 President Peterson, Provost Morton, Deans McGuire and Eliason, distinguished panelists, faculty, and Nobel conference guests. Today, Gustavus Adolphus College honors Nobel Laureate, Steven Chu, Professor of Physics and Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Professor Chu shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics with physicists Claude Cohn to Danouge from France, and William D. Phillips from the National Institute of Standards and Technology for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light. In 1985, Chu and his co-workers used an array of intersecting laser beams to create an effect they called optical molasses, in which the speed of target atoms was reduced from about 4,000 kilometers per hour to about one kilometer per hour, as if the atoms were moving through thick molasses. The temperature of the slowed atoms approached absolute zero. Chu and his colleagues also developed an atomic trap using lasers and magnetic coils that enabled them to capture and study the chilled atoms. Phillips and Cohn Danouge expanded on Chu's work, devising ways to use lasers to trap atoms at temperatures even closer to absolute zero. These techniques make it possible for scientists to improve the accuracy of atomic clocks used in space navigation. To construct atomic interferometers that can precisely measure gravitational forces, and to design atomic lasers that can be used to manipulate electronic circuits at an extremely fine scale. Stephen Chu was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1948 and raised in Garden City, New York within commuting distance of Brooklyn Polytechnic University, where his father was a professor. Academic excellence was an expectation in Chu's family with virtually all of his aunts and uncles holding doctorates in science or engineering. But as the academic black sheep in the family, he often found schoolwork to be tedious and boring. He did enjoy building model airplanes and warships, and from fourth grade on, a rector set creations whose main design criteria was to maximize the number of movable parts and overall size. As he grew older, he graduated to chemistry, starting a soil testing business with a friend for the neighbors in Garden City, while also experimenting with homemade rockets. He enjoyed a variety of sports, including football, basketball, baseball, and even hockey. He taught himself to pole vault and play tennis, earning a spot for three years on his school's tennis team. Eventually, Professor Chu found some courses which relieve the tedium, geometry, and English, and as a senior AP physics and calculus. He remembers these courses as being different, where he was asked to think in clear logical steps instead of merely memorizing facts. He also admits that he was blessed with the talented and dedicated teachers, particularly his physics teacher, Thomas Minor. Steven Chu studied physics and mathematics at the University of Rochester, earning bachelor's degrees in both in 1970. He says that if it were not for the Feynman lectures, he would have almost assuredly left physics for math. When he went to graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley, he thought that he would become a theoretical physicist. But after passing the qualifying exam and standing at the threshold of a career in theoretical physics, he spent two months playing in the lab instead of working on the theoretical problem his advisor had given him. Realizing that he would be happier in the laboratory, Chu convinced his advisor to let him work on high-energy physics experiments, launching him on his incredible career in experimental physics. He earned his PhD in physics from Berkeley in 1976, before the experiment was even finished. After a post-doctoral appointment at Berkeley, Chu moved to Bell Labs in the fall of 1978, where he worked on fast optical spectroscopy, electron spectroscopy, and laser cooling. In 1987, he returned to academia, joining the faculty of Stanford University and continuing his research on laser cooling and trapping, while also venturing into polymer physics and biology. His efforts in the field of laser cooling and trapping atoms have ultimately led to the 1997 Nobel Prize in physics. He extended these methods in developing optical tweezers for manipulating polymers and other molecules like DNA. He was the Theodore and Francis Geball Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Stanford for 17 years, before becoming the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 2004. He is now active in energy problems in his co-chairing and international Interacademy Council study, transitioning to sustainable energy. Prior to receiving the Nobel Prize, Chu had been awarded the Breudy of Rick Meyer and Shocklau Prizes of the American Physical Society, the Meegers Prize from the Optical Society of America, and the King Fasal International Prize for Science, a Humboldt Senior Science Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has been a fellow of the American Physical Society since 1987, the Optical Society of America since 1990, and of the American Academy for Arts and Sciences since 1992, and was elected to membership in the Chinese Academy of Arts, or Academy of Sciences, and the Korean Academy of Sciences and Technology. Gustavus Adolphus College is privileged and honored to bestow an honorary degree on Stephen Chu for his contributions to atomic physics, biology, polymer science, and sustainable energy. President Peterson, upon the recommendation of the faculty, I present Dr. Stephen Chu for the degree of Doctor of Science, honoris causa. Dr. Chu, at the opening of our Nobel Conference annually, it is our tradition and our honor to present visiting Nobel laureates with an honorary Doctor of Science degree. In recognition of the accomplishments just cited, and in gratitude for your presence with us on this special occasion, on behalf of the trustees of the college and the entire Gustavus community, I'm very pleased to award this honorary degree. And so, by the authority vested in this institution by the state of Minnesota, and upon the recommendation of the faculty and the board of trustees of Gustavus Adolphus College, I hereby confer upon you Stephen Chu the degree of Doctor of Science, honoris causa, with all of the rights, privileges, and honors pertaining thereto. Congratulations. We're excited to have Professor Chu kick off this year's conference with the world's energy problem and what we can do about it. Professor Chu, a great pleasure to be here and be honored at Gustavus. Let me just turn this on. We're ready to go. Good. I would like to talk to you today about a problem that has certainly got my attention over the last five or six years, so much so that it stimulated me to change my career yet again. There are people here, Jim Hanson notably, who have been concerned about this climate problem for almost two decades. So in that sense, I'm a giant come lately, but I hope I can share with you some of the urgency of the problem and give you a hope that it's a problem that can be solved and has to be solved. I'd like to start off by reminding, as was mentioned before, Glenn Seaborg was one of the first of the group that started this conference 43 years ago, and I want to read a quote that he attributed to him, that he wrote, actually, and it actually captures a lot of what's been happening. The modern world to many seems very bewildering. The great advances in physics and medicine and all sorts of technology seem as though it's going away from normal folk and totally bewildering. So Seaborg said, the modern technological world appears overwhelming to many people. It drives some to pessimism and despair. It makes others doubt the future of mankind unless we retreat to simpler lives or even to the ways of our ancestors. We cannot go back to those days and those ways. Furthermore, for all our difficulties, life today is far better for more people and the possibilities for the future can be brighter than ever. If we develop not only new knowledge, but a greater faith and confidence in the human mind and spirit. So I think really this is what this conference is going to be about. So with that, I'll launch into the energy problem. There are many facets to the problem. There are, of course, grave environmental concerns, air pollution, water pollution, but to me, above all, the threat to significant climate change. You should also know that out of the 6.7 billion people in the world, 2 to 3 billion of those currently lack access to modern forms of energy. That means they cook with twigs or dung or lumps of coal they find. 1.6 billion of those people have no access to electricity. Number three, there's a real potential for geopolitical conflict due to the accelerating competition for any resources, especially oil and gas, and I'm sure later in the conference we'll hear about many of these things. Very briefly, and Hansen will talk more about this, I want to show you what the evidence is that the climate