to go to the moon and building NASA, or legislating the clean energy transition, like empty-yard or stuff like that. Yeah, I think that's very much the mindset of the half trillion dollars worth of investment. And I think the fusion work was an example of also something that was really like a moonshot or whatever you want to call it shot. It's to say, now is the time to come. We're going to begin to accelerate those investments. So I think that's very much. I don't think that there is a wand-wakin' way. Yep. Yeah, I started the space program. So this is the most exciting thing I've seen since then. The difference, as you fully articulated at the end, is the diversity of stakeholders and objectives that they might have. So I think you've got that covered. And I do think the, Ali Zaidi actually talked about in this seminar last year, people, places, and projects, which is this kind of, I think the administration's version of the community-based thing. So it is often in the case that the indigenous people who were formerly in smokestack communities, smokestack industries that were shut down basically had these outsiders come in and benefit from the development. So they got a little bit of a reduction in local pollution, but no jobs. And I think that was something that was, from what you said, a pretty high priority, I know. Oh, yeah, it's a huge, I mean, jobs are, yeah. If we don't, at the end of this, create a lot of really excellent jobs, we will have missed a huge opportunity, not only to be competitive internationally, but we will end up with a citizenry that is very disillusioned, I think. I think jobs are critical. The energy industry is what, like 10% of the economy. So we need to keep that 10% vibrant and growing. And it could be even bigger, too, as we think about supply chains, as we think about industries that largely don't exist in the United States right now. There's a huge opportunity for new industries associated with the energy transition. Yeah, it's no surprise that the lead and the council of economic advisors in the administration is a labor economist, and actually came not from the academic community, but from the advocacy community. And I think that's pretty consistent across all the dimensions you outline, from what I can tell. That's the only one I do know. We have another question. Thank you. We're running out of time. Let's do these two, and then go out. OK, thank you. I think this is working. Get close to the mic. OK, I'm close. My question's around critical mineral mining. And so of course, we need a lot of minerals to power the EV and clean energy revolution. It's a very extractive industry. I feel like there's a lot of NIMBYism involved. I'm wondering if in the administration and maybe your personal views on how the US is going to enhance our supply chain there, particularly when it comes to extraction. Given that I think a lot of people might be against that when it's in their backyard and if you have any mapping has been done of where those mineral deposits are in the country and where the areas are most ripe for action. Thank you. Yeah, the US Geological Survey has played a leading role in mapping where those deposits are. There's lots of one-on-one engagement with communities that are near mining sites. And you are right. In some communities, they're extremely resistant to any kind of new mining activities. On the other hand, there are other communities that are very excited about it. Very happy with the new jobs. There's also new mining approaches that are not so disruptive, particularly if you can do in situ leaching. So some of the recent work on producing brines that contain lithium from the subsurface and then extracting the lithium and then putting the liquids back underground. But I do think it's going to be really, really challenging. And it's one of the things that keeps me up at night. There's also the issue of mineral processing, which is also a very energy-intensive activity. I think we need to hold ourselves to very high standards for restoration, near immediate restoration, very good practices in terms of pollution associated with the mining activity itself, ongoing mining pollution. Last question over here. Yeah. So I think it's hard. That's the bottom line there. But we need to do it. Yes. Thank you. Very interesting presentation. You mentioned ammonia as a feedstock for fertilizers. I would assume you're a first of all. And as a bunker fuel, what do you think about ammonia strategic role as a hydrogen carrier in this transition to a low carbon economy and then achieving net zero at the end of the day? Right. So ammonia has good things about it in that you can make a higher energy density fuel with ammonia. It's much easier to store and transport and so forth. However, there are also challenges with associated with releases into the environment, both as a toxic as well as nitrogen emissions into the atmosphere when you burn it. So I think that, in particular, the developing approaches for full combustion would be really critical or otherwise you would just put greenhouse gas compounds into the atmosphere that are nitrogen-based compounds instead of carbon. So I don't think that there is a clear winner or loser yet. And there are strong opinions on both sides. But I think it will be looked at very seriously. And I think a lot of people will do work on it. And maybe it ends up as particularly for shipping as a primary fuel. That said, we're just about out of time. So let's thank Professor Benson one last time for a great talk. Thank you. Sorry it took so long.