 We call this session unscripted because it is exactly that. We have developed no script. I wrote down a few questions that would be good to talk about. I've showed them quickly to the other panelists and they said, that sounds like it's a good reason to do so. We'll start with a conversation here among the three of us. Then at some point, turn to the audience and get in questions and quick comments from everybody. For those of us who work in the energy area, we've got to always remember why when we talk about a sustainable energy system, what do we mean by that? One of the elements of a sustainable is treating the only world that we have, that we now live in, in a sustainable way. That has a lot to do with global climate change. We're going to talk about just energy and climate change. I'm going to be jumping us back and forth between a few questions. In a way, it may look a little random. If it looks like the questions are random, actually, you've perceived correctly. The questions probably are a little random in a way. But I want to start with one thing. How much do we really know about climate change? Is there a significant uncertainty that really we should be taking into account? What's the nature of that? Let me turn to Chris first on that. A few comments about what do we know and what don't we know? Sure. One of the things that was dramatic about the 2013-14 reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, if you look at the projections and you compare those with the projections from the 2007 reports of the Intergovernmental Panel, they were about the same. And the reports of 2007 were slightly larger magnitudes of climate change than from 2001. The thing that's striking about our understanding of climate change is that the projections have in general been very stable. The message that's the key take home is that we were right in 1990. We were right in the 1995 report. We were right in the 2001 report and in the 2007 report. There are two things that are new on the scene, and it's important to remember those. One is that we have a much clearer understanding now than we had even a few years ago of the extent to which we're already experiencing impacts of climate change. And those are really consequential everywhere around the world. And only a few years ago real impacts were mainly hypothetical. So in many ways, climate change has advanced out of the realm of theory and prognostication into real experiences that are impacting you and you and every country in the world. The other thing I think that's become super clear with climate change really only in the last few years is the extent to which it expresses itself in extremes. People don't lose their homes or their farms or their businesses because of the average conditions. They lose them in a storm surge or where a hurricane is pushing high water or heat wave or heavy precipitation. And we know much more now than we knew just a few years ago about the way that climate change increases the probability or the severity of different kinds of extreme events. I think those are the things that have changed the landscape and in really important ways, but it's not that something was wrong before. This is subtle improvements of the understanding and real impacts that are occurring to real people. Well, given that, as their uncertainty, I want to turn to John Wyandt. Is there uncertainty about what we can do about it either in the mitigation or adaptation thing? Is that an area of fundamental uncertainty or do we have some real pretty good knowledge and those about those issues? Thanks, Jim. I'm delighted to be asked to be on this panel with the two colleagues here looking at our age distribution and these blinding floodlights up here. I kind of feel like I'm at a Fleetwood Mac 30 or 40th anniversary tour. I don't know about me, but these guys can still kick it. So for the youngsters here, the audience seems to be able to rock out pretty well. Has done so all day. So combining mitigation and adaptation together and one question about uncertainty is a little bit overwhelming. Well, let's do one. Let's talk about... Pick one. It's real. Climate change, Chris said, it's real, it's happening. What can be happening in adaptation? Is that going to be a major part of the issue? Adapting to the reality. Okay, this kind of connects Chris and I through the IPCC. I usually do work in the mitigation and emissions projection panels, which is called Working Group Three, for those of you who don't know. My one excursion, which was a tough job, was to be in the Work Group Two, which was on physical impacts, essentially of climate change. So that was the third assessment report, circa 2000, and at that point, there were certain economists that Jim and I knew very well that said, what's the big problem? We've calculated that for two degrees C, mean temperature increased on the surface of the earth, there might be climate benefits that could... Economic benefits that would be a percentage point or two. But picking up the themes that Chris left off with here, the problem with that is the whole rest of that working group was organized around sectors and regions where real impacts were already occurring. So there was a kind of pivot away from the aggregate calculus that wasn't very good anyway to what is the image that you want to give the policy makers at that point. That led to a kind of famous diagram that has, I think, even through the round that Chris ran, known as the Burning Embers, which I call Flaming Embers, which said it's really about unique individual systems, extreme weather events, this aggregate stuff. But if you're going to do that, you ought to decompose it by the number of people affected. So even though the aggregate world economic output goes up, 90% of the people who happen to live in poor countries in the South, meaning close to the equator, take it in the shorts and the rest of the people, and we see them, we know them, we love them, we see more and more comes out. Now, fast forward, so it was imagined that inventory that was then decided to put together would be maybe 20 or 30 or 40 studies that showed impacts that could not be directly immediately related to climate change