falling within the green band.
And so what this means is that,
if this analysis holds up
against further work,
that it will turn out that indeed
not all of these scenarios are equally probable,
which is a different thing
than saying they're equally valid.
I will reiterate the main message here,
and I'll say it later on this part of the talk.
On the one hand,
these very catastrophic scenarios,
A2 scenario that goes like that,
seem to be very unlikely
to actually come about in practice,
and that's good news.
On the other hand,
the chances of us not getting
about two degrees of global warming
above the pre-industrial value.
I should say that the zeros on these graphs are different.
The IPCC scenarios have a zero temperature,
measure the temperature change from the current value,
whereas the insert measures the temperature change
from the pre-industrial minimum
that occurred around 1900.
And so I've slid the insert up
so that it matches the same vertical scale
as the background.
So the good news is that
things are very unlikely to be as catastrophic
as you may have heard,
and the bad news is that it's very unlikely
that we will get away with less than two degrees
of global warming.
And the problem is, first of all,
that is the pain threshold even.
Maybe not in Hamburg,
but in much of the temperate world
for economic damage
and well above the pain threshold
in subtropical regions.
And for human habitation.
And secondly, this is an unprecedented rapidly rise
in global average temperature
and has enormous implications for the biosphere as a whole.
A human part of it notwithstanding.
Okay, our analysis simply divided the world
into two regions.
One of them is shown here.
This is all of the countries that lie completely
within 40 degrees north and south latitude.
I call it the tropical or developing region.
It's of course really the tropical and subtropical countries.
And the rest of the world,
which includes what's here,
is called the temperate region,
although it's really the temperate and sub-arctic region,
but the dominant part of the population in that region
is in the temperate region.
And on the lower left side you'll see here
the data and fits to the data
for the increase in population over the value in 1820.
Everything I'm going to talk about in this set of slides
is based on the increase over 1820.
There are unfortunately about a billion people in the world
that were in 1820 who lived a subsistence existence
and there are still a billion people in the world
who live a subsistence existence
with essentially no commercial energy use.
And as long as that continues,
what's interesting in this analysis
is what the other 5 billion now
and eventually 9 or 10 billion people do.
So the first question we answered is a simple one
based on these analysis, who will be rich?
And the answer is that we will be rich,
and they won't if everyone here is in the first world.
So this is the GDP, growth domestic product per person,
measured in terms of purchasing power parodies,
what it actually can buy for you as a function of time.
And many analyses assume that there will be convergence,
absolute convergence.
That is, eventually you often hear,
well, they will, they, meaning the developing countries,
will want to have a similar standard of living
and therefore will use a lot of energy.
And that may be true in terms of wanting,
but in terms of actually getting,
there's no empirical evidence that we're headed in that direction.
This, of course, is bad news for billions of people in the world.
In some ways, it's, on the other hand,
mitigates the concern a little bit
that we have about global warming.
Concomitantly, along with that,
these lower income countries have lower,
continue to have lower GDP per person.
Yes, thank you.
There we go.
Not surprisingly, they also end up with lower per capita energy use over time.
Now, let me back up and just introduce the next slide.
Here we have projections forward in time
and we've taken off to much larger times
of the energy use per person and the total number of people
and therefore the total energy use in each region.
But for the global warming picture,
which is dominated by emissions of carbon dioxide,
what we want to know is how much carbon is used for each unit of energy
to get projections of the amount of carbon.
This introduces, there are only two parts of this analysis
which are not completely calibrated against various types of empirical data.
One is some estimate of how much more expensive
it's going to be in the sustainable limit future
to use non-fossil fuels and fossil fuels
and from existing technology we know that roughly to be about a factor of two.
And that didn't make much difference what we assumed for that.
The other is what is the amount of carbon per unit energy?
How is that going to extrapolate into the future?
Now, most analysis do that as a function of time.
They take a look at the past trends in carbon per unit energy
and extrapolate forward as a function of time.
We found it more useful to take a look at the amount of carbon per unit energy
and ask, as we use up fossil carbon,
as we use up coal, natural gas and oil,
and as we have more and more experience in various places
with the deleterious local effects of using coal,
what does that imply for how much we use coal
versus lower carbon content per unit energy fuels,
like oil and natural gas versus non-fossil fuels.
And the historical data on that is shown at the left hand of this slide.
So I'll go slowly on this one because there's a lot of information here
and it's also important to the top analysis.
So here we have the carbon per unit energy
in fossil fuels divided by the value for coal.
So when you're all coal, which originally we're talking here
only about commercial energy, not about dung or firewood.
So for commercial energy, before 1850 it was all coal
and it stayed predominantly coal
until the introduction of oil as a major competitor for coal
and then we went down this portion of the curve.
And this is plotted as a function of the total amount of carbon burned
and released into the atmosphere.
And the units here are billions of tons.
So where we are now, as it turns out both in the tropical region
or at least two or three years ago when we did this analysis,
is here at 0.67.
And that's just about the amount of, actually 0.74,
is the amount of carbon per unit energy released from oil
as compared to coal.
So what we did to begin with for this analysis
is to take this historical trend, which goes down to here,
and extrapolate it forward in time.
And there's some uncertainty in the fit of the data
so we actually took 20 random samples
and extrapolated them forward in time.
And we ask ourselves, what will happen
when we get down to this area here?
The amount of energy per,
amount of carbon per unit energy in natural gas
is about half of what it is in coal, 0.54 to be precise,
0.054 to be precise.
And what happens when we get down here?
This part of the curve occurred by substituting oil for natural gas.
And this part of the curve, mostly after the so-called energy crisis
in 1973 to 1986, occurred, and to a large extent,
by substituting natural gas for oil, particularly for making electricity.
As we move farther down this curve,
we'll be using up more and more of these cheap fossil fuels,
and in particular, we'll be using up more and more of the natural gas.
And so natural gas will get more expensive.
And in any case, you can't get beyond this point
simply by bringing in more natural gas.
You have to go off to other non-fossil sources of energy.
And they are much more expensive, roughly a factor of two more expensive
than natural gas now.
And so when we get down to here, it will get more difficult
to keep on going down this curve,
both because we exhaust the cheap sources of natural gas
and because we now have to substitute non-fossil energy
for coal in particular.
And China will have to do that too,
as well as the United States and other countries.
And so this is often called in the literature
this change from this slope to some lower slope,
the new age of coal.
That is, it's quite possible that countries will start
actually back substituting coal,
start using coal again when they run out of cheap natural gas.
In fact, there was an attempt to do that in the United States,
in Texas, just two years ago, which was narrowly defeated.
Some people will say, I think with quite justification,
that China is already in the new age of coal.
China is building one coal power plant per year
and has overtaken the United States as the leading coal emitter,
coal user, and is on a trajectory to end up using
twice as much coal as the United States per year by 2020
if it keeps on its track.
So what we assumed was that when we got down here,
that the slope of this curve would decrease by about half.
That would be more difficult.
Until such time as the global average temperature increased
by two degrees centigrade over its pre-industrial value.
