 Vice Chancellor, thank you so much. It's wonderful to be back at ANU. This is such a marvelous institution. And with many friends and colleagues and former students, it's always a tremendous pleasure to be here. And I've been having an absolutely spectacular time in Australia this whole week, meeting many leaders, many fascinating people doing important and wonderful things. And the government also gave me great entertainment this week. So this was one of, I do fancy myself a bit of an expert on budgets, and I found this one fascinating. And this was unusual. And we're learning a lot about a lot of things this week. So I'm especially happy to be here. And I'm going to start in a little bit of an unusual way on my cell phone, because actually just a moment ago, I got a nice email from the head of the Pontifical Academy of Science. And the Pope spoke today about our issue. And I just want to read you a couple of things that Pope Francis said. He said, it says here in the news article, gazing out over the massive crowd, Pope Francis reflected that quote, the gift of knowledge helps us to avoid falling prey to excessive or incorrect attitudes. The first lies in the risk of considering ourselves masters of creation. Creation is not a property which we can rule over at will, or even less, is the property of only a few. Creation is a gift. It is a wonderful gift that God has given us so that we can care for it and we can use it for the benefit of all, always with great respect and gratitude. And he urged people to nurture and safeguard creation as God's greatest gift to us, because while God always forgives, creation never forgives. And he warned, if we destroy creation in the end, it will destroy us. And I hear there are a few Jesuits around someplace. And Pope Francis is our first Jesuit pope. And he's speaking very clearly, I think, for the whole world, actually. We do face fundamentally not an economic challenge and not a technological challenge. But fundamentally, we do face a moral challenge because the issues that we're confronting are solvable, but we're just not choosing to solve them yet right now. And actually, Pope Francis has been speaking about the globalization of indifference, which is a term that I find very compelling. And I feel it a lot in my own work at the United Nations trying to mobilize support for actions, even for dying and poor people. It's very hard right now. We have just a buzz of confusion, of misdirection. I sometimes call it Murdochland because it is how I start my day at 4.30 in the morning. The first thing to arrive is the Wall Street Journal. And it is absolutely the first thing to get my blood going in the morning. A propaganda sheet of despicable proportion that really confuses us, misdirects, propagandizes, and is designed to keep us away from basic truths and basic moral principles. And this is our big challenge to stop being indifferent and to understand that we are threatening enormously. Our lives, our well-being, and we're doing it because we're not working very hard collectively at finding practical solutions to our problems. And we're not doing that because the very short term and really short term greed continues to intrude on basic truths and long term need. And I find it exciting to be here, partly because I'm working with Frank and others at this university on some of these problems. But you're just across the street, as it were, from the corridors of power. And part of the essential belief I have, and I like how Pope Francis said it, we have to bring knowledge to bear on our problems. We have to bring knowledge to bear with a moral attitude. And if we do that, we will solve these problems. And so a university across from the power centers is just what we need, actually, because we need to bring together the serious scientific knowledge with those who are responsible for the well-being of the country and make sure that we get on the right track. So I'm going to talk a bit about that this evening with regard to one of the major challenges that we face. And I'm going to be brief because I think if we have a discussion, it will be even more interesting for all of us, but especially for you than if you just watch me yak on. So I do want to talk about the basic challenge of climate change. It is an unavoidable, inescapable challenge, because it happens to be true. And no matter really how much Rupert Murdoch says or the propaganda on his page, and I don't just mean to pick on him, I just find him despicable. And I do for a real reason, by the way, because if we're not serious in what we're doing, we're really going to pay huge consequences. And he has no right to mess up the world for my three kids or for yours. And so that's why I really do take it seriously. We need to bring the best of our knowledge to bear on these issues. We absolutely need to do it. So I don't really know how much more we need of being pummeled in every part of the world every year these days to understand what the scientists are just screaming at us about, which is that we've already entered a new climate state and we're quickly moving to a world of dangerous instability and with massive risks of feedback effects that take us out of any known environment and into even greater dangers. So you know these familiar sites. The top left is my city in the super hurricane that we faced. The storm surge was unprecedented on the century scale because the sea level rise on the northeast coast of the US is already a third of a meter. And this changed the dynamics of the storm led to massive flooding. We learned as every one of these shocks teaches us how unprepared we are as well. No matter how sophisticated you think you are, somebody forgot to take the backup generators out of the basements. And so we lost all the hospitals. They all went down. There had to