 So, today we have a rare unusual treat. We have the two pre-court directors in a panel with noted Hoover Energy Task Force energy expert, David Federer, moderating. I would say this is unusual because it's unusual for both of the co-directors to be in town at the same time, let alone be in town at the same place at exactly the same moment. So, I personally am very grateful for that. And I think they were anxious to talk to the global energy, the campus, and then global energy community, basking in the glow of a very successful global energy forum back in early November, I think it was. So, they're going to talk to us today with David's leader through David's moderation about the future of energy here at Stanford and around the world. So, David, take it away. Thanks, everyone, for coming to the Energy Seminar. John, how long has the Energy Seminar been going on here at Stanford? Let's see, two, six, three, 11 years, four years. At least. Something like that. So, I'm at the Hoover Institution. My research analyst there worked with George Schultz on energy policy issues, and I've known over in Sally for a while now. Previously, I was an undergrad here at Stanford. I was studying the Earth Systems Program, and that's where I got interested in energy. So, when I think about energy today, that's where I start sort of 10, 12, 15 years ago at what my boss calls an inflection point in energy in the US in terms of technology and awareness of different issues around policy, climate, things like that. And so, today I'd like to talk about with Arun and Sally where we are on energy as a country and sort of how Stanford has played into that conversation and how it's doing that today, where we're going next. Introduced them briefly, they are co-directors of the Stanford Precourt Institute for Energy. Sally was formerly at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, where she was deputy director of operations, came to Stanford in 2007. And she's a geohydrologist by training and worked later to direct Stanford's Global Climate Energy Project, GSEP. About the time that Sally was coming to Stanford, Arun, you were also over at LBNL across the bay and a professor at Berkeley. Later went into government as the founding director of ARPA-E Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy under the Obama 1.0 administration, working with Secretary Chu. Later went to work for some of Google's energy initiatives before joining us here at Stanford, as well in your now in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Material Sciences. Is that right? Yes, right. So we'll come back to, I think, both those issues, GSEP and ARPA-E and the relationship with Stanford. But let me take you back to my life as an undergrad. And the issues that I saw energy then and under the George W. Bush administration early in the mid-2000s. And to set the context for, I think, what has happened in energy since then? Because I think really I've had a step change in this country in the past dozen years or so. And the role that Stanford has played in delivering that to today. So what did we think about back then? We thought about energy. We thought about, I think, first, top of mind early 2000s was really access to energy and a lack of energy. I think we were generally concerned that we would not have enough energy to go around. We had very intelligent and honorable men and women arguing about peak oil theories, not just in the US looking at the peak of oil production in 1970 here, but for the whole world. Of course, now if you look back, that seems kind of silly when our oil production has well exceeded what we had in 1970. Prices were through the roof. Natural gas was reaching $12 or $13 per MMB to you. And I think today in the US it's about $3 per MMB to you. That was mostly a fossil energy story, oil and gas. Oil and gas is about 80, 81% of the world's energy use. That's true today. That was true 10 years ago. That was true 20 years ago. That was true 30 years ago. Oil and gas has been about 80% of our total primary energy supply. So that was a lot of what was happening underneath the ground. The National Petroleum Council had an interesting report called Facing Hard Truths on Energy, where they argued that the US was in a very precarious place in its energy supply situation and something needed to change or we'd be really beholden to imports. And then there was the issue of energy access for the developing world, getting the billion plus people who don't have access to modern clean energy on the grid using clean fuels. And I think of those issues of energy access, you could say the price issue and the peak oil issue has been addressed. But the energy access issue really has not. There's a lot to be done there. And maybe Sally could come back to that later to get your views on that. The second issue I would flag is the idea of international competitiveness for the United States and energy technology. And there was really a feeling in the mid-2000s that the US might be falling behind in our ability to produce the advanced technologies we needed to compete with China, even with Europe, and this extended into energy. The National Academy put out a study called Rising Above, the Gathering Storm, in 2005, which reflected a lot of these concerns about the US falling behind on education and key technologies. There was some dispute over how true that was, but that ultimately led to something called the America Compete's Act, which was the founding charter for RPE, which Arun later led. So maybe you have some commentary on that history and how that plays into the university ecosystem. Then there was climate. I think today we talk about energy and climate is sort of first in mind. I intentionally put a third on my list looking