 So I thank you very much, it's a treat to be here. If I could just ask if people could turn down their cell phones or put them on stun or vibrate or anything that would be great, I really appreciate it. So I always have to do this caveat when I speak here. Just a little housekeeping matter. We never discuss my speaking fee. And I actually have two speaking fees. One is a lot of money, a lot of money. And the other is George Schultz, okay? This is a George Schultz lecture. It's, as they say on the house, because I never get enough chances to do a favor to my dear friend and mentor, Secretary Schultz. So George, this, this bug for you. I would never presume to talk to this group about energy at any technical level. And what I do wanna talk about today though, as Sally said, is really the context within which I see energy policy needing to evolve. And particularly in the context of resiliency and sustainability. But I'm gonna get there, if you'll bear with me, the long way. My talk this afternoon is called The World Is Fast. And it is in my own head a brief theory of everything. The working hypothesis that I'm carrying around in my head today, as I write my column, for how I explain more things in more places in more ways. And in the end, as you will see, energy and climate and sustainability play a very important role. Now, 100 years from now when future historians look back at this moment in history, the late 20th century, early 21st century, what will they say was the most important thing going on? Will they say it was 9-11? Will they say it was the subprime crisis? Will they say it was the breakup of Brad and Jen or the marriage of William and Kate? What will they say was the most important thing happening at this intersection of history? Well, I would argue what they will say is that the most important thing happening at this intersection of history is the world started to get really fast in three incredibly important global realms, the market, mother nature, and Moore's Law. And that's really what I wanna talk about today. Because I think I can explain more things in more ways if you understand how the market, mother nature, and Moore's Law all entered at the same time an exponential phase. Now let's start with Moore's Law, and I got this idea entirely from Eric M. Jolson and Andy McAfee from MIT who wrote a wonderful book, came out last year called The Second Machine Age. And the argument of their book, which I highly recommend, is that the first machine age was based on the steam engine. And the steam engine doubled in power every 70 years. And in the era of the steam engine, human labor were great compliments to machine labor. Their argument of their book is that the second machine age is based on Moore's Law and microchips doubling in speed and power every 18 to 24 months. And as a result, human labor is increasingly less a compliment to machines and increasingly now being substituted by machines. Now, Core to Andy and Eric's theory is the story of the chessboard. I'm sure you're all familiar with it. The man who invented chess gave it to the Persian king. King loved it so much, said, how can I reward you? The man said, Your Highness, I just want to feed my family. It shall be done, the king said. What would you like? He said, just take one kernel of rice, put it on the first square of the chessboard, put two on the second, four on the next, eight on the next, 16 on the next. Please keep doubling it, Your Highness, my family will be fine. He said, it shall be done. Not realizing that when you double something, 63 times the number you get is 18 quintillion. What Andy and Eric argue in their book is that when it comes to Moore's law, we just entered the second half of the chessboard, where the doubling starts to get really big and you start to see some really funky stuff. You start to see, as they point out, machines that can, computers that can win at chess, computers that can beat you in jeopardy, great leaps forward in genetics and biotechnology and energy we've seen just in drilling technology. You even get to see, as they point out, I'm 61, I grew up on the Jetsons. You'll recall that George Jetson, George Jetson drove his own flying saucer. The creators of the Jetsons could not imagine what we have already, a Google self-driving car. So when you enter the second half of the chessboard with Moore's law and we just got there, you start to see some really funky things. Now the more I thought about their theory and I've done a lot of events with them, the more I realized that we've also entered the second half of the chessboard in the market and mother nature at the same time. Now for me, the market is globalization, driven in part by Moore's law and driven in part by other geopolitical factors, very quietly over the last 10 years, the world has gone from connected to hyper-connected and from interconnected to interdependent. And these are differences of degree that are fundamental differences in kind. And as with Moore's law, when the world gets this interdependent, you start to see some really funky things. First of all, you get a geopolitical inversion. You could see it today if you were following the markets where your friends can kill you faster than your enemies. If Greeks don't pay their taxes, if Germans don't loosen up their economy and give us a little inflation, everyone in this room could be impacted. Greece is a member of NATO. In fact, we're obligated under the NATO treaty to protect Greece if they're invaded. Greece can kill us today. Greece is an ally. The other geopolitical inversion you get is that your rivals falling in an interdependent world becomes as dangerous, actually more dangerous than your rivals rising. If China goes from 8% growth to 1% growth, everyone in this room will be harmed. Every single person here. If China gets another aircraft carrier, I couldn't care less, let them get two. When the world gets this interdependent, you start to see some really funky things. Now how did this happen? Well, as Sally said, in 2004, I wrote a book called The World is Flat. And the simple argument of that book was that four things converged right around the year 2000 that created a much more level global playing field. They were very simply the PC. What the PC allowed was for the first time in the history of the world for individuals, individuals to create their own content in digital form. Words, data, photos, spreadsheets, video, music, it didn't matter. That is they could create their content in bits and bytes. Now individuals, they said, have been creating their own content ever since cave men and cave women etched on cave walls. But with the PC, they could suddenly create their own content in digital form. And when it was in digital form, it could be manipulated in so many ways and sent so many places. That coincided with, didn't have to, but it coincided with the emergence of this thing called