 Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome. My name is Bill Burns, and I'm the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. It's truly an honor and a privilege to welcome Secretary of Energy Ernie Manees to Carnegie. Those who have had the good fortune of working with Ernie are intimately familiar with his MIT smarts. Those of you who have had the misfortune of negotiating with him are intimately familiar with his Fall River toughness. And all of you, I suspect, are familiar with his viral late-night TV appearances. I've learned a great deal from Ernie over the years, from his mastery of the Iranian nuclear program to his infamous debates with our nation's most esteemed collection of nuclear and climate scientists, the House of Representatives. Ernie is not only one of our nation's most remarkable minds, he's also a remarkable colleague and public servant, and I'm very pleased that he's joined us this afternoon to preview the historic Paris climate conference, which begins later this month. Being Secretary Manees on stage is my friend Steve Clemens, the Washington editor-at-large for the Atlantic, and senior fellow and founder of the American Strategy Program at New America. Steve is a D.C. institution, someone who has followed and shaped the most significant policy debates of our time, and I cannot think of a more consequential debate than the one on climate policy and diplomacy. There is no question that among the overarching challenges facing the United States and the world, climate change ranks at the very top. The facts are as clear as they are compelling. Well, but one of the 10 hottest years in history have occurred in the 21st century. In the past three decades alone, Arctic sea ice has lost half its area and three-quarters of its volume. Sea level has risen by about three to five inches since 1950, presenting a real and present danger to half the world's population that lives on or near a coastline. These dramatic trends have led the Department of Defense to conclude that climate change poses immediate risk to U.S. national security. In addition to the risks it poses to our coastline cities and environment, the report argues that climate change is a threat multiplier that makes nearly all other global challenges from poverty to pandemics more severe and more intractable. Under President Obama's leadership, Secretary Kerry and Secretary Manees and their colleagues across the U.S. government have spent the past several years building an international coalition to combat climate change. And in Paris they'll look to put that coalition to work and to secure concrete actions that will slow and hopefully reverse today's very dangerous trend lines. We're very fortunate that Secretary Manees has agreed to make a pit stop at Carnegie on the eve of the final ministerial meeting in Paris, and we're especially fortunate to have another opportunity to benefit from his wisdom and skills. So please join me in welcoming Secretary Manees and Steve Clemens. Thank you. Mr. Secretary. Okay. Well, thanks, Steve. Let me make a few remarks. First of all, let me thank Bill Burns, who I would reciprocate with just a fabulous colleague in the administration on a number of issues, including our favorite shared issue on the Iran negotiations. But I have to say, in fact, just last weekend I was in the Middle East and it's always Bill Burns slept here, you know, in every hotel we go to. So it was really fun to work with Bill. Thank you for the opportunity to come here today. And actually, with this discussion, we are releasing a report that I'll come back to called Revolution Now. But let me just say a few words about our pathway and our is the administration, and it's especially the Department of Energy role that I'm going to focus on today going into Paris. I'm going to take as a given the various issues that Bill talked about in terms of climate risk and really talk about the solutions. And our approach, not surprising perhaps for the Department of Energy, is going to be very technology focused. We are advancing the theme that energy technology innovation and the resultant continued cost reductions of clean energy technologies are ultimately key to meeting our challenges in climate change. It's for a whole bunch of reasons. First, quite simply, lower cost clean energy solutions enable policy to move forward more quickly. In the context of Paris, we are at a pretty remarkable place compared to what I think most thought say a year ago. I think the joint announcement of President Obama and Xi in Beijing last year kind of changed the conversation globally. The fact that both countries have moved forward with important national steps of commitment to their targets, United States with the Clean Power Plan, for example, China with its cap and trade announcement, has really helped move commitments now by I think it's over 160 countries, commitments that are taken together, quite reasonably ambitious, commitments that when executed would really move the needle on our approach to climate change. We also know that the analysis suggests that nevertheless these are not two-degree centigrade commitments when taken collectively. Maybe it's closer to three. However, here's where the innovation theme comes in again. With continued cost reduction, what we would see is that enabling increasing ambition as time goes on. And that notion has certainly been confirmed by many of our critical international partners. And third, in terms of why this agenda is so important, the if we anticipate going forward, and by the way, I'm not talking only 2025, 2030. I'm talking also 2050 and 2100, where we're going to have to keep squeezing down very, very hard on