 So tonight's session is designed to get four people who have been and still are really insiders. They're keeping track of what's going on. Now it turns out that they were insiders in a democratic administration. And honestly, I ask a whole group of people who I thought would be good, who would be in a Republican administration, but none of them were able to be there. First, anybody who's in the administration isn't here, but we have four people who are very knowledgeable. Now if you look around on your table, though, you'll see two things that are paper. Some are yellow cards. Those are for questions. I have a group of questions I'm going to start with, but I'm going to mix in the questions that you write on cards and send up. And there are students that are going to go around and collect them from you, so that if you have a card, hold it in the air, wave it, get the attention of one of the students who will pick it up and bring it here. Second, there's evaluations. Fill out those evaluations. It helps us know how to adjust for next year, what people like and what people don't like. That you can give to any of the students or leave on the table or whatever, but please do both of those. So I'd like to start right now. We're not going to start with any introduction and comments other than what I just gave. We've heard a lot today about clean energy, clean energy revolution. Are there changes that are going on at the federal level? Are they going to stop that revolution, slow it down? Or what's going to happen? Give you some projections. I'd like to start with you, Lynn, and then maybe turn to other people, particularly who may have additional spin on it. Lynn? So Jonathan actually started a soft well on the important ideas here by noting the really quite deep cost reductions that have happened, for example, in renewables. And then the lunchtime debate reminded us that there have been similarly deep reductions in CO2 emissions that have come because of low natural gas prices. So the big economic forces that have really kicked off this acceleration in the clean energy revolution, they're still there. There's also quite a lot of activity at the state and city and local level and a lot of individual interest as well. So I think that the clean energy transition that we think needs to happen is well on the way and certainly will continue. Is it possible to put some bumps in the road? Yes, that's certainly true. And I think there are going to be some here. We'll talk, I know, later about the question of science and energy, R&D, and whether that is going to proceed as it needs to. But I think it's underway, and I think the big forces that make it be underway will continue. Well, is there any other view? I mean, it almost sounds like what's happening now may have big bumps, but it will not make much of a difference. Do you all agree with this? Okay. I'll build on what Lynn said. So I agree with everything Lynn said. I'd add that I think for my colleagues in the private sector with whom I've spoken about weather. For example, if you're running a big energy company utility and you're thinking about your long-term strategy and you were operating under the assumption that the clean power plan was going to be the rule of the land. Now that that may be no longer the case, will you change your strategy? And the answer is no. You set your strategy. It's a decadal strategy for transformation of your portfolio. And you're going to proceed regardless of what happens in these few years. So I think on the private sector side, we'll see companies continuing to move toward a clean energy future, which they realize is coming our way. And globally, one of the most remarkable developments of the last couple of weeks since the announcement was made that we would withdraw from Paris is how many countries have stepped forward to say, we're going to lead the way if you don't. Those were countries that we had been prodding to play a role in with alongside us. And it is good news to me that they have seized the mantle. Now, I'd like to see us in the lead because I frankly want to see American leadership of the world and I want to see American businesses and American workers benefit from the clean energy revolution globally. But I think there will be progress that will take place regardless of this. Oh, Jonathan, what are you hearing? You have great international contacts. What's happening? I mean, what are they? So let me put a story out there, which is in my mind a little bit of Oz and maybe more pessimistic. I think that ultimately I probably agree with both Liz and with Lynn. But here's, I think, an interesting story. So the Nigerians, as many of you guys may know, have had this horrible dynamic in northern Nigeria with Boko Haram. The president of Nigeria, Buhari, is interested in the energy system there, in part as a means to manage a place that's lawless and has no capacity. And if they could put in some energy, it would begin to normalize the circumstances they could go in and do some development work. They went to the World Bank and the World Bank said, yes, we'll give you a $300 million loan to put in a series of renewable programs. China piped in and said, we'll give you a billion dollars if you put in some coal. So to me, the model is not yet evident. They took them both. They took 1.3 billion dollars and they'll do the coal and they'll do the renewables. But they won't go down the renewable route exclusively and China is pretty actively exporting its coal. But wouldn't that have happened regardless? Why is that dependent upon the policy of our administration? Because the policy administration was essentially to push and we won't any more push on a more aggressive bank policy, on a more aggressive international foreign policy. Yes, but we couldn't have gotten in the way of the Chinese offering that money to the Nigerians. Well, what was interesting to me about it was that the conversations that I was in with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Finance and China was around their export policy. That was an Obama administration vision. That was something that we were promoting. It is not evidently something that the Trump administration would promote the same way. Partly because it's the moment not really about us, it's about China and that's not where they're focused. Partly because it's about coal and his vision is that coal is a good thing, not a bad thing. So I don't think it necessarily leads to a longer term change. But these bumps that Lin was talking about, I see plausible bumps. Okay, so we're talking about the clean energy, energy efficiency renewables and so forth. There's the other side of it, what climate is doing for us, the resilience. And Alice, you've been