 Well, good morning, everyone. It's great to see such a good crowd out here for this session. I'm David Pumphrey. I'm Deputy Director and Senior Fellow of the Energy and National Security Program here at CSIS. And we've been doing, for the past year, a lot of work looking at the intersection of energy security and climate change and trying to look at what the pathways forward might be and put the milestones and the roadmap for getting to a future low-carbon secure energy system. And I think you saw outside some of the material that we're just putting out on the table. So I was going to plug that as well. But one of the most important pieces that came up in our discussions and looking at this question was how do we move forward to get the kinds of technologies that will really allow us to achieve this vision of the future? So the role of science is really fundamental to helping us find a way that we can economically move to a low-carbon secure energy future. So when we were given the opportunity to host this round table on the report that recently been issued by the Advisory Committee to the Basic Energy Sciences Program at DOE, we really jumped at the chance to be able to put it on. And by the size of the crowd that has come, it shows that it is really an important topic that we'll be looking at. And obviously it's a topic that's under a lot of discussion right now on Capitol Hill and the stimulus package is how much money should go towards basic research as a part of the stimulus package and how does that look going forward. We have three tremendous speakers here. I think you have the biographies passed out at the door. But I'll just run through George Crabtree's Senior Scientist and Distinguished Fellow at Argonne National Laboratory, John Hemminger is Professor of Chemistry and Dean of the School of Physical Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, and Mark Kastner is Dean of the School of Science at MIT. And what I'm going to do now is just turn it over to them. They have a presentation to run through that will give you a synopsis of the report and then we'll open up for questions and answers at the end. So who wants to begin? John? Thank you very much and thank you all for coming on a day, coming from California when I looked out my hotel today, I thought, wow, Snow, that's great. We have to go to the mountains to see that. But at least it's not sticking very much. So thank you all for being here. It's wonderful to have this opportunity. What we want to do is to share with you some of the results from a study that we did that a subcommittee of the Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Committee did. I chaired the Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Committee, and the subcommittee was chaired by George and Mark. One of the things that this report stresses is that virtually all of the potentially revolutionary technologies in the energy and environment area have what we call scientific roadblocks. In other words, areas where we just don't understand how nature works well enough to invent the next generation of devices or technology and that basic science is really required in a lot of these areas. And so that's really going to be the thrust of this presentation. And we want to give you some examples of that and how we think we can move forward. So one of the things that make the issues that we're interested in or that we're facing now even more complicated and more difficult to deal with is what I like to think of as bringing together a perfect storm of the problem or the issues of energy, environmental impact, and security. Security being both political security and economic security. And the result is that the whole problem is just much more complicated than if you had to deal with just energy, finding energy sources itself, or just deal with global climate change issues, and so on. So that's really another aspect of this whole problem. One of the things we also want to stress is that the energy environment problem also provides tremendous opportunities. And I'll get to that in a minute, but that will be a theme throughout our presentation today. First of all, this plot, which many of you who've worked in the energy industry for quite a while already, I'm sure, have seen many times, this plot shows a plot of the energy production in the US as a function of year and the energy consumption in the US as a function of year. With the disturbing trend that they're diverting and they're not diverting in the way we would like them to see them, there's a gap here between what we produce in the United States and what we consume, and that gap is expanding. And in fact, since 1970, that gap is pretty much doubled. That leads to this issue of energy independent. And this energy independence issue really places the US in jeopardy both politically and economically. Because on the order of 85% of the US energy supply comes from burning fossil fuels, that also is driving the CO2 environmental global change issues, and so one has to try to deal with that. As I mentioned earlier, there's also an economic opportunity, in addition to our economy being quote, threatened by the high cost of imported fuels. Someone over the next 10 to 15, 20 years is going to invent new energy technology. If that is us, we're going to be selling that to the world. If that is China or Japan or Europe, we're going to be buying that from them. And so one of the major issues is whether or not in the future, we're going to be an importer of new energy technology or an exporter of new energy technology. And I think the only way to do what we want, which is to be an exporter of new energy technology, is through basic science. As I said, there are a number of roadblocks to getting us there. One of the things that the Office of Basic Energy Science has done over the last five years is to run a number of studies. And on the inside cover of this report that we have, we've listed a number of reports that have come out of these studies which are called Basic Research Needs Studies. And what I want to stress here is not the details of these reports because these are much more technical. They sort of dive deep into the issues. They're very good reports and I would recommend them to you strongly. But what I want to stress here is that they really cover the gamut of energy technology and issues all the way from basic energy needs for nuclear systems to catalysis for energy to needs for electrical energy storage, batteries to energy efficiency to solar energy research needs. So there's a whole bunch of these reports that I would recommend to you. Each one of those, one of the common themes is this theme that there are fundamental issues where we don't understand enough about how energy works to make the sort of progress that we're saying that we need to make in each of these areas. That's going to be a theme, this sort of theme of science revolution making an impact on energy technology. So let me, I'd like to just give you an example of how revolutionary a science impact can be. And one of my favorite examples, everybody has their own example that they like. My favorite example relates to something that I think all of you may have recognized over the last five to 10 years. And that is you go down to Best Buy or wherever you go to buy your next computer or a computer device. And what you find is that you can buy hard drives that now have huge amounts of memory and they're really tiny. Every time I go into one of these stores, I'm just shocked. So one of the reasons for that is that in 1988 there was in fact a fundamental discovery happened simultaneously in France and Germany which led to a device which has an effect called giant magneto resistance. So we don't have to go into that in detail. Happens to be relatively complex, thin layer device, uses nanotechnology to try to make these things. What it does is it's a device where in a magnetic field the resistance changes dramatically. What does that do for you for a hard disk? The way a hard disk works is that you store information on the disk by magnetizing the disk in different ways in little spots. To get more information, what you need to do is you're all greedy, right? You wanna make really tiny little spots and yet you need to measure these things. What this giant magneto resistance does is to generate a much more sensitive device for measuring these little magnetization, a bits of information. That discovery, fundamental science discovery in 1988 was so important that it was in production by 1997. That happened because of some innovations, technology innovations in the US at IBM, but it was in production by 1997 and now every single hard disk that you buy uses that technology. That is the kind of science revolution that we need in the different areas of energy technology. So what we're gonna do for the rest of this talk today is not talk about all of these different reports and all of the different kinds of things that need to be done, but we've selected out a few that we'd like to talk about to just share with you the specifics of and we're gonna go through and they're listed up here. We're gonna talk about carbon sequestration a little bit, solar energy and then energy efficiency, the grid and battery technology. So let me turn it over to Mark who'll tell us a little bit about present investments and carbon sequestration. Thanks, John. So I wanna say, talk a little bit about what we really need to do in terms of the investment in energy R&D. The first thing you have to understand is where we are and the picture is not good. US federal spending on R&D has declined from 10% of the total US R&D in 1980 to only 2% in 2005 and we're not alone. Every major developed country except for Japan has similarly reduced its R&D investment over that period of time. So we're actually behind where we were in 1980 and private industry investment in R&D has also declined although we've seen an upturn in the last couple of years because of venture capital and solar energy and new things which is great. Just to give you, these numbers just amaze me. If you look at the biotech industry, they invest nearly 40% of their revenue in R&D, look down the list, semiconductor, 16%, even the auto industry invests 3.3%. And yet the energy industry only invests 0.23%, 10 times less than the auto industry. So we are just not investing