has been changing and the fact that it is most likely due to humans. So this is a record from 1860 to 2001, 2002, of the average temperature of the earth, and it has gone up by roughly 0.8 degrees centigrade. And you might look at this and say, well, yes, it's been increasing, but is this just some local anomalies, some weather? After all, 140 years is nothing by geological time scales. So what we can do is we can go back further, and this chart takes us back 420,000 years. And in fact, there's good geological evidence of temperatures that go back more than 50 million years ago, but in this chart we're plotting in red the temperature that's measured from Antarctica ice cores, the atmospheric carbon dioxide, and the atmospheric methane. This is the present day, and you see that there was an ice age, a cooling period over here, another ice age, and so on. A sawtooth pattern that we now understand to be initially due to slight changes in the orbit of the earth, both the eccentricity of the orbit and the tipping of the earth relative to the plane of the orbit. We understand that that caused this initial rise. We do not fully understand why the rise was as large as it was, and then there was a little pattern that slowly cooled it down. In this time, it is understood, at least in the beginning parts, that carbon dioxide did not cause the earth to rise. It was an initial rise in temperature that released carbon dioxide and caused it to rise. So here we are today in temperature, and here we are today in carbon dioxide. And so this is a little bit odd because all of a sudden, on the time scale of 420,000 years ago, the increase in carbon dioxide has occurred over 150 years, and so on geological time scales, that's an instant. So there is a great concern that the historical past, the geological past, won't actually tell us as much about what will happen in the future. And to quote the great American philosopher of the 20th century, Yogi Berra, predictions are hard to make, especially about the future. So what one has to do is warm up in your predictions by predicting the past. Now, what does it mean to predict the past? Well, let's first look at the history of the past. This is carbon dioxide, methane nitrous oxide, over the last thousand years, fairly flat, and then this great uptick, the uptick started around the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. We can date, you can use isotopic methods of date where this stuff came from, and it's coming, for example, to carbon dioxide. A lot of it can be traced to fossil fuel. This is manmade, this is caused by humans. So, if you put in a computer model, which is shown in gray, all the natural occurrences, for example, the changes in the solar variation, the fact that if there are large volcanoes, that tends to cool the earth down, and these what we call natural changes that are random things that occur due to acts of nature. And what we find in this particular model is that you can fiddle with the parameters as best you can, and you cannot make it agree with this red curve, which were the temperature measurements. However, if you take that same model and now allow the human carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxides to be put into the model, which we firmly believe it's due to humans, then you get a reasonably good fit. So, is this proof that humans cause it? No, it's not. It's suggestive that humans caused it. And it's suggestions like this, not just one suggestion, but many, many points of evidence like this one begin to very strongly suggest that humans cause the increase. So, with that, and that was a prediction of the past. That was a prediction of the last 140 years or so. So, going forward in the future, I think many of the predictions, one cannot say will absolutely come true. To lesser or greater extents, there are great uncertainties in these predictions, but one is predicting and beginning to see increased damage from storms, floods, wildfires. We're beginning to see the sea level rise. That's a measurement. We are beginning to, just beginning to see species extinction and the spread of disease, especially waterborne diseases that are affected by temperature like malaria are expected to increase and be killing millions of more per year. But I'm going to just talk about one prediction that will affect most of the people in the world and that is water shortages. So, this is taken from a paper published in 2004 and it uses two climate models. And these are climate models that assume how much carbon dioxide the world will put up there in the next 100 years to the year 2100. B1 is a very optimistic model. It says the world will not go above 500 parts per million of carbon dioxide. We're around 380 parts per million today. A1 is a modified business as usual plan with some reductions, but one in which the world does not make a concerted effort to limit carbon emissions. These are predictions of what will happen in California in the alpine and subalpine forests. Those forests are part of our watershed. So when it snows in the hills and mountains, it's the trees that help those hills retain the water. The other part of the watershed is the fact that when it snows, it stays as snow and the snow melts gradually over three, four, five month period. In the most optimistic scenario, the forests are predicted to be half gone to three quarters gone. And the Sierra snowpack will decrease by 30 to 70%. And in the more business as usual scenario, it's three quarters to 90% gone. So in the optimistic scenario, we're facing a tremendous water shortage because a great part of the watershed of the Sierra Nevadas in California will be gone. And when the trees are gone, when it rains, there are gonna be floods. British Columbia has similar predictions. It's predicted that being 78 and 80% of their pine forest would be dead within a decade due to parasite infestation of pine beetles that are no longer killed in the winter. And you might say, well, this is just alarmist stuff. It's not really gonna happen. Just a bunch of scientists saying the sky is falling down. Well, this is a picture of the British Columbia pine forest now dead. And about 40% of the forests are gone today. So we're halfway there. Minnesota has some pine forests up north. They are retreating north. This is not only true in the United States and not only in California and the entire West. It is also true all around the world. The Great Tibetan Plateau, whose snow and rain feed many of the major rivers in the world in China, India and Pakistan. This glacier is now shrinking by more than 1.2 meters a year. Many, many cubic kilometers of ice are disappearing. Similarly, the forests are retreating further northward, further upward in altitude. The major water source of China in the north, the Yellow River is now beginning to run dry due to a combination of over irrigation, pollution and climate change. And going in this century, one is looking towards really catastrophic changes in this water supply system that touches half the population of the world and is actually the major source for one third of the population of the world. So let me talk about energy consumption. So on the X-axis, I'm plotting the wealth per person of each country. This is the United States, Ireland, UK, India, China. And on the Y-axis, I'm plotting the energy used per person in each of those countries. And here we are in the United States, the wealthiest country in the world, highest GDP per capita. And also we consume the most amount of energy in this grouping at least. And this is the yearly thing. It's flattening out primarily because US industry has gotten much more efficient in its use of energy and also because many of the heavy energy-intensive industries are being all short, steel making, for example, and others. So what about this 350 billion joules of energy per year per person? Most people don't really have a good feel for what that energy is, so I thought I would convert it into a unit that you can all understand. And a human being needs about 2,500 calories per day to sustain life and to do a good day's work. 3,000 calories a day, it's a really good day's work or you get bigger. So 350 billion joules per year per person in the US means that every man, woman, and child in the United States has 100 energy servants. That's why we can go to the market driving a car which has one to 200 horses. That's why we can fly across the country on an airplane that has 100,000 horses and why we can plug a wire into the wall and out-jump about six to 10 horses to clean your carpet, your vacuum cleaner, uses that much energy. We've gotten used to a lot of energy and it is the primary reason why we have such a high standard of living in the world. Average person in China has 10 servants. Can the whole world population go up to this level of standard of living that we enjoy in the United States? And I think the answer is yes. And I think the answer is yes because the standard of living is not directly tied to