 This is Think Tech Hawaii. Community matters here. You bet. Energy in America. Lou Puliarisi in Washington and me, Jay Fidel here in Honolulu, talking about energy in America. More specifically, we're going to talk about the U.S. interagency client assessment. Is it a real crisis or is it doomsday mongering? Whoa. Hi, Lou. Hi. How are you doing, Jack? Pretty good. It's quite cold here in Washington today, so. We are less than sympathetic. What can I tell you? Exactly. Yes. So, yes, I think there's been enormous media coverage of this interagency report, 1700 pages of it, and we should all be quite thankful that it was released on Black Friday instead of prior to Thanksgiving, then we didn't have to talk about it, and Thanksgiving dinner. And if you watch the media coverage of this report, I just think it's been almost irresponsible and just terrible. I mean, so if you read the media, so we call it, even the non-mainstream media, you read the report saying, well, we've got in front of us mass death, global food shortages, economic destruction, national security risk, all from climate change. And so the question is, what did the report really say? And why did the media focus on actually the absolute worst case, most least likely scenario? And was that a wise way to think about how we are to work our way out of this problem? So I thought what we'd do today is go over some basics of where we are in climate, like we observed so far with the model, say, where people are and trying to get down to 1.5 or 2 degrees, and then talk about the real world for a little bit. Yeah, we need to do that. I mean, it's refreshing to hear you say those things, and I can hardly wait until you describe what's in the report and how it compares with the media reports. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So why don't we start with the first slide up here, right? And this slide shows actually where the gap, what we might say is what the models are predicting or what the models are generating and what observations to date show. And remember the trend lines of this to 1900, and I'm going back thousands of years to the global, you know, to the middle-aged warming period and all these other times, we're just looking at a relatively short snapshot in geologic time. I mean, just a minuscule amount, 1900 to 2100. And if you look at this, you can see what's happening with observations, and there's some debate there, and there's a big band, as you can see, a small band, whether we've actually increased our temperature between, you know, since 19, hovered around zero, you know, the baseline is zero, up one and a half degrees, or maybe less. There's a huge body of literature for those who are interested in that. That's not my thing. And then there's this forecast going forward, right, on expected temperature change based on the model. What you need to understand about the difference in these future scenarios, they're driven largely by kind of exogenous or external assumptions. Among them are population growth, whether the national economies of the world are dominated by fossil fuels, are dominated by, you know, more industrial process or more service sector, and how balanced their fuel makes it. But you can see the degree of uncertainty going out to 2100 is quite large, and it's really important to understand that even based on the fundamental drivers, there's considerable uncertainty, right? Can I ask you this, Lou? So you have a pink line, which goes higher on the scale, and you have a gray line which goes slower, and I can't read on the 90-degree tilt. What do those two lines represent? So they are different special report emission scenarios from the United Nations. They are very similar. The high one, the absolutely highest one, the high end of the red period, is RPC 8.5. Don't ask. That's the aggressive growth scenario in the climate report, the interagency climate report, which was just issued on Black Friday. So if you're thinking about where did the U.S., where's the media drawing its attention from, it's very similar to the very top end of the red line. And that's a so-called series A2 special report emission scenario from the U.M. and the interagency report there. And it's basically a pretty rosy report on economic growth. But the way the climate science works is the richer we get, the worse off we are. That's sort of where we go. The more we have to lose. Yeah. So I just wanted to understand that this uncertainty is not driven strictly only by kind of the nature of the calculations of the emission foreseeing models, but also underlying assumptions in economic growth, population growth, the structure of the national economies. And so there's lots of uncertainty in this stuff. And we're going to get to why worst case scenario planning may not be the way to think about problems, but let's go to the next picture which shows kind of a consensus of modeling and on where, you know, what people have agreed to in Paris and what the gap may be from what they agreed to and what a lot of the, let's say, the doomsday