back 10 or 15 years, because it was a growing as a concern, but it wasn't the number one focusing issue. Science was clearly progressing beyond, I think, the policy world's acknowledgment. This is going to be a key issue. It was progressing beyond general public attitudes and media. It was still common. You would read a New York Times story. It would mention climate change. And it would be sort of like he said, she said. Scientists say this, but this guy says that. And we're not really sure what's happening. And there was more uncertainty back then. But there was a feeling this was going to become more and more central to the energy story going ahead. And people at Stanford played a big role in that. Folks like Steve Schneider, who was one of my professors back then, he was really one of the early people, both involved in the science of climate change and in the idea of how you can communicate that to the general public, the policy makers. He really advocated for scientists, not necessarily advocating for policies, but advocating for their own research, as opposed to letting someone else just sort of read the paper and decide what it meant, but to actually engage. But he was very careful in how he did that. I can recall, I took a seminar with him in Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. And Steve had gone on Letterman to talk about the impact on rising seas and hurricanes. And was this all due to climate change? And he played the clip for us. And Letterman kind of egged him on to say, yes, this was all due to climate change. So he had these policy changes. And he came back and he said, well, I feel bad about that. I went a little bit beyond what I felt I was comfortable with on the science and what it really showed, because that's what I wanted to believe. Today, that science is probably stronger on that. But he felt like at that time, he wanted to be careful to keep the credibility of the scientific community as they sort of learn and set these ground rules for how they're going to engage on the policy issue. And that really started to affect energy as well. Just a couple other folks at Stanford, Chris Field, who founded the Carnegie Institute of Center for Global Ecology, was very influential in some of the early IPCC work on this and in the science of understanding how elevated carbon dioxide's affect ecosystems around the world, including with some work over at Stanford's Jasper Roods Biological Preserve. BP, Lord Brown, when he was heading BP in the late 90s, gave a very influential speech at Stanford, where it was basically the beginning of BP's beyond petroleum branding and the idea they're gonna have to move beyond their bread and butter, oil and gas. And later, Lee Raymond for ExxonMobil spoke on that as well at Stanford, acknowledging some of the role of human activity and climate change, which led to GSEP and maybe Sally, you could tell us some of that history and how that relates to today. Finally, there was the Kyoto Protocol. And I would say at the time, that climate was not a particularly partisan issue. Senate had sort of voted 970 to say, Kyoto negotiations are going on, don't bring us back a tree where the developing country doesn't have goals or we won't even vote on it. And ultimately, even though the US signed it, it was never even brought before the Senate because it just wasn't really enough buy-in yet and comfort with the idea in Washington. And that's something that's changing today as well. Last, I would say, cutting over that, looking at the issues on energy in that era, was the policy question, sort of cross-cuts. From my perspective as an undergrad, I saw how economists at Stanford were really early movers in the policy analysis world on energy and climate. They had a background in doing natural resource economics. Folks here like Larry Goulder, really world experts in thinking about things like pricing emissions, carbon taxes versus cap and trade. He continues to be active in that today and Larry's in the room now. Or John over here with his energy modeling forum group at Stanford, which for many years has brought together modelers for environmental and economic systems to ask policy questions and to give factor analysis. California was starting to engage in a lot of climate policy issues, energy policy issues, the Pavley bill, vehicle efficiency standards in 2002, AB 32, 2006. Folks like Jim Sweeney over here were influential in advising some of the California policy makers on sort of better and worse ways to approach somebody's early climate policies. Then we have folks today like Catherine Mock, who was I think a PhD student at EIPER program when I was an undergrad here and some of these climate issues were coming up and in the past few years, and here at Stanford today, they've been extremely influential in guiding some of that policy and science going forward. So I go back in time to sort of give a sense to some of the undergrad or grad students here, the ways in which these questions have evolved and to give a sense that people at Stanford have engaged on this in a very broad way. Energy goes from physicists at Slack who are looking at molecular interactions to folks like myself at the other far end who are thinking about how policy makers approach how they prioritize sort of their constituencies concerns about energy and climate issues broadly. And there are a lot of ways to engage. I think people can feel helpless sometimes about energy and particularly climate issues, but I would urge you to think of the ways that Stanford students and professors have been constructive in this space over the past 10 or 15 years and really defining a new era in energy and climate technologies in the United States and how they continue to do that