the internet. Where suddenly I could create my own content digitally and send it anywhere in the world virtually for free. That coincided with the emergence of something called workflow software which allowed me to collaborate on my content and you on your content wherever we were in the world. And that coincided with the emergence of something called Google search which allowed me to search my content and you to search your content and enhance our collaboration exponentially. All four of those things came together in the late 90s and early 21st century in a way that created a platform where more people in more places could compete, connect and collaborate on more things for less money with greater efficiency than ever before. Hence I declared the world is flat. Had I been a more honest man, I actually would have called the book the world is flat to me. Because there were only about a billion people on that platform, but I had an instinct of where it was going and it never would have sold four and a half million copies of it had been called the world is flat name. So I wasn't a more honest man. Well in 2011 I sat down and wrote a new book with my colleague Michael Mandelbaum called that used to be us. And the first thing I did when I sat down to write the new book was get the first edition of the world is flat off my bookshelf, just remind myself what I had said. I cracked it open to the index. I looked under A, B, C, D, E, F, F, A, F, A, C, F, A, C, E, F, A, C, E, B. Facebook wasn't in it. Yeah, when I was running around the world, when I was here at Stanford in 2004 saying the world is flat, we're all connected. Facebook didn't exist, Twitter was still a sound, the cloud was still in the sky, 4G was a parking place, LinkedIn was a prison, applications are what you sent to college, Big Data was a rap star and Skype was a typographical error. All of that happened in just seven years between 2004 and 2011. And that took the world from connected to hyper connected and from interconnected to interdependent into the second half of the chess board. Lastly, climate, the subject you've been talking about today, I don't have to tell you, for 800,000 years the world's climate carbon content oscillated between 180 parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere and 280 parts per million. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, we've gone from 280 to over 400 heading to 450. That is about 100 times faster than at the end of the Second Ice Age. For me mother nature is climate, it's also population, I believe this is right, that not since Adam and Eve has there been someone like me 61 years old be able to say the world's population doubled in my lifetime. So we're seeing population and climate and also species extinction, which is now a thousand times the background rate of species extinction, all three also enter the second half of the chess board. So in the market, mother nature and Moore's law, the world has gotten really fast, entered exponential growth phases all at the same time. The market, sorry the Moore's law, you see the implications of that everywhere. I see it everywhere. What it is doing to empower people. My favorite just happened a couple of weeks ago. I sometimes take the subway to work in Washington DC and I park at the Bethesda subway stop next to the Bethesda Hyatt and I take the subway and I come back, I get my car and I'm leaving the park, not to hand the guy the ticket in the little booth there to take my money and looks at me and says, I read your column. I said, well, thank you, that's great. So I don't always agree, but I read your column. I said, that's great, you're the perfect reader. It means you gotta check every time. We had a very nice exchange, I drove off. Week later, I'm back there. Same guy, hand him this ticket. He says, Mr. Friedman, I write a blog. I said, really, you write a blog? Yeah, he said, I'm sort of a columnist too. And then he writes down, adanambi.com. He writes down his blog, his web address and I actually go home and check it out. The parking ramp guy is now my competitor, okay? That's one of the funky things that happens in the second half of the chessboard, just in my little world. In Mother Nature, I hope some of you saw the Showtime series last year, Years of Living Dangerously. It was a wonderful series on climate and I really had the pleasure of doing three of the shows. One was on climate change in Syria, one on Yemen and one on Egypt. And of course, here is really how you see the impact of climate in the second half of the chessboard. You simply cannot understand what happened in Syria. The Syrian Revolution, unless you understand that between 2006 and 2010, the four years that preceded the Syrian Revolution, Syria experienced the worst drought in its modern history. A million Syrian farmers and herders left their homes, swamped the cities, overwhelmed the infrastructure. President Assad did nothing for them. They did not start the revolution, but as one of them who we interviewed in Raqqa province, I was actually in Raqqa province, which is now the capital of ISIS, said to us with the first call of Allahu Akbar, we joined this revolution. And these were conservative people. These were farmers and herders. You will never understand what happened in Syria if you don't understand it was in the wake of the worst drought the country had ever faced. That's what happens when Mother Nature enters the second half of the chessboard. And lastly, globalization in the second half of the chessboard. I'll give you a million examples of that, but one of my favorites is I'm in Egypt and actually covering Tahir Square. I fly home. I'm in the souvenir shop in Cairo Airport. And they have a camel for a little toy camel. And it's got a hump and if you squeeze its hump, it honks. And I turned it over and it said, made in China. Now you're a low-wage country. You're a low-wage country, low-wage is China. And a country half a world away can make your honking humped camel cheaper than you can, ship it, take the profits and repatriate them. That's what happens to a country like Egypt when globalization hits the second half of the chessboard. So in all three of these realms, you can see the stresses that are produced by these exponentials. Now what are the implications of this? Well, there are several. First is that this is an amazing world to be a consumer in. We all know that. Great time to be a consumer. Go on Amazon.com and absolutely get anything in the world now at the lowest price possible. Go to Airbnb and you can rent out Lichtenstein online, okay? It is a great, great world to be a consumer in. It's an amazing world. I don't have to tell people who live around here. It's an amazing world to be a maker in. To be an entrepreneur in this world when you can download from the cloud now the cheapest tools for dimes and nickels to start a company that is global overnight from