And that is widely understood to be the pain threshold,
and we assume that that pain threshold then might precipitate
a global agreement, an effective global agreement,
not a global agreement, but a global agreement
that actually works to reduce carbon emissions.
And that puts us back down on this original slope
that we're on now.
So this is the one policy-relevant assumption
that's built into all of this analysis
that is above and beyond calibration of models
against historical data,
and it only comes into effect out here.
Out to this point, we are still extrapolating historical practice.
So now that we have some understanding
of a sensible way of approaching the forecasting
in the future of carbon use per unit energy,
and we have the previous results on the amount of energy used,
we can add this up to see how much carbon
is released into the atmosphere.
Before showing me that, I should say that so far
I've only shown you the average result, averaged over time.
And of course what really happens is this.
Our carbon use goes up and it goes down,
or at least it levels off and then it goes faster.
And in order to do this analysis
and develop random samples of the outcome,
you have to account for those variations in time.
And so we did that.
And that's why there are wiggles on this graph.
So in addition to looking at the background trends,
we accounted for all of the statistically significant
periodic variations around those background trends.
Now this turns out to be very important
and understanding who does this and who does not do this
in their analysis makes a big difference
when you're trying to understand the implications
of what people are saying about global warming.
Because it is commonplace in the field
to take where we are now and the direction we're headed
and extrapolate that onto the future.
And you can see what happens if you take this particular data,
well the data goes back to here and does that.
If you take a set of data that looks like this
and extrapolate it that way into the future,
you get a very different answer than if you account for the fact
that there are historical fluctuations in the data.
Now this time here is about 2010 where there's a decrease.
You can see that we use data only up until 2003
from 1950s to 2003 to calibrate this model.
And yet somehow the model knew that things were going to slow down.
Well there's no mystery about this.
That's because things slowed down in 1980 and so it knows about
both the long term period, the worst recession,
it was about 1980 before the previous one
and the analysis knows about that.
It also knows about the shorter term business cycles
and so it knew that this was coming.
Now I must admit that we got it off by about a year.
If I were able to predict this month by month,
then I would not be standing here.
I would be sitting in my palace that I had built
because I had made a fortune selling short on oil futures.
So we make no attempt here to analyze the markets day by day
or month by month or within a year.
But over the long term there is quite a bit of predictability
from the historical data in looking at the future
and it turns out that we managed at least one part of it
to get it pretty much right.
Okay, when you add up all of that carbon emitted into the atmosphere
and just see how much there is in total added up,
although if I go back, there is of course
a considerable amount of uncertainty here
and appropriately as you go farther into the future
the uncertainty gets larger and that makes sense.
Nevertheless, what's really one of the things
that's most important about climate change
is not just the amount of carbon that you use every year
but how much you've used over the course of time
because that carbon dioxide ends up in the surface oceans
and it saturates the surface oceans with carbon dioxide.
Now in the United States we have very highly carbonated Coca-Cola
because everything is served ice cold
and so every American knows that when you take a Coca-Cola
and you warm it up and open it up, it goes like that.
I think it's probably less carbonated in this country
because it's not often served as cold.
But anyway, all of my students understand
about how warming the oceans will release carbon dioxide
into the atmosphere and saturating them
makes it more difficult to absorb it.
So it is this cumulative emissions of carbon dioxide
that matter most for global warming
and despite all of the large uncertainty in the future
the cumulative carbon emissions are on a track
for which there is very little hope of going under.
Now I should say that in this analysis
we did lump China in with the rest of the temperate region
and that tends to mask its growth of the temperate region with doing that.
So we may underestimate somewhat, perhaps as much as 20-25%,
this overall picture and therefore the global average temperature rise,
but we almost certainly did not overestimate it.
So we're stuck with this and that means we're stuck
with about two degrees of global warming
as according to the excellent work
that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has done
when it comes to analyzing the physical consequences
of these carbon emissions.
Okay, with that said, let me go on now to the second part of the talk,
the inconvenient truth about the inconvenient truth.
And what I'm going to discuss is seven things that are said about global warming
which are A, true and B, often misleading.
And it's the inconvenient truth about these inconvenient truths
that I want to discuss.
One I've already mentioned that the International Panel on Climate Change
scenarios are equally valid, true, but as we saw potentially quite misleading.
The second is that global average temperatures correlate
with atmospheric CO2, I should say, levels in the geological record.
This is also true and I'll show you a picture
from Al Gore's book that he used in the movie
to explain why this is also potentially very misleading.
Third, that melting the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps
could raise the sea level by 50 meters.
I'll show you what that might, has already meant
since the last ice age in terms of sea level in North America.
This is also true, but I think also basically irrelevant
for the reasons I will explain.
Fourth, dependence on oil imports is problematic.
As you may have noticed, the United States just invaded an oil-rich country
a few years ago.
There were controversy about why that was done,
but there was no controversy about the idea that oil was,
that the Middle East is strategically important
because it's an oil-producing region.
That is, almost everybody agreed with that.
It also turns out not to be true for reasons I shall explain.
Therefore, this is also misleading.
Sixth, that renewable energy resources reduce greenhouse gas emissions
and can reduce greenhouse gas emissions, I should say.
That's true, but they don't necessarily do so
the way they're implemented, and so I will talk about that as well.
That can be misleading.
Sixth, that limiting carbon emissions from the United States
and the European Union can help avoid seriously deleterious climate change.
It's true, they can.
It's not necessarily true that they will.
It has to do with China, and I'll explain that at other countries.
And finally, and most importantly, limiting greenhouse gas emissions
and foreign aid together can help the global poor,
who it is true are likely to be already suffering the most from global warming.
It's also true this can happen.
Unfortunately, it's not likely to happen,
and there's another alternative which no one is going to like.
At least no one here or in the United States, almost no one.
And I'll talk about that.
So, controversial statements.
Let me try to back them up.
Okay, we discussed the IPCC scenarios and the problems with them.
Well, what's the problem, so what?
Well, there are two problems.
One is that we do not yet have a methodology that is agreed upon
in the international community for assessing the actual likely outcome
and therefore the starting point for the negotiations
between the United States and China and other countries.
Indeed, Jana Peters, I have to thank her and her focal
for coming and bringing to my attention a paper
that's recently been written on the same topic,
which comes to a much different conclusion.
And so we are lacking convergence yet in this field.
More importantly, for most people who have to deal
with the consequences of global warming,
and this includes one project here at the university
to look at the possible implications for global warming
on the city of Hamburg, people who are interested in that,
and my daughter who's an urban planner,
and the people who had to decide in New Orleans
whether we rebuild the city in New Orleans where it was
or we move it to higher ground.
Those are decisions that, particularly in the case of New Orleans
and similarly in Bangladesh,
those are decisions that have implications
that will be important for 100 years.
Once you put New Orleans back where it was,
these storms come around every 100 years or so,
you're stuck, and it's going to be there for the next 100 years.
If you move it to higher ground,
it will be in higher ground for the next 100 years.
And so you really need to know,
is there going to be 2 degrees of global warming
or 4 degrees of global warming?
