 intervention. You can also spell that bioengineering. We have a man who teaches at Harvard and Yale about that and about climate change and about net zero and has written a book. Let's see the book. I want to show the book before we do anything else. You thought it was Pandora's box. It's Pandora's toolbox. Very important to extend it to that notion. That's Wake Smith. He joins us now from Paris. That's where Harvard and Yale, they all spend their time at Paris. My problem is I didn't pay attention in eighth grade French class, and so I've been left back in some odd universe, and I'm now over here trying to brush up on my French. Okay. We cover a lot of energy, and this is a revelation. Your whole proposition here is that it doesn't end with net zero. In fact, it begins with net zero, and everybody's struggling to go net zero by this year or that year. We're not doing a very good job at it, by the way. Let me add that. I'm sure you agree. But that's not the subject of the proposition. The proposition is that that's not the end of it, even if that's a long shot. We hit net zero by, say, 2040, 2045, whatever the year may be, your particular jurisdiction. There's a lot of work to be done after that, and that is so interesting because that is actually the future of the human species. Wake, tell us about your book. Tell us about your course. We're so interested to find out the concept. Well, you're very kind to have me. I do, as you note, teach a course at Yale that I believe is the world's first undergraduate survey course on climate interventions, which is a little different than climate change. There are loads of courses all over the world on climate change, but climate interventions refers to the suite of things that we may need to do in addition to reaching net zero, and mostly after net zero. But you're quite right that I believe that net zero is unlikely to be the end of the climate crisis. It would be that if we were to reach net zero very soon, by 2050 or so, as the intergovernmental panel on climate change would urge us to do. But unfortunately, I'm an emissions pathway pessimist. I think this is going to be much more difficult than people realize. I hope I'm wrong, but I think I'm right, or at least that's the way to bet. And if it does prove true that getting to net zero is difficult and costly and therefore slow, we will, when we get to net zero, have a whole other set of problems that people generally are unaware of. One of the points right up on your book that I cared about is that you can reach net zero, and I suppose I understand what you're talking about when you say, if we do it quickly, the job is less onerous. If we do it slowly, which is more likely the case, the job is greater because you have to reverse all the problems that you find. It's not just that you go to net zero, it's that the temperature of the earth and the sea level rises and all that have been going on a long time. And they will have had a huge effect on the planet in that time. And then you have to reverse that, which is a terrific job to do. If we could achieve net zero right now today, that damage would not have been so onerous, but if you wait until say 2050, it will be very great and we will have to repair the damage. Am I right? Well, if we were to reach net zero magically today, I would stop this interview right now and go get champagne because the amount of climate damages that we are experiencing today are greater than they were 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago, but broadly, frankly, they're very survivable. If the current level of climate damages was all the climate damages were ever going to have, that would be no problem. The problem is that that isn't likely to be the case. And it's easiest to think of what drives the climate system as a bathtub. We've got a spigot running into the bathtub, which is our ongoing flow of emissions, CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The atmosphere is the bathtub, the tank into which these gases are flowing, and then there's a drain. The problem is the drain is essentially clogged. And so the more, the longer we fill the bathtub, the higher the water level in the bathtub gets. And when we finally get to net zero and stop filling the bathtub, the water level is whatever it is at that time, and it won't decline if four centuries. So whatever level of heating we have heated the earth to, by the time we finally get to net zero, that's what the next 10 or 20 generations will live in for their whole lives. And so if we get to net zero quickly, we haven't heated the earth much, no problem. If we get to net zero slowly and we filled the bathtub to a level that future generations find unacceptable, then we have exported to those future generations a huge problem. Yeah, I want to be a student in your class at Yale for a moment, ask you questions that occur to me as a fire away that class. You know, right now we have people killing each other at a rapid and disgusting rate, horrible rate in Eastern Europe, with no excuse, no political, no rational basis for it. And then, you know, we have all these issues in our country and essentially around the world there are issues. And these issues stand in the way of the most important story of our time and our planet and our species climate change. And we are really not paying attention. We are being distracted by all these things that are not necessarily that don't necessarily deal with the existential threat of climate change. So my point is that, you know, it's a lock and hops question is, is mankind, humankind, perfectible