greenhouse gas emissions. Certainly if we are going to bring along everyone, including the least developed countries, who have many challenges in providing universal service, energy services to many of their citizens, we're going to need this cost reduction to continue. So again, this is a central theme that we will be advocating. And today, and I'm sorry, I should say that that will be in two stops in Paris. As Bill mentioned, next week I will have the pleasure of chairing the biannual energy ministerial of the International Energy Agency. And then of course that will be followed a week and a half later by the COP 21 meetings in Paris, including December the 8th, a day that the French hosts have labeled Innovation Day to continue the theme. So we will be advocating this in effect continuously from now through the end of the COP meetings. And then of course, next year, get down to the real job of implementing that agenda. What I'd like to do, Steve, in the rest of our time is at the appropriate point, say a bit more about the Revolution Now report. And also talk about some of the neat technologies we're going to showcase when we're there. Well, actually, with your permission, let me just show one graph. One graph. One graph, one graph. One graph. They're cool graphs, actually. There we go. It's your name. No, no, that's very interesting. There we go. So this is, we won't dwell on this right now, but this is the first graph out of the Revolution Now report. And what it shows is the, as you can see, the indexed cost reductions over the last six or so years in five technologies, land-based wind, utility scale, photovoltaics, distributed photovoltaics, battery costs for electric vehicles, and LED lights. And without going through all the details now, what you can see is minus 40%, minus 50%, minus 60%, minus 70%, and minus 90% as cost reductions in just a half a dozen years in these technologies. It's a remarkable story, not well enough known. That's why we're trying to highlight it with this. And the kind of story that we need to continue, and not only for these five technologies, but for all of the other low carbon options. So let me ask you the obvious question with this drop in price reduction, if we and the aggregate have been able to achieve such dramatic scale and drop in price without pricing carbon, then why do we need to price carbon? The, first of all, if there were a carbon price, and I said if there were, I didn't say that that was our policy, but if there were, it would clearly have the advantage of a economy wide approach in terms of the least cost approach, probably through market mechanisms for achieving low carbon. So that is still necessary in my view. But again, these kinds of cost reductions make that or another policy mechanism going forward certainly easier. But some of this is clearly happening in a dramatic way. LEDs, let's say, as the most impressive of those price cost reductions. Well, we have gone from very small deployments half dozen years ago, when even though the life cycle cost was in your favor, it was kind of a big barrier to put down 20 bucks for a light fixture. Now it's come down to literally we're getting to months of payback period, and we have 80 million deployed suddenly. You were telling me the other night that India was about to go just gangbusters on LED if I didn't get that wrong. You didn't get it right. And that might tilt the universe. So India is making mass purchases of LEDs. They have a current order for a few hundred million over three years. And with that, they have driven the cost down for them to a dollar. Amazing. And of course, their goal here, they are going to use that to distribute to their rural population, where introducing lighting of this type is a game changer, literally a life changer for families. And of course, the idea is with LEDs requiring roughly one sixth of power, it dramatically reduces what they need to pay to get the source of electricity for the lighting. Many people in the environment energy world see the transitions that you're talking about here as big costs to the US economy, leading to decreased competitiveness. This came up in the GOP debates when Marco Rubio said, we just can't go down that path. The costs are too high. Is this without being specific to Rubio necessarily? But is this revolution now report a response to those critics who think that the retrofitting of the US economy around these next generation energy technologies is not as high a bar as they would argue? Well, it is certainly a big part of that. But I do want to emphasize that certainly any of the, what I would say, reliable economic modeling, general equilibrium models, etc., of the economy suggest that going to low carbon has a very, very small impact on GDP. So kind of the macroeconomic impacts are very small. However, there are distributional effects. And that's where I think one gets into the politics, the economics, etc. Because clearly any change in a society has some dislocations that the society has to adjust to. So that's where, certainly in the administration, we are sensitive to the idea of needing to provide assistance to certain kinds of communities and areas where the distributional impacts may be felt. But certainly the idea that this is a big drain on the overall economy I think is just incorrect. Secretary, is this a hair on fire issue? Not that I want your hair on fire, but I mean, you know, is it the other day? I want to recognize Jessica Matthews, Jessica Bill's predecessor here at Carnegie, was with me in Abu Dhabi the other day. We had a panel that was on global shocks. And as I went through the panelists, most of them were talking about whether Iran, the nuclear