Is the sea level going to rise by 2 meters or 7 meters
for it to make over the next 100 years?
And right now, there's really not adequate guidance
for those people,
which is almost everyone who has to deal with policy decisions
dealing with global warming, actually,
in terms of numbers of people.
Okay, the second claim.
Global average temperature correlates with atmospheric carbon dioxide levels
in the geological record.
This is true, it correlated,
but unfortunately the correlation is backwards.
That is, historically,
now that the last several hundred thousand years,
600,000 years,
it has been the increase in temperature
that has driven the carbon dioxide out of its reservoirs
and into the atmosphere,
not the other way around.
So the temperature increase has been the cause,
and the carbon dioxide increase has been the effect to begin with.
And the trouble with that is that instead of taking a...
Therefore, we don't have such a simple picture as Al Gore.
Here's the famous slide from Al Gore.
Anybody who's seen the movie know that he's...
He put this across a room about this size,
and then he had a ladder here,
and he pretty much did it, and said,
here's what happened in the past,
and here's what we're doing now.
And I think that convinced a lot of people
that he really had a point,
because it sure looks that way, right, on the source of it.
However, if you look closely at this...
I'll stand up here, because it's helped make the point.
If you look closely at the lines on here,
the initiation of...
This is the temperature rise,
and this is the carbon dioxide increase.
The initiation of these increases starts on the average
with the temperature increase,
and then proceeds to the carbon dioxide increase.
The exception here is in the Holocene in the last 10,000 years,
and this has to do with the invention of agriculture.
So there's a period in here.
There are a couple of different periods.
We'll see in a minute.
There's one 25,000-year period,
which is just due to the recession of the Earth's axis.
And we are about 20,000 years from the peak of the last ice age,
so we should be sliding into another ice age.
And according to Redmond, at least,
the reason that didn't happen,
because about 6,000 years ago,
many of your ancestors moved out of the Middle East
and started clearing the forest
and released about a carbon in the atmosphere.
Meanwhile, in China, they started growing rice
and increased the amount of rice patties
and therefore the amount of methane that went into the atmosphere.
And so the human effect on the climate so far
has not been deleterious for humans, at least.
It has maybe for penguins, but not for humans.
It has been helpful because it has prevented
us from sliding into another ice age.
And the problem, as it turns out,
correctly analyzed is that we are, in fact,
in the process of overdoing that.
But this doesn't tell you that.
And this has been known for a long time.
The essential point is the amount of sunlight
that falls in the summer,
the intensity of sunlight in the summer,
in the places where the ice sheets accumulated
around 65 degrees north latitude.
Yeah, it's this way.
There are three things that affect that.
One is the possession of the earth,
the wobble of the earth's axis.
So the orbit of the earth is elliptical.
Right now we're closest to the earth in the winter,
and that would be normally produced in ice age.
When you're closest to the winter to the sun
in the summer in the northern hemisphere,
then that helps melt the advancing ice
and that reduces its reflection coefficient
and therefore helps it retreat more and so forth
so it drives away the ice and vice versa
12,500 years later.
It's a little more complicated than that
because the eccentricity of the earth's orbit,
how much of an ellipse it is, changes over time,
and so does how much the axis is tilted
with respect to the pole.
When you add all that up, you gather this
for the sum of, for the insulation
for the intensity of sunlight in the mid-summer
at 45 degrees north latitude,
and this is a measure of the global average temperature
and they are excellently superimposed with each other.
So this has actually been known for a long time
and had Al Gore either consulted better with these scientists
or bothered to tell the complicated picture
he wouldn't have been able to do this dramatic story.
Okay, claim number three.
That is that we have to do something right now
because we're making an irreversible change on the climate
and we're going to melt the ice sheets in Antarctica.
This is the ice on the land.
Mostly now we're melting the ice on the water,
which doesn't make much difference
because it's already floating on the water,
it doesn't change from ice to water,
it doesn't change the sea level appreciably.
But the ice on the land, and we're melting it quickly,
it's bad for skiing, and the Alps and so forth,
because the glacier is there.
So retreating, the ice there is retreating.
But it takes a very long time, as it turns out,
many, many centuries to melt the ice sheets
in Greenland and Antarctica
because they're so thick and have huge amounts
of thermal inertia, and we know that from the pictures
I'll show you in a minute.
Now if you extrapolate forward the economic production,
global economic production,
you'll find that the expectation is that the world
will be a lot richer in the 22nd century
than it is in the 21st century.
If in that century everyone takes a ton per person per year
of carbon and uses it for structural materials,
and they'll need to do that,
they'll need to build better insulated houses
because they won't be able to burn all this cheap fossil fuel.
So if they take the wood and they treat it
so the termites don't eat it
or otherwise make it last for hundreds of years,
then they'll take out carbon out of the atmosphere
at about the same rate that we're putting it in.
And so it is to be expected that this catastrophe won't happen
because people in the future will be rich enough to prevent it.
And so I'm going to show you the time scale
for the Retreated Ice Sheets.
I'm going to show you this animation three times.
The first time, just take a look.
Here is the number for thousands of years in the bottom
so you can see how many thousands of years it takes the ice to retreat in the past.
The next time I'd like you to concentrate here on Florida and the Bahamas
and imagine that this continues to happen over the next hundred years.
What will happen to islands like the Maldives Islands,
which are all going to go underwater, and we're worried about that,
and what will happen to Florida?
Florida will almost disappear, as well as much of Bangladesh more seriously.
And so even a modest amount of sea level rise turns out to be a major problem.
Now the third time, take a look at the gray areas here.
This is fresh water.
Look at this huge amount of fresh water here.
And look what happens to it 9,000 years ago, about 9,000 to 10,000 years ago.
It all gets dumped into the North Atlantic Ocean.
Does anybody know what happens when you dump a huge amount of fresh water
into the North Atlantic Ocean?
You stop the Gulf Stream from bringing warm air up,
and I'm not sure if that was the reason,
there was a large amount of water dumped into the North Atlantic Ocean,
and it stopped the Gulf Stream because when the salt-laden water
hits that fresh water, it sinks underneath it.
And there was an ice age, a recurrence of the ice age for 1,000 years
in Europe called the Younger Dry House.
The current situation is that the ice sheets have probably,
there's a big controversy about whether this could happen again
by melting this ice, and the current understanding of that
is that the amount of fresh water that was dumped when this happened
into the oceans was much larger than would come from Greenland
on a much faster time scale,
and therefore there's unlikely to be a recurrence of this new ice age
in Europe at the same time that the rest of the world is warming up.
You'll be glad to know.
Okay, from the security point of view,
this is a particularly important commentary.
It is claimed that reducing oil first will do things.
First, help improve national security for NATO Alliance as a whole,
the United States and its allies,
and help reducing global warming because reducing oil imports
can be done by substituting other methods of getting around
that use less carbon.
Well, this turns out to be misleading for two reasons.
First of all, it's not true, this national security part of it.
I've written a whole book about this and we may have another,
we're talking about another colloquium in a couple weeks
where I will go into this in detail,
but the short version of that one-hour talk
is that currently the military activities in the United States
use 1.9% of the total petroleum consumption.