in R&D and energy as a nation, as a world. If you then ask what would we need to do to stabilize CO2 emissions at current levels within the next 40 some years, the International Energy Agency estimates that it would take $17 trillion. And that's just to keep the CO2 levels at current where they are now. And most climate experts would say that we really should be reducing the CO2 levels significantly. And if you want to reduce them by 50%, it's going to take $45 trillion. So we're just talking about gigantic investments. Now this is not just R&D, this is also implementation. And implementation takes a big fraction of that. This is a figure you may be familiar with. It's from a famous paper by Pecala et al. It's often called the Wedges Paper. And the argument here is that if we continue business as usual, that's what BAU stands for at the top, CO2 emissions will approximately double by the middle of this century. And that's just intolerable. The vast majority of climate experts will tell you that this will just lead to unacceptable global warming. The blue curve is a model where we gradually reduce CO2 emissions. The bottom is a schematic. And what these authors say is that if you want to stabilize CO2 emissions, you're not going to be able to do it with one technology. There's no magic bullet. You're going to have to introduce a whole bunch of technologies, each of which will reduce the CO2 emissions by some amount. And each of these wedges in the lower diagram is corresponds to one of those technologies. Unfortunately, if you look at these closely, each of these technologies have things about it that we don't know how to do. Or we don't know how to do it cheaply enough, inexpensively enough to really implement well. We don't believe you should stop. We believe you should try to implement these as quickly as possible because the reduction in CO2 is so urgent. But we need to make each of these technologies better. And to do that, we have to overcome these scientific roadblocks. And the thrust of our report is to say that if you look at any of these technologies, there are roadblocks which need basic research. So I'm now going to talk about carbon sequestration, which is one of these technologies. You know, the world has a gigantic amount of coal. And I think it's naive to believe that we're ever going to come up with a worldwide policy to stop people from burning it. China is a wash in coal, and India has a lot of coal. And they're going to burn the coal even if we don't. And I just can't imagine that we will stop either. So we really need to figure out a way to burn that coal or to use that coal without letting the CO2 go into the atmosphere. Now this picture is from the Department of Energy's Office of Fossil Energy. And it's a vision of how the world might work if we had a system for sequestering the carbon dioxide. So in the upper left corner, there's a picture of plants. And of course, plants sequester CO2. They take it out of the atmosphere and they use it to live on. And of course, if we then burn the plants, we put the CO2 back. So one way in which CO2 is generated, of course, is if you take coal, which is in the middle, and you use it in an electric power plant, and then you release the CO2. But if you use biofuels, you're releasing the CO2 that was sequestered by those plants. Many of our industries release huge amounts of CO2, the cement industry and the steel industry. And so the vision here is that you take the CO2 from all of these industries and you capture the CO2 and then you put it someplace where it won't do any harm. Obviously, if you capture the CO2 from burning coal, then you haven't increased the CO2 level. If you capture the CO2 from burning biofuels, you actually reduce the net CO2 in the atmosphere because the plants are taking the CO2 out of the atmosphere. But then the question is what do you do with it? And on the far left is one wonderful thing you can do with it is you can start, use it as a feedstock for producing useful things. You can use it for producing other fuels, you can use it for producing other materials, plastics and so on. But most people would say that if we just go ahead and burn coal, we're not gonna be able to use enough CO2 in those ways to take care of all the CO2 we'll be creating. So the vision here is that you take the CO2 on the far left and you pump it down underground. And there are a couple of places it could go which people believe would be safe. One is to put it into saline aquifers. So some of the water that flows under the surface of the earth is highly salty. It's not useful for drinking or for agriculture. And so if you put the CO2 in there, it's believed that it would stay there indefinitely and that would be great. Another thing you could do is to put it into rock formations and of course you can, it's already being used for recovering oil. You pump CO2 into oil reservoirs and you push the oil out so that helps with oil recovery. It might help with removing methane from coal fields and so you could use the methane usefully. But there are a number of ideas of how you might sequester the CO2. Unfortunately, if you look at these methods, they all raise questions. First of all, can you really inject the CO2? And what are the aspects of the rock that you would need to understand to get the CO2 down into it? And once you put it there, will it stay there? There have been events in history when CO2, natural CO2 was released suddenly in a valley and asphyxiated large numbers of people in the valley. So if it comes out, how fast does it come out? If it comes out slowly, it's not helping the environment but at least it's not killing people. If you put it into rock formations, will it stay in the rock formations or will it get into the aquifers, which are freshwater aquifers, which we need for drinking in agriculture and then it turns them into Perrier, which is unpleasant. And finally, if you put it into the saline aquifers, will it stay there? Or better yet, would it react with the ions in the rock and just form new rock and be there really permanently, which would be ideal? But how do we know? How do we monitor what's going on? We need scientific methods to, from the surface, monitor what the CO2 is doing. So to answer these questions, we really need a new, deeper understanding of the chemistry and the physics of CO2 interacting with all these other materials. And that's one of the thrusts that we think that one of the basic research needs reports really focuses on the research that needs to be done to get this better understanding. So with that, I'm gonna turn it back to John who's gonna talk about solar. Thanks very much, Mark. So solar energy is recognized by a wide number of people in the United States as being maybe our savior in this issue. There is a tremendous amount of energy falling on the earth that we can try to figure out how to use. And the solar energy industry, which is booming in parts of the United States, may be able to take advantage of that. And so solar energy is, in fact, what I would consider a success story. This plot shows part of why it's a success story. And this just is one component of solar is solar photovoltaics. These are the panels that you can put on top of your house, generate electricity. And in my part of the world, sell it back to Southern California Edison. Okay, so and in fact, this curve shows you that in any new technology, as you expand manufacturing, you learn lots of things. You learn how to do the manufacturing cheaper. You make little changes here and there that make it so that you can do things in a more cost-effective way. In the photovoltaics silicon technology, which is what I'm talking about here, this has led to this curve, which is sometimes referred to in the industry as the 80% learning curve. And what that says is that the price for a module, for a given module decreases by 20% for every doubling of the number of modules you make. Now, obviously that can't go on forever because you become more and more efficient. And so what's started to happen already is that this is starting to level out and it's going to plateau. And the predictions are that we're pretty close to the plateau. And so, well, there's a, this is, as I said, a real success story so that the present predictions, it depends on who you talk to, present predictions are that solar photovoltaics based on silicon technology will be at a cost level within the next, let's say, pick a number five years that is at grid equity so that you could actually sell electricity to the grid and be zero cost, okay? What's the problem? The problem is the best estimates are that by 2020, the current technology might be able to generate something like 16 gigawatts peak power, can't do it all the time because in the dark you don't get anything, but on average it's about three and a half gigawatts in the US. What's the problem? That's the problem. Just for electricity, the projections are we'll be using 425 gigawatts. So 16 is great, but it doesn't get us there. I think more importantly, this number is really the 100,000 pound gorilla in the road. The US uses or will be using 2,000 gigawatts of energy for fuel. That is the issue that we need to address and solar can in fact address that with new technology. What does new technology do for you? New technology, and I don't wanna go into a lot of the details of this curve, new technology does this. If there's revolutionary new technology, it gets you off this manufacturing learning curve onto a new one. And so that's where we really wanna be. There is lots of research going on in the US now on new kinds of photovoltaics based on thin film materials, high tech materials. There's second generation photovoltaic thin film devices. The problem is that as of now, their cost of manufacturing is very high. They're way up here on this learning curve. The efficiencies aren't where we'd like them to be. We need to learn more about making those materials. There's also a third generation that people are talking about that involve nano devices, a quantum dot devices that have the promise of high efficiencies. The manufacturing technology at this point is very expensive for those. But what we do need to do is to get off of this curve onto the new curve. That's the thrust of what we need to do in solar. And some of the numbers are over here. What'll get us to parody