energy. Here I've plotted electricity consumption on the x-axis against what is called the Human Development Index which is the gross domestic project plus the healthcare system plus how much education people have in those countries. And what you find surprisingly is above a certain high human wealth index, these are wealthy countries, these are wealthy countries, these are wealthy countries, they use the same amount of, they use a totally different amount of energy, okay? Equal wealth, different amounts of energy. Here's Japan, equal wealth to the United States, to Canada in this index. And there are, now the reason why Canada, US, Australia, Norway use so much more energy is because they historically grew up in an era and in a time where their natural resources gave them essentially free energy and they didn't have to be conserving as much. Whereas Japan down here always grew up in an era where the energy was very costly. The European companies, the EU and Japan want to go down to here as we should go down to here. And it is possible to go down to here. If we're down here, these countries, China and Pakistan can all come up here and it really might be possible to sustain a middle class existence all over the world. But in the end, it's not about energy, it's about carbon dioxide emissions. And so here we again, GDP, US has the highest carbon emissions followed by Australia and others. The United States must go down by at least a factor of four, perhaps a factor of five. And in fact, in the state of California, the governor has pledged within 2050, California pledges to get its carbon emissions down by a factor of five. It's a goal we hope we can get there. What is China and India gonna do? Are they gonna follow the course of the United States, Australia and other energy abundant countries? And once they get to a certain wealth, they say, oops, we shouldn't really be here, we should be down there. And now we'll work to put in more efficient energy systems. Or are they gonna leapfrog past our mistakes and learn from us and go directly to this point? Now, this is the great question. Many of us are trying to develop systems and urge China and India so that they can actually leapfrog past the mistakes of the United States and other countries. But it remains to be seen. This is the carbon trajectories of business as usual, the red curve. These are different scenarios as the world can reduce the carbon emissions. The prediction of the California Alpine and Subalpine forest, decreasing by a factor of two to four, lies somewhere between this green curve and the yellow curve. I should say that it's unlikely we will follow the yellow, this orange, whatever color this is, orange curve. And I would hope that we can be below this green curve. This is the total carbon emissions since the beginning of civilization, of humans. And this is what one expects. This would be a doubling. This area under this curve is the same as the area under this curve. And so what this tells us is, yes, up until 2007, the developed countries are responsible for the lion's share of the carbon. But China has now begun to pass the United States in carbon emission. And in 20 years, the developing countries will be 60% of all carbon emissions. So because the carbon will be doubling in the next 30, 40 years, it's important that both developed and developing countries be partners in this. But of course, the developed countries, the richer countries have to set the example and have to do the lion's share of the reduction. But the developing countries are now part of the issue. So the dual strategies, we need to solve the energy problem by maximizing efficiency and also developing new clean sources of energy. Government has to play a role in this. You cannot allow the free market to find a solution. Regulation is really needed. And just to drive this point home, you can ask the question, how many free market economists does it take to change the light bulb? And the answer is none. If it needed changing, the free market forces would have taken care of it. That's, I think, believed at Stanford and University of Chicago, because that's where the heart of the free market economists are. But their free markets, when left alone, actually fail when there is what we call a commons problem. And what's the commons problem? The commons problem is that many people and many nations share a common resource. Like fishing, there's international waters. A single country doesn't control the fishing of all the oceans, so they make a decision, well, if we don't fish, someone else will fish, so we might as well take as much fish as we can take before someone else takes them and you over fish. This is also true of air and water pollution. If you're a town and it costs money to treat your sewage, so you dump the sewage into the river. That's all good and fine until there's another town above you that dumps sewage into the river and then you say, hmm, maybe you shouldn't dump sewage into the river because it costs us a lot more to treat the sewage that you've just dumped into the river than it would have cost you to have treated it. So then a regulation comes out and says nobody gets to dump sewage into the river. A similar sort of understanding has to be done for climate change. We share a common earth. This is the ultimate commons problem. Free market incentives won't take care of this. It is possible to induce people to conserve or at least limit their supply of energy. In the first oil crisis, California underwent a number of things and the electricity supply is essentially flat per person while the rest of the outsates went up by 60% if you take out California, the rest of the outsates is up here. How did they do it? Well, it turned out that a physicist in my laboratory, Arthur Rosenfeld, the last student of Enrico Fermi, left high-energy physics and went into the energy problem. He did many things. He went into an appliance store and he noticed that you can buy refrigerators of a certain size and the price was all about the same for the given features. But the amount of electricity these refrigerators used varied by about a factor of four. So without being a refrigerator engineer, he could automatically assume the efficiency of refrigerators has very little to do with the price. Therefore, why don't we ask the refrigerator manufacturers to make only energy-efficient refrigerators? He convinced the legislature and the governor of the state of California that they needed standards and as the size of refrigerators given by this brown curve went from 18 cubic feet to 22 cubic feet in 2003, limited by a way, not by the size of the American appetite, but by the size of the kitchen door. The electricity use of those same refrigerators, as they got bigger, the electricity plummeted and in fact it went down by a factor of four and a half, not 40%, four and a half. The price of refrigerators inflation adjusted and went down by a factor of two because as the insulation got better, as the compressors got more efficient, you can make a smaller compressor and then the cost went down. Now, you wanna notice something here. The first standard occurred in 1978 and yet the efficiency started increasing before that, a few years before that. How could this happen? Well, it happened because the manufacturers were given fair warning. There will be a standard a few years from now. Don't try to change the standard, forget about lobbying, forget about suing us, just think about it. And so once you assign a job from a lawyer or lobbyist to an engineer, then you make progress. This is true of appliance standards like heaters, air conditioners, refrigerators. It's true of very high building efficiency standards, double-pane windows were mandatory, very thick 12 inches of insulation on a roof even though it's California. The walls had to be insulated, even the floors had to be insulated and half of the energy efficiency was found by decoupling utility companies from the profits they make. In most of the United States, a utility company makes more money by selling more energy. So if the shareholders wanna make more money, they sell more energy. Well, that's not right, you've gotta break that. So what we did in California is we said the important question is for a given investment, how much return on that capital, the invested capital can you make? You can make more if you use the efficiency, energy more efficiently and especially if you balance the load so more energy is used at night where it's much less expensive to produce than in daytime when everybody wants it to run their air conditioners. And any energy efficiency program you start or any efficiency investment you make will can be automatically passed on to the consumer. And having just tweaked these two things, the utility companies in California became the biggest preachers and profits of energy conservation consistently year after year. And this has been going on now for over 18 years. It's been very successful. We're the only