"Well, this is like the earth" " Yeah." " ...and what it's going to be like." "I'm scared because it's going to get very, very, very hot." "When the ice is going to melt and the sea's going to flood, most of the countries will either be under water or a desert." "The animals will die." "The trees will die and fall down." "Everyone's just going to die." "I'm scared that it's going to happen quite soon." "It scares me so much, I was actually shaking." "I don't think that people are doing enough to sort this problem out." "Global warming's real, and it's an important problem, but the scare tactics used to motivate people have gone too far." "The hysteria blocks clear thinking and diverts billions if not trillions of dollars to the wrong solutions." "Bjorn Lomborg." "I'm one of the world's most influential people." "He's being called one of the 50 people who could save the planet." "Thank you, Bjorn, for joining us." "Author of The Skeptical Environmentalist." "The Skeptical Environmentalist." "The Skeptical Environmentalist." "I wrote a book saying there's something that we've misunderstood." "People got incredibly upset, and they said "That can't be true."" "Bjorn Lomborg is a traitor." "Some people see him as the enemy." "Now all of a sudden, a guy nobody ever heard of came along, and he's got the answer." "He's been described as misleading, dangerous" "Your opinion has been disputed in your country and elsewhere." "They called him a parasite, an idiot." "Bjorn is definitely a controversial figure, and mainly because a lot of people actually misunderstand his message." "He used to be with Greenpeace, left it, then started asking questions about environmental activists, about their agendas." "This guy needs to be taken down, not put up." "Bjorn is contributing significantly to our awareness." "Lomborg is somebody I admire very much." "You're not helping the world if you're reinforcing Bjorn Lomborg." "I can tell you that." "He's making it harder to achieve the policies that we need." "to prevent a potential catastrophic outcome on Earth." "Climate is angry, and humans are provoking it." "And we're now at a turning point." "Millions will starve to death." "If we only listen to worst case scenarios, that's unlikely to make for good public priorities." "We're likely to be saying we should be spending most of our money on the people who shout the loudest." "It's going to get a lot worse unless we do something about it." "The hottest temperature ever recorded" "The future of human civilization is at stake." "The fate of the planet is at stake." "I was born in 1965 on January 6." "My mom was a primary school teacher, and my dad was a florist." "I actually come out of a gardening family in Denmark." "And even as a young boy, I loved exploring nature and the environment." "When I was 1 1 , I decided to become a vegetarian because I didn't want to kill animals." "When we stop nuclear power, we will usher in a new energy alternative." "The whole idea that we needed to stop nuclear power and we needed to move away from oil-- all that kind of stuff was very high on the agenda, and so I remember saying to my friends" ""Why don't we build a windmill?"" "And we got all excited about it." "We were drawing out sketches and everything, and we started digging, and we dug up quite a bit of the garden before my stepdad came out and said "What are you doing?"" "And we were like "We're building a windmill."" "I just recall that he wasn't as pleased as we were with that project." "My love turned to fear when I learned about nitrogen pollution causing dead zones around the coast of Denmark." "I was very worried about the environment." "I was a member of Greenpeace, and I was very, very angry at the center-right government because they weren't doing enough." "I think I was just like most of my friends, worried about the fact that the world was coming apart and we weren't doing enough." "Years later, I was going to be a researcher, and I was teaching college students here in Denmark." "I was settling into that understanding this was going to be my life." "And when I was at UCLA in Los Angeles for a professional conference when I was a tenured professor, I was just wandering in the bookstores, flipping through magazines, that I ended up reading this story." "He was telling me all this stuff about the environment-- that the air pollution's better, that the water pollution-- that there's virtually no problems that we're not actually dealing with and doing better." "We have longer lives, we're better fed, we're healthier, and also, if you live in the Western world, where we're richest, we have cleaner air, cleaner water." "We have lots of things that actually make us safer." "My initial reaction was" ""Right wing propaganda." "It can't be true."" "But he kept on saying "Go check the data."" "I figured, All right, I'll actually show him wrong, and we'll have fun doing that, so got his book, went back to Denmark, and assigned some of the smartest students I have to go through this whole book and show how wrong it was." "For half a year, we went through all the different issues, and as it turned out, there was a lot of what he said that was true." "There's actually a lot of things that are getting better." "It doesn't mean that there are no problems, but it means that we can actually start thinking this is not a doomed planet." "This is a place where we'll, in general, leave the next generation in a better state than in a worse state." "Mostly I think we suffer from not understanding the data and making clear priorities, so I founded the Copenhagen Consensus, a think tank dedicated to bringing together the world's top economists to prioritize the world's problems based on the cost benefit analysis" "of the best available solutions." "I tried to get information on economics on some of the biggest problems in the world to tell us how can we best spend our money in the smartest possible way." "Beginning in 2004, he assembled about ten of us to spend a couple of days looking at all kinds of proposals for how to alleviate poverty in the developing world, and what we tried to do is to rank them" "according to which was the most effective in terms of what you got for your money." "Copenhagen Consensus is about asking where can we do the most good." "Malnutrition, improving girls' schooling, community nutrition, vitamin A, those sorts of things." "Yeah." "And making motherhood safer." "That's good." "That will work." "A lot of people believe wrongly that he denies or used to deny climate change." "You accept this is a real phenomenon." "Definitely." "Totally." "Global warming is happening." "Or that he's somehow a very sophisticated climate change denier where he has some sort of complicated way of arguing that we should do nothing or something, which-- which isn't true." "Bjorn came to public notice when he published The Skeptical Environmentalist with Cambridge University Press." "The book is The Skeptical Environmentalist." "The Skeptical Environmentalist, in which he claims predictions of a looming global environmental disaster are grossly exaggerated and that actually we've never had it so good." "In the beginning, I got a lot of messages." "A lot of them were about" ""How on earth could you think that global warming exists?"" "and the other half were about" ""You know that global warming exists, so why don't you act?"" "Do you accept that there is human agency" " involved in this?" " Yes." "Why do you dispute, then, the measures that are being taken to control some of that human behavior?" "Basically because I'm arguing we should not just solve a problem if the cost of solving that will be even greater than the problem itself." "Seems to me that there's a total lack of prioritization." "I mean, this guy comes along from nowhere." "He's published nothing." "He's going to tell us the right way to solve a problem that he has no understanding of?" "That book produced a storm of controversy and led to his being referred to the Committee on Scientific Dishonesty of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences, and that investigated his book to discover whether he was attempting consciously to deceive people." "There was a huge reaction against him, so he became a rather notorious figure." "I mean, that just tells you what kind of opposition he aroused." "Any time you would challenge a consensus, you really run into a big problem." "On my birthday, incidentally, they would be coming out with this verdict which would essentially say they couldn't prove me dishonest, but that was only because I was too stupid to be dishonest, but I definitely was in breach of good scientific conduct." "It was very clear that the intent was political right up front." "They said very clearly that they wanted to make sure that I could never be named" "Head of the Environmental Assessment Institute." "It was a terrible experience." "I didn't know whether I was going to be able to