today. So maybe I'll turn to Sally and Arun and let them talk for the rest of this session, but Sally, we talked about GSEP and some of the ways in which climate concerns were coming into energy R&D space. How would you describe sort of that history of GSEP and then 15 years ago, the way we thought about these issues versus how we're thinking about them today at Stanford? Okay, well, since you went back to the mid 2000s, I'm actually gonna take us back a little earlier in time. I think I'm gonna start out in the mid 1970s, which is the first time I ever got any awareness of energy and I was living in the Bay Area and this was the first energy crisis where conflict in the Middle East led to a severe shortage of petroleum in the United States and it was really, really bad. If you wanted gasoline, you had to get it only every other day and the lines to get gasoline was huge. And back then everyone was driving cars that maybe got eight miles to the gallon or 10 miles to the gallon. I mean, really, really incredible. And so that was a really wake up call to everybody that there was something fundamentally wrong and the price of oil shot up, I think like three times. And that's a huge shock when you think about the fact that usually energy takes about 10% of the economy and if you take something that's that important and all of a sudden you bump that up triple, all of a sudden you can set off a recession. So in response to that, the government decided to make a big push in the investment in a couple of things. One was in the area of renewable energy and the other one was to try to make the United States more self-sufficient in oil and gas resources. So say a little bit about Stanford at that time. Stanford had then and still has today a world-class petroleum engineering department and it was called Petroleum Engineering then and some of the most famous names. We're busy working trying to make so you could get more oil out of the ground by things like in situ combustion or steam flooding and really the epicenter a lot of that innovation was here at Stanford. But at the same time it was recognized, well, we could use renewable resources and so really influential people like Dick Swanson who then went on to make some power had started to work on solar energy and people like Roland Horn, one of the world's leaders in geothermal energy was also here at Stanford in the 1970s and it began a conference, a geothermal conference that still goes on to this day. So that was really a huge push, emphasis on increased reliability of hydrocarbons and renewables diversify your supplies and Stanford was a major player in both of those and at the same time energy efficiency, the importance of that especially in California became paramount and so people like Jim Sweeney became very heavily involved with the state and as we heard about started to really make it so that California became the first state to decouple its energy emissions or its energy use with economic growth and that was really seminal work. So all that went on but then all of a sudden the price of oil went down and all of a sudden everybody stopped paying any attention to things like reliability of oil supplies and oh by the way, renewables are way too expensive and they were really expensive, solar might have been $100 a watt back then. So a lot of that work kind of went into hiatus and Stanford and many other universities around the United States basically slowly I guess divested perhaps from having such a strong focus on energy research but then fast forward we find ourselves and again of rapidly rising oil prices, the US now in even a greater situation with regard to shortages of its own domestic oil supply and at the same time as you heard climate started to become a real issue and it's like wow, how are we gonna provide all the energy we need? How do we address the climate problem and how do we do that in a secure and affordable way? So that's when GSAP, the Global Climate and Energy Project came along and Professor Lynn Orr who was then the Dean of the School of Earth Energy well what was then School of Earth Sciences got together with faculty from across the campus and they said we think we really need to do something to jumpstart this next wave of energy innovation. We need decarbonized energy products and we need reliable supplies. So very fortuitously in 2002 through a lot of hard work of many people they were able to partner with four companies a very interesting it was ExxonMobil, General Electric, Toyota and Schlumberger came together really to do a moonshot for the future of energy. And the idea was to invest in high risk, high reward technologies that would put us on this pathway to sustainable energy for everybody. And what was so extraordinary at the time is it was a $225 million investment over a 10 year period. So it really definitely built the moonshot idea. There was no university elsewhere who had anything close to the program of that magnitude. So Chris Edwards from the Mechanical Engineering Department in Lunore, said about building that program beginning in 2002, a number of projects got started and I came here in 2007 to help run that program. But what we were seeing is huge amount of innovation in material science, chemical engineering, advanced combustion, entirely new ideas like capturing the carbon dioxide and pumping it underground, all of that got going in that time period. And it really spurred this tremendous wave of innovation across the School of Engineering and the School of what's now Earth Energy and Environmental Sciences. And Stanford did this really long before most other universities were really starting to pay attention. And so it was really the incredible leadership of the folks here that began to make that