with the grid is something like 10 cents a kilowatt hour. What we need to do to be impactful with respect to fuel is to get it down to two cents a kilowatt hour. That doesn't sound like a lot, but it really requires getting us off this curve. And that's what the fundamental science that's going on now and needs to continue will do in the area of solar. So with that, I'm going to turn things over to George who's gonna tell us a little bit about energy efficiency in the grid and storage batteries. George? That's great, thank you, John. So John was talking about new ways to produce electricity and I'd like to spend a few minutes telling you about ways we transmit that electricity. We have to do it through the grid. There are several problems with the grid. And on this view graph, I list three of them. This is the first one. Challenges for the coming century. The first one is capacity. Most of us like to live in cities and in fact in the US, it's over 70% of the US is urbanized in cities or suburbs. That's a problem for electricity. Number one, you have to get the electricity into the city so you have to usually bring it in from as much as 100 miles or sometimes more. And the second problem is you have to distribute the electricity in the city and that's usually done with underground cables. The problem is that those underground cables are starting to saturate and it's hard to increase the amount of capacity in cities because you have to dig up the earth and build new cables. That's difficult and expensive. So there's a thing that we call in the industry the urban power bottleneck and the problem is to break that urban power bottleneck. The problem's gonna get worse. So in 2030, the projection at the bottom of the view graphs there is that the demand growth will be 50% in the United States and 100% in the world. So this is a problem that we really have to deal with going forward. The second problem is reliability and power quality. And you can see in this chart, interesting numbers, the average power loss per customer minutes per year for three countries. US is 214, France 53 and Japan 6. So we're the champion in this department, a place where we don't really wanna be but we have the example of Japan which shows us that we can do very much better than that. These interruptions, power outages are actually very expensive. Here's the number for 2006, about $80 billion. And remarkably, it doesn't depend on whether the outage was momentary for a second or so or extended for minutes or even hours. And the reason, and that's what this shows here. So about a third of the interruptions are momentary and about a third of the cost is from those interruptions and sorry, our two thirds and one third is sustained. But the point is that we live in a digital economy where even a short power outage of a second or less can have enormous impact because you have to, it can shut down equipment. For example, an assembly line which is being run by computer or an internet data center takes a long time to bring those once they shut down to bring them back up. And so it doesn't matter if it's just a second or more. So the third problem is efficiency, something like eight to 10% of the electricity that we put into the grid never comes out. The energy comes out, it comes out as heat, but the electricity doesn't come out on the other end. And because we use so much electricity, that's a tremendous amount. It's worth about 40 power plants, 41 gigawatt power plants in the U.S. are required just to produce that electricity which is lost in the grid. And of course, there's a CO2 burden that's produced as well. So these are three of the biggest problems with the grid. And we know we've heard lots of discussion about solutions and there are many solutions that we have to go forward with. One of them is the smart grid which would take technology that we now know about and apply it to the grid in ways that we haven't done before. That's something we certainly ought to do. But there are revolutionary solutions, breakthrough solutions as well that would bring the performance of the grid to a new level, a level we've never seen before. And that's what I would like to tell you about on the next slide. That breakthrough is superconductivity. So in 1986, there was a terrific discovery. It was in the science world, big enough to win the Nobel Prize the next year, which is really quite remarkable. It was the discovery of superconductivity in the copper oxide system at very high temperatures. So above 100 Kelvin, which is not high by human standards, but it's a factor of 10 higher than the previously highest known superconducting material. So why is this so important for the grid? Well, the reasons are listed here because you don't have any resistance in a superconductor. You can put a lot more electricity through the same size cable. In fact, in current terms, in amperage terms, you can put hundreds of times more current through. And in power terms, it comes out to be a factor of five. So in the same size cable, you can put five times more power in a superconducting, with a superconducting material than you can with conventional copper. So if you imagine what that means for our cities, if you rip out all the underground conventional copper cables and replace them with superconductors, you immediately have a factor of five increase in capacity, which is enough for many, many decades of growth. And that's something you really can't achieve any other way. The second point is that it turns out, superconductors, when you exceed their current carrying ability, they switch to a resistive state and limit the current within a fraction of a cycle in a few milliseconds. That speed is something that you cannot achieve with conventional circuit breakers or with fault current limiters. So the utility companies now are dying to get these superconducting, as they call them, fault current limiters. And the problem is, of course, simply to develop them from these materials. So these, and the third thing, of course, is efficiency. So the superconductor has maybe 10 to 100 times lower losses than copper. And that's a tremendous increase immediately. So these three things, all three of them, are things that you cannot do with conventional cables. Here's, and this is already happening. So here's a picture of installation in Columbus, Ohio, a demonstration project. This black, flexible cable contains the superconductor. That's the superconductor. It's cooled by liquid nitrogen. It goes underground to carry the current in the system. The conventional cables are connected here to these three things. And when this picture was taken, that was before they were connected. It's been running since 2006, essentially flawlessly. Technically, it's much better than copper. Outperforms the conventional systems. There are still, and you get this five times increase, so there are lots of advantages. But there are breakthroughs that are still needed. You have to get the cost down by a factor of five or a factor of 10 to compete with copper. You have to raise the current carrying capacity of these wires so that they're even more effective and you have to lower the cooling cost. You have to cool these with liquid nitrogen to 77 degrees Kelvin and that costs money. So although this is being put into the grid now, 20 years after its discovery, there's still challenges for basic science that we need. There's another problem with the grid and that has to do with renewable electricity. John was telling about solar, there's also wind. And that's getting the electricity where you need to get it. So if you look at this picture of the grid in the US from satellite and ask the question, where is the wind energy? It's located in the upper central US. Where's the sun? That's in the Southwest. Where's the demand? It's on the East Coast and on the West Coast. Not close to where the renewable electricity is generated. And in fact, an interesting article in the New York Times last fall in upstate New York, there are wind turbines that you have to turn off on windy days because they produce too much electricity. The grid, the local grid is not capable of getting that electricity out to New York City. So the only option is to turn the windmills off. That's certainly not what you want to do. So superconductivity is a solution to this. You could bring the power from where it's generated to where it's needed losslessly. But there's a problem. We can't yet send long distance transmission of electricity through superconducting cables because of the cooling cost. So what we need to do, the breakthrough that's needed to make this possible, is to discover the next generation of superconducting materials with a higher operating temperature. That's the breakthrough that's listed here. Here's an interesting, a little bit technical, slide about the materials. The highest temperature elemental superconductor is calcium. That's a 25 Kelvin. That was discovered in Japan. If you have two elements instead of one magnesium diboride, you can double the operating temperature. That's 40 Kelvin. This material was also discovered in Japan. The copper oxides, which were discovered in 86 in the groundbreaking Nobel Prize-winning discovery, can go up to 164 Kelvin. This particular one has five elements. So you see the pattern. As you get more complex, you get higher performance. And that's because complex materials can do more for you. They have more ways of operating. What do we need? Here's the next thing we need, this empty picture frame. We need something that goes to about 200 Kelvin. Not such a jump from 164, where we already are. And this material was discovered in Russia. Question is, where will this one be discovered? Remarkably, the US doesn't put much, many resources, into materials discovery and synthesis. And that's reflected in this pattern. None of these landmark discoveries were made in the US. Two of them were made in Japan. And Japan, if you visit Japan, they're deathly worried about China, because China is putting enormous amounts of money into materials design and synthesis. And the speculation is that this next material will be discovered in China. So we need that breakthrough, the next material for long-distance superconducting transmission. And I'd like to spend a little bit of time talking now about energy storage. So there are two reasons why you want to