but were consistent with what one might expect to see in these regions and sectors. That became about 300 by the AR-4 was how many, 1,000 by the time Chris was running the whole panel, you tell me how many were in there. One last thing on this, so those are real and present dangers and a place to look from the bottom up, saying here's the most vulnerable places that we ought to work on adaptation for and then Chris's group in their chapter 19, which was interestingly parallel to our old chapter 19, pushed the whole enterprise farther by clearly defining the concepts of vulnerability and the potential for adaptation and reframed the whole thing, that whole workgroup report as a learning and adaptation, adaptive problem of risk analysis. So that was the thing. So you saw increasing mean impacts in the region and sectors unfolding, which was bad but not that bad. But then if you put in plausible extremes, you've got a much more dire consequence and also, I think this is the way Chris would, and Mike Oppenheimer worked on that chapter, would describe it much more about a ability to do deep dives into those really vulnerable sectors where the people couldn't adapt easily and were very vulnerable to see if there was anything that could be done. Okay. One thing about, go ahead, adaptation. The adaptation agenda is incredibly important and there's a vast amount of things that can be done. Just say what we mean by adaptation. That's a really good question and people mean different things. What I mean by adaptation is investments in decreasing the impacts of climate changes in order to sustain families, industries, ecosystems. You can think about adaptation as investing in resilience and just figuring out how to continue doing the things that we care about with minimum impacts and the message that's so clear in the adaptation space whether you think about adaptation as improving risk management through insurance products or early warning systems, improving infrastructure or even relocation. There are lots of strategies for adaptations that are tried and true that we know we can deploy if we can limit the amount of climate change that occurs to the low end of the spectrum, something close to 2C. Most of those strategies are no longer relevant if we live in a world of continued high emissions where 2100 we're looking at something like 4C of warming. So the critical thing to understand about adaptation is that it's pretty much binary. It will mostly work in a world of ambitious mitigation but we really have no clue and it mostly probably won't work in a world of continued high emissions. Is that why the two degree centigrade maximum rise as a goal has sort of been adopted around the world is what the Paris Agreement, what does that number come from? Is that a magic number, two degrees? It's terrible if we get beyond two degrees. It's okay if we get up to only 1.95 degrees. What's special about two degrees? And either of you can respond. Well, let me start with just a couple of thoughts. And for me, they're really two different levels really two baskets of issues that make ambitious mitigation important. And Jim, you already spoke to something that's a key feature here. It's not that 1.95 is okay and 2.05 is disaster but we know that there are big difference between a world of ambitious mitigation and one of continued high emissions. I already spoke to the issue of adaptation and I think for the activities that all of us do whether or not we can sustain something like that is incredibly important. For me, there's another class of issues that's equally important and that concerns tipping points in the natural system and there are two categories that are really important. One is commitment to very long-term changes and the way the earth system works. And we know with a high level of confidence that there is some temperature in which we become committed to very large amounts of sea level rise. Sea level rise somewhere between five and 15 meters over a period of 500 to 1,000 years. That threshold is one that is, as far as we know, irreversible once it's passed even if the climate's cooled down as a result of geoengineering or some other kind of activity. Once we trigger these marine ice sheet instabilities we're committed. And we don't know exactly what the temperature is at which the commitment occurs but we know we don't wanna pass that threshold. Another class of tipping points involves feedbacks where the earth system starts releasing the greenhouse gases that are driving further warming so that even if human emissions are brought down to zero climate warming continues. And there's been a lot of attention recently to the risk of large scale thawing of frozen soils at high latitudes, permafrost soils. Again, we know there's some point at which the warming reaches a level that's sufficient that the melting of these frozen soils generates enough greenhouse gases that the concentrations of the heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere continues to increase even if we bring human emissions down to zero. That's another tipping point that we don't want to cross. We don't know exactly where it is but we have high confidence that we're much safer if we can stabilize warming at something like 2C than if we live in a world of continued high emissions. Good, so within that context, the Paris Agreement was used as a target of two degrees maximum with a examination of the option of what can we do to keep within 1.5 degrees. John, let me ask you this. Given the agreements from Paris, is that apt to keep us within two degrees? Could you comment upon the relationship between the Paris commitments and this two degree target? Okay, it's a little bit complicated. I will start with Chris's point that as temperature increases, not only do mean impacts everywhere, which are very diverse because temperature doesn't change uniformly, worse, but you also have a higher probability that you'll hit a tipping point in each and every one of those sectors. Given that the global modeling community, mostly on the physical science side, has put together these long-term scenarios that get you to two degrees C by the end of the century. Lots of details about