deal, Syria, big problems. And then Jessica says, we've got to focus on climate. It was a very compelling thing. And I raised the question with Jessica at that time about, was this the climate issue sort of seen as a squishy issue by other sort of, you know, the more muscular national security issue? Could it hold its own as a topic? And so I'm asking really a question on urgency and whether you feel that this issue that we're preparing for in Paris hangs with the other major national security issues of the day. You should always listen to Jessica. I did. So the answer is yes. The reality is that, well, if we take two degrees, we're pretty much halfway there. However, we have cooked in a lot more because it takes quite a while for the atmosphere and the oceans, et cetera, to come into equilibrium. Now, having said that, what are the consequences? Well, a very simple one to see is, in fact, rising sea levels. And there we can easily see putting aside for the moment the drivers of extreme weather. Just putting that aside for the moment, you see the amplification of the impact because of higher sea level. That's just, that's one example. Now secondly, let's not put aside the extreme weather drivers. Again, we cannot associate individual events, but we know the amplification effect on extreme weather. We know that the patterns of extreme rainfall and of drought are exactly what was predicted decades ago, quite literally. We know that that in turn leads to issues like extreme wildfire. We know that that leads to disease vectors. Specifically, I'll talk about my beloved Western forests with things like bark beetle ranges expanding dramatically. So we are seeing the impacts. Other countries are seeing the impacts. We know we have already cooked in additional impact. The mitigation, the minimization of those impacts is absolutely critical. And that's why we cannot afford to sit back and expect the characteristic 50 year time frame for historical major changes in the energy system. We just can't do that. We don't have the time. And by the way, when President Obama put out his climate action plan in June of 2013, he started out by saying, look, we love to work with Congress on a legislative approach, something that could have an economy-wide impact of the type that we discussed earlier, have a market-based optimization. But then he also added, however, we don't have time to wait. And so in the meantime, we are going forward using whatever administrative authorities we already have for an aggressive program. But this is inherently kind of a sector-by-sector approach using administrative authorities versus the kind of economy-wide approach we could have if we could work with Congress on an appropriate legislative solution. So what does a mathematical equation look like over time when we have such a dependency on various fossil fuel sources of energy? And you and I were with a number of leaders from that industry the other night who say this is all fine and good, but even with this, you're not going to reach the scale that displaces the overwhelming dependence on fossil fuel for many decades. And how do you deal with that as the steward of the whole portfolio? What is the equation of displacement? Can it go faster because of this? Or is it just simply an incorrect assertion that wind, solar, and other photovoltaics and others can't, in fact, achieve a much greater scale than predicted? Well, first of all, by the way, on the technology side, clearly for solar wind in particular to scale even much more dramatically than we have now, does require other solutions, whether it's a combination of storage, smart grid, all of these possibilities. But let me go back a step. As you know, some people like the expression, some don't. I personally never tire of it, the all of the above approach. How about the sum of the above approach? No, no, no, absolutely. There are too many people who like the sum of the above approach. And by the way, some means my favorite technology as the silver bullet. This is not going to work. There is not going to be a single low carbon solution for the world. There's not going to be a single low carbon solution within the United States. We're going to have dramatic regional differences. So we say all of the above, let me make it very clear, all of the above starts out with a commitment to low carbon. And now the statement is that we need a certain Department of Energy responsibility is to advance the research and development demonstration for all fuels for a low carbon world. So for coal, for example, it's very clear what that means. That means advancing and engaging in the same kind of cost reduction for carbon capture, utilization, and sequestration. What about natural gas in the power sector? Is natural gas part of the problem or part of the solution? And the answer is yes. Right now it is clearly part of the solution. It's had a major role in CO2 emissions reduction through its market driven substitution for coal in many places. And it's carbon light. However, not in this decade or the next decade perhaps, but as we go to a trajectory of ever lower carbon emissions, well then natural gas will be too carbon intense and it will need carbon capture and sequestration. Fundamentally, in terms of the question of the fossil fuels, what we need to think about is that if you look at solutions to climate change, typically, what you find is number one, and again, I'm not talking now short term like 10 or 15 years. I'm talking even going out many, many, many decades that the demand side, energy efficiency conservation, always have to be a big part of the solution. I don't believe we can supply side our way out of the challenge over the