be emergency evacuations of people from the ICUs and the CCUs in the middle of a hurricane because the power went out and the backup generators went out. And you had the flooding in Bangkok recently and in Beijing recently and mega droughts all over the world. Right now we have massive droughts in California, mega droughts in Brazil, where I just was a few weeks ago. We've had massive droughts in the American Midwest, the biggest in many decades. Massive droughts in the Sahel where I work on many development problems and I can watch. Literally you can watch how these droughts turn into violence and turn into conflict. I remember in Mali one evening a couple of years ago, before the Civil War, I was having dinner. It was as pleasant as could be out in the open sky with the governor of one of the states in Mali. And he said to me, Professor Sacks, the drought is really unbelievable. Can you help us to finance some bore wells because the farmers and the nomadic population are at each other's throats right now for the scarce water. And I went back and I experienced the globalization of indifference again and nobody could give a damn, basically. And within a few weeks, the Civil War had broken out. Now you can never trace a huge event like that to one cause, but these ecological pressures are absolutely forcing variables in the kinds of explosions of unrest that we've seen repeatedly. This was true in Syria as well, which had mega droughts all through the first decade of the 2000s. And that was the tinder for the explosion when the Arab Spring broke out in early 2011. And Australia is a continent, every part of which is vulnerable to these disturbances. It's amazing because this incredible and unique set of ecosystems, and they're all in the line of fire, as it were, floods, droughts, massive forest fires, massive heat waves, as was experienced this past year. It actually doesn't take much to understand this. It takes a shred of honesty. And I find a few minutes with a good climate scientist. And they can explain a lot. I headed the Earth Institute at Columbia University. We have, of course, hundreds of climatologists. Basically, every week someone tells me it's worse than we thought. The feedbacks are more intense. The instability is greater, or the progression of climate change is faster. And our lead guru is Professor James Hansen, who's a name that many of you will know. He was the US government's lead climatologist for 30 years before just stepping down from the NASA unit. And now he's professor at the Earth Institute. If you just want to be turned into a quivering bowl of jello, sit with Jim Hansen for an hour because he will tell you what's going on on the Earth and just how extraordinarily dangerous it is and how every dimension you can measure. And he's designed half the measurements because the gravatometry and the spectrometry and the solar irradiance measurements and the ocean buoys measuring the heat that is getting into the deep oceans, all the rest. He's been part of the NASA systems of measurement for years. And they all point the same way. And what he really shows you is that the paleoclimate record read essentially by the isotopic history of the Earth shows that whenever we had carbon dioxide loadings of the level that we have today, these sea levels were several meters higher than they are now. And what Jim Hansen is emphasizing is that what that really means is that we have already started a series of feedbacks, the fast ones we feel, but the slower feedbacks of the loss of the ice sheets, for example, could be decades or even centuries. But we've already done enough to change the planet in a way that we've committed to lots of very deep feedbacks. And this was the feature of an article last week in Nature which said we've already committed to losing a significant chunk of the West Antarctic ice sheet, which is already on its way into the ocean. But we don't know whether it's on a decadal or on a century scale. But it's already lost was the conclusion of the scientists. In other words, the feedback effects are already in play in a way that is now no longer reversible. And that was about a one meter rise of the sea surface as a result of that. This is one of Professor Hansen's slides. A fascinating slide. What you see here are nine maps of the world. And he calibrated these maps by the period 1951 to 1980. And for each place on the planet, he calculated the mean distribution of a normal distribution for each pixel on the map. And defined for that 1951 to 1980 probability distribution plus minus three standard deviations from the fitted curve. Three standard deviations happens approximately two times per thousand. And the dark red are the three standard deviation extreme warms. So you look back in 1955, which is during the fitted period. And in this year, which is for the summer northern hemisphere summer months, there's very little dark red. Because you would expect during the fitted period only 2 per thousand of the cells would be in an extreme event. And similarly, in 1965, there were a couple odd places on the planet. But look what's happening in recent years. The planet is just becoming completely blotchy with red, meaning what used to be extreme events is now normal. Basically, what used to happen 2 per thousand is now happening 50 or 100 per thousand. This is already the new climatology of the planet. This is not the future. We're already in the new probability distributions. And we know this is leading to soaring disasters of hydro meteorological variety, floods and cyclones, basically, and droughts. So I want to take one hold on this mountain side that we're standing on before we get completely swept away by the avalanche of climate change if I could mix metaphors. I want us to take a foothold. The foothold is to stop the rise of temperature