state that has really flattened our electricity consumption per person. I should also say sadly that there's only two other states in the union that have adopted this policy. So you can talk to your local representatives in Minnesota, talk to people in California, learn more about it. Let me talk about energy supply. There's a wide menu of things in energy supply. This is one dire prediction given by the International Energy Agency that in the next 30 years we're gonna add a lot of CO2, it's even more dire than the one I gave. Perhaps three times as much CO2 is the previous history of all humanity. The sad news is or the good news is we will not run out of fossil fuel. Yes there will be a peaking of conventional oil but there will be unconventional oil such as tar sand, shale oil and there will be lots of coal. And coal will be the default option of the United States, China and India. Why is it gonna be the default option? That's where all the coal in the world is. It is very abundant. And certainly China and India will not turn their backs on coal. We need to minimize our use of coal but we too are beginning to go back to coal. And that's an issue. Wind is a real success story. These very large, beautiful windmills. Actually over a period of 25 years the price of generating electricity from wind has dropped by more than a factor of 10. It's now about five cents a kilowatt hour. It's becoming, it's within 10 or 20% of being competitive with natural gas. These are engineering marvels. These largest installed windmills, each one can generate three million watts of power. And the new ones on the drawing board can generate five million watts. The wingspan of the current ones have the wingspan of a 747. The new ones will have a wingspan of 126 meters, one and a quarter soccer fields. I asked the senior GE engineer how much bigger thing can they get? This is getting pretty exciting. He said this is about as big as it can get for a while because these blades will no longer make the turns on railroad cars or trucks. Now you can have big ones offshore, if you can load them onto a boat, if you can get them from the factory to the shore. So that's now a limitation. There's lots of wind, Minnesota, there's lots of wind. So the good news is there's lots of wind where there are no people and the bad news is there's lots of wind where there are no people. So we need a long distance efficient transmission line to take wind energy from these areas and put them into the west coasts and east coasts. We need an energy transmission line to take the sun solar energy from the deserts and move them to population centers. And we don't have an efficient long distance transmission line. Our grid is just a connection of local wirings that local utility companies have put together. And there are very few very efficient transmission lines designed to go even 1,000 miles and certainly none designed to go 3,000 miles. This is a technology that we can develop, we have in the world, but it hasn't been done because of the boundary conditions of the economics of power utility companies in the US. I wanna tell you a little bit about the work done by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and UC Berkeley. It's something I took on when I joined the laboratory three years ago. I was a professor at Stanford. I had begun to give more and more talks on energy and the climate problem. And then when people said, why don't you apply for this job? I said, I wasn't interested and they asked, well, just so I hadn't a ring. I said, I'm not interested. And then I began to think, well, I've really got to put my feet where my mouth was. And if I was really concerned about this energy problem and the climate change problem, is it possible to go over there and try to enlist some of the best scientists to start to work on the problem? There were already excellent scientists working on the problem, but many of our best basic scientists were not. So the idea here was we would try to capture the sun's energy and convert that into transportation fuel, either by plants or microbes, or using photovoltaic solar cells to convert to electricity. And once you had electricity, is it possible to convert the electricity into transportation fuel? So when you ask a question like that, you first have to ask, what are the world resources for growing, for example, plants? You have to grow food, but you also can possibly grow plants for energy. And so in this map of the world, black means there's enough water, there's enough sunlight, and you can grow food or plants for energy. Red means there may be enough sunlight, but there's not enough water, and so this is called vaguely desert. And blue means it's too cold or it doesn't have much radiation, because when you're really far north, the sun is hitting the globe at a very slight angle, and so there's simply not enough solar radiation or it's just plain too cold. So most of the world is desert. A good fraction of over half is desert, excluding the blue stuff. And so desert means you might wanna use the desert for converting sunlight into electricity, either by heating up a fluid and converting electricity or by directly converting into electricity. You can look at the economics of the situation and it's my estimate, actually based on behavior of people, more than anything else, that you need about a factor of three, reduction in the cost of electricity, typical US state, say 10 cents a kilowatt hour. The production of electricity by photovoltaics has to drop by a factor of three before homeowners will stick them on the roof without subsidy. You need about a factor of 10, decreasing the costs before power companies will start to deploy large-scale solar facilities without subsidy. The tantalizing aspect of this is these are small improvements, relatively speaking, but you would only need two to three tenths of the deserts of the world to generate all the world's electricity needs. At 20% efficiency, we have the 20% efficiency today, we just don't have the cost down. These are what are called learning curves on the y-axis as a total accumulated amount of electricity generation that's installed, how much you've invested in the industry. And on the y-axis is the dollar cost. Gas turbines have been going down, down, down, by the way, this is a logarithmic curve, so straight line means there's exponential improvement at Moore's Law. Gas turbines have been going down, they've been plateauing out, they're suddenly going up because of the cost of gas. Windmills are down here now, they're getting in striking distance of gas turbines, and photovoltaics are here. Once you're on these learning curves, you don't go down this way, you always flatten out. And so with the same technology, so with this technology, you can begin to predict a learning curve at a time of installment and where you would need to be, and quite frankly, this convinced me that silicon photovoltaics will not get us there fast enough, because that's the gap. So what we want to do is we want to use very new science based on nanotechnology, the technology of making teeny tiny particles, so tiny that you can begin to image, these are rows of atoms of a tiny particle. Now, why do we wanna make solar cells of these teeny tiny things? Well, we now know how to make them, essentially as perfect crystals. If you want to make a large crystal, like a large silicon crystal, perfect, it costs a lot of money. And as you well know, if you want to go into and buy your girlfriend a diamond, it costs a lot more money to buy a one-carat flawless diamond than a quarter-carat flawless diamond. And so the weight is double, the cost doubles, sorry, the diamond of double the weight costs four times as much, but if it's flawless, it's actually much higher. So we can make perfect tiny crystals. When the size gets so small, we can play all sorts of new tricks in physics and chemistry. And so we can design very new types of things. I don't wanna go into the technical details, but just suffice to say, we now know how to make teeny tiny little particles, sunlight goes in, creates electron and a positive charge. Those things separate as they do in conventional solar cells and they migrate to the ends. It's perfect and it can be made with inexpensive white chemistry. The only thing left is how to adjust the chemical properties so they make good electrical contacts with these electrodes. And so if we can do that, we've got it made because we think we can already line them up, all standing up straight next to each other like soldiers. So it's ideas like this that we think perhaps in five years, we can make these things work. There's about a half a dozen of them we're trying. Another thing we're doing, you'll hear more about later, is we want to create, use sunlight and use a plant to grab the sunlight, the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, water and nutrients and to make a plant. And the plant we wanna make would have very efficient use of water, sunlight and