mongering folks want us to worry about. Okay. Or, you know, responsible people as well. So if you look at this next one, this is the gap between something called nationally determined contributions. That means you showed up at Paris and actually it's technically intended nationally determined contributions. And you said, well, I'm China and I plan to do this. Okay. That was, so you put that in the pot, right? So if everybody in Paris achieves their nationally determined contributions and which they are not obligated to do, you will lower the emissions from the gray line there to the yellow line. Okay. So you can see the total reduction from Paris for which everyone's just horrified that Trump pulled out of us, right, has almost no effect. Okay. So Paris is a more political theater than anything else. Okay. You could argue it's a start-up, but you can see from this graph here the gap in emissions ranges, right? And I think, and this excludes LULUCF, this excludes land use and land use changes in forestry. So you don't, in this model, you get no credit for planting trees. Okay. But what I want to say is that the thing your viewers should take away from this chart is that what we've agreed to in Paris versus what you would have to do, at least under the modeling, to get to 1.5 degrees is a big number. Not even close. Okay. So that's it. Now, let's go to the next one. And I think that this shows you for the G20, right, and the G20 are the richest OECD countries in the world, including South Korea, Japan, Argentina, Europe, US, Canada. And I think what this shows you here is, you know, what, you know, where, where are we in the whole question of the average change to 19, you know, since 1990, right? In emissions, right? And emissions per capita, you can see the red line there. That's kind of, that's kind of flat. And emissions intensity in the energy sector, right, and has flat and energy intensity of the economy of the G20 has actually fallen, right? And emissions have grown, but they have not grown exponentially because we have become to, we've become a less, a less heavy industry society, more service oriented, and we've become more efficient. It doesn't meet the, it doesn't meet the objectives of many in the environmental community who want to literally end fossil fuel use by 2040 or earlier. In other words, to meet some of these targets of two degrees, you literally have to stop the use of all fossil fuels in the next 20 years. That may seem like a long time, that's a very difficult thing to do. So let's go to the next. Now you said this is the G20 that's meeting in Argentina just in a few days from now. Yes, right. Do you think I'll be talking about this report in Argentina? I doubt it, but it may be a little bit. Point out that in France, I ask anyone who thinks that this stuff's easy to do, look at the riots in France, right? This was only because he decided to increase the taxes on diesel fuel. And, and when they surveyed these, all the French farmers and the truck drivers and everyone are like stopping traffic and engaging in these massive strikes, they say, well, yes, we're very sympathetic to, you know, environmental initiatives and improving the environment. But the thing we're really sympathetic about is our survival. I can't argue with that. Well, you can't argue with that, but our politicians sometimes are disconnected. So, and I think you might take a look here at how the G20 is doing on our last picture here on decarbonization, right? And this is from a group Energy Transparency. It's, you know, no, they're not a bunch of crazy, they're pretty, you know, pretty aggressive and trying to push for climate change initiatives. But I think what you can see here is that nobody is really engaged in massive coal phaseout, our biggest carbon emitter. And in fact, Australia, China, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, Russia, South Korea, Turkey, actually they list the United States. I don't quite agree with that. No consideration or policy in place of phasing out coal, right? I think that's true for the US, except the market is driving out coal to our cheap natural gas supplies. Well, I mean, do you think, is this going to change? That's really remarkable that coal is sort of the enemy of clean energy. Wouldn't you predict that it will change? Coal will change in the US, keep in mind the notion that somebody in the US decided to write this big report on a territory which is in the United States, and they're going to measure the impacts on a territory which competes 1.6% of the entire global space, you know, the space of the earth. It's kind of, you know, bizarre. Why would anyone think you could do that in any reasonable way? You're taking a massive global system and you're saying, oh, we're so smart, we're going to measure the impact on 1.6% of that space. And so I would say, and this is what we learned in our LNG work, and LNG is more expensive than coal. You go to India, yes, you're getting some progress in China, mostly driven by local air pollution issues. But in much of