 Okay, welcome everybody here in the room at the Kokusai Bunkakaikan in Tokyo and online. Thank you so much for joining us for this second installment of the Future of Energy and Climate Seminar Series jointly hosted by the Asia Society Japan and OIST, the Okinawa Institute for Science and Technology. Very honored to have you here and now without further ado, I'd like to open the program and I would like to give the stage to Dr. Peter Gruß, who is the president and CEO of OIST, of the Okinawa Institute for Science and Technology. Peter. Well, thank you very much, Jesper. It's an honor to be here today and we gathered here because we share the common belief that climate change is the biggest threat of our century, enhanced even further by political turmoil, resulting at least for the Europeans in a cut-down of the supply of natural gas, ironically replaced by coal and other fossil fuels. Societies are critical of atomic power. The perspective of fusion power is unclear. There are not enough sustainable energy providers. This is quite a mess. So we need guidance and answers and it gives me great pleasure to introduce Sir David King as our today's speaker who might have answers to at least some of the questions. David was born and educated in South Africa. After his PhD, he moved to the United Kingdom where he had an impressive academic career. In 1988, he was appointed professor of physical chemistry at the University of Cambridge. From 2008 to 2012, he was director of the Smith School of Enterprise and the environment at the University of Oxford. David has published over 500 papers on his research in chemical physics and on science and policy. He was the chief scientific advisor to the UK government and head of the government office for science under Prime Minister Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. In that time, he raised the profile of the need for governments to act on climate change and was instrumental in creating the 1 billion pound energy technologies institute. During his tenure as chief scientific advisor, he raised public awareness for climate change and initiated several foresight studies. He was appointed the foreign secretary special representative for climate change in September 2013. From 2013 to 2016, David was the first chairman of the Future Cities Catapult, a government-funded body conducting research into smart cities. In his role as scientific advisor to the UK government, King was outspoken on the subject of climate change saying, I see climate change as the greatest challenge facing Britain and the world in the 21st century. Getting back to the action himself, David founded and chaired the Centre for Climate Repair at Cambridge. So, David, can we repair some of the mess we made? Peter, thank you very much for your very warm introduction. I'm very grateful to you and I'm delighted to be speaking at this Asia Society talk, the OIST. I'm going to, first of all, say a little bit about the arrival of that final agreement reached by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2015. I think that it's fair to say the British government played a very heavy role in the achievement of that agreement and I was in the driving seat in the previous three years to the 2015 agreement. What I would like to say is I was really convinced at that point in time that we should be aiming for no more than 1.5 degrees centigrade above the pre-industrial level if we were to avoid a series of catastrophes around the world that would begin to make our civilization look very difficult to continue to exist. At this point in time I've got to say that I've had to change my mind and the reason is because the understanding of the risks of climate change means that we are already in the place that I was hoping we would avoid and the reason I'm saying this is because there's very little discussion at the moment about the so-called tipping points in climate change. There's a group of scientists who have been led by Johan Rockstrom and by Peter Linton in the UK that set out about 15 tipping points and saying once these tipping points go the next tipping point becomes very vulnerable so it's like a bunch of dominoes and the first tipping point I'm going to be telling you is now very much in danger of going. So in this presentation I plan to set out the clear risks that the world is now facing and going through and how this is only going to get worse as we get further into the future but I will also then be setting out a detailed strategy. I left government in 2017 to come back to the University of Cambridge and set up a Centre for Climate Repair so in a way I'm going to explain why I have set up a Centre for Climate Repair and what its objectives are it is acting as a global hub. I also want to say bilateral agreements between countries are critically important yes the UNFCCCC process is important but I'm going to emphasise the importance of bilateral agreements in the run-up to Paris 2015 I made 96 official country visits I had built up 165 climate attachés climate experts in our embassies around the world no other country did this it's the bilateral agreements that produced that result in 2015 and by the time I arrived in Paris I knew there would be an agreement so let's move on what I'm first of all going to take you to is the state of the world in terms of greenhouse gases at the moment and I have to correct a very common misconception here 260 270 parts per million is the pre-industrial level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and of course most of that due to carbon dioxide and as we move forward in time you see in blue the carbon dioxide level alone and the total in black and red two different estimates the total is well in excess of that figure and the reason is because the carbon dioxide has now been joined by methane particularly but other NOx gases for example that are greenhouse gases and methane is roughly 130 times more effective as a greenhouse gas per molecule than carbon dioxide and so what we see is that today we are in excess of 500 parts per million we are rapidly approaching a doubling of the greenhouse gas level and this is really rather like when you get into your bed at night you put a duvet over yourself to get warm to stop your radiated heat going out just as our radiated heat goes out into space from the earth and if you then put another duvet on you yourself on your bed you would feel far too hot and so the net result of doubling the greenhouse gas is quite simply is that we will become far too hot or at least the temperature change and other changes in our weather systems will become unbearable compared with the climate systems that we're all used to and have got living in around the whole world here's one of the consequences of what is currently happening last summer i'm talking about 2021 in that summer we had serious extreme weather events of a kind never observed before around the whole of the northern hemisphere and the newspapers tended to report these as if they were almost accidentally all happening at the same time i have set up a group called the climate crisis advisory group composed now of 16 individuals from 12 different countries this is the world leading group on climate change they're all climate change experts all recognized globally as climate change experts this group is able to respond in a very agile fashion many of them are senior authors of the IPCC reports but we are able to respond in a much more agile fashion and so we produced a report on the extreme weather events around the world last year and we produced it at the end of august now what i'm going to say is we were able to attribute these events to one of the tipping points that has now begun tipping and that is the melting of ice over the Arctic sea exposing the blue sea below the ice that used to be below the ice to sunlight during the polar summer months the three polar summer months are the period when the eventually 24 hours of sunshine and the sun it's a sun's energy is soaked up by the the blue sea whereas of course the ice that was sitting over the sea for many hundreds of thousands of years was