Endgame with Gita Wirjawan - Steven Chu - Climate Change: A Revised Prediction

Episode Date: November 15, 2023

Join Endgame YouTube Channel Membership! Support us and get early access to our videos + more perks in return: https://sgpp.me/becomemember ----------------------- Nobelist, physicist, Stanford professor, Steven Chu talks about the updated story of climate change, the unheard story behind his Nobel Prize & time in public service, and how he thinks that meritocracy is at risk. Professor Steven Chu is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor at Stanford University, the 1997 Nobel Laureate in Physics for the "development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light," and the 12th US Secretary of Energy. The host, Gita Wirjawan is an Indonesian educator and entrepreneur. He is currently teaching at Stanford as a visiting scholar at the university’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia Pacific Research Center (APARC). #Endgame #GitaWirjawan #StevenChu ----------------------- Supplementary Readings: "How to Win a Nobel Prize" (2019) "The Hidden Habits of Genius: Beyond Talent, Iq, and Grit--Unlocking the Secrets of Greatness" (2021) ---------------------- Understand this Episode Better: https://sgpp.me/eps162notes ----------------------- SGPP Indonesia Master of Public Policy: [e-mail] https://admissions.sgpp.ac.id https://wa.me/628111522504 Other "Endgame" episode playlists: International Guests Wandering Scientists The Take Visit and subscribe: SGPP Indonesia Visinema Pictures

The problem is really big. It is profoundly big. This is not about fossil fuel for electricity. This is about greenhouse gas emissions and agriculture. You've got to decarbonized steel, chemicals, plastics, concrete, everything. The full dangers of climate change are obvious. Do we have enough resources in the world to do this? Choose the right guy to do this. He's got a Nobel Prize in physics.

He actually deserved his nobel. Nobel Prize. Our guest today is Stephen Chu. Welcome to Dr. Steven Chu. Now we have the Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu. Rediscovery is really important. You're not influenced by people's thinking. Was that the time you knew you're going to win the Nobel?

I was just growing up and discovering the world through amateur experiments. Right. And if you look at a lot of biologists like great signs, there's a lot of that going on when they were growing up. They were discovering on their own. They were discovering the rules by themselves out of textbooks. And that exploratory curiosity is what actually leads to new discoveries. If it's all from a textbook, it would limit your imagination. This really has been a random walk, and it continues to be random,

because we don't really have any side of where we're going next. Thank you. Hi, friends and fellows. Welcome to this special series of conversations involving personalities coming from a number of campuses, including Stanford University. The purpose of the series is really to unleash thought-provoking ideas that I think would be of tremendous value to you. I want to thank you for your support so far. And welcome to the special series.

Hi, today we're honored to have the presence of Professor Stephen Chu. who's a professor of physics and also of molecular and cellular physiology and environmental science and engineering at Stanford University. Steve, thank you so much for coming to our show. Great to be here. I want to ask you a very simple question about how you grew up, how you picked up science and how you decided to become a scientist. Well, it's easy. We were given no choice. Both sides of the family were scientists, and they wanted us to be scholars and the extended family, not only my two brothers and I,

but also the cousins who had emigrated to the U.S., essentially in the late 40s. So we were thought, oh, we had to be scientists, and it was assumed we would all get PhDs in science. Why physics? Physics was different. They weren't really wedded to physics, My father was chemical engineer.

I was a chemist. I had a civil engineer. I had an grand uncle who was a physicist, but I didn't know that he was a physicist much later. So that was a personal choice in high school. I loved this elegance. I love the fact that a few simple ideas, and you could get very quantitative explanations.

I had great physics teacher two years. Right. And he was inspired. This was in high school? Oh my gosh. Oh, my gosh. In suburban, just south, a bedroom community outside New York City, Gold Garden City, it's middle of Nassau County.

And I remember to this day, he said, we're going to talk about very simple things, you know, how things fall on gravity, pendums, things like that. But it might seem really simple, but with that really simple, but with that really simple things, thing you can build a foundation and you can build on that foundation for hundreds of years. And I was enchanted by that idea of this cumulative knowledge. You know, your family and your siblings, some of them went to the Ivy League universities and you went to Rochester. If you've told me separately that it didn't stop you from winning a Nobel Prize.

Well, yes, I was the first. In the extended family of the male people, they either went to, two went to Harvard, one went to Princeton, my old brother went to Princeton. I applied to Yeh, and Princeton, they interviewed me, but I got Bs in German,

well-deserved Bs, maybe B-minuses. And I wasn't, aside from a few courses, I wasn't really taking off until I'd say my senior year, I was living in the shadow of my older brother. and it turned out to be a good thing that I went to Rochester. Had I went to Princeton or Yale, I think I would have done well.

But at Rochester, the teachers in math department and physics department took me under their wing. And that was very different. I don't think I would have been treated that way. I would start getting invited to math parties for faculty parties as an undergraduate. but they didn't invite the graduate students. Wow. Right. And physics professors who invite me to dinner.

It's not for a student faculty dinner. It was me with a faculty member and his spouse. So it was different. And that was good because you can imagine my self-confidence growing up in a brilliant family, an extended brilliant family. And so at Rochester, Within one semester, I figured, hey, you know, I can do this. And I was confident, but for example, I had to tell you a story.

So in math major, I skipped the first year. And by the third year, I'm taking graduate courses. And I told one of the math processes, well, you know, this course linear algebra, I think I can teach you myself, do I really have to take it? And they said, well, you're a math manager. It's a required course. And I say, I'll make you a deal. I'll tee for the course.

And if I do a good job, will you give me credit for it? They said, sure. Not a bad deal. Not a bad deal. So that summer, I read the book that they use. Did a good job for it. He said, yep, you know linear algebra. Wow.

You know, you were interested in so many things. when you grew up there's a story about how you taught yourself how to play tennis by reading a book first you know explain that uh well first we're poor okay so it's good enough no country clubs no no no canisters this was in st louis no new york when i was gone up in it was in junior high school okay and i sort of kind of thought yeah i kind of like the game I would do sports. We would pick up basketball games, pick up football games. In Long Island, it would freeze,

and then there's a little basketball court that had a little dent and hockey. So I did all these sports. But tennis looked like fun. So I said, oh, okay. You know, no one reads a book in basketball. You just watch people play basketball or baseball. So I did all these sports,

but tennis, you know, is something different like golf. It's there's a lot of, things that are sort of semi unnatural. And so I had to start by reading book. Then I could go to the backboard of my elementary school, brick wall, and just started bouncing the ball and got good enough to first again, the junior varsity team, then the varsity team in high school. And then I could actually get coaching.

Amazing. Was that the foundation that allowed you to look at the world in a moment? in a multidisciplinary manner. Yeah, that's a good question. I was doing all sorts of things, not only sports, but, you know, I had chemistry sets and erector sets. And in those days, it's not a pre-form snap these Legos together and you built something.

It was really nuts and bolts and things like that and make big messes in the living room because the three brothers were in one bedroom the whole time we were growing up. So there was no space. you know, just bunk and so, so I did this in the room, very patient mother, you know, and she would just kind of in between days, she would just put the mess to the side, but there was a big, you know, kind of a localized mess in the living room that she allowed.

One thing, so I play with all these things and I learned how to make what I would call is matchstick rockets. So you take a wooden matchstick rockets. So you take a wooden matchstick and you just have it. So you're just the ignitable fosters point. You wrap a lumen foil around it, a little tight little thing. And the paper clip will of a little hole. And another paper clip to suspend it, put a match into that.