nutrients. Once we get this biomass plant stuff, we wanna convert it to chemical energy but in an improved, much more economical way. Is there enough biocapacity to feed the world and create some biofuel? Well, the answer is partially yes. In the years 1960 to 2005, the world population went from three billion to six and a half billion. The area harvested is in the black and this is what was seeded. So it was essentially flat and a little bit less than flat, yet the productivity went up. So the population more than doubled, the amount of land used to produce grains actually went down and the yield went up by a factor of three or four. That's modern agriculture. In the United States especially has so much agricultural surplus land that we can indeed make fuel out of crops. Corn is not the right crop. The reason it's not the right crop is because the amount of energy you put into making a fuel in growing the corn and fertilizing the corn fields and plowing the fields is within 10 or 20% of the amount of energy you get by making it into ethanol that you can put in your car. Also the amount of CO2 you create by growing corn is again within 20% of the amount of carbon dioxide you make by drilling, refining oil and putting in your car. What corn does do is it means we don't have to import as much oil from abroad, but there are better ways. This is a grass that was grown in a field in Illinois outside the University of Illinois. This young lady is a graduate student who happens to be five foot four in case you were wondering. There's another picture of a basketball player here but they thought it would be better to put a short graduate student. It doesn't really matter because this is grass grown on unfurlized land and unirrigated land. Okay, there was no sterile oil stuff going into the ground. And the amount of cellulose that grew out of this land would be 10 times the amount of ethanol that you could have produced from a high producing corn field. So same amount of land but 10 times, no irrigation, no fertilizer. It's even better than that. These plants are perennials so you don't plow them in. Next year you harvest the tops, next year they grow back. And year after year they grow back. Because the roots remain in the ground, you can induce these plants to have relationships with bacteria like legumes that actually fix their own nitrogen. In the old days we used to rotate crops because some of the crops actually put nitrogen back in the soil. Well these guys do it too. At harvest time, because they're gonna be here another year and a year after that and a year after that, they actually withdraw those precious mineral nutrients back from the leaves parts, back into the roots at autumn time. And so many of those precious nutrients are restored to be used another year. And even lowly switchgrass, which is not as good as the grass I just showed you by a factor of two or more, has one eighth the nitrogen runoff, which is the water pollutant, a major water pollutant in agricultural areas and one hundredth the soil erosion of corn. So this is what we should be growing, not corn. But then why are we growing corn? Well, it's because we do not have economical means of breaking down the lignin and cellulose in this material to make fuel. It's all about money. Whereas corn is a very simple starch and we can break down the fuels much more cheaply. Sugarcane is even better. It's a sugar and we can just press out the sugar and immediately go to fermentation. In grasses what we have to do is we have to separate molecules to protect these long polymer sugars. That's very energy intensive. You've got to invest a lot of energy and then you've got to use a set of very expensive enzymes to break the long chains of sugars into simple sugars. And then finally you can ferment. The differences of how to cure three, two and a half to three, some people think that this is a goal that can be reached within five or 10 years. And for that reason, BP, formerly British Petroleum, has invested in a research program at University of California and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and then we got as a partner, University of Illinois. It's a modest amount of money. It's half a billion dollars over 10 years. The Department of Energy has invested in us the tune of $25 million a year for these five years and we expect it to be for 10 or 15 years. So that's roughly three quarters of a billion dollars or more just to do research in biofuels. What type of research will we be doing? What will we be trying to make better plants? We can breed better plants. No one has bred plants for energy. We've bred plants for increased productivity of food and we think we can do much better in that. Once you have the plant, we can design the plant so it's easier to break down the cellulose material and then we will look for a better set of enzymes and microbes to break it down. So this is a cartoon of a termite looking beatily at your home. Now, when a termite eats wood, you'd be surprised to know that it can't really digest the wood. It would just pass through its roughage. But what happens is that there are sets of microbes within the stomach of a termite. This is the stomach, it's stomachs of a termite and there could be as many as a hundred different microbes that are used to break down the cellulose, take a little bit of energy to feed the microbes and pass the rest of the energy to the termite. With the instructions, go find me more wood. So everybody is happy, the termite's happy, the microbes are happy, maybe the homeowner's not happy. Okay, so this relationship between the microbes and the termites has bred a special environment but especially microbes that are really good at breaking down cellulose. So what we've done is we've partnered with a small company going out the world, gathering up termites from all over everywhere, finding out which termites really do a good job on your house, analyze the DNA of the microbes in the guts of the termite and understand how those microbes really work and what enzymes are they really doing. And with the kind of support we're getting from both BP and the Department of Energy, we will be prospecting not only for termites but for funguses and microbes all over the world. Using very rapid new techniques to screen for them. Once we've got them, can we improve them and make them better? Now this all signs like science fiction, but there's a new field called synthetic biology where you can introduce a whole set of genes into an organism, this is E. coli, to make it produce something it really didn't want to do before. In this case, Jay Keasling has introduced a set of, over a dozen genes, so this lowly bacteria can produce an anti-malaria drug that is really a cure for malaria. The malaria protozoa has become resistant to the old style drugs. The drug is called Artemisinin, that's Jay Keasling. And his work got the attention of the Gates Foundation and so the Gates Foundation gave him $42 million to take his work out of the laboratory, create a startup company and bring the drug to market. The idea is you bring the drug to market at cost, okay? And so the new company was formed called Amorous. They've been met every milestone so far since 2005 and they're now ahead of schedule and they believe in 2008 they can deliver this drug that's going to be 20 cents a cure. The drug now is available at $4 a cure but that's too high a price for poor people and let's say in sub-Saharan Africa. As terrible things going on with this drug, it's being counterfeited, it's being diluted because the old quinine-based drugs aren't working anymore and people are dying and the big fear is that because it's being diluted, the protozoa will develop a resistance to this drug so we've got to get this out in the marketplace and make it so cheap the counterfeiters will try to kind of fit something else. There's not enough money in it for them. But and malaria kills one and a half million a year. But this technology, the same technology of a micro making this type of drug, this drug is a close relative of a fuel. So the company is now altering its course in addition to giving this drug cure is now thinking of how to make these bugs grow biofuels. So it will replace the yeast. And Jake Heasling wants to do more research to a totally different approach, but a similar sort of idea. Now in the end, there's not enough plant, we can't grow enough plants in the world and the reason we cannot grow enough plants is there's simply not gonna be enough irrigated land or irrigatable land or land that has enough natural rainfall to grow enough biofuels to serve the world's needs and feed people despite the agricultural stuff. In the end, I see five or 10% of the world's energy coming from biofuels. So is it possible, can we grow a plant that or something, it may be an artificial plant that can convert sunlight into fuel at 1% efficiency. The plants actually convert sunlight into bio stuff as up to 1% efficiency, but then you take another hit