reflecting the sunlight back into space this means that the north pole itself during those three summer months is now one of the warmest regions of the planet now the next slide i mean this slide that you can see now is showing you the average temperature in black for the whole planet and there you see the temperature rising to about 1.3 1.35 degrees centigrade above the pre-industrial level that's where we are on average for the whole planet but in red we show what is happening on average for the Arctic Circle region alone and this is the annual average temperature you'll see that the Arctic Circle is now heating up at roughly four times the rate of the rest of the planet and the temperature there is now about three to 3.5 degrees centigrade above the pre-industrial era the consequences of this massive increase in average temperature around the Arctic Circle region and in particular the very severe temperatures in the summer are very severe in terms of what happens around the whole planet and i'm just going to expand on that statement as i move forward in time but let's just seriously take in the the graph that i'm showing you here because it all began about 15 years ago this was the period when the blue sea began to appear every Arctic summer period and now we have something like 50 percent of the Arctic sea exposed to sunshine and the north pole as i said is one of the warmer regions of the northern hemisphere 20 degrees plus being observed at that point the the key parameter i want to get across now is the jet stream and on the left hand side you see the the classic position of the jet stream not absolutely circular as shown here this is an idealized picture but never far from circular and this is a very strong wind it's a wind that blows anti-clockwise around the north pole and that wind separates out the cold air in the Arctic Circle region from the warm air from the equatorial region so marked l here as the cold air and marked h is the the warmer air in the tropical regions and that that wind has meant that for example the uk is rather warmer than it would otherwise be now it is based on the fact that the coldest region is around the north pole no surprise there on the right hand side what we see happening and this is what is happening during the polar summer months three months of the polar summer we see that the warm Arctic and above that Arctic ocean the air is now warming up rapidly and above the Arctic that low density warm air is pushing the cold air down so you see that the cold air going down over in this picture North America this is actually a record of the position of the jet stream during a particular period in time a few years ago so you get this central American area very cold and then the warm air of course we can't have a vacuum in the atmosphere warm air coming up from the tropical region and moves up north to replace the cold air that has moved down south in another region now this is what is disturbing the climate systems of the northern hemisphere in particular but it doesn't restrict itself to the northern hemisphere so these are the schematics i wanted to show to demonstrate the importance of the Arctic this wind that blows around the Arctic that we call the jet stream now this is actually what happened to the jet stream over North America last summer what we find is that the jet stream is running from south to north along the coast of North America and in Central America we find the jet stream dropping down and so we get the jet stream now blowing from north to south whereas before from south to north and so instead of being circular it's very seriously distorted and the position i'm showing in this diagram the jet stream got locked in that position for a few weeks and the result was the highest temperatures ever observed not the highest by point one degree centigrade but by five to ten degrees centigrade in these regions of the world Litten in British Columbia famously hit 49.9 degrees centigrade more interesting perhaps is that this is an area of the world where very few people have air conditioning because it's not a very warm part of the world Canada isn't that warm and as a result because people cannot survive at these temperatures without air conditioning for very long about 135 people died in this very upper middle class town in British Columbia on the other hand down the center of America very cold air some of you might have heard Texas recording temperatures minus 13 and then even minus 16 degrees centigrade snow in Texas never heard of before so the cold air coming down from the Arctic being pushed by that warm air and that distortion leads to very stormy weather around the the jet stream the jet stream is still a very strong wind it is being weakened by this distortion this is showing a general picture of what is happening as a result of the melting occurring in the Arctic region so on the left hand side i'm simply showing the blue Arctic sea and this is a real-life version of what has happened there a satellite but drawn up picture from satellites and what what you see is the blue ocean is now along the coastline of Greenland as as never before in our history in the civilization's history and so as a result Greenland ice is now melting irreversibly and i'm quoting there the IPCC this isn't a newly discovered phenomenon Greenland ice is now melting irreversibly and what does that mean when all of the Greenland ice has melted global sea levels on average will have risen by about 6.5 meters and quite clearly well before that time we would have lost the ability to live in many many of our coastal cities around the world if not all of them so what what we see here is a potential danger to the longevity of our civilization that level of sea level rise may take a few hundred years but what would two meters sea level rise do what would half a meter sea level rise do already these would cause very significant chaos and i'm going to come back and emphasize that point in a moment but remember that no country except the landlocked countries in the center of large continents will be free of the consequence direct consequences of this and the indirect consequence no country would be free from the center slide is just showing what i've been talking about the yandering of the jet stream and and on the and i've already talked about the extreme weather events which are not restricted to the northern hemisphere but let me quickly say what happens at the north pole is very different from the south pole the north pole is an ocean surrounded by landmass and on that landmass is permafrost the south pole is land surrounded by oceans Antarctica is a large continent and that is where the ice is sitting as the ice on Antarctica melts of course it enters the ocean that's six and a half meters melt of sea level rise from the melting of greenland ice has to have added to it the further three four five meters from the loss of ice from Antarctica so this is an underestimate of the final rise in sea levels globally on the right hand side we've known for some time that there's a vast amount of methane trapped in the permafrost in the arctic circle region that permafrost contains methane in the form of methane hydrate and methane hydrate decomposes below the melting point of ice some of that decomposition has been observed for many years in some areas of the permafrost region you can throw a match onto the ice and you find you get a beautiful blue glow over quite a large region of the ice around you now that situation is now changing quite dramatically with the explosive release of methane methane in the atmosphere has a life half-life of about 10 to 12 years and for this reason people have tended to underplay the importance of methane in the atmosphere so if i just draw an analogy with a bathtub and water running out of the bathtub and water running in the rate is such that after 10 to 12 years half of the bathtub is empty if there's no more methane emissions but if the methane continues to flow in if the water continues to flow into the bath and it flows in faster than it's running out of course methane rises in the atmosphere and