It ignites. And when the fling, it would go, phew. And we'd shoot all over across the kitchen. Okay. Now, the downside of this was I was playing with these matches in the fire and we had a linoleum table. and my mother gets home and the thing has been burned with all these pock marks of burn marks on the looms

so she starts to cry and said you just ruined our table our kitchen table so I said don't worry mom take me the lumber guy we'll go buy a piece of a you know this for my coat and said I'll make a new one and it'll work she took me in a lumber

I bought it, made it, fit it, replaced the old one, it looked like new. It's better than it, it was new. But so again, I, so this is when I was in like a great school. Yeah, right. I had enough confidence just don't worry about it. But, you know, just some stupid things too, like ruining the kitchen table. Was that, was that the time you knew you're going to win the Nobel? Oh, no. I was just growing up and discovering the world through, amateur experiments. Right. And if you look at a lot of the biographies

are like great signs, there's a lot of that going on when they were growing up. They were discovering on their own. They were discovering the rules by themselves out of textbooks. And that exploratory curiosity is what actually

leads to new discoveries. If it's all from a textbook, it would limit your imagination. How do you see the young generation nowadays? Do they have the same kind of curiosity that your generation grew up with? Well, to be fair to them, I think many of them do, but it's stamped out early.

The educational system tries to stamp it out. But also, for liability safety reasons, you can't do now what I could do then. I started with the ACO overchemistry set. but there's a little chemistry supply store. So I would go to this chemistry supply store, and you start with this little kid of mostly safe stuff, and I started by all sorts of chemicals,

which they had no rights selling to a kid, including nitrates for my rockets. And so you can't do stuff like that today, but a lot of it is pre-programmed, and sadly, mostly kids today are playing with computer games. Right. and it's very different they don't fix things anymore they you can't you can't fix a car anymore the same way you can do it right you know you bring it in and your car computer talks to the

shop computer and they you know well will that affect creativity or innovation going forward yes or scientific discoveries i think it will be different because of this hands-on experience of making things things and you get this intuition on how to make things my I've got brilliant graduates since post-ax now but they don't have that built-in hand intuition and and when we're discussing about what to do how to design something virtually no one has the intuition it comes from making stuff since you were little and knowing how things and how to design things so I'd sit there in front of them and we'd have these long groupings this oh well so they show me designs oh well that's

maybe but how about this and da da da da da and they say oh that's better but but it's or they're thinking of what to do you know remarkably they will go to a computer CAD thing and they do this on the thing right and they get a laser to read it out and everything and I'm trying to get them no take the machine shop course and feel it you're not doing it well they're probably telling chat GPT to do it. Let's say I'm trying to encourage them to do it to make things with their own hands because then you can go faster and you could come up with something new. Let's talk about the Nobel.

You won in 1997, right, on how to trap atoms with a process called the optical molasses. Explain that to a layman like me. it's not so complicated think of this following you think of an atom and when light gets absorbed by them it remits and remits in all directions

and so think of this as a big bowling ball the atom and the photons is little BBs and lots of little BBs in it and so each one is a teeny kind of change in the velocity of the atom but you know there's

billions a second millions of billions a second so being pummeled by BBs you can do this okay so need one other so you say okay you can push this bowling ball around what does cooling mean cooling means that it has some random energy random velocity it could be going to the left it could be going to the right so there's another trick and that is if you take a laser there's a very sharp resonance where the BBs will scatter off the bowling ball and otherwise they just go through you can tune the resonance of the lasers. So when this big atom is going towards the laser light, it's tuned into resonance. So sky is more light. Meanwhile, the beam from the other side is running away from it. The Doppler shift. The visualization of the Doppler shift is

when I walk towards you, I sound a little higher in frequency. And when I walk away from you, I sound a little lower in frequency. Okay. So that frequency shift, is now Adam going this. It sees a doppel shift. I'm in resonance. It's running away from this. It's out of residence. So what does it do?

It scatters more from here. Self-correcting. If it goes the other way, it from here. You don't have to know where it's hitting. Goes right, goes left. So I said, oh, that's neat. How do you cool in 3D?

X, Y, C. And he said, this is simple, and it's going to work. And I said about, doing this when I was at Bell Laboratories. I told my director I was a department head by then and said and he had shut down all the effort to trap atoms because they had other scientists worked out for about 10 years didn't work nowhere close one of the lead scientists named art ashton was trying to get me interested in this because I had done a few other very difficult experiments

in my career so so I see he's he's he's my director looks at me and says, okay, you've earned the right to do this because you did this other thing, positive training. Don't ask anyone else. You can use your technician postdoc, but don't ask anyone else to join you.

So I said, okay, the whole experiment, from the conception to starting to sit down and write the paper one year. Now, if I was in academia, it would have taken five or six years. Right. But that's,

but the major thing about this whole, thing is then i sat down to write the paper and ariish and says you know you should read this paper that was published 10 years ago by two scientists who are well known archello ted hench archel by then uh had gotten Nobel prize for laser and he was a co-inventor of the laser I read the paper and said, oh my gosh, this is exactly what I did. They said surround the atom with light and use the Doppler shift. It was a two-page paper. And then I started, after I did the experiments, I read more of the literature.

I'd just plunge it and just do the experiment. Don't read books. Just do it. That's why I was doing it. I was a kid. I still continue to. What you did. Yes.

I still continue to do this to this day. Long before, if I go on a new field, I'm just thinking, oh, what about? about this? What about this? And then afterward, you can start to read the literature. So, going back to this optical molasses, that it's going to work. Then I read that with this language surround the atoms with light, there were a few Russian proposals in uniform. And that's wrong, because it turns out for other technical reasons, that would be absolute wrong geometry. And so I chose the right geometry, but I wasn't influenced by subtleties of language. And then I come here.

This is afterwards. So I did that in 1985, published. I started in 84. Come here in 87, Archel attract. Both Ted Henshin, Art wanted me to come a couple of years, and I just kept out saying, no. Finally. You're a Berkeley guy. Finally, I say, okay, what will take you get into?

Because by then, eight and a half years at the labs, you don't spend it really. So art becomes a good friend of mine. I say, art, as I read more about the history, and you got a Nobel Prize in 1983. I did this experiment in 1985. In your Nobel Prize lecture, you had 40 references of all the spectroscopic work you did with you and also with Ted Hensch, you didn't even mention this paper. He says, in 1983, I didn't know it was gonna be important.

And they never tried it. They didn't realize how easy it was. They could have tried it. And so that's where rediscovery is really important. You're not influenced by people's thinking. There was a tossaway thing for them. But it transformed atomic physics. That cooling method.

You basically slowed down the speed, right? Yeah, you slow down the speed from the speed of Mach 2's super-scient jet planes to how fast and antwalks. Once they're really going slowly. It's a lot easier. Oh, very subtle forces. You can push them around. You can hold things. And then the craziest thing was, then we tried trapping.

Once you're I'm cold injured. We had a few false starts. And finally, we used an idea that our actually had proposed in 1978, but didn't take it seriously. Why? Because you had to focus the laser beam really hard, and there was no volume. Even with our wonderful cooling, which had a million atoms per cubic centimeter, the depth of how hard you had to focus beam, you would find a tenth of an atom in the volume. It's ridiculous. No one's going to try that.

A tenth of an atom out of a million. And that was the first time the world had these cold atoms. And so, no, no, no, it's not to work. You know what? I started to think stupidly, well, you know, if the atom's moving around, it falls into the trap, it will get stuck there, but we're always cool, man. But you can do the diffusion equation. And there's nearby atoms.

And they're going to fall in. And they're going to fall it. And maybe in a half a second, you can get thousands of atoms. So you just want random walk cooling to. And I used, so it worked. You know, and I used to joke and got in trouble. After it worked, I said, well, it's sort of like you're in a weekend. And you're watching people stagger out of a bar.