thinking about it, is that move towards coming to grips with that, slow down, sped up, stay the same. What are you seeing from your vantage point in Washington? Well, from the Trump administration, there is absolutely no signal that resilience to climate impacts is a focus. There is some discussion of resilience, but as far as we can tell, any climate resilience work is occurring pretty much in secrecy or not being flagged because the president signed an executive order that repealed the signature executive order by President Obama on the issue of preparing for the impacts of climate change. And by doing that, he had a further line in the executive order that signaled that perhaps agencies can repeal all work that was done pursuant to that initial executive order. There's been some discrepancy about how that's played out. There are still, I happen to have led the development of seven executive orders, six relating to climate resilience. Only one of those has been specifically rescinded by President Trump. That is the one relating to national security impacts, requiring all federal agencies to plan. Ironic that if we are going to scale back our efforts to cut our emissions, we're also scaling back our efforts to prepare for what is a national security risk for the nation. And Liz, you thought a lot about these sort of security issues. What do you see in that? So I certainly see that the Pentagon is very much with the program of anticipating the impacts of climate change around the world because it sees that the consequences, whether because of extreme weather, drought, rising sea levels and flooding, so that the call on the Pentagon to respond for humanitarian relief or more significantly instability in countries that just can't manage the impacts and conflict emerges either within the country or across borders, is something that the Pentagon has to plan for in many regions of the world. And so their view is we can't keep the waves off this beach. We actually have to be ready for this, ready for a variety of scenarios where we may be called on to respond. And so whether or not this executive order has been rescinded, our military planners have to go ahead and plan. But national security is very broad. It includes Homeland Security. It includes FEMA. It includes USDA for food security. And all of those agencies are now receiving a signal that this is no longer important. And I think we have to look at the dedicated workforce that we have in our federal government. And they tend to want to make sure that their careers go well and they have received, in my opinion, a strong signal that unless your particular secretary is signaling that they believe that climate change is a threat, this isn't necessarily where you should devote your energies. Which means the purpose of the executive order was because there was a vacuum, was to try to fill that vacuum, now we're back. I will just say that the think tank for our intelligence agencies issued a report in September 2016 outlining the six pathways in which climate change will pose very significant impacts to the United States in the next 20 years. This isn't some flight of fancy. This is our best analyst saying we have essentially a dire risk here, but we have put that aside for now and we do have the Department of Defense continuing planning but no visible planning occurring elsewhere in the federal government. Scary. Now other countries must recognize something's going on and they can either say we got to protect ourselves now or we're going to give up. Jonathan, what are you seeing in this, in other countries? I am struck by both in Alice's and this is an example, we're a little bit unusual. No one else is following this trajectory. Everyone else has basically made the assumption that there are real risks, real damages and are beginning to actually make substantial investments against those. One of the earliest presentations that I ever saw on climate risk that I thought was incredibly compelling came from the Ministry of Defense in the United Kingdom and they did a presentation in which they imagined this, if you will, they took a map of the world and on it they put in kind of blobs. They said well this blob over here, this is where you've got famine and they put another one over here, this is where you've got significant drought and they put another one over and they said and this is where you've got current armed conflict and they looked at climate change and it added to every single one of those and for them it was a very clear linear progression. This was a military Ministry of Defense problem, this was a security problem, this affected them at every single level and they were out there distributing this 15 years ago and they've been doing it consistently ever since. So we're the outlier here, we're not the norm. I didn't much say you. Well I'll take the other angle that the countries around the world are also seeing an opportunity here and since we seem to be stepping back and seeding the energy innovation part of this they will happily step in and go to work on that and so I think they're watching carefully what we try to do but if we don't continue our leadership role there that we'll regret that in the future as well. Okay Alice. I'll just add I think in the resilience space other countries are also recognizing that we will not continue to be in a leadership position. So I was up in Canada recently and they have very aggressively moved out on resilience as is Australia, Australia is standing up a significant national security and climate change effort. So the Netherlands as well so what is happening is that as Jonathan's saying even both sides energy and the resilience side we are stepping back. Liz. This is depressing so I want to add something positive which is that. Thank you. In our great nation we are founded on this principle that there is a federal government and then states have rights and one of the things that we can do on this front is to call from the states for action to ensure that we are prepared and resilient and if we think about some of the kinds of scenarios that you prepared for at the White House Alice if we think about a tsunami and an earthquake we exercised for that the Cascadia rising scenario last year that we exercised for in the Pacific Northwest if we look at the potential effects of climate and we indicate at the state level that we need to be prepared, we need to organize, we need to plan, we need to train, we need to resource and we need to exercise and if there are enough states that call on it there will be pressure on the federal government to be responsive and I think that it's incumbent on all of us to make the effort to call for that kind of collaboration because we cannot