that is giving rise to this very severe temperature change earlier than we had anticipated we really ignore methane in the atmosphere at our peril if we get explosive release of this methane in large quantities over a period of maybe 20 years we could see temperature rises in the region of five to eight degrees centigrade or even more so this is really a very big challenge to the comfort of our human species as we go forward none of this is good messaging i realize but i hope to come back with a better message at the end next slide please where are the regions most at risk and i'm going to immediately say well southeast asia doesn't look too comfortable the the left hand side is a projection for the land underwater at high tide in vietnam now the mekong delta has been formed over many hundreds of thousands of years silt brought down by the mekong river means that that delta is all based on silt being brought down by that river and the whole of vietnam is built on that delta and the country is therefore very close to sea level so if we just take into account the understanding of sea level rise before what i've just explained to you we get the presentation on the left hand side this is the once a year flooding simply at high tide what so this is the highest tide of the year and what you see is that a significant proportion of the mekong delta region is underwater once a year that's seawater and that's where a very large proportion of the world's rice is grown the biggest rice paddy fields in the world are in vietnam on the right hand side the same research group have republished this estimate based on a reanalysis and you'll see a much more frightening situation where about 90 percent of the landmass of vietnam including a large proportion of ho Chi Minh city goes underwater at least once a year by mid-century that's less than 30 years from now rice production may continue if we can produce saline resistant rice in time and the rice research institute in the philippines is busily working on that if we can produce it in time if not of course we lose a very large fraction of the rice production in the world this is the third biggest area of rice production in the world but of course sitting across from vietnam is indonesia many of you will know that the indonesian government has now decided to move its capital to higher ground because i mean for example jakarta last year in two months was effectively underwater so the rising sea levels are already challenging this part of the world indonesia is an archipelago very close to the sea and a large amount of rice paddy fields are also close to the sea and in southeast china the same and what you can see is not only population movement massive migration following further rise in sea levels in this region but also a massive loss of food production for the whole world and here is the explosive release from methane from the permafrost region of northern Siberia this was an explosion that crater that you see there measures about 50 meters in diameter and about 60 to 70 meters deep it's a beautifully symmetrical cylindrical hole in the in the permafrost now of course what you see is green growth around the outside there the permafrost contains in the surface area a fair bit of earth and so there's a fair bit of growth occurring there you will know there are forests that grow arboreal forests that grow in the permafrost people living on the permafrost about 250 kilometers from where this explosion occurred reported this to the russian government i believe they thought this was explosive tests by the russian government themselves but the russian government knew they weren't doing that they sent a academy of sciences scientists over to explore it and this is what they found how many of these explosions have now occurred about a thousand it could be more so it's a the the permafrost in that region is becoming pockmarked with these explosive releases um of course the contribution to greenhouse gases from these explosions is not large enough at the moment to be worrying but those deep holes there all evaporate except for the earth in the in the permafrost all evaporate into the air the ice evaporates as water vapor and of course the methane as gas so what is happening a large bubble of methane evolves from the methane hydrate underneath the surface of the permafrost and when the pressure in that bubble exceeds the weight of the permafrost above it it's it's released explosively so there's the big fear that we may see a very large set of explosions occurring rapidly if methane is is produced very rapidly just as you turn on your tap very hard in the bath then it's kind of fill up to overflowing very quickly that's that's the worry slow release we can take up to a certain point but rapid release we can't now the question is what do we do about this here's the definition of climate repair we have here set out ourselves as a hub and we're working globally and the idea is to work with research centers with governments with political people but also with businesses and financial communities to see that we have a comprehensive strategy to manage the climate crisis going forward now here's the three elements of the strategy first of all deep and rapid reduction of emissions there is no choice for us at the moment 40 billion tons a year of being emitted now from what i've told you i hope everyone can understand there is no carbon budget left we have already put too much in the way of greenhouse gases up there every ton of greenhouse gas we emit today will have to be removed to create a manageable future for humanity and i mean every word of that which is why i'm spelling it out carefully every ton we emit today will have to be removed so this is rather like a country that is in deficit economically but then it decides to trade its way out by spending further money creating a bigger debt in order to manage the future we are simply creating a bigger debt of greenhouse gases in order to manage our future deep and rapid emissions reduction has to be in my view an orderly transition it shouldn't be that oil and gas and coal companies are simply shut down overnight we have to have an orderly transition so that humanity is not impacted by it this orderly transition really requires cooperation between the wealthy parts of the world such as the united states europe japan and so on and the less wealthy parts of the world the parts of the world that i'm talking about particularly today or in africa but also in other parts of the world we need to be pulling together on this in a way that we haven't managed yet and i'm pushing for a group of nations willing nations to get together on this project and sort out this orderly transition as quickly as possible net zero by 2050 is a starting target and all of us would like to see us achieve deep and rapid emissions much more rapidly than that the second part of the strategy remove excess greenhouse gases that are already in the atmosphere and any further greenhouse gases we emit from today that means we have to create vast new greenhouse gas sinks to remove excess greenhouse gases from the atmosphere the center that i've set up here in cambridge is focused on remove and the next one repair there is a significant amount of work happening on the reduced front but the political need for orderly transition means that we need a much much more clear strategy for governments to follow to manage that program repair the north pole regions and ice on land that's the third part of the strategy now what's the point of this this first tipping point is now tipping and tipping rapidly as we proceed in rising temperatures we can anticipate that the remaining ice on the arctic sea during the arctic summer will will disappear how do we manage to restore and manage the ice over the arctic sea to see that it keeps reflecting energy back into space the whole world cannot stand by and allow this to continue and i say this not because we've got this whole set of tipping points once one goes the next goes but also because simply what's happening in the arctic circle region is challenging the entire planet rising