The proportion is even lower, no doubt, in the rest of NATO
because almost all of it is the U.S. Air Force.
So from a military perspective,
it is not now and has not been since the Second World War
strategically important to keep the military machine going
to have access to imported oil.
Indeed, two Gulf of Mexico oil platforms
can supply all of the U.S. military needs for 30 years
at modest prices without any need for importing foreign oil.
The other claim is that economically,
it's strategically economically important,
even if it's not important to actually keep the military apparatus going.
And people used to believe this,
but now we've seen over the last 10 years
that since oil prices started increasing in 1998 again,
that the economies grew very rapidly at a time of very high oil prices
and, in fact, were able to grow,
continue growing when oil prices were twice the level,
which is sustainable over the long term,
even with concerted cartel action by the exporters,
which is probably around $60 a barrel.
And it was not the increase in oil prices
that precipitated the current economic collapse.
It was an overexpansion of the money supply
and, of course, as exemplified by the subprime mortgage crisis
in the United States, which everyone's suffering for now.
This is more clear now because oil in the United States in particular,
we use half as much oil per unit of domestic product production,
economic production, as we did from 1973 to 1986.
So the economy is much less oil intensive,
so it's much easier to see that it's the financial instability
that is first driving higher use of energy,
and then when the economic collapse comes,
it's going to lower use of energy, not the other way around.
So oil is also, the economies can weather large variations in oil prices
without much difference in economic output,
and so it's not strategically important from an economic perspective either.
Moreover, if the NATO countries reduce their oil imports,
the effect, and that's what they do, no other global agreement,
then that will make oil cheaper for other countries to use,
and they will use more of it.
The bottom line is that there's about a,
we've used about a trillion barrels of oil,
and we will use another five trillion barrels of oil
until the price goes up, getting it out of the ground goes up to $100 a barrel,
and then we'll use something else,
and that's going to happen pretty much no matter what.
And the same thing for natural gas.
But that amount of, that's only about a trillion tons,
a thousand billion tons of carbon.
It's only about enough to raise global average temperature by about one degree.
There's just almost no way of avoiding that,
but it's not the real problem.
The real problem is what?
The real problem is coal.
Whatever you do about oil, natural gas is not going to make much difference.
The real problem is with coal,
of which there is a vast amount,
enough to raise the global average temperature by 10 degrees
if we burned it all and it was still cheap to get out of the ground.
Okay, let's go to claim number five
about renewable energy resources, having talked about coal.
There is truth that renewable energy sources can reduce greenhouse gas emissions,
but there are two problems in the way it's been done now,
particularly in the United States and also in Europe,
although the European Union has backed off a little bit from its biofuels mandates.
The current legislation in the United States mandates
that we use about 20% of our total transportation fuels from biofuels
that's mostly ethanol and a little bit of biodiesel.
And they're supposed to be grown not from corn,
from food stocks, but from cellulose, from other grasses and so forth growing on.
And these either will be grown on prime land, farm farm land,
in which case they will drive up the cost of food,
which will be politically unacceptable,
or they'll have to be grown on marginal lands,
which are not currently used, of which there's a great deal in the United States.
If they're grown on marginal lands, however,
you have to till those lands, and more detailed studies have shown
that that releases more carbon than you save by making the biofuels,
and you don't get payback on the carbon for many decades to come.
And so basically over the time frame that's most important over this century,
biofuels are not a practical solution.
For other renewable energy resources, they're more promising,
wind and solar, for example, and we'll talk about nuclear power later.
The problem is that, especially in the United States,
the use of those resources is encouraged by subsidizing them,
that is by either paying people to build them,
or by reducing the tax on them and keeping the tax on other things constant.
And of course, when you subsidize a form of energy use,
what happens to total energy use?
It goes up, right?
And so the way that many of the renewable energy resources have been encouraged
has been useful for introducing the technology,
but not a long-term solution that has to be changed.
There's no way around a carbon tax or the equivalent effective emissions trading
to this, simply subsidizing renewable resources the way it's been done
has marginal effect.
Another problem is that, and this is already,
we're coming to this limit here in Northern Europe,
that when you get to about 15% of wind and 15% solar,
then the fluctuation during the day and with the weather
makes it very hard to control the stability of the power grid.
And so it's hard to go beyond that without also introducing another source,
which is nuclear power,
and so far there's not a consensus on what to do with nuclear waste,
and so we don't have a consensus on that approach.
Moreover, even if you did all of this, there's another problem on the next slide.
And that has to do with China and other developing countries.
The problem is that the absence of an effective agreement that includes China
reducing U.S. and EU greenhouse emissions
will primarily allow China to burn more coal
until China itself decides that this is making the world too hot.
Okay.
I myself was the chairman of an intergovernmental panel on solid waste disposal,
and we went to tremendous efforts to increase our recycling program
because we were sending our solid waste off to a landfill
that was not up to modern standards.
And so everybody felt good about this.
Well, I was one of five out of eight people who voted to get it to happen,
so I was responsible for this as well.
And everybody else felt good about it.
I wasn't so sure because the net result is that we put less waste in that landfill
and other communities put more waste in that landfill
and the net impact on the environment is the same.
So we just subsidized other communities for cheaper waste management.
And the same thing will happen if all we do is to reduce carbon emissions
in the United States and the European Union
that if in effect is a way of foreign aid,
it gives the Chinese more time to put more carbon into the atmosphere
until one way or another the world gets hot enough
that the Chinese decide on their own
that they're putting too much carbon into the atmosphere.
Well, this is actually a topic of great interest right now
because there are negotiations going on in the background
that reported in the newspapers between China and the United States
in preparation for the Copenhagen talks on global warming.
And the answer is that they are not this far apart.
We are this far apart.
And that's hardly surprising.
The Chinese currently use about a quarter as much
carbon per unit per person as the United States does.
And so when the United States goes down by a factor of four,
they're willing to talk.
The United States is not exactly willing to go down to a factor of four
over the next 20 years.
Not only that, but what really counts
is how much carbon has been emitted into the atmosphere over time.
And there the ratio between China and the United States is even larger.
And so there's just no...
There may be some window dressing.
If there's a German word for window dressing.
The same.
There may be some window dressing that comes out of Copenhagen.
But the chance of a really effective agreement,
because that requires cooperation between the United States and China
first and foremost,
the chance of a really effective agreement coming out of Copenhagen
is very unlikely.
Well, I never believed Obama would be elected,
and my wife did.
She was right.
But I'm still betting that way on Copenhagen.
And that it indeed is the reason we did what we did in the simulations.
Okay, finally, I'm just on time here.
The most inconvenient truth of all.
Limiting greenhouse gas emissions and foreign aid can help the global poor.
We'll suffer the most from global warming.
Fair enough.
In principle, yes.
But in practice, not so lucky.
As I just mentioned,
the chances of actually limiting global greenhouse gas emissions
in a way that will do the global poor much good
in the readily foreseeable future are very small.
So what about foreign aid?
And there's been more concentration now
on dealing with the effects of global warming
rather than just trying to prevent it.
