Endgame with Gita Wirjawan - Steven Koonin: Why Nuclear Energy Deserves A Comeback?

Episode Date: July 24, 2025

Where did the 2-degree limit come from? Why does nuclear energy deserve a comeback?In this episode, Steven Koonin discusses why it is “fundamentally immoral” for developed countries to dictate the climate agenda of developing nations, why electric vehicles are not a silver bullet, and how rushing to decarbonize could deepen global inequality.#Endgame #GitaWirjawan #StevenKooninAbout the guest:Steven E. Koonin is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a University Professor at NYU. He is also a former Undersecretary for Science at the U.S. Department of Energy and Chief Scientist at BP. His work focuses on climate science and energy, and his bestselling book “Unsettled” (2021) calls for more transparency in climate discourse.About the host: Gita is an Indonesian entrepreneur and educator. He is the founding partner of Ikhlas Capital and the chairman of Ancora Group. Currently, he is teaching at Stanford as a visiting scholar with Stanford's Precourt Institute for Energy; and a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.------------------------ Berminat menjadi pemimpin visioner berikutnya? Hubungi SGPP Indonesia di:[e-mail]⁠https://admissions.sgpp.ac.id⁠⁠https://wa.me/628111522504⁠Playlist episode "Endgame" lainnya:⁠Technology vs Humanity⁠⁠The Take⁠⁠Wandering Scientists⁠Kunjungi dan subscribe:⁠SGPP Indonesia⁠⁠Visinema Pictures

It disappoints me as a scientist. The problem with climate is that it takes a long time to realize that you got it wrong. It's fundamentally immoral to tell that poor part of the globe what kind of energy system they can have or how they should be living their lives. It's like telling a guy who's starving, don't eat that steak because of cholesterol. all. You got to deal with the immediate existential problems. You have the opportunity of intersecting, interacting with so many great scientists, one of which was Richard Feynman. How is he? Hi, friends. Today we're honored to have Steve Coonan, who was the former Undersecretary of Energy,

and he's also a tremendous scientist. Steve, thank you so much for grazing the show. Great to be here chatting with you. You went to Caltech and MIT. I did. And tell us about how you grew up and what role your parents and your ecosystem played in making you so curious. Yeah. You know, I'm fortunate to have grown up the way I did. I grew up in the middle of Brooklyn, in a middle class family. My mother had one year of college and my father no college at all. But when I was young, one of my early, memories, maybe I was three or four, was my father explaining nature to me. We would look at the sky, look at the moon, plants, and he would just tell me stories. And I think that may have been

what made me curious about the world and how it worked. And that curiosity served me through elementary school and high school. I was just interested in how things worked. I didn't know it was called physics or science, but eventually, of course, discovered that. You had an incident with thermometers. Oh, yes. The thermometer story, which I talked about in the book a bit. Yeah, so I was interested, I think maybe unusually so, in measuring things. And again, that's what scientists do, of course.

And we had in my kindergarten classroom a set of rocks and, magnets and things, science kinds of things for kids to play with. And there was a thermometer in there, a little mercury or liquid, probably alcohol, not mercury, thermometer. Although in those days, people weren't as careful about mercury as they are today. And I, of course, watched it change during the day inside the classroom, but then I wanted to see what would happen if I took it outside. And so one day, as class was breaking up, I took the thermometer, put it in my pocket and

took it outside to see what it was reading. And then I took it home because I wanted to put it in the refrigerator and see whether it would go down or up. Eventually, my mother finds out that I've got this thing, and she got really mad that I took it from school. Next day, she marched me back into the classroom. I was made to apologize and put the thermometer back. But then a couple days later, my parents got me my own thermometer, and so I was out measuring all kinds of temperatures. And if I look at my professional life, I see a lot of what I've done is about observing, measuring, characterizing.

And maybe it's in the genes, I don't know, or the environment that I grew up with. Why physics? I was good at math. And I liked physics. I liked physics a lot because it was a fundamental description of matter and energy. You didn't have to know a lot to be good in physics. You just needed a few general principles, conservation of energy, conservation of momentum, and so on, and then just be clever at how you had to apply them to particular situations.