sea levels rising temperatures and changing dramatic changing of our weather patterns around the world so let me say re-freezing the arctic during the polar summer months is a major challenge but we are working on that and again we have a large consortium working on that international consortia is the only way forward so agile international political and financial action absolutely vital in this whole process this is my best example of a group of willing nations acting together to to see that we can make a way out of our crisis in a good way and in which we create wealth as we manage the crisis the idea and this was an idea i set up originally when i was in the foreign office the idea is the willing nations should promise to spend 30 billion dollars by 2020 2021 a year of public money on clean energy research development and development and demonstration so the idea was that we would de-risk for the private sector all of these opportunities arising from the de-fossilized world of the future and i'm very delighted to say and this was a great moment for me as you might imagine and i traveled the world trying to get heads of governments to join this program the key was when obama agreed he's standing in the middle of this picture to stand under this we we set up outside the cop negotiating process on the first day of cop 21 in in paris sorry cop 21 in paris in 2015 we set up this banner and invited heads of governments to stand under it if they would follow this commitment and of course you'll see that japan was there but in addition the united states and europe and and and then critically we had china and india on board it was a very broad group of representatives of the key nations of the world and these nations together have now added three more we've got 25 nations on board representing about 80 of global gdp that's the kind of willing nation group that i believe is necessary to drive the program through that i've just been describing and when i say necessary this is i hope you've seen a necessary program bill gates is standing there next to the president of of the united states obama because he rang me up he said it's a brilliant idea and i'm going to back it up with my own private money as an investment into the new technologies emerging and he has delivered on that promise critically important he understood this was de-risking the opportunities for the private sector to take these new technologies into the marketplace i've just got a moment left so let me quickly say my favorite intervention for removal of greenhouse gases at scale and also for recovering the ocean mammal fish and crustacean population is marine biomass regeneration a program that we initiated here in cambridge about a year ago and it's a program that is now flying very rapidly it imitates natural ocean fertilization processes creates a green layer of phytoplankton and i can explain that in a moment and the calcium carbonate deposition largely and other carbonates into the ocean crust so firmly sequestered as the carbon dioxide now what i do want to quickly say is this all follows a recent understanding of the key function of baleen whales in the biomass of the oceans the baleen whales feast on krill about 300 to 500 meters below the surface of the ocean this is the reason they have such massive blubber it keeps them warm it's also the reason why they have such massive lungs they can stay down there for a very long time the whales will stay down there the krill is a social animal it it tends to hang around in clusters of perhaps a billion and the whales sail through these clusters with open mouths the whales live on krill the krill is a shelled animal those shells of course drop to the bottom of the ocean so this is a positive process but more than this we know the whales have to come up for air it's very obvious that that function but they also have to come up to defecate and the reason is that when they 300 to 500 meters below sea level their orifices are all jammed shut by the high pressure of the ocean so as they come up for air they also defecate we've now got a bunch of photographs showing this process here is one where you can see the the whale feces spreading amongst the pod of whales as they come up now very often that will create a thousand to 5000 square kilometers because these pods are large of fertile material in the sunlit surface of the ocean and within three to four days of that this whole area is covered with phytoplankton we follow this with satellites and phytoplankton is the initial foodstuff of all fish larvae when the fish larvae hatch from eggs they need phytoplankton the vast majority of fish larvae die every form of fish is in the same place they die if there's no phytoplankton available and so in these green forests created by the whale feces within a month you might have half a billion fish so the fish also are feasted on by larger fish etc this whole area becomes a living forest in the ocean and what we are therefore focused on if i could have the next slide is using this function of the whales as a means of stimulating us to develop artificial whale feces to put on the surface of the ocean and as we do this we immediately create of course phytoplankton and the net result is recreating a fish population and of course a krill population i want to emphasize krill is also formed in this phytoplankton area and so the net result of all of this ought to be if we can conduct this across the world's deep oceans at scale we could recover the fish mammal and and crustacean population back to where it was 300 to 400 years ago before we discovered whales had this amount of oil substitute if you like in the in the form of their fat and and we were not catching whales initially for their meat at all we were simply catching them for their blubber this was the first form of oil well before the discovery of oil these blue whales i'm showing you a blue whale here are now at about one percent of their original population and most of them are now living during most of the year in the southern ocean around the Antarctic where they maintain a relatively high krill population the rest of the planet's oceans is very very devoid of krill and so they are really stuck there we can have a discussion about this if necessary next slide please i'm just setting out here the timeline you'll see that we have set out a consortium composed of people from india the united states south africa involved in this they can work in all of the big oceans of the world and we hope to be able by 2027 to have completed the research to have legal permission to carry this forward and if this program works i believe after a while we can sit back and let the whales continue the function that they used to have next slide please i am rapidly coming to an end people often ask me how are you planning to re-freeze the Arctic and the answer is by creating white cloud cover over the Arctic here once again we are mimicking natural processes white clouds are created when there are as a wind at sea creating tiny droplets of seawater tiny droplets of seawater lose their water quite rapidly and you're left with a tiny ice crystal maybe a nanometer across not visible by eye that's picked up by upward streams of air over the warmer ocean and you get a big dust cloud of the sodium chloride crystals which quickly attract water again and there you have a white cloud tiny droplets of water means you have a white cloud so we're designing devices this is one designed by marine engineer to see if we can create this process artificially these vessels you see here would be remotely operated picking up energy from the movement of the ocean and from wind in order to run these pumps and we would need to surround the Arctic circle with about a thousand of these we'd obviously have a lot of building up to do until 2027 to complete field trials and then we can begin rolling this out and obviously we would anticipate all governments to contribute to the cost because of the cost of not doing this is allowing sea levels to rise to unconscionable level I've reached the end and I just want to thank you for your patience and I'm