 Good afternoon, and you're very welcome to this IEA webinar event. We're delighted to be joined from Washington DC this afternoon, this morning for our guest, by a distinguished speaker, Alice C. Hill, who is Senior Fellow for Energy and the Environment at the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations. My name is Alex White, I'm Chair of the IEA's Energy Group. In her latest book, The Fight for Climate After COVID-19, Alice Hill argues that the global response to COVID-19 can serve as a lesson for the urgency and the scale of the response that's required to avert climate disaster. She argues that mitigation is now no longer enough, that adaptation is clearly required, and we're going to explore some of those themes and obviously talk about the book a little, and also obviously, since we're so close to the conclusion of COP26, we might reflect a little bit on that as well. And another theme, if we can get to it, will be the climate agenda of the Biden administration. So before I introduce Alice, let me briefly just outline what today's format is going to be. But just in our en duration for the full event, initially there'll be an in-conversation discussion for about 15 or 20 minutes or so between myself and Alice. But of course, as always, we're keen to hear from you, from our audience. So please feel free to submit your questions using Zoom's Q&A function, which you will see at the bottom of your screen. We ask, as always, that if you're submitting a question that you would include your name and your affiliation, the organization that you represent or you're from, if that applies. A reminder that the full session, the initial conversation portion, and then the Q&A, is all taking place on the record. And you can join the discussion also if you're minded to do so on Twitter. And if you're doing that, you can use the handle at IIEA. So our guest, Alice Seahill is the David M. Rubenstein Senior Fellow for Energy and the Environment at the Council on Foreign Relations. Her work at the CFR focuses on the risks, consequences, and responses associated with climate change. She previously served as Special Assistant to President Barack Obama and Senior Director for Resilience Policy on the National Security Council, where she led the development of national policy to build resilience to catastrophic risks, including climate change and biological threats. Prior to this, she served as Senior Counselor to the Secretary of Homeland Security, where she led the formulation of the department's first ever climate adaptation plan, and the development of strategic plans regarding catastrophic biological and chemical threats, including pandemics. She is the co-author of Building a Resilient Tomorrow 2019 publication, and author of the Fight for Climate After COVID-19, as I've mentioned earlier, which is just published this year, 2021. In a previous life, Alice mentioned to me earlier that she was a practicing lawyer and indeed a judge, and has taken a close interest in many of the legal ramifications and dimensions to this whole climate agenda. So we're delighted, Alice, to have you this afternoon. And let's just get going. I mean, in your book, you argue that the global response to the pandemic can serve as a kind of a lesson, or, I don't know, prototype, or a go-to experience for how we can deal with the climate emergency. It struck me, it's a little bit of, I suppose, a cliche at this point, but a former colleague of yours, Ram Emanuel, had coined this great phrase, not wasting a crisis. And I wonder, perhaps a little bit different, this crisis is different from the one he was talking about, which of course was the financial crisis. But I mean, is it a version of that sense, that look, we're picking things up now, we're learning things now, let's see what we can do to make things better and to improve our approach to the climate agenda. But anyway, that just occurred to me as something that he had previously said. But what do you, what's, maybe just elaborate a little bit on some of those basic arguments that you're making. Well, yes, thank you so much for having me. I'm just thrilled to be able to join you. And I think Ram Emanuel, who was President Obama's first Chief of Staff, definitely got it right when he said, essentially never let a good crisis go to waste, is I think how we phrased it. And of course, we can learn from crises, and that's often how we see great leaps forward in preparedness. We saw that using examples from my country after 9-11, certainly that event shocked us. And our anti-terrorism efforts just completely exploded. We reworked how we did government to respond to that. And we've seen similar events across history where cataclysmic occurrences motivate populations to do things differently. With the pandemic, we're having a catastrophic risk that affects everyone. And although it's very concerning, terrible, it can yield lessons for another catastrophic risk that is already unfolding and probably will lead to even more damaging impacts than the pandemic. And that is, of course, climate change or the warming of the atmosphere, which is causing these big events, bigger floods, longer, deeper droughts, extreme heat that can kill within hours. And just climate strange events, one of our columnists called climate weeding, where we have arctic blasts occurring in Texas causing our electric grid to fail. We're seeing that climate change is already stressing society, and these two threats share some similarities. Both pandemics and climate change impacts are borderless threats. I had never really heard that before, but when I was working at the Department of Homeland Security, this huge sprawling agency created after 9-11, we were talking about biological threats. It makes sense to close your borders to keep biological threats out. We never really answered that question where there was a recognition that you can't keep them out, and that's what we've seen with the pandemic, but you might be able