There is a program called the Millennium Challenge,
which countries in Europe have committed a fair amount of money to,
at least in principle,
to help...
And the people most affected are the people in the subtropical regions,
30 degrees north and south latitude,
where drought is particularly problematic.
And this is much of Sub-Saharan Africa, north and south.
The problem is that so far developed countries have lacked the methods
that they're capable of implementing to do this,
to make foreign aid effective in transforming those countries.
And they also lack the will to appropriate the amount of money
that would be needed to do so,
even if they knew that they had the means.
That's well known.
The problem with the means is less well known.
But our political science department has studied this in some detail
in order to try to figure out how to fix the problem.
But the problem is this.
If you give a lot of money directly to the governments of various countries
and ask them to use it to make lives better, ask what happens.
Well, we do give a lot of money to countries
in the form of high oil prices,
and Nigeria is the best example.
And that money ends up making it easier for an unrepresentative government
to continue governing without the consent of the people,
because the money that they use comes from outside,
and not from the people.
And the same phenomenon has been noticed in some forms of foreign aid.
So effective foreign aid requires a much more subtle approach,
that is working at the community level and finding mechanisms,
working in countries that are politically stable enough
so that the powerful do not go ahead and steal the money
that you tried to distribute to the poor.
So the bottom line is this is something that really needs to be worked on,
and I think it's important, and I'm not saying it shouldn't be done.
I'm just saying it's not likely to be the solution to the problem.
So let's ask ourselves, well, this has happened before
in the history of our species, but the life of our species,
that the earth has gotten warm, and the earth has gotten cold,
and the earth has gotten warm, and the earth has gotten cold again,
and what did people do?
Well, the reason we are here, most of us, maybe all of us looking around,
is that about 80,000 years ago, the earth got cold,
and the sea level went down,
and people moved out of Africa over the Red Sea.
The Red Sea really wasn't quite parted, but it was lower,
and they spread there all around the edge of the world,
the edge of the oceans, and then as the ice retreated,
they moved north, inland.
And we have, from Lake Baikal in that region,
we have the Stone Age hunters that develop impressive technology
for hunting large animals.
They use that technology when the ice advanced again,
particularly the Han Chinese, to move and basically almost
swamp out the original people who had been there,
except for a few Highland people.
And then, when the ice retreated again,
there was increasing population pressure and climate change
that was harder to live in some of the areas that had gotten warmer.
What did those people do?
They moved into those empty areas in the north,
and that was their solution to climate change.
So that's what human beings have done in the past.
What's the situation now?
Now, we don't have all this empty space in the north
for people to move into.
We have lines that have been drawn on the map,
lawn, by the way, by the ancestors of people who are responsible
for emitting all this carbon into the atmosphere in the first place.
And along those lines are people with guns and borders,
and in fact, ringing the northern hemisphere,
are countries that all have nuclear weapons.
So not only are there impediments to moving individually person by person,
but there are also impediments to moving in large numbers north
to take advantage of the improved living conditions
in the sub-arctic and temperate regions.
So the most inconvenient truth of all is that the historical solution,
the ethical solution, and the likely solution
to the impact of climate change on the poor is migration.
As you well know from the controversy over Turkey being admitted to the EU
and the 11 million undocumented workers in the United States
and what to do about them and their families,
we are by no means prepared for dealing
with this most inconvenient truth of all.
Thank you.
APPLAUSE
Yeah, thank you.
Giving much more scientific effects,
which is very general.
It was very intimidating and lighting.
You see the logic of all these kind of issues,
and I'm certainly sure that you will have some time to discuss.
So, are there specific questions?
Thanks.
You can just work here.
Yeah, please.
It's certainly what you said earlier,
and that's the development of an improvement.
I think it's also very important,
and yet there should be a major mix of any of the major economies in the world
with respect to the amount of energy used,
the ratio of energy used to economic production.
One of the primary reasons for that is the same problem
that used to be in Germany,
and that is that the mining industry,
the labor in the mining regions is extremely politically powerful.
That's the communist regions in central East India.
And so far, because of the coalition politics in India,
it's been impossible to rationalize that.
So, an Indian coal is very inefficient because it's full of dust.
When India was connected to Antarctica and the dust blew off,
the ice settled into the coal-producing regions.
And so India is particularly inefficient,
not only with respect to energy per unit GDP,
but also the amount of carbon used per unit energy
because you have to use a lot of the coal just to heat up the dust
when you're making electricity.
I mentioned this in terms of United States and China because it's most obvious.
I mean, first of all, the United States and China have to come to an agreement.
And after that's done, India and several other countries,
India most important, have to be brought into the bargain as well
to make effective progress on limiting carbon emissions.
And there's a lot of other compounds which have a high annual warming potential
of carbon dioxide.
So there was a lot of research to classify this material,
the discussion of methane in the sea or from animals.
Is there any influence of other chemicals on the global warming,
or can you just concentrate on carbon dioxide?
The main thing is particularly important.
And there's a large natural contribution from methane.
It could be much larger if the methane in the tundra is liberated
as a result of global warming, which is a major concern.
But it's agriculture that's the primary problem with methane,
and that has to do partly with how we cultivate rice.
But it also has a lot to do with animals.
Meat producing animals release a lot of methane into the environment.
And there's a lot of controversy about that,
but in the 19th century when we had much less problem with global warming,
people ate meat maybe once a week because they would feed the leftovers
to the animals and slaughter the animals or use the milk.
And that limited the amount of animal products that one could consume
to a level that was healthier for the environment
and healthier for the individual on the whole.
So a substantial improvement in the global greenhouse gas problems
could be accomplished, both by using less carbon dioxide,
less fossil fuels to generate all the energy that's used in agriculture
to raise so much animal products,
and also in the methane produced by the animals themselves in the process.
We're headed in the opposite direction.
There is, particularly in China, the amount of meat consumed per person
is going up very dramatically.
This had a lot to do with the spike in food prices and grain prices
that happened over the past couple of years before the economic slowdown.
So yes, of the other greenhouse gases, methane is the most important
from the point of view of the addition it makes to global warming
and from a policy point of view.
There are other chemicals which have already, in the process of being limited,
because some of them are greenhouse, are ozone depletion chemicals as well,
so they've been regulated.
And then there's one laboratory chemical.
We talked about it before, sulfur hexafluoride,
which goes up in the atmosphere and stays there forever
and is the best greenhouse gas at all.
And that's also under tight control now internationally.
The essential problems lie with carbon dioxide and methane.
We've pretty much focused on the emissions of greenhouse gases or CO2.
So my opinion is only part of the story,
because you also have to take into consideration
that there's the possibility to enhance carbon sinks,
such as carbon and sequestration via a new engineering world terminal.
And secondly, even if you consider both mitigation components,
like emissions reduction and sequestration,
the other thing that matters is education.
So you mentioned migration, which is part of the possibility,
but there are other opportunities to adapt to the adverse consequences of climate change,
which is much more important than the actual climate change,
like the increase of the global average temperature of 2%.
So this alone standing is not a figure that says anything about consequences
for human livelihood.