looking forward to an exciting panel discussion thank you so David thank you very very much I think you know judging from the from the from the looks of the people here in the audience you know there's a lot of awe so thank you very very much for you know pointing out the realities focusing us on the tipping of the tipping point and also for your constructive proposals on what possibly innovation and global cooperation can actually do about that now before we go into a panel discussion I would like you know to introduce Arima sensei you can see you know in the handout here has a very distinguished career you know on energy policy from within the Japanese government at the highest level there and he's now a professor at Tokyo University and without further ado you know what do you make of the talk and what are your own thoughts on the topic and thank you Jasper and then first of all I'd like to say pay great respect to Sir David King for his presentation and in particular the last part of his presentation marine biomass regeneration intrigued me a lot and then from my side you know the Sir David's very much important point is reduce remove and repair and reduce rapid and also deep emission reduction and I'd like to depict some challenging part of the deep reductions in the current economic and geopolitical circumstances and first of all this is you know gap report prepared by the UNEP and then in order to achieve 1.5 degrees pathway there could be a huge gap at the time of 2030 between 29 gigaton to 32 gigaton and by the way China's total emission is 10 gigaton so we need to say remove three Chinas from the atmosphere to achieve this additional emission reduction and now we are talking about 45% reduction from now to 2030 for keeping track to 1.5 degree pathway and in 2020 we have seen 5.8 percent reduction of this energy related to emissions obviously because of COVID-19 and already we have recovered that emission in 2021 actually it has reached historic high and in order to achieve 45 percent reduction we need to reduce a 7.3 percent per year every year from now to 2030 much deeper emission reductions compared with COVID which resulted in say a lockdown of the economy and massive energy consumption reduction and so on so we need to first realize the magnitude of the challenge we are say facing and also looking at the emission trend obviously Asia has a key whether or not we can achieve 1.5 degree Celsius target and then among Asian countries why would see the peak out of Chinese emissions around 2030 but for India and Asian countries we'll probably see continuous growth of their emissions beyond 2030 and what makes most complicated is the different priority among developed and developing countries concerning the SDG from 1 to 17 and obviously we are looking at SDG 13 climate action but according to the global poll called My World 2030 being conducted by United Nations we can by the way see the country's specific outcome our voting outcome and in Sweden where greater tumor is coming from clearly climate action is number one priority in Japan the third priority as well but in China the biggest emitter of the world the climate action receives only 15 out of 17 SDGs in terms of priority and Indonesia most popular nation in Asian region the priority on climate action is ninth out of 17 so generally speaking in developing countries where the pocket GDP is lower than developed countries they tend to put more priority on poverty eradication or no hunger or education good health and also job and economic growth so I think amid these different priorities on climate actions it would be very difficult to assume that climate change is without any condition the number one priority for all the countries and then would developed country do everything to combat climate change not necessarily this is an outcome of recent survey conducted by Chicago University and now seven out of 10 Americans believe that climate change is a real danger and they consider that government should take certain actions but being asked how much are you ready to pay additionally for monthly electricity bill the biggest answer was one dollar per month so 12 dollar per year so if that amount is raised to 10 dollars per month namely 120 dollars per year then almost 70 percent of Americans are opposed to such an additional cost burden and according to the is scenario which is published last June the net zero emission 2050 they assume 75 dollars per ton CO2 carbon price for advanced economies in 2025 so if we multiply this carbon price to per capita emission in americans then americans are supposed to pay almost thousand one thousand two hundred dollars per year for achieving IS net zero emission scenarios so looking at the political reality in the U.S. they are now complaining about say skyrocketing gas impulses and by demonstration is doing everything to cooling down the gas impulses so I think political say visibility seems to be very low now the COP26 thanks to U.K.'s excellent diplomatic efforts we have come out with very much ambitious Glasgow climate pact the U.K.'s efforts is say are indeed loudable at the same time the Glasgow climate pact it seems to me that it has changed the nature of the Paris Agreement based on the very delicate balance between top-down temperature goals and bottom-up NDC setting and 1.5 degree goal and the 2050 global carbon neutral target means we have somehow say put the cap on global carbon budget as Sir David clearly said and then that will result in very intensified competition of a limited amount of space between developed and developing countries so probably developing countries say that you know the 2050 carbon neutral to go by U.S. and EU and Japan are not sufficient you should go towards carbon neutrality by 2040 and after that you should achieve net net negative emissions in order to give carbon space to developing countries and in addition they'll claim say more and more financial assistance from developed country to developing countries by the way in COP26 Prime Minister Modi of India say in announcing India's 2070 carbon neutral to go he also said developed countries should pay one trillion US dollar per year while the current target is 100 billion US dollars now the COP26 said you know the countries which have not revised their NDC should do so within this year in order to achieve compatibility with Paris Agreement and whether China and India would revise their NDC by 2022 I doubt it they could argue that their carbon neutral to goes in 2060 and 2070 respectively are aligned with Paris Agreement temperature goes and Glasgow Climate Pact also included the call phase down language and probably call phase out with clear timeline will re-emerge in the future negotiation and that could also spread to other fossil fuels like an ordinary natural gas but that has some incompatibility with current energy crisis where countries say very much eager to secure reliable fossil fuel supply and willingness to pay I have already touched upon then climate change issue is not in isolation from geopolitical and geopolitical situation so long as climate change is another side of the same coin of energy and US domestic politics US-China tension and energy crisis and of course Ukraine war now Ukraine war is raising energy prices it has been already skyrocketing since last autumn and what concerns me is because of the say mushrooming LNG price and not only Europe but also in Asian region that could delay the fuel switching from coal to natural gas which has been considered in many other countries and you know the coal could stay longer than expected in Asian energy mix that is a great concern so this is my final slide and then due to energy price hike and food price hike and stark inflation risk of world economy affordability and reliability of energy supply is the highest priority for many countries including Japan as though political narrative about climate change does not change and this is indeed very strong narrative but its momentum could be reduced in reality whether or not you like it whether you like it or not and China and India has been boosting their