or imperfectible? Is there a flaw in our species that makes it impossible for us to act together? You say we, what we, we can't seem to get our act together. We can't seem to develop the political will or hold it for any length of time. So people say, you know, net carbon at 2040, 2045, 2050. I mean, at the rate we're going, we're not going to do that. And it's biblical. We're going to wind up wiping ourselves out. A lot of people feel that way. So query, will we get to net zero? And when? And this is the biggest challenge to me of our lifetimes and the lifetimes to follow. Well, I guess I'm generally a pessimist about things, but I'm not quite as pessimistic as that. I think that we will survive climate change. We as a species, humankind is clever and adaptable. If I were to list the things that worry me about wiping out humanity, nuclear weapons is still much higher on my personal list than climate change. But the fact that we as a species will survive climate change in my best guess doesn't mean that every current society will survive climate change. I think that there are a lot of societies in places where agriculture agriculture is currently marginal. And those places, agriculture in those places may become the land may no longer be fertile in a climate that is too much warmer and too much changes the rainfall patterns as much as we may. And by the end of this century, we will have 10 or 11 billion people on this earth, a quarter to a third more than we now have. Most of them, most of that new population increase will be in the global south, where the agricultural system will be most at risk. And so I worry about circumstances where we have a billion or two billion people who need to move from where they now are to the newly warm places in Canada and Russia. Well, how in the world would we organize that in the modern world? What would we do with the failed states those people are leaving behind? So I don't I don't think this is existential for mankind, but it's sure existential for a lot of people and a lot of societies and all of this ignores the damage to ecosystems that can't adapt anywhere near as well as mankind can. Well, let's assume the answer is that there are great challenges to achieving net zero. There are, in my view, a lot of political challenges. Are those challenges going to go away when we as and when we hit net zero? Or will they remain? Because if you want to do the kind of intervention we need to do in order to say reverse climate change, but at least take the steps that are necessary to do the geo engineering after we hit net zero, you still have to have political will and query whether the problems we have in developing political will on this issue are going to go away at that point or where they are going to live with us into the future. I certainly worry about that, but that isn't merely an issue for the future. We're we're incapable of governing our response to climate change in the present. After all, the Paris Agreement is a magnificent piece of statecraft. It is about the best that we were capable of doing, but it's not yet working. Emissions are still rising, the COVID interruption aside, and so governing climate interventions would be a daunting challenge, but so too, as it turns out, has been governing decarbonization. After all, the Paris Agreement is not the first attempt at a global climate limitation treaty. It's the second, the Kyoto Protocol, its predecessor utterly collapsed, and that's why we have Paris. You know, one of the things that will happen into the future is technology. So you talk about bioengineering in phase two. We'll probably have a lot of new tools, and so I want to ask you about Pandora's toolbox because it's dynamic. It's going to change. The scientific community is going to find new ways to deal with climate change to ameliorate it and to intervene in it and so forth. What do you see happening in that regard? Well, let me first cross my fingers and pray for miracles. We need huge breakthroughs in the energy economy in order to find ways to decarbonize our energy supply and despite the thrilling growth in the last decade of wind and solar, the world still gets 80% of its primary energy from fossil fuels, and that's a statistic that has not changed in my lifetime or yours. So we are still a hugely fossil fuel-driven global economy, and turning that is going to be very difficult, but let's hope that something like nuclear fusion comes along and can be the complement to wind and solar that we need so that we can have power 24 hours a day, whether the sun is shining, whether the wind is blowing or not. But even if we get to net zero, we find ways to decarbonize quickly with technological breakthroughs or slowly without them, we must one way or another get to net zero. But again, if we get to net zero at a time when we have made the earth unacceptably hot for the people who live on it at that time, there are two other huge categories of climate responses that the world may undertake beyond decarbonization on one hand and adaptation on the other, and those other tools probably can be broken into two sides of Pandora's toolbox. There is carbon dioxide removal, pulling greenhouse gases back out of the climate system, and then separately there is solar radiation management, which would be to attempt to reduce the amount of solar energy coming into the climate system, and the two are very different. They have different purposes, but I'm afraid we are going to need to develop those tools so that we have them available should we need them. Yeah, that's pretty