day one where your customers and suppliers and collaborators can all be global, it is an amazing time to be a maker. Unfortunately, it's also an amazing time to be a breaker. When the world is good for makers, the world is good for breakers. Just ask the boys and girls of ISIS who are as early adopters of technology as you'll ever want to find. I'm afraid it's not just a great world for makers. It's a great world for breakers. Fourth, it's a terrible world to be a leader in. You do not wanna be leading anything in this world, okay? To be a leader of anything in the second half of the chessboard is hell on wheels. Why? Because every leader today, every leader from the president of this university to Sally to Xi Jinping in China is now involved in a two-way conversation. The days of one-way conversation leadership is completely gone. Xi Jinping will be the first Chinese emperor to have to make the most political reform with 400 million Chinese on Sina Weibo commenting on his every step. And what's true for Xi Jinping is the truth for every company and every university president. It's also hell on wheels to be a leader in the world of Twitter and Facebook where everyone is commenting on your every step. What do you suppose archeologists, a thousand years from now will think, when they dig up Washington, D.C. and they hit the layer 2010, and they're gonna really puzzle over something. They're gonna discover that the second most powerful man in America, arguably the second most powerful man in the world, the chief of staff of the president of the United States of America voluntarily gave up his job not to get but to run for mayor of a Midwestern town called Chicago. Archeologists, they will puzzle over that. They will say, did the advisor of Caesar ever say, boss, I'm leaving, I wanna run for mayor of Carthage? Okay, what is that about? What that's about is that it turns out it's actually not that much fun to be the second most powerful man in America today. In large part because I would argue our country very dangerously has gone from a representative democracy to a popular democracy. Our founding fathers believed in representative democracy. They thought the will of the people should be filtered through elected representatives. Our Congress today, unfortunately, is so much more like American Idol than it is the constitutional Congress in some very, very dangerous ways. You go up on Capitol Hill today and half the people are walking around just following their Twitter feed, just like this. If you can get their head out of that and you can pull them away from fundraising for two minutes they might actually talk to you about the future of the country. We have very quietly and I think dangerously gone from a representative democracy to a popular democracy. But lastly, and this will get me into the core of the subject of your conference here. The single most important socioeconomic fact of this age of doubling and the single most important geopolitical fact are the following. I think the single most important socioeconomic fact of life in the second half of the chess board when the market mother nature and Moore's law are all doubling is that average is officially over for every worker. Average is over. That old saying in Texas of all you ever do is all you've ever done, all you ever get is all you ever got is officially NA, no longer applicable. If all you ever do now is all you've ever done all you'll ever get is not average. You will get below average. Every boss today has cheaper, easier, faster, more efficient access to above average labor, above average automation, above average software, above average robotics, above average cheap labor and above average cheap genius. Average is officially over. And I believe that is at the core of so much of the social labor stress in this country today. Every middle class job today is being pulled in three directions at once. It's being pulled up. It requires more knowledge and skill to do. It's being pulled out, more people, machine software and robots can compete for it and it's being pulled down. It's being outsourced to history faster than ever. Picked up The New York Times a few weeks ago, we had a story that dairy farms in upstate New York now have robotic cow milkers. Robots, milking cows. So you wanna be a dairy farm hand now? You better know some software and computing. Literally the whole process now is being done by robots. That thing that sustained the American middle class, Stephanie Sanford from College Board taught me this, was called the high wage middle skill job. For 50 years our middle class was built on something called a high wage middle skill job. That is increasingly disappearing. There's only gonna be a high wage high skill job and the socioeconomic implications of that are extremely stressful and I don't think we've even begun to fully absorb the implications. But average isn't just over for workers. In the second half of the chessboard, average is also over for countries. You see in the Cold War, you could just be an average little country because there were two superpowers who were competing over every square on the chessboard. And because they were competing over every square on the chessboard, they would actually come and build your army. In fact, if you were Egypt and Syria, you could lose two wars to Israel and they would come back and rebuild your army each time, virtually for free. They might build your stadium, they might educate all your kids at Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow. They will give you financial aid, build your stadium. I was just in Madagascar, the president there lives in a home, the official presidential palace in Madagascar was built by North Korea. It's like the definition of how do you know you're poor? You know what I mean? It's just like, you know, just North Korea built, and it looks like a North Korean building in the middle of Madagascar. That was the Cold War world. You could be average and you could also be average because the Cold War was a world of walls. So you did not have to worry if you were Egypt that China was gonna come over and make your honking humped camel in the souvenir shop or the pyramid ashtray that's also sold there. You didn't have to worry about any of that. You could make whatever junk you wanted, sell it to your people, sell it to any tourists. Average was just fine in the Cold War. Well, both of those are gone. And that is why I believe the great divide in the world today is no longer between the East and West, no longer between North and South, no longer between Communist and Capitalism. I believe the big divide in the world today is between the world of order and the world of disorder. That is the big division in the world today. Countries under the stress of all these three doublings, the market, Mother Nature and Moore's Law, are literally blowing up before our eyes. And you can see