domestic coal production and burning coal power even before Ukraine war and gas price hike in Asia could delay the fuel switching in Asia and China and India are keeping distance from G7 on sanction against Russia because they're interested in procuring cheap Russian energy and even developed countries say preoccupied with cooling down of energy prices for example in Japan recently government has decided negative carbon tax from gasoline and more broadly divided world which could emerge after Ukraine war is not conducive for global collaboration in tackling climate change I fully agree with that we really need global collaboration and actually climate change agenda has become very much you know active in say in conjunction with the end of the Cold War in 1990 but now we are moving towards more divided world unfortunately and increased military expenses in western countries could crowd out climate finance for developing countries and discourage their mitigation efforts because their NDC are in many ways conditional to financial assistance assistance by developed countries China has been benefiting from global climate politics by exporting PV and batteries and EVs to developed countries and coal power plants to developing countries and access to cheap Russian energy could further enhance their energy security position and so Ukraine war is a wake-up call for rebalancing energy policies which has been up to now very much primarily driven by decarbonisation agenda but now energy security is not a free lunch so we need to say so more challenging say simultaneous equation how to achieve energy security and climate mitigation and the government efficiency simultaneously so in this regard so innovation technology innovative technologies are even more crucial under this challenging situation so I'm a great fan of mission innovation and I admire say Sir David King's initiative for making this happen and I'm also very much interested in say carbon the Cambridge Carbon Repair Center initiatives such as marine biology marine biome regeneration so I'll stop here and I very much hope that I'd be persuaded by Sir David King that no no you are too pessimistic you should be more optimistic about the more ambitious actions so I expect the activity discussion thank you Adima Sensei thank you so much and I must say you know I love the fact that you know I think in in the initial remarks Sir David you sort of scared us you know with all these you know you know the negative forces unleashed as we've moved past the tipping point but you then made the circle and to move towards reduce remove repair and you brought an element of positivity and now we've got Adima Sensei and you know basically tells us oh but there's a new reality and the divided world the new cold war and Sir David you've had a lot of you know very proactive hands-on experience in building global alliances towards climate change how worried are you about this new reality of the divided world as Adima Sensei calls it of actually leading to setbacks of course one has to be worried because if I understand what Adima Sensei was presenting there it is that there is no hope I think that is the basic message I've just heard that we humanity really cannot expect to survive in our present form for another 50 to 100 years so I think it's a it's a very gloomy message I think the the unfortunate message really that I've got to return with is that extreme weather events are now impacting around the whole world and this is a very important means of understanding but let me just if I may take a few minutes to respond to some of the very important points that have been raised and all of them rather negative the magnitude of the challenge I'm fully aware of the magnitude of the challenge when we began in Europe to work on this and I'm going to say we it means Germany in 1989 introducing feed-in tariffs to encourage people to use any sort of renewable energy any non-fossil fuel energy to create electricity feed-in tariffs initially were an enormous subsidy by government for people to build photovoltaics on their rooftops etc and put any electricity back onto the grid at an enormous price advantage it worked extremely well and the British government we and the British government introduced this in 1997 in a slightly different form and the result then spread across Europe what we did in this process no economist predicted would happen the price of renewable energy as the market expanded through this intervention by governments as the market expanded the price of all of these new technologies collapsed and when I say collapsed if we if we look at light emitting dimers these very enormous energy saving means of lighting up our cities and our houses light emitting dimers have come down a factor of a hundred in cost photovoltaics are still coming down initially if I go right back the cost is reduced by 50 a factor of 50 offshore wind in Britain we became rather desperate because the British people didn't want onshore wind and we had a big program which was being wrecked by that restriction being imposed by local authorities in Britain so we went offshore and it was going to cost us three times as much we estimated to get electricity from offshore our offshore wind is now more efficient per kilowatt hour produced than any other form of electricity production and the offshore wind we brought in marine engineers ironically from the oil and gas recovery the marine engineers working on recovery of oil and gas from the North Sea and they produced massive reductions in the cost of offshore wind and that was then coupled with seamen's coming in and producing wind turbine blades measuring 110 meters these these are the most efficient wind turbines in the world we didn't anticipate this and that is now being explored across the world these large wind turbine blades which you can deliver offshore very very difficult to deliver onshore so I think there have been so many surprises in this process what I've just described and I think that with all respect Arena Center is missing this point the whole world has benefited right the cost of renewable energy installation new installation around the whole world but particularly between the tropics has dramatically fallen so it's at least as advantageous economically as it is to install new coal fired power stations or new gas fired power stations this is a critically important point so what is the big parameter that is really the battle and that is you mentioned the United States you also mentioned nationally determined contributions this was a massive turn down in the international negotiating process but it was the only way we could get Obama to sign that 2015 agreement if we had an agreement which said this agreement would be imposed on the United States he would have to take it through senator congress and he couldn't get a majority there nobody has got no president has had a majority on climate change in the United States and why is that the power of the lobby system in the United States unless we understand this we don't understand anything the lobby system the gun lobby look at the damage it's causing in the United States before that the cigarette lobby we now have of course the climate lobby and that lobby is being extremely effective the estimate is a billion dollars a year being spent by the oil gas and coal industry on these lobbies to try and denounce the the science of climate change if you ask the american population where they stand you've seen 70 80 percent are saying there is a problem with climate change but this is in the face of this massive control of media by these lobbyists control of senate and congress by these lobbies so i think we need to understand where the big challenges are because if i listen to arima center i've got to say perhaps i should just go on to a greek island and give up my efforts because there is no way forward if we don't understand the severity of the challenge a third european war following what is happening in ukraine and russia would be disastrous would it be as disastrous as what i'm describing to you in climate change terms of course it