store energy effectively, at least two, especially for electricity. One is to store the intermittent solar and wind electricity that we're going to generate renewably. So when the sun doesn't shine at night, you want to use the electricity that was generated during the day. That's a big storage challenge. You need to store a gigawatt day of power. That requires an enormous investment. The other one is to electrify transportation. So we'd like to, instead of running cars off oil, we'd like to run them off electricity, which in this country means ultimately off of coal. And that shifts the burden of that energy source from imported oil to something domestic. But you need a battery to do that. So how much energy can you store in various modes? That's what this graph shows. This is the energy per unit weight, the energy density in various storage media. This is the energy per unit volume. On this graph, batteries and supercapacitors are here, very close to the origin. That is the best lithium ion battery you can buy. By comparison, and this, of course, is electricity that you store, by comparison here's gasoline. That's a factor of 30 or a factor of 50, depending on how you count, higher energy density than the best battery we make. And that explains why we drive around with gasoline in the fuel tanks of our cars, because we can go 400 miles on one tank, which isn't very big. You can't do that with the present day batteries. Here's ethanol, which is the substitute for gasoline. It's not quite as high an energy density, so your gas mileage will go down if you use ethanol or mix ethanol. But nevertheless, it's still pretty good, about three quarters of gasoline. There's a tremendous gap here between these two. So what can we expect? Well, you could make batteries better by better materials. And if you do that, scientists and engineers will tell you, you might in your best dreams make a factor of 10 improvement in battery energy density. That's this circle. So you get better. And that's enough with the present day batteries on your Prius. If you unplug the gasoline engine, you'd go about a mile on the battery you have. With plug-in hybrids, which are coming, you might go 40 miles. And with a factor of 10 increase, you might get to the 200 or the 300 mile range that we're used to with our gasoline engine. So this, in fact, is very important. But that's not enough energy density to really store the electricity that we're going to generate renewably for the grid. That's a much bigger problem. And there are ways to do that. There are things that fill this gap. You can use fuel cells, which would run on hydrogen, for example, or on methanol. And because they're liquid storage devices, they have a much higher energy density. And you sort of fill this range between combustion and fuel cells, which can convert electrochemically these fuels to electricity. So the breakthrough we need is 2 to 5 times increase in battery energy density. That might be reasonable. 10 times to 20 times increase through chemical storage and fuel cells to store things that you might get off the grid. Why do we think that science can now provide these breakthroughs? What's different from the last 20 years? Well, actually, there are several things that are different. I've listed some of them here. The thing that we can now do, science is at the dawn of an era where it can now, instead of simply observing phenomena and how materials behave, actually control those phenomena at the atomic and the molecular level. Why can we do that? Well, we've had 10 years of nanoscience. And nanoscience has taught us a great deal about making materials atom by atom from the self-assembly, as it's called from the bottom up, and observing how they operate at the nanoscale. And this is a tremendous advantage when you want to control phenomena. We've had 10 years of rapid progress, really remarkable progress in computer modeling. So we now have supercomputers, say 1,000 computers connected in a network to make a cluster that can do pterophlops and soon pedophlops of computing. You can now tackle problems that you couldn't think of tackling, let's say, even 10 years ago and certainly not 20 years ago. And we've got a lot of experience with complex materials. I showed you on one of the earlier graphs how superconductors have become more complex. But that trend is true of every material that we use. And as we learn to control these complex materials, we can target them to the uses that we want. So here are the reasons why science is at the dawn of this new era. We can build materials with atom by atom precision. We can predict the behavior of materials before we make them, which means we can screen on a computer, say 1,000 materials and choose the one or two that are likely to be successful at the tasks we have in mind and make them in the laboratory, tremendously streamlining the process of discovery. And we can design materials for specific tasks. So these are things that we couldn't do before. Here's a few perspectives, opportunities for the future. Some of the things we've been telling you that are in our report, and we've mentioned in this briefing, weaning ourselves from an imported oil requires structural change. We're so used to that in our economy and in our psychology. To get off imported oil really means big changes. They're not incremental changes that can come by tuning things up a little bit. We really need to do things differently. The next generation of energy technologies will have to operate at far higher performance levels than we do today. And those higher performance levels require breakthroughs. Again, they cannot be achieved by simply tuning and incremental improvements. So we need to learn how to control materials at the atomic and nano scale and through scientific breakthroughs. And these breakthroughs, when we make them, will enable the new energy technologies that if we export them to the world, can replace the economic drain of imported oil with economic growth, which is what we need for the long term to help not only our financial crisis but also our economic future. So as John was saying earlier, these new energy technologies will certainly be born. The whole world is chasing them now. And the question is, will the US be buying or selling them? We certainly want to be in the position of selling them and not buying them. So here are the recommendations of the report. The problems are huge. The opportunities are likewise huge. To realize the opportunities, we need to have dream teams of the best scientists that is taken from more than one institution, the best in the country, give them the best tools, focus them on the most important problems, and put them to work. And that's how you achieve transformational change. The BES Energy Frontier Research Centers, which have been proposed and, in fact, the proposals from the community are on the table, are an excellent way to launch these dream teams. So they're well thought out. The proposals that are on the table have chosen which energy areas to focus on, the ones that have the most promise. We need to fund them and make them work. But it's more than just the established scientists. We need more than the best scientists. We have to go after the young scientists. So we're going to have a problem really for the next few decades to make our energy technologies successful. And innovative and you have to go after the young people. So the graduate students and the postdocs need to be recruited. They need to be developed with special programs, incentives and career awards and so on to turn them into the next generation of innovators for the next energy technologies. And the last point here, a massive and sustained investment is needed. You really need two things. You have to start it fast. So you have to do it now quickly. But it's not going to be an easy solution. It's certainly a decades solution. So you need to sustain that investment until we've actually made the new energy technologies that we need. So this is a challenge that really has these two aspects to it. So the last slide is a listing of our committee. And they're drawn from industry. They're drawn from universities, drawn from national labs. So they represent a balance. And this is the group that put together the report which you can pick up and make outside on the table. And I think with that we'll stop and hope that there are some questions in discussion. So thank you very much. Thank you. Those were excellent presentations. We'll now move on to taking some questions. For those of you who have been here before, you know we have a few rules of the road. The first is when you ask your question if you could identify yourself so that who you are and where your association. The other is if possible, if you can frame whatever statement you want to make as having a question mark at the end, that would be helpful so that there's something to actually answer. But I was going to take the prerogative of starting this off by asking a question that sort of comes out of where I've come from over 20 years of working international energy issues and looking at the ways in which we can more effectively cooperate internationally. You know we're facing global problems that are gonna require global solutions. In some ways the way you've presented the report here would imply that while we need to do this basic research in an American way so that we support American industry, but yet international collaboration has been an important part of this. So I don't know if you have some thoughts on how to effectively do the international collaboration without giving away some of the advantages that we get. So let me make a stab at that. I think we all as scientists have always been very collaborative internationally. You know, we did emphasize in this presentation some of the international competition which I think is a very healthy thing. The important thing is for us to be in the game so that when a discovery is made, wherever it's made we can exploit it and understand it. If you look at the Department of Energy large facilities at the national laboratories, Argonne at Brookhaven and Oak Ridge at Berkeley, these are facilities which bring people from all over the world to do experiments and increasingly we're working collaboratively in certain areas of research to build facilities internationally. So I don't