In contrast, going through middle school, high school, I hated geology, biology, even chemistry, because you had to remember too much. Who could remember the difference between ethane and ethylene, for example? Not to mention a periodic table. And the periodic table, although as a nuclear physicist, I had to learn the periodic table. But you just had to know too much. And my mind was not like that. And I've discovered, of course, talking with other physicists that were all like that in that way.

You had the opportunity of intersecting, interacting with so many great scientists, one of which was Richard Feynman. was he? Yeah, Dick was, when I finally was on the Caltech faculty, Dick was a neighbor two doors down from me in Altadena. Sadly, all those houses burned in the last a couple months. As an undergrad, Dick was one of the reasons, of course, I and many others came to Caltech. He was such a towering, mythical almost figure.

And, of course, we had all read the famous red books, the Feynman lectures. on physics. I did get to play the bongos with Dick once as a student. So, you know, Caltech is relatively small classes, and I was in one class, I think in my sophomore year,

taught by another famous Caltech professor, Bob Layton. And Bob son Ralph Layton wrote some books together with Dick. Anyway, Bob had the class over one night to his house. he was a consummate experimentalist, so he had his own telescope that he built in the backyard and so on. But anyway, we're all over there having barbecue and in Walk Stick is another guest at the party, and eventually the bongo drums come out

and we're all banging on various things. He was a lot of fun. As a faculty colleague, I can tell this story, which is interesting. I was an undergrad at Caltech and finished up, and there was kind of the intention that I would go off to graduate school and come back because I was interested in nuclear physics, which Caltech had a robust experimental operation at the time, but not much theory.

And so they thought they would send me off to MIT, and I'd get a PhD and maybe come back as a faculty member. Things worked out pretty well. I finished my, I almost finished with my PhD at two and a half years at MIT. And I come back to give what's effectively a hiring seminar. Right. It's the big Thursday colloquium, 200 people in a room. I had often sat in the back of that seminar way up in the nosebleed section with the students,

the bald heads down in the front row. And then there I am six months away from my PhD giving the colloquial. I'm in the front of the hall. And as usual, Dick and the other senior people are sitting in the front row. And I get about 15 minutes into the talk, and Dick booms out. He says, I don't understand that. It doesn't sound right to me. And I patiently try to explain what it is.

Some of the work I had done at MIT. And I go on, five minutes later, he says, no, that doesn't make any sense. And I figured, my God, I'm sunk at this point. So I mumbled through it and eventually get through the rest of the talk. And then as usual, the seminar breaks up. The audience begins up out of their seats, files out. Dick bounces out of the seat in the front row and comes up to me and says, I was just testing you.

You did fine. All right. So I felt better after that. So I signed on right out of grad school. an assistant professor. Sure. And I really enjoyed 30 years at Caltech on the faculty. I want to go back a little bit to your upbringing.

You got a brother, that's a musician. How did your parents see the two of you growing up differently? One guy becoming a physicist, not a guy becoming a musician. I think my parents were born in the U.S., though their parents were not. I think they were kind of in awe of us. As I mentioned, in terms of education, they really didn't go much further than high school. But my father certainly enjoyed music a lot,

and I think that contributed to my brother's career. But it was just the kind of thing that Jewish parents did for their kids. You learn music. And I started piano at about age five or six, and my brother started guitar at about age four. And we both became pretty accomplished at it. We played in bands as teenagers, and we played together a lot. But he was just so much better than I.

I mean, he's got perfect pitch and pursued a professional career as a musician. But I think it was encouragement on the part of my parents. It was, I don't really understand what the kids are doing, but they seem to be successful at it, and they're passionate about it, and we will just back them. And, of course, there were the usual lessons. They were taking us to band gigs. For me, it was extra-curricular activities on Saturday,

going to Columbia University for science and things of that. It's just amazing how your parents would have been highly supportive. Yeah. The democratization of, you know. Yeah. I can't believe they let me do some of the things I did. I finished high school at age 16, a little young. It skipped a grade.

And I really wanted to go to Caltech for various reasons all the way across the country. You got into Caltech at the age of 16. Yeah. Yeah. And my parents let me go. Of course, now with my own children, well past that age. But at that age, I would have never let them do that. One of the ethos at Caltech was to embrace scientific integrity.