happen. So that gets us up to around 2007 or so, yeah. Arun, do we have all the technologies we need now in energy and climate? Tell us a little bit about the handoff between university research of the sort that Sally has described, what you were doing at RPE and how that interfaces today with industry involvement as well. You know, to be honest, first of all, happy new year to everyone. I wish there were all the technologies that we needed to maintain our temperatures below two degrees Celsius, which is what the United Nations has said. I'm afraid, I don't think we have that. So what was the mandate for RPE? Let me actually take you back even further. Because, and this goes back to the origins of DARPA. DARPA was created in 1958 in response to the 1957 launch of Sputnik. And at which time it was thought that this was an existential threat for the United States. And DARPA got created not because we did not have research already going on under the Office of Naval Research in the Navy, in the Air Force, in the Army, et cetera. It was all going on. But they needed a new model of research. And that was to blur the boundaries between science and engineering. To go basic as you needed to, to go applied if you needed to, just forget these terms for the time being, and look for breakthroughs that would create a competitive advantage. That was the whole idea. And the model was that to get the smartest people who are actually doing the research in the scientific community, in the government, and give them ownership of creating new fields of research. But to be time limited, so you, after a while, you get out of there. You cannot stay there as a permanent staff. And so that brought in a freshness of ideas from different people to come in and create new fields. And many careers got built by starting new fields and creating a ecosystem, a community, of researchers in that particular field, which is how things like the internet, the TCPIP, in fact, Vint Cerf was a faculty out here, and he left Stanford, went to DARPA. And in fact, the first TCPIP implementation happened out here at Stanford and a few other places. So that's the kind of thing that the DARPA created. And it was felt, as you mentioned, in the Gathering Storm report, that the energy field needed that because there was some gathering storms in that. Not only because of the fact of, as you said, access to energy, because access to energy is a national security issue, but the fact that there's been going on, the traditional ways of energy was going on for a while and they saw some barriers coming in, whether it's access or whether it is greenhouse gas emissions, et cetera. The fundamentals were changing. And so they felt that there's a, despite the fact that the Department of Energy has a lot of research going on in fundamental science as well as some of the applied, there was a gap that was felt and that's why the idea of ARPA-E was created to look for breakthroughs in energy technologies. And I think one has to take a long-term view on this. Sometimes ARPA-E is thought of as a short-term thing. It's like, hey, let's commercialize. I would take a long-term view and take back even further to how we got into this. We got into this in a climate issue starting from the Industrial Revolution. In the Industrial Revolution, the steam engine started what, 1776? That was the James Watt engine. Before that, it was a new common engine. And James Watt increased the efficiency from, I think, 0.1 to 1%, okay? And it turns out, and we all know now that it follows the laws of thermodynamics. Well, the laws of thermodynamics were developed, were finally put into, in 1850s. So this was fundamental science that came after engineering. And so the idea that science gives you engineering, engineering gives you a technology, that was broken in the 1700s and 1800s. And I think if you take that long-term view and ask the question, what are the new things that we need today? And I suspect that the technologies that we will be engaged in when we're developing, will lead to new science that we don't understand today. And I think that's the long-term view on this. And that's part of the reasons that RP was created. Not only to develop new technologies, breakthroughs, but also blur the boundaries between science and engineering. And let's solve the problem, and in solving the problem, we will come up with new scientific principles that we don't know today. And so that was how RPE got started. And through that process, whether it is part of the, as you said, America competes act, there's a global competitiveness in this that we'll have to address at some point. And that's part of why it was in the competitive, competes act. You mentioned some fundamental science changes. Can you give us some crumbs, areas where you think that will make major discoveries? Well, for example, we don't completely understand the science of photosynthesis. Okay? We survive on it. We don't quite understand that, right? We haven't been able to understand fully or exploit fully how fusion works. And fusion in the sense of controlled fusion. And it is still a science problem. And we don't completely understand all the details of that. And that is a work. And there are many such examples that you could give where the principles has still have to be developed and things that we can't anticipate right now because we haven't quite developed the things. Yeah. So I'll give you, I think another example that is not quite so far out as fusion. So if you look at material science and if you look back to, gosh, it must have been the around the 2000 timeframe that there was a real revolution in material science that we realized that the materials behaved differently in bulk than they do when you make them into