think there's a problem with basic research being international, but if we are not leaders in that research, we're going to have a real problem exploiting discovery. Good questions in the back, John. My question of you regards your recommendation of the dream teams. I support the proposition that basic science needs enormous support in this country. But I don't know any example that I could give you of a dream team that has actually done basic science where the government or even the private sector literally organized it. Have you got an example? These energy frontier research centers I think are an example of that. And the way you make a good point that the government hasn't organized dream teams in the past, I think that's actually true. This is the EFRCs or a bottom up organization. So they put a BS put out the call. Here are the areas that we'd like you to address. The ones that you think you can do it with a dream team. And the dream teams self assembled. So I know of one of these proposals, for example, that's unsuperconductivity that involves two universities and two national labs. So the universities are Columbia, University of Illinois at Champaign, the national labs are Brookhaven and Argon and two companies. So Superpower and American Superconductor. The only two companies in the states that make superconducting wire. There are only four in the world. So this was a self assembled dream team. And these companies have come basically to the scientists and said we need something. We need to make the current carrying capacity higher. Help us do it. It's a scientific problem. You have to design the defects in the materials to do that. And that's an example of a way it can be done in which you don't need the top down government organization, but you do rely on the bottom up, let's say, common sense of the dream teams themselves. Maybe before you do, I'd like to. So let me argue that the Manhattan Project was an example. And there, it was much more like this where you had a definite application in mind, but a lot of basic science had to be done. I would argue that the materials research labs, which were started at a number of universities in the 1960s by what was then ARPA, I think, led to enormous progress and achievements in material science, materials chemistry, materials physics. The Joint Services Electronics Program started by the Defense Department had enormous value in generating research in electronics and the beginning of computer science. So I think that there are actually examples as long as it's bottom up, where once you, once the government blesses the long range goal, then it asks the community, how are you gonna reach that goal? I think we actually have examples of successes. Excuse me. Is it your assumption that the funding comes from the government? I didn't understand. I mean, it makes enormous sense to me. My father was an inventor at Bell Labs, and I spent a lot of time at IBM Research, so I value what these institutions did, but we basically threw them away. We gotta get back to supporting that kind of stuff, and I can't see companies doing it anymore because they're all into short-term results now. So I think we agree completely. These energy frontier centers have been proposed by the DOE for funding, and Congress has not yet funded them. It's my understanding that they are in the house version of the stimulus package, but not the Senate version. We really think that this is an extremely important thing for the government to do, and I mean, if you look at the history of the energy industry, it seems extremely unlikely that they're gonna make the kind of investment as to serve. I'm sorry, I didn't mention, because I can see them, but you can't. There are two microphones that are working their way around the room, so if you can wait till they get there. I'm Dan Bilstein, from the Energy and Environmental Security Director in the DOE's Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence. I guess my question's mostly for Dr. Crabtree. In Argonne's research on batteries, and I understand Argonne's advising a consortium of US tech companies on lithium ion battery production, is it a concern or is it discussed about the new resource dependencies that could be produced by going down that technology path? I'm not an engineer, but my understanding is that there'd be dependence on obviously the lithium, which is concentrated in South America, and also cobalt, which is in the Congo and Tibet and Siberia, from what I understand, so. Yeah, that's a very good question, and indeed almost every new technology you can think of has a dependency like that. It's unusual to find a technology that has only abundant cheap materials involved. But, well, I mean, certainly when, at Argonne and elsewhere, when you look for new technology directions, one of the first things you look at is what materials are required and can you get them easily? So it's not always possible to solve that problem as well as you'd like, but many things are eliminated from consideration because they're not safe. Mercury, for example, is not something you wanna have around. And other materials, which you could use, but you don't use. Or they're scarce or they run the risk of being, let's say, hard to get because of geopolitical concerns or tensions. And I think oil is certainly in that category. That's the king right now. We don't wanna repeat that problem. So it's an issue that people are concerned about, can't always be solved, but you wanna, in a sense, use the technology, the flexibility of choosing a technological direction to minimize that problem. I am Achilles Adamantiatis. I work with a wind energy developing company, developing wind in Kansas. I have a more fundamental question that bothers me. We know that perhaps the root cause of the problem is that we have been on a path that is not sustainable. Excessive consumption of energy and other materials. And so on, we all know. Is it possible in your mind that your message contradicts the issue, contradicts the more fundamental message that we need to change our ways of life, that we need to stop this profligate use of resources, the unnecessary waste of natural resources and energy, that we all need to change our lives, which is essentially a social and moral message. Or is it perhaps that you say, well, look, we don't really need to change. We can go on happily ever, you know, from now on, and technology will solve all our problems. So I think that, let me just make a comment about that. One of these basic energy, basic research needs reports is exactly about the, how one goes about improving efficiency. I think it's going to be difficult to do the amount of social change that you're talking about without actually trying to go down the road of improved efficiency as well, right? So I think that you have to do the efficiency issue, right? And that's something that needs fundamental basic science as well. That's a great question. And I think you phrase it in the right way. Is technology going to solve all the problems and we don't have to change? There's no doubt that the most energy that you can, the most new energy that you can generate now is from changing the way we sort of use energy. So we could carpool, none of us do, including myself, I'm sorry to say, that's a factor of too less energy for that trip. It's just such an obvious thing to do. And there are lots of things like that that we could do and perhaps should do. That will get us a big benefit so we can use a lot less energy in that way. It probably isn't enough to solve the problem over the next 50 years. So I think one of the messages of the report is that you have to do everything that is feasible to do. You shouldn't at this stage be picking winners and losers and say, well, we don't need to do that, but let's do this. We really have to do all of them. And probably the biggest thing right now in the short term is certainly the way we use energy. So I think your point is a very good one. I'm Federica Deriemann from the National Science Foundation. One sort of energy source that you did not discuss was nuclear. So I would like to get your views because in a sense it runs the camel of basic science and all from materials to... And also any related sort of question is in terms of the power distribution, the smart and green, certainly there is a lot of simulation modeling of designing sort of this green, but how these kind of models take into account the different energy sources that we might have explored and also the consumption mechanisms. For example, you mentioned that we're gonna have pluggable cars. And you also mentioned that in cities there is a problem in distributing electric power because of the density. So are these models include this kind of projections and possible sources? And what efforts we need to do to create this kind of model? Thank you. So on the issue of nuclear, we're really talking about the basic energy sciences part of DOE, which doesn't involve the development of new kinds of nuclear reactors and new fuel cycles and so on. But there is one of the BRN reports which focuses on the materials science issues related to nuclear reactors and how you could make nuclear reactors much more efficient and effective with new materials. And so I think that is one of the issues. Again, I certainly believe, and I'm speaking only for myself, I believe that you cannot deal with the environmental problem without some nuclear energy. I think it has to be one of the wedges. In terms of the grid, I'm not an expert, but what people have told me is that the modeling of the grid currently is extremely naive and we need a lot of research on that area. Again, it's not the area that this part of DOE would focus on, but I think it's an important issue. Can I make a comment also? I like your question about nuclear and it's quite clear as Mark says that we need to go forward with more nuclear than we are doing now. That's one of the things which we actually know how to do. There are nuclear reactors out there. They're producing electricity rather cheaply and they're very effective and they don't emit any CO2. So of course that's a solution that we need to pursue. The issue I think going forward, most of the reactors that are out there were built in the 60s and that's technology from the 60s. We can do better now. You could double the efficiency of