why. I mean, there's no secret. People in these countries can now see how everyone else is living. They can see just how far behind they are and they can do something about it from their end. And at the same time, hierarchies, top-down order is so much more difficult to sustain whether it's Libya, Chad, Mali, Egypt, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, go right across the board. You see, the world of order is built on two pillars, either imposed order from the top-down or sustainable order from the bottom up. That's what we have. But the price of top-down order in the second half of the chessboard is going up every day. Ladies and gentlemen, I attention you to the news out of Hong Kong. Look at the problem the Chinese government is having in Hong Kong maintaining top-down order. Now, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, these are just extreme, this is just the extreme edge of a world where any kind of top-down order is going to be more and more difficult to maintain. If you wanna know what's going on in the Middle East today, it's very simple. This is a pluralistic region that lacks pluralism. So its pluralistic character was always bandaged horizontally, vertically, excuse me, from the top-down. First by Ottoman Turks, then by the British and French, then by kings and dictators. Today, no more Ottoman Turks, no more British and French, imperialism is totally over. No one wants to occupy anybody anymore because all you win is a bill. And at the same time, the kings and dictators in the second half of the chess board don't have and cannot maintain the authority that they have. So what's actually going on in the Middle East today is an entire pluralistic region whose pluralistic character, Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds, Druze, Turkmen, Christians, Jews, its whole pluralistic character was always managed by an iron fist top-down. There's no more iron fist to manage a top-down. The only way they can have order now is if they produce it horizontally by reaching social contracts between all the constituent communities. So what's really going on in that region in the second half of the chess board is an entire region is going from vertical to horizontal. Now you can go from vertical to horizontal if you have one of three things. If you have a Mandela, unfortunately, turns out there's only one of those. If you have a military, Egypt kind of tried to do it, didn't do it very well. Or if you have a midwife, that was the role we tried to play in Iraq. If you have no Mandela, no military, no midwife, and you're trying to go from vertically controlled pluralistic nature to horizontal, you have Iraq and Syria today. So that's how the second half of the chess board is playing out. We now have a world of order and a world of disorder. And therefore, therefore in my view, the single most important geopolitical goal of every country today has to be resilience and sustainability. How do I live in a world without walls, where average is over for workers, where average is over for countries, and there are no walls to protect me? And we've got these three big doublings happening. Now at another time and another day, I would talk about what that means for workers, how you produce more resilient workers. We can save that for another conversation. But what is the subject of this conference today, I think is essential for how you produce more resilient and sustainable countries. If we actually, like I heard, we're having a midterm election. I heard. I don't know for sure because I have no idea what this election is about. Does anybody here know? It seems to be Democrats saying Republicans are all crazy and Republicans saying Democrats are all failed Obamaites. That seems to be what this election is about. Meanwhile, you pick up the paper today. The stock market was down over 400 points. We have a second Ebola case. We have the Middle East in flames. We have the world of disorder expanding. You would think that one person, maybe one person just retiring from the Congress, just sort of walking out the door, might say, geez, we should actually have an election about this, about how we produce a more resilient and sustainable country in a moment of history where the world is cleaving between order and disorder. And so I bless you for coming together here to talk about one critical aspect of it. Because I think there are four things in the energy, climate, sustainability realm that would be vital for us right now. If we were actually having a real election and someone was actually running on what the country should be doing at this moment of history in this kind of world, what would they be calling for? I'll tell you what I would be calling for. Four things. First, I would lift the ban on oil exports from America. Because I want to bring down the price of oil. I want to give the world a tax cut and I want to take money away from Putin and from the worst bad guys in the Middle East. I want to bring down the price, not too far, not below $75, because then we'll end up choking off production here. But I want to bring the price down. There's a big difference for Putin between $110 barrel oil and $75 barrel oil. But I want to combine that with a carbon tax, a revenue neutral carbon tax, $20 a ton over 10 years, raised by about 5%, 6% every year, produces a trillion dollars of tax savings over 10 years. I'd give it all away by cutting payroll taxes for every American worker and corporate taxes for every American corporation, make both of them more hireable and more competitive and ensure that if we're pumping more oil, we're also got a carbon tax that is driving clean tech innovation. But I wouldn't just stop with a carbon tax. I would also impose a national clean energy portfolio standard that says you can generate electricity in this country any way you want, sequestered coal, biomass, hydro, solar, wind, wave. I don't really care, but you gotta meet this clean energy standard for pollutants and greenhouse gases. And it's the standard that's gonna go up every year just to make sure that natural gas is a bridge to our clean energy future and not a ditch that prevents our clean energy future. And the last thing I would do would be a national standard for the extraction of natural gas that ensures that methane leakage doesn't swamp all of its benefits. You give me those four things, and I would argue we would be so much more resilient as a country in a world cleaving between the world of order and disorder. We would separate ourselves from everyone else. Why is this so important? Because this is the world we're going into. And in this world, I believe what our parents bequeathed us, our parents bequeathed us George's generation an incredible world of freedom. And what a bounty it was. They bequeathed us an incredible world of freedom. And freedom was the central goal of that greatest generation. The goal