find ourselves unprepared for what is inevitable. Let's expand on this concept. All nature abhors a vacuum and we're creating a vacuum both in the resilience and the clean tech space at the federal level. That generally means there's opportunities. You mentioned opportunity for other countries dropping in. How about what do you see as enhanced opportunities now for private sector companies, innovators like we have in Silicon Valley to start coming in. It could be in information technology. It could be in private provision of information security. What are the new opportunities that are being created by the vacuum that's going on? Anybody want to pick that? Jim told me I couldn't give the 50 minute lecture on this. I'll just give one example and then my colleagues can do many more. I think we're entering sensor world. The ability to make inexpensive sensors that can communicate, that gives us a way to measure what goes on around us, think about the grid, think about understanding the ocean, think about all the ways we interact with the world around us. A combination of capabilities of the technology of the sensors, of the communications, of looking at the data sets that you get and understanding how to use those in an effective way gives us the potential to manage both energy and other systems in a way that we couldn't even envision just a few years ago. There are huge business opportunities there and there's kind of no place in the world that's better equipped to take that on than Silicon Valley. Liz, I'm sure you have something to say. I agree with Lynn. I regret that we will not put the power of the federal government behind this to open doors for American business. One of the signature initiatives of the previous administration was to take our clean energy companies on road shows around the world to open doors for them to create access for our entrepreneurs with clean energy solutions in China, in India, many other countries. What I saw, for example, on a presidential clean energy mission to China with 24 American clean energy companies was that the local leaders in Chinese cities were desperate to do deals because they were experiencing what can only be described as the fierce urgency of now. Their cities have become unlivable. And whatever was going on at the Beijing level, they wanted to get these technologies deployed. So we missed that opportunity to partner with our private sector and help them to make these opportunities happen. And that's a loss. I would like to see that it happens without the support of the government but it would be stronger if we would stand together on this. Well, Jerry Brown was going to... Yeah, he's going to do it. Well, I think when you step back and look at resilience, resilience is very much a local problem. But they need projections as to what's going to occur and often they need the science to make those projections and the federal government has been doing the monitoring and the science for that. So right now we heard mention of our building codes Our current building codes, our model building codes do not reflect future risk. So any major building we're doing at the moment, including our infrastructure, even if the service life is 100 years, does not include future risk from the projections of climate change. That's a huge vulnerability and to expect a local community to take on understanding what their particular risks are without the federal government is a huge expenditure of money. And that's where I think you will see philanthropy perhaps move in to close some of these gaps for communities and allow them to start planning. I think there are economic opportunities and resilience but they are not as well developed yet. As the impacts become more real, you're already experiencing it here. It's a little ironic. We're having such a significant heat wave. But if you think this is bad, we've increased by about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit. According to the national climate assessment, the third one, if we continue our projection, we could be at 8 to 11 degrees warmer on average by 2100. Sometimes people think, you know, when you hear about sea level rise, Rhode Island will have 9 to 10 feet of sea level rise at 2100. I think they think, oh, on New Year's Eve, it's all going to change like that. But you know, it's going to be gradual and these impacts are here. The communities are making choices now and they are not informed. Typically federal science would inform building code development. That's the way it works right now. We create model and we're not going to have that for them. So that's leaving us very vulnerable. I heard something this morning when I was listening carefully to Jonathan's talk about how the private sector people were creating understanding of risk and vulnerability, the ExxonMobil sharehold. Would you, are you seeing, is this a unique example of ExxonMobil shareholders saying, hey, look it, we're going to be, without government regulation, we're going to start disclosing that. Could you expand on that? So there's two different pieces here. One is the open question of whether or not the risks are being evaluated within companies and the answer seems to be that they are beginning to be evaluated. We are seeing a trend in that direction. The second question though, perhaps more relevant, is will it change their behavior? So I was struck by a conversation that I had with someone from, in fact from Exxon, in which what we looked at was the Exxon internal shadow price. This is a price that Exxon attaches to every investment they make. They look at it and say, well, what is an $80 a ton carbon shadow price? Would it change the context of my next investment? And the answer is it hardly changed it at all. Which was startling. I had anticipated it would make an enormous difference at least in the rank ordering of their choices and they were saying no, it did not make that much of a difference. So to me, there's this open question is, how do you evaluate risk? What do you do with it when you've evaluated it? Do you make a change? What's the time horizon in which you have to return on your investment? Do you invest in Goldman Sachs and you intend to hold your investment in coal fired assets for three years, you're probably fine. If you're a pension fund and you want to hold them for 20 years, not so good. So these kinds of dynamics play out enormously and the risk is going to have to establish that. I am struck a little bit by the fact that the Financial Stability Board is asking for a long term scenario. So they're beginning to think no longer in an annual or quarterly basis. They're thinking a decadal basis. Alice? I don't think so. You're at Hoover. Maybe you should do a private sector