very small like nanoparticles. So we opened up this incredible toolkit of new functionality of materials. So that's one thing we did. At the same time, there was a revolution in the ability to characterize materials using synchrotron radiation that you could look at the species of the chemical, you could understand the structure and function of those materials. So that was a really important piece. The other thing is, is that we began to have advanced computing that allowed us to calculate the function of the, how these materials would function from an atomic level using very advanced theoretical tools. And so the taken together, those three things and the ability to synthesize all these new materials has created really a revolution. And we now have technologies that can take carbon dioxide and water and a renewable source of electricity and they can make a fuel. Now, maybe it's still a little bit too expensive and maybe it's not as efficient as we'd like, but we can do that. We can make advanced battery chemistries with these same ideas. We can make solar cells, then film solar cells with these same kind of ideas. So there's been this huge revolution that much like the human genome, that got going with the hope that there were going to be all these medical breakthroughs with that and it actually took a really long time before those medical breakthroughs started to occur with genomics, but they have and those same kind of fruition for bringing this new fundamental science to solving energy problems is here today. You talk about distinct technologies sort of coalescing together into some kind of a breakthrough product. There's a story of Apple and the invention of the iPod and distinct technologies are floating out there. You had small screens that were, you could manufacture for low cost in Asia. Didn't really know what they were going to do with it. Then you had digital music, MP3s, people were downloading them or sharing them online. There are a few stories you could buy them from and there's some early MP3 players but you didn't have a good distribution system. And so there's a story of Phil Schiller coming to Steve Jobs and saying, look, we have these things and now we have this new thing which is a 1.8 inch miniaturized hard drive. And if you put these three things together, and now suddenly you, by themselves, are not that useful. You put the three together and you get a really breakthrough product that you didn't even realize was possible before. I mean, in that way, if you look back on GSAP, for example, and the hundreds of projects that really were examined over 10 years, are there any big surprises in your mind, things that came up from that that you weren't expecting or things that didn't work out that you thought might work out? You know, I think we always had huge hope that good things were going to happen from this investment. I guess what's encouraging that we've seen is that initially, not to sound judgmental, but the approach was very sort of Edisonian. You know, there was a lot of trying and saying, it's like, okay, we can make this, let's see how it works. What I think is really surprising is how all of those pieces have now come together to make discovery and effectiveness much more deliberate. So I think it's a really encouraging result and I think we're really at just the beginning of being able to design materials that do many things that we would like and need them to do. Arun, we talked a little bit about the innovation chain. Could you describe some of the handoffs between work that goes on, I'd say the university or national lab and then how energy innovation gets out into industry? What does that relationship look like? Yeah, so if you really look at, if you wanna make impact in energy at a large scale, scale is important and cost is important, right? That's at the macro level, you gotta have large scale, otherwise you're not gonna make impact and if it's not economically competitive, okay, it's not gonna make impact. So both are important, but if you narrow, if you now take one step deeper as to how to get that, you need R and D to be able to get to scale as well as reduce the cost. And so one of the challenges that we have today going from a university research which is the laboratory research which by definition is not at scale, okay? To an industrial scale is that there are lots of layers in between. And so we need the, I would say handoff, sure but really feedback loops where we at the university understand what the major challenges are from the industry. By definition, things at that scale are not through university or through the industry. So the industry has to educate us as to what the challenges are. And frankly, where they are unwilling to go, where the universities can go because of a risk appetite, because we have a longer term view than sometimes the industry. And so that feedback loop is very important and for them to take the things that we do at a university and then transition that at different levels of scaling. I mean, you gotta have, in a lab, we have a proof of concept. Some way you need to develop a proof of system which sometimes we do at a university but sometimes it has to go outside. It has to have a pilot operation at some point and as you go downstream like this, you will need more capital and not quite at a university, then we can't do that. Can you give an example where industry has come to you as a researcher at university or elsewhere and said, here's the problem that we're dealing with and we can't figure it out? Tons of example, GCEP is a great example of that and now we are seeing sort of the next stage of GCEP is what we call Strategic Energy Alliance. We're working with the corporations, large corporations, looking at issues