of our generation, the key word for our generation is not freedom, it's sustainability. Because in a world where the market and mother nature and Moore's law are all doubling, if we don't bring sustainable values, sustainable values, not what my friend Dove Simon calls situational values, do just whatever the situation allows. No, if we don't bring sustainable values to these three doublings, they are going to impose restraints on us that would be worse than had the Russians won the Cold War. My friend Rob Watson, the founder of Green Buildings, always likes to remind me, Tom, mother nature. She's just chemistry, biology, and physics. That's all she is. You can't talk her up, you can't talk her down, you can't say mother nature. Did you see the doubt today? It was off 400 points. We got to take a little time out here. She's going to do whatever chemistry, biology, and physics dictate. And mother nature, as Rob says, God bless her. She always bats last and she always bats a thousand. Do not mess with mother nature in the second half of the chessboard. The market, the market, same thing, market's just the balance between greed and fear, greed and fear, greed and fear, greed and fear around any stock. Come on, any piece of real estate. It will do whatever the balance of greed and fear dictates. You can't talk the market up, you can't talk it down. It's going to do whatever those two dictate. And if we don't bring sustainable values to the market and mother nature in the second half of the chessboard, as I said, they will impose restraints on us that would be worse than had the Soviet Union won the Cold War. And that's why what freedom was to our parents' generation. Sustainable values, sustainable energy policy, and sustainable energies need to be to our generation. Otherwise, we will not be free. Thank you very much. Thank you. Okay, so we will take questions, if that's all right with you. Yeah, okay, we've got microphones. So ask away. So one question for you. Can you introduce yourself? Oh, sorry, John Mashe, a local resident here. So we have internally in the US a fairly well-constructed infrastructure via the Koch brothers and Richard Mellonscape and their friends that seem dedicated to the exact opposite. So you have any thoughts on what to do about that? Yeah, I mean, there's, no one's gonna repeal politics. And it's our system that you can go out and raise money and militate for whatever lobby and elect people for whatever your position is. And my position is that those who care about this agenda, the clean energy agenda have to do the same thing. And there's just no getting around it. And one of the problems I find, I find this particularly on some college campuses and I don't want to generalize, is that one of the problems with Facebook and Twitter, I notice is that they create a faux sense of activism. Oh, I tweeted about that, Mr. Friedman. Really, you tweeted about that. It's like firing a mortar into the Milky Way galaxy. You know what I mean? You tweeted about it. I did a Facebook post on that, yeah. Well, you know, the people you're talking about, they're not, they're actually not in Facebook. They're in your face, okay? And they're not in the chat room, they're in the cloakroom of the US Congress. So get out of Facebook and into somebody's face if that's what you care about. It's a free country still. Kind of going off of that. We can, I mean, the people's climate march has happened. Like we can go and get in people's faces, but it just seems like it's not working. Especially you have these statistics on 80% of Americans think that climate change is caused by humans and yet Congress is doing nothing to do that. So what do you do in the absence of congressional response? Yeah. Well, you know, what I fear is, and you're asking a very legitimate question, you know, first of all, you know, thank God for California and what it's done as a state because it's created some wonderful examples and some wonderful technologies, I say. Secondly, you know, I would give Obama credit for a couple of things. One is the auto mileage standards. We're doubling auto mileage from 27 to 55 roughly miles per gallon for trucks and cars and going up an increment every year. And that's a big deal. That's gonna be a big deal because it's driven a lot of new technology. I don't believe a new coal-fired power plant will ever again be built in this country as a result of what the EPA is doing. So I don't think we're nowhere, you know. But what I fear is that we're basically as a country sitting around waiting for the perfect storm and the perfect storm is a storm big enough to end the climate debate, but not so big as to end the world, you know. That's kind of what we're doing. But I'm gladdened by the fact, I've noticed in the last year, I know how you feel here on campus, I notice that the debate is changing, you know. I really feel that it's changing. But I did an event with the energy minister from Denmark at the UN General Assembly this year. And he said something, it was like so simple, but so true. He said, you know, in Denmark, the business community is 100% behind what the government is doing and a clean energy agenda. And that was because the incentives they set up were such that it became very, very profitable to pursue both of those. And so incentives are really everything. Really the question you're asking is a very important one is, and that's what's been kind of missing here. How do we get the incentives aligned so the entire business community, you know, will really wanna get on this agenda for profit? Because one of the things I really learned in, I did a book on energy called Hot, Flat, and Crowded. One of the things I learned from that book was that energy is a scale problem. And if you don't have a scale solution to energy, you have a hobby. And I like hobbies, I used to build model airplanes. But I wouldn't try to change the climate as a hobby. And so the question always is, how do you get enough scale to change something that big? I believe the only way to get scale is when you have a system. Because what a system allows is for ordinary people to do extraordinary things. And so the only way you can really get big change is when ordinary people can be extraordinary without thinking about it. So I feel extraordinary when I go into a hotel room in Europe, I wish it was everyone in America, and they give me a key and I have to actually put the key in the slot to turn the energy onto my room. And I take it out of the slot when I leave my room. I'm actually saving energy when I'm in Denmark as a visitor. So that's actually being extraordinary. But that's because there's a system underlying it. And the question for me is really, how do we get those kind of systems in place? But I'm very excited when I see what Apple is doing with this new iPhone, how you'll be able to manage your home energy from your iPhone. What Nest is now