And then you come in the next morning. And what do you find? You find them pass out in the gutter. Not on top of a car. Why? Because that's the lowest energy state. And I said it's like a junk sailor walk. And then I was saying,

angry letters from the U.S. Navy. Pretty accurate description, though. And, but the amazing thing was, Art says, well, we can try this with a little polysyrian sphere, which is a lot bigger, so the forces are bigger. And we just use water. And the water is like the optical molasses. keeps it cold, and you can track it.

So he tries this in his lab, works. Within a month, the atoms were, okay? We didn't think the particle stuff was a big deal, but it turned out to be a big deal and got him in Nobel Prize. But the interesting thing was, he had a focused beam to levitate particles in 1970. He proposed a single beam trap in 1978.

In 1971, he had done all those things. And it took optical molasses and an atom trap to say, this is going to work in a particle in water. It was crazy. It was just one step missing. And you came up with it? Yes. Did you know that it was going to be life-changing? No.

Not at all. Wow. I don't consider it more. Life change is not the important part. It actually changed. There's a hell of a breakthrough. It changed physics. It really changed physics.

And it then, and then, okay, so then Art discovered that his little trap, you can not trap particles, he discovered you can trap bacteria. So he started messing around with bacteria and little organelles within east. Okay, and you can show you could pull these seeds. So, so there it was in 1986, 87, we got molasses to work. the atom trap to work, the particle trap to work, and then the so-called magneto-optic trap, which came to workhorse.

It's so easy. It's an undergraduate science project. And so just before I left the labs, I said, look, you can trap E. coli. We can trap atoms. I'm going to trap a molecule, a single biomoleculecule. I'll attach a little polystyrene spirit to this biochemically, and then you can hold on and manipulate this single molecule.

you can do measurements in single molecules. So I came to Stanford in 91, 92, got it to work. There was a later, a year later, I was a conference that Art was at, it was actually in Sockham, I think, and art was in the front run and he says, you said you could do this, I didn't believe you, wow. And he merely glommed out to that.

And so he got the Nobel Prize for the optical tweezer in biology, which I'm very happy about because, you know, when I got my Nobel Prize, I said, Art, I'm sorry, but you were the brain child of, you know, a lot of this stuff you were talking about for 15 years. Home time ago, yeah, and 70s and yeah, in the starting and I would have loved to have shared it with you. But so it was good. And, you know, it was, it was nice that it was recognized that it was also, has been transforming biology, which I think is great. You know, you were the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, right?

As a physicist or as a scientist, how would you differentiate the Einstein's and the Oppenheimer's and the Newton's of the world from mere mortals like me? Or meomorals like me. No, no, no, you're up there, man. I'm way down here. It is possible, actually. What makes them the way they are? Well, without disrespecting a lot of scientists, I would say that most scientists think incrementally,

and they look at what's progress and think, what can I do to inch it forward? What Newton and Einstein did. And to a lesser extent, Oppenheimer, but he also, Oppenheimer was more theorist who followed the math. The other two were very different. conceptually just look at the world a very, very different way. And so Newton had to invent the mathematics to figure out what gravity did. So he had this conception of this universal gravitational law,

and he had to invent the mathematics to show that it was consistent with all the precise, precise by then reasonably precise astronomical observations of how planets revolve around the sun. Okay. Amazing, right. And then he also knew that it wasn't complete. In fact, he said the fact that one body can act in another body at a distance, seemingly with nothing in there, no person of sane mind, I'm paraphrasing, of competent facilities, we'd ever dream that this is but i leave that as a discussion for future people okay just this is the

law and it works and the same law and his law's emotion allowed him to calculate the speech what's happened this the that so he did all this stuff and it was amazing okay so then ianistan comes long and his greatest contribution was this deep thinking where he was he started to look at things very differently. And his biggest contribution was the general theory of relativity. And he imagines himself in a spaceship, you can't see outside, and it has a uniform acceleration. So what do you feel?

You feel some forces pulling you towards the bottom of the spaceship. And he said, you can't really tell the difference between uniform acceleration and near a gravitational body where you feel is uniform force. So there has to be a very, there is no difference in principle. And so you started doing very conceptually simple things. Okay, if it's,

spaceships, uniformly accelerating by a lot, and you look at a pulse of light going across. Okay, if it's constant velocity, the pulse of light looks like it's going down, it's straight line. But it's accelerating, so it looks like the pulse of light is falling. Right.

So this is, oh, that means gravity must bend light. But if light is what we use to measure short systems between two points and everything else, that means the real geometry is now warped by the presence of gravity. Amazing, right? And he similarly said, time will also do. Again, these very simple freshman physics, if you well thought experiments. So he starts casting around, well, what mathematics is self-insistent? Now, Einstein hated mathematics.

Yeah. He skipped his math classes when he was in college. Yeah. He had a good friend. Can you imagine if he would have loved it? The world would be a different place. No, but Marcel Grossman was his good buddy. And he said, Marcel, go on take, you know, taking notes and tell me what they're talking about,

because I'm not really interested in math. And many quotes of Einstein, he has told this regard to him. So Marcel Grossman, he starts talking to my mind. about this he's got this problem he's Einstein's smart enough to realize he can't think of it self-consistent mathematical description to myself says you know this guy remand you should read this stuff because i think he's his whole curve space framework fits in Einstein's oh my gosh and so with remonian geometry boom it became a complete theory within less than a year after he was pointing to the right mathematician. But conceptually you can see it was totally different.

It's just a wild crazy, simple ideas totally new ways. If Einstein wasn't alive, general relativity might have taken another 20, 30, 40 years, you don't know. It, um, climate hacks was a group effort of which Einstein was a major contributor and that's very essential things. Again, goofy. He didn't really believe in the end, the mathematics, that it was a complete picture. He believed in mathematics that he didn't think it was a complete picture. That was a philosophical thing more than anything else. But when Einstein in those days, he would just think things in this totally simplistic,

beautiful way. And so those people to physicists is just amazing. If Newton didn't discover calculus at the age of 24, how much longer do you think it would have taken? Oh, no, he had a competitor in calculus. There's a guy named Lignitz. Oh, yeah. And Newton was a fiercely competitive. And so in that nice guy.

So he would have taken maybe a few more years. Yeah. But the universal law would have taken longer. His laws of gravity and his laws of motion. You need the calculus and those laws. Right. And so it was that combination. Now, Newton, as I said, was

you know he's special he's special but it's also very competitive there's a there's a guy contemporary of his first they had to dispute with liveness you know who really invented they both invented it but he didn't like robert hook robert hook who hook compound microscope you know it's very eminent they're both revered in that time and still are in terms of their scientific contributions. And they, he, they, he didn't like hook. Maybe Hook didn't like him, I'm sure, back. And, and then I was told, I don't know if this is true, but that famous quote,

the reason I see so far is because I stand the shoulders of giants. Hook was a very short man. Good one. That's a good one. That's a good one. But, but what would it take for somebody to become a new? Is it like just intense? No, no, it's something different.

No, it's this is, we're talking about once in a century kind of people, literally. Yeah. And it's this combination of really looking at things very differently. Yeah. Another example, Maxwell. Yeah. Halfway in between comes up with Maxwell's equations. during that whole time, all physics would describe how energy go through in waves, water waves,

sound waves, things like that. There was always a medium. So Maxwell said, okay, there's got to be a medium that this light can go through, even though we're not sure what it is, because, you know, you can pump out and make it a vacuum and light just does this thing, it just travels. So he constructed something. And in the end, he said, you know, I'm very unhappy with this mechanical model. I'm struck him.

I'm just making this up. And so in the end, you know, I'm going to say something. What these things are doing are described by the equations, Maxwell's equations. And forget about the mechanical model. Century later, Long comes Einstein and says, that is a huge insight. that you don't need a mechanical thing to describe something that the fields, the equations, the mathematics become the reality. And that changed the way we thought of physics. Just like his equations of general relativity.