view. I think that our markets aren't fully reflecting this risk accurately yet. I don't think Moody's are standard and poor's are accurately reflecting the risk of sea level rise to our coastal communities. They have talked about it, but they haven't done any downgrading based on that risk yet. Interestingly, where I have seen the most engagement on the risk is in our utilities. Our water sector, wastewater treatment, you can imagine is mostly at sea level. Sandy, the storm surge that was described came in, flooded our wastewater treatment plants, flooded the surrounding waters and then because waste travels downhill, they are highly vulnerable to sea level rise and flooding. Similarly here in California with the wildfire risk to transmission towers, you see PG&E and Southern Cal Edison both have resilience officers who specifically look at climate resilience issues for the leadership of those companies and they begin to take steps. More widely in the economy, it's in my experience less common except if it might be a large company looking at their supply chain risk, Nike, Nestle, different food companies. Coca-Cola. Well now the Trump administration has done some specific things. They roll back the Clean Power Plan and that's regulatory action. How much of a difference will that make on the evolution of the system? On what time scale? Whatever time scale you want to give an interesting answer. I'll elaborate. But if you think about 2025 for example, the 26-28% reduction doesn't matter that much because it doesn't kick until 2022. But even if it stayed, that's when the reductions would start to be required. But in the long term it makes it harder to get to the goals because it had the effect of speeding the retirement particularly of the oldest, least efficient coal-fired power plant. If that doesn't happen then it's a negative. I thought the market was pushing out the retirement as some of these older, more... Yeah, I think that's it. You've seen the ones that go first when you replace with natural gas or the oldest, least efficient ones for sure. And then it's right in the sense that if you really want a disciplined process then you keep this in place. Now it's going to depend entirely on the decisions of CEOs and their boards and shareholders and it won't necessarily happen in the time frame that those who judge that this is urgent would want it to take place within. Maybe just add one question to this which I think is an issue that really certainly warrants more conversation is the retirement of nuclear capacity. One of the things that's been very, very interesting is that we think about the current numbers in the United States electricity fleet and think about who's retiring. They're retiring as a combination of gas and the renewables and they're retiring because they operate at a commercial margin which is insufficient to meet those costs. And yet it's a zero carbon source. It's a source that in the near term if we were to disband we'd almost certainly replace largely with gas because the point would all be renewables. It's point sources which means that it's enormous individual locations of demand and supply. And we haven't got a model there. So one of the things that's interesting to me is whether or not on the upside the Trump administration might do something positive for nuclear which could in turn do something positive for the emissions. But John, if you look at the budget in lens old area of responsibility the nuclear budget is proposed to be cut 30% with a team that supports small modular reactor research for example which is the most promising future for our nuclear power. Let's go to a hypothetical which has the probability of happening right now a $50 ton carbon of carbon dioxide equivalent tax. Would that fix the problem of nuclear or would that just not be enough to make them economical? The numbers we ran in the policy office when I was still at DOE suggest that's insufficient. What? $100? Getting close. At $100 what's kind of interesting though at $100 you probably do other things first. Because even then there are cheaper things in the hierarchy of action. Somewhere around $100 you probably bring in carbon capture and storage. Somewhere at $100 you have a massive efficiency improvement. Somewhere at $100 you probably have significant capacity on distributed generation to remanage the grid and look at battery storage. So at what point do you play that out with a discrete set of policies instead of something like a price? So what this reflects is the fact that we in markets you're talking about one market signal which would be a carbon price but there are other issues for the grid it's having rotating machinery gives you stability on frequency and phase angle that you might not have otherwise. There's the question versus intermentancy and there's a whole host of services that go with the different kinds of plants that we don't recognize in the markets right now. Now some places New York has talked about for example a premium to help the nukes stay alive partly to deal with that. But I think it reflects a broader issue which is that even as we think about all the cool technology options that we can bring to clean energy we should also be thinking about the market structures and what those say to investors because we do want a diversified energy system that's in the national interest as well. Why? Why are you careful with diversified technologies? Because it's more stable and more secure against what? And probably better and more resilient against any kind of supply disruption. Space weather. But I think what we're saying is without some major reform of the markets, the whole market structures or a level of carbon tax which we're not going to get nuclear is not a very happy future for nuclear power. Is that fair? Am I wrong on what I'm saying? It's hard to be optimistic even if you believe that it should be part of a clean energy future. I don't know what it means to be optimistic. Is optimistic you happy it's going to go away or is optimistic you happy? No, optimistic about nuclear remaining a significant part of our energy mix given what's happening today. Do you all basically agree on that? Worldwide I think the Chinese, the Koreans and others are moving into nuclear generation and provision across to other countries. One of the concerns for national security purposes is proliferation of nuclear power in some countries where we may not have as great an understanding of what our controls are. So there's an interesting intersection growing between climate change and nuclear power. I don't think it has been fully appreciated what risks there might be as we try to transition to a clean economy given that we have non-state actors who might have