to slow the spread. So I learned that all these jurisdictional boundaries that humans have so carefully crafted are essentially not going to apply when you've got either a pandemic or now with these big events fueled by warming rising temperatures. And we also learned that early action matters. You can look at the different experiences of different nations to see that those who acted early on the pandemic had better outcomes. Similarly, that would be true of climate change and leadership and planning matters. So my hope is that we would study and think about and learn from the pandemic and start applying these lessons so that we can have a better future together as temperatures continue to rise. I think that notion at that point about borderless, you know, that this agenda has got to transcend borders. I mean, self-evidently. I mean, that recognition, I suppose at some level was there back in the 90 in the early 90s when the UN FCC came into existence. But of course, the sovereignty of nations and sovereignty is still such a dominant, a fundamental truism of global life and of the interaction between states. It's interesting. Perhaps we'll come back to that if we get a chance as to, you know, the enduring importance of sovereignty and how difficult it is for us to perhaps get around that, frankly, in terms of the sort of actions that are needed internationally. But just on the let's sort of stay positive for the moment. I mean, if we can, I mean, we've come out of COP. We saw some advances there. We saw some undoubted disappointments there. I think anybody would have to agree that we saw both and it's a stage along the way. The political will that you're, you've had the advantage, the privilege of being, of being able to observe closely what happens in the White House and what happens at the highest level politically in the US. So we have the Obama administration, the two administrations, then the Trump one, and now back to President Biden in terms of the approach. How important is political will and is that political will is something that's growing, do you think, as it's still have to be fought for. Well, I think political will is important going back to what Rahm Emanuel said, and political will can occur as a result of events, because then you have the political support to give politicians the will to make the hard choices. But the challenge with climate change, in my opinion, is that we will have, unlike the pandemic, we won't have a single event that causes people to rise up and say this has to stop. Instead, we see these impacts come in on a very localized basis. And speaking from the United States, there's still a lack of understanding that these events have been fueled by climate change to the extent they're greater extremes than we've ever had before. So we have to assume that people begin to understand that and then that they will act on that but climate change comes in peril by peril. It doesn't come in across the board, it's very geographically localized. So it becomes more difficult to get the political action to address the overall problem, which requires mitigation of course the two sides of climate change at least mitigation cutting the harmful pollutants that human activity is sending up in the atmosphere forming that blanket around the globe trapping the heat and warming us all warming everything up and then with these impacts following and then adaptation. So adaptation is to prepare for and respond to the impacts. But we just it's hard to get the political will for the mitigation and on the adaptation it's hard to get the political will to address all the range of threats from climate change. If, if you haven't experienced it yet and some of this goes back just a human cognition how we understand risk. And so that will be a challenge for us going forward. More events will add more political will in my opinion, but we still have deeply divided understandings of what's ahead, and until we can get a better across the board appreciation for the threat. But it's going to be harder to make progress and the political cycle. I mean, God we see the political cycle in the US because everybody observes what happens there but the political cycle is reality everywhere. And so you know for elections that are coming will will prey on the minds of politicians who are trying to be reelected. So just the points you made a moment ago that there may be good will but there may be a sense then of not not being able to take the big steps that really are needed because of the political pressure to come back from the electorate and the risk of not being reelected. So I was going to ask you actually, you know, mentioned about the legal end of things is a terrific and really interesting judgment of the German constitutional court this year, earlier this year, and it kind of touches on your point about the rational but you know we know what needs to be done but we don't really kind of have the political room or possibility to do it. And politics then sort of, they kind of sit back and they let events flow whereas but the German Supreme Court said no no young people alive today in Germany are likely to face a very drastic constraint on their freedoms in whatever 20 years time 30 years time, we don't do something now. And they characterized the rights that those young people who had applied in that case they characterize those rights as an intertemporal rights. In other words there are rights which are right to a future, which you know the threat to which is not going to crystallize for quite a while, but it's, it still works in injustice to those young people today, because there's a certainty of a problem for them in Europe and many other people won't be around so I suppose the point is slightly academic point once the German court I think got it because it's sort of try to cut through this political cycle this electoral cycle to say no no, you've got to do something now that avails those young people because otherwise