hold my ground or just be swept away by this whole thing that was bigger than me." "Was it going to cost me my job?" "Was it going to cost all my employees their jobs?" "I honestly didn't know which way to go." "It was the worst day of my life." "Fortunately, there is an increasing number of people saying they didn't quite feel comfortable about what's just happened." "They make him a liar." "They make him a liar, a dishonest person." "...because, I mean... ln one case, there was this Dutch professor who's gathering forces in Holland to look through all of the claims to see whether they were right or wrong." "We published our results of the investigation in an American journal which is called..." "There was the title" ""On the Opposition Against the Book "The Skeptical Environmentalist" "B. Lomborg."" "Over time, I think it sort of softened a little bit." "But not all that much, because I think the environmentalists are a rather impassioned group." "Read The Skeptical Environmentalist." "You think he slowed it down." "I'm certain he slowed it down." "It's constantly cited." "He's a massive negative force in this issue." "The establishment, they don't want to hear a new viewpoint, and so they will do anything and also discredit you to keep you out of that conversation." "They never, ever came up and said," ""This is where Bjorn did it wrong."" "They just basically came out and said," ""He's dishonest."" "I think to a very large extent, the reason why I've been able to go out and say this stuff that's made me deeply unpopular with many people is that I feel secure in the world." "I feel that fundamentally, somebody loves me." "And that comes from my mom." " Hi, Mom." " Hi." "Unfortunately, she's got Alzheimer's, and she's in an old people's home." "She's not at all where she doesn't know who I am or anything, but she's definitely there where she doesn't know what happened five minutes ago." "We found her what I think is probably the best home in and around that area." "It's very beautiful, they're really sweet there." "I call her every day and then I try to go visit every month." "Bye, Mom." "Total should be around, like, 60-- 50, 60 minutes." " Yeah." " And then there will be a lot of questions." " Yeah, that's good." " The usual." "Yeah, but we also have time for it, right?" "We have 75 minutes." " Yeah." " Yeah." "He's invited for talks from all kinds of organizations." "Companies, governments." "Recently, he flew to the USA and then he had a talk over there, and then to Portugal, and then from Portugal to Toronto for some interviews, then down to Brazil, and then to Kenya." "It occupies a lot of his life." "What can we do about civil wars?" "What can we do about water and sanitation?" "I was busy traveling all over the world, trying to engage people in how to best fix the most pressing problems in the world when An Inconvenient Truth came out." "An Oscar-winning documentary and literally hundreds of slideshow presentations later, the world finally is paying attention." "Mr. Gore, welcome to this committee." "We appreciate you and Professor Lomborg appearing before us today to discuss the very important issues surrounding global climate change." "Number one, I think we should immediately freeze" "CO2 emissions in the United States of America." "This is a picture from-- Al Gore and I gave a presentation a couple years ago to Congress." "I'm sure it's, like, the second before he realizes who I am, because he's smiling." "But I think we need to thank Al Gore for having put it on the agenda." "Al Gore and I, and I believe most of us, want to fix global warming." "This is not a discussion of whether it's true or not." "It's a discussion of how do we actually tackle it." "And I would like to argue that we're not tackling it very well right now." "If you will allow me just a very brief history of climate change legislation" "And we must make no mistake about what is now at risk." "The first earth summit, where the rich world promised to..." "Of course, we did no such thing." "I was at the treaty signing, and it's been 18 years since then, and we haven't done a thing." "Our children's children will read about the spirit of Kyoto." "In Kyoto in 1997, we promised much more, that we could cut our carbon emissions to 5.2 percent below 1990 levels before 2012." "Of course, we did no such thing." "The U.S. didn't ratify, but also Canada didn't do it, and Australia, many other countries." "If we'd spent that money, Kyoto would have cost about 180 billion dollars a year." "The reduction in temperature would have been about 0.008 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century." "I mean, it's almost ridiculous." "You're talking about spending large sums of money to do virtually no good a hundred years from now." "We have before us Professor Bjorn Lomborg." " ls that pronounced right?" " That's right." "We'd like to hear your comments for as much time as you'd like," " within reason." "Thank you." " Of course." "If we invest a dollar in hiv/aids, we'll probably end up doing $40 worth of social good." "Invest it in malnutrition for micronutrients, we'll probably do about $30 worth of good." "Free trade, probably 20, malaria about $10-$15 worth of good, whereas Kyoto came out next to the bottom." "Probably for every dollar you spend, you probably do somewhere between 25 and 30 cents worth of good." "Environment ministers in New York will hold an emergency meeting tomorrow to try to find a way of rescuing the Kyoto treaty." "We've been doing climate change policy in the same failed way over and over." "I think it's about time that we realize the current approach is broken." "The European Union is currently the only place in the world that has a really significant legal requirement to cut carbon emissions." "The EU has promised to cut 20 percent by 2020, and doing so by employing 20 percent renewable energy." "The problem is, if you ask the economists, it's estimated to cost about $250 billion a year." "This is assuming that the EU will continue to do this across the entire century." "Yet, the net impact by the end of the century will be to have reduced temperatures by about one-tenth of a degree Fahrenheit." "Turns out that for every dollar you've spent in EU making climate policy, you will have avoided about half a cent of climate damage." "If what you wanted to do was to do good for people, why on earth were we spending that much money on doing so little good?" "is there a smarter way forward?" "And the short answer is yes, there is." "We're gonna talk to Nobel laureates, climate economists, top scientists, inventors, policy makers, community organizers, people in the developing world, everyday people." "We'll take a look at some of the most promising technologies that just might provide the answers we need to this challenge." "And then I'm going to make a proposal on how to spend" "$250 billion to fix climate change, along with the world's most desperate problems." "Copenhagen is hosting the United Nations Climate Change Conference." "You just tell me where-- ls this good?" "The 120 leaders of states and governments slated to meet find a cost of failure too high and finally make the hard decisions to seal a deal." "We do need to tackle climate change, but we need to tackle it smartly." " And we're not." " So what's dumb about this, then?" "Well, fundamentally, I mean, these guys are meeting up on an 18-year-old agenda, to say, "Let's promise carbon cuts."" "We promise all these beautiful things and then we're not gonna do them." "These international discussions have essentially taken place now for almost two decades." "And we have very little to show for it." "That's why I come here today." "Not to talk, but to act." "Time is running out to finalize the details." "Already, a new treaty has been ruled out for Copenhagen." "Not much happened in Copenhagen, unfortunately." "There was a lot of protests." "Lot of speeches." "A lot of meetings." "But essentially no action." "And you can't fix a global problem if the largest consumers of energy, the largest emitters of greenhouse gases, aren't part of the equation." "Everybody talks about cutting carbon emission, but nobody actually does anything about it because it'll raise the cost of energy, which is politically unpopular." "In the United States, we have degenerated into a system where two parties are fighting each other and not cooperating even when it's clear that for the public's interest, they should be coming to some policies that would work." "And the quicker that we get to it, the quicker that we put in place the incentives." "I have never said I'm against the government incentivizing change." "I desperately want to support this bill." "It doesn't work." "It hasn't worked in Europe." "It's gonna be hugely expensive." "I just think this is lunacy." "Just don't attack the President and attack the Democrats." "Work with us." "For the past 18 years, cap and trade has been proposed as