long term. Supply is still important. What is the next sector, if you like, where you will see decarbonization fastest? It probably is electricity. For one thing, we have many different options, including coal with carbon capture, renewables, et cetera. Industrial processes. Many industrial processes are very, very well tuned or have processes that are amenable to something like carbon capture. You have, whether it's an ethanol plant or a natural gas plant, they tend to have, getting slightly technical, rather pure streams of CO2 that are inexpensive to capture, for example. The transportation sector is likely more challenging. For one thing, you have smaller mobile sources rather than large point sources. And secondly, the reality is there is no higher energy density per cubic foot than a petroleum-based fuel. That's just a fact of life. So that's obviously very convenient for a transportation vehicle. Nevertheless, we have a three-prong strategy to address that. One is efficiency of vehicles. Part of that is the CAFE standards, but a lot of it is technology. You told John Stewart we're going to 50 miles a gallon for vehicles. We're going to 50 plus miles per gallon for light-duty vehicles 2025? As you go through that. No, I've got to finish my three prongs. Efficiency, biofuels, and electric vehicles. There you are. When you heard about Volkswagen, just tell us what it was like for you when you heard about the Volkswagen thing. Well, look, in the end, the EPA is the one who has to investigate all those issues. But it's still landed on your basket, would you say? No, but obviously, given the apparent evasion of some of these measurements, it's obviously something we can't tolerate, and we won't. So I think the EPA is correctly moving. How many other EPA members do you think are out there? I hope none. But obviously, the EPA is now going to move towards much more mobile testing to actually do the measurements in real-world drive cycles and use. And so we're driven to that. How Volkswagen resolves that issue with the regulator's here and you're off. Well, it was not nice. But I was pushing along again, because I did read your report, which I hope folks will pick up. And I understand that I want to get into the role real quickly, and I want to go to the audience soon. But the DOE's role in this, in terms of how do you tilt? Poor this. I know you're working on light-weighting vehicles. You're working on truck efficiencies with truck transportation. Super truck. Super truck, we call it. And it's a fascinating array of things. And I'm always interested when I meet people like you. There's this stuff up here you have on the graph, but I know you know the things in the energy field that we're not talking about that we haven't, that we don't even know about. You know what the moonshots are that are cool. And I liked that part of the report that flirted with some of the things that we're coming on in the future. So can you share with us a little ankle about what's not in the report, which just a little bit further on? Next week in Paris, I mentioned technology showcase. Yeah. These are the technologies we're going to do. But let me just go quickly. How about flying wind turbines? I didn't know he was going to do this. How about a 50-wet megawatt nuclear reactor that can be built in a factory and just taken over the highways to a site? How about a great, efficient, solid oxide fuel cell? How about a great driver? How about a, this is an oak ridge. This is for, I was looking out at the audience, I'd say, for approximately a quarter of you. You should remember that this is the 50th anniversary of the Shelby Cobra. And this is oak ridge. Is this James Bond's vehicle? Well, I'll take you for a ride. Oak Ridge, our Oak Ridge National Laboratory with some companies, what this displays is a 3D printed car. Wow, this is an electric vehicle, Shelby Cobra. But the point is, things like new manufacturing processes, like 3D printing, highly efficient, that's going to be part of the lightweighting, for example, of a future. Supercritical CO2 power fuel cycle. Now that sounds very catchy. It's very important. What's that going to do for me? What's that going to do for you is whether it's applied in a coal plant or a nuclear plant, any thermal plant, it will dramatically increase the efficiency of the plant. This is a hybrid solar thermal photovoltaic technology out of our ARPA-E program in Arizona and a novel little low-head hydro thing. So those are examples. How did you know I was going to ask that question? Thank you. And actually, those are going to physically be in Paris next week so that we can display to the ministers who were there, et cetera, why ambition is a good thing in addressing climate change. And this is going to be part of the solution. That's an amazing roster of things. And so when you look at all of that, how does it actually technically work? I know that you have an ARPA-E that works with a lot of innovators, but how does the R&D system kind of function? Because I do know your role in the nuclear arena, which is very well described. It's not very well understood the role that you're playing in other areas of innovation. Well, first of all, it's highly varied. And let me give you kind of different examples to highlight that. Let me start by saying it's by no means our full research effort, but certainly we have 17 national laboratories, and they play an absolutely central role, from everything to energy to basic science to our nuclear security responsibilities. Now, in terms of how it works, it's quite varied. For example, if I start at the very basic research end, we have currently a network of 32 what are called energy frontier research centers out of our Office of Science. This is use-inspired basic science. First, we bring the community together. 