So what's your opinion on that?
The rest of the biosphere, very dramatically, which is not to be forgotten.
But I agree with you completely when it comes to the human part of the equation.
The most important thing we need to do with or without global warming,
from a global perspective, is to successfully implement the Millennium Challenge.
Jeffrey Sachs, I've heard him talk about this, for example,
claims that the investment of $1,000 per person in coordinated investment
in clean water, nutrition, education, and agricultural technology education,
and those five areas, just $100 per person over 10 years is enough to transform a village.
And so, in principle, it can be done.
As I mentioned, in practice, we're having a hard time figuring out how to do it.
But that's the most important thing, the ethical challenge facing the world today,
in any case, with or without global warming.
And it needs to be done anyway, and if it's done,
it may go a long way towards dealing with the greenhouse gas problem.
As far as sequestration, we actually, at University of Illinois,
and right next to us, have gone for the major carbon sequestration projects in the United States.
One is at Argent Daniels Midland, which is a major ethanol producer,
and producing ethanol releases a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
And they happen to be sitting right on the property, where ADM has its plant,
is the perfect geological location for sinking a well and pumping that carbon dioxide into the ground.
You don't have to separate it from the emissions from the power plant or anything.
You just have almost pure carbon dioxide.
And so that's the best example.
And they're drilling now, and so we're doing that.
But that can only be done in a few special cases.
So it's coal-fired power plants where that technology would be applied.
And so we're also now with the new president.
We got to go ahead to build one about 100 kilometers, maybe 60 kilometers from where we live.
But it's going to cost about five or six times as much as a regular coal-fired power plant.
Maybe the cost will come down by a factor of two as we learn how to do it,
but it's going to be a lot more expensive than other ways of doing it,
and it's going to be a lot more expensive than nuclear power as well.
So far, unless something remarkable happens, which I don't see on the horizon,
that form of carbon sequestration has a major large-scale fix in the next few decades doesn't seem to be on.
As we gradually increase the cost of carbon or we give credits,
if we increase the cost of carbon or give credits for sequestering it,
then taking all the materials that we use
and just making sure that the carbon in them doesn't end up back in the atmosphere,
that is something in the long run that, as I said before, might have some impact.
Just to give you some idea, if you take a look at the carbon dioxide concentration,
it doesn't just go like this. It goes like this.
And the annual change is due to leaves falling on the ground in the northern hemisphere
and then releasing their carbon.
And that annual change is about three times as large as the annual rise.
So now collecting all the leaves in the northern, or a third of the leaves in the northern hemisphere
and sequestering them is not a simple matter,
but it gives you the idea that the biomass part of, that the harvestable biomass
is of the right order of magnitude to actually sequester as much carbon as we,
at the rate, sequester carbon at the rate that we're currently releasing it
as the world gets reorganized to do that.
I have two questions.
The first one is on the point you think about that diluting greenhouse gases.
In the U.S., the EU won't help much with respect to all the warming in the future.
And I would just do that because I think that you're right in saying,
if you just propagate current trends, then the Chinese don't.
We are not part of any kind of climate change,
the climate agreement plan to control efforts.
Then it doesn't even have a tendency or a difference.
So if one looks at it in this kind of mechanical view,
the newer population is possible.
However, how will the Chinese ever get to agree to any kind of control?
I think the other way could be through the United States and Europe
also agreeing and agreeing before China's own control.
That's the Chinese argument.
And I think I find it much more plausible, your argument,
saying that it is a bit much different.
I think the only long-run solution to this,
which you want to write it up, of course,
the concept of interest is to agree on some common standard.
And this common standard, I think, will,
how important it will be that reduction in the United States and Europe
over the foreseeable future have to be larger than those reductions?
We can select China in it.
Therefore, counter your argument,
saying that, of course, it's right if you look at it mechanically,
but if you look at it both ethically and politically,
it's unavoidable that the United States would be relieved
in reducing reductions and do that even if China doesn't agree
in October and maybe over the next few years
on the reduction of its own climate change, the greenhouse emission.
The second point is on migration,
where I also would question your last sentence there,
or the last paragraph.
But I don't think that in the last couple of decades,
a loss of income or a loss of evening,
a loss of means of reproduction has been a major problem in migration.
I think it's even minor problems.
If you look at, for instance, inner Chinese migrations,
how many people are moving within China,
and for economic opportunities,
also you mentioned Turks or Mexicans in the United States,
they're not coming because they don't have an income in Mexico or Turkey anymore.
They're coming to have the opportunities in moving.
And I think that the people that move are probably not the poorest ones.
As I've seen, it's not the poorest one.
Migrate, in some cases, of course,
but on the average it's the people of the most prospects of the human.
So it's the young people with usually higher education.
So this link between poverty and people who are mostly affected by climate change
and migration doesn't seem to me to be really representing the situation.
As I mentioned, I'm talking about the inconvenient truth about some truths.
It's true.
Clearly, reductions in carbon emissions by the United States,
particularly and to some extent Europe,
are in necessary condition for an agreement with China and therefore ineffective.
And so it needs to be done if there's ever going to be an agreement with China.
And you're right, that has to happen first.
There's no way that the Chinese are all of a sudden going to say,
okay, you guys, now you guys have seen the light
and you're going to reduce your carbon emissions by a factor of three
and therefore we're going to start reducing our carbon emissions right now.
No, the Chinese are going to wait, make sure that it's serious, and then talk.
Nevertheless, it's still likely to take, in addition to restraint by the United States and Europe,
it's likely to take a substantial financial incentive
subsidizing the nuclear power industry
or subsidizing Western companies to build nuclear power plants in China,
which is not going to be popular in Germany, I think,
or some other mechanism of massive,
a very large effective transfer of wealth to China.
There are two ways of foreign aid.
One way is to let them use more carbon,
and the other way is to find another way of foreign aid.
But one way or another, it's going to take something else
than just restraint from the part of Europe.
And that's the inconvenient part of the inconvenient truth,
is that it's not sufficient for the United States and Europe to reduce their carbon emissions.
Something else has to happen, and we have to understand that something else has to happen,
or we're just fooling ourselves.
So that's the major point there.
It doesn't mean we shouldn't do it, we need to do it.
There are other reasons anyway.
Right now, the United States in particular uses far more, emits far much carbon
than it needs to for its own good,
because their incentives for energy, we're very bad at energy efficiency,
because it's easier to subsidize nuclear power plants or wind or solar
than it is to do all the one-at-a-time things you need to do to get people to be more energy efficient,
even though, and my own university is a prime example,
we are the most energy inefficient university in the whole region,
because we were paid separately for our energy and for everything else.
And so we did us no good to save on energy.
Now we're fixing that.
But you have to go through all these institutional changes,
which are not easy in order to get to higher energy efficiency.
It's much easier to deal with the sources.
On your migration point, of course, migration is driven primarily by economic disadvantage.
If you look at the difference between the per capita GDP
and the developed and developing countries that I showed,
and you ask when that's like factors of two or three, three or four,
and you ask how much damage is global warming doing, and that's only a few percent.