access. This is a hugely important issue and one of the reasons it's been beneficial to us to have a leading nuclear power industry is that we have been purveyors of technology to countries around the world seeking to deploy nuclear power technology. We have placed controls on the way that technology would be used so that there is not enrichment and reprocessing that could lead to a defense military nuclear program. Without our presence in the marketplace others who have no scruples are going to prevail and it's not only our allies, the Japanese and the Koreans are looking at the Russians and the Chinese doing major deals at and undercutting costs and that's a huge risk. I think it's very important to have raised that Alice. It's another reason to regret the challenges to the domestic nuclear power industry. That doesn't speak to the issue of training and capacity because as our system declines in size and scale we're no longer providing a cohort of students who come through engineering programs, who become nuclear physicists, who learn how to run the system who can keep it in train and that's a problem that we're already seeing in the pipeline of new capacity. All of these things combine. I completely agree. It's an ecosystem. Okay, well let's talk. We've seen some unhappy things happening but what do you see what the U.S. world will be in fact going forward and when I say the U.S. world I mean the combination of the federal government, the state government, the cities the private industry, the government, where it's a whole world surging ahead of us while we're going to limp behind her. What do you see happening is our goal in the future. People want to take that on. I'm never smart enough to keep my mouth shut when I should I guess but first of all I think there is a huge opportunity space on the energy R&D pipeline. There's been a recognition in this country and the world that energy is woven through the fabric of modern societies in a way that is absolutely essential. Students are interested in this university. We have a very big and very active energy R&D program and it goes all the way across from the technology side through to the policy side and regulatory side as well. There's a huge capability in this country. If you look at the national labs Liz pointed out earlier that those are treasures of national capability that we've built over a long period of time and we need to sustain that expertise. That means not accepting the recommended budget for the Department of Energy but I was encouraged by the hearing particularly the Senate budget hearing where I'll just quote one thing that Senator Alexander said when ARPA-E came up, ARPA-E has been a very successful program that really has worked at transitioning technologies into the stage where they're ready to scale in the marketplace. He just said he was very disappointed in the budget as a whole and with respect to cancelling ARPA-E that will not happen. I think there's some evidence at least that there's congressional support to maintain our place in the world. Let's transition a little bit more to the budget discussion as you've said. Other comments first on the DOE budget and then I'd also like to bring in the EPA budget department budget. Three big actors that the skinny budget and the fat budget just decimated anything that they were doing on climate. Who would like to take on the budget, the rest of the budget things? There's already been a fair amount of discussion about what happened with the DOE budget. The top line for the DOE budget has not dramatically changed. The budget has been at about 29 billion dollars most recently. What the proposal involves is a major shift away from funding of clean energy and investment in science and technology research to the nuclear dimension of DOE's responsibilities. That is defense nuclear, the production of the nuclear deterrent and associated programs. That would be to be a cutting of muscle where we should not be cut and cutting it on the side of the house that Lynn was responsible for. If we are seeking to enhance our work on the defense side, we should find additional resources to do it. Not at the expense of the science and energy program. The current proposal and this hasn't been agreed to by Congress and you've noted this pushback that science would be cut approximately 17% nuclear 31 fossil energy 54 renewables is the dramatic cut. It's a 70% cut in the renewables budget transportation. For example, light weighting vehicles and electric vehicles 40%. Energy efficiency. I talked about this this morning. There's a very significant cutback there. The reliability part. 74% cut or maybe even more in the efficiency budget. And 100% as Lynn noted, then very importantly also 100% wiping out the loan program's office. Which is a very significant program designed to put the investments of the federal treasury in major undertakings to deploy clean energy solutions and earn the money back. And it's all been repaid. Can I just change the ground rules? I caused the problem by talking about the skinny and the fat budget. My understanding is all those budgets were dead on arrival when they reached the cut and they weren't even much of a starting point. Is that true? What do you think is going to happen in time? What's going to survive and what's not? I think it's important to consider the original intent of the leadership. Now, Secretary Perry indicated in the testimony that he hadn't been part of the development of this budget. He was up before the hill having to defend it. Extraordinary. Extraordinary. We must take some, we must hope that this means that there is a negotiation that will take place and that our members of Congress and advocates from the outside, those who care will weigh in and seek to reshape this budget to be a more sensible budget that reflects the interests of the country. Okay. Go on. It's not just to be the DOE budget but I think actually what I want to say is likely to I think it applies there too. So there is going to be, there's enough support in the Congress for many of these things including the science part of EPA that there will be congressional pushback. It much depends on how they choose to deal with the budget caps. If there is this big increase in the DOD budget then that really puts lots of pressure across the whole rest of the budget. What Senator Alexander said was it was not okay to balance the budget based on the National R&D National Institute of Health and two other national things but he just said that's not the right way to do it. I think it's a tough budget year but it won't be as bad as the President's budget. I had two additional things to the comments that has already been made. The first one is that it is likely in my mind