the best way to tackle the climate problem." "Here's how it works." "Cap and trade sets a price on carbon usage." "Governments sell permits to companies allowing them to emit a limited amount of carbon." "That's the cap." "If those companies want to emit more, they buy additional permits from other companies that don't reach their cap." "That's the trade." "The hope is that all this evens out and that the cost makes us want to use less carbon-based fuel." "Cap and trade is an invitation to massive corruption." "Governments often give permits away for political reasons, so the companies get billions of our money and yet the carbon cost is hidden in our utility bills or the price of the products we buy." "I see absolutely nothing wrong with people who want to make money and expand the economy based on efforts to decarbonize the economy." "Where we should be concerned is in efforts where people are able to make a lot of money and exploit the system." "So, a good example of that would be carbon offsetting, where companies in India and China were producing a chemical byproduct, the chemical name is HFC-23, and it turned out that they could sell carbon offsets to Europe for destroying this chemical." "And in the end, it was more profitable for them to make and destroy this chemical than to actually be involved in their original line of business." "It's not well known, but a leading lobbyist for the Kyoto Agreement was Enron." "They were hoping to become a trading firm in carbon permits." "There was a memo that was circulated at Enron that said this is our biggest opportunity to make money." "It's not only Enron." "Duke Energy, General Electric, Dow Chemical." "There's a very broad consensus among big businesses that there is money to be made if the government will mandate policies that raise energy prices for consumers." "These companies can make larger profits, and that's what all this is about." "Cap and trade just keeps us with high levels of carbon pollution." "And it essentially grandfathers in the old technologies." "As long as fossil fuels are the cheapest energy, then we're gonna continue to use them." "Countries such as India are producing increasing amounts of carbon dioxide as they try to industrialize." "To my mind, the most important thing that's happened in the last 50 years is China and India getting rich." "I think this is wonderful." "But in order to become rich, they have to burn coal." "There's absolutely no alternative." "That's the principal reason why cap and trade cannot solve the global problem." "Because countries like China and India will never accept a cap on their economies, they've said that very clearly." "And why should they?" "Clearly, you're not gonna get China and India saying oh, yeah, hey, we'll forgo having our kids, giving them an education, maybe even food and healthcare." "They're not gonna do that." "They have other and more important priorities." "There's over a billion people who don't have access to modern forms of energy at all." "There are hundreds of millions of people who don't get any light apart from what the sun provides them." "So when the sun goes down, their lives are covered by darkness." "I went to Nairobi, Kenya to do a Copenhagen Consensus conference on malnutrition, but while I was there, I had the chance to go to Kibera, which is the biggest slum neighborhood in Nairobi." "When you talk about global warming, it's important, but to who are you talking about that?" "People who are hungry?" "People who don't have jobs?" "What does global warming mean to them?" "It has no meaning." "Hey." "A car?" "You want this kind of a house." "With electricity and with beautiful lights and everything." "Yeah, okay." "And a television." "You didn't even draw a television there." "What did you draw here?" "This is a bus?" "Why a bus?" "Okay." "That's a beautiful house by Alice, and then a car, and another house." "A house, oh, and the President and Prime Minister." "And a house." "They're drawing what they would like to see in the future." "But most of them want a car or" "Or a house." "Yes, yes, yes." "These are the things that they really care about." "I go around the world to talk to people about what are their problems and also what are their solutions." "Yeah?" " Yeah, diseases?" " Yeah." "Yeah." "What kind of diseases?" "Healthcare." "Yes." "Other things you worry about?" "There is poor housing." "People will sometimes die and sometimes they are injured." " So better housing." " Yes." "If we were to spend money on making the world a better place, where should we spend that money?" "Some should be spent on healthcare." "Education." "Who would spend it on education?" "All right, one for education." "Who would spend it on global warming?" "One, two, three, four?" "Who would spend it on healthcare?" "Every time I visit the developing world, I'm reminded that malnutrition and disease are much bigger concerns than global warming." "We in the developed world are fortunate to live without those fears, but we found others to replace them." "So what have you been drawing?" "Well, I've been drawing the earth and I've been doing zoom-in parts." "And some places, as you can see, they've got" " They're dried up." "And people really need water." "And other places, like the South Pole and the North Pole and other places in the world, they're flooded." "What is this down here?" "The sun's got to the-- lt's broken through the ozone layer and it's got to the ice, and the ice is melted." "And the sea level's rised, and then it's flooded." "And Antarctica's just water." "And so, all the penguins have gone?" " Yeah." " That's why you put an X over them?" "Yeah." "It is going to be very, very, very, very, very, very, very times a hundred much warmer than now." " lt's just gonna be water." " This is gonna be water all over." "Yeah, it's just-- There's just gonna be nothing." " Just the sea." " And where are we gonna live?" "Nowhere." " When do you think this is gonna happen?" " You never know." "It might just happen today." " So that's actually pretty scary." " Yeah, yeah." " Yeah." " ls that something that keeps you awake?" "Yeah." "Yeah, it does." "And I pray a lot in the night, before I go to bed and stuff." "In many ways, fear has been ruling the climate debate." "This is one picture which summarizes how a lot of people see global warming, as this all-ending catastrophe." "The tagline of Al Gore's film is" ""This is the most terrifying film you'll ever see."" "It was designed to scare you." "The actual lPCC numbers wouldn't scare you." "So, they produced pictures that would scare you." "Even at the 15th United Nation Climate Conference in Copenhagen, the opening video set a fearful tone." "Representing this issue in catastrophizing language, the way that Al Gore and others have done, is a perfectly understandable political gambit." "Because if you want to get people's attention on a complex issue, you scare the pants off them." "It's a way of life for a huge number of my friends, and it's important for their livelihood to keep people scared." "Excellent scientists and international bureaucrats and huge numbers of people traveling around the world going to meetings, it is a danger." "The ideology of global warming is pushed in a certain direction by economic forces." "Americans live in about the safest times in human history and about the safest place in human history." "And yet, there are all these fears and scares around, and they're all blown out of proportion." "First, you duck." "Then, you cover." "Concern is growing at airports that SARS is a threat." "At Don's gun sale, business is very, very good, thanks to the Y2K fear." "If you want to make a lot of money, or if you want to make a reputation in America, especially as a politician, a great way to do it is to scare people." "If they're afraid, they'll vote for you." "They'll buy your products." "It's a very effective strategy." "In the descent to an ice age, one severe winter would follow another." "Eventually, the snows of Buffalo would never melt." "You have to say to yourself if it sounds like it's out of a movie or scarier than it should be, there's something wrong here." "Certainly when I was at school, there was a reasonable amount of media coverage of ideas that we were about to descend into a new ice age." "And I lead a group that's looking at the effects of ice sheets on future sea level change." "Predicting natural systems and how they'll change in the future is actually really difficult." "Because it's essentially almost non-scientific." "This problem is so complicated, it's very difficult for individuals, for media, or for governments to fathom it." "Dr. Stephen Schneider is a climatologist from the National Center for Atmospheric Research." "In 1970, we didn't know whether dust and smoke pollution which was gonna cool the climate was gonna win out over greenhouse gases." "I underestimated the strength of the CO2 and said cooling was gonna