they will be affected adversely in the future. So it's a way of, I suppose, the legal system maybe going behind the drawbacks of the political system and the political cycle and the electoral cycle. So we are seeing some very interesting developments across the globe. The case you mentioned, we also have the case in Netherlands with the Royal Dutch Shell and then we have the case in Pakistan where Pakistani people they're not doing enough. We also have bubbling along here in the United States lawsuits brought by cities and by children saying against both fossil fuel companies or causing emissions that then cause these harmful pollutants that then cause these impacts, and then cities suing because they're suffering these impacts. It's quite a legal debate in the United States, whether this is an issue that is more appropriately left to the legislatures, rather than to the courts and that same dynamic that you've just described is underlying all this look the because we're politically divided and because of a lack of politicians having the support to make these choices. We're not making them and that's putting everyone at risk. But as a former judge, for many judges that's not something they see as their role to step in and craft solution so I think we will see great tensions along the way on this and probably ultimately will have to be resolved in our Supreme Court. So, but it's, go ahead, yes. No, no, no, it's interesting because that issue, exactly the tension as you say policy is not for judges and they they share that as you as you rightly say and that's the same in our tradition here. We had a very interesting Supreme Court judgment last year and climate case Ireland where those questions were addressed and when the Supreme Court came down and said no look we don't make the policy. If you set, meaning the government, if you set certain targets and if you say you're going to do certain things and you have legislation solemnly declaring that you're going to do, and then you don't do them, or you bring out a plan that's inadequate, and that is just manifestly not matching up with what you yourself have said you will do well then we will intervene the courts can intervene and that happened in Ireland as well in a very interesting case, but let's come back because again just, I suppose, looking at the the broader geopolitical political context if I can put it that way I think you wrote at length in a number of different outlets in advance of cop that if we didn't get the kind of political leadership that we're looking for that there will be a very real possibility of increased geopolitical tensions and surrounding climate action. So now that we're on the other side of cop. Do you want to assess the outcome of cop in the context of your, your concerns about possible geopolitical tensions of people didn't step up, or if there was continuing conflict perhaps between countries as to what should happen. So at the cop. I think the UK president of the cop and held in Glasgow and I did have the great privilege of being there for the full two weeks. I think he summed it up well. The goal that the scientists told us should be our goal we really had the goal since the Paris Agreement in 2015 but in August, this very important report was issued by the international panel on climate change a group of scientists who reviewed 14,000 peer reviewed scientific articles we had over 230 scientists from over 60 nations, they poured over these findings, and they issued an executive summary the report in August was quite long I think over 1000 pages but the executive summary is far shorter. That summary importantly was agreed to by all the member nations of the UN framework convention on climate change the UNF triple C. That's 197 nations so every one of those nations agree to this executive summary and the summary said we have to keep below 1.5 degrees of warming free industrial time so that was a big goal coming out of the cop 26. And that will remain intact. But as the UK president Alex Sharma said, the pulse is weak. And with that is course then if we blow past that 1.5 degrees the scientists have warned us that we were will be in territory that human civilization has never experienced really catastrophic threats to ecosystems to our built environment. The possibility of tipping points where very dramatic events happen very suddenly that are extremely difficult for humans and other living things to prepare for. So, we don't know where we'll be but that means that there's additional pressures developing because there is doubt whether we can contain our heating. And I think there are two things that will need to watch for first is there's going to be growing emphasis on geoengineering it's almost as if there's now a third side to climate change you have mitigation cutting emissions adaptation preparing for these damaging impacts and now geoengineering and geoengineering is essentially major interventions in the climatic system to try to control the heating and things like solar radiation management, where you're putting particles up in the atmosphere to deflect the sunlight. And it's putting silica beads on the Arctic to slow the melting of the Arctic ice to slow heating it's putting cloud cloud changing the cloud coverage so that we can slow heating. Having far more of that move forward we have no international system or understanding on how that should be governed and it could simply be done by a billionaire or by a nation state so that's a separate area developing and then we have the impacts will be getting worse and if our adaptation efforts find fall behind and the developing world is vulnerable to climate impacts it's not equal how these climate impacts fall and they also don't typically have the kind of infrastructure that you would find in a developed nation. Say levees, seawalls, drainage systems to protect themselves so they will be suffering ever more damaging events, and that is highly destabilizing to governments. In