that we'll have a continuing resolution again. I just don't think we're going to resolve this problem very quickly. At least not now but I think it's creating the debate that's going to pass forward over a period of time and in my mind the thing that I think is really important is that we have a lot of discussion about the budget but the detailed programs get killed and that's an easy way to do it because they have one or two voices and they get overwhelmed by the majority of the loud voices in favor of the headline. We may end up with the DOE budget that says it's only a 6% cut swallow it and do a little fixing and Perry has given the mandate to do some readjustment internally and what's startling to me is the notion that you can run this program with that kind of a reduction in force. So I've worked on it off of the State Department since 89. I'm struck in the context of a conversation that I had today. One of the things that the Secretary has proposed to cut are all of the people who give out visas and you would have thought that giving out visas is going to be a pretty important thing but that's on the line because the people who come in for their first tour who go into a foreign service post and that's what they do and we're cutting that back. I don't really understand how this works. This is not exactly a clear model for progress. This is independent of whether or not you believe that you should still have an aid and a development assistance program and that you should support African investment and you should play out in terms of allies because they give you security at a global level. I think that the Secretary was able to articulate it very clearly in his testimony. Jim, you asked earlier there were questions. It was in the earliest discussion about implications of this for the long term and one of the big implications of this kind of budgetary situation is a message to young people who will be studying at a place like D.O.E. where you need to see that there's a prospect for professional development to want to be a scientist there versus in the private sector which is quite competitive and so I think we send a very pernicious message when we need the best young minds to come in and work on building a better community. I think that's one of the important things to come in and work on behalf of the public good that this isn't a safe bet to make when we are in a budgetary environment like this and they see the kinds of cuts that are being threatened to some of our most important science enterprises in the federal space. Let me turn to Alice but I want to make sure we get in another idea as part of the conversation. It's not just the young people who are really talented. Are they leaving and can you rebuild afterwards or is this permanent well 20 year damage to agencies. Both of the young people coming up and the senior people who the ones that have really most talent who can get opportunities outside would seem to be the ones most likely to leave and then expand that Alice. I first just want to say one other thing that I don't think we've appreciated as a result of our pulling back on our push for climate cutting our emissions as well as resilience. There will be increased pressure on finding solutions through geo engineering. Just in this short time I have been contacted by people who are interested in pursuing this. That was more of a theoretical science changing but I think we have to recognize that it could be a company, a billionaire or someone else who chooses to try to change our climate so that we don't have these such bad impacts. I don't know how that plays out but that is increased as a risk in my opinion as a result of our pulling back. What's happening in the federal government? I do think that not a lot of career people are leaving. Some who are ready for retirement I have observed are leaving but it is difficult to find a job in climate right now so it may be better just to stay and see where it plays out. I do think what's happening is because it's so uncertain and I can tell you that they just contact me and they're thinking should I stay, should I go and then I ask what you're working on and they say not much because there's no direction. President Trump hasn't been able to fill his positions. These are people who have been working on climate issues. There's no signal from the top as to what's to happen so they're waiting and it's not a good result for them or for us as taxpayers so some choices need to be made but we don't have the senior team in place to make the choices yet. I want to put one more piece on the table here which is that one of the places that people would tend to go to for this kind of work is our academic institutions but if you take a look at the average academic institution a very substantial share of its budget comes from federal dollars and those federal dollars are also under attack. They're under attack from the National Science Foundation from the Department of Energy Science budget from the budget at USDA from the budget at NOAA from the budget at NASA all of which have seen remarkable cuts. I take a big research institution and I think about its overhead and I talked about this to the Dean at Stanford at one point at a meeting and the story that I got back was that something on the order of 60% of the budget is in some fashion connected back to federal dollars. So a place like this does pretty well for a few years. It's got a big endowment it can manage to live fairly well. I did my PhD at the University of Minnesota. It has a fair number of dollars coming out of the state government coffers and not of the federal dollars but it's still 50% federal. I look at some of the smaller private schools which are using that same thing. So this is a much deeper in my mind much more significant attack on the basic science. It doesn't stop with the DOE labs or the NOAA labs or the scientists at HQ. And so can we add one more point here because it takes us directly to the fact that we are observing which is that there are other countries that are seducing our young scientists. That's the only way to put it. They have big research budgets, they have big labs, and they are coming to places like Stanford and recruiting our minds to go and work on their programs that will ultimately outcompete us. It's going to be a huge concern for our future. Lynn, you were going to say something about this. This was your responsibility the only jump in. I was just going to say that but we have a secret weapon and that's Stanford students. But they're recruiting Stanford students. No I know. But can you expand some of these things? I can certainly talk. Because this was your role there. So I think there's this larger question of the role, how