Asia, you're part of the world there. The cost of electricity is much more important to the political structure and to the folks living in both democratic and autocratic societies than concerns over climate, which is not the same as the concerns these populations have over air pollution. That's a much different thing. They can see it, they can feel it. So what I'm trying to present here is that, yes, the report presents, and I'm going to, we can talk maybe after the break, I don't know, we can go through, OK, what part of the report did the media draw on, which exaggerated what it actually said? Yes. Good question. Let's take a short break. Lupu-Dirisi, E. Prink in Washington, D.C., will come back and answer that question. This is ThinkTech. This is ThinkTech Hawaii, raising public awareness. Aloha. I want to invite all of you to talk story with John Wahee every other Monday here at ThinkTech Hawaii. And we have special guests, like Professor Colin Moore from the University of Hawaii, who joins us from time to time to talk about the political happenings in this state. Please join us every other Monday. Aloha. No, you won't. OK, we're back with Lupu-Dirisi. This is Energy in America. And we're talking about the US Interagency Client Assessment, rather climate assessment reports that came out on Friday, Black Friday. And the title of our show is That Report. Is it a real crisis? Is it talking about a real crisis? Or is it doomsday mongering? We're going to see now what the elements of the report are that you could draw conclusions either way. Right. And I want to sort of make, we don't want to make too light of this, but I do think that this is serious stuff. It requires a lot of thoughtful initiatives on the policy side. It requires some hard-headed thinking, not just aspirational goals. I mean, a lot of people, I mean, I've been looking at this for many years. And we understand how people feel about it. But just because you feel bad about something doesn't mean you should do, you know, you should bankrupt the entire country to do it. You should be thoughtful going forward. So the first thing I would say about the report is that the reporting on it drew upon the most dire economic outcomes. In other words, and actually, even those outcomes are not that bad. So in the report, they said that US GNP would be reduced, it would be 10%, right? Less than, you know, there would be 10% loss in the GNP of the US by 2100. And actually, if you step back from the reporting on that, 10% sounds like it's greater than the great recession. The US economy between now and 2010 is a likely to grow four times. If you took the worst scenario from this report, it would grow 3.8 times. OK, so then you might start, that's even the worst one. That's the most serious outcome. OK, that's bad. But how bad is that really, right? We grow four times, we grow 3.8 times instead of four times. Yes, it would be better for us to grow four times than 3.8 times, but we should have an intelligent strategy to do that. It also, and the reporting on the report only takes the most extreme and least likely climate scenarios. If you go through the whole report, it's a theoretic, so it's known as the so-called representative concentration pathway 8.5, OK? And in that one, they use four representative trajectories to project different greenhouse concentrations. But in this scenario that was used, they use the fastest population growth, a doubling of the Earth's population to 12 billion, the lowest rate of technological development, which is something I refuse to believe is going to happen, right? And slow GDP growth, a massive increase in world poverty, which is completely different which we have seen over the last 20 to 30 years, and high energy use and emissions. Despite what the climate assessment says, this RPC 8.5, it's not a likely scenario. And we always say, worst case scenarios are useful, but do we really want to plan everything in the world? From defense planning to dance for only worst case scenarios, if that's the case, we're going to be quite poor. There's some risk we have to accept, right? Well, whether the predictions are true or not, whether the assumptions are an appropriate ray of assumptions, I mean, it seems clear to me that we're going to have some kind of negative effect. And the negative effect... We are, okay. So it's hard to put a kind of metric on it in the sense, well, are we going to lose 500 million lives or maybe a billion lives? Yeah, but how do you... But someone has to decide if we're going to have a command to control or our governments are going to tell us to do something, right? We have to decide how much of our economic well and our well-being we're going to put into this, right? It's just like anything else we think about in society, right? Big question then, does the report go into that? Does the report say, well, because of these assumptions and these predictions, you have to do this, that, and the other thing? Does it say that, talk about that? It doesn't or just describe what we don't make policies. Okay, that's