fact, at the COP 26 for the first time ever the UN General Secretary of NATO gave a talk on national security and climate change. And there's just a recognition that the security threats will grow because the humanitarian needs are growing. You know, since 1970, we are now experiencing five times more disasters than we did in 1970. So we're saying huge humanitarian needs, greater food insecurity, water insecurity, and as those things unfold, they can topple governments. They can give rise to authoritarianism. And these are issues that we are only beginning to come to grapples with but we saw it during the pandemic. We saw rebels in Yemen saying it's using the pandemic to recruit. They said it's better to die as a martyr than it is to die at your home and COVID. We saw El Chapo, the leader of the cynic little cartels, daughters passing out hand sanitizers, the mafia was trying to help local population. So this is a point of vulnerability for any government if they can't adequately respond to these worsening, damaging climate threats. And actually picking up on the, I suppose, by way of analogy, again, the COVID, the lessons of COVID. One of the things that often said about vaccines in the COVID context is that no one is safe until everyone is safe. You know, that sense that it's a collective by definition as a collective effort. And similarly, if it's not stretching the analogy too much, isn't it the case that internationally, I mean, itself evidently is the case of no individual country can stabilize the climate. I mean, no matter how powerful a country is, no matter what resources, if it thinks it can do the job within its own borders, it's greatly mistaken because countries are, territories are dependent on other territories. I mean, there are many countries that are, you know, downriver of other countries that that you mentioned water that there are all sorts of interdependencies going on. And isn't that one of the great challenges that perhaps wasn't really quite met, it wasn't met at all in Glasgow. The need the record the need to recognize that, you know, financial transfers will be will be necessary that there will be many countries in the eye of the storm that won't be able to afford the infrastructure development that you're talking about. The other countries that will be in a better position to afford it for itself, but they need to those countries need to think about helping those, helping the countries that are in the eye of the storm, because of these necessary interdependencies down the line. Well, this was a brewing issue before the cop. I wrote a piece about watching the finance at the at the cop and in fact it emerged as a big point of contention and disappointment coming out of the cop for the developing world. Of course, in 2009, the developing world promised the develop the developed world promised the developing world that they would mobilize they would get enough finances $100 billion a year by 2020. The developing world did not honor that representation and by it's difficult to calculate by 2019. They'd only given about 80% and importantly from the perspective of the developing world, much of that came in the form of loans. And if you think about the balance sheet for the developing world they're hit by the pandemic they already face. Because their credit ratings are lower they face higher prices for borrowing money, and then they've had to shell out just huge amounts of money to help their populations deal with COVID. So they're there in precarious finances and then the help on climate change comes in the forms of loans so that's not as helpful to them. And then it's mostly for mitigation it's mostly to help them get electric grids that are not emitting. But these nations as you pointed out need a great deal of help with adaptation in fact the UN says that currently the needs of the developing world for adaptation run at about $70 billion a year, and that by 2030 it could go up to $340 billion a year. So developed world had trouble coming up with $100 billion and most of that went to cutting emissions not to these things of adaptation which would be helping them with their flooding cities, many cities on the coast that will need either stronger protections or better planning going for it. That help didn't come as much. So it will be going forward a continuing point of contention and of course the developing world also wanted greater progress on the issue of loss and damage. And that's a related concept but essentially it's saying hey, you developing world have caused most of this climate crisis we the developed world has caused it we the developing world haven't had much to do with it. You should pay us money to help us deal with this problem you created and of course as a judge I can appreciate the liability argument that's underlying that saying you caused it, you should pay for it. But so far that issue has been kicked down the road. What came out of the cop 26 was a promise for a future dialogue on or dialogues on the issue of loss and damage. So this is going to be a point that will be revisited many times over. Ultimately, if you look at the security risks that fall follow from a failure of governments to be able to cope with climate change. There may be long term thinking that needs to be done to why it's in our interest to make sure that countries can help their populations thrive at home. So that they're not bad actors recruiting more to their ranks or we see the kinds of migration that is predicted with climate change migration just a whole other part of the agenda. Obviously, just to remind our audience please feel free to pop in a question. I'd like to do that, and I'm sure we'll get have an opportunity to get and we've got a very good attendance. It's nice to see that so you may pop your question on the Q&A anytime that they occur to you. I'm going to take you back Alice just to the States just for a moment and just to look at we touched on it earlier at the Biden