exciting. I mean, the possibilities are there. And who knows, we may be able to invent something. But one of the other problems or the other possible candidates options in Pandora's toolbox, it seems to me is a social reorganization. For example, Vladimir Putin is affecting public opinion using technology and propaganda, Xi Jinping doing the same, and they can affect the way people conduct themselves in life. And if you want to address climate change, either in removing carbon or stopping carbon, zero emissions, or in intervening, you really have to have public support. So it seems to me that part of Pandora's toolbox would include a social reorganization where people become for the first time large numbers aware and committed to following the rules. We clearly will need a substantial social reorganization to tackle the climate problem. We can't continue to imagine that each of us is an island and tire unto ourselves, and that we can each do whatever we want without reference to the consequences that that has for the rest of humanity, the rest of the natural world, to our successors on this planet. Right now, we imagine that it's our sacred right to sort of burn anything we want in our backyard or in our car or in our furnace, and not deal with the consequences, not be saddled with the consequences of that, but combusting things does turn out to have ramifications for the future. And one way or another, we're going to have to reorganize society in a way that recognizes that, which means the dreaded carbon tax. We are absolutely going to need that if we are going to begin to reduce our emissions and force people who emit, which is you and I and everybody, I'm not blaming this on some big bad exon. We're all going to have to internalize what is currently an externality, which is the cost of our carbon emissions on future generations. And of course, all of that affects the global economy. And I wonder if you could take a peak with me, a pristine peak through the keyhole and see what the future looks like, assuming we make those social changes in order to save the world. Well, again, a carbon tax would make everything more expensive, which is to say it would make everyone a little poorer. That is true. But again, the lack of a carbon tax degrades the environment for the future, and that is not fair. But the economic aspects of this are complicated. We would, a global carbon tax would slow economic growth, but again, it would improve the environment for future generations. It would impose less damages on those future generations. But among the reasons that decarbonization will be hard is that decarbonization brings unwanted economic consequences to the present. Again, in terms of higher prices for things that are now more lowly priced. There is also an economic problem that derives from the fact that not everybody is trying to pull in the same direction, that direction being towards net zero. After all, if population increases as I earlier noted by a quarter or a third by the end of the century, all else being equal, that will have a quarter or a third more demand for electricity or energy. And moreover, the people of the global south today and tomorrow aspire to live the energy rich lifestyle that we in the global north currently live. So they're not looking to cut back. They're looking to join the energy party. And so growing population, growing economic growth, both primarily in the global south, are forces that will tend to pull against the desire to reduce the impact on the environment of our energy system. So again, it's a hard problem. And it's a global problem. What I mean is the world that you paint is a world without borders, really. We have to collaborate across borders, across continents in order to do this together. It's not one country. It's not one continent. It's the whole enchilada. And that is a new world. That is absolutely a new world and in this respect, this problem is not like air pollution, where if Beijing wants to live in dirty air and Norway wants to live in clean air, they can independently make those choices for themselves. The greenhouse gases are super well mixed in the atmosphere. And so emissions anywhere affect atmospheric conditions everywhere. And for that reason, then, we won't get to net zero until the whole world gets to net zero. It doesn't work, say, that Europe and the US decarbonize and the global south and the fossil fuel economies of the world don't. We've got to talk Saudi Arabia out of oil. How are we going to do that? We've got to talk Russia. I mean, Russia is basically a gas station with nukes. We're not going to talk them out of nukes, but we've got to try to talk them out of being a gas station. That's going to be difficult. Yes, certainly, especially with this sort of autocratic government they seem to have adopted. So you teach the class at Yale. And I wonder what you think of the generation represented by that class. I wonder what you think of the possibility that there'll be a generation that will follow you and me, carry the torch on this and make it make it make a good a good run at it. Well, I'm super impressed by my students. I live in fear each class that they will finally discover I'm stupider than them, but thus thus thus far I've I've sort of played the role. But but you know they're bright. They're hardworking. They're certainly vastly more focused on climate issues than I ever was. And so there's reason there to be optimistic. But I suppose even for my students at Yale, it doesn't appear to have hit home that solving the climate problem will in the end require