So that few percent is clearly lost in the wash of the factors of three that we currently have
without the incentives for migration.
However, in the future, there are going to be hundreds of millions of people
who are directly affected by climate change, who need to move,
and in part are going to need to move if there's no effect if they are going to move
because they simply can't survive where they are.
Now it's true that the people who move tend to be the better off,
but that's because we induce so many, put so many barriers in front of the people
who really need to move from moving.
We make it a lot easier, even if you're an illegal immigrant in the United States,
it's a lot easier if you've got some resources to get north.
You have to pay somebody a couple thousand dollars to get across the border.
So the very poor make it harder to move.
The ethical challenge is to address the needs of the people who are most affected
by global warming, who are least capable of doing the migration response.
And I didn't say that that's going to be, you know, that we know how to do that.
I said we don't know how to do that. That's the problem.
Mm-hmm.
They don't come here. They stay where they are and get the military aid.
So I think, you know, that the point is not migration, I think, that will come.
It's probably that there's some migration by the more educated, but the really poor,
they will be, we will feed them.
Yeah, maybe.
To an extent, in Bangladesh, I don't think it's going to be the case.
In Bangladesh, people are actually going to have to move,
and they are going to end up moving to India.
They already, millions of them have moved, in part because living on the delta
of the Ganges has become increasingly difficult.
We'll see. I think there's truth on both sides,
and it may differ from one geographical area to another.
Another question on China.
I mean, it's very important to complain about Chinese energy consumption,
but I'm always wondering what parts of this consumption
are really due to the developments in China,
and what parts of it are due to our wish to consume cheap goods that are produced in China.
So maybe it's just some outsource carbon dioxide emission.
So they produce our video coders, plastic toys, whatever,
and we then have cheap consumer prices,
and can at the same time complain about the energy consumption.
And if you look at, for example, the Chinese foreign currency holdings
are about a trillion dollars, as compared to a ten trillion dollar US economy.
So that gives you some idea of the scale that we're talking about in terms of the trade.
So that has been going on in the past.
China is now in the process of developing internal markets
because they have an enormous unsatisfied internal demand.
So I think looking forward into the future,
that's going to be much less of an issue,
and it's really going to be internal consumption in China.
But it's still going to be an issue,
and there's been talk of basically a tax on the carbon content of imported goods.
If I do something about that, of course the Chinese don't like that idea.
That's going to head us off in the direction of not being able to come to an agreement with them,
and less people are serious about that as a stick,
and there's also a carrot somewhere.
More questions, please.
Obviously, China's running a much less carbon dioxide than a person
as the US and Europe do.
What do you think?
There's an appropriate ready point for most parties to meet,
because obviously China wants to accept the stopping at the current level,
and the US and Europe can't afford to cut back to a Chinese level of consumption.
What do you think?
Well, I can't afford part.
There have been recent studies
indicating that a factor of four or five reduction in carbon emissions per GDP
is actually quite readily achievable within the United States.
That would be a smaller reduction in Europe to get to the same level.
It could be done, if that was what we decided to do,
and that would certainly help.
I think to answer your question,
a lot of what I do, as you know, because we've been working together,
looks at not what should happen, but what's actually likely to happen.
I think that's a good starting point for thinking about this problem.
So what's actually likely to happen is not much for the next couple of decades.
And then at that point, China's carbon emissions per person
will probably have roughly doubled,
and with some luck, continued political pressure,
because there's a consensus, I think, of developing in the United States
and in Europe, and maybe even Japan, that we need to do something about this.
Even if it's just altruistic, there's an elbow or something like that.
Even if he hasn't been as straightforward as he could about the reasons.
So there is a certain amount of altruism that seems to be developing in the system,
and why not? That's also a political dynamic.
So if you look two or three decades ahead,
you will see the Chinese at substantially higher levels,
and perhaps these other countries at somewhat lower levels.
And at that point, then a serious discussion can take place,
and it is still going to probably require, and this is doable,
some sort of subsidy for the Chinese to become,
it's financial incentive for the Chinese to become less carbon intensive.
And there are various ways of doing that,
giving them good favorable trade bargain on technology transfer
and equipment transfer and so forth that leads to more efficient,
less carbon intensive energy production,
and higher energy efficiency in their transportation and other systems.
So that's the kind of deal that needs to emerge.
Our simulations have it emerging a few years from now.
But, as I mentioned before, my wife was right and I was wrong about Obama,
so maybe it will happen a lot sooner than that.
And if it does, that's the kind of pathway that will probably be taken.
I've heard you over the talk.
She'll give you a much more optimistic talk about all of this.
It's a part of the migration, so being an economist,
I don't need to be the government's beginning to create it.
So instead, I don't need any response to incentives.
And given your point that industrialized countries,
like the incentives to actually improve the living conditions of the poor,
maybe this will change as the cost of preventing immigration
to the industrialized countries increase
because of increasing pressure from the developing countries.
So this might actually not solve the problem,
but kind of community this tends to address the problem
of the people affected by climate change is another question.
But just talking about migration, in general,
what you mentioned is already happening.
The rate of immigration to the United States illegally
has gone up dramatically over the past 20 years.
For a variety of reasons, it's become easier to get around,
physically easier to get around.
It's also easier to get around without fully integrating,
so now you can send money and email, internet messages
and Skype and whatever back home.
And so there's more incentive to come, even if your life is not so good,
because at least it helps the people you left behind.
And so there are a lot of reasons.
And the other major driver is aging.
It's become politically impossible to send those 11 million people
back home in the United States because they're performing essential services.
And many of that is in nursing homes and other service industries.
And basically all...
The United States has a less than replacement population rate
except amongst recent immigrants and immigration.
So the United States population would stay at 300 million now
if it weren't for that.
But it's actually projected to be continuing up to 500 or 600 million
in the next 50 years because of that.
And Europe is more resistant, but this will come in Europe as well.
It is coming to a certain extent.
And Japan is the most resistant,
and that will be interesting to see what they do
as their population continues to age.
It's a lot easier for them to control migration for cultural
and geographic reasons than Europe and the United States.
Just...
An issue that you implied when you talk about the ice melting over Greenland
and in Africa you said that future growth will make the effects
of those things most likely less important than it might seem today.
And the question is...
Can you comment on this debate
on future... the depreciation of future growth
that is between stern and normal?
Yes.
Okay.
We're starting to think that there will be no growth
at least if you account for GDP in a square foot time.
We don't know if that's the way it will work with it.
But...
And then this...
...technically speaking,
the total time-integrated discounted utility of per capita consumption.
You're an economist, so you know what I mean.
This is a neoclassical approach.
And so I looked carefully into the literature on discount rates
and a lot of the controversy between stern and other people
was not a question of what should be, but a question of what is.
And the economist would reply,
yes, according to stern we like very low discount rates
so that the future is weighted heavily,
but the evidence does not point in that direction.
So we calibrated the social discount rate
using a standard model against a very large database
in about 2.3% per year.
So the future of looking at a 100-year timescale
is pretty heavily discounted.