administration and in office now for positive year you lose track of time and pandemic. Yes, just about a year, January 20, right. So, how are they doing on climate? I mean, the benchmark of President Biden's immediate predecessor may not be a great one in the sense that you certainly would be expecting it to be a lot better than what happened then, but doesn't it need to be many times better to make progress? How do you think he and President Biden and his administration is faring in this agenda? Well, look, we have never had a president more focused on climate change than President Biden. He's made a central pillar of his presidency. We announced, he announced immediately after taking office that the United States is back. Of course, there's a lot of cleanup that has to occur from the Trump administration if we want to make progress on climate change. So President Trump rolled back many of the efforts that had been accomplished under President Obama, those in the ruling back meant that he sued or he took action unilaterally and then, for example, environmental groups brought lawsuits saying you can't do that. So a lot of the work that President Obama did is tied up in the courts based on what President Trump did with that work. And we have here a president who's brought in more people than ever focused on climate. You know, I visited Canada in 2016 and I had a remarkable experience. I'd just been come out of the Obama administration and you almost found no one with climate in their title. The climate was still viewed as kind of a polarizing issue, so they would have different words in their title, even though they might have been working on climate. In Canada, I found under Trudeau, many people had a climate in their title and that's what's happened with Biden. He's said we are a climate team and advisors, special assistants all have climate in their titles and in their portfolio. This is extreme effort being driven from the executive branch to address climate change through whatever executive actions can be taken. But you point out there are headwinds here and the headwinds are most noticeable when you talk about how divided our Congress is. It's really divided or we as a nation are really divided when it comes to climate change. Recent polling has shown that at least 70% of Americans understand or identify climate change as a problem. But if you drill down on that, you see that there's a stark difference between Republicans and Democrats. In the last seven years, the percentage of Democrats that think that climate change is a serious threat has gone up to 95%. So if you're Democrat, you're worried about climate change. But during the same period, the share of Republicans, and we're obviously a two-party nation, the share of Republicans who say climate change is a serious problem dropped by 10%. And it's just at 39%. And then you move over to our Congress and our Senate and we need both houses. We have both the House of Representatives as well as the Senate to pass legislation. Our Senate is split 50-50. There are only 100 people in the Senate and 50 are Republicans, 50 Democrats. So we need to go to the vice president to break a tie, but we can't, a lot of our legislation requires 60 votes to pass in the Senate. So it's a big challenge trying to drive a climate agenda through. And you see that right now, if you follow in the United States, where President Biden is pushing a bill under a parliamentary rule that allows for only 50 votes or 51 votes to get through. And that would have much of the bulk of the climate provisions for the United States. It looks like that'll pass, but it's been a challenge. We just don't have an electorate in our split and how the representatives are in Congress have not allowed either President Obama or President Biden to be able to just simply drive through legislation easily. It requires more work. So that slows things, but I think the Biden administration is firing on all cylinders to get these things done. It's a high priority. Everyone recognizes the threat it poses to our country, our economic health, to our prosperity and our public health. And then it's a global issue. As you've said, we need to work with other nations to come up with a solution that keeps the entire planet safe. Emily Binchie, thank you Emily for your question and Emily, thanks you for your very interesting presentation. And asks, given the great disparity in historic emissions, you did touch on this already, but perhaps just to delve into it a little bit more. Given the great disparity in historic emissions produced by developed versus developing countries. How optimistic, would you feel about the prospect of achieving climate justice and climate solidarity globally. So as I said, we have touched on it but this is to bring back it look where where do you start you optimistic that this can be achieved given this great disparity that's there. Well I'm an optimism I think most humans are that's how we get. I'm an optimist and that's how we get through life. My hope is that these issues can be resolved, but I'm also try to exercise discipline in thinking through these issues I think it's going to be a very large challenge going forward because the developed world is also going to be suffering from these impacts. And you need to develop the, you need to have the political will as we've said to talk about the kinds of transfers of capital that might be involved, particularly when we're talking about investments in adaptation. Investments in adaptation simply don't have typically the rate of return that you get for example for investments in clean energy. It's not as obvious how you're going to make money from investing in a mangrove forest to store carbon and protect against store storm surge their ways to do it, but it's more complex it's also doesn't have an easy metric like you do for mitigation of carbon or whatever other greenhouse gas emission in the atmosphere. Measuring adaptation and resilience is just