above a certain level. And the world agreed in 2010 to define the barrier as a 2 degree centigrade barrier relative to the pre-industrial level. Now, Professor Hansen says, no way. That's way too high. Because 2 degrees centigrade will take us outside of all known human experience, actually. One degree centigrade is already above the whole Holocene period, meaning the last 10,000 years, the whole period of civilization. And 2 degrees takes us into uncharted territory. But 2 degrees, I'll indicate in a moment, is extraordinarily hard to achieve as a limit. It's what our project with ANU and Monash and Climate Works is trying to determine how that can be achieved. It's tough. In Cancun, in 2010, the government said, that's our line. They haven't taken any steps to hold it. But they did say, that's our line. And it is the right line at the outside. Maybe it should be tighter. But to go beyond it is absolutely reckless, especially when we haven't even tried to achieve that. Why 2 degrees? In part, because we know at 2 degrees we're likely to see a massive increase of extreme disturbances and extreme dislocations of the food supply, of extreme storms, floods, droughts, and so on. And significant sea level increase. It's also a threshold that many models suggest is a threshold for significant positive feedbacks. So that if we aim for a little bit above 2 degrees, we may quickly find ourselves at 4 degrees or 5 degrees. In other words, what Hansen has been emphasizing is our climate system is a positive feedback system. You nudge it a bit. The feedbacks are amplifying, not negative feedbacks. We know many of these fast feedbacks are straightforward. The sea ice melts, and then the ocean absorbs more of the heat. The so-called albedo is reduced. The reflectance of the planet is reduced, and you get more absorption. We know that the drying that will take place through the intensification of Hadley-Cell circulation could lead, for example, to the drying of the Amazon. Many models suggest that the Amazon will dry out, basically because of the increased heat of the Caribbean Sea, rising air and then descending dry air over the Amazon, leading to a warming of the Amazon. Well, a study last year which looked at drought in the Amazon during 2010-11 showed that when the Amazon dries, it releases a massive bolus of carbon because you get the loss of this biologically sequestered carbon. We have good reason to believe, and I saw a movie of it a couple of weeks ago actually at the Vatican, shown by one of the world's leading climatologists, Professor Schellenhuber, that the methane is bubbling under the tundra level, and you can actually observe it and film it. And as the ice melts, it's going to release massive amounts of methane, which is, of course, an incredibly potent greenhouse gas. And that's another feedback. So the two degrees is partly because the damage that will come and partly because of the feedbacks. And it's our political goal right now. And as this slide suggests, and I'll leave the presentation with you, Professor Hansen says, no way. Two degrees is far too much. And the small island states have said, at least bring it down to 1 and 1 1⁄2 degrees before we entirely disappear under the ocean. Go around to the politicians. They're not anywhere close. Two degrees? What's two degrees? What are you talking about? This isn't important. What about jobs? What about this? This is inconvenient. And so the likelihood of achieving the two degrees is slipping out of our hands. And in fact, we're about to lose it entirely. Because if we fail on this last attempt at reaching an agreement on climate change, we're just running out of space and time to actually hold the line at two degrees. That's what I want to suggest. The business's usual scenario, if we continue doing what we're doing right now, is somewhere around 4 or even 6 degrees centigrade. So the baseline of where we are right now is recklessly off course. This is the amazing thing about our political systems, I find. Here is one of the most important issues in the world. Here is a government a few blocks away from leading scientists at this university. Here is a commitment that has been made solemnly by 189 government signatories to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. And it has no reality. And I sometimes think, where's the grown-up world? This you might expect in third grade. But where's the grown-up world? What if this were real? What if it weren't a hoax, as Rupert keeps telling me every day? And you know what? It's real. It's real. This is the only show we have, the only planet we have. And this is what we're doing. We set the goals. We don't take them seriously. We're way off course. And there's extraordinarily little cognizance of it. So I want us to do what I would consider really the grown-up thing. But this is an insult to young people who are much more grown-up than grown-ups. I want us to take seriously the science, the commitment, and the implications of it. And I want us to ask ourselves, what would it mean to actually achieve the goal? And I want our governments to do homework. They hate homework. More than anything, our governments hate arithmetic. They hate adding up things. But here, we really need to do the homework to ask the question, if we are to meet this goal, what would it imply? And the basic idea is in a way straightforward, because the climatology is at least adequately straightforward for our purposes. And that is, if you set a threshold temperature, you also have a carbon budget that goes along with it. Basically, there is a path of CO2 emissions conditioned by the other greenhouse gases, nitrous oxide, methane, and the fluorocarbons that says how much CO2 can be emitted consistent with that carbon, with that temperature limit. And so that's a carbon budget. And we