whether the temperature needs to be stable, going up, going down, whether you can overshoot those and so on. But that's kind of on purpose, and I think that number was picked because of the work that Chris's workgroup and others like it have done, actually both workgroup one and two on staying well clear of these tipping points, but still recognizing, I think the way the reports are written, more risk than we actually experienced today because you're gonna go up before you go down. So on the, where are we with respect to that? So if you take the long-term scenarios that people have developed and you look at not the two degree pledge that the countries have made, but the actual targets that they have set, both for their own countries, independent of what everybody else has done or contingent on other nations acting, and look at those and where we are so far and where we seem to be headed relative to these long-term trajectories, you're about halfway to where you need, halfway from business as usual baseline down to where you would need to get to in this kind of long run approach to a reasonable two degree scenario. Even more troubling though, is if you actually look at policies on the books, fuel standards, carbon taxes, whatever people are using, client sufficiency standards, you lose about a half of that. So you're only about a quarter way onto that trajectory. So that's all bad news by far in a call for urgency from most quarters. A little bit of good news is those are just short run targets. So the nations of the world actually could redouble their efforts like we have here in California and the EU is doing and so on and get back on track. That's why verification and transparency of where the actual emissions are now and what the policies are and the projections of what the existing policies, not the hope and a prayer that will get to some target without doing anything, where those go. And I think that's a very productive line of research for the modeling community and the people who do kind of the bottom up assessments is now. There's an excellent report that comes out every November called the UN environment program gap study which actually lays pretty much these numbers out each and every year and they've done so since before Paris. So to make sure I've got it right, we have the business as usual projections who we don't do anything. We have what you need to stay at two degrees and all of the Paris, not just commitments, but the actual policies in place get you only about a quarter of the way. So why does it matter if US is withdrawn? Does it matter if US is withdrawn? If you need to do so much more than even that they've committed and US now is projected in the future to be only about maybe 15% of the emissions, why do we matter? Let me provide a more optimistic way to think about the Paris agreement which I would argue was incredibly important. It's important not necessarily for the numeric targets but for what they imply. So there are three visions. You look like kind of a wonky crowd. So I'll give you the wonky version of Paris. You don't have to justify such a word here, they are. So you can think it's about the level. If you think it's about the level then it's only a quarter of the way. If you think it's about the first derivative of the change, that's the one that John said gets you about halfway. And if you think about the second derivative, how fast we're changing the underlying mechanisms that allow us to change the rate of change, then we get pretty close to two. And so I think it's that second derivative framing that's the important one. When Christiana Figuera has talked about the Paris agreement, she talked about raising the ambition. And I think more than anything else the Paris agreement brought the countries of the world together to decide what's a fair approach and what's a trajectory for change. What's the second derivative that you need to set in order to solve the problem? But the issue is that once every country in the world decides what's fair, if the historic biggest emitter pulls out, you don't really have a deal. Okay, yeah. Yeah, so if you're interested in what is the explanation for this second derivative that Chris talked about, which I think is a really excellent way to describe it, it is all around you. So I think what's changed is people are now more aware of what the problems are that we're facing and what some solutions might be. And I don't mean just technology which has been a strong response, but also business models and market design and institutional things like that. Often in the modeling world, where we fail to get either something that should happen or shouldn't happen right is we forget about all the institutions by which I would not include just kind of green NGOs but markets in various companies. So I think there's a cause for optimism in that in the second derivative sense. Now on the US in particular, as has been evident here, especially here in Silicon Valley and the state of California, the US government isn't the only engine for change in this regard in the US. And there are other jurisdictions outside the US, but even within the US, there's the states and the cities and the NGOs and the strategic corporate alliances that have emerged. So I'm somewhat optimistic. One could turn things around and say because of the lack of activity in Washington we'll actually wind up doing better than we would have otherwise because all these other entities and institutions will adapt. I'm not willing to go that far yet, but it could happen. And you again see that in the faces of the people all around you here. If we can export that, this is a Jerry Brown speech, right? If we can export that to the rest of the world so much to better. We actually hosted, these guys were involved in this, the chief negotiator from the European Union here for a seminar. And we said, would you like to go up to the California Energy Commission and Air Resources Board and compare notes with them on the here and now challenges you're facing in working the climate mitigation equation within the EU with people in California. He said, are you kidding? Screw this seminar, I'm gonna just go up there. I said, wait a