much we invest as a country in science as an enterprise as a whole. And people around here have heard me talk endlessly about how we need the full portfolio of fundamental science, of applications and plenty of crosstalk between those two. I still think that's true and I think there's lots of support for that idea in the country as a whole. In terms of the specific cuts in the Office of Science, the biggest ones were in the biological environmental research programs that the things where we did the stuff related to climate. There are also some cuts in the some recommended cuts in the fusion program in places. But that's where the biggest reductions would stretch out some of the construction of user facilities and reduce the operating time on the light sources and neutron sources and the big user facilities that the nation relies on. I think that doesn't recognize the fact that there's not just university research there but there's a whole lot of industrial research that goes on using those facilities. So those cuts I think are not in the national interest but I think there's also recognition in both congressional committees that looked at the budget this year that that's the case. The problem with people I think is a bigger, longer term problem and that is that it's much easier to take apart the capabilities that have been built at the national labs than it is to build it up over time. So there's recognition of that in the congressional hearing so I think we'll see some pushback there too but it is definitely something to worry about and I think what's happening in at least at DOE is people are just waiting to see what happens a little bit maybe they're waiting for the packages that they think might come down the pike but they're kind of holding their breath now to see what happens as the Congress weighs in here and if we don't have a budget and we have an operating under a continuum resolution well then that adds another dimension to it. Let's expand that a little bit one of the things that is happening or if there's not happening is nominations of the people below the secretary level the undersecretaries and the deputy secretaries and of course the agency I think the last estimate I've heard of what is it 1500 presidential appointees and so forth 65 nominations had come through that was a few weeks ago it was only after can agencies really function that way and what's happening Could they have functioned without us of course they could have Yeah No I mean what is happening I mean it's hard to even shut down an agency it's completely bizarre I think where it hurts is President Trump being able to drive his agenda ironically and I heard a wonderful story when I first became a political appointee from someone who served in George W Bush's administration and he said this is what it's like when you're a secretary you go to a cabinet meeting and the president for the first time says you know Tom I'd like you to work on this you say yes sir I will I'll get right on that it's not something you want to do so you're not doing it next time next cabinet meeting how's that going oh sir we are on it we're working on it we're looking into it a few obstacles but we'll we're working on it of course goes back nothing happens third time you know it's serious I've got to do something same thing happens at all levels it's about accountability and if you do not have a senior leader or someone with authority saying this has to get done if it's not part of what the career folks had thought was on their agenda it won't necessarily get done unless there's some accountability and I think that's what the gap is for President Trump to be able to achieve his agenda without people following up so I just like to add because I think you're right on the political level I would observe that many of these agencies do a lot of work that's fundamentally apolitical and the people who are missing are people who are responsible for leadership and management of the enterprise I mean the deputy is the statutory chief operating officer you have responsibilities for an enormous number of activities on behalf of the American people that if you don't manage efficiently will either not be executed or will be conducted in a way that does not respect the taxpayers investment there are numerous ways in which things can go sideways and we read about them all the time in the newspaper the responsibility of leadership is to oversee this in a way that delivers the responsibilities we have to the American people so I worry very much about the function of our government if you're responsible for some of the for example environmental cleanup the Department of Energy cleans up massive projects where the United States manufactured plutonium and highly enriched uranium for the nuclear weapons program these are communities that have enormous contamination responsibility to clean them up these are multi-billion-dollar decadal undertakings and they're very complex and they're usually over budget and over schedule and the responsibility of leadership is to oversee getting those things done and driving progress there's no one to drive progress right now so things just will drift they won't be overseen in a way that enforces the kind of discipline that should be enforced we have about two minutes left I want to bring a little bit back to Silicon Valley and the state because what we do see is the state trying to take leadership but we also see attempts by the federal government to roll back at cafe standards for example California's have a waiver to have standards above others how much do we have to fear about the ability of the Trump Administration to roll back California's ability to manage its own whatever we believe about states' rights what's happening there will cafe standards for example survive the US that is will be the enhanced cafe standards for California to survive so that's a subject of debate right now what's your speculation is about going to happen I don't have a crystal ball a limb does, excellent I just have my fingers crossed she sent you an answer I mean there was some rumor mongering in Politico the other day about how Scott Pruitt did not wish to take on the waiver issue I have no idea whether that's credible or not but I hope it's right well that's a legal issue maybe we have a judge on the panel oh yeah good idea I'm going to deduct that one we have only a few seconds left I want to give each of you just a chance you want to say just a few closing words because these will be the things that will start closing and I'm supposed to have about 10 minutes of wrap up time so we can cut into that because I find this much more interesting than anything I was going to say I would just close on something very simple