that they cannot by themselves do whether it's carbon capture, sequestration or whether it is renewables integration onto the grid, they by themselves cannot do and they're coming to us to figure out what are the options we have, what are the new ideas that we could try out and some of them will fail by definition because these are risky proposition but the ones that succeed will actually then change the ball game in the future and so many times we look at energy technologies as following what is called a learning curve and the more you do, the cheaper it gets. The more solar panels we generate, we get better at it and it gets cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. The one of the roles of the university is not only to enable that to happen but also to look for ways to be, to create entirely new learning curves that we don't have today that have the shot at becoming cheaper and better and faster and cleaner than what we have today. The lithium ion battery, for example, made nickel metal hydride batteries obsolete, okay? And the question we should be asking is what are the battery technologies that we should be looking at or storage in general that could make the lithium ion batteries obsolete and that's the role of university now industry that is invested in lithium ion batteries is unlikely to do that. Right, yeah. Go ahead, but I do have one more surprise that I think. Stanford has a great, I think, history of working with industry in a constructive way. MIT does that as well. My boss, George Schultz, likes to say, Silicon Valley is just a Stanford spin-off but I think that that's, it allows the work that students do here, I think, to have a broader impact and to really see how what they do in the lab translates beyond that. Sally, did you have a point? Yeah, I just wanna go back to some surprise and maybe it's more of a lesson learned. One of the things that we did as part of the Global Climate and Energy Project is to do systems, energy systems analysis that would help us make good investments in those technologies that were likely to have a big benefit. And we began studying things like batteries and in particular got very interested in how much energy it actually takes to build a battery. And so that it turns out that if you choose to use a battery and, for example, pair that with a solar cell that sort of your first reaction would be, well, of course it would always be better to have a battery because when I'm not using the sunlight directly, I can then save it and use it till later. But it turns out for even simple systems where you pair a battery and a solar cell, in many cases because of the systems effect, you don't get all the benefits, the environmental benefits that you think you're getting. And just to give another example that if we, right now, solar energy, wind energy are really, really inexpensive. Actually, natural gas is really inexpensive right now. And so, well, especially because solar and wind are so inexpensive, people say, well, oh my gosh, well, that's our solution to the climate problem will be to just double down on those, just use the most of all the cheap stuff you can get. But the problem is, is we rely on 24 seven power, 365 days a year. So when you try to say, okay, we're gonna limit our choices to say two or three choices or those plus a battery, that you end up having to overbuild the system so much so that what you think is gonna be the cheapest solution because they're all the cheapest component, in fact, may not be the cheapest solution. And some recent work we're doing in California has actually shown that it's cheaper if you say, okay, well, let's have a little bit of carbon capture and storage for our electricity system. And the overall cost of getting to 100% decarbonization is about one third the cost that would it be if you only said, we're gonna have batteries, solar and wind and hydro. So the systems aspects are really important and I think we're just beginning to come to grips with that. And this is a topic, I don't know if you saw Bill Gates year-end letter this year, he touches on this need for your technologies as well. To that end, just before the Christmas holiday, Rune and Sally, you co-authored an op-ed in the Financial Times. With George. With Secretary Schultz, talking about the need for the massive investment in energy R&D to deal with today's energy and climate challenges. You mentioned the Global Energy Forum, which took on this issue and Bill Gates spoke at that a couple of months ago here at Stanford. Can you give us a little rundown about what the Global Energy Forum is, why we're hosting at Stanford and where that's headed? We are speechless, I think it's first of all, if you look at the role of Stanford, we certainly, we know that some of the research that's, we are amongst the best in terms of the research that is produced out here. The scientific research, the technologies that come out, the policy work that is done, et cetera. But I think Stanford has a, in many ways, a unique role to bring together an ecosystem that needs to be brought together to accelerate this progress. I mean, one of the things that, one of the key takeaways from the Global Energy Forum is the fact that we don't have much time. If you are to keep below two degrees Celsius, we can emit only about 800 gigatons of carbon. And if you look at the emission rate today, which is about 40 gigatons of CO2 per year, 800 gigatons of CO2 as the budget. And if you're emitting at 40 gigatons of CO2 per year, we have roughly 20 years at flat rate. And then after that, it has to be zero. This conversation's gonna be great in 20 years, by the way. This kid is right. So we don't have much time left on our hands and if you are to keep it below two