wouldn't because what i'm describing means a totally new challenge to the whole of our civilization and until we all realize this and until we see that every part of the world is impacted by it already and this can only get worse we're not going to get public opinion changed i'm never impressed i'm afraid with current opinion polls when i started working with tony blair we were up against it it wasn't that easy and then people discovered that they found the future rather attractive and some of you may know that in britain where the industrial revolution began and it was all fired up by coal mined in britain we no longer burn coal to produce electricity right and our electricity production is now 40 to 50 percent from renewable energy sources and we have plans to see that we get that down to to zero from fossil fuel sources as soon as possible it is all doable and it's not it really is not damaging to your economy now let me just quickly deal with the developed versus the developing nations issue at cop 26 as at many other cops for the last 20 years there has been a very clear development of mistrust between the developing and the developed nations and i'm glad you referred to this difference between them the developing nations are pointing a finger at the developed nations and i think quite rightly saying you created the problem now please help us they're also saying and what are you doing about it you're telling us that we should get busy with non-fossil fuel energies and so on but what are you doing what is the united states doing we have failed through having no leadership from the united states on any major issues since 1945 i would suggest the united states leadership has been critical that's why the montreal protocol went through absolutely quickly because we had the united states leadership on that that's why the united nations was formed was led by the by the united states we have had no real leadership on this issue from the united states and apart from state actions federal government actions in the united states have been very very poor lack of leadership from the developed world has created a total mistrust between developing and developed nations and i think this really is an allusion to the hundred billion dollars what you didn't mention is the total sum of public money which was promised at a hundred billion dollars a year back in 2015 2016 which was promised per year at that time has never exceeded 23 billion dollars now we're not producing on our promises we're not producing on what we said we would do about climate change because we felt we had to take the burden first all of that was said in the negotiations so there is a real lack of trust we have to recover that lack of trust and i think that is doable i mean what we as a nation have to do each of us is show that we are doing the best we can and now we can persuade others much more easily to follow suit but we also need to help financially a trillion dollars a year modi's pretty upset about he's he's lost the the trust of the developed world who knows a trillion dollars a year not a lot to pay for the challenges of climate change believe me the extreme weather events i was describing from last summer and the previous summers just the last three summers but last summer i believe the loss that will be announced by the insurance and reinsurance industry in the west will be approaching a trillion dollars the loss from climate change events today is already numbering the sort of numbers we're talking about as apparently too large to manage this enormous challenge and i'm just challenging that so i think what what we need to see is a greater willingness to understand that challenge that humanity is faced with and unless we understand that we don't manage this problem how did i manage to persuade the british people and the british public and by the way i had to do that because we're an island nation and as an island nation we suffer dreadfully from rising sea levels our capital london is very much at risk from rising sea levels but all of our coastal cities and our major cities are on coasts so i think the understanding of the risks needs to be got across at a national level on every possible occasion and then you'll get the support that you're looking for yes thank you very much so david and um uh you your your world was very much powerful to me and at the same time uh yes i totally agree with you that we need to understand the i'm gonna say magnitude of challenges i mean the risks caused by climate change at the same time we need to acknowledge the political and the comic challenges which we are facing and because we are living in political reality and the current government have to care about the current population and you don't care about say opinion poll according to the u.s opinion poll quite recently about 60 percent or 65 percent of americans are supporting more oil and gas drilling and 30 percent are worried about climate change ramification caused by more oil and gas production so that is a u.s public opinion so whether you like it or not this is a political reality and we need to live with that political reality and well since i was involved in our climate negotiation and i have been doing such a dirty work so maybe i might have i might have become too much realist and i need to have um you know high um say ambition and ideal like you and i think uh we are sharing the common uh objectives that is um you know uh please don't miss misunderstand me that i'm you know not say uh total or say pessimist and i don't want my pessimistic say vision will come true and i very much hope that our situation will change and um uh in order to make that happen uh say renewable energy uh has already uh say achieved a lot of cost reduction as writer pointed out but a renewable energy alone uh cannot solve the problem because more intermittent renewable penetration needs backing up of the fossil fuels and how to cope with ccs and batteries too expensive and also such an integration cost needs to be taken into account and um you know the though we have seen massive cost reduction but adding integration costs may not be uh say still a hundred percent competitive with conventional power and also competitiveness of renewables varies from country to country though renewables end out uh in all the countries but uh the potential of economics exploration uh could be different in Japan you know we have very much limited land so our solar power potential could be less compared with say india and our wind condition is not as good as north sea and offshore wind uh we are putting a lot of high hope on offshore wind but uh the uh offshore wind situation in the summertime is much much weaker compared with north sea so we cannot imagine as competitive price for offshore wind as north sea so each country has different say constraints and in addition uh under very expensive natural gas prices um you know I have a lot of talk with uh you know Asian energy policy makers and the keyword which they use is affordability of the energy prices so uh under the current natural gas prices they feel obliged uh to say extended use of coal um even though it is say uh very much you know damaging uh the climate system but uh they may delay the shutting down of the coal power plant and india uh you recall uh the india's strong opposition to phase out of coal uh in the last last scene of the corp 26 and um you know uh they say energy transformation uh from viewpoint of developed country it is a switching from fossil fuel to renewable but for india uh for those who do not have access to modern type of electricity delivery of electricity is a first priority and so long as they have abundant coal uh there is no choice but to use coal uh so they could accept the argument of clean use of coal but they cannot accept the word of total phase out of coal so uh how to cope with that political reality that is uh the point I'm putting on the table I'm not saying that uh we should give up our endeavor for climate change mitigation and finally maybe uh the biggest problem of this issue is um you know prisoner dilemma and the free rider