win." "It was a mistake." "Science never proves truth." "Therefore, when people say, "Let's make a science of it,"" "meaning making it exact, that is exactly the opposite of science." "So how do you know how to separate out who's giving you the straight story and who isn't?" "I think the best information, and I think most people would argue that, comes from the UN Climate Panel, the so-called lPCC." "It's by far the most widely accepted source of information on climate." "That doesn't mean it's perfect, as we've also seen, and I think many of you have heard that there are problems in some of the reports." "But fundamentally, the UN Climate Panel is the best source of information that we have, and it does tell us global warming's real, it's man-made, it is an important problem." "I view lPCC as my pro-bono day job." "It takes up half my life and they don't pay me." "Many good scientists, thousands of scientists, are involved in this." "So I think it does a good job of summarizing the general knowledge." "We just have to tell them everything we know and the single most important thing is we have to tell them how likely it is." "As a scientist, I've been trained to talk about things I can test." "And then I'm being asked to give projections as to sea level rise, ice sheet change over the next 200 years." "Clearly, I can't test that." "Some scientists are very conservative and say we shouldn't say anything till we're sure, others say no, we have to warn society." "The evidence for alarm is virtually nonexistent." "Well, we know that CO2 is going up very fast." "What effect it has on temperature we don't know so well." "I can't be certain that we're gonna warm up 4 or 6 degrees any more than I can be certain that we're gonna be lucky and only warm up 1 or 2." "It's a bell curve." "Scientists have come up with a range of global outcomes for climate change." "Very few expect it to have little or no impact." "Likewise, very few see it leading to massive catastrophe." "The vast majority of scientists think the ultimate outcome will fall somewhere in the middle, between those two extremes." "We scientists, we say, well, there's evidence for this, but on the other hand, we don't know about this." "That's what the truth is to us." "It's the whole picture." "On the other hand, how you gonna do the whole picture in five seconds on the evening news or five minutes in front of the U.S. Congress?" "The truth about the coming climate catastrophe and our last chance to save humanity." "Happy holidays." "I think it's very dangerous." "We're scared all the time." "I do want to do something about the problem, but not going to solve anything if I'm just scared." "Everybody's discussing what to do, but nobody's doing anything, and I just-- l can't listen to all that anymore." "I'm so tired of it." "If you scare people to motivate them, and things don't turn out the way you predict, over time they turn off." "You lose them." "The lnconvenient Truth did a big service for the community." "It brought an awareness." "However, it was probably more for getting a message across than being scientifically accurate." "Al Gore's film, that's a brilliant film and full of lovely things, but the only problem is that a lot of it isn't true, and a lot of it that is true is misinterpreted." "It's a great piece of propaganda." "There's this one quote from Al Gore's website for his film where he says we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tailspin of epic destruction involving extreme weather," "floods, droughts, epidemics, and killer heat waves beyond anything we've ever experienced." "Let me just take you through four of those points." "But I want to focus on West Antarctica." "If this were to go, sea level worldwide would go up 20 feet." "Greenland would also raise sea level almost 20 feet if it went." "Twenty feet of sea level rise." "We see Florida, Holland, San Francisco Bay Area," "Shanghai, Beijing, and New York City, and obviously it seems terrible." "But if it's not the true number, what is that except for scaring the pants off of people?" "I certainly don't support outlandish projections of either climate change or sea level rise." "Neither Greenland nor Antarctica in my opinion is threatened with complete extinction in the next 1 ,000 years, 2,000, 10,000 years." "With satellite data coming in, we've been able to establish a few very large areas that are losing ice into the ocean." "If all of this was to go?" "Yeah, if all of this section were to go, the fastest-moving glaciers in that area have about" "80 centimeters of sea level rise tied up in them." "And that's one of the things that you are concerned about." "Yes." "But the most rapid rates that people are talking about, perhaps five meters in a century or two centuries, are really pretty unrealistic." "The UN Climate Panel estimate somewhere between 18 and 59 centimeters, most likely probably around 30 centimeters, about one foot." "How big of a problem is that?" "Well, we actually know." "Because over the last 150 years, sea levels rose about a foot." "Yet did anyone notice?" "Imagine asking a very old person who lived through most of the 20th century, likely to be a woman, and ask her what were the important things that happened in the 20th century." "She'll talk about the World Wars, the suffrage for women, maybe even the it revolution." "But it's very unlikely that she'll go," ""And sea levels rose." Right?" "It underscores the fact that sea levels rising is a problem, it's a cost that we'll have to incur, but it's something that our much poorer forefathers handled very well, and that we are also likely to handle at fairly low cost." "Al Gore talks about hurricanes." "I would argue that Katrina put global warming in the minds of many Americans." "If you remember, the Al Gore film poster was actually a smokestack with a hurricane coming out of it." "And of course, when the oceans get warmer, that causes stronger storms." "The statement that got a lot of people worked up was the notion that Hurricane Katrina was directly attributable to global warming." "As the water temperature increases, the wind velocity increases." "And you'll see Hurricane Katrina, as it comes into the Gulf, over that warm water, gets stronger and stronger." "In any kind of complex system, like the weather, you cannot attribute any particular event to any cause." "You just can't do that." "It's my opinion that global warming played no role in what happened with Hurricane Katrina." "That was completely a man-made cause disaster." "Not because of global warming, but because of having people live below sea level, coupled with, you know, an engineering failure, coupled with people not evacuating." "It was just a horrible event." "If you take a look at what we see here," "U.S. impacts from hurricanes from 1900 till 2009, the total cost in present-day dollars, there's no impact in the early part of last century, and only a tiny bit in the mid-century." "And here it escalates towards 2005, which was by far the biggest impact." "Clearly this seems to indicate global warming's getting worse and worse, and it's impacting hurricanes, meaning we're gonna see increases that keep going up and up." "That's actually true." "But has very little to do with global warming." "This is Miami Beach in 1926." "is it fairly obvious that if a hurricane hits here, yes, we are going to have some damage, but probably not all that much, right?" "Whereas, of course, if a hurricane was to hit in the same place in 2006, it would probably be more expensive." "What we are seeing here is not the impact of global warming." "It's the impact of many more people with much more stuff living closer to where hurricanes hit." "Another myth set up in An Inconvenient Truth regards malaria." "There are cities that were founded because they were just above the mosquito line." "Nairobi is one." "Mr. Gore says that the malaria mosquitoes were below Nairobi, but that now they've moved up to Nairobi and of course it's an unhealthy place." "Well, this is absolute rubbish." "Malaria was a major problem in Nairobi when it was founded in 1899." "Malaria is extremely complicated, and taking one single factor and extrapolating that to disaster is nonsense." "It is slightly connected to heat." "We're expecting that because of increased temperatures from global warming, we will probably see an expansion of the area in which malaria is gonna be endemic." "And that probably means, if we take some of the best estimates, that we're gonna see about three percent more malaria by the end of the century because of global warming." "Malaria, it's a disease of poverty." "As poor countries get better off, malaria disappears." "In Southeast Asia now, malaria is relatively rare where it was really a problem in the past." "We won't change the problem until we change people's living conditions." "If you're rich, you don't get malaria, and even if you get malaria, you don't die from