minute, we're gonna arrange this but you actually have to come back and do the seminar. And that was just magic. Diane Grunick, I don't know if she's here, actually former PUC commissioner here in California suggested just the right people and just the right offices to help them do mostly transportation and renewable regulations around their cap and trade system. So I think we can still have a big thing. It's kind of the Debbie Downer effect of the leaders talking like this isn't a problem like my reading of the trade panel, maybe nobody's listening to them anyway. Well, let me tell it just a couple of quick stories and these do actually lead to a question I'm saying. If we look at energy efficiency, which has been the big story in decarbonizing the economy, we have a lot of examples, but one of them in particular is airlines. If you compare to the time of the oil crisis in 1973 to now, we use the airlines, the commercial airlines use half as much fuel per seat mile as they did. That's not paying attention to whether the seats full or empty, but we use half as much. And that's because not a government regulations but because of a group of more efficient technologies winglets and airlines, better airplanes, better aerodynamics, more efficient jet engines. If you look at the energy used per passenger mile, it's down by a factor of four from that time. So another factor of two that is totally behavioral is the airlines using yield management. You've all seen yield management used to be, when I was a youngster, I was always happy that there was an empty seat next to me. Now, if once every five or 10 flights, I see an empty seat in my part of the airplane, I'm happy. And that yield management, the dynamic pricing helps keep the planes full. You know, what I mean by dynamic pricing, you checked the prices of your airline ticket. It's one price, two weeks later you go to buy it and it's an entirely different price. Well, it's because the airlines are making judgments about how to move people from one flight to another to keep the flights full. Those are happening independent of any government making commitment about a Paris. And we have industry has been massive amount of energy efficiency because it's profitable to do that. States like California and New York has taken lots of initiatives going forward. So I go back to the question. Given a lot of this is happening anyway, why does it really matter whether the US is a federal government and says in three more years we're going to have pulled out of Paris agreement? Does it really matter or is this all symbolism? Well, the answer is it does matter and there are two stories that are really important. One is, as you've described, we're seeing amazing progress. John talked about the investments at the state of California, energy efficiency, commitments from corporations like Walmart's Project Gigaton, they're all really important. When you add all those things up, we're changing the emissions rate at something like a half to a third of what we need to change it at in order to end up in this world of ambitious mitigation. It's not that we're not going to eventually bring emissions down to zero, but if we don't do it until 2150 or 2200, we're going to be looking at an amount of warming that's so large that we will have triggered some of these thresholds. We'll be out of the zone where we can reasonably expect adaptation to work. But what's the full set of strategies that can be used in order to accelerate the rate, to increase the ambitions we've been describing? And many of those are things that can happen at the scale of cities or families or corporations, but some aren't. And the other thing that's really important about the role of the US government is that, John and I spent a lot of time in the international context trying to understand how other countries think about their role and their opportunities. And for particularly people from the poor countries to say, I'm ready or my country's ready to be really dedicated to this issue in a context where the folks who got rich as a consequence of their profligate use of fossil fuels aren't doing anything, does not create a strong motivation. So the idea that, well, maybe everybody else will carry the ball doesn't resonate with any of the conversations I've had on the international stage. And so I don't think there's a narrative that says, well, maybe everybody else will just do it. The world doesn't work that way. John, do you want to weigh in? Because you've been part of these with an energy modeling community looking at that. Does that resonate with you too? Yeah, it does. It would be helpful. Jim has this outstanding book that you all read on energy efficiency looking at some of this history that you just talked about, which I think is great. But I do think there's a danger here in thinking that it's somebody other than the governments that are responsible for internalizing all the externalities associated with energy use and agricultural practices. It is a big collective problem. And some of the most ripe fruit nowadays are not individual technologies or individual business models or little fixers. They're systems things. So this would be the variable smart grid type solutions plus a lot of other things like that. We just had the electric transport actually in California and the rest of the world here. I think a lot of those go beyond what individual actors can do. A lot of the discussion this morning spun off both our plenary and the high tech panel actually pointed in that direction. As you can do all these little elements and then you have a bunch of assets kind of on the shelf. But at some point, you've got to put those whole pictures together. So two things to me stuck out about that conversation is in order to coordinate, you've got to communicate and build some trust number one. And it's hard for non-government entities because they are only stakeholders in so far as their country or collection of countries are. The other thing that came up again and again is the idea of standards. You need standards, particularly for system solutions to make sure things fit together number one. And then on the environmental health and safety side to