degrees, otherwise it's gonna go beyond. So given all, and there's a lot of feeling that, there's a lot of sense that all this innovation that's going on in wind and solar and natural gas and all terrific, it is terrific. And there's a lot of R&D that has gone into it. But that's necessary and certainly not sufficient. And I think it is very important to bring this ecosystem together, as you said, along this innovation value chain to bring them together to accelerate that, to create this feedback loop. And I think Stanford has a role to play, and frankly, others also have a role to play as well. So we decided at Stanford that, A, to not only showcase what's going on out here, but also play that role of a convener. There are another very few conveners, neutral conveners that can bring the community together. The government can certainly do that. Right now it's not quite happening. Right, right. So I think we should take the responsibility and play that role of bring the community together so we can start accelerating this thing. And this is a global conversation. This is not just the United States conversation, because as Bill very correctly pointed out, if China and India doesn't get it right, we're toast in terms of two degrees. So it's that global community that we need to build. And this is, and frankly, GCEP has provided and all the previous work has provided a tremendous platform. We need to take it another level. Sally, what should undergrad that Stanford know about how they can be involved on energy issues, whether they're on the hard engineering side or sort of soft policy folks like myself? Yeah, I think number one is if you're interested in energy, it doesn't matter what discipline you want to study. There's something that you can study. If you want to be a lawyer, you can work on energy. If you want to be in business, if you want to be an engineer, an earth scientist, that there's really something for everybody, the humanities, economics. So I think that's number one. So if you think you're interested, don't think that you have to be an engineer. So second thing is that we offer a ton of programs here at Stanford for our undergraduates. The first thing you can do is take a fantastic class called Understanding Energy. After that, we have a fantastic sophomore college where you have a deep three-week immersion in geography-specific energy issues, undergraduate research programs, internships with government. Anyway, it just goes on and on. So find your way to get involved in that ecosystem. We do everything we can to help. Write us an email if you can't figure out how to do it and just jump right in. Thanks. John, Katie, do we have a couple of minutes for questions from the audience? Sure. Any students who want to know how to engage our energy at Stanford? Student? Yeah. Anything over there? I was just wondering if you had any thoughts or any stories that you could about that in China? The names, the Greek, about a second. Have you reacted in China? I've been in China recently. Yeah, I haven't quite followed exactly what has happened out there. Have they shown gain greater than one? Okay. If you've reacted, there's something that would shock. No thoughts, no comments. Because I haven't read up what they've actually done. No, I would just try and end a little bit. One interesting development in that space is we spent some time looking at nuclear energy fission at the Hoover Institution. And there is a lot of new entrepreneurship happening in this country with small startups. There are few in the Bay Area looking at SMRs or more advanced nuclear chemistries. And for the last few years, there's been this idea. Gates has been among them saying that it's quite hard to do testing for some of these new nuclear technologies given the strict regulatory framework in the US. And so maybe we'll go abroad to do this testing. We'll do it in China. He had a group, TerraPower with a traveling wave reactor that they were going to build a prototype for in China. But with some rising trade tensions and concerns on IP actually this October, I think DOE said we're actually gonna control the export of civilian nuclear technologies and limit cooperation with China on these issues. And TerraPower said that's it, so we can't work in China anymore. Maybe we can work in the US, maybe not. I'm sure that DOE would happen for them to do in the US if DOE could provide some funding to do it. But I think it gives a sense. Arun talked about sort of a global community in dealing with some of these issues. They need to be able to scale across the world, colliding with some of the more short term geopolitical issues that come up and have always come up in energy. Any other questions? Student. Yeah. Any other questions? Student. Student. Yeah. Student. I think it can be done in a smooth way, or is it going to be ugly? I think it can be done in a really disruptive way. I think that, honestly, that there's a lot of that afoot. I think that there are some people who basically believe the only way we can solve any of these problems is with disruption. Right now, our electric utility industry is really being weakened by a whole set of policies, market structures, and so forth, that disadvantage the kind of traditional generating resource assets. On the other hand, one can strategically and deliberately choose a path of investment that is designed to minimize disruption. I think no matter what, there will be some disruption. But I think it's really incumbent upon all of us who are interested in the security of our energy supply to understand, learn, educate ourselves, and advocate for pathways that keep our energy system very, very strong. Because I've spent a lot of time in emerging economies with very weak energy systems. And