personal sacrifice. And it it will everybody imagines that what we need to do with scold bowing and scold Exxon and you know, force corporations to do things differently. No, this is a cake. We're all going to have to eat together. Yeah. Well, as it presses home on us, as it the reality, as the reality comes in the door, we'll find out and regrettably for a lot of people the hard way, maybe for the whole planet the hard way. So I don't want to I don't want to short shrift your client intervention toolkit, though. What have I missed? What have we missed in enrolling that out to people? What else is in the toolkit that you that you kind of play? Well, again, the two big categories are carbon dioxide removal, where we suck out of the atmosphere, some of the carbon that we have put there. That's technologically feasible. That is financially hard to imagine the size of the industry that would be needed to pull carbon out of the atmosphere at the rate that we're now putting it into the atmosphere would be roughly the size of the entire fossil fuel industry today. So the whole oil industry, the whole gas industry, the whole coal industry, all of that degree of expenditure would be required every year for a century or two to pull out of the climate system all the carbon that we have put into it in the in the in the prior centuries. So that's a big financial debt that we are passing to the future. And yet if we don't get to net zero quickly, and we do live in a much hotter world in the future, costly, though it is an unfair in an intergenerational way, though it may be, I'm afraid I'm afraid the future may decide that it needs that tool. But to flip to the other side of the toolbox, the person born in the net zero year, they look at their whole life and see that they're going to live in a too warm world, or at least they will if we make it too warm by then, because carbon dioxide removal won't operate quickly enough to have a big effect in their lifetime. And so they're going to demand additional remedies to the climate problem. And the most feasible additional remedy, the remedy that could work quickly in somebody's lifetime in a year or two, is solar radiation management or specifically stratospheric aerosol injections or let's call it solar geoengineering. But by whatever name, this is the idea that we could mimic what volcanoes occasionally do naturally, which is to throw up into the stratosphere a lot of reflective aerosol particles that reflect out one or two percent of the incoming sunlight and thereby cool the earth artificially in that way. That isn't penicillin for the climate issue. It's merely morphine. But if it's too hot, the world may in the future demand some climate morphine to cool the earth artificially, while carbon dioxide removal then works to cool the earth in a more permanent way. What I hear you say, Wake, is that we will never get back to the way it was when the inconvenient truth movie was revealed to the public. We'll never get back to the way it was before we started worrying about climate change and that the best we can do is hold it steady after the likelihood is that the best we can do is to hold it steady after reaching that zero. I think something like that is approximately right. The consequences of the industrialization of the world on the climate are simply huge and we are not going to stop utilizing fossil fuel energy in the near future. We're not going to make that sacrifice and so we are going unfortunately to continue to warm the climate until technology rescues us and makes decarbonization very inexpensive. But until it becomes very inexpensive, I'm afraid I see humanity as passengers on the deck of the Titanic now newly seeing through the moonlight the iceberg. We can see it right there. We can see we're headed for it. The captain's begun to try to turn the rudder and the ship isn't turning one bit. And in agonizingly slow motion, you and I for the rest of our lives will continue to watch the economy chug towards the iceberg without turning much. And you know that's an awesome problem. But I'm afraid it's the problem that we likely will have. Well you offer hope in your book and you mentioned challenges only fair need to be mentioned. But the one thing that I would like to explore with you at the last here is who. Who does this? You know it's the age old problem is that people talk about sort of the larger we and the planet must do this, that and the other thing. But who among us will step forward and how do we motivate those individuals to take the leadership position? Very few political campaigns in the world are based on climate change and sea level rise. Very few. And most of those that are lose. Thank you. Yeah, how do we find the who? I don't have a good answer to that other than that I myself am trying to add my light to the sum of light. I teach a course. I've written a book. I give lectures. I am moving forward the frontier of technology in terms of how we might in particular undertake stratospheric aerosol injections. But we are doing very little research on any of this either on solar geoengineering or on carbon capture. We're beginning to get going on carbon capture, but at nothing like the scale that we need. I'm afraid again the world isn't broadly aware that we have this problem. The world. This is not new to science, but I think it is new to the general public that getting to net zero isn't the end of the whole thing. And so there's lots of or there is increasing focus on net zero and that's an unalloyed good thing, but I'm trying to be Paul Revere writing through town