1,500 scientists defined the core basic science challenges that would underpin future technology breakthroughs. Each one of these centers is addressing one of those problems and doing it at the gym effectively. ARPA-E. ARPA-E was created in 2009, as were the EFRCs, these energy frontier research centers. 2009, ARPA-E was created. This is for higher risk technology investments. For example, that hybrid solar thing I mentioned was one of the ARPA-E projects. I might say we believe that program is underfunded by a factor of three, in terms of innovation and American capacity to innovate. But let me take other examples. Carbon capture and sequestration. This is now we have a set of large-scale demonstration projects. They're risky. But a couple of them that are already working and we'll have a coal plant turning on in 2017 with carbon capture, we have industrial plants with a capture risk cheap. And we either use the CO2 for enhanced oil production or put it into a very, very deep saline formation. And finally, one of those technologies that we had at the beginning with the cost reduction, if you remember, was utility-scale solar, which fell by 60% in cost over that time period. 2009, this country had zero utility-scale, meaning greater than 100 megawatts, photovoltaic farms. Now, another mechanism, our loan program. Our loan program, which has issued over $30 billion in loans and loan guarantees, provided debt financing or backed debt financing for the first five utility-scale projects. All successes, that's all we're doing. That's all we need to do. Because now there are 21 additional projects with purely private financing. You had to get over the hump to show that these projects can get out there, can work, are financeable, et cetera. So you can see it's everything from basic science to high-risk technologies to things like loan programs. Actually, I'll add one more, again, in the solar arena. Steve, the I've already. The job is so much cooler than I thought it was. I've already emphasized the technology developments. But you know, the costs have now fallen so much for photovoltaic modules that the dominant costs are not the modules anymore. It's really the other stuff you have to do, particularly if you want to put a PV system on your rooftop. It's permits, labor, rent, labor, it's like OVE. And so another very different thing we did is not technology. We have something called, you mentioned moonshot. You've got it not quite right. It's called sunshot. Sunshot. And it's about getting solar costs down with certain targets by 2020. But in that program, besides technology, it's got a program that just works with cities and towns in terms of how do you streamline permitting? How do you get a permit down from a month to a day? So it's technical assistance to do that, and it's having quite an effect. Let me ask you just a couple of just some really quick questions, because I don't want to go to the audience. But how does this play out politically? Because you are in a political position, and has anybody driven across Kansas lately? I drove across, you have. I drove across Kansas. And you get to that west side of Kansas, and there are windmills forever. I mean, there must be 70 miles of windmills. I had no idea. That is a red state I happen to be born there. And how did you get so many windmills in Kansas? We're now up to about 70-some thousand megawatts of wind in the country. Well, I know you don't have this graph there, but that's the coolest graph in the report. I wish I could show it to all of you. But maybe you should describe it to them. But the point is, when you lay that out over there, I was very surprised to see such an investment by someone over a vast expanse of land in Western Kansas. How did that happen? Well, and the Kansans know it. Oh, absolutely. It's hard to miss them, actually. You didn't. Well, first of all, the United States has a fabulous wind belt that runs up the middle of the country from Texas to the upper Great Plains. So this is wind. There may be just a coincidence that at least a large part of that has a rather low population density because it's pretty windy. But it's an enormous wind resource and clearly the major load centers tend to be somewhat far away. So building up high voltage transmission is absolutely, absolutely critical. And we're talking about that again. Texas has a pretty much isolated grid and they have an enormous wind resource and, of course, big load centers. But if you get from, let's say, Oklahoma up through North Dakota, then a big part of the job is building out the transmission system to move the wind to market. For those of you who can't see it and because I want to reference it, there are a number of graphs in this one I'm showing here with land-based wind power just demonstrating a staggering decrease in the cost price and the cumulative wind capacity just really taking off. It's just something I find great. Well, and actually essentially the same kind of figure is there for all of those five technologies, cost dropping, deployment going up. So we live in Washington, which thus far has not proven able to untie the political knots that we're in. And so direction is hard to find. But you've been working a lot with cities and states and other sort of non-federal level players. And recently the Atlantic and Mike Bloomberg and others convened something called City Lab. When you bring in mayors from all around the world, they all have their climate plans. So what do you interact at all with this sort of non-federal level and help give guidance, support, look at innovation