problems if developed country uh continue to go through more ambitious and ambitious climate mitigation actions then uh inevitably uh they will have a level playing field problems so that is why the European Commission is now considering carbon border adjustment measures and I'm not sure whether this seaban uh will receive a bullet uh for ensuring uh level playing field between uh say active developed country and non-active developing countries because uh that could uh say lead to easily the total trade war between developed and developing countries and it is a very much high probability and china and india are united in opposition uh to these sort of trade related measures so how to say ensure a level playing field um so and to avoid a carbon leakage that would be another headache uh we have to say uh phase in coming years so I'll stop here thank you so david before you launch into your rebuttal we can know you're you're like you look very eager and feisty to do that um but in in the interest of time we've only got uh about seven minutes left if in your rebuttal um you know you know the the the lack of leadership from the united states um you know what are your interactions and your impressions of um willingness to lead from the people's republic of china from the people's republic of china i mean that that's an interesting question because at the moment can i just quickly put in one point of response this is the first time i've been told i'm an idealist and that i'm opposed by a realist and i i frankly find that unnecessary i would like that statement withdrawn i cannot tell you how often i have discussed things with political figures around the world and i believe i'm the one facing up to the reality of climate change i haven't yet heard arena santi addressing the question how do you manage the transition all i hear from him is this is what the current situation is how could we possibly win through and of course that's what i was faced with back in 1997 it looked as if the whole world was never going to move properly on climate change so i think that that's the first thing i want to say let me just quickly come in with china we're in a global situation and this is part of what arena santi is saying where china has become the the target of many many criticisms and i think this was all begun with the the regime in the united states before biden and quite frankly i have to say to you that i think china has done more on climate change issues than almost any other country in the world given their situation if your economy is growing as it was a 12 percent a year 10 percent a year and you are taking a larger and larger fraction of your community out of pop of poverty and they're coming into being middle-class people much more rapidly than the world has ever seen before energy demand goes up very rapidly now they have met that energy demand as far as they can from renewable energy and nuclear energy sources and i must very quickly simply say anisante don't forget nuclear energy as an alternative to to what you were saying using gas and uh and fossil fuels in order to manage the the renewable energy system which does depend on for example solar panels no energy during the the when there's no sun china around so i i think i do want to say china is doing a heck of a lot more the whole world benefits from the fact that china started rolling out solar energy farms around china wind turbines around china they built more nuclear power stations than any other all other countries in the world put together since this whole climate change debate came up china since 2012 has been very focused on this and if you take a public poll of the people of china they clearly don't see it as a priority nor have they in the past but they have seen as a priority the business of clearing up the air in their cities and that has helped the chinese public bureau to manage this program so i think avoid the criticism of china china has always said that it will follow the united states in whatever actions they take on the global scene and once obama said he would sign the 2015 agreement china signed so i i think that quite frankly raising the chinese issue is a bit of a red herring i do think china will deliver and it always has delivered on its past promises that by 2030 they will have turned around and reduced total emissions from china and that they will reach net zero by 2060 but i believe they will achieve that much much earlier so i think i would i just want to leave the issue of china on the table but if you want to raise it again please do that's that's exactly what i was what i was fishing for in the sense of that you know you actually have had given the economic development and stages of economic development a lot of action taken in the people's republic of china which is sort of being demonized by the absolute amount of co2 emissions and that's just completely faulty now in the interest of time i think we've got room unfortunately for only one question the world co2 emission is four million tons per hour how much greenhouse gas can we realistically sequester and at what time scale that's a very very good question and a very important statement four million tons per hour is the current rate of emissions what what sort of greenhouse gas capture but let me first of all emphasize i'm looking for greenhouse gas capture because we want to see the greenhouse gas levels down to a safe level for the future of humanity which is 350 parts per million by the way i'm talking about the real world not an ideal world this is the real world situation unless we get ourselves down to 350 parts per million we can't look further in the future than 100 150 years i don't know how many other people care about grandchildren i do i've got a two and a half year old granddaughter qb 72 at the end of this year will she be talking about her grandchildren at that point in time that currently if i were to listen to rima santa and simply sit back then i think there is no possibility so greenhouse gas capture is to bring it down we have to take down the emissions not match the current emissions to allow it to continue and so the emissions withdrawal using marine biomass this is a byproduct of rebuilding the ocean population of biomass is roughly no less than four billion tons a year and possibly as much as 10 to 15 billion tons a year this is from one single process but remember the oceans lost 72 percent of the world's surface that's the real world by the way and so as we as we take into account all of the other means of of capturing carbon dioxide here's a very difficult one if farmers were to play the practice of no longer using chemicals to kill off all of the living species such as earthworms we could trap as much carbon in the earth per year as as i'm talking about from the oceans just from increased marine biomass so i think four million tons per hour is doable by greenhouse gas capture but please remember the idea is that we have to stop emitting this stuff otherwise we just make the problem much more challenging for the greenhouse gas removal technologies so david thank you very very much unfortunately we've run out of time i love this debate i like the tension in the room um you know which is very very good um and uh you know i think that following um you know sir david's um you know proposals his initiatives his realist initiatives bringing global leaders bringing global investors um together um is absolutely exciting reduce remove repair um so david i think that you do still have these monthly sessions right from your climate crisis advisory group uh sort of doing the education campaign and then of course the climate repair center that you've recently founded um you know would be urge everybody to please take a closer look and follow that um so david adima sensei thank you very very much i also want to thank everybody here in the audience and everybody joining us from overseas or from your remote computers thank you so much uh we hope uh to that you will join us again at future events from the asia society and from oist thank you very very much adima sensei thank you very much sir david