harder to do we don't have a worldwide metric for it yet. So it makes it less attractive for financing and figuring out public private partnerships in this space may be more difficult so that will be a challenge. The developing world will be having growing needs, but also the developed world will be suffering from impacts that they want to spend capital on. So that's the big fear if you look at the war gaming and there's been war gaming and other types of gaming done on this for over over a decade. It shows there was a game done I think in 2007 2008 where former diplomats and others are assigned roles as leaders of different nations and this was run by the Center for Naval Analysis. And it showed over time, looking at the progression of impacts coming in that the developing world. The demands increased but the developed world began to pull back. They got tired of humanitarian rescues. They got tired of the demands for money and they turned more insular and turned towards just tending to their own populations. So I don't know if that will occur but that's what we have seen and that can give rise to authoritarianism and other challenges as I've mentioned so this is a big issue going forward and we don't have the answers yet and cop did not give us the answers. I'm interested because it is a central theme of your book the you know because we much of the debate is about mitigation and you're saying no look we've got we've got to be talking about adaptation as much equally if not, I don't know if you think more so or whether they should both be on the same track but be on the same level of focus. I mean, isn't it hard to sometimes those becoming I think a little easier but isn't it generally difficult to keep the focus on the climate agenda, and is there a risk that if we, is there a risk that if we have to fire on two cylinders as aware of the mitigation and the adaptation that we risk one distracting from the other in the public mind in terms of people's ability. They're sort of bandwidth to you know to cope with the problem and to be able to address the problem if they've got to address both. I don't doubt that they do, we do have to address both, but it's in terms of the public focus I'm wondering. Well, there is a divide in the world between mitigation and adaptation and when I say the world I mean the experts that are in that world. And I think that divide currently is hindering our progress. Because if you don't consider how mitigation is affected by adaptation or vice versa, you are at risk of making some decisions that will be viewed as not so wise in hindsight. And this divide is long standing. And we first really started working globally on climate change. Climate change was viewed as something in the far off and you know here in the United States people talked about in terms of polar bears or something for 2100. Well climate change has now arrived it's arrived with a vengeance you can pretty much look at your window and see evidence of climate change so it's happened faster. One of the most remarkable things that I learned during cop was the consensus it seems among scientists I spoke to wow, we just are surprised, not about how it's unfolding, but that it's unfolding so quickly so it's happening quickly and so this decision to not talk about mitigation for a variety of reasons it might concede that we failed on our mitigation efforts. It might distract as you said, I don't think we can put off that conversation anymore and no question, we need to mitigate, we need to cut our lives, we need to avoid unfathomable catastrophic changes to the planetary system so no question we need to continue in full force on that, but to preserve our economies are public health we also need to embark on an adaptation. We don't do both. We risk the failure and adaptation, causing communities to crumble causing really abrupt economic disruption that make it difficult to achieve our goals on the mitigation side. And then importantly we need to consider whether a choice made, let's take in mitigation can have some negative impacts on adaptation and I'll just pick one for this example be solar energy. You know in Australia in California we've seen solar energy just explode, of course there's a challenge with solar energy first of all you need battery storage so you have variability but it turns out that when you have wildfires solar energy, the production of energy plunges because as you have a big wildfire this happened both in Australia and California, the smoke makes it difficult for the sunlight to hit the panels then and it also causes soot to hit the panels. So, the production plummets and what happens then a lot of people go out and power up their diesel generators, or they power up those coal plants that are sitting as a backup, and that can undermine the whole calculation about what you're going to achieve with solar energy and you need to account for that. A flip side would be a decision on adaptation that can negatively affect our mitigation efforts. So, one of the things I remember vividly in the White House was sitting around a room talking about water security and how can we increase water and somebody piped up, oh well let's just build more desalination plants and we've seen an explosion of desalination that's when you take salty or briny water and you turn it into fresh water. I think we have 18,000 plants across the world. What turns out to do that to take salty water, sea water and turn it into fresh water takes an enormous amount of energy. So, if you're not thinking through we need to use clean energy to create that fresh water, you've greatly added to your problem of heating up. And in fact, in Saudi Arabia they spend about 25% or use about 25% of their oil production on desalination efforts. So, we need to think through how these two efforts can work jointly so that we're not harming progress in one area so that we can achieve progress in the other. And that is not happening in my experience at any level