Okay. And, you know, the idea that mass could change, you know, space and time and bend it, do it this. Crazy. Crazy. Crazy. Right. I mean, if I was there, I would have thought it was crazy. Well, you know, when he got his Nobel Prize,

they gave it to him for the photoelectric effect, which was the springboard for quantum mechanics, because at that time, they weren't quite sure generally he was going to be right. Crazy good. But he could have got a Nobel Prize for about three things. Yeah. Wow.

Anyway, I want to switch topic here. You became Secretary of Energy. were you excited i was excited because i thought by then that climate the energy problem the climate problem all the largest the same village was the issue science had to solve right uh it's going to solve other problems but that was that's the major one and it would take decades this isn't you know we it's I had met someone who's when I met him in two weeks after the election, he said, I have two major priorities in my administration. President Obama, then President-elect.

He said, I want to reform healthcare. And I got to do something about the climate. Those are my two highest priorities. And everybody's telling me you should be the Secretary of Energy. So we talked for an hour, just as two of us. asked me about what I felt about this, that, and, and as I get, as we chatted, I guess, okay, this guy is pretty good. And there's no space.

And I also said during that interview or whatever that, look, if you choose me, I ask you that I know what happens with cabinet positions, that there's a lot of political payback time. You try to be different. And the president's people say you should have this one as your deputy secretary, these is your undersecretary, and they tell you who you should hire. Right. You just pay back.

You know, most cabinet people are payback. Their early supporters are former. Right. Okay. And so this guy, number one, no political connection. Never campaign for him. Never campaign for anyone. And no political connection.

So he chose me for competence, knowledge. And then I said, will you let me? me hire who I want to hire. He said, yes. He kept his word. I said, you can make suggestions, but in the end, it's going to be on me. He said yes. And then I did something no cabinet member, I don't think before since it's done, which is I was a practicing scientist. I knew a lot of brilliant people. And I started getting on the phone and saying, hey, you want to come join me? That's how I got room Jumdar that's how i got remesh that's how i got a few dozen people and then they came in and started with me and them okay who else we're gonna hire and we're looking around the country's

best people brilliant people yeah never happened before this is something assigned to some lawyer three levels down i'm not kidding and and it's crazy because when the secondary energy whose scientists they know and respect and they couldn't believe I was going to work for government I said I know but look they probably thought you're not going to last this guy's special and look it's simple we're here to save the world come join me was two years four years I don't care six years I was thinking I was going to be there eight years my wife after four years had different ideas but never mind that she for very very very very good reasons did not like dc but but and so then i big it's only after i left and then i realized

how special obama was you know he was making appointments not's political payback he was making appointments looking for the best people including some of his political rivals like hillary clinton very smart lady okay and it's and and and i knew he had trusted me as a scientist So the little minions around him, true in every government. They're always worried about how the public and how the press might spin things. And I didn't worry because I knew the president had full confidence in me. So I started making decisions only based on science and merit, didn't have to worry about the politics because the president had my back.

Similarly, when I brought these really great people in, I saw my role is to block and tackle for them and to brainstorm with them but I would never direct, even if I disagreed, I would not overrule them. Right. But you don't do that with good people. You can discuss now, you're sure you want to do it,

but in the end, it's your decision. And the blocking and tackling was noticed because these guys, you know, they were trying to work hard. they were in 60 hours a week. Some of the career guys said, these guys make us look bad. I'd be kidding.

Or, you know, Bill Brinkton and Arun, Majum Dar wanted to go and talk to Congress. And they said, no, you can't do this. Only the Secretary of the Deputy Secretary are allowed to talk directly to Congress. And I said, no. I trust these guys. They can talk directly to Congress.

They're not going to be scripted. Right? And... Wow. Right. So I was blocking and tackling, but they were good friends of mine and also brainstorming. We just sit around and what. And then again, that's something I would see around in a conference room with people, you know, five levels down, thinking about what you will be fun, how good is this, how good is that? And then when the RAPE things, you know, Rune also conveyed that to his people, he's not going to overrule them, but he's going to say it. And the thing was the program managers said they were on their toes.

They said, you know, we've got to be really know what we're doing. Because in the end, we're going to talk to Arun and Steve. And they're going to sit there and ask us questions. And there'll be technical questions. And they'll know if we're BSing. Right. And so that was the other great thing about this. And the whole model was what I experienced at Bell Labs, very flat organization.

Right. There was no hierarchy. Right. And it could be sometimes a little unfriendly, but you're seeking the truth. And I said, and I wanted that spirit of Bell Laboratories to be in the people we brought in the Department of Energy. You spoke with realism about the challenges of attaining sustainability.

Yes. Attaining carbon neutrality. Right. and you started speaking like that when you were in the government and you're still speaking like that right you're you're one of very few i mean there's a lot of optimists out there but not realistic i'm both an optimist but also realistic you know that all the pledges of zero carbon emissions by 2050 yeah i mean this is zero carbon emissions in every sector right including agriculture yeah are we going to get there no

Yeah. And are we going to hold to, you know, 450 parts per million? No, we're going to go over that in about 15 years. And we're going to go to... And you mentioned three degrees. Yes. Just last week when we were in Korea. I think it's more likely three than two for sure. Yeah. And there's still a lot of people that are still talking in 1.5 degree. Well, you know, I when I started when I was lab director and I took that job because I said, first I said, I don't want to apply. I'm happy doing my research. And then I thought, well, look, I'm already going around talking about climate change. This is a great laboratory. Right. you know it's the first job or they trained graduate student postdoc maybe three dozen Nobel laureates that's a good track record yeah 15 Nobel lawyers who worked for the lab and say I'm talking about energy and climate change and I don't want to be director of a department of energy lab where I can get

some of the maybe the best scientists start thinking about technical solutions that was so I said finally okay I'll throw my hand in the ring. And so when I was off the job, immediately, you know, day one started talking about, hey, you know, we have to think about this. And some of my friends at Berkeley said at Berkeley lab said, well, we don't know anything about energy. And I said, neither do I. We're going to teach ourselves. That's what we did. before it became a big financial support item.

This is important. And I used to say there are going to be Nobel Prizes in the science discoveries that come into the solutions. They will be such good science that will earn Nobel Prizes. But don't do it for the Nobel Prize. Do it because we need to, you know, this is the mother necessity of all in, you know, necessity is the mother invention. and this is the biggest of all necessities. And so far, too. The blue lighting main diode and batteries.

There'll be more. You think those are going to win Nobel? They won Nobel. They won lithium ion battery and blue LEDs. They won a Nobel Prize already. There'll be more to come. For sure. Very exciting science.

But do it because we're trying to solve the world problem. And I still believe that. I still think it is the most important problem that we have to solve. And it needs policy, for sure. It needs public support. It needs the public to understand what the stakes are, which is very hard for them to understand. It seems abstract.

Well, maybe in the last half a dozen years. But how are we going to get there, though? I mean, at the moment, we're powered to the extent of around 6 terawatt. we're planning to get to 12 terawatts in the next i don't know 10 to 20 years how do we get there in a cool way i mean in an environmentally friendly way right right right difficult okay so here's the problem um we have wind we have solar great technologies uh we need to electrify but as you go more and more towards renewables like wind and solar that aren't steady can't be banked on and require a lot of area okay uh then energy storage becomes immense okay and then

depending on the country year if you're south korea if you're hawaii if you're any of these places you don't have a lot hawaias lots of sun south korea doesn't have very much sun and their wind is mediocre and and so so then what do you do And so what those countries do now is they import most of their energy, mostly fossil. But they have nuclear. But there's a big debate about nuclear. So I'm trying to convince people. Talk about that, man.