what the report says. It doesn't say, but I would say that but I would like to point out that it estimates nearly impossible levels of coal consumption. It takes almost no account of the massive increase in natural gas production from the shale revolution. It ignores any kind of technological innovation that occurred both nuclear and renewable technologies. And if you go to more realistic things, what happens is when you look at some of the work by climatologists, Judith Curry and some others, if you use a more kind of realistic view, most of the catastrophic outcomes disappear, right? They don't kick in. And I think a big issue of this is in the report, they also, I think they overdo it of hurricanes and floods, you know, heat waves and wildfires. We look at current events, right? A few years worth of data was okay, this shows it's all based on climate. Might be a contributing factor, I'm not saying that, but if you look at Professor Pelkey's work, and I think we've talked about this before, he, this was a report he did in August, 2017, shows no increase in drought, no increase in frequency magnitude of floods, no trends in intensity hurricanes, and low confidence, right? Climate change and detectives in Western United States, right? So, I mean, I think, and if you go through this, and it depends the trend you use, the period of time, you can, the framing of heat wave data from the 60s today makes it appear there's been more heat waves in recent years, but if you frame wildfire data from 18, 18, 1985, you get the same thing. But if you go back, if you go back a hundred years, you don't really see it, so. Well, you know, it strikes me. Go ahead. Go ahead, Lou. Go ahead. So, I think that that's one thing we need to do. We need to kind of, okay, and we go through the report, we say, okay, what is a kind of responsible strategy which is robust against the uncertainty? Because just, I think if you try to scare the public all the time with this, with these, frankly, doomsday-mongering scenarios, they become inert to it. And I say, you know, this is just like the old cancer research, well, everything causes cancer, so I'm just gonna have an extra stake today or something like that. You have got to kind of educate the public on this in a much more systematic way, and say, okay, here are the sacrifices worth making, and here are the ones we're not gonna make you do, okay? Because it's not, you know, it's, the probabilities are too young. Well, I don't understand, just about the report in general, is it, as I recall, it came out of the White House. The White House had something to do with releasing it, and yet the President doesn't agree with it, he makes a public statement yesterday, day before, that he didn't agree with it, so how much credibility should we attach to this? The government is a little tossed on it, no? So I think the report is required to be issued every four years by Congressional mandate, right? And it's a process through the interagency process. And as far as I understand, the White House did nothing with the report. They didn't want to be seen intervening with it, it's okay, they released it. And then Trump does what Trump does, you know, he just makes it come, I mean, I'm sure he also did not read the report, okay? And I don't know if anyone's summarized it for him. I mean, there is a technical, rational discussion we can have on climate, but that goes beyond the attention span of people who watch cable news. That is going to be, we're going to have leaders who are gonna have to be willing to spend the time to say, okay, look, here's a cost-effective approach to proceed, right? Well, you know, the other thing I wanted to mention who is this, is that maybe the assumptions and the way of presenting this information, making predictions is at the pessimistic end. And maybe it is, let's assume that it is. But doesn't that have a role in trying to motivate government, motivate people? Because up till now, you may know more about this. I don't know if the government has done very much in order to make us more resilient, in fact, more resilient to deal with climate change, either on an optimistic or a pessimistic level. And maybe there's a purpose in all of this to try to get us excited enough to go to action. Yeah, so keep in mind, since the beginning of time, man has been adapting to climate change. He invented clothes, fire, shelter. We built sea walls, dams. So it's not like we are not trying to adapt to climate. We've been adapting to climate since the Roman Empire. So I don't think that, so the question is, what adaptive measures, if in fact, most of the preventative measures, and you saw from my chart, I don't think, we can wring our hands all we want. We are not going to substantially reduce. We're not going to reduce fossil fuel use to zero in 20 years, okay? I don't care what the UN said, it's not happening. So just wake up and accept that, and then start to talk about what's a responsible, adaptive strategy for a range of outcomes and be prepared with adequate research and