You mentioned that in the book. And how that gets juxtaposed with some of the realities you had to deal with? Yeah. So from the beginning at Caltech, it had in those days, and I think it still does, an honor system for the undergrads. And it gets inculcated into you from the first day on campus. Basic principle is you shouldn't take unfair advantage of some other member of the Caltech community. And that's interpreted or realized in terms of integrity on exams, on homework,

and of course more serious violations of stealing things and so on. And it worked very well. And forms, it is meant to be also, of course, part of the ethos for professional scientists and engineers. And I hardly these days think about it, it's just so ingrained in what the way I think about things, the way I do. As I moved on in my professional career and started to interact with senior scientists giving advice to government and so on, it is just the way we did things. And you don't fudge, you tell the whole truth and so on. And Dick Feynman, who we talked about already, kind of personified that for many of us.

And you saw Dick do that in the Challenger Commission and also many of the things the way he just interacted with students and other scientists. What has happened? Why is it that we're seeing more and more people fall into this trap of hyping things or overhyping things? I think there is, or even worse, not telling the truth, we will get on to some of the more modern topics. But I think it's because it's several things. One is there are a lot more channels now to reach people, social media, the web, podcast, casts. Another is that there are rewards for fudging things, whether it's financial fame,

status, that induce people to do it. And, you know, it's more common in some disciplines than others as biomedical has become so prominent and justifiably so, because we've had great scientific progress in that. It's a field which has a lot more loss of integrity, let me say that, than let's say physics. Climate science is somewhere in the middle. We can talk about that. Talk about some of the misinformation or even disinformation about climate change. I mean, one of the things that surprises people when I tell them is that if you read the official UN reports, so not making things up. There are, for example, no long-term

trends in hurricanes in either intensity or frequency. Talked about that on the book. Yeah, and if you just get your information from the media or social media, you're surprised by that. Similarly, the highest temperatures in the U.S. have not gone up in the last hundred and something years.

And it's right there in the reports, but you never hear that. I can go on. There are so many stories like that in the climate and energy business, actually, that it disappoints me as a scientist, that that kind of misinformation is being what's promulgated as the official science. Well, I mean, if you take a look at the way the media have evolved in the last call it a couple of decades, right? the way the incentives have worked gotten completely upended. It's the clickbaits. Yeah.

It's the sensationalization. It's the, I call it the festafalization. Yeah. Good. As opposed to the intellectualization. Yeah. And then this kind of leads up to this, you know, branching, you know, between what's seeking truth and what's seeking something else.

There is, that's part of it. And I think that maybe is a big part of it, but another part is ideology or belief in a certain set of facts about the climate and energy and not willing to explore or portray alternatives. So many of the journalists now covering climate have a climate beat, let's say, they've got to produce articles about climate to want to get on the front page or the home page. or the home page. They're not trained in science. You look at the trainings, their background, or they're trained in some other field, like biology, not to pick on the biologists,

but it's not a great basis for understanding climate. And so they'll just take what the press releases hand out. They also have the mission to save the Earth and educate the public. and a lot of the nuances or alternatives to reducing carbon emissions never get discussed. And so the public is terribly misled. The politicians have to cater to the public if they want to get reelected. And so you see Europe, for example, on a suicide march because of their energy policies driven by climate. Wow.

I mean, it's really bad. My own belief is that it will self-correct, but the question is, will we go too far down before we start to self-correct? What would it take for, I love the phrase that you use, uncertainties being the prime mover and motivator of signs, what would it take for that to be retained at the rate that you've somewhat departed or diverged Boy, you know, I think uncertainties come to the fall when alleged certainties fail. You know, if you believe, for example, that wind and solar generation in the grid is the future.

And then you discover that your electricity goes out every month for a few hours because the wind and solar fail. I think that's a powerful motivator to re-examine your basic premises. The problem with climate, as opposed to energy, the problem with climate is that it takes a long time to realize that you got it wrong. If you said the earth is going to warm by two degrees over 30 years, you got 30 years to prove that right or wrong. And by that time, everybody's forgotten what you said. And you're on to some other misinformation. Well, I mean, some, some have already come up with the notion that it's going to be at least three degrees, right? And I'm just surprised how the party line for many policy makers around the world would be with respect to 1.5 degrees.