nuclear reactors by letting them or making them work at higher temperatures. And the issue that Mark raised I think is an important one. You have to then find the materials that can withstand not only the high temperatures but also the high radiation environments which you would also get let's say more severe than in the 60s because it's possible now to do that. But we don't really have those materials. So it's again a question of this control. We wanna make materials that can do specific things so they can withstand neutron bombardment at 10 times the level that they do now and also the high temperatures and there's another feature, highly corrosive environments. There's even water at 800 degrees is corrosive. You don't think of it that way but indeed it is. So those are science questions that one has to come up with. And fortunately there's already an industry there to accept these breakthroughs and implement them quickly once they are made. So I think that problem is actually a little bit easier than say some of the renewable solar and wind which the industry isn't so well developed. When it comes to your second question what about the smart grid? I completely agree with everything that Mark said. And I think your point was a good one that it's a question of distribution within cities. So if you're gonna be charging your car overnight your plug-in hybrid then you want to monitor that. I mean you really want to know this electricity is going to a car. You might want to charge it. You might want to charge for the electricity that is a little bit differently. Or you might just want to monitor how are we using our power. And you can do other things. I mean you can arrange for many of the appliances in your home to take electricity at low peak times when it's not needed for other things. And even from let's say hour to hour to adjust to how much demand there is and how much supply there is. So these are wonderful things that we ought to do. I think Mark is right, it's pretty primitive what we model the grid now. We can do a lot better. Let me, before we go on let me just make one a couple of comments about nuclear because I think this is really a huge issue for the United States. The nuclear chemistry academic community in the United States has an average age probably of 80. I think that's probably on the young side. That's conservative. That is a major issue in the United States. Basically academic institutions, I would say failed the US by abandoning nuclear chemistry, nuclear engineering. You need that for fuel reprocessing, all kinds of things. That's an area which the universities need to step up to and with government funding deal with. A couple of weeks ago I saw a picture in the Los Angeles Times of a new generator being delivered to a nuclear power plant that's probably 20 miles south of where I live. It was on a barge. One of the reasons it was on a barge in the Pacific Ocean is that it came from Japan. That's because if you're gonna build a nuclear reactor you want the very best materials and you buy that from Japan. That's something that we should be doing here in the US. Jennifer Bovell here at CSIS. Could you speak more to that last point you just made about the manufacturing capability? I think it's not just with nuclear but also when you're looking at battery technology. GM just spoke about their new plan to pair with a Korean company on car batteries and they went with that company rather than some of the United States companies because this particular group had actual experience with car batteries and those in the United States are just non-existent. So can you speak about the lack of moving from basic science to implementation and the role of manufacturing domestically here? So one example which I think is a great example of the success of the investment in basic research by Basic Energy Sciences at DOE is a company called A123 which began with very fundamental research on battery materials at MIT and we're very proud of that. And I think DOE should also be very proud of it. That company actually is doing a lot of manufacturing and they have now I think all of the batteries and black and tec-decker tools are made by that company and they are going to be making batteries for plug-in hybrids. They didn't win on the competition with GM but my understanding is that that was just because they didn't weren't up to the capacity level that some of the Korean companies are. But you know I don't think we should take GM as the arbiter of what's the best way to do things. I'm Bob Hershia, I'm a consulting engineer. It has been mentioned that more research is needed in modeling the grid. Could you elucidate a little more on what kinds of research you need? Well again, this is not something which we have expertise on and all I can tell you is that I have heard that there's been enormous progress in modeling complex systems, multi-scale systems and the aerospace industry for example is very good at that. At MIT we have applied mathematicians in the Aero and Astro department who are phenomenally good at modeling such complex systems and I just don't think those people have focused their attention on the grid and I think that's something that would be easy for funding agencies to get them to do. Carl Irwin, West Virginia University. Mark alluded to productive uses of CO2 for example fuels and materials which could maybe be implemented rather soon or rather than later instead of sticking in the ground and hoping it stays. So I wonder if you could comment a little further on that and other such applications of CO2? So I think from what I understand that there are chemical processes where you could use CO2 as a feedstock for valuable things. Unfortunately they're all highly energy intensive. So if you're gonna use electricity produced by burning coal to do that you're gonna be behind the game rather than ahead of the game. Our vision is that in the long run you get all the electricity from renewable sources and if you have excess electricity then you can use some of that electricity to convert CO2 into useful forms. But I think that on the short run I don't think it's valuable because you'd be creating more CO2 than you're taking up. Can I make one comment on that? There's a lot of scientific interest in using the sun which is a wonderful in a sense free source of energy to do exactly that, to sort of reverse the combustion cycle and put the oxygen backward, belongs to make fuel out of CO2 in water. And in fact there is a program that's just started now at Sandia Labs to do that. They call it Sunshine De Petrol and they have solar converters, solar concentrators that can achieve temperatures of 2000 degrees which is really what you need in order to reverse this combustion process and reconstitute fuels. They're looking at two fuels. They wanna split water to produce hydrogen, that's a fuel. They wanna split CO2 to produce CO, another fuel. In fact hydrogen plus CO together is what's called sin gas. You can do a lot with sin gas. You can burn it as a substitute for natural gas. You can also do chemistry on it and create gasoline through standard Fisher-Tropsch procedures as they're called. So this is a wonderful thing that one, new horizon that one wants to look at and in fact has a lot of promise and hasn't been explored for the reasons that Mark says it's been perceived as to be pretty energy intensive and you need to have that source. Yeah, Don Paul with University of Southern California and CSIS. I think the discussion around complex system modeling which is really, you think about large non-linear complex systems but at scales thousands of times bigger that have billions and billions of elements is what the real system has. That in my view is an area of applied mathematics computer science. Was there any discussion in the report about why that, where that would be done if not with this program? Yes Ashraf John, FAA's office of environment and airport planning. I would respectfully try to introduce a topic for the panel discussion which I believe has not been touched upon. I may have missed it. We talk about the materials and a lot of material research on transmission and other aspects of energy production and transmission but also and we also talked about the nuclear power. And one of the issues from the environmental perspective was the storage of the nuclear waste. And from the past discussions seemed like there is no material that will outlast the nuclear waste material. Whatever we store it in, it will not outlast. So when we are talking about the material research, so then is it not a topic that should be also included in the material for storage of the nuclear waste because this was one of the main constraints from the environmental groups for the nuclear energy production. Thank you. So let me address this. So as we pointed out earlier, there's 10 of these basic research needs reports, one of which is in fact on nuclear energy and an important part of that is the nuclear waste issue. And as I alluded to earlier from my standpoint, that's real, I'm a chemist, right? That's nuclear chemistry. And one of the things that has to happen in the US is the regrowth of research in nuclear chemistry, of dealing with radioactive materials. And a lot of them are in parts of the periodic table where we haven't invested a lot of time and energy in understanding the fundamental chemistry. And so just being able to do chemistry on the actinides and the lanthanides is something we just need to spend more time understanding. So I think your point is exactly right. It's in one of these basic research needs reports and it's something we certainly think should be supported. With respect to the earlier question about complex systems modeling, I think that's going to be throughout the science funding arena, both at NSF and in the Department of Energy. The Department of Energy has a separate office of advanced computing. There's a lot of work in fundamental applied math there. And so I think that's an area that does need attention, not just taking existing approaches to computing, but really developing new mathematical approaches to computationally studying fundamental complex problems. I think this question about complexity is really interesting. It was brought up in the context of the grid, which is probably, some people say, the most complex thing that men or men