Don't, you know, the question is don't, let's not talk about what we like and dislike. Talk about our choices. Right. And the choices are for something compact that you can turn on. It's going to be natural get in the future. Sure. You know, we'll evolve from coal because it's too poisonous in many other respects. So I see naturally, as they see nuclear, as compact storage, you can turn on when you run out batteries.

And prospect in the next 20 years of batteries that are so effective and so cheap that they can run for a month on batteries just isn't going to be there. The big goal is when will we get to three days? Yeah. In a couple of decades. Okay. So just that long. Two decades. Two decades to get to three day around the world.

So I know I work on batteries. I'm working on utility scale batteries. They got to be cheap. They got to be reliable. So I'm thinking, okay, nuclear should come back and people should have an open mind. So I talked about the safety of nuclear and that people, it's irrational. And you have to gently try to convince them that you, eat a banana, you eat bachshoy.

I love that bachoy. And the amount of radiation you've just eaten will be a thousandfold more than eating a heavy fish diet, a fish caught next to Fukushima. Okay. So, and oh, by the way, the banana is not bad for you. It's okay. And you continue to eat bok choy because the radiation level is so low, it's not going to endanger your health. And so you have to think, but you think about burning coal or even natural gas and the nitrous oxide, the particular matter, these things.

Those are, so I'm trying to help convince people in a non, you know, talking down to a way to try to say, you know, that you have to understand. The risks you're taking, there aren't really risks. Right. And so this is not a risk. And if you don't do this and your energy prices go up, your economy will suffer a lot. Yeah. You know, sustainability or climate change is a much easier problem for developed economies.

It's a much, much more difficult problem for the less developed. the developing, if not the poor. Right. Right. Most of the people out there are still worried about putting food on a table. You've got the demand side, supply side. Demand side is easy. We can socially re-engineer.

From today onward, stop using coal. From tonight or tomorrow, start using whatever that's environmentally friendly. They'll do that if they can afford it. If they can afford it. That goes back to it. Right. Especially in fact, I agree with you. Right.

Absolutely. And, you know, we're talking about countries with huge fiscal space limitations, right? And monetary space limitations. The supply side is also partly solvable from a technological standpoint. You've got nuclear, wind, solar, and whatever. And you can tailor each one of these to whatever the demand is, right? The problem is the economics. You know, the economics is a lot more manageable within the developed economies.

Right. Furthermoreless, it's, you know, we're exposed. And I speak as a developing country citizen, right? I think it's going to be realistically difficult to resolve. You know, we're just going to have to be patient until the economics would make sense. Because you got to drive the cost down to at least, or at most, four cents on a kilowatt hour, right? Right.

Oh, I think. Preferably less. No, you want it to be one. One cent. Yeah. One cent. Then you're competitive with anything. Yeah.

Right. But that's going to take a long time and to drive things down from 10, 12, 15, 20 to less than four cents. Yes. So it requires, I think, geopolitical, some sort of geopolitical subsidization. I agree with you. at the rate that these guys are so fiscally limited, monetary, limited. No, I agree absolutely with that, that the rich countries have to help the poor countries.

And the poorer countries are the ones where you have the most population growth. Right. And because of that, you also have other needs. And as you say, all those reasons. So you look on how you can structure. First, you get the cost of financing down. that part could be pretty easy because you just need to backstop if the loan goes south for a few years or the project goes out.

Okay. The DOE program showed how effective that was. It didn't lose the government money, but it allowed things to really accelerate. The cost of capital is everything in developing countries. And so you want to aggressively put in play these areas where you lower the cost of capital. And then after that,

then there are what I would call some old habits and established sectors in all these things we're talking about, whether it's the primary energy source, coal, naturally has, whatever, or in any industry. And they want to say, okay, this is, you know, this is the way we do business. We know how we know this works. The first forays into that have to be subsidized

and backstop by a government to get a foothold. So people who can see with their own eyes that it can work. I was at a conference years ago, 15 years ago, and it was the Oslo Energy Conference where I was listening to a person say that solar is very unreliable. You know, the sun doesn't always shine. What you really need is the diesel generator, and while you generate your electricity from diesel,

it's really expensive. Okay. Coal is a different story, but that's what you're saying, and I was saying, have a diesel generator, it's backup. Okay, but if three-quarters of your energy comes from solar, that when the sun is shining, you can pump water for irrigation, you can purify water in diesel electricity, You can store energy and cell phones.

And the LED lights, which were just beginning to turn and said, you know, you can do a lot. Okay. But so I saw the incumbents saying, no, no, no, no, you shouldn't trust these things. And a lot of unscrupulous business people trying to sell junk, junk LEDs, junk batteries, through some of us. Yes, mostly it's a developing countries. And it's just atrocious. China was trying to unload appliances to sub-Saharan Africa.

They weren't allowed to sell in China because they were such low efficiency. But sub-Saharan Africa, the governments are subsidizing energy. They're subsidizing electricity. So they were unloading junk on poor developing countries. And so there's got to be something that says, you're not allowed to do that. If you're not allowed to sell this in your own country because if your own efficiency standards,

because you realize it's costing your country and your people more money, why should you be able to sell it in another country? Because you've got inventory, or you've got a factory that makes the junk? So there are things like that that can help. But in the end, it's... And now coal is really cheap and it's...

Yeah. We got a lot of those in... Indonesia. Yeah. And that's a problem because the temptation to scrape out the coal and burn it. It's easy and cheap. And it is so bad for people's health. Yeah. But there's no other choice. Right. I mean, yeah, if you, if you get me nuclear at a cost effective rate, done. We'll close the coal mines today. Well, if you get me cheap solar, you get me cheap hydrogen or whatever. Ah, that's the other thing. That's a scientific goal. Yeah. You can go to countries that. of abundant wind and solar and hydro and all these things make the stuff there make the hydrogen

there convert it to ammonia or even natural gas right we can ship ammonia natural gas and and super tanker type things right so it's like you're importing coal except now you don't have all the downsides and the poisons particular matter and the socks and the knocks and the climate stuff right but it's got to be competitive you can't pay twice as much absolutely cannot pay twice as much 10% more, it's okay. Yeah. Why is nuclear so unpopular? Fear.

There's a primal fear. It's unknown. It's like when you hear the word cancer, you get scared. Right. Even though you get more cancers from cold than from nuclear by a long shot. Right. But the facts are startlingly easier to swallow. Yes.

then, you know, what people tend to portray? Well, genetically modified crops. Right. We've been genetically breeding plants and animals for hundreds and thousands of years since the beginning of the agricultural revolutions, okay? That's okay. Then along comes science. And then we used to actually irradiate things with radiation,

smash up the DNA and then see what grows out of that. Okay, that's shotgun. The chance of getting a Frankenstein plan from that stuff was like crazy. Now all of a sudden, there's a beautiful surgical way of introducing genes, but then it's creepy because then it's, you know, these scientists and white coats who are going to be, you know, not completely to be trusted. And so that's the Frankenstein, they have vision, the Dr. Frankenstein. So there's a, in hate fear of that.

And there's also pushing economically that you don't want to be upended if you're traditional supplier of seeds or this and that. And then Monsanto did terrible, terrible thing of, you know, genetically modifying something. So you had to go back to them for more seed. which is very different than generically modified golden rice for vitamin A deficiency probably saves a half million lives a year from young children, but the next generation of Cs still have that gene. So the farmers can planted.

BT eggplant and genetically modified, you don't have to use poisonous pesticides. stays the gene. Now, the insects are going to figure out a way for that one. So you need a couple of things, but you get rid of incestasized pesticides that, you know, people in Pakistan and you're drowning this stuff and it's expensive. And you don't make it so that it's an intended obsolescence for the farmers. So those are good stories. People should be saying these are, this is the power of this. And you need this in order to feed a growing population. And it's going to be cheaper.