know a lot about carbon emissions, because our whole world energy system is based on carbon. And so we can ask what this means for the use of coal, oil, and gas, and what it implies for how an energy system worldwide has to be restructured to be consistent with the carbon budget. That's what it means to take 2 degrees centigrade seriously. And then one can ask what options there are, what kind of energy systems, what do we know, what are the obstacles, what's promising, and so forth. So 2 degrees implies a certain amount of CO2 that can be released into the air. That sets either a limit on total burning of fossil fuels or on burning of fossil fuels net of carbon capture and sequestration, the famous CCS option, which has been talked about for a couple of decades, but never properly tested and still unknown in its implications for scale. And that's what we need to figure out. So the basic arithmetic is roughly the following. The basic arithmetic is that the 2 degree centigrade limit means a cumulative carbon combustion of about 1,000 billion tons C, or in terms of carbon dioxide, which is 44 12ths the atomic weight of C, about 3.6 trillion tons of carbon dioxide cumulative emission. We have already burned a certain amount, little more than half of the total allowable. And we've already filled up the atmosphere with non-carbon dioxide greenhouse gases, which take up a bit more of this carbon budget. And what it leaves us with, according to the most recent IPCC calculations, the ones that are on the RCP 2.6 concentration pathway, so called, is about 275 billion tons of carbon left that can be burned and still have a 2 thirds probability of remaining below the 2 degree centigrade threshold. We have a number. We have a range of uncertainty. But basically, we have something around 275 billion tons of carbon that still could be burned cumulatively and have a likely chance in the jargon of remaining below 2 degrees, but still 1 third chance of exceeding it. Now, here's the problem. We're emitting already 10 billion tons carbon every year at this point, or 36 billion tons of CO2. So if you have 275 billion tons budget and you're emitting 10 each year, that's 28 years left. That's it for all the emissions. And if you figure that the world economy wants to keep growing, it's obviously less than 28 years. Our backs are to the wall. You might think that this would be viewed as something of a problem. Maybe we'd talk about it. Maybe we'd actually have a strategy. What might we do for the sake of creation? But we don't have a strategy yet. To this day, we don't have a strategy. Australia doesn't have a strategy. The United States doesn't have a strategy. China doesn't have a strategy. Canada doesn't have a strategy. And we're right at the end of the limit of this. It's amazing to me. I can't really figure it out deeply how we can get ourselves into this situation and how we can't be a little bit more concerned to find our way out. So essentially, this figure says where we are, where we're likely to go, and where we ought to be going. On the vertical axis is billions of tons of carbon per year. Again, multiply by 3.667 if you want to get it to CO2. We're at 10 billion tons right now. The business's usual path is this one, RCP 8.5. The reference concentration pathway that shows basically very little emissions control, a good time had by all. And it's essentially a 4 to 6 degree centigrade increase by the end of the century. And the path that we want to be on is something like this one, which is the 2 degree centigrade reference pathway. And what it shows is quite striking. Not only do we have to peak and start coming down, two more points. By mid-century, we have to be at less than half of our current level. In carbon dioxide terms, we have to go from about 36 billion tons of CO2 emissions down to something like 15 billion tons. We have to do that in a growing world economy. And I want the world economy to grow. That's my other job. Help fight poverty, help economic growth, help economic development. I believe in our lifestyle, actually. I think it's a nice life. And I believe that it's compatible for other people to have a nice lifestyle also. And I actually believe this pathway is compatible with that, as I'll explain. But the point is we need to bring down emissions sharply in a context of a population which will go from 7.2 billion to about 9.6 billion by 2050. And in a world where the deepest drive of all is for people in developing countries to close gaps with people in developed countries and enjoy more material well-being, that's hard. And if you think about it also numerically, here's how hard it is. Right now we're at 36 billion tons, 7.2 billion people. That's five tons per person on the planet, on average, of CO2 emissions per year. In 2050, 15 billion tons for 9.6 billion people that's 1.6 tons per person. One-third with a much higher average living standard. Australia is at about 17 and a half tons per capita. But admittedly, as I've been puzzled and I haven't gotten this nailed down, the international data show about 17 and a half tons. And the national data show more than 20 tons. And I'm not sure what the definitional differences are entirely, so I want to just flag that. But the international data from PBL or from the International Energy Agency put Australia's emissions at 17 and a half tons per capita. The United States emissions are slightly below that now at about 17 tons per capita. Australia is actually the number one emitting country in the whole world in per capita terms for a country larger than a little oil state. The little oil states are higher, but for a country of above a couple million people, you're at top of the list. And what the global budget constraint says is that the budget constraint is to be at about a tenth of that level by the middle