and women have made. But there are actually more complex systems which are just as interesting and just as important and those are materials. So some of the complex materials that have let's say five or six elements and a very complex structure, it's hard to know what they will do. It's even hard, once you observe what they do, it's hard to understand what they do. And this is a tremendous frontier for material sciences, modeling materials. So what you can do in some cases at the moment and in the next 10 years, certainly in many more cases, is to predict the material, to predict the properties of materials before they're made. That's really a tremendous change in the way we do business with materials and it offers enormous, let's say, opportunities and horizons for finding the materials that you want, the very special complex ones that are targeted to a specific task. So this will happen with computation as well. I don't think it's just a grid. It's really materials which are on the horizon as well. My name is Barry Wessler. I have a question about the source of the funds to do this. It seems to me that the source of the funds can come from reallocation of funds going to basic research that is taking it away from somebody else, taking deeper into the general funds of the United States, taxation specifically for the type of research that you want to do, or reallocation of some forcing function to increase the source of funds being used for basic research by industry that is getting back from the 0.23 up to a rational level. What is the hope of the committee and how does it see going about it? Do you want me to ask the question now? Often, I'm Chris Cadu from the University of Maryland and the Maryland Energy Research Center. When I talk to students about this problem, I often use an analogy of spacecraft where the earth basically is, we're all living on the spaceship. Control volume is drawn around the earth and we are stuck basically with living. Our life support system is the environment. Our energy is stored on board except for what we get from the sun. Of course we all have to get along so things speak to the gentleman's concerns up here. So I'm wondering if maybe you thought about using this analogy when you explain to people why this is an important issue and as you explain your strategies for dealing with it. I'm not going to touch the second one. And I'm not really going to touch the first one. I would say that the source of funding is of course extremely complex. You know, in the long run, I believe that we're going to have to somehow tax carbon in order to handle the global warming problem. And that's likely now to be a cap and trade process. Unfortunately, cap and trade will yield revenues only in the out years. And research has to be done up front. So I think we have to take funds from other mechanisms to pay for that. And I don't believe it should come from other areas of science because the government's investment in science overall is way too low. The physical sciences, which in particular are the areas where all of this research has to be done, have had flat budgets since the end of the Cold War. And if you go to any university campus and you look around and you say, where are the new buildings? They're in biology and life sciences, maybe computer science, but you don't see a new building in physics, in chemistry, in earth and planetary sciences. And if you look at the equipment in those buildings, they're archaic. There has been just a general underinvestment in those areas of science, which are gonna be most important for this. But the investments that have been made, I've been great ones. And I don't think you wanna disinvest in the life sciences in order to pay for energy research. I think it would be a tremendous mistake. I was gonna follow on a question I was thinking of probably as equally as uncomfortable. We're right now looking at a generational opportunity to invest in new energy systems. We've got a stimulus package that's got maybe 70, 80, who knows how many billions of dollars that may go to clean energy. But as I listen to your discussion, we may end up investing in an infrastructure that may be old by the time it actually gets built and but we'll have to live with it. So do you have any thoughts about maybe the balance as we're putting, and you made the comment about cap and trade money comes later and we're now putting up upfront money. Is there any thought about the balance of what we're doing? And you don't have to answer that. Can I make a comment on that? Very good question, I think. And it's strategic as well as tactical. And you kinda have to think about it now. You wanna think about it for the next 20 years as well. But there is a trade-off between improving what we have now, which you might call incremental improvements or tuning it, and then being stuck with it for the next 30 years and that certainly applies to coal plants. So you can build coal plants like we have now. They're rather hard to retrofit for capturing carbon, but you can do it quickly and you can do it cheaply. The other opportunity is what we've been talking about, invest in the breakthroughs that give you new ways of doing things that in fact will be the technology for the next 50 years. And so there may be an advantage and you have to think about this. There may be an advantage in tilting toward those new solutions, the breakthroughs that need to come in order to create the technologies that over the next 50 years will actually be cheaper and operate better than just doing what we do now. Business as usual, I think in the sort of present climate is not a good idea. We've had business as usual for the last 20 years or so when it comes to energy and particularly imported oil and we haven't gotten off the dime. So we still have the problem of imported oil. We need to do something structurally different in order to solve the problem for the next 50 years. But I don't think George meant to say that we shouldn't begin to implement solar technology and wind technology just because we think we might be able to do it better in 20 years. We have to start. Otherwise we're not gonna be able to make a dent in the CO2 problem. Thanks for making that comment, Margie. Absolutely right. I didn't know if anyone wanted to. You know, I really like that comment you made about talking to students. One thing that I think all of us have noticed is that students are very interested in the energy problem. And in fact, I was at a student seminar last year where somebody, a graduate student came up and said, well, I'm working, I shouldn't mention the field, working in high energy physics, but I'd rather do energy. And how can I break in? And actually it's hard to break in. I don't think students, you know, in universities there is no department of energy that's read out in physics, chemistry, biology or wherever, engineering. And that's a resource that we really ought to tap into. It's a special moment to capture the imagination of these younger folks and get them into an area where they really wanna work anyway and are gonna have an enormous impact. So your comment is very well taken. John Metzler recently retired from the Department of Energy. Did the BES panel ever look at the waste issues that would come from widespread use of solar energy, battery technologies, eventually a carbon restricted coal industry? Because this is what really hurt the nuclear industry. So I was wondering if BES actually thought of addressing those issues. I didn't see it in the reports. That's a great question. I think the answer is that to date, none of the reports take that question head on. I've been thinking about what BASIC Energy Science Advisory Committee should be doing next. Maybe that's a good idea. Or physicist, MIT. Previously. Where's that? It's up north somewhere. Is it cold there? Sometimes, yes. We inherit an earth that is not entirely all mixed up. We live off the entropy increase that is being made by mixing it up more. Aren't we really operating as a faith-based cargo cult? Cargo cult. With regard to what the real future holds for us. Except for the sun. You know, that's, I think, an analogy to what was said before, the earth is a spacecraft. And I think that's a fair statement. At least I believe in thermodynamics, right? And so, but we do have this sun up there that is going to outlast anyone in this room, I hope. And so I think that's our potential salvation, all right? Jim Kaye, retired from the Organization of American States. I think it's implicit in what I've heard today that the committee would agree that there are some things government and only government can do. And that public funding is absolutely necessary for what we have to have. And so we need to make a case for it. And I've listened to the one thing that I think is an attempt at making a case. Well, should we be buying or selling the technology? But wouldn't you agree, given what we know about the behavior of multinational corporations, that ultimately we're most likely to be all buying it from the most adventitious offshore tax haven? So I think perhaps we need a much better case. What can we do to make a much better case for that public funding? Good morning, my name is Mark Perez. I'm with the Institute for Defense Analysis in Alexandria, Virginia. And essentially I wanted to touch on an earlier question on the demand side of the equation. Obviously, technology is improving, especially in silicon devices. And I think that if we also look at the demand side, we can do a lot to begin to address the issues we're facing. And that is with smarter design, smarter homes, smarter automobiles, computers, and so forth. In your opinion, do you think that those industries can also contribute in addressing the issues? Because we've seen improvements in laptop technologies, fuel cells for man-packed devices, and so forth. So let me respond to the first question. We did stress the competitive issues because we do think there's gonna be a great industry born here, and our economy is not in great shape, and we'd like to see this country have a share of that. But for myself, the much stronger argument is that we have to do something about global warming, and we have to do it fast. And every country in the world should be doing everything they possibly can. And in particular, we at the universities, most many of us