But there's this inherent fear stoked by incumbents. Not the incumbent who said, you need diesel. You know, solar's not trustworthy. He says, no, you can have the diesel. You sit there. It's the operating cost that kill you for the diesel, not the generator. And the pollution, too. And the pollution.

I live in some of those places. Words have noisy diesel generators. Yeah. Yeah. So what's the way forward? I mean, you've talked about three sectors, right? That I think we need to focus on to usher the sustainability narrative, right? Agriculture, infrastructure, and power.

Yeah, we get it. But it's... You need a few things. You need people in the development who are importing this technology to the developing world to be absolutely scrupulously honest right and they're doing it because they're trying to help the world they're not trying to do it for a quick buck right and point off second tier stuff because there are a bunch of people like that they're like war profiteers it's the same sort of thing unscrupulous greedy in it they're going to get out in 10 or 20 years they'll have a fortune they

retire somehow society has got to figure out how to please against those people. Those people won't stop because they suddenly become altruistic. You've got to get government to say, no, you're not allowed to do this. Or this other country, you're not allowed to pull off your junk on us. And we started this clean energy ministerial. We started talking about energy efficiency and appliance standards. And we had South African representatives and said, well, you know, that's a lot of infrastructure to applying standards.

First I said, it's going to save you money. So we get that. But if you have a standard. Long term. Short term. You buy a refrigerator, you buy. Fans. Biggest cooling thing in India is fans.

Those overhand fans, those things could be 60% efficient. They could be 90% efficient. No. It's cheaper to build a 60% efficient one. Yeah. Okay. India's, you know, a lot of electricity is stolen and they'll solve a lot of subsidized. So, you know, who pays the cost?

In the end, it's the people. So there could be regulations, for that. And then you make sure that these development things, when solar does make sense, when it does make sense for this and that, do it. And then wait for some technology, appliances, efficiency, you don't need to set up a big apparatus like we have in the United States in the Department of Energy. You're right. It takes too much know-how and money and everything. Just watch what the developing countries do, follow a couple of years behind, because once a new technology you know it gets cheaper learning curve cheaper cheaper cheaper cheaper so you you know you don't want to be

first adopters the first electric vehicle is a hundred thousand dollars you know you want to wait for them to be thirty thousand dollars and right so you can fall behind in your standards and you can know what the market is doing and it's still you're much better off and having no standards so there are ways of of letting the rich countries be the first adopters. Right. First adopters are usually rich people. Yeah. Who want to do it because they love technology

or they feel they have to do it for other things. But, you know, the big breakthrough would be this 20 or 30,000. The car that undersells internal combustion engine cars, first costs. It's a really better operating expense. First cost. It has to be first cost, too. And so those are things that I see very clearly as the challenges and how important it is to actually get people to move in the right direction.

Once you have those technologies, you don't need policy. People talk about the political will. I agree. Better technology? I agree. I'm a much bigger believer of technology as opposed to policy. And policy is a little more exposed than developing countries. it's more difficult to reshape.

Let the rich countries do the experiments on the policy side. Correct. You know, they're the ones who are going to first outlaw internal combustion engine vehicles. I don't expect Indonesia or India to do this first. They shouldn't. Yeah. Okay, even though, you know, the air pollution from that, those two cycles is terrible. It's okay.

Yeah, we love coal. So, I mean, so that's my view is. is let the first movers be the rich countries. They can afford it. And if there's a mistake, if they're forcing something too early, they'll know about it. Already, you know, this very aggressive,

no more internal combustion engines by 2030. And then they're bringing us, well, maybe 2035, which, you know, someone who really cares about climate, that's a sensible thing to do. 2030 is just around the corner. The price won't be right by 2030.

It's just outlawed. I'm smelling optimism in your tone in that in the near foreseeable future, technologically, things are going to be available cheaply. Now, having said that, we're still being meeting lots of carbon by 2050 and maybe even by 2075. And so the other thing that there's a split among some people, I said, okay, because of that, because we can go over 450 and probably 550, We need to capture carbon out of the atmosphere and sequester safely.

Because the time of damage is 50 years to several hundred years. It'll take the glaciers to reach the new states and several hundred years, maybe half a millennium. Because the bottoms of the oceans are so cold, the fact that you've got carbon dioxide barrier now, a heat barrier. So sun energy coming in, roughly the same. Energy gone on and less. So what do you do? You warm up the ocean. So most of the heat that should have been changing our weather is used to warm up the ocean,

but like you're melting ice cubes. That is known within 20% is of roughly 40 years to get two thirds away to the final temperature. Get rid of the carbon dioxide before you warm up the ocean, before the weather really changes. because what we've already done if you don't do that, we're in much worse territory. It's already written in, but it's not written in. Unlike cancer mutations, which you don't reverse, we can get the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

No? Other people say, no, you can't do that. But it gives fossil fuel people a chance to go on and continue. This is not about fossil fuel for electricity. This is about greenhouse gas emissions and agriculture. you've got to decarbonized steel, chemicals, plastics, concrete, everything. Concrete, yeah. Yeah, 8% is concrete.

You've got to decarbonize all these things. It's not going to have, we don't have those technologies at the moment. It could take a decade or three. Meanwhile, you've got the carbon in there. So you've got to get it out. And so this clear-eyed, it will give the fossil fuel companies longer to exist is a little bit too religious for me. You know, I've seen the graphs written by, you know, these famous oil and gas consultant, right?

It's sort of like plateauing in the next couple of decades at least. You know, you've got demand for fossil coming down from automotives. Demand for fossil from petrochemicals going up. Demand for fossil from aviation still going up. Yep. So, net net, it's not coming down. Yeah. For the next 10 or 20 years, I think absolutely that's probably going to happen.

Yeah. All the plastics to make the lightweight cars, they, for... Everything you've seen in a car is petrol cam. Yeah. Yeah. And so until we get, until we can... Okay, so there's another technology thing. Can we...

Is enough agriculture that we can start to raise agriculture for food. Right. of $8 billion going to $9 or $10, and enough for a substitute for plastics, or at least aviation fuel. But I don't think aviation fuel, I think, you know, but the plastic thing is a real issue. Now, having said the plastics, you know, chemistry, as we both agree, is petrochemistry. Because you take some high energy content molecule and you're gliding downhill. right to make anything you want and the last thing and then there's this well it's got to be by the variable no no no no you dug something out of the ground do it and you and you and you throw it

in the atmosphere no you dig it out of the ground use it make sure it never goes in the atmosphere the waste issue that's around the world the micropastics on that is something of you know pay attention or garbage. Yeah. You can socially re-engineer that. You can socially re-engineer the garbage problem. Yeah. And it's hard technically to, because the competition for the petrol side of the chemicals is hard.

Whether plants can make inroads, some of it, yes, but maybe not all. I don't know. But these are things where you need a realism. and the fact that the problem is really big. It is profoundly big. But like I said, you know, it's going to spur great invention, great discovery. And in the end, it can be reversible. Draw the picture for us for 2050.

Temperature would have risen three degrees? No. How many islands would have been submerged? No, no, no, no. No, no, much slower than that. I think we're talking, the three-degree stuff we're talking about is the end of this century. It's reversible. Yeah.

And we have to develop the technology that can reverse it. And so my optimism is, no, we shouldn't not talk about going above certain things. Right. They're going to happen. Recognize they're going to happen. Think of what's going to happen next. You know, there's a feeling, oh, then you give it. Well, if you give up, then what do you do? You live life like, whoopee?

You give up on your children, you give it, no, you gotta keep on trying. And it's really important, and my optimism is we will lick the problem, but it won't be by 2050, maybe, 2075, yeah. Okay? And we have to reverse the damage, and it is reversible. That, the climate guys know, I know. I know. And so we say, look, it's not a point of no return.