of scale. These two communities still remain separate and another hard challenge for us to work on, but we need to correct that as well. Luke O'Callaghan White who is a senior researcher at the IAEA and take you back to the domestic politics in the US on this question but also a policy, I suppose, a policy difference as between the US and Europe. Luke says, given the broadly partisan and deeply entrenched divide in Congress and the challenge of passing any climate or environmental law without reconciliation, do you think the President Biden could successfully introduce a price on carbon over the next three years of his administration? Well, that's something that certainly the United States has struggled with. President Obama in his first term tried to get towards a price on carbon. We don't have the reconciliation bill done yet, but certainly there have been representations that it could be included in there. At least one senator said he has 49 votes in the Senate. He needs the 50. Then he'd get the Vice President as well to get there. So that could happen. And then you saw in just in the G20 negotiations, the EU and the United States coming to agreement essentially to work on. It wasn't a resolution, but some kind of carbon border adjustment tariffs for steel to try to incur and steal. Congress is one of those industries that it's very hard to cut the emissions that result from the production of steel. So to encourage green steel, they agreed to work on whether they would have some kind of system for that. So I think you'll see more efforts developing to try to get to some kind of pricing on carbon. But I don't know yet how that will ultimately play out. But the administration has certainly signaled that it's looking for other ways to drive consideration of the carbon emissions in different areas of industry. Alex Conway asks whether you might like to comment on the moves, some recent moves that we've seen by big international firms like Shell and Unilever, their moves to more flexible jurisdictions like the UK and away from the EU. And in response, it would seem or arguably in any event is partially to the strenuous climate regulations and obligations imposed on them. And how can we avoid a corporate race to the bottom for climate regulation? Good question. Well, this I can't comment on that particular situation and I haven't followed it closely enough, but I can tell you that this is a concern because there is growing interest in the EU, you're ahead of the United States, but interest in regulation of disclosures of climate risk for corporations to include and form their shareholders of the transition risk, that's the risk, what will happen to their assets, for example, if we go to clean energy, as well as then the risks to their operations, their supply chains and their facilities from climate change impacts like more flooding or heat. So what I expect in the United States, we will see regulation coming out of the regulatory agencies on this issue. But one of the flags of that approach and I am in favor of regulation and is that we could see responsible companies just selling off their assets, their heavy emitting assets to less responsible companies. And this is something that Larry Fink, he's the head of BlackRock, it's the world's largest investment manager, they manage over $8 trillion worth of investments. And his point is, as we go through this drive towards regulation to get greater transparency on the theory that that will force corporations to consider more climate risk and be better stewards going forward, that we could see a sell off of particularly dirty assets to people who are less interested in the greater goal of achieving controlling emissions and they just want to make as much money as they can. I don't have the solutions to that, but that will be a challenge, but I still believe that we have at the highest levels, we do not have full understanding in the polling on this issue shows or the analysis on this issue shows this as well. Our corporate leaders and some of our government leaders don't have a full understanding of what's at stake with climate change. So regulation would force that into the boardroom to make sure that corporations have the proper risk management measures in place to avoid sudden sell offs or other challenges that could result as climate change worsens. I suppose coming back to to your book and I mean again this comparison or at least is you know what can we draw on the COVID experience into the future in relation in respect to climate. And it occurred to me just today or these few days there's a lot of discussion in this country and I know it's the case elsewhere to about this in COVID in relation to COVID. The question of coercion. That's maybe a strong word to use but you know coercive measures such as lockdowns for example probably the most extreme versus encouraging responsible behavior so with this is a recurring motif I think in all of the debate about COVID you know can we can we encourage people to do the right thing whether it's vaccines or you know social distancing, all of the things that we're hoping that people will do or avoid doing as the case may be to try to prevent the spread of as a COVID. So there's this debate libertarian debate about you know it's my body and I have a vaccine if I decide to have one I, if I don't I won't. And then the more collective perspective that many people would have. So if you apply that to climate. And we spoke about the carbon carbon tax a moment ago. I'm interested. Do you have a view about the balance that's going to be necessary between coercive measures, and I use the word coercive in a general sense, and versus people just deciding that it's in their interest to do the right thing. Is that going to be, is that going to play into the politics of this issue, domestically around the world as well where governments have to decide whether they're going to force change, or just encourage change. Well, I do think that