doing with Google? My feeling is we're gonna get there, but we're not gonna get there anywhere nearly as fast as we could or should if we had government policy behind it. And I wish I had a magic cure. There are big economic forces that are blocking this. They're blocking it for their own economic self-interest. And the only way to take them on basically, in my view, is to empower other economic forces to have a different set of incentives. I don't see any other way because the way our political system is set up now, as this questioner said, you can buy a lot of votes. Our Congress today is a form for legalized bribery. So you can do a lot with money. And the only way is you gotta play that game. And the question is, I do believe the balance is tipping. Companies like GE, they have huge incentives now in the clean energy future. But whether it's gonna tip fast enough for your generation, I don't know. But all I can do and all you can do is keep trying to push it in that direction everywhere you can. I wish I had a better answer for you. It's really not a very good answer, but it's the best I can do. Thank you. Oh yeah, sir. My name is Santiago Saavedra. I'm a PhD student in economics. I was wondering why you suggest a cap on trade and a clean electricity standard at the same time, why it's not the carbon tax enough. You are suggesting both solutions at the same time? Absolutely, because I think that... At least theoretically with the carbon tax should be enough, or why do you think you need to complement it with a clean electricity standard? I would be happy with either one, frankly. So your question's quite legitimate, but I don't think they're also mutually exclusive because I think they would be very reinforcing. I'm interested in the carbon tax because I'm actually interested in, as tax reform, more than energy reform. My real goal is to have much more efficient tax reform where basically we weren't taxing things we want, which is more labor and more investment. And I think a great way to get around it is with a carbon tax. So I think if carbon tax more is tax reform, that'll also drive clean energy policy and a national clean energy standard as reinforcing that. But I think they could go together, but it's really because I'm thinking one more is tax reform. It's a good question, actually. You call me. Or right over here, I guess he's got the mic. So you characterize the world as being order and disorder, but I also feel it's rich versus poor. And if, is that divide gonna lead to disorder? And it's a very good question. Certainly in a world where average is over, is a world of rising inequality? There's no question about it. We see what's happening to how stagnant median incomes are. I think that is very directly related to Moore's law in the second half of the chess board and the fact that every middle class job now, there's no such thing as a high wage, middle skill job anymore. And I think the only way, there's two ways to take care of that, seems to me. One is with education, more education everywhere. And the other is with government policy. I want a floor under people. I am for healthcare. Pardon me? It can't, well, we just look at the Middle East. That's the extreme version of it. I don't think it will lead to it here. I don't think you have to be, it has to. But the thing about this world is that the way I describe it, and one thing I really hasten to explain is that, do not confuse my enthusiasm for describing things, because I really like discovering things and connecting dots, for approval or disapproval. I sell people about the world is flat. I didn't do it. I swear, okay? All right. But I do, for me, I'm trying to put the puzzle together in my head, you know? And so the thing about this world is that I always say to people, it's a 401k world we're going into where everyone has to pass the bar and everyone will face the most email list. So what do I mean by that? So if the world had a dial on it, I would argue that for the 50 years after World War II, that dial was set to the left. And the closer you were to the Soviet Union, the more to the left the dial was set. And what it pointed to over here, it says you live in a world of defined benefits. Do your job every day, show up, be average, above average, you'll get these benefits. I would argue that what's happened as we entered the second half of the chessboard in Moore's Law Market in Mother Nature is really fast. That dial has whipped over here. And it now points to you live in a world of defined contributions. Now your return will be directly correlated to your contributions. So I say, we now live in a 401k world. That's not all though. Everyone will have to pass the bar. What do I mean by that? So for whatever reason, the legal profession cited 100 years ago that getting a law degree from Stanford was not a proxy for your ability to practice law in the state of California or anywhere else. You have to pass something called the bar exam. I believe the bar exam is coming to every job. That we're entering an age in the second half of the chess world where no one cares what you know because the Google machine knows everything. All anybody cares is what you can do with what you know. And I believe the fastest growing industry in education will be certification of what you can actually do with what you know. In fact, if you look at what's going on out there, you can already see it. So the bar exam is coming everywhere. Now then, unfortunately, it gets worse. So if you go to New YorkTimes.com, bottom of the right on the home page, there's something called the most email list, the top 20 most emailed items updated every 15 minutes. Any New York Times journalist who tells you they don't look at it is a liar. How could you not? How did my column do? How did my story do? Am I on the list? Am I number 20? Number 15? Am I number one? So my daughter is in education. We know of education software for third grade reading teachers that can track how many of your kids are on third grade reading level every week. And parents can see it from one side and principals from the other. Through big data, the most email list is coming to every job. So I think this is going to be really, really stressful. And basically what's happening, the most exciting thing about this world is the ceilings are gone. It's really cool. And what's also scary about this world, the floors are also gone. It's blown away the ceilings and the floors and the walls all at the same time. And therefore, that's what I meant when I said, what would we be talking about now if we're having a real election about the moment we're in? Well, to me, those are the things we'd be talking about. It's why I'm a huge supporter of health care. I want to be able to afford it. I want a system that works. I'm not an expert on health care. I don't know whether we've got the right one. But I want floors under people every way I