It's not like you've been smoking for 30 years and you've caused all these mutations and we can't stop that nowadays. You know, you've been smoking for 30 years, chances of getting heart disease or lung cancer or anything else. We don't know anything in medicine to stop that. We know if we get rid of the CO2 in the atmosphere and store it, back on the ground where it came from okay then things will cool down before the ocean heats up the ocean is giving us time yeah that's the good news the bad news is the damage we've already

done is not visible we'll feel it in a few decades you'll feel it in like a half is you'll feel the worst of it in a half a century oh man man it's it's really is like smoky or or getting sunburned when you're in your 20s. It's like realizing that your cancer is caused by things you would have done 20 years ago. Yeah, if you're like complexion, you're taking lots of divets out of your head in your face when you're 60 and 70, right? Though the damage was done 20 through 60. Anyway, so the good news is it reversible?

But are you suggesting that the temperature rise would be less than two to three to degrees from today in 2050? I think two and a half degrees is almost baked in. Yeah. Okay. That's pretty bad, man. We're only 1.2 and look at how the weather's gotten really strange. Yeah.

At 1.2 from Go, which is beginning in the Industrial Revolution. So you double that? Things are very nonlinear. We're beginning to appreciate how sensitive. the environment is to slight changes in temperature. Who would have thought? But actually, but you could have known that because for five degrees centigrade,

you look back to the historical record where the continents were essentially the same place. There was no ice in Greenland in Antarctica. You look back in those times and you know what the sea level is, but you have a fossil record because of the things that live in the border of land and ocean, land goes up, land goes down.

So you have to average over the entire ocean. But we're talking tens of meters to 100 meters. This is crazy. So you never want to go to three degrees, really. But everybody says this is going to take a long time. Maybe, you know, they're getting a little, we're all getting an alarm. But once these glaciers start going down, You know, it's a plastic deformation.

Sea level. And you don't, the only way you stop it is you've got to lower the temperature. But that's going to take half a century to see the remedy. Yeah, but you've got to understand the temperature that's already baking if we do nothing is invisible. Yeah. That's the scary part. The real effects are not visible yet. Are we going to be able to emit carbon less than 35 gigatons by 2050 a year?

By 2050, 35? That's kind of like the rate at which we're emitting today. No, no, no, no, no. If you include the methane nitrous oxide, the carbon equivalent, it's more like 52 giga tons, 52. Ouch. Is that going to come down by 2050? It will come down. will go down to 31

then we're really toast but no it has to it has to be hopefully cut in half by 2050 I don't know that's pretty aggressive but that's pretty aggressive to be cut in half

is very aggressive is that realistic though I would say it's more realistic and going to zero yeah okay that's a great politically correct answer answer. If we can capture 10 gigatons, that's a big deal.

We will need to capture, in my humble opinion, 10 to 20, no matter what. Will there be a technology that can capture that much per annum? We don't have it yet. I know, but will there be in 27 years? 27? In 2050. Will we be able to capture carbon that much? No, no.

but it's a massive amount of carbon dioxide. And to sequester it safely. You kind of mentioned probably one or two gigs, right? Yeah, you want, we're trying to shoot. Okay, we're, we're now capturing and sequestering in CO2 from oil fuels. You know, we're talking 10 megatons, going to 30 megatons. Right? Yeah.

Okay. And you, and you really want to get into the gigatuton range. okay so what would be capturing a tenth of a gigaton in 20 probably a gigaton i don't even know of the gigat not 20 yeah probably one or two gigs yeah if we're lucky yes at best yeah wow we're exposed man oh by the way i don't count i don't count taking natural gas out of the ground taking a CO2 using hydrogen. I'm talking about capturing from the atmosphere, right? Okay. Okay. You know, making a clean source. That's helpful, but the fact that you're drilling for oil and natural gas, we already know, disrupts the ground and it seeps up and then not captured for energy. How much do you think?

Well, it's actually measured in different oil fields. It varies from about 2% to upwards of 6, 8%, depending on how mismanaged the oil fields, oil and gas fields are. It's a lot. Wow. You don't even using the energy content. It's just leaking out. Yeah. So, yeah, we, it's pretty sobering.

Yeah. Having said all this, you know, if you're assigned just doing research, you've got to be optimistic because you fail most of the time. That's a great one. That's a great one. And how many islands are exposed by 2050? I mean by way of the expected sea level rice. Oh, it's hard for me to say, but there's an... Been a thousand, right? Yeah, yeah. There's going to be a lot of people who are going to be displaced. Those people will be displaced. The people... Oh, by the way, there's another thing that displaces

people that's not fully appreciated. It's not the gentle rise. It's the storm surges that wipe out things. Let me give you an example of that. Okay, you get a storm surge. And if the storm surges happen every decade, it's going to displace people. They happen every century. There's no memory.

I was worried about temperature rise killing salmon in the Columbia River. They're all cold water fish, okay? and I thought, okay, that's going to happen the later part of this century. And then what happened is we had a tremendous heat wave in the western part of the United States this last summer. The temperature went really high for a week. Tons of salmon died. Wow.

So it's those fluctuations that bite you. It's those big hurricane storm surge cyclones that come long before the average. And this I'm seen with my own eyes. Holy smokes. I wasn't thinking about that 10 years ago. But these big fluctuations will cause earlier disruptions. We're already seeing those in Southeast Asia. Yes.

Bigger size. Typhoons and... It's in Pakistan. Yeah. Right? For months. Oh, and also aided by the fact that Himalayas are melting. Yeah.

So you get, and this physics we know, higher temperature means more water in amster, which means more precipitation. What happens, it doesn't happen when you want it. It happens when it happens. And so that's hard to predict. This is a kind of inconvenient truth that a lot of climate deniers don't believe, right? How do we deal with that denial? who, you know, these deniers who keep saying that, you know, a lot of the green gas houses, I mean, green gases out there are caused by natural disasters more than anything.

That's utter nonsense. That's arithmetic. We can make pretty good estimates, and we have satellite measurements of increases in carbon oxide, which bear the isotopic signature of sequestered carbon. but there's no more carbon 14. So that's fossil fuel. And that's arithmetic. Okay.

And so then, so the denying it or that it's natural and climates have changed in past since it's not our fault, that's the way the world works. Well, that's factually wrong. But even if it were natural, wouldn't you want to do something about it?

If the land next to a coastal city is sinking due to natural causes, you'd want to do something about it for societal reasons. But anyway, it's demonstrably factually wrong, but it's this wishful thinking that you tell people, says, don't worry about it. It's not as big a deal. You know, don't worry about COVID. It's not a big of a deal.

And by the way, the vaccines don't work. That was a message being sent by a president in the United States and his advisors, some of his advisors, including a person at Stanford. That, you know, our track record of the number of people who died of COVID should be a national shame and embarrassment of a developed society. We per capita, we had the most deaths and we could have done a lot about it. It's very sad. And so... People over science, not signs over people.

Yeah. Tell them what they want to hear. Trump is a master. Tell them what they want to hear. If their lives aren't getting better, I can fix it for you. He's not really interesting fixing it, but he will tell people what they want to hear. Hitler was good at that. Yeah.

What's your message to the kids and grandkids? Don't give up hope, number one, but press your parents and your grandparents, especially those who have influence, that don't you care about me? It's your responsibility. You're handing us a much worse world. Stop it. And being in personal habits and any influence and as you vote in the polls. And, oh, by the way, taking a 10% hitting in your,

income for me is not the end of the world for you but it might be really bad for us that personal pressure can start to move things right it was one of those i i said this one once when i was secretary of energy and told i could never say that i get i told a bunch of senators story imagine you're on your deathbed and you're sorry i'm like you're going to kids and you're grandchildren. One of your grandchildren says, Grandpa, you could have done something about it. You were in position of political limits. You would have done something about this. Didn't you love us? I was promptly told, I should never say that again, to any senator. Why not? This makes him feel very uncomfortable. That was the idea. Yes. Yes, you should feel uncomfortable if you're, if you're, if

sacrificing someone's future for a little bit more personal greed, especially in rich countries and rich people. You know, it's very different if you're struggling to survive. Do you sense that there needs to be a new kind of political culture in households, in schools, in social institutions, where the conversation needs to start changing, right? Yeah. Both for the demand side and the supply side of the game.