with some of what cities are doing? Oh yes, absolutely. In fact, just recently I was with Mayor Garcetti, for example, in Los Angeles helping dedicate a novel solar system being installed in fire stations. And it's emergency power for them, but it's also emergency power for the neighborhood. You've got to get your cell phone charged up. If things are down for a while. So the cities are doing a lot of creative things. The mayor's conference actually at least a couple of years ago, I did that with Kevin Johnson, the former basketball player who's mayor of Sacramento. And they are just innovating tremendously. I cannot underestimate how important that is. Not just in the United States, but globally. And our mayors are being very active in partnering with mayors across the globe. Look, mid-century, the globe, the world, is going to be 70% urbanized. It's like Willie Sutton, why do you rob banks? That's where the money is. Well, if you want to address these issues, you better go where the people are. And that requires a big urban focus over these next several decades. Now, part of that, especially in the United States, we're not going to be, I don't think, we're going to be building new metropolitan areas. We may be enhancing some of the ones we have. But in other parts of the world, they're going to be starting much closer at least to scratch. And there, what I hope is that we also think about the genuinely new solutions of how you design an urban environment with those opportunities. I'll just give one example that I was kind of liked. If you think about, imagine a city that is, roughly speaking, pretty much all electric. The vehicles are electric vehicles, et cetera. And you say, quite correctly, no tailpipe pollution. Great. But what we don't then say is, oh, and by the way, very, very different noise levels. Well, if I got very different noise levels, maybe I don't hermetically seal every building, et cetera. I mean, this can actually open up completely new vistas for integrating our energy, water, infrastructure, communications, transportation systems in ways that are good for the environment, but also provide, frankly, a better quality of life. Promise the last one. One of the oddest moments in the Democratic debate was when Hillary Clinton talked about how she and the president heard the Chinese were in the parking lot. Then they were over here. And there was this scramble to find India and China at the last minute. And then always say, it's like a Keystone cops operation. Do you think Paris is going to have any fun like that? Well, first of all, despite the hurried nature of the conclusion of the Copenhagen conference, I want to say that I believe the Copenhagen conference will go down as having been an important turning point by establishing some very important principles for future negotiations. Now, in Paris, it's well known that the inverse approach is being taken. That is, the leaders will be there at the beginning of the conference, charging the conference, charging their negotiating teams, and then the negotiations. We'll have to find the negotiating teams in the parking lot. We'll be left to the negotiating teams. And we'll recruit Bill Burns when we need him. OK, great. Let me open to the floor. It's been fun. Wow, so many. Is Jim Shuto here? I don't see Jim, so we're not going to worry about him. I promise him. I'm going to go to this gentleman right here in the mid. And then we're going to bring you a microphone. There are millions of people watching. So tell us who you are and make it short. Hi, my name is Ramirez. I'm a reporter with Climate Wire. During the climate negotiations, how do you leverage future innovations? How do you bring into effect future solutions to current problems and get other countries to act? And what should we expect from the ministerial next week? Terrific. Thank you. Well, in terms of the COP negotiations, for example, I think there are several things. One is we will be looking to make strong commitments in innovation among a set of countries. And that will include the opportunity to do more collaborative work. So I'll just give you one example of kind of unnatural. Take India. India clearly has a tremendous need for distributed generation. As do we have a tremendous interest in distributed generation. We have more that we can do there. So I think the INDCs, the targets, are pretty much set for this first round. But we can talk about how we can work together on innovation to get more ambition when it comes time to revise those targets. So that, to me, is in some sense how I'm thinking about that. And next week it'll be about getting the innovation theme set up to roll into COP just a week and a half later. Just quick 30-second follow-up on your good question. Will other countries bring these whiz-bang ideas themselves? Are there things that other nations are doing that we can learn from? Anything you've seen that would be a shocker? Absolutely. There's a lot of innovation going on in many countries. What's the coolest thing you've seen? Well, I think there's a lot of work. I don't want to get back to your earlier question. But there is a lot of interesting work going on in the electric vehicle space in other countries. As well, by the way, in other alternative fuel vehicles. So that's one area where I think there's a part of it. But I think we also should have said in our international activities, a lot of countries have an interest in our consultations with regard to building an innovation system. I see. Because when all is said and done, there is a lot going on elsewhere. But we are viewed as kind of being in the forefront of that. And we've done a lot of work still imperfectly understood. But