make sure you don't do nanotechnology that creates rogue nanoparticles that get into people's bloodstreams just to give one gross example. But there are many things like that where there's a huge public interest not just in climate change but in environmental and social issues. And I promised him I would stay out of my other favorite hobby horse that I don't know a lot about but I'm concerned about and that's cybersecurity. Well, it does seem and just to expand your point that there's a tremendous amount of good ideas bubbling up of new technologies, new business systems, new behavioral patterns. Anybody who listened to this whole event could hear that there's a lot of ideas bubbling up. But the federal government can get in the way of having implement of these new technologies having markets and being implemented or it can enhance it. I guess that's a long-term process that you see happening over many, many years. It's just some of these new ventures. Some of them will succeed and some will fail. But if we can double the probability of any of them succeeding, we have a lot of difference. And the federal government, I guess, plays a role in it. Are there any other consequences of what the federal government plays as roles should be in this? Is it mostly the physical changes in the United States that'll be different? Is it mostly how we negotiate with the rest of the nations? Is it mostly how we inspire or depress other nations? What haven't you covered already in these issues? I think all three of those are important. The things we do here, the negotiations and the inspiration, in many ways, the key to solving the climate problem is to have the technologies be cheap enough, that they're the low-cost option. And the thing we've seen dramatic progress in the energy generation space as well as in the energy efficiency space is just once things get deployed at scale, creative people figure out ways to make them cheaper and to integrate them into systems and come up with the interconnections. And I think that the thing that we're not doing enough of is driving the deployment to see how cheap the cost can become. And I'm optimistic that with a few more decades of ambitious deployment in the countries that can afford to do it, that the technologies that especially generate electricity emissions free, they're already the low-cost option in many cases and those certainly be the low-cost options with continued investments in driving the cost down. Oh, John, you can go to it, but I've got some more questions to ask for you, but go ahead. This is a thing I wasn't gonna bring up, but I think I will. Another thing that's important to work all three of these angles, which I think are the right ones, and they need to be kind of broadcast widely is how shall I put this? Providing good information to decision makers and citizens. I think we do have a problem. Some might call this fake news, but it's not just on the climate side, it's actually on the climate impacts and adaptation side, it's on the mitigation side. So we have some authors here who have actually written about this in addition to political support for certain political parties. The same group is doing things like right here and now, this was written up a couple of days ago, are actually doing targeted investment and political manipulation, I guess I could call it or political influence, to prevent mass trends and systems from proceeding in major US cities. I see this all over, I almost asked, but didn't ask to the electric car group. Remember the whole who killed the electric car experience here in California? Many of you are old enough. I do worry that despite the governor's challenge and the utilities willingness this time to go aggressively along with that, that there will be a counterintelligence offensive. That will be hard to do in California, but it could happen. And in the rest of the country, we may not get the desired spillover kind of example effect in those jurisdictions if the information that comes out, it gets distorted in one way or another. Okay, let me change gears a moment. We're talking about energy and climate. How much is agriculture? How much is it women and animals that's coming in? Is that insignificant or is that an important element of how we might need to deal with the climate issues? It's an important element for sure. The most recent IPCC budget had emissions from agriculture being about 25% of total climate forcing and comparable to agriculture. And it represents some really difficult issues because with, for example, having cows and sheep not release methane, we really don't know what the solution is if people continue to want cattle and sheep products. So eventually that's a series of problems we need to solve and we can't put it aside. We can't say, well, we'll deal with that later. Yet every source of greenhouse gases needs to be tackled. There's one thing that's worth keeping in mind, however, which is that climate forcing from methane, second largest contributor to climate changes, is really, really important. Methane's a much more powerful gas than CO2, but it doesn't last that long in the atmosphere. The thing we often tend to forget is that warming from CO2 is, as far as we know, essentially permanent. It persists for at least thousands of years and probably tens of thousands of years with very little decrease over time. And the warming from methane goes away. So one way to think about that is that from the warming from agriculture, where CO2 from deforestation, critically important, and nitrous oxide from fertilizer and manure management, it's incredibly important. But with methane, which is a big part from agriculture, even though it's important and we need to tackle it now, the consequences, the costs of waiting are a little less perverse than the cost of waiting on CO2 because of this fact that the warming from methane eventually goes away. That's really good news. I thought you were gonna say we're gonna all have to become vegetarians. Well, that too. In order to avoid human and animals, but phew. Okay, so we don't have to all become vegetarians, but it would help, right? A little. Well, let's just say that of all the technologies and all