of the century. And same for the United States. Europe is somewhere around between 8 and 10 tons per capita. China now, which is by far the world's largest emitting economy, is at about 8 tons per capita also. Quite high, because it's a middle income country, but massive energy emitter, because it's so industrial and moderately inefficient in the energy mix, but hugely industrial, and therefore a very, very heavy energy user. So the trick of two degrees, taking it seriously, is to get onto this pathway. All right, what does that actually mean? Well, one thing it means is that either carbon capture and sequestration works at a massive scale or the majority of the proved fossil fuel reserves have to be left underground. Because if we can emit about 1 trillion tons of CO2 left, the amount of CO2 in proven reserves of coal, oil, and gas is more than 3 trillion tons. And if you add in the resource base that's not yet proved reserves of unconventional oil and gas, it's probably 6 or even 8 trillion tons of CO2. And so we have more than enough fossil fuel now to wreck the world two or three times over. What are our companies doing? Spending hundreds of billions of dollars to discover more. Something's not right with that market signal. What are they doing with all of that exploration? It's unsafe to use. We have enough. We have more than enough. We don't need more. Of course, the only way that it would be safe to use all of this is if massive carbon capture and sequestration were feasible. That does not help to account for the fact that this government has slashed the CCS budget this week. This is just the kind of disconnect which is so fundamental that it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. It's amateur hour at a time when we actually need something more serious. Australia's not alone. This is how governance is right now in most of the world. Our political systems hate this problem. It's a completely wrong problem for politicians, by the way. First, you have to know something. Second, it's a problem on the scale of decades, which is of no interest to politicians. Third, it's complicated. Fourth, it's global. Fifth, it's filled with uncertainties. It's the worst political problem you can imagine. I would love to find a way that politicians didn't have to touch this problem, but that it could actually be handled systematically, professionally by scientists, engineers, and society at large saying, save us and save the creation. Because this is too hard for politicians, actually. And that's one of our biggest problems. And yet, that's who we were in there custodial care right now. This is Australia's emissions. Doesn't look like that curve of tipping down with any confidence. So what do we do? Actually, I'm going to dispense with the details of the PowerPoint and just quickly come to the bottom line. Every study has shown that if you want to decarbonize an economy and still have the economy function at a high level, you have to do three basic things. One is you have to produce electricity in a low carbon way. Second, we're going to have to shift from the internal combustion engine to electric or equivalent vehicles. Because the transport sector accounts for a huge proportion of emissions. So we have to get out of internal combustion engines. You can't capture carbon at the tailpipe of an internal combustion vehicle. You have to have a different kind of vehicle. And third, we need huge energy efficiency, which is possible in the building sector. It's possible in the transport sector. It's possible in several industrial sectors. And so I like to say that we have low carbon electricity. We have fuel switching or electrification. And we have energy efficiency. On top of that, we have to get the land use policies reversed from net deforestation to net afforestation and reforestation. And we have to have a carbon biological sink this century, something on the order of about 100 billion tons C net sequestered biologically, or about 300 billion tons CO2. So we have to do the proper land use alongside the decarbonization of the energy system. So how do you get a low carbon energy system, a low carbon electricity generation system? I think our options up to 2050 are pretty well known now. Maybe after 2050 fusion or something else will come online. But what we know now is probably going to be what's put in place substantially between now and then. And we know that that's renewable energy, wind and solar. We know that it's hydropower. We know that it could be nuclear power. And we know that it could be carbon capture and sequestration. There aren't too many other scaled solutions to this. I'm in favor of all of them. I'm in favor of nuclear as a major part of the solution. And I'm in favor of testing carbon capture and sequestration with the urgency to see what kind of scaled approach it can play. And of course, I'm in favor of learning how to make a power grid work on intermittent renewable wind and solar power, of which this country has vast, vast, vast resources. And this country may be one of the very few where biofuels could also play a role at scale. That is not true globally, because land scarcity, water scarcity, ecosystem stress is so great that a big biofuel solution doesn't make sense. But what does make sense is filling deserts with solar arrays and collecting a lot of solar radiation and collecting a lot of wind power. And you have uranium in a very sophisticated country, I would say nuclear power also. And the evidence is over many decades that it is vastly safer than the alternatives, certainly vastly safer than remaining as a coal-fired power system. So these are the basic choices that need to be made. And these are not simple choices, of course. They're not solved by simply putting on a carbon tax or a tradable permit. And I found that the whole