So that's worth telling you a little bit about how the one and a half degrees or two degrees or three degrees came about, right? Okay. So where did two degrees come from? I was once talking with a guy named Sheldon Huber, who's ran one of the major climate centers in Germany. And he's a physicist. Right. He knew better than what he did. And I asked him, he was known as the father of the two degree limit and promulgated two degrees to many people in Europe.

And I asked him once privately, why two degrees? Why not two and a half or one and a half or whatever? And he said two degrees is about right, and it's an easy number for the politicians to remember. Ouch. All right? And of course, then the politicians trying to one up each other changed it to one and a half degrees. But we're going to go past one and a half degrees within the next couple decades. And the world is not going to fall apart.

Right. It will not. It's a very soft, perhaps not even valid limit. Right. You know that at least for economic projections, that the impact on either the national GDPs or the global GDP is only a couple percent for a couple degrees. If the world got three degrees warmer at some point in the future, the GDP would only be a few percent smaller than it would have been otherwise, at least according to projections. Now, there are, of course, inequities and there are uncertainties, but nevertheless, you would not use the word existential. to describe that kind of projection.

And there it is in the official literature from the governments, but you never hear that. The Obama, not I'm sorry, the Biden White House in March of 2023 put out a white paper from the Council of Economic Advisors and Office of Management and Budget

that said for the U.S. GDP it would be less than 1% for three degrees of warming. Right. Yet the president keeps talking about existential threat. I don't understand that. Well, no, I do understand it, okay? Because the politicians are about feelings, perceptions, they're not about facts.

Fear mongering. Yeah, of course. I love this quote. It's in the book. H.L. Mencken, who was a somewhat cynical, acerbic journalist at the beginning of the 20th century in the U.S., is that something like, the purpose of practical politics is to keep the electorate alarmed by a series of mostly. imaginary hobgoblins so that they will be clamoring to be led to safety. It's a powerful

motivator fear. Missile gap in the U.S. in the 1960s. We were afraid that the Russians or the Soviets had more missiles than we did. Immigration at the border. We're afraid that the country is going to be overrun by people from South America and Central America. It's what the politicians do. Well, another phrase you came up with in the book was how rapid decarbonization is an overkill. You know, it doesn't take into account many considerations for humanity. There are many reasons why you want to take decarbonization slowly. Of course, if it were really an existential threat was going to happen next decade, then you'd think differently. But it's not that.

Yeah. Okay. So why might you not want to decarbonize rapidly? First of all, within, let's just talk about within a country, let's say within the U.S., which I know best, energy touches everything. It is what enables modern society. And so if you're going to monkey with the energy system and change it, you'd better do it pretty thoughtfully. Otherwise, you're in big trouble.

And again, we've seen Europe trying to decarbonize too rapidly. as a result, they see deindustrialization, political instability, and so on. So first of all, change it slowly because it touches everything, but also the facilities that give us energy, whether it's a power plant or refinery, they last a long time. And you shouldn't change them too rapidly or you get stranded assets. And things have to work together. You can't just slap on a lot of wind and slow. or onto a grid and expect the grid to be still stable and reliable.

We can go to the technical issues if you like, but basically you can't change things too rapidly. First of all, secondly, if we go outside of a country, the U.S., we in the developed world enjoy a privileged life where there is abundant energy. it's affordable, it's reliable, and it's what gives us the high quality of life that we enjoy in the U.S., Japan, Europe, and so on. What most people don't realize until you teach it to them or tell them is that there are 6 billion people in the world who are energy-starved to varying degrees. 6.5 billion. Six and a half, right?

That'll be a deal. Right. And their overwhelming priority is to get more energy so that they can have the kind of life that the rest of us live. And, you know, it's, I like to say it's fundamentally immoral to tell that poor part of the globe what kind of energy system they can have or how they should be living their lives. It's existential. It is existential for them, right? It's refrigeration, it's guiding, it's mobility, it's... Putting food on a table.

That's right. And what you see when you look at countries broadly is that as GDP per capita goes up, the country becomes richer, their energy use goes up. And for the poor countries, it's universal. I can tell you, it's four megajoules per year for every dollar of GDP. And, you know, that kind of universality is really interesting. so as a subject of research of mine, but it also means that we're going to see a great increase in energy demand

as those six and a half billion people become richer as they should over the next 30 years. Talking about elevation from poverty, or extreme poverty, potential prosperity for six and a half billion people. Disease will go down because sanitation will improve. You can have clean water. You have refrigeration for fresh food. You have cooking indoors with, let's say, propane as opposed to traditional biomass, wood and dung, which kills two million people a year. And you tell this to students here or adults who haven't thought about it, and they're astounded.