that issue will arise. What comes to mind is managed retreat, which has now become those two words are dirty words when combined in the United States and that's the challenge that you have for example on coastal and coastal communities where we know going forward land will be lost to sea level rise so those communities may have to relocate houses, roads, infrastructure and there have been calls for planning to make sure it's not a chaotic withdrawal from these areas but in fact it's a planned relocation or moving back from dangerous areas. This is proved in recent times very difficult issue for most communities to manage. We had in California very dramatic instances of this along our coast. We have a very long coast along California in the West, and there's a California Coastal Commission, a state run commission that's responsibility to make sure that public access to the beaches in California remains. They have some regulatory authority over what happens along the beaches and they instructed communities to come up with a plan for what they're going to do as sea level rise occurs. And one of the cities, probably one of the wealthiest cities in the United States home cell for well over a million dollars, not that large a city, maybe 3,000 homes affected or something, but the city, the residents said, wait a second, you're talking about managed retreat. That's going to be terrible for our property values. If we were talking about having to move back from the coast, we don't want to do a plan like that. And they voted the plan down and they voted any discussion of it down. And we've seen that in other communities. So we don't have the vocabulary. We don't have the means yet to address the fact that change is coming. It's coming quickly. And when you're talking about people's homes, where they have deep emotional attachment, this is the extremely difficult discussion. And I don't know how it will come out right now. We have not used coercive measures. We've mostly used voluntary measures, voluntary buyouts, for example, of homes that are at risk. But this will be an ongoing challenge to figure out how do we help communities be aware of their risks and then make choices that are choices that are acceptable to their communities. Thank you. We're coming towards the end. And I'm going to give our audience one more chance opportunity if they would like to add a question just before we finish it'll have to be a quick one. And but while people are thinking about that. And Dara Moriarty asked a question, I suppose post COP 26. You know, we've discussed some of the pledges were made that was disappointment. There was some progress in some areas. Back to this focus on young people Dara asks, you know, given how important young people have been in pushing the climate agenda. What, what would you say to keep young people motivated and engaged. And President Obama had something to say about that I think in the last few weeks when he was addressing that I'm not sure it was he or at least around the time. No, he was in Glasgow. Yes, he was a he was addressing. So what's what's to be said to keep young people motivated when they see that the progress is painfully slow. I am. I do worry about that. I worry that the young people are going to become too discouraged. And in fact there was a poll not so long ago of about 10,000 young people covering a number of countries across the globe and nearly six and 10 from ages of 16 to 25 were very or extremely worried about climate change and felt their governments were not protecting them the planet or future generations. And the issue for us is, how can we make sure that young people want to be engaged. And I, when I speak with young people, I encourage them to really learn about climate change because it will be the defining issue. It affects everything. That's the challenge with climate change. It affects virtually every natural system or built systems, cross cuts across all disciplines. We've talked about law, engineering, architecture, health, the economy, you name it. And so get some expertise in climate. And the other thing I try to convey is look, this is an enormous challenge. None of us really knows what to do. No human civilization has ever experienced what we are going through this rate of change in our environment and with the risks involved. But what I find in working on it is incredible excitement, opportunity for iteration. It's changing so quickly. And if you become a part of it and the psychological studies tell us this, you feel far more empowered. That engagement gives you the motivation and the drive and it brings you satisfaction and purpose as you're a part of it versus standing off on the side. So I urge everyone figure out the angle that you're interested in and then start thinking about how whatever discipline sector or line of work you've chosen, how it will be affected by climate change and then one of the solutions to reduce the risk that climate change poses to how we've been doing business in the past because the past is no longer a safe guide for the future. And I find so much reward in this work. I'm hoping that they can too. No question. And we are coming up on the air so I'm going to bring proceedings to a close and thank you. Thank Alice Hill for being with us this afternoon this morning. Alice Hill's book the fight for climate after covert 19 is published by the Oxford University Press and there's several dozen leading comment just looking down the list of our audience afternoon and thank you all for joining us and many of the leading commentators and players in this field have joined us and that's great. And I think your book. Congratulations on the book you mentioned has been translated into Chinese and I'm sure amongst many other languages to but thank you so much for being with us to discuss some of the teams in that book and also to range over such a wide area. And thank you very much and thank you all for your attendance this afternoon. Thank you.