that's not a good way to live. Yes, one of the. Yeah, to follow up on that, I'd like to ask between developing countries and developed countries, this issue of impending. Could there be different solutions in terms of approach? Because I think by the fact that there is a disparity between the two in the way of solving that problem would be different. Well, let me just say that I think we should not be putting the burden on climate change on those countries that don't have access to energy. I think that's a big mistake. At the end of the day, people need energy for their own prosperity, economic development, et cetera. And the top 20 economies, I mean, I know that Paris Agreement required 190 countries, 170 countries to come together to come with Paris Agreement to reduce their missions to keep below two degrees. You really, for mitigation purposes, you do not need 170 countries to do that. You need the top 20 countries to reduce their missions. And it's really their responsibility to do that. For the adaptation to climate change, you do need the 190 countries, because they will have to adapt to the climate change. For those countries that are undeveloped, electrification, for example, is a big deal. Today, we seem to have the tools, with solar being cheap, with storage, reducing in cost, and some microgrid solutions that are coming in that technologically this may actually be possible. But there are other barriers in terms of governance, in terms of pricing, in terms of the policy. There's financing, trying to get to microfinance and connect the microfinance, distributed finance, to the financial system that we have today, which is macro, is non-trivial. We have a sustainable finance initiative here at Stanford to be able to enable that. But those are the kinds of issues that we should be caring about as far as developing economies, developing countries are concerned. Just to say a little bit more about that. I mean, one of the things we see is a lot of investment or in coal. And the reason people do that is it's often in and of itself. It has the appearances of being the cheapest form of energy. But if you, for example, combine solar energy and wind energy with natural gas, that can actually be as cheap or cheaper than coal. But you have to look at it as a system. And it becomes more complex. And you need a better grid in order to manage that. But it can also position a country to have a much stronger robust system in the future than making a big bet on coal as a primary source of electricity. And just to add to that, I think in many ways those countries that do not have the infrastructure today have the opportunity to leapfrog and to get to the 21st century grid. So they can go from 19th century to 21st century. And I think that's how we should be thinking about it. Right here in the front. I think that's a story that doesn't always get told. So I was thinking about the global warming. And I'd say I think that the story doesn't always get told, but it very much happens. Especially when you have industry that is making a lot of revenue in a certain field, they can then actually have a very high rate of technological development in the field. And they're iterating very quickly. That's what we saw with natural gas fracking. We see that with enhanced oil recovery. Sally, I don't know if you have comments on that. But the efficiency of what has happened in terms of the ability to extract and the cost at which we can do so is a pretty amazing story if you're looking at providing energy services around the world for sure. Yeah, I mean, certainly the industry invested a huge amount in hydraulic fracturing technology, which has made us have abundant natural gas supplies, abundant oil supplies. So there is actually a lot of investment. But to speak more directly, in the short run, it's very beneficial to have much more efficient processes that use fossil fuel. Because as Arun said, we have 800 tons or 800 gigatons of CO2 that we can emit into the atmosphere before we're guaranteed to go over 2 degrees C warming. But we'll burn through that in about 20 years. So in the not too distant future, when you are maybe 45 or 50 years old, we're going to be in a situation where global warming will have been exceeding internationally agreed to targets. And I think we're going to find that a world with 2 degrees C warming is not a very comfortable world to be living in, particularly with regard to extreme weather. Can I just add one point to this? I think this 1 degree, 2 degrees, we are 1.2 degrees above the global average temperature is 1.2 degrees above what we had before the Industrial Revolution. And that's absolutely accurate. And we're trying to keep it below 2 degrees. However, I think it is as far as communicating issues related to climate and energy, it is a mistake to talk about the average. Because around this average, there's a distribution. And the tail of the distribution has a disproportionate effect on our lives, whether it is our agriculture, whether it's our livestock, whether it's hurricanes and or for that matter, fires. So I think it's very important that when we speak to a general public, that we talk about not only the average, but the tail of the distribution. And we have to say that if the tail of the 1 degree distribution is this bad, you can just imagine what the tail, that that tail of the 2 degrees is going to wag the dog. And I think it's very important to make sure that we all, not just here at Stanford, but the general public understands that. With that benediction from Reverend Madrumdar, I think we'll close it out. We'll be around if anyone wants to talk to us some more. And I'll boil the ocean here today. I think we need to wrap up. So let's thank the 70 and 80 people.