malaria." "If you're poor, you get malaria, in the third world, and you die from malaria." "If what we want to do is to leave this world a better place, why is it we're so focused on the 3 percent malaria in a hundred years, instead of the 97 percent which we could already fix right now?" "Polar bears have become the icon of global warming." "Certainly, Al Gore was not above showing this cute, animated polar bear swimming away on an ocean with no ice." "It is true that as temperatures rise, we are gonna see less and eventually disappearing summer arctic ice." "That is gonna be a problem for polar bears." "But most of us probably don't recognize the fact that we've actually seen a dramatic increase in the global polar bear population over the last 50 years or so." "We estimate that by 1960, there were probably about 5,000 polar bears in the global population." "Today, it's probably around 22,000." "So it's been going up dramatically." "But much more importantly, if every country in the industrialized world implemented Kyoto and did it all the way through the century, it would probably save about one polar bear every year." "Yet, isn't it curious that nobody talks about the fact that every year we shoot polar bears." "And not just a few of them." "We actually shoot every year somewhere between 300 and 500 polar bears." "There's something fundamentally wrong about the idea of saying if you want to help polar bears, the right way to go about it is to cut carbon emissions." "No." "If you want to help polar bears now, the right way to go about it is to stop shooting them." "Presumably, this is about making a better world." "I understand that a lot of people, they want to show they care." "But it's not about feeling good about yourself." "It's about doing good." "And that also means we need to be able to say when is something just fashionable and when is it actually rational?" "More than 50,000 homes and businesses in the city will switch off their lights for an hour tonight." "Even McDonald's will turn off its golden arches." "The World Wildlife Fund estimated that two billion people, or about one in three people in the world, participated in this, they turned off their lights for one hour to show how much you care about the planet." "The problem is partly that it doesn't do anything." "I mean, we can't even measure the reduction in emissions." "But it also teaches people, oh, hey, dealing with global warming's quite easy." "I mean, I just have to turn off my light once, for one hour, once every year." "Also, if you think about it, most people, certainly the people I know, they light up candles instead." "It makes you feel good, right?" "The problem is, of course, if you actually light two candles, you end up emitting more CO2 than what you save by turning off your lights." "Science has been hijacked by alarmists." "And the public are given to believe that they are to blame." "We only have one world, and it's a good idea to try to keep it from exploding into flames." "It starts with, like, the smallest things you can do." "We started washing our clothes with stones." "I'm completely off electronics." "Now everybody's gotta, you know, go to Wal-Mart and get those little lamps and things like that." "You know, you can get an energy-efficient lightbulb today." "Recycle more, drive hybrids." " l have a hybrid." " l drive hybrid." "These are great things." "By all means, let's do them." "But let's not kid ourselves and believe that this is what's going to fix the problem." "I'm wearing Alex J., and she's a newer designer that's making all eco-friendly, sustainable clothing." "Global warming has become the defining moral issue of our time." "It's not a fad. lt's not a boutique thing." "Do something about it." "Do something about it." "Even if everyone in the U.S. changed to Priuses, it would cut only about half a percentage point of what we need to cut by mid-century." "If everyone in the U.S. changed their lightbulbs to energy-saving lightbulbs, we would only cut of what we need to cut by mid-century." "Well, this is the eco-driver, and each Friday, the eco-monitors have a look on the eco-drive and see if we're under a hundred kilowatts, and if we are, we win ten pounds." "Oh, this is May, June, July, August, and September." "We did very badly in January." "In February, we were all right." "We did very badly in March." "Do you have your personal reading at home?" " Some of us do." " l do it." "I take my readings at home every night or every morning." "I feel better when I get a low reading, because I know I'm doing something to help the environment." "When we get a high reading, we do try and find out why at home." "We try not to keep the lights on all the time." "When my dad did toast every morning, it used a similar amount to about a lightbulb." " Yeah." " So did he stop making toast?" "What?" "No, he didn't stop eating toast." "The main problem with the solution that we're focusing on today, which is promise grand carbon cuts, is that we don't do them." "And there's a very simple reason why." "Because fundamentally, no one of us wants to stop flying or stop heating or cooling our homes or stop doing the many things that are made possible by fossil fuels." "What we need is technology that will make it cheaper for us to not emit carbon dioxide but still be able to do all these great things." "We need to find cheaper ways to have alternative energy." "Just as the world community joined together to create a space platform, that's what we need to do in energy." "On our home here, we have enough solar to meet our total energy demands on an average day." "What we're looking at here is one week's reported output from the solar panels on my roof." "And that's cool to look at, but it's even more interesting when the utility starts to buy power back." "And that's a week's worth of earnings, depending how I use my solar array." "Solar panels look great, cost a fortune." "They probably cost about ten times as much as fossil fuels." "And as long as this is the case, we're not going to get green energy going." "Wind energy is one of the most exciting sectors." "We've seen the scale of wind energy projects expand, so much so that everything from individual farmers who have discovered they can make more money renting space for a wind turbine than the crops on the land, but they can still grow the crops." "Now, I personally happen to think that wind turbines look beautiful." "But we still get what's called NlMBYism." ""Not in my backyard" sorts of behaviors." "And part of that is just things that are new, are different, and are a challenge, but some of it is a wind turbine too close to one's home is not something you want." "On land, they take up space, they often inconvenience people." "But obviously, there's plenty of space that would inconvenience virtually no one if you put windmills out in the water." "The problem right now is that they still cost quite a bit more, simply because it's more problematic to put them up and it's more problematic to service them." "Renewable's been coming down in price about 50 percent per decade." "So a little bit like waiting for a computer, at some point you actually have to buy it." "And you can't just say it's gonna get better next year." "But on the other hand, you can also buy too early." "Denmark was a leader in wind technology, for instance." "What we did was, we put out way too many windmills way too soon, because we thought, you know, it was a cool thing to do." "The problem is, now we actually have to take all of them down." "Overall, that was a bad investment for Denmark." "Offshore wind projects like this were supposed to play a vital and growing role in filling Britain's energy needs." "The trouble is, the companies investing in them say they're now having trouble making the numbers add up." "What I think is really crucial is to come up with a smart way to start thinking about global warming." "In DC, we essentially asked some of the best economists in the world," ""What are the best ways to help the planet deal with climate change, what are the smart ideas, and what's the cost and what's the benefit?"" "One of the most interesting technologies that we should be alert to and watching for..." "The last thing we should be doing is acting as if it's a big problem and doing nothing." "This current Copenhagen Consensus-- l hope what it does is focus some attention away from just carbon taxes and cap and trade as the only things we should be thinking about." "The only way that we're gonna fix climate change in the medium term-- by making sure not to make fossil fuels so expensive that nobody wants to buy it, but by making green energy technologies so cheap that everybody will want to buy them." "Part of the challenge of renewables isn't just how good the solar panel or the wind turbine is." "It's that it's not reliable all the time in the way we turn on a gas turbine." "So they're intermittent." "You have to use them