can in this kind of world. Because it may be that fewer people are actually going to be working and making higher incomes. And fewer people are not. And if you don't want a revolution and I don't, and you want to have a big middle class, which is, I think, critical to any democracy, then we have to be thinking about these issues. This is what we should be talking about. I don't in any way pretend to have the answers. But to me, that's also part of resilience and sustainability. Yeah. Hi, thanks for the talk. You gave a pretty vivid description of the situations happening in Syria and people moving from rural lifestyles to going and taxing the infrastructure in the cities. And while that's an issue right now, can you talk a little bit about how urbanization could be a catalyst for sustainability and solving some of the problems, especially if that's something that's going to be happening with other climate scenarios? It's clear that re-urbanization, in many ways, compared to my generation that all went out to the suburbs and then the ex-urbs, isn't so much more energy efficient. And probably also just so much nicer for community, social cohesion, and innovation. So I'm kind of all for that. What ails these countries is not a plan for urbanization. What ails these countries is that they have no citizens. They have residents, but they have no citizens. And people who feel a kinship to one another as citizens and don't need their tribe or their sect to be in power, otherwise they feel they'll be sort of ruler or die. And so the question you're asking is a very important one. I think it's a great trend. There are people here who know a lot more about it than me, but it doesn't really apply out there. I'll tell you about a chemistry, chemical engineering consultant. It seems that in the US, you're suggesting we do these four things and we can generate sort of sustainability. I'm just picking those out. Maybe somebody has better ideas. But then what about the rest of the world? Because it seems to me the population growth will tend to destroy almost anything you can do. And the brakes on that don't seem to be working with health care, improved services. It seems like it's just going through the roof. What can we do about that problem ultimately? It's a very good question, a very important question. Obviously, in a brief talk, I didn't have time to go into that part of my mother nature thing, population doubling. I'm not an expert on that subject. I can't tell you X, Y, or Z per se. I'm a huge believer that I'm always very careful not to tell somebody else how many children they should have. But I'm also a huge believer that we should make population family planning technology available to every person on the planet who wants it, and if they so choose. But I think that the reason it's easy to say legitimately, as you did, we're dropping the bucket. But I'm a huge believer that we are kind of the Archimedes point of the world. That is, when we go green, the world goes green. There are a lot of people hiding behind us now, our ambivalence, China and India, to name just two countries. And I think if we made the kind of truly green leap as a country, that's why I've actually never believed in the Copenhagen, Bali, I was out all of those. Great trips, wonderful cities, OK? But exactly, exactly. But the idea that we're going to get 192 countries in the world to all agree on verifiable limits on their CO2 emissions, I think, is a complete pipe dream. I have one, my own philosophy is very simple. Get America to go green, because I'm a huge believer that emulation is so much more powerful, a force of change than compulsion. And when people see us doing the right things in the right way, I think the ability of that to scale is really incalculable. And I really believe that it could have a much bigger effect than people realize, especially in an interconnected world. Will that be the answer? Can technology outrace population? That's old debate, and I'm not, in any way, schooled enough to say so, to one way or another. But I am a big believer, though, in the power of technology, to do a lot of this. And I'm less worried about that, and I'm more worried about the disorder that is being created that doesn't allow technology to actually be put in place, or family planning policies to be put in place. And that's what unnerves me right now. And my simple mantra for American foreign policy is that, where there is disorder, collaborate with everyone you can to first contain it, and then try to bring order. That's what we're sort of trying to do in the Middle East. Where there is order imposed from the top down, try to make it more decent, excuse me, Egypt, for instance. Where there is order and decency, Jordan, Morocco, try to make it more sustainable and effective. And where there is order and democracy protected in Tunisia like a rare flower. And so that's kind of my progression of how I think about the world. But this is going to be hard. I don't think we've faced this kind of problem before in a post-imperial world where you have vast regions of disorder and the resources needed to bring order, outstrip any single great power or small power, and maybe even coalition. So I think that's sort of what's on my mind right now. Yeah, a couple more and we'll stop and let you go. Two more. Hi, Karim Farhad, I'm a PhD student here. So connecting the dots between the Middle East and Washington and energy policy, given what you have seen in the Middle East and what you have seen on Capitol Hill, do you envision any magic formula in terms of energy trade between the US and the Middle East that would work for the people in the Middle East make them a little bit more stable and happier with the US and equally work for the US and make the energy policy here more sustainable? It's a good question. That's a really good question. Next question over here. No, it's a... No, no, no, no, no, no, it's a... I really think that there is an answer to that. It isn't really just about energy though. You know, I think, you know, if I were to pick a number out of the year and you can talk to oil experts, know more about this than me, but you know, $80 a barrel of oil is enough. I don't wanna see Saudi Arabia be bankrupted tomorrow or Iran, that will lead to a different kind of chaos. So, you know, you want whatever transition is gonna happen to happen gradually. By the way, I don't wanna see chaos in Russia either. And so I don't think going just cold Turkey, I think would have its own very negative implications. But at the same time, I wanna be a pathway this way, not that way, that's for sure. Not only because it'll be a cleaner world, and that's, I think, the most important reason, but because oil has been a curse for all of these countries. You know, the country that Vladimir Putin threatens the most in my view is called Russia. Because he's got Russia on a now almost completely