And it's not about you. It's about me and your grandkids. Right. Not mortgaging the future for today. Yeah. And there's all these sayings, you know, you don't inherit the land from your ancestors. You borrow from your children. That's very true.

Ancient Native American saying, usually the indigenous people who live very close to land have a real profound appreciation of a person's impact on nature. and they're immersed in it and so yes these things have to change and there has to be a good motivation and the rich countries have to help the poor countries and be the early adopters and make this work and you're optimistic about some sort of acceleration of scientific discoveries i have choice yeah i'll give you look scientists we think we can do anything Hey, this is a challenge. This is great.

When I was, I'm going to stop, but when the Bacondo oil spill, go Mexico. And I made a suggestion that I don't know how the president learned, I think, my chief staff, and I suggested some things, BP. They left, he's learned that the BPA is laughed at it and said, you know, he may be right. So the next coming in a meeting, it's early May. He just goes up and says, shoot, go down and help them stop the leap. Not I want to form a committee. Not any of this stuff.

And so what did I want to do? I didn't want a form a committee. I said, okay, I need really out-of-the-box thinkers, original thinkers. We don't know anything about oil. But BP has access so all the petroleum engineers they need. And so we're going to go and help them. And so again, I called up the first thing, names that I called them up next day. They all said yes.

And so, by the way, great. Or sometimes they say, let me tell my department. I'm teaching a course. Let me tell my spouse and this and that. But they all said yes. And I said, first meeting 8 a.m. Houston tomorrow. Because it was a national emergency. And it was a patriotic duty.

It was a cold arms. And these brilliant people ended up, you know, there's only half a dozen of us. I've spent half my time down there for two months. And so a lot of things were all floated. And I was actually seeing there. in Houston half the time. Not all the people were there half the time. Most of them were not,

but they were in constant communication, daily's. Okay. And we did help them stop the leak. Okay. Yeah. But there was something about that. I said after,

I saw BP school up two weeks later. I said, no, I can't. This is crazy. These guys are still acting like rash cowboys. So I said, from here on in, before you do anything, we have to agree on exactly what you're going to do. And I have to buy into this. And my little group said, you know, I want to do that because you take responsibility if you're demanding that you have to approve this. That's okay.

If it goes wrong and I get fired, I will have done my scientific best. We don't vote in this committee. we're here to talk to each other and the decisions on me, I can live with that. I can assure you no Washington bureaucrat thinks that way. You signs the heck out of that. This was a great example of how science overrules politics. Yes.

And now we're living in an era or a world where, forgive me, but politics tends to overrule signs a lot more than necessary. When we finally figured out how to get, get the flange off and then we could put a tight cap on the BP guys had to send me their blueprints yeah so I said okay great so I called people at Los Alamos and also sendia and said look I got a job for you they we have these blueprints we have the pressure of the well we have all these things I want you guys to go over this design with fine-tooth column see is it going to fail the pressures the upper

limit of the pressures, things like that. And they came back and said, but sir, you don't understand it's the fourth of July. It was literally the fourth of July. And I said, oh, that's right. Hmm. Well, they usually have big news. Maybe six o'clock, give them a coal. But I'd like to know the answer two days. So they worked around the clock. They came back with these detailed calculations and said, no, the steel's too thin. You got to make it. thicker, this is what we give. And oh, by the way, this big two-story thing was tipped because of boat and 45 degrees and sank. This steel pipe, one mile, was stretching like a rubber band. This whole thing tilts two degrees and then there's a swivel thing with a lasmary and it goes another six degrees.

And they said, the biggest thing is you put this 33-ton thing on top of that, you'll break off that alasemar and then you can never do anything until you, you can never see that well from the top. And that was a message. Next day, okay, beep, guys,

this is it. This is the calculations. Tell me what you think. They came back and said, first they were very impressed. Over two day, working around the clock. These guys came up and said,

we agree. You're right. And oh, by the way, we agree with this, that the risk of this snapping off is too much. So we sat there and said, okay, we can figure out how to straighten it.

It's very clever. So you have this thing. It's, it tilted so much. It was hard stuck. But you can actually put little hydraulic things in there with these remotely operated, you know, and then we made, and then when it's only two degrees instead of eight degrees, it will hold. And so when that was all done, you know how the BPM changes.

Go ahead. they were by this time totally you know we weren't telling the press anything we weren't talking to anybody we were just helping them and they were they would bear everything to us and because we were you know really trying to solve together so the cabinet you know i'd come back and i said steve this is really this must be really stressful you know every every day 24 7 CNN you have the oil and gas come out you look happy. I said, yeah, I am, because I'm using science to solve a technical problem. I'm using my brain to solve a scientific problem.

Couldn't be happier. Wow. I'm going to ask you the last question, since I'm talking to a Nobel Prize winner. You know, United States has produced more than 400 Nobel laureates, laureates, disproportionately much higher than any other country. What makes it possible? And how could that inspire other countries? Well, there are two things.

First, we were rich. Okay, that's a long way for some of us. Hitler helped. Mussolini helped. Mao helped. Okay, so there's that. Episotic stress is helped. Yes, episodic stress is helped.

But there's something else. we were rich, but also something else that Europe didn't have, you come to the United States. You can be a first generation and in your adopted country, you can be accepted and your kids will be seen day one as American. You can be third or fourth generation, Swiss or German, and you're considered foreigner. So inbred in the society was this acceptance, which a few politicians these areas are trying to stamp out, but that's a half faith. It's a multinational society and it was a mixing ground. And yes, you can keep your national identity in your language or anything,

but you're becoming American and you're going to be accepted. And it was a meritocracy. And so that plus capital support of science after World War II was a big deal. But it was that other thing. You come to the United States, your kids will be American, not viewed as a lens you're not one of us you may look different but you know you're viewed as American so that's great one one last question I got a few last questions is is meritocracy at risk yes given how political systems are yes changing globally it's at risk for two reasons

some of for for socially noble reasons that you want to to correct social laws of decades, if not, and centuries. But if you throw America actually completely out the door and go by fractional this and fraction of that, not you as an individual, you have a problem. Because that could shred society. You're there because you are different, but you have a different race, a different background,

a different this. So these good social reasons for why you would want that. I believe in affirmative action, but affirmative action taking too far could be very bad. And oh, by the way, going back to my high school days, I didn't get into Yale in Princeton. I got in Rochester. It was the best school for me. Turned out okay, man. Yeah, turn out okay.

You know, it's what you make out of your life. Yeah. With the chances you've given, take advantage of them. And it's, you know, so the high school, the college, that's your start of your life. Yeah. Right. And it's all, Obama said this many, many times. It wasn't really nervous this.

You know, if you want to work, there's nothing that's going to stop you. If you want to apply yourself, you have the opportunity to do everything. We want to make sure that people have the opportunity, that they're not frozen out for other reasons. Now, if you grow up poor, I'm a big believer, economically disadvantaged people, you know, this is bad. So having your admissions for economically disadvantaged people who you believe, well, by the time they graduate, be as good as the rich kids, I'm all for that. Wow. Steve, thank you so much. You're welcome.

Okay. That was Professor Stephen Chu Nobel laureate in physics at Stanford University. Thank you. This is end game.