a lot of work in trying to understand what works in our country. And a lot of that, research universities, big laboratories, linking those to investor networks, et cetera. And we are trying new things. Why would we want to give that knowledge to someone else? Because we've got a big global problem to solve. And we want to solve it. And furthermore, exposing them to our innovation isn't a bad idea either. Terrific. Yes, Henry. Yes. Thank you. My name is Whitney Bernstein. I'm a AAAS fellow and an MIT grad. And my question stems actually from what you were just saying as far as consultation. And you also said earlier that we need the cost reduction to bring everyone along. And I was wondering if you could speak a little bit to challenges around intellectual property and technology transfer in this area, especially in regards to developing countries. And also, if you had you mentioned so many interesting technologies, I was wondering if you had any thoughts on Leslie Dewins, also an MIT grad, transatomic power for using spent nuclear fuel for additional energy. Thank you. Transatomic power, blah, blah, blah. All right. I thought TAP was a transatriatic pipeline. Anyway, what was the first question? Intellectual property and technology transfer. That's right. So first of all, we have worked out now some very suitable IP arrangements in our international collaborations. For example, with China, we have a significant program and a specific thread of that was working out IP arrangements, which I've worked quite well. Number two, we are doing experiments. For example, at Berkeley, there is something called Cyclotron Road, which is really a spin-in approach in which our laboratory provides essentially investor and inventor opportunities, kind of cheek by jowl with the lab. And third, in terms of the transatomic power, I have been briefed on that when I was at MIT, but I'm not going to go into any specific technology. But I will say the following. Very interesting thing has happened. I showed that new-scale modular reactor. But there are something like 50 companies in the United States with private capital looking at innovative nuclear fission and nuclear fusion technologies. We don't need more than one to work. Two would be great. But it's amazing, it's a new wave of innovation looking at nuclear because of its carbon-free characteristics. The president put out a statement this past week on the importance of nuclear in part of our own carbon. Well, one week ago, there was a nuclear meeting workshop held in the White House, specifically because of the president's interest in that. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Yeah, hi. Dave Ramoswamy of Africa Agribusiness Magazine. We have a billion people who are hungry in the world, many of them small farmers in Indian subcontinent in Africa. And many of them live on marginal lands. So how do we get a fraction of them to adopt next generation or to grow next generation biofuel crops to put it into the transportation network? Thank you. Well, that's probably, to be honest, a question that some of my colleagues at AID and maybe agriculture might be able to answer better. But clearly what we are doing, I think as you know, is we are doing the research and development for many different kinds of biomass feedstocks. We are looking at things for, as you said, biomass on marginal lands, salt tolerant because of saltwater invasions, et cetera, in certain areas. So we are doing that research. We have outreach, for example, particularly our National Renewable Laboratory, which does have a big biomass component in NREL and Boulder, does that. But to be honest, I think the bigger outreach on that probably happens through other agencies more effectively. We are trying to provide the tools. Everyone's nodding me, and I'll nod right back. But I'm trying to do this. So just short question. Right here in the front. We'll go between these two here, yeah. Right here in the front. Just make it brief. I wish I could. There was a gates. I know. OK, but the issue here with, first of all, the Economist magazine is ruin the closing of nuclear plants. I was concerned, interested in that. But the recent Atlantic article of gates and gates is suggesting there are places where if you buy an electric car, you're actually increasing CO2 emissions. Can you comment? I'm sorry, could you repeat that again? I didn't quite hear the. In the Bill Gates interview in The Atlantic, he talks about the fact that there are places where you can invest in renewable vehicles. You can do something. But in the process, you're actually net increasing carbon. Well, I think that depends very much. In this transitional phase, it depends very much upon what the mix is of fuels. So for example, this is a little bit of a simple minded, but let's say an electric vehicle in the northwest versus one in the upper Midwest is going to have a more positive carbon impact because it's drawing upon hydropower, for example. Whereas the marginal benefit, again, I'm not arguing against these being deployed everywhere, but for similar reasons, the marginal benefit of an efficiency investment will be higher in the upper Midwest than in the Northwest. So it really depends how the technologies and fuels are matched to what's going on regionally. Now, of course, I argued that the electricity sector, in particular, is going to be pretty much, in my view, decarbonized by the time we get to mid-century. And some of those geographical effects, therefore, would not apply. Yes, right here. Hi, Dr. Moniz. This is Xin Zhang from CCTV America. Well, in the beginning of your talk, you mentioned China. As I observed, when there is a state meeting between the