natural resources, not just oil and gas, but also mining, diet. And here's a great country that's produced great writers and musicians and scientists. And all Putin is doing is drilling the ground and tapping the energy and not tapping the people. Russia's incredibly talented men and women for the good of Russia and for the good of the world. That's really, I think, gonna end really badly for them. And I think that's the same problem in the Middle East. So many generations, I mean, three or four now, where leaders have tapped the ground and not tapped their people. And I think a lot of what the Arab Spring was about were people reacting to that. And so I would like to see a steady glide path. But the thing that we underestimate most about the Middle East, I believe, and it's core to my thinking, is that what people are starved for there, in my view, is really two things. Justice and governance. They live in rigged societies that are deeply unjust and incredibly poorly governed. And we so underestimate, we always think if we just could train one more soldier, we could just train one, it's just that, we just didn't train enough Iraqis. And that's why they all threw off their uniforms at the first sight of an ISIS guy and ran away. It's not about the will, it's about the way. It's, do I see a government in Baghdad that I wanna fight for? That's delivering to me the governance and the justice that I, as a citizen, want. And we so, you know, one of the most, where are you from, if I could ask? Lebanon, bless you, country near and dear to my heart. One of the really formative experiences I had in the last couple of years was I actually covered the last day of voting for Muhammad Morsi's election as president of Egypt. So he was the Muslim Brotherhood candidate who won. And I was in Cairo for the last day. It was rolling voting over two weeks. And I went to an all women's voting station in Shubra, which is one of the poorest neighborhoods in Cairo, at an elementary school that was so poor your kids should never see such a school. And I interviewed probably about 20 women when they came out with my Egyptian reporter colleague from our bureau there. And every one of them was veiled. 19 voted for the Muslim Brotherhood and one voted for the waft. And I asked each one of them, why did you vote for the Muslim Brotherhood? Oh, it was very simple. More street lights, better sidewalks, security for my kids, justice from the government, an end to corruption, jobs for my kids. There wasn't one woman who said if I see another bikini on the beaches of Alexandria, I'm gonna go kill somebody, okay? Every one of them spoke about governance. And it's the thing we totally underestimate in this whole story, that when they see corrupt, unjust governance, the idea that we could train them with American special forces 365 days of the year, but if there's no government they wanna defend, they will throw their uniform off at the first sign of trouble. And we really, because we really don't listen to people. And we think, we know the way. It's just a little, another couple of months of training. And it's not about training. It's about how people are governed. One more, yeah, yeah. I'm Ed Rubin from Carnegie Mellon. Thanks for the good talk. Kind of the bottom line question. If you can think ahead 50 years from now, specifically regarding to the energy and climate issue, where are we gonna be? 50 years from now. Where will we be on energy and climate? When all the students in the room start looking more like some of us up front here. I think we'll be, if I'm really honest, if you slap the lie detector on me, we'll be doing a lot of adaptation. That's what I feel. I just am afraid, when you look at all the vectors of carbon and climate and whatnot, that, and the politics of trying to get there. It's just so hard to get one generation to act on behalf of a generation that hasn't been born yet. And that's really what climate policy comes down to. It's an act of stewardship that is unlike any other. And I wish, I kind of feel about the debt issue a lot of the way I feel about the climate issue. And some economists give me grief about this, but I still believe it, which is that, if you talk to liberals about the debt, the national debt, we're bequeathing our kids. Say, don't worry about it. We can spend another dollar, but do not emit another molecule of carbon. You talk to conservatives about climate change. They say, there hasn't been a temperature rise in the world and there hasn't been a temperature rise in 50 years. We can emit all the carbon we want, but do not rack up another dollar of debt. And to me, they're just mere images of each other. We're leaving these two incredible mountains of debt. One's called a carbon debt. One's called a financial debt to the next generation. And they are really going to be pissed off at us one day. And when I'm with young people, I'm always tempted to say, you are so much more optimistic than you should be. I bite my tongue, but the one thing I can't, I always said this to George before, which is, I can ruin any dinner party. And so I don't want to ruin your conference and I will tell you the one thing that gives me sucker and this is not contrived. When I rode hot, flattened crowded, I got to travel all over the country. And talking about energy, it was really interesting. And it was in the middle of the subprime crisis, so people were a little distracted. But I'd go to Tulsa and I'd go to Minneapolis, my hometown. And what is amazing, if you want to be an optimist about America, stand on your head, because the country looks so much better from the bottom up than the top down. Because when you go out to all these places, what you discover is none of them, none of them have gotten the word. None of them got the word that China's going to eat our lunch. None of them got the word that Germany's going to eat our breakfast. And they just go out and invent stuff and fix stuff and collaborate on stuff. You see business government, NGO collaborate, just in Missouri. It's amazing, you know, things there in fact, even with Ferguson down the street. And so, thank God, there's just a whole group of people in this country who didn't get the word. And when you go talk to them about energy, what is always just incredibly striking to me is they come up to you after your talk, and they give you their business cards of their energy innovations. Mr. Friedman, I've got a duck. It paddles a wheel, blows up a balloon, issues methane, turns a turbine. I heard like the craziest stuff, okay? So there's people all over the country doing that. And I would end the day, often, or end the evening, go back to my hotel room and empty my pockets of business cards from all these innovators. Rock stars get room keys. I get business cards, okay? But I got to tell you, they're very exciting and very hopeful. They didn't get the word. Thank you very much.