when you convert that cellulose and lignin into fuel. So it then becomes a few tenths of 1%. But suppose you get 1% efficiency, then the officially listed surplus crop land in the United States supplies all of gasoline consumption and what's better than that, you can do much better. And let me just tell you why. First, let me give you a little. Help you recall when man tried to learn to fly, they first looked at birds. This is from a sketchbook of Leonardo da Vinci. This is one of his sketches of a potential flying machine. Kind of looks like a bird. The first flying machine was a hybrid. It copied some of the things of birds. For example, when big birds learn to control their flight, they took their wings and they tipped them a little bit. They warped their wings. And so the Wright brothers actually designed that their airplane would have controlled flight by warping their wings. And so you see this picture head on of a wing warp. The other part of the bird, namely, let's say, Leonardo's leg muscles substituting for a bird's breast muscles didn't go. They just went to an automobile engine. That part doesn't look like a bird. And indeed, many years later, 100 years later, 747s don't look anything like birds. But they work pretty well for our purposes. So the question is, can we make an artificial plant that takes water, splits it into hydrogen and oxygen, takes carbon dioxide, reduces it into carbon monoxide, and that once you have oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon monoxide, you can make a hydrocarbon fuel. Now, why could this be better? It's the water. Possibly you can use every molecule of water to get going to a carbon fuel. Let me assure you that every molecule of water in a plant that a plant uses, or is used to water the plant, does not go into a fuel. So if this is possible, then we can produce fuels, transportation fuels, and have abundance of water for that. So this is a long-term goal, and maybe we get our equivalent 747 10 or 15 years from now. I just want to finish by bragging a little bit about my laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. It's on a hillside overlooking the Berkeley campus, not to confuse with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which is over the hill and is part of the nuclear weapons stuff. We don't do any classified work here. It's a science laboratory. 11 of employees have been rewarded Nobel Prizes since this beginning 1975 years ago, and more importantly, nine of them did their work at the lab. But if you include the students that were trained at the lab, the postdocs that were trained, and the people who started their careers at the laboratory, or who spent a significant amount of time there, the number goes to about 43. I was trained at the lab, for example. And today, there is about 3% of the entire membership of the National Academy of Sciences at the lab. So it's a very special place. It ranks up there with the top 10 best research universities in the country. I also spent nine years in another very special place, Bell Laboratories, after I left Berkeley. I used to live in the original farmhouse of the area built in 1850, hop defense, walk to work. Bell Labs was a very special place. 15 of its scientists received Nobel Prizes. It was known for many inventions. The laser, the transistor, had the fundamental understanding of electronic noise, information theory of how much information you can send over an optical fiber or through radio waves. This is, by the way, the first transistor. It's a device only a mother could love. What happened was, nine years before this invention, Bell Labs scientists discovered that if you put two pieces of some semiconductor material together, electricity would only go one way. And then they said, aha, if you can get that to happen, then you can control the amount of electricity that goes one way, and you could have the replacement for a vacuum tube, an electronic switch, an electronic amplifier. Now, how did they make that leap? Well, that wasn't a leap. What is a vacuum tube? It's a hot little wire, get really hot, red hot electrons come out. Then you put a little metal grid here, and the electrons go over the metal grid. So, electricity only goes one way. Then you put a little screen in between the hot wire and the metal plate, and by adjusting the voltage in the screen, you can change the current that hits the metal plate. That's a vacuum tube. And with a vacuum tube, you have electronic amplification and electronic switching. Nine years after Bell Labs scientists discovered that in a semiconductor material, electricity can make it go one way. They said, write that in there, we can make a solid-state vacuum tube. Let's make it. It'll be much better than a vacuum tube, and voila. These are the people who got the Nobel Prize for the invention of the vacuum tube, and what most people don't know is that there had to be fundamental breakthroughs in material science. There had to be fundamental understanding of what the electrons were really doing in this material, and what were they really doing at the edges of these two different types of semiconductor material? So, little teams of scientists all over the lab started working on it. And in those nine years, and the following 10 years, the scientists at Bell Laboratories essentially laid the foundation of modern electronic semiconductor industry. Okay. This, I joined Bell Labs in 1978. Yes, I, too, was young. This, we were all hired, these are older pictures of the others, but we were all hired as young students, fresh out of school, fresh out of graduate school. I was a little different. I was a little older because I was a post-doc, and Berkeley made me a professor, but I didn't ever teach a course, instead of starting my own group. I took a leave of absence, went to Bell Labs, and stayed, well, the plan was to stay for two years. I stayed away for 26 years, but I did come back. These were five of the people who were hired within one year of me. All got Nobel Prizes. Over half of the 40 people of the young science, and we were all hired as kids. Over half of us are in the National Academy of Sciences. So this tells you what a special place Bell Laboratories was. I would have to honestly say, if it wasn't for my research experiences and learning how to do research at a place like Bell Laboratories, I would not be the scientist I am today. Now, there was a special atmosphere at Bell Laboratories, and there was a special atmosphere at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. And the idea is that brilliant people, like Ernest Lawrence, sitting in the center, who had a good idea, he invented the cyclotron, and he can run around and get brilliant people to work with him on this idea. So he gathered a team of people. The first four others on this list went on to get their own Nobel Prize. And there was actually a fifth that's not in this picture. A Segre was also part of his team. Robin Oppenheimer, who you also heard of, and Robert Wilson is the founder of Fermilab. So Lawrence invented the idea of team science. And what was said of Ernest Lawrence was that he had the vision to glimpse at the limitless nature of the horizon and the generosity to make room for others. His personal credo was, there is enough research for all of us to do. He interceded with his rare persuasiveness to create new facilities for worthy projects. He rejoiced as jubilantly in the success of others as in his own. As a result, the careers of many scientists, my own included, are founded on his large contribution and his generous nature. Indeed, so great was the opportunity he created that he was influential in the training of a significant portion of the present core of nuclear scientists. So that was Seaborg talking about his mentor. This tradition continues today. The 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to George Smoot, who was put in charge of the scientific group that led to his Nobel Prize when he was 32. Glenn Seaborg was drafted in the Manhattan Project and was put in charge of the little group to isolate plutonium when he was 30. Richard Feynman was put in charge of a little group at Los Alamos to do theoretical physics when he was 24. John Mather, who co-shared the prize with him, he worked on a different part of the satellite. So they worked on different experiments, co-shared the Nobel Prize. He was a graduate student at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Saul Perlmutter, who discovered that as the universe expands, all matter and energy self attracts. So as it expands, the forces are always pulling inwards so it should slow up. So he set out to measure how much slower it was getting and he got the wrong sign. It was accelerating. So this is a big shock. Why is it a big shock? No form of matter and energy that we know about in the universe will make this happen. So for whatever reason, he called it dark energy, maybe because it was sponsored by the Department of Energy. This too will get a Nobel