the sources of greenhouse gases that we have talked about so far, finding a source of methane-free beef is the one where they're the fewest mature technology solutions. The impossible burger. Well. Yeah, one little tag onto this in terms of dynamics is if you're gonna go really low, if you look out at 27 or 2080, most analysts think with all the successes of people in this room and around, you can get the industrial side down pretty easy. Meaning those associated with industrial activity other than agriculture. So at that point, if you haven't done anything about the agriculture, methane, or carbon releases, it could be also in unmanage ecosystems. You gotta be, that's all you got left. So that's what you have to work with at that point. So you can't put it off forever. So there is this kind of pleasing dynamics though. If you continue to work on that, and then you're trying to hit a long-term target, you can kind of use the methane as a shock absorber because as Chris says, the stock turnover is whatever it is and the molecules only last about 10 years. So you could do that. And there's a little debate in the electric community which actually reflects different assumptions about how aggressive people are gonna be on doing that. So there's kind of a separate dynamic for methane than for carbon, but you can't ignore it if you wanna go as low as we need to go by the end of the century. Okay, let's stay with methane a little bit. Major source of both agriculture and methane releases from oil and gas businesses. We release in production of production and transportation and use of natural gas. We release the natural gas, which is primarily methane. There, where in the chain of use is it really mostly coming from? Is this because we frag for natural gas or is it for some other reason? Well, there've been all these really compelling studies connected with natural gas leaks in big city distribution systems and you've probably read the newspaper articles about the exploding manhole covers. And we really face infrastructure crisis in many of our cities where things like the natural gas distribution infrastructure is close to century old and there are just all these leaks and the leaks have been priced into the consumer pricing model and resulted in people being injured and killed as a consequence. But we also have, and especially in the early days of the fracking era, had an industry where there were opportunities for cowboy operators who were taking advantage of a loose regulatory environment and using industrial processes that were known to not be at the best practices standard. And I think the real challenge with natural gas now is that it can be incredibly valuable. It has already been incredibly valuable in squeezing coal, the most polluting fuel out of the energy space, but we still are not being as careful with fracking as we need to be in order to drive the methane emissions down to the lowest possible level. The frustrating thing about it is that it's not mostly a question of not having the technology. We know how to do it. It's not even a question of it being so expensive. It's a question of there being incentives to skirt the rules or to use less than industry best practices in locations where it's complicated. You use the word we. And I don't think you mean the three of us, but maybe you do. No, I thought you were the big investor in fracking. I'm not a vegetarian, so maybe that's it. Who's the we? I mean, is this like a Pogo we've met the enemy in Hiaras or is there particular actors, particular entities who for whom they really have to clean up their act in order to deal with the problems of methane releases. Either one of you can make a crack at this. I don't fortunately, I don't know if I'd know the names, the names, but if I did, I probably would. But I totally agree that the research group here that's looked at this has kind of talked about this problem. So on the front end of this, there was this kind of argument about federal versus state regulation. This is kind of mostly within state things or it should be state regulated. And then you have this immediate problem of the most fly by night operator in the most loosely regulated state. Fortunately, I think the industry itself realizes this is a problem because there's gonna be civic unrest if this gets to be a bad problem. So there are actually some innovative institutional designs involving environmental NGOs and various elements in the gas industry, including a lot of the operators. So I don't know if you met who is we on the solution side or the problem side. I mean, is this Shell Oil Company? I won't say Exxon Mobil because there's somebody from Exxon Mobil here. So he was. Or is this the cities who don't say, hey, we've gotta clean up the natural gas pipelines in here? Or is it electric generating plants that use natural gas and have leaking? Who should you put the pressure on in order to fix issues of methane leakage? Even though you say it's a transient problem. Transient problem. I'm a transient problem. I mean, I'm only gonna be here transient time. Another 12 minutes, yeah. Well, I do think that the issue of the methane leakage in urban distribution systems is something where it needs to be tackled as an infrastructure problem that falls under this big umbrella of how we restore and maintain infrastructure that is critically important discussion in the US and around the world that we're not investing anywhere near what we need to be. And I think that in terms of the emissions from fracking that John got it exactly right, it's the worst producer and the least regulated area tends to be the actor that's the source of many of the emissions. One really encouraging thing that's just happened in the tracking emissions from fracking space is recently EDF has pioneered a commitment to a methane monitoring satellite that has the potential to help identify locations where leakage is occurring and hopefully that will provide an incentive for closer looks and identification of the sources and the deployment of the technologies to capture it. Okay, so we've got to point with that methane leakage is something that we need a little bit better information where it's gonna come