when the grid is on, because we can't store energy." "I would say that..." "Solar power needs to be 24 hours a day, seven days a week." "Solar doesn't work like that." "So trying to get a storage mechanism is the big key." "So we've set on this path of using sunlight and inventing things that could mediate the sunlight and then store it in a chemical fuel." "And that's in water splitting-- hydrogen and oxygen." "If you take the mit swimming pool and take only one-third of that water and split it to hydrogen and oxygen per second, you'll take care of our energy needs for the next half century." "The term we use to describe our process is "artificial photosynthesis."" "Because it's really doing what a plant does." "It takes sunlight and splits water into hydrogen and oxygen." "Hydrogen and oxygen are fuels." "So you can take the hydrogen and the oxygen, put them in a fuel cell." "You can use batteries, but they don't store a lot of energy." "A fuel cell stores a hundred times a thousand more energy per weight than a battery." "And it also doesn't just have to work in pure water." "If somebody has a stream or dirty water supply, our catalyst can start splitting it when powered by a photovoltaic." "And then when it comes out of the fuel cell, you'll have clean drinking water." "The discovery we've had is so simple to implement." "We should be spending about a hundred billion dollars a year on research and development into green energy alternatives." "That'd be about 50 times more than what the world is spending today." "Even though funding of science has gone up, it's still a little drop in the bucket." "And if something doesn't happen within five years, I'll be very disappointed." "The United States is pumping waste water into the ocean right now to the tune of about..." "We can grow a population of algae, like these green algae here, Chlorella, in about ten days." "This is a typical NASA solution, right?" "Where you find out one thing that's considered a waste product, and you say, "Well, how can we use that as a resource rather than considering a waste?"" "We're processing waste water." "And by the way, we're gonna be sequestering carbon dioxide, because the algae live on carbon dioxide in water." "We have a huge infrastructure based on fossil fuels." "Much of that material came from algae that lived millions and millions of years ago." "If we look at algae now as these single-celled organisms, many of the species produce huge amounts of oil that, if we could figure out how to harness that, then maybe we could solve the problem of liquid fuels." "The first "A" in "NASA" is for "Aeronautics,"" "and "Space Administration."" "And in order to keep planes flying, we're gonna have to develop some alternative fuels." "NASA's been working hard on optimizing sort of very efficient aircraft." "But the fuels-- lf we can change the fuels so we're using a carbon neutral fuel, it'll have a huge impact on our ability to fly airplanes." "We would still need on the order of 10.5 million acres to be able to grow enough fuel to replace the fuel that we're currently using for aviation, for example." "Now, 10.5 million acres sounds like a huge area, but it's an area 128 miles by 128 miles." "So it really isn't that far-fetched that we would be able to do something like this." "This idea that we don't mine our energy anymore" "We don't bring it out of the deep earth and burn it up and put it back in the atmosphere." "We start using our, quote, unquote," ""waste materials," to create energy." "Our basic idea was to reinvent nuclear power." "In particular, we wanted to come up with a energy source that you could credibly scale to give everyone on the planet U.S. levels of energy consumption." "As a developing world develops, they are going to need to have it." "So that's a pretty tall task." "But that is the task that I think we need to solve over the course of this next century." "This is a model of our nuclear reactor-- our terra power reactor." "The difference is with ours is that we can fuel this entirely with waste." "We can solve the nuclear waste problem." "Because this fourth generation nuclear power plant can burn this nuclear waste and produce waste that has a half-life of more like a couple of decades, so that after 100, 150 years, its radioactivity is small." "The beauty of this is a molecule of uranium has a million times as much energy as a molecule of, say, coal." "The potential is almost in a class of its own." "Do we know if it works?" "We have high confidence that it works." "You know, until we build a test reactor, you can't know for sure." "Nuclear has the potential to be a major player." "It's already a fifth of our energy economy." "The question is, can we build a next generation of plants at scale affordably?" "And we don't know that yet." "What do we think about the cost?" "Because obviously, nuclear power works, but it's also pretty costly." "We believe that we can make these at a price that's competitive for coal." "If you can make something that's cost competitive to coal" " You've won." " And we think this can." "In the case of the United Kingdom, we are an island surrounded by the ocean." "So wave power is a spectacularly untapped source of renewable energy." " So that's the new bridge." " Yes." "I was looking for technology that would work in the winter in Scotland where our solar input is not very good." "And waves looked to be quite an interesting way of doing it." "I think the key inspiration to this was when I wrote that the transmission of energy from one wave to the next was incredibly efficient." "And so what I wanted to do was to find a way to make the wave think that it was just driving another wave when it was really driving my machine." "And this silly little bit of balsa wood, driving a gadget with magnets and coils and things, was able to get about 90 percent of the energy out of the waves simply by trying to mimic a wave." "We made 60 of these and tested them, and they work really quite nicely." "Why don't we have Salter's Duck in the Western approaches?" "The answer is that when that technology was being assessed, the assessment task was given to the atomic energy authority, which is a little bit like putting Dracula in charge of a blood bank." "The decision to shut it was because it was looking as if it might actually be viable." "At that stage, they were desperate to make the economic case to build new nuclear power stations which, at that time, was much harder than it is today." "I got sent minutes of meetings that I was clearly not meant to get." "What happened was that in the assessment, an assumption was put in that that undersea electrical cable which, we are told by the electrical industry is a very reliable type of cable, was assumed to break not once in a thousand years," "but once in 10, 20." "They were withholding some reports and changing numbers in other reports." "We wasted 35 years now." "And this a good example of why we need to have coherent science-led policy." "You'd think that this would be something that the government would target lots of research money for." "They don't." "We're talking in large part about changing the type of energy we use and how we use it, which means we're talking about changing very big business in very big ways, and that's tough." "The energy infrastructure is a mature industry." "No one has come up with a brand-new energy source in a very long time." "Almost every one of us knows or has heard of some billionaire who made his or her billions in the fossil fuel world, and yet none of us can name a billionaire who made their money in the solar world or in the wind world." "Because while these technologies are all really appealing, they haven't generated the kind of industrial base and the kind of wealth yet that allows their proponents to say, "This is as good an economic engine as the fossil fuel one."" "The question of transforming the whole world economy to change from coal to oil, which was happening when I was a child, took about 50 years." "And now change from oil to solar will probably take 50 years." "We need a big commitment to what's called adaptation, which means reducing people's vulnerability to climate impacts around the world." "Adaptation is just realizing that we have an environment that keeps on changing, as it always has been, and we have to adapt to it." "If you look at human ingenuity, human society, men are actually very good at adapting." "It's an old statement." "We know how to come in from out of the rain." "A combination of melted heavy winter snows, ice jams and swelling streams in the annual battle against Mother Nature's tantrum." "We have adapted to many things." "We have developed home heating, air conditioning." "There's people living on the equator, there's people living on the North Pole, and they all get by." "So that means that then we can adapt to basically anything." "If the sea level's gonna go up a foot or less, we can probably