Prize. So this continues. If you look at the culture of Bell laboratories and Los Alamos and Lawrence Berkeley Lab and Lawrence's day, you realize that there were a lot of individual geniuses and you nurture those people. But once they have a good idea, and many of the good ideas, the really great new ideas come out of young people in their 30s. And you have to encourage those young people to run around and form teams. But in order to do that, you have to give them the confidence that they will be put in charge of those teams. They won't go to a senior hair professor, okay? And the only way you can do that is that the managers in these organizations had to be such good scientists that they understood the fundamental science in their gut and can make evaluations and say, well, I'm gonna put money on him. I don't need peer review for this. This is a good idea. There it goes. And that was true at Bell laboratories and it's true at Lawrence Berkeley Lab. And with that, you can actually encourage bold approaches. You get people to fail. You ask them to fail, but fail quickly and then move on. You don't wanna fail and take 10 years. In closing, I just wanted to remind you of a very famous picture taken when I was in college. And this is Apollo 8. It was the first Apollo mission that went around the dark side of the moon, if you will. And as it came back on the other side of the moon, the astronauts took this picture and it's called Earthrise. This is a great picture because it shows in stark contrast what the moon and what we know of other planets and our solar system, they are very stark and barren or non-hospitable places to live. And in this blackness, there lives a very precious thing that's been very good to us. And like many other things, sometimes you have to leave home before you realize how good it is. This is a world where if there's significant climate change, it will continue, life will continue. There were many times warm periods in the history of the earth, but it might not be so good for people or polar bears. So we kinda like it the way it is. So let me close by quoting one of my two favorite authors. And in this quote, it just emphasizes that there are solutions to the climate and energy change, the energy and climate change problem. We believe that aggressive support of energy science and technology coupled with incentives that accelerate the concurrent development and deployment of innovative solutions can transform the entire landscape of energy, demand and supply. What the world does in the coming decade will have enormous consequences that will last for centuries. It is imperative we begin without further delay. On December 10th, 1950, William Faulkner, the Nobel laureate in literature, spoke at the Nobel banquet in Stockholm. And he said, "'I believe that man will not merely endure, "'he will prevail. "'He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures "'has an inexhaustible voice, "'but because he has a soul, "'a spirit capable of compassion "'and sacrifice and endurance. "'With these virtues, the world can "'and will prevail over this great energy challenge.'" So this was said by me, one of my favorite authors. It is the preface to a report that will be coming out October 12th, which will hopefully be a roadmap of how countries around the world can go to a sustainable energy future. And the publication of the report will only be the beginning, as we all know, it's the selling of the report to the political leaders and to the world at large that will really matter. So with that, I thank you. Here's the first question from the audience here. Please comment on the prospects of the role of fission energy, especially fusion energy in the First Seal Bill for the future. Well, let me separate the question. There are two parts, fission and fusion are different forms of energy. Fission is the kind you split heavier nuclear part, there's the kind that we have a technology for. Right now contributes to about 20% of the US energy need. We have not installed a new nuclear power plant in the United States for, I think, about 25 years. There, it's an uncertain future, as to whether the United States will continue to do this. I personally hope that it could be kept at 20% because it doesn't have carbon emissions, at least in the generation of electricity, apart from the carbon used to build it. But it has some issues, the issues are that it creates nuclear waste. And that is an issue that we haven't fully solved because Nevada is not allowed in the United States to start a repository. But, and then there's in the amount of nuclear waste, we do not have economical technology to take the nuclear fuel, reprocess it and burn it again. We have it in an experimental basis, but, and that could reduce the amount of waste by more than a factor of 10. But it's not economically yet. And we just don't know whether the power companies will be willing to invest in a new generation of reactors. One thing is, we are confident is that new generation of reactors will be safer. So the issues are waste proliferation in the sense that you have more nuclear material around the world. But that I don't think is a serious problem to me personally because unfortunately, the secrets out of the bag, there are people in Pakistan like Khan, I've been selling nuclear secrets to others sadly over a decade. So it's a technology that certainly Japan, France is 78% electricity generation by fusion. China, India, Japan will be increasing. But the bulk of the share of China's power will come from coal, not from fusion. Which is far worse in my opinion. Fusion, we are doing another generation of an experiment in fusion. It should play out in about 15 or 18 years. The most optimistic people in fusion, that's where you take light nuclei like heavier isotopes of hydrogen and fuse them together to helium to make energy. The good part about fusion is far less radioactive waste, long live radioactive waste. No proliferation problem. But it's at least 40, 50 years away before you can even dream of making a pilot plant. And even when you make this pilot plant, it's not, you're not guaranteed commercial viability because in the end it's all about the cost of generating the energy. If it's 50 times more expensive, there are simpler more, even if it's twice as expensive, there are simpler, more elegant solutions of low carbon emission energy sources. So that's uncertain. Hopefully maybe in the last three quarters, last quarter of this century, we can get start to put it on board, but we just don't simply know. We should continue doing research, but we should not bank on it. Another question here. What waste is produced during the creation of nanosolar technology? On a large scale, will this be a problem to look at and solve? I think any industrial, new industrial process of large scale is going to produce waste. Now, the good part, and there are, so it depends on the materials is the short answer to that question. What type of materials will you be using in nanotechnology materials? The materials we are looking at in particular, we want to use things like iron and magazines, more abundant materials. There are always is a possibility of industrial waste. The good news is that the thickness of these nanoparticles that would be used to absorb the light are on the scale of 100 nanometers thick. So what is that compared to silicon? Silicon is on the scale of a few hundred microns. So one micron is a thousand nanometers, is that right? So it's 100, one, two, three, four, five, five to six orders of magnitude thinner, less material. So it will be nano-waste relative to more conventional photovoltaic material. There will be less waste. Here's sort of a follow-up question here that's probably considerable interest of the looks of us in Southern Minnesota here. Should we stop investing in corn for ethanol and plants for fuel? Well, let me start in and have, no, because if you grow grasses, you won't have a bio refinery to buy your grass and turn into ethanol. So you've got to bootstrap this at the same time. You have to develop technology that would prove that it's economically feasible to build a plant that can take your grasses and digest it to make fuel. There are some pilot plants being built today, but they are using technologies we currently have. And that is primarily the reason why BP and the Department of Energy are investing that amount of money upwards of a billion dollars to develop new technologies. The current technologies of cellulose aren't gonna get us there without huge subsidies. So grow the corn because there are corn refineries. But again, as soon as we get a bio refinery, grow grass. It only takes a year to make that decision. How do you expect to convince third world governments to voluntarily limit their energy consumption, particularly given the resistance in developed countries to do the same? Well, as long as the United States, acts like the United States has acted in the last decade, I don't think we can convince