from but if it's rebuilding the whole urban infrastructure that's gonna be massive amount of money I believe and cities are not many of them are not financially that well off and the utilities are facing financial problems as well. So the good news, that's the bad news, the good news is it's a transient problem and so we're back to the carbon dioxide controls. We have in the environmental protection agency a few years ago had an endangerment finding finding that carbon dioxide endangered creates an endangered endangered economy and human health and so forth. I hear rumblings that the EPA is going to try to get that endangerment finding reversed. Is there any hope that, is there any, and I don't want to use your hope here because that suggests the wrong thing, is there a fear that the EPA under the leadership of Scott Pruitt may succeed in reversing the endangerment finding or is that so fundamental so difficult that that's going to stand? What's your prediction? What do you guys think? Actually, I thought about this a little bit. So a couple of things about that. That seems like a hard thing to do because it probably goes back to the Supreme Court under the endangerment finding. The easier thing to do, which I was actually interviewed by Stanford EDL, whatever it's called, the day after the election is undoing the clean power plan was easier to do because it was an executive order essentially not part of the legal case. Now, the way the law works, as I understand it, is that doesn't mean the endangerment finding is wiped out, but the clean power plan was in part, difference of opinion about that, kind of pinned to something called the social cost of carbon. What's the marginal damage globally of a kind of carbon? And in the way the politics worked out, that's not actually obvious in the clean power plan section 111 B and D proposals. On the other hand, if you actually look in the appendices from that report, you will actually see that those same targets could be justified with reference to adjustments in other air pollutants and air and water pollutants. So you could go that way. So I think it is possible that this administration will try to undo all that, but I think undoing the regular cleaner actings, we're seeing them trying to do that is harder to do and going back for the Supreme Court, even though the court has shifted composition, which was an issue in the transition from the last administration to this one. So I'm not sure how much mystic could be done, but I'm somewhat optimistic that within this period of time when the single administration is in there, it can't get too bad and there might be some pushback on it. I don't think I can speak to the question of whether it might be overturned, but I can say a couple of things about where I see the science background. And the endangerment finding was that this basket of the six greenhouse gases had a reasonable probability of endangering human health and welfare. And when I look at the categories that the administrator of the EPA looked at back in the 2009, it was human health, ecosystems, forestry, energy, security, water. And in all of those areas, I see stronger evidence than we had in 2009. Many, many more studies, no thread in any of the research indicating that the risk of impacts was less than people thought in 2009. In many cases, there are whole new categories of impacts that are coming up in each of these areas, more severe ones, especially associated with extreme events. And then there are whole new topics that have come into focus since 2009 that we hadn't really even considered prior to that. One example is all of the recent research, especially led by Stanford investigators on link between climate change and violent conflict. And another one is that climate change and ocean acidification had barely come into the radar screen by 2009. California's devastating horrible experience with recent wildfires is another one where a whole class of phenomena that hadn't really been in the thinking in 2009 is just coming into focus. So I don't see where there's even an entry point for discussion about the science about whether the Endangerment Binding should be able to turn. Mr. Kerr-Fron, my understanding of the String Court Endangerment Binding, it was largely based on old ice species in addition to the National Climate Assessment, which is leveraged, as you well know, leveraged off the IPCC work, but kind of in those studies, the fourth one is now just about ready to come out or just zooming in on in much more detail at the US, including some of these more recent impacts that people have. So it actually would, if precedent drives the law, it would be hard to use precedent as a reason. The derivative again is in the other direction. Okay, just to summarize that, I think there's an agreement that even if somebody wants to reverse the Endangerment Binding, the scientific evidence has gotten even stronger that there is a danger to human health and welfare than there even was when there was of the Endangerment Binding initially. So proving the opposite that there is no Endangerment would be very, very difficult. Of course, along that line, we have the proposal from the Environmental Protection Agency leadership saying that for the cost-benefit analysis, and you know that for the regulatory rules, there's a cost-benefit test that has to be passed and that becomes part of the legal justification for changing rules. There was a proposal that no longer could we consider the co-benefit of climate change, the co-benefits, the benefits of reducing the other emissions that are associated with carbon dioxide, the other health in you. Again, that probably will lose because there's a lot of very talented lawyers and a lot of strong NGOs who will push back on a legal front against the elimination of it, but you do see a systematic change towards trying to chip away at the legal processes that are getting us towards global climate change. But it is important for people to remember that the Endangerment Binding doesn't have this benefit cost analysis component. It's about a reasonable expectation of damage. But the implementation of particular rules absolutely does have that benefit