adapt to it." "Sandbags were also stockpiled along the river dikes and flooded areas." "Dikes have been used in Holland for centuries." "When I fly into Holland, it seems like you're precariously close to water level." "You're looking here at probably one of the most vulnerable systems." "And this is Rotterdam, one of the biggest ports in Europe." "Yeah." "Also, we need to find solutions." "How do deal with a system where the urbanization is so close to the river." "So what we're going to do is we're going to close off from all sides with barriers that can close when there is high water." "We're nearing the storm-surge barrier" "Maeslant Barrier." "These arms don't look that big from this perspective, but actually, each one of them is the size of the Eiffel Tower." "That's amazing." "So this basically safeguards some of the most valuable land in Holland." "Yeah, probably the most valuable in economic terms." "So it's crucial." "One of the ways the Dutch are protecting themselves against flooding is by dredging the ocean and expanding their coastline." "So, essentially, this is the North Sea that you're trying to protect Holland from." " Right." "Right." " All of this area didn't exist just half a year ago." " Correct." " And we basically created that to safeguard the houses that we see down there." " Houses that are below sea level really." " Yeah." "Well, you feel pretty safe now knowing that this is in front of your low-lying area." "This is essentially what you're holding out to the world to say that we can do this well, and we can do this fairly cheap." "I mean, at 0. 1 percent of GDP, you can basically safeguard all of Holland." "But Holland wasn't always so fortified." "In 1953, a massive storm hit and killed thousands of people." "With over 60 percent of its population living below sea level, this terrible event got the Dutch seriously thinking about comprehensive flood control." "A similar wake-up call came to New Orleans in 2005." "This section of levee-- about 300 feet of it-- failed." "The wall actually collapsed." "And all the houses in this area were totally swept out for about four or five blocks." "During Katrina, this wall was at 12 feet in elevation, and as built, was one and a half feet too low." "Over 1 ,800 people perished, 400,000 lost their homes, and all of that because of the failure of the federal government levee system." "This was a manmade catastrophe." "This didn't reflect global warming." "It didn't reflect that Hurricane Katrina was a super-duper hurricane." "Katrina mussed us." "We need to build decent levees, something like the Dutch." "The Dutch give 1 in 10,000 year protection." "We have 1 in 30 year protection here." "Well, as a result of being involved in this, I lost my job at Louisiana State University." " He got fired?" " Yes." "I didn't know that." " Actually, he got fired?" " Yes." "I was afraid for it." "Everybody loved us until we said," ""Ah, the levees failed because they were badly designed."" "Suppose New Orleans is hit again by a hurricane?" "Should we rebuild it?" "Do we rebuild cities below sea level, or do we move them?" "The mission for us is to build a cradle to cradle inspired home, to build 150 homes here in the Lower Ninth Ward and show people how they can build green effectively and function as a catalyst to bring everybody home to the Lower Ninth Ward." "So there are large steel poles embedded within the front and the back of this home." "In the event the home were to actually float, the home itself would just ride up, and this would stay stationary." "We can fix the flood protection system, as Dr. Van Heerden always tells us." "We can have a comprehensive system with wetlands and barriers and flood gates." "All the things that the Dutch have in their system." "America can do this." "We have the technology." "The question is, do we have the will and the commitment to do it?" "Most people around the world live in urban areas." "We're estimating more than 50 percent right now." "It'll probably be somewhere between 80 and 90 percent towards the end of the century." "Urban areas are much, much warmer than their surrounding countrysides." "Why?" "Because there's no water, there's no greenery, and there's lots of black surfaces like asphalt." "Last week, the government said a staggering 1 1 ,435 people died in the August heat wave." "Far beyond initial estimates." "The city we see out here is a city where we will see more and more heat waves and more and more heat deaths." "Yes." "But we can do something about it smartly, simply, if we focus on cheap ways to, for instance, make this city cooler." "One of the many ways that you can combat this global warming problem is to reduce the amount of energy absorbed by the Earth." "Simplest way to do that is to paint the world white." "We can reflect some of the sun's energy back into space and actually combat the problem." "The cities are warming at a rate of about 1 degree Fahrenheit every decade." "This is an example of an area that as far as your eyes see, there are rooftops and paved surfaces." "So, what do we have to do to make Los Angeles cooler?" "White roofs for flat roofs, cool-colored roofs for sloped roofs, plenty of shade trees, and cool-colored pavements." " 5 degrees" " That would reduce the temperature by as much about 5 degrees." "This particular driveway is actually made from what's called pervious, or porous concrete, as commonly called." "The water actually goes through this concrete." "And it's a lighter color as compared to asphalt." "We can decrease the heat island effect of this compared to asphalt by almost 29 percent." "For very little money, we could actually make virtually all cities in the world very, very cool." "Absolutely. I think that's a no-brainer." "You save air conditioning, you improve comfort, and you cool the globe." "Yeah." "What is there not to like?" "We can do this." "We could actually, for about 1 billion dollars, once make Los Angeles cooler than global warming will make it warmer throughout this century." "This is not a perfect solution for everything, but it's certainly a great start." "What if we get this kind of sudden, highly destructive climate change?" "If that scenario were to play out, the only possible response would be climate engineering." "It's the only way to stop warming rapidly." "If you have a heroin addict, what's the best way to cure them?" "Methadone, right?" "It's a palliative." "So we are addicted to carbon." "We don't seem to be able to get off it." "We may have to have some palliative to try to temporarily get out of it." "I have always personally supported research in geo-engineering, because we may, unfortunately, at one stage, need planetary methadone, because we can't get un-addicted from carbon fuel." "People have viewed geo-engineering as a crazy sci-fi idea." "Something you might talk about, but, come on, you'd never really do it." "We started doing geo-engineering 5,000 years ago when we started plowing." "We have done a lot of geo-engineering." "We have cut down forests." "That's exactly what we do when we burn carbon." "We're emitting things that are changing the climate of Earth." "We've already changed climate to make it warmer by putting out carbon dioxide." "We didn't do that on purpose." "But possibly we could do some things on purpose to make the world cooler." "In 1 783, a volcano in Iceland erupts." "A volcano called Laki." "A horrible catastrophe for Iceland." "It kills 25 percent of the population, and it causes the winter of 1 784 in Europe to be terrible." "Well, Benjamin Franklin is living in Europe as a diplomat." "He thinks about it, figures it out, and in 1 784, gives a paper that says," ""l know what the weather was caused by." "The volcano blocked the many rays of the sun."" "Now, Ben Franklin's idea got a very good empirical test in 1991 ." "Daybreak in Mount Pinatubo bursts angrily into life again." "Mount Pinatubo was a very large volcano." "It put the dust and, particularly, sulfur dioxide, very high in the atmosphere, into the stratosphere." "In fact, it cooled the Earth." "Benjamin Franklin and Mount Pinatubo are the two great inspirations for the one thrust in geo-engineering, which is to say, if we can go and make an artificial volcano, that would be good enough to solve the problem." "And we could do it quickly." "This is not something that takes 100 years to ramp up." "Mount Pinatubo, you know, did it in a long weekend." "Our basic idea was, let's get this stuff up into the stratosphere the cheapest controlled way that we can." "Our current design involves a hose that has lots of little pumps." "It turns out, these are actual balloons, made by a company called JP Aerospace, that they've put up this high." "So that part works." "As we zoom out, we see, boy, we're a long way up." " How far up are you?" " 25 kilometers." " 15 miles" " That's up to the stratosphere." "So if we look then down at the bottom of this, we have the