which is I think the most important development that we see is the decoupling of economic growth from emissions that was talked about in the earlier part of this in your presentation this morning looking at some of your charts which you wrote about in your book as well Jim the wonderful book you did for Hoover and I think there the important action that we will see in the coming years regardless of what happens in Washington is what the private sector does to generate opportunity in our economy and to bring these solutions that have been innovated here to the countries around the world that need them that is a way of moving forward that is that positions us to be strong economically and to continue to lead the world regardless of the policy decisions that are being made in Washington so I have some reason to hope it is not sufficient but it is the best way forward that I can see in the near term to continue advancing this agenda which is so important to our future just to maybe build a little bit on Liz's comments it does strike me that we have two agendas before us and the agenda is exactly when Liz has laid out this is a community of entrepreneurs a community of inventors people with resources, people with access to both political capacity economic capacity and international connections it is up to you guys to make this happen and it is up to all of us to support you I think the second thing though that probably as important is that ultimately we have to think about what we want as a nation and that we have a role in making that choice also that the same things that give you the capacity to succeed in your chosen disciplines and your areas of work are ones that will help us succeed collectively and it doesn't happen if we sit quietly on our thumbs and wait for someone else to make that happen I would like to close with a reminder that we should be optimistic I think back to the late 1960's when we were having this same debate about air and water quality a very long story but we passed the Clean Air Act based at least partly on industry not wanting to have 50 sets of rules and here we are 47 years later and we haven't solved every problem but it's a heck of a lot better than it was we're kind of still in that debate period with regard to climate so if we take the long view and think about the kinds of capability that are reflected in the people that are here today and the students that we see at Stanford we can do this we have to work, we have to do it over a long period of time but humans are so invented when we're really challenged to be so that I think we should remember that and remember how important the energy space is to the way we live our lives and live on this planet and that alone is a considerable hope that we can figure out how to do this My last word is that as a result of the change in the balance of power I think there's tremendous opportunity for you particularly you sit in the seat of innovation technology at your fingertips and you are in the state that is taking the lead in figuring out solutions for the nation and really the world so when I think of the opportunity ahead and that it won't be necessarily the federal government, the big entity solving these problems I'm reminded of a quote from Margaret Mead who said, never doubt what a small group of committed people can accomplish indeed in the world that's all who have ever done anything and really it's going to take committed leaders looking at your own risks figuring out better ways to be sustainable and sharing that with the rest of the world because what you have here is more advanced than pretty much what the rest of the world is looking at Those would have been great things to end on but I decided I lied a few moments ago because I want to ask one more question and go ahead and give you a chance should we resist we're trying to be hopeful here's the question listen to the question then decide what you want to do there's about 25 students here most of them for Stanford but others are from other universities they're from many countries if you were speaking directly to them they're studying a career what would you what ideas would you want to leave in the minds of the students sitting around here if anybody is willing to take that on without resisting Liz that I won't resist where are these students everybody is a student stand up here please just stand up stand up you know how to stand up right thank you excellent if I were a student today I would choose the hardest problems in the world I'd look out at the world and if you're in this room you've chosen already clearly one of the hardest problems and I would devote my life to working on them because it's what's worth working on are the hardest problems and I would get an education that would prepare me with the power tools I needed to make a difference in that space and in this era not having an education in STEM really I think impairs you from being effective so I would do a do over because I'm a soft scientist I didn't come through as you did you too because that's critical to solving the world's problems and so I encourage you all to believe despite what you've heard the concerns expressed here legitimate concerns about the current course of policy and know that there are ebbs and flows in everything and we will have opportunities to serve in the future if you choose to work on these hard problems you should also look for a way to participate in public service because it's enormously meaningful and you feel part of something larger than yourself and get to work with an extraordinary team of devoted people who want to contribute to their country in the world I'm with Liz that was great and I only have one more thing it's really fun you will work with a lot of people you will like you will respect you'll have a really good time with because you're all working on something important it's incredibly interesting it's global so it's fun and it's tough and it's important so we need all the players we can get on the field we have every confidence in your ability to change the world to get to work so I would say everything they said but I said a little bit differently in terms of your focus and if you want to ensure there's a wide open field for you to play a role in get involved with climate resilience if I ask to show of hands of who's working on climate resilience and who's working on sustainability here you'll see it's about 1 in 100 but if we've heard these impacts are coming we're going to need to plan everywhere climate affects virtually everything you can be an expert in any field if you know about climate impacts and I guarantee you there will be plenty of jobs to figure out how we can address these impacts I want to thank the panel