stuff for the more serious outcomes should be a core, a core. But that is not a dramatic, religious, all-encompassing spiritual fight. That's a kind of technocratic solution we use to solve lots of problems, for which it's not very exciting politically. Don't we need that? I mean, I would have, I haven't read the report, and nobody I know has actually read it, although we're going to have a show about some of the people who wrote it in a few days, about the Hawaii chapter anyway. But wouldn't it be better if this report actually included options and alternatives and took all these findings? So this is a kind of one of these issues, right? Well, no, most people do not want to spend their life. We talked about this in the last show, the climate tax went down in Washington, a very liberal state. It's not one of which the public has been convinced outside of California that a massive amount of money should be spent on this. So I do think there's a lot of homework for people to do. And one of the things is to even educate the media, because I actually don't think the media reporting really reflects what the scientists think. But actually, most of the scientists are pretty thoughtful, and they've done some serious work. There are members among the community and people who are not scientists promoting different agendas, but they are not really part of the mainstream thinking of this issue in my view. So you have the possibility that it's a real crisis. Maybe some of this can be translated into that conclusion. And other parts of it would be doomsday mongering, which is not good for us either. But what is the next step here? It seems to me there should be somebody waiting in the wings to come out and say, okay, we have read the report, and we've analyzed the report, and we've integrated all the possibilities. And here are some action points for you in New York, you in Washington, you in San Francisco, and Los Angeles to actually do now. And let's get on with it, and let's find a reasonable way to do it at a cost we can actually afford. Where is that coming from? Yeah, I think, so I don't know. It's not coming from our current political leadership on both sides of the aisle. But some of the states have promise of doing responsible things. I think Florida's looking at, you look at Florida, they changed a lot of their building standards for hurricanes. There's a lot of interesting work being done on sea level rise and subsidence and Louisiana and other places. So yeah, a lot of this is like local, is gonna take place at the state and local level. And probably what the federal government ought to do is provide some research, overarching research and maybe some funding and some support for demonstration projects and things that make sense. As you know, my own bias is that we spend much too much money trying to put the carbon in the ground, keeping it from getting into the atmosphere and not enough on adaption. I would think the adaption is likely to be that is what mankind has done for 5,000 years. There's no reason to think you can't keep doing that. Well, maybe we ought to put this in the hands of the think tanks, the energy think tanks. Energy think tanks just like your energy think tank and you could write a report putting all this together and giving us away a path. What do you think Lou? We don't work on climate. Well, if I asked you how this affected your thinking as a researcher and analyst on energy policy around the world, has it affected your thinking so far? I guess more to- It doesn't really affect my thinking very much at all because I look at the data and I don't see anybody rushing to impoverish themselves to meet some problem that's 100 years away. And I do think that, yeah, the way it shapes my thinking is look, you should be putting more money into research and development. You should be looking at some interesting adaption issues and you should sort of follow Bill Gates' strategy. When the alternatives become competitive, they'll emerge. And the way and what you might wanna do is accelerate when they'll become competitive but put more money into research and development. But to try to centrally manage the national economies or to wrench them into alternatives that are very costly, that's a strategy for getting kicked out of office. But we have to find one, don't we? We have to find a strategy that will be useful, that will be manageable and that will take all these points into somehow into account. Otherwise, it's sort of like, you know what it's like? It's like the frog in the water. You know, if you throw the frog in boiling water, he'll jump out. If you just go ever so gradual, that's the end of the frog. So we have to remain completely aware and conscious of how these things are going. And we'll look to you for that, Lou. We'll look for you to tell us about. I'll keep telling you about it. Okay, Lou Putirisi, President, Chief Executive of E-PRIG, Think Tank on Energy in Washington. And I look forward to our next discussion two weeks hence. Thank you so much, Lou. Thank you, Jay. Aloha.