their world developing countries. But if the United States takes the leadership role and says, okay, we're gonna do this, I think there's a possibility. There is a possibility of convincing countries like China and India to go to more efficient mechanisms because that costs no money. If you build a more efficient building, you actually can save money. China has to import its oil and gas. And so the efficiency part is the central government is fully on board. The only problem is the local governments or the local entrepreneurs are not completely on board because they wanna make more money and quite frankly, they're gonna cheat. And so the issue here is it's like when you build a building and there's a regulation of how much installation you need to put in the building, well, you save more money by putting installation in the building. And this is a big problem in China and India. First, there are very few inspectors. They need about 100 to 1,000 times more inspectors but simply getting more inspectors will only mean that you have 100 or 1,000 times more corrupt inspectors. So, I'm actually trying to, in discussions in how to design a program so that they're not the official government inspector type to do this but it's a non-solve problem and it's a non-trivial problem. But I think the efficiency side is good. On the technology and investment side, quite frankly, there should be a monetary fund of some kind, perhaps paid for by the richer countries that help price on carbon and carbon cap and trade of carbon can actually put money into developing countries as well. Is this working? Yes, it is, please, jump right in. Yeah, I think the, excuse me, I think the difficulty of convincing China and the developing countries is probably not as great as is often assumed because they will tend to suffer actually more than we will with climate change and that is becoming clear to them. They have a quarter of a billion people living within 25 meter elevation of sea level, for example. They also have air pollution that is much worse than our air pollution and those air pollutants other than carbon dioxide also cause climate change. So they, the government, the central government actually understands this in China and they're eager to do something about it, but they're also eager for their economy to improve. And until the United States begins to, since we use 10 times as much energy per person or CO2 emissions per person, it's difficult until we begin to take a leadership role, as Stephen said, but once we do, I think bringing them on board is not gonna be that difficult. Can I respond to that? Please do. There's a, I agree with what Jim said. With a caveat, I had a personal experience with the Inter-academy Council report. The Inter-academy Council represents over 90 academies around the world and there was a Chinese representative. And then as we were getting the final proofs in, the Chinese representative said, well, we wanna change the language a little bit in this particular section that said it was a code language for developing countries. The world should still adopt the principles of the key or protocol, which said that developing countries shouldn't really have carbon emissions, cats at all, until they're developed. It was the view of Jose Goldenberg and I that although the developed countries have a primary responsibility since the developing countries will emit so much, they can't go there again. That was 10 years ago. They were holding up the report. Finally, there's a lot of pressure being put on the president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences to not let the report go forward. Finally, we drew a line in the sand and said this is a scientific report. What each country does is up to you and other countries. But the scientific report and what we feel is the right thing to do, we have to stand by. And then they backed off. But in a 2007 Chinese climate study report just just came out, they said in the history of civilization, no country has ever developed economically without following the path of high carbon emissions. So we have to convince the Chinese to do the leapfrog. They are really saying if we're gonna go and follow the path they're gonna say, it's gonna come back down. And so that's the scary part. And so we've got to get the top leaders to really believe that it's possible to leapfrog. Yes, I think that that attitude is what is coming through those scientists who are allowed to speak by the current government. But we've had workshops with working scientists and I would say with Chinese and Indian scientists. And I would say that the majority of them understand the situation and the fact that they need to take a different path. But there's political posturing in what the top people are saying, I think. Well, the scientists absolutely agree, absolutely. Professor Joscoe. Just to add another factual note, the Kyoto protocol has something called the clean development mechanism, the CDM mechanism, which is incorporated in the European Union's carbon dioxide cap and trade program. And under that mechanism, if you can go to China and make an investment in energy efficiency or even more efficient coal plants or windmills, you can get credit in the EU. It's been a very clumsy and clunky mechanism because the question always comes up, well, you made this improvement or you saved this forest, but how do we know you didn't go burn down some other forest? What's the baseline? And I think everyone's coming to realize that even if the caps are relatively high compared to developed countries, you need caps and targets and the baselines against which to make it feasible for developed countries actually to pay for clean up and for energy efficiency in developing countries. In the case of China, as you know, even if they just installed more efficient coal plants, they could reduce their CO2 emissions by 10% from the electricity sector. They're not installing the best technology and the central government has less control over what goes on in the provinces than many people seem to assume. So there are some real opportunities there. Perhaps one. Am I on here? There we go. One last question here. What are the three top things the average person in the US can do to make a contribution to the energy issue? The question is, one of the three top things? What are the three top things the average person can do to make a contribution regarding energy issues? Number one, by far, let your representatives in government, your state government, the public utility regulators, the federal government representatives and senators know that you are very concerned about the climate problem and are willing to pay a little bit more to invest in solutions. The politicians are, there's some very well-meaning people in Congress and the Senate now who want to do the right thing, but they also fear that their voters, if they even whisper that perhaps you can raise the gas impacts or whispers that perhaps the electricity rates can go up, one or two pennies per kilowatt hour to tilt the industry to invest, not in a coal plant, but let's say in a gas fire plant, until we can figure out cleaner solutions. Those decisions are being made, they feel pressure from the general public not to do that. And so the most important thing of what you can do is let your representatives know that this is no fooling around, just like in national emergencies such as World War II, the United States is willing to make some sacrifice to get a solution. Number two, there are mechanisms that can really encourage efficiency, energy efficiency and conservation. Next 10, 20 years, that will remain the lowest hanging fruit. So we're talking about, you place every bulb in your house with a compact fluorescent sooner rather than later. Get your university to get rid of incandescence sooner rather than later. Insulate your house as best you can. It's, these things begin to save a lot of energy. Buildings consume, commercial and residential buildings consume 38% of the energy in the United States today. It remains truly the lowest hanging fruit. You can really talk about factors of two or three less energy consumption in buildings without any change in lifestyle. If you go down to factor two, energy consumption in a car, there's a slight change in lifestyle. Your car shouldn't be weighing 6,000 pounds. Maybe 3,500 isn't enough. But, and then finally, so I think it's those things. You can do it personally in the institutions that you deal with like university or your home and of course, and in the government. And you know, and after those two things, the rest I think will take care of itself. We will get physical policies in place. I think that will make sense. I think there's enough people who know, or can be willing to experiment whether it's cap and trade or carbon tax or this or that, but you need to give your leaders the courage to do this. So it ultimately depends on all of you. With that, I think we'll break for lunch. Thank you, Dr. Shue.