political handling of this issue puts things backwards. We should be talking about pathways of technology first and then figuring out what kinds of policies could help that, rather than arguing about techniques of should it be prices, should it be quantity, should it be permits. That gets it all wrong. Because those questions don't answer fundamental questions like nuclear or not. Land use policies, national grid, pipelines for carbon capture and sequestration. Maybe in the end, once a strategy has been set, then some pricing incentives and so forth can play a role. But the economists have jumped far too fast to almost tricks rather than thinking through what really is meant in the solutions. For those of you who are technically trained, when we solve a nonlinear optimization problem, you can solve it in two ways. You can solve the primal of the optimization problem, which says, what quantities do you need of various things? Or you'll end up with Lagrange cofactors and you'll ask, what is the dual of that problem? What prices are the shadow prices for those quantities? Economists love prices. So they went straight to the dual of the problem. They said, we want permits or we want taxes, but they didn't ask the primal. What kind of power system do we want? What kind of cars are we going to drive? What kind of mobility between cities are we going to have? Those are really the interesting questions, it seems to me. It seems to me also the way that one can speak to the citizenry and even the politicians about what this transformation really means. And if you go straight to the quantities or the taxes and so forth, it sounds very unpleasant. Who wants to be taxed? Nobody. And so you lose office. But if you say, here is a way that we can be a modern, efficient, clean, safe economy as part of a global transformation that's going to raise the quality of life and our safety, and here's what it means, then I think the public can easily understand that and can buy into a kind of solution. So this is why I like to think of this as solutions pathways. I met with the environment minister yesterday, right? My days are completely now a bit jumbled. But the environment minister started by saying, here's our plans for 2020. And I said, with all respect, I'm not interested in your plans for 2020. They have nothing to do with this problem. I don't care whether it's down 5%, up 3%, that's not the problem. I care about your plans for 2050. What's your strategy? How are you going to get out of this mess? 2020, that's not the point. The point is transformation. You're going to buy some CDMs from somebody and that's going to satisfy your 5%? Big deal. How are we going to change the energy system? What needs to be done? So that's really our challenge. And part of the problem is this is a very complicated problem. Even if it were handled by saints and scientists, it would still be a complicated problem because there's a lot that we don't know. We don't know the geology of carbon storage, for example, well enough to know whether this is a tiny niche or whether this is a significant part of the solution. We don't really know yet which kind of zero-tailpipe vehicles will be best suited. The story is not done between fuel cells and battery vehicles and how they function. We don't really know how to operate a grid on intermittent power when that share of the grid is more than 30% or 40% right now. What the right storage is, what's potential on storage. So there are lots of unknowns. None of them is an unknown of breathtaking, massive, unknowable complexity. These are not the hardest problems in the world. These are engineering problems that are solvable. They're practical problems. They require a lot of learning by doing. They require a lot of experience, a lot of demonstration, a lot of testing, and so forth. These are easier than the problems between 1961 and 1969 of putting a man on the moon and back at a time when a room full of computers was weaker than the computer on our cell phones. And yet NASA figured that out. President Kennedy said, this is a good idea. We're going to do this. The public was inspired, bought into it, a timeline was given, a huge amount of money was spent, and a wonderful result came out. And that's what we need to do now. We need actually to invest in this in a way that's serious. So we know the broad outlines. We know the kinds of choices that need to be made. Different countries will make different choices. Some will choose nuclear, others not. Some have massive amounts of sunshine. Some have very little sunshine. Some have huge amounts of wind. Others are basically quiescent. Some have tremendous hydropower, unexploited. Others have almost no usable hydropower. So these are the choices that country by country need to be made. But we all should be able to share the basic framework that we have to get down within the carbon budget. We have to avoid the dangerous spirals and pathways. We have to solve the major technological problems. And just to conclude, we have to do this within 19 months. We have to reach an agreement on this in Paris, 2015. We promised ourselves five years, that's our rendezvous. I can tell you, oddly enough, it's the only month in the next astrological cycle of the next 67,000 years when it fits American politics. Why? Because we have a lame duck president. He's not running for reelection. It's an off-election year. Thanks, God. It's just after an election, not before an election. It's before just the month before the presidential elections start. So he can just kind of slip into Paris and out again and sign something. And that's what we have to do. Don't miss this opportunity. America is such a weird place. Really, this comes around only once every several generations. We don't usually have the seventh year of an administration just at the