have decided to redirect part of our research effort, at least part of our research effort, to try to address the energy problems because we believe it's so important. And I just think that the government is the only agency in this country that can organize the effort that we need to address these problems. So I'd like to make a couple of comments addressing each of these in a somewhat side-wise way. I'd like to tell a little story that I like about technological revolutions. And this comes about because a couple of years ago, a good friend of my mother-in-law turned 90, and her family had a birthday party for her, and we were invited, and so we were sitting around, and the son says, Mom, you've lived through this century, almost an entire century, a lot has happened. What would you say the most important technological advance has been since you were born? And I'm sort of sitting there thinking, wow, that's a hard problem to ask a 90-year-old, but I would say a couple of different things. And she had an instantaneous answer, and that was the radio, okay? And I thought about that, and that was a great answer, because that was really a revolution with respect to how information got transferred around. It wouldn't have been the answer that I would have said, and I think that just because I didn't live through that, I didn't see that change. What I would say is that I can't tell you what the next technological revolution will be, but that I hope it's in the areas we've talked about, that in the areas of energy and environmental global change control, that someone sitting there 50 years from now looks back to this next decade or so, and says that's the technological revolution of that 100-year period, because if that doesn't happen, I think we all have problems. Let me address the other issue, which is the question about continuing to do improvements and so on, solar and efficiencies and how you build your houses and so on. One of the things we've stressed is that we have to do all of these things. In other words, energy efficiency has to be at the root of what we do, okay? And in fact, continued improvements in silicon technology and photovoltaics will happen. That unfortunately doesn't get us off of this curve that I put up there that will certainly allow us to use solar for electricity locally in the grid, but won't really address the magnitude of the energy consumption problem that we have. My name is Ishwar. I currently don't work in our energy-related field, but I want to get back into it. So my question is around, based on all the technologies you see and based on your experience, there might be some of the best opportunities for entrepreneurs or start-up companies. You know, if I knew I would be investing. I think you can see where all the entrepreneurs are investing, they're investing in batteries, they're investing in solar, but you know, if you look at our report, you'll see there's a vast array of technologies that are going to be important and I think they're going to be opportunities in all of them. Can I make just one tiny comment? And that is that, you know, a breakthrough is a wonderful thing to jump on immediately and that's what entrepreneurs could do. That could be a strategy. It's sort of worked for Bill Gates. And those breakthroughs are the things that we would like to see happen and when they happen, fortunately we have an entrepreneurial sort of system here. So as soon as the breakthrough comes, there's lots of entrepreneurs that want to jump on it and I think that's really something the US has that some of the rest of the world doesn't have. I'm Mitzi Wertheim with the Energy Consensus. I want to ask about educating the next generation and it seems to me that there's a real barrier. It's the way in which schools and universities are organized, they're organized by departments, they're not organized to address issues and the only school that I know that is doing that now is Arizona State University. And in fact, they've just established a department of sustainability. And I actually think, this is my bias, that schools of higher education are only slightly less difficult to change than the Catholic Church. And so the question I have is, how do you, well, no, no, but you gotta give people problems to solve and you can educate their learning around solving problems. There are no problems that we have today that I think can be solved in a stove pipe. And it's getting this collaborative horizontal thinking involved not only with the scientists but the social scientists and others. I mean, I'm a social anthropology by training but I've been spending the last five years in energy and all I do is ask questions that other folks don't. But you need to get that multidisciplinary, get out of your own, get other people asking questions with you. If you want it implemented, the hardest part is to implement. It's about how people think, feel and behave. And if you don't address that, you'll just have a neat technology that just sits there. So let me make a comment about that. And I agree with everything that you've said. Well, so we're gonna have an interesting debate here. I think that the fundamental knowledge to attack problems is very important. That's one of the things that you get through the educational system that teaches fundamental abilities in chemistry, physics, math, and so on. So I think that there needs to be a retention of that. The one thing that is happening is that the forefront of science is almost always at the boundary between existing disciplines. And that's no more true now than it has been in the past. And what one has to do is to grease the wheels to allow that sort of interdisciplinary study. If you look around the United States, virtually every major university is setting up a quote, special program or institute or center in energy, environment, energy and environment, global change or whatever. These are responses to the fact that you can't solve these problems just by doing chemistry over here and doing physics over here and doing social sciences over here, but you have to have people talking together. And so I would argue that, number one, you have to retain the fundamental science education to train people, but that you have to generate a capability to encourage people to work on these interdisciplinary problems. I would say that these energy frontier research centers that the Department of Energy is trying to set up show that the community is ready to respond to that because these proposals that have come in are all very interdisciplinary. Obviously I'm certainly enormously enthusiastic about interdisciplinary research. I would argue that the institutions of higher learning in this country are the strongest institutions this country has and I wouldn't trade ours for those in any country in the world. And one of the reasons we've done extremely well is because they are extremely flexible contrary to what you've said. There is a tension between disciplinary education and interdisciplinary education and that tension is a very healthy thing. The great universities in the United States are great because they have disciplines which can set standards and can measure how good people are and if everything is entirely interdisciplinary you lose the standards. So what you see at all the universities are cross-cutting programs where students can take minors. At MIT we have a new energy minor which students regardless of what their major is can learn about the energy problem. But it's extremely important that they have a firm footing in either physics or chemistry or something else. Okay, fine. I get this argument a lot so that's why I reacted so strongly. You know, let me just make one more comment about this and that gets back to the enthusiasm level of the students and young faculty to work in these areas. We're just overwhelmed by really, really bright young students who have a sort of a religious fervor to work on environmental and energy problems now. And so I think that the universities are responding to that. We're starting to run out of time and I think there were two people that indicated they had questions over here so if you can ask them succinctly that would be quite helpful. So I think there was one, you had one. Now I'm getting up to three. Okay, these two. Can I still ask? Is that cool? Second to last. Yeah, Luke Ong from McKinsey. You talk a lot about the portfolio approach for this whole energy problem and all these different areas we have to go in and the interdisciplinary conversation you just had goes along the same way. But you also talk a lot about the dearth of scientists in this country and the dearth of young scientists in this country and so how do you go about prioritizing all these different areas you wanna push into and obviously at the very core they have very similar things, the disciplines. But how do you go about prioritizing where can the US really take the lead and where are other countries gonna take the lead? Cause we can't take the lead everywhere. We just don't have the resources I would say. Okay, and then this will be our last question. Okay, very quickly, Michael Isabella, APS. Just wondering what role does geothermal energy have for the upcoming future? So let me take a crack at both of those. I don't think at the research, at the basic science level one needs to prioritize. The resources that the country is investing in basic research is so paltry that you could invest in all of these areas quite easily and then only when you begin to try out these technologies do you decide how to set priorities. And in terms of geothermal, I think it's a great one and we need to do more work on it. Part of the geophysics basic research needs report addresses some of the challenges in geothermal. There's enormous payoffs there because all you have to do is learn how to dig deep holes, right? So I think it's a great one. Just a comment about the geothermal from a Mark answered that from a physics standpoint, from a chemistry standpoint, there is a tremendous amount of chemistry we need to understand in terms of corrosion and materials to deal with geothermal. But geothermal is clearly a very important potential energy source. Well, I think we're gonna need to wrap up at this point. So I apologize to those who didn't get their questions in but let me join me in thanking the presenters. Thank you.