facility down at the bottom where we pump the stuff up and we have a pile of sulfur out the back that we turn into it." "In our most efficient scheme, it's a hose about this big around." "One hose this big around could do an entire hemisphere." "You'd need one in the north, one in the south." "And what's gonna be the cost of this?" "Well, we think this could be tested for tens of millions of dollars and deployed for hundreds of millions." "It's a balloon and a facility, but it's really nothing compared to the size of the problems that people say will occur if global warming gets out of control." "And, of course, nothing compared to what we're otherwise thinking of spending in terms of hundreds of billions and possibly even trillions of dollars." "And we think this is hundreds of millions, so it's vastly smaller." "In fact, so much smaller that if I'm off by a factor of 100," " it's still cheap." " You're still good." "Yeah." "The RD funding we asked for-- 750 million per year for ten years." "The potential net benefits are 18 trillion, so we're asking for .06 percent of the potential benefits to spend on RD." "The same engineer who pioneered wave energy has designed the boats to deploy what the Copenhagen Consensus found to be the most cost-efficient geo-engineering solution-- cloud brightening." "My contribution at the moment is making clouds just a tiny little bit whiter." "If you have a large number of small drops, you get a white cloud, and if you have a small number of big drops, you get a darker cloud." "Those ones are 4 millimeters in diameter, and those ones are a hundred times smaller." "And a chap called John Latham had the idea that if you could give the air in the mid-oceans more condensation nuclei, than you'd get whiter clouds, and this would reflect more solar energy back out to space." "So this is essentially a sail." "This is doing the job of a sail, all without hemming." "The ships are fueled entirely by the wind." "They're sailing ships." "By spraying sea water up into the air, you could actually make the clouds denser." "Only slightly denser." "You couldn't even see it with your naked eye." "But it's enough denser that that could cause enough light to reflect back into space, and you could cool the earth." "And how much would this kind of thing cost?" "Between one and a half and three million dollars each." "So let's say we wanted 300 ships at two million each." "That's 600 million dollars." "Once they're built, they're not using any new fossil fuels at all." "There's other approaches to geo-engineering." "You can try to suck the CO2 or other greenhouse gases right out of the sky." "This is to the earth what liposuction is in plastic surgery." "Plantations on degraded lands-- what we call biochar algae." "There is a way of slowing sea level rise down, which is to pump water from the sea onto this ice shelf." "Use snow-blowing machines to create a thickening ice shelf." "This is a brilliant idea about how to tie up a lot of carbon in the soil-- what we call regenerative grazing." "If we would take all the land that's not being used for food, we could plant a trillion trees and stop the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for about 50 years or so." "Obviously, Al Gore has been a big influence in this whole discussion, and" "Well, he's not very keen on geo-engineering yet." "The last thing he said about it was that it was nuts." "And I don't think nuts is right." "I hope we don't need it," " but I feel we might." " Yeah." "Maybe he's thinking it will give us an excuse not to go over to renewables." "You have to watch out for the moral hazard." "A moral hazard means you tell people," ""Oh, don't worry." "We've got this little" ""back-pocket solution called geo-engineering," ""so we don't have to do anything now." "We can always use it later." That's not true." "This is a way to bide time." "It's not a permanent solution." "We still have to find ways of generating energy in a much better way." "Geo-engineering is to the climate issue what stem cell research is to the health issue." "It does make the politics that much more complicated, because there is a sizable fraction of the environmental community who will say no." "We're not ready to deploy these technologies, but they're promising enough that, to me, they seem well worth investing the RD money to develop them further." "Some folks will say, "Look," ""this technology got us here in the first place." "You guys are only gonna screw things up worse."" "And I think the appropriate answer is to say, "Okay, what's your solution?"" "Don't stop me if you don't have a solution of your own." "Our economics is gonna have to evolve, meaning we're gonna have to reflect our values in our currency." "The Stone Age didn't end because we ran out of stones." "And the Oil Age isn't going to end until we figure out something that's a cheaper, better alternative." "1906, Wilbur and Orville Wright flew their little plane off a sand dune." "And within 60 years, we had a person in orbit around the planet." "I mean, this is amazing." "And then, nine years later, we had someone walking on the moon." "When we put our minds to things and when we invest, we can do amazing things." "And I'm very optimistic that we're gonna be able to make this transition." "The message that Al Gore forgot to tell everybody is there's a lot of scientists and engineers all over the world that are totally energized." "We're gonna do it." "We will do it." "So the inconvenient Truth only got you halfway there." "They forgot to give you the solution." "The solution is us." "Al Gore talks about global warming as our generational mission." "What's gonna be our legacy?" "He asks each and every one of us," ""How do you want to be remembered by your kids and grandkids?"" "The surprising thing is that many, many well-meaning people, many of my good friends, but certainly also many world leaders around this world, seem to want to be remembered for spending lots and lots of money doing virtually no good." "I just don't think that our kids and grandkids are gonna say, "Great going there, Granddad,"" "when we could've done so much more good." "We can do it for the same amount of money that the EU is proposing to spend on doing no good" "100 years from now." "So the budget is about 250 billion dollars per year." "Climate." "100 billion dollars on research and development into green energy." "It's basically to make sure that we find long-term solutions to deal with climate change." "At the same time, we also need to have a stopgap measure if things turn out to be much worse than what we expected, and/or if we need some extra time in order to be able to phase in the green energy." "That's where the Nobel laureates propose that we should be spending 1 billion dollars in research and development into geo-engineering." "We can tackle the global warming impacts by focusing on sea level rise" "30 billion dollars." "On inland flooding-- about 6 billion dollars." "And urban heat islands-- that is where most people will be living by the end of the century-- for about 12 billion dollars." "And we can solve all the major remaining problems in the world." "We could tackle health problems." "We could tackle hunger." "We can tackle lack of water and sanitation." "And then, lastly, we would be spending 22 billion on education, making sure that everybody can read and write, and enable them not only to participate in the global economy, but also participate in democracies and elect their own leaders and be influential" "in the decisions that are gonna shape their future." "And the total price would be about 250 billion dollars per year." "Or do we want to spend 250 billion dollars on the current approach, which is gonna reduce temperatures by 1/10 of 1 degree Fahrenheit by the end of the century." "is that really better than dealing with all these problems, both with climate change, adaptation, and all the other problems?" "The point here is, why aren't we doing it?" "Why aren't we focusing on this?" "I think I understand your point." "Now, maybe Denmark, with all due respect, is incapable of dealing with those things." "But I'll tell you something about America." "We are capable of dealing with hiv, malaria, and the commitment to our grandkids to not just spoil this planet, because it is a moral obligation to do all three." "And we're going to do all three in this country." "You want to make any comment, go ahead." "I will just really make two points." "One is you say America is a great country." "And it's absolutely a great country, and it's definitely much bigger than Denmark." "You say also that you will deal with both malaria," "hiv, and global warming, and, you know, we could add on a few others like clean drinking water and education, and all the problems in the world." "I'm very happy to hear that." "I would, however, ask respectfully why you didn't do so the last ten years?" "Why haven't you solved all these problems?"