US and China, there is such a topic called climate change. People call it climate change diplomacy. So my question is, what is the cooperation between the US and China now on climate change, compared with a few years ago? And how have you worked with your Chinese counterpart before the Paris meeting to ensure a substantial result from the climate change meeting? Thank you. Well, first of all, again, I've already said the joint announcement last November, just about a year ago, was clearly a major turning point. And that has now been followed up in just about every meeting of President Obama and President Xi with additional progress, most recently here in September, when the cap and trade approach was announced. Presumably, it did not escape attention that the two presidents basically announced, more or less, the targets for Paris at the same time. And we're working together on that. At the same time, the announcement last November, if what looks at the background papers pointed to a significantly expanded role for Department of Energy collaboration with China on energy technology. It also enhanced the scope of what we were already doing in some areas, like carbon capture, like buildings, et cetera. But it also added a completely new line of activity in terms of the energy water nexus as a focus area. And I might add, even in the areas that we were already working together in, like carbon capture, even there we added new focal points. For example, the big utilization right now of captured carbon dioxide, as I said earlier, is to do enhanced oil recovery. And by the way, the scale is not trivial. In the United States today, we are producing about 300,000 barrels of oil per day from CO2 flooding of mature reservoirs. But now what we added, and it's in the document from last November, and we're moving forward, is enhanced water recovery using CO2. So the idea is deep brines, whether they are potable water is a different issue, but there's lots of uses of water, which if you desal and clean up a little bit. And we have a, we are in the, right now, and on our side, we're in the middle of selecting a site for our first enhanced water recovery project. And that's something with China. You're off to the IAEA ministerials, the International Energy Agency ministerial. It's kind of an antiquated group, isn't it? It sort of leaves China out. It leaves some other big energy players out. So is that a problem that you're going to hang out with the folks that aren't the problem? How does China build in this weekend coming up? No, so we are going to hang out with the Chinese as well, because they will be present. Now, the IAEA membership by its construction in the 1970s in response to the oil shocks is OECD countries. However, the world looks different today than it did in the 1970s. And so the IAEA is in a number of dimensions looking to do some modernization, and that clearly includes, among other things, the idea of, you know, welcoming dialogues with the big economies, the big energy consumers. So frankly, we expect China there, we expect India there, Indonesia, quite a few countries that are not today members. Let's get our friend from Brazil right here in the fourth row. Hi, I'm Professor Claudio Pinho. Regarding Hydropower Efficiency Act of 2013, what have you been done? What is the next actual status, and what comes next? How megawatts do you expect for the next five, 10, or 20 years? In the United States. Yeah. That's a hard one to answer, to be honest. The there is, I mean, I don't see that we're going to be building any big mega dams in the United States, but there is a lot of interest in small hydro, in fact, one of the technologies I showed was a low-head hydro project. There's also a lot, there's a lot, if I remember, no, I'll get it wrong. I think, and this may be incorrect, I think there's the order of 100 megawatts of opportunity for powering small, unpowered dams, for example. A lot of that is with the Corps of Engineers, I mean, for those kinds of projects. So we do research in some of the novel hydro, and by the way, also hydrokinetic technologies. This gentleman right here in the middle. Hi, James Reed with George Washington University. With the reduction in the cost of producing these technologies, our government subsidies, whether they're grants, loan programs, or tax breaks for companies, still necessary, even with consumer demand for these technologies. Good question. What if you just took all the subsidies away for all of the energy sources? What would the picture look like? With your favorite carbon price? Yeah. Look, we believe that we are still at the stage because of the necessity of dramatically accelerating the low carbon transition, that we still think that some of these well-placed renewable investment and production tax credits should continue. Now, forever, no, probably not. Would that be helped if we had instead something that internalizes the price of carbon emissions? Yes. But where we are today, we think we, A, we need those, but B, there is an issue of the continuing major credits in the fossil areas, which I would say are probably a little bit more difficult to defend. Just in closing, I just learned recently that you are an avid soccer player, not just a soccer, what position do you play and do you have any games lined up for Paris? Avid should not be confused with good. This is true. I generally play in the defense, but last time they put me up in the front line, so I wouldn't say it's anywhere that goes. Oh, season's over. The season's over, but anything lined up in Paris? No. No, that's okay. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very, very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.