moment we need a solution. And so this is the time when we have to reach an agreement. And I'm hoping that some combination of that reality, the obvious pressures that the world is facing, the nearest fixation of residents of Beijing and elsewhere in China that can't breathe their air anymore because of the coal pollution, the advances of technology in many different spheres will lead us to save ourselves. Thank you very much. Jeff, thank you for an inspiring, a truly inspiring speech. And we can use the inspiration. We have just a few minutes for a question and answer. We need to finish on time at 6.45. We'll take brief questions. No statements, please. Please let us know who you are. And just while we get organized, let me ask the first question. Jeff, in one of your talks, your several talks in Melbourne yesterday, you said that the solution to an ambitious global climate change mitigation outcome lies in the hands of just a small number of countries and that Australia will be one of them. Can you share your thinking on that with us? Yeah, very briefly. The fossil fuels of this world are held in a concentrated way. Australia is the owner of the fourth largest reserves of coal behind the US, Russia, and China. And Australia ranks fourth in the world in this. If you look at the major emitters, a handful, the United States, China, European Union, India, Russia, the Gulf, Canada, Australia, Japan, and Korea, you basically got it. And if you can take out Japan and Korea as non-owners of fossil fuels, the rest of the countries are just sufferers. Not purely. They buy some of the fossil fuels from others. But basically, the owners of the fossil fuels are hugely concentrated. And this is where the real politics lies, and this is where the real decisions are made. And my hope is that we go basically starting, I think I may have actually put the order of logic as I understand it. There it is. It seems to me that the way we reach an agreement in Paris is to start with the US and China, the G2, reaching an understanding that, OK, this game has to stop. This is too serious on many fronts. That may very well happen. If it doesn't happen, we're not going to reach an agreement, actually, unfortunately. But these two countries will determine the fate of the rest. And if the two reach an agreement, the EU is all in. There's no mystery about EU politics. Why? Because they don't have fossil fuel, basically. And because they're hugely vulnerable to climate change. So that's the combination, which makes them very interested in this. It's not pure saintliness. It's what you own under the ground, which determines how this stuff works. And then once the EU, China, and EU are in, Australia and Canada, you're going to be pulled in. It's just the way it's going to be. You're going to have to be part of this story. OK, that has almost all of Murdoch land in it. Then comes the GCC, the Gulf States. They have, obviously, about 70% of the conventional hydrocarbon reserves. That's not a small part of the story. There's a lot that can be said. But I can bet that if you get the first group in, they have to be in for security reasons and for geopolitical reasons. India is tougher because India is always said, we're too poor, don't bother us right now. We have too much development to do. But I actually think that Prime Minister Modi will come forward, not at the top of the list, but probably at about this point. Russia, that's tough. Who wants to negotiate with Russia? Raise your hand. OK, I don't. But anyway, they have to be there. And then comes the rest of the world and the means of implementation and sharing this. So I actually think there is a political pathway to reaching an agreement by a year from December. Paul, to go. My name is Paul Berg from the ANU. Professor Sacks, thank you for your talk. Your talk, if I may, had quite a strong central planning focus to it, whereas as you mentioned, most economists would suggest putting prices in place and then letting the market sort out the pathway to a lower emissions future. I wonder if you could just comment on the relative importance of central planning and the market. Thank you. I believe in planning a lot. I don't believe in central planning in the Soviet style, but I do believe in technology pathways and planning for technological change. Seems to me, energy systems are so deeply embedded in public space in terms of issues like public tolerance of different kinds of energy systems, liability, land use, complementary public investments in grids and so forth. And free markets in knowledge actually don't work at all. They are not at all. But we know that technology is produced by a complex innovation system of both public and private institutions. And we know how short the time we have for this that I believe we have to direct the technological change pretty dramatically. So I would like, for example, and this is what I recommended to the foreign minister, I would like Australia to pull together, in this case Canada, India, China, the United States, and say, we got to figure out CCS. Our country's future is heavily influenced by whether this is real or whether it's baloney. And so we need 10 years of absolutely focused, massive research development and demonstration projects. That's not going to happen by putting $50 a ton on CO2. That's got to be a marriage of geology, engineering, and the major companies of the world like BHP Billiton and others. And it's got to be all of the major coal-using countries, maybe the Gulf as well, to say, we're going to test this out. And we're really going to map these fields and we're going to measure whether CO2 porosity is adequate and whether there are enough storage sites in China to make a difference. That's not a matter of a $50 price. That's a matter of a massive research activity. If you had put a $10 billion or $50 billion price on going to the moon before the end of the decade, it would not have happened in the 1960s. It required NASA. And to use a different, maybe an example you won't like, the Manhattan Project also was not a market project. It was get the world's best physicists together, put them in Los Alamos, and tell them to solve a problem. This problem's somewhere in between. It's not that for sure, but it's also not a free market problem. And it requires very directed change. And I'm not against, of course, countries are going to choose different options. I'm in favor of carbon pricing and other things. I just regard those as tools at the end of the day, not as the beginning of the story. And I think that there are such major R&D issues for mass commercialization. And I've mentioned them, that I see these kinds of R&D initiatives at large public-private scale as being something that's going to move us to where we need to go. Maybe in 10 years, it becomes market-based, because the technologies are proven, and we're on our way, and countries are ramping it up, and then let the markets do it all. But we would never have had the internet. We would never have had semiconductors. We would never have had computer age. We would never have had almost any technology breakthrough, even hydrofracking we wouldn't have had, had it not been for government at the very early stages of these pre-commercial technologies. And we won't solve the problems unless, collectively, we decide, is Australia going to have nuclear power? That's not a matter of 50 bucks a ton. That's a matter of a public policy choice. And the public will want to know, what are all our options? And so that's why I think we have to have a visioning and an R&D road mapping as a very critical component. And the more I learn also, by the way, of how Moore's Law has been protected for 50 years, that's industry technology road mapping at the industry scale, not just at the company scale. So this kind of non-market pushing the R&D is extremely important. And I'll give one more example. The US government led brilliantly the human genome sequencing. And that was a great innovation. And when that was, and then Craig Bentner came in, showed that he could compete with NIH and actually help the process along. So it was a public and private competition in that case. And then in 2000, NIH, National Institutes of Health, said, OK, now we have $100 million per human genome. What do we do next? And an expert committee that was called said, let's get it down to $1,000. And NIH made a contest with a massive, multi-billion dollar grant program on a competitive basis to drive down the cost. And they got it down to $1,000 this year from $100 million in 2001. And that's directed technological change of the finest sort. And that's what I want to see in this case. Time is up. But negotiations here on the sidelines have given us, I think, three additional minutes. So second and final question to Hannah Parris. Hello. Hannah Parris from Greenpeace. Where? Yeah, I'm just here. What I thought was missing from your very interesting presentation was the why. We know what we need to do. Why are we not doing that? And that comes down to, essentially, power relationships between the major players, both globally and nationally. So I wanted to ask you, in your experiences, in your international experiences, who are the major private and public players that are blocking progress towards these kinds of outcomes that we need to achieve? And in particular, what can we learn from that to try and make sure that our somewhat disinterested government doesn't get in the way of the negotiations in Paris to achieve that kind of outcome you mentioned? I think the reason we're not doing it is not just power. This is, as I said, the most complicated policy problem the world's ever faced, actually. Because the scales wrong, the dimensionality global, multi-generational, uncertain science, pre-commercial technologies, a whole world economy that grew up on fossil fuel. By the way, I have a whole nother lecture that where I just sing for an hour the praises of coal. I love coal. Coal made the modern world. I love James Watt. I love the steam engine. This was great transformation. And what it means is we grew up in a whole world economy grew up on fossil fuel. So it's not easy to change the guts of the world economy. We need to reconstruct the DNA of the world energy system, by the way. And so I don't think it's just power. Power plays a role. The power of the oil lobby is phenomenal. The power of the mining lobby is phenomenal. But the incentive structure of politicians is extremely inadequate to most problems we face in the world these days. They're just more complicated. They're longer term. I feel bad for the politicians. I'd like to amuse them and be happy to keep voting for them and so forth if that pleases them. But let's find some other way to solve problems. Why do we put all these difficult problems in front of these people who have other things on their mind? And that's really what I have in mind with our projects and with this SDSN network. We need an era of knowledge led policy. We need the universities to play a much more proactive role than they're used to playing. We need the universities not to be pure research centers and education centers, but problem solving institutions that say, you don't know how to get carbon down in this country. Here is our solution. And because the politicians can't do it, they really can't literally. The best knowledge is here. And so this is the kind of change that I think is also really important. This is just a tough, tough problem. And power is part of it and Rupert is part of it. And the complexity is part of it. And the time is short. And I think we're still going to make it. Thank you very much.