In fact, in these calculations,
it's really the capital depreciation rate that dominates
and the social discount rate is a small impact compared to that.
So again, if we try to analyze what actually is,
that's what we get.
Now, there is some discussion in the literature about whether...
We'll see this when we look at the DICE paper,
the Nordhaus work,
about whether you should take the discount rate as deeply as possible
at the time, which is plausible as countries develop.
And if you do that,
then you will get something that starts a little higher than 2.3%.
It decreases.
We haven't done that calibration against the data,
but it would be worth doing.
The role of food energy in the whole debate is actually also
in connection to the other temperature.
I'm over here.
I have to answer it.
I have to answer it in my bag.
Just a...
The role of food energy.
Right. Okay.
So this is for you, actually.
So just today, I convened a group of a dozen experts
from Midwestern universities to look into part of that question,
which is what's to be done about nuclear energy,
and I'm here to work on a bookmark project
that is precisely aimed at that question.
Not this, because it's being edited right now,
but I can give you a copy.
It will be out.
Okay.
There are two problems with nuclear energy.
First of all, the new round of nuclear power plants
that are being built have turned out to be about twice as expensive
as expected, and we're still trying to figure out why.
That makes nuclear energy not very economically competitive
with coal or natural gas without a stiff carbon tax,
a substantial carbon tax.
And in the simulations, we...
I didn't show this, but we break down energy
into those various components,
the kind of econometrically calibrated analysis as well.
And what that suggests is that nuclear energy will take off slowly
but then become a substantial population.
In fact, without some major change in technology,
nuclear energy would be the dominant source of non-fossil energy
in the long run because of these limitations,
barring any political barriers to its implementation,
which seemed to be evaporating in the United States
and were never there in China,
and may even be eroding in Germany to Turkestan
and certainly were never there in France.
So it requires somewhat more expensive fossil fuels
for nuclear energy to be competitive but not much more expensive,
and so that is expected to be the case,
provided that there are no major political impediments.
And one of the major political impediments has to do with
dealing with spent nuclear fuel with the nuclear waste problem.
There have been three approaches to that proposed in the past,
A, B, and C, and you can see the title here is Plan D.
So originally, we were going...
It was spent fuel was supposed to be a valuable resource.
We're going to use the D-Lishnella Buddha
and use it to make more plutonium
so we have an infinite supply of energy.
That turned out to be naive.
Then we were going to bury it in the ground forever
in the Salzk
That was Plan B.
Then in the United States and elsewhere,
we were going to take all this spent nuclear fuel
and we were going to burn it not just once
in a Buddha, what was the Schneller Buddha,
and the fast reactor, but burn it three times.
I did detailed studies of that and found that
that would cost an extra three or four trillion dollars
over the century or so.
I gave these results to members of Congress
and their staff, and they have since voted against doing that.
Not because of me, I'm sure.
That was Plan C.
Plan D is actually to do what we've been doing all along,
which is the safest thing to do with spent nuclear fuel,
which is to leave it at the plants where it was produced
until those plants are decommissioned.
At which point, the great majority of the radioactivity has decayed
and dealing with the spent nuclear fuel is more straightforward.
Once we decide that that's what we're going to do,
that is the British give up on Thorpe,
the Germans have stopped sending the fuel
to the British for reprocessing,
the French eventually even maybe give up,
or at least the Japanese are reprocessing lots of spent fuel,
but they're not burning it, they're just storing it,
which is just a lot more expensive way of storing it
than just leaving it where it was.
Once we agree that we're going to do that,
and we have a regular system for doing that,
then we do need a long-term system for deciding,
for basically revisiting those storage sites every decade or so,
examining the canisters.
Is it safe to leave them where they are?
Is it most economic to leave them where they are?
Should we take the fuel out and reprocess it
because that's become economic,
or should we take the fuel out and bury it
because we're sure it's never going to become economic?
I think the United States is moving in a direction
of finally developing a consensus around that
and to help that long is why we did this report.
Once the United States does that, even when it does that,
that will help a lot because it will demonstrate
for the world's largest nuclear power system
that we have a sensible way of managing the spent nuclear fuel.
And that, I think, something like that
is probably going to happen over the next,
we're talking 50 to 100 years here,
over the next 50 to 100 years,
as we get farther and farther away from the Cold War
and the idea that all nuclear energy is dangerous
because it makes plutonium, which is true.
I don't dispute it, but it's in practice
we get farther away from that.
And we deal more and more with the problem of carbon emissions.
I suspect that eventually we will end up with it nationally
and eventually more or less globally agreed way
of dealing with spent nuclear fuel
and that will, at the same time,
fossil fuels will get more expensive
and so nuclear power will become more used.
That, of course, is assuming that there's no major technological advance elsewhere
and it's quite possible that through biotechnology
we'll develop a way of using solar energy,
which is deeper than nuclear power.
Could happen 100 years from now, could happen 50 years from now,
could happen very surprisingly.
It could happen much sooner than that,
and we're just not thinking clearly.
It could be, you have to be careful what you wish for.
By the time we have the biotechnology to transform our energy system,
we'll have the biotechnology to do all sorts of other dangerous things
that we probably don't want to do, too.
And so it'll be a little bit like nuclear power, I think.
You know, nuclear energy, it will have a good side and a bad side.
So the simple answer is that nuclear energy
is supposed to be in a long-term a major source of energy
and major impact on the global warming problem,
but it might turn out to be irrelevant.
In any case, one other thing to say about that is
subsidizing nuclear energy does no good.
Subsidizing nuclear energy, first of all,
has a very small effect on the problem right now,
and second of all, as I said, subsidizing any energy production
makes people use more of it and has very little effect on the problem.
It's not an advocate of subsidizing nuclear energy.
Yes, I worked on controlled fusion for many years,
mostly to train myself as a plasma physicist
because I was interested in propulsion.
And the answer is no.
There is not the slightest chance that fusion will be competitive with fusion.
Right now, and I actually spent many years
developing probability distributions while I developed some of these methods
for the cost of a controlled fusion reactor
that actually makes energy eater because it's now being built.
And the answer was $10 billion for a machine that barely keeps itself alight
and more than that.
Right, yeah, so more than ten times the cost,
more than five times the cost of fusion, if feasible at all.
So the answer is no, very simple no.
They're fascinating devices, and I worked on them from a physics point of view.
From an energy point of view, they should never be sold as an energy system.
Okay, so maybe this is the moment where we invest more of all across the world
into our talk, which was, I think, right in two minutes.
This kind of showed that most problems are not solved.
I think you gave a great image of it in 18 years
because many people are oriented as well.
More or less, I think it was very, very important behind it
about the things that science do to prove and to test the premises
and to see the consequences of future developments.
And I think we all know that from a physics point of view,
we can make calculations, but we have to implement it also by politics
and this makes things even more complicated.
But thanks again for the talk, and I'm sure we might hear more
from you in seminars, and everyone who is interested in it
can, of course, contact you or take them to proceed with this very, very long discussion.
Thank you very much.
For a very effective and very knowledgeable audience.
Thank you.
Have a nice evening.