saying folks we got more problems coming behind that and we need to begin to focus additionally on those problems not not instead of but additionally we do need to dramatically increase the funding for research and development in all of these facets of climate interventions because I'm afraid we are exporting to the future what may be massive problems and if we can't stop exporting those problems to the future, perhaps we can at least additionally export to the future some tools by which they may be able to deal with the suffering that we are likely to cause them. So let's let's assume as a member of your class I take your point and I treat the class in this this whole discussion as central to my education as a as a you know a constructive member of society and I'm reminded of a of an organization that I saw on cable not too long ago called run for something.org and it's run by a woman named Litman as I recall and her thing is if you have if you have a point you want to make if you want to change the world run for something don't let the other guy do it because he may not have the same view that you have and so I'm thinking that part of the the parting comments that you would make the takeaway you would make to the class to one of your you know iterative classes over the years at the end the last day would be something like you know you got to carry this phone we're counting on you you're the next generation and you're smart and you understand hopefully you know the way society works in our time so run for something put it on your platform what do you think about that is is that what you tell them or do you tell something else that isn't what I tell them but maybe it is what I should tell them I we will need public actors in policy but as well in business who understand the gravity of the situation and are are ready to do something about it I'll tell you you a ray of hope that has emerged in the last year or so has been the new willingness of investors around the world to begin to invest in climate friendly investments and a year or two ago that was mostly nonsensical greenwashing everybody had an ES every company had an ESG official who did nothing now money is gushing into climate friendly funds so much so that there's a lot more money flowing in than there are worthwhile projects to be funded so I'm afraid we're going to waste a lot of money in the near future people investing in tree farms that do barely anything for the climate in fact but the fact that lots of investors pension funds university endowments individual investors are now prepared to put some money where their mouth is that's an enormous force and that will galvanize change in 1896 William McKinley represented Wall Street and the the the issue for the country was whether we're going to represent the people of the Wall Street interests capital interests and and the people answered although some say it was not a fair election that people answered capital Wall Street that's who should rather get and although we've had moments certainly through American history after that suggests that the people do count and we've had legislation that suggests that the people do count um on balance the McKinley model still defines the country and that and that was repeated by Milton Friedman who said you know corporations are looking for the bottom line that's the way it should be that's the essence of capitalism you look at the bottom line you look at dividends and profits and all that and it strikes me that if we really wanted to do this we'd have to change that we'd have to say no no no it's not the bottom line it's not dividends and profits it's something else we have to find a way to codify impact what about that I am a capitalist at heart so I don't think that capitalism is the problem after all uh China and Russia whatever you would imagine whatever economic system would you would suggest they now have they're worse than we are um uh so it isn't the case that if we just got rid of capitalism we would solve this problem the problem more nearly is this the mother of all externalities which is again the fact that we don't pay anything for using the atmosphere as a waste dump for our greenhouse gases if we simply pass legislation but it would to be effective it would need to be worldwide lots of countries would need to do it but if we simply pass legislation that forced the party that benefits from that fossil fuel emission to pay for the environmental damage it causes capitalism would solve that problem pretty quickly the the the problem is more nearly one uh where there isn't political will to do that once again because it would bring unwanted consequences to the present right now I get to enjoy cheap gasoline and cheap aircraft flights and it's my great grandchildren who will pay for that if we're going to solve this problem we've got to solve that intergenerational problem but again if I ran on that platform I'd lose way smith lecturer at Yale college and Yale university thank you so much for joining us today uh wish I could be in your class maybe I'll pop up there one day I hope you recognize me well uh kind of you it's been uh fun to imagine I'm in Hawaii even if I'm not thank you for doing your part it's wonderful to see somebody who dedicates themselves this way thank you so much for watching think tech hawaii if you like what we do please like us and click the subscribe button on youtube and the follow button on vimeo you can also follow us on facebook instagram twitter and linked in and donate to us at 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