cost. Oh, I promise, time for the audience questions. I just, not paying, I blew it. Yes, ask loudly because there may not be time for the microphone to get in there, a comment. Is that an understatement? I'm gonna summarize that because people may not have heard, but with those with microphones, come and help those who are asking questions. The question in, greatly summarizes, I can't we more empower the use of the legal instruments, of course, to find that Scott Pruitt is the head of BPA, is endangering human health, having endangerments finding about the EPA is endangering human health and welfare now. Isn't there a way of more aggressively using the legal system that we're doing? Roughly, there was a lot more words in it than that. Any thoughts? Well, I think that's happening. I think there are more than a dozen state attorneys general now that have suits that are working the way through the system. You know, I guess I would respond to your question by saying this is kind of an all hands on deck environment. We ought to be using every opportunity and every avenue that's available. And if the courts turn out to be a productive one, that would be really important. David Hayes who was a visiting law school professor here for a couple of years is now leading an effort that's based at NYU in order to make sure that the state attorney generals have all the information they need in order to wage the most effective cases. And I don't know the status of any of those, but a number are proceeding. Okay, I see Greg Lowe. Most people I can't see because of, but I can see Greg right here. So somebody, I'm putting that, and Greg just wait a moment till we get this. And I'm going to cut into my closing comments grossly to allow some questions from the audience here. So I'll very short closing comment. Okay, I want to ask Chris a question which is relevant to whether Jim should become a vegetarian or not. And the question has to do with the leakage of methane whether it's from cattle or from leaky pipes or whatever. And that is that even though you said that the methane decays in about 10 or 12 years to has a half life. It doesn't completely decay, but that methane which is not burnt, it just goes into the atmosphere when it decays, it becomes CO2 I believe. So it adds to the CO2, so we haven't solved the problem. Yes, that's exactly right. But when we do our greenhouse gas budgets, we typically count a ton of methane as having 30 times the greenhouse gas forcing of CO2 on a hundred year time frame. You could argue whether that's exactly the right way to do it, but that's the standard way we do it. And one other thing that is worth bringing into the conversation is that ultimately we may decide that there are some sources of heat trapping gas emissions that we can't deal with. And if we want to stop climate change, we're gonna have to be removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere or doing some other kind of geoengineering. And I think we do wanna continue to look at technologies for negative emissions. Personally, I'd be thrilled if we come up with a solution portfolio that doesn't require them. But at this point, some of them look like you're gonna be hard enough, like aircraft emissions, that it would be wise to continue to invest in technologies for capturing CO2 and other gases from the air. You sure he's become a vegetarian? He may decide to do it for health reasons. I'll give Paul David the last question under the condition the question is short and can have short answers. And not about being a vegetarian? Right. Gotta be a short question, we have to do short answers. Yes, I wonder whether the two experts would say whatever it is they think is worth saying about the implications of the commercialization of direct air capture in which there are two plants under construction in Georgia, each with capacity of a million tons per year. And taking that in connection with the revision of section Q45 of 2008, 2009 legislation, which offered subsidization for what is now included direct air capture and sequestration. Those are tools added to the tool set. And the question is what is their impact on existing medication policies? Well, turn to Chris for that answer and that will be the last question. Chris, you wanna do a job? Section 25Q says that for either enhanced oil recovery or for direct air capture, you can get a tax credit of up to $50 a ton for sequestration. I believe it's up to 25 for enhanced oil recovery. Maybe wrong on the exact numbers. But I think that where I would say we are with the technology for direct air capture, there was a paper last week that with a partial cost accounting said that it may be practical to do it at a cost that's somewhere between $100 and $250 a ton of CO2 that was a partial cost accounting. And so the actual cost is likely to be somewhat higher than that, potentially a lot higher than that. And right now, that's very far from being the cheapest technology to deploy. I'd love to see continued investment in direct air capture. The real enabler of direct air capture, assuming the technology prices continue to come down is having abundant emissions free electricity in excess so that we could use it for this. And if we had abundant emissions free electricity, our other problems would tend to go away as well. So it's really important to continue to invest. What we want to avoid is a situation in which we justify current high emissions on the expectation that a technology that is far from mature now will mature some decades into the future. And that's the way I would characterize not only direct air capture, but biomass energy with carbon capture and storage as well. And I'll give John the last word. So I'm an all of the above guy, but you got to do it strategically, as I think Chris just said. So I'm for continuing to explore at its stage of development, CDR, CCS, and nuclear. It is also interesting to note that 45Q regulations have actually been strengthened by, they were Obama era regulations or subsidies and now have been strengthened earlier this year by the current administration. So maybe there's some faint cause for hope out there. Okay, and I want to thank my two panelists for stimulating.