It's a completely different perspective than what you hear from the mainstream media in this country. I want to try to put this in a context of the region where I come from, right? And it's characteristic of a typical developing economy. You know, off the 8 billion people on a planet, about 84% earned less than $13,000. I call them developing or underdeveloped. Only 16% are developed economies, 16% of the planet. And what matters to people in developing economies in Southeast Asia, much less sub-Saharan countries, being able to put food on the table. So I think it's important to understand that there's no lack of desire for purposes of decarbonizing,

as long as it's not a disruption to the economic convention, which is why we can only use coal because that's the only thing affordable. And you should, okay? My perspective is, of course you should. I like to say, you know, it's like telling a guy who's starving, don't eat that steak because of a collective. All right. I mean, the people in the absence of everything else. Yeah, right.

And people in the developing world have much more real, immediate, and soluble problems than some vague climate thing that's going to happen 30 years from now. We don't know what might not happen. You got to deal with the immediate existential problems. And so when I say this to people here in the devout word who are advocating for rapid decarbonization worldwide, there is no good answer. Nobody gives me a good answer. And I see this as the nub of the climate issue. We could have in the U.S. or in Europe, we can have any energy system we want. We could shut down our emissions within a decade. It'll cost us money. It'll be politically

disruptive, but we could do it. The problem is in the developing world, you can't. And frankly, you should. The electrification for India and Indonesia is about 1,300 kilowatt hour per capita. U.S. is well above 10,000. Yeah. Singapore, just around 10,000. And I came up with this threshold of 6,000, which I think is a threshold for some kind of modernity. If, let's say, countries like Indonesia and the others in Southeast Asia, there's 10 countries.

we're to want to move up the needle from pre-existing levels to 6,000, we're going to have to build a terawatt. Yeah. Okay. That's about the U.S. total U.S. grid. Yeah. Well, 1,300 gigawatts, right? Yeah. And, well, not to mention the queue into the grid into the U.S. is about 2,600 gigawatts.

Yeah, capacity, yes. But a lot of that is wind and solar, which doesn't have much capacity. But anyway, yes, your numbers are right. Okay. So it's an enormous scale, right? Yeah. To do that. I don't know an awful lot about Southeast Asia. My only direct experience is Singapore, which is not representative.

It's first world. Of course, hyper first world in many ways. But, you know, there's coal, but there's a lot of gas in the region. And gas is better than coal for many dimensions. So I would say as quickly as you can develop gas. Yeah. More expensive at the moment. Yeah.

But with technological innovation, I think it's going to get cheaper. And gas is, I mean, a one-st-the-gast-turban is about a dollar a watt or so, maybe even less so, a million dollars a megawatt. And again, you've got so much gas in that region, as we do here in the U.S. Well, I mean, technologically, I think there is a solution. But economically, there is no solution. No, no. So I think we're just going to have to wait.

until such technological innovation gets marginally more efficient and more effective, cost-wise. Yes. I mean, you build coal and you should, right? Again, you're a cleaner coal, right? So you eliminate the local pollution, which we know how to do. Right. But the electricity is such an enabler that it will, of course, make society take off. You should.

But the problem is, as you know, you told me once it's capital, right? You need to have. Big time. Yeah. I mean, Southeast Asia will need at least $2 trillion to modernize. I mean, we don't have that kind of money domestically or locally or we've got to get it from outside. And whatever is coming from outside into Southeast Asia is predominantly going to Singapore. Because of that.

Yeah. Clarity of rule of law and all that. Is it, are the returns? there in the rest of Southeast Asia, but it's the risk that people are worried about? I could make a case that it's viable on a risk-adjusted basis. I could make a case that there's not enough comprehension about the region, you know, amongst or within the capital holders in the U.S. and other rich countries. They just don't understand, much less, you know, what's happening in sub-Saharan countries and all that, right?

And what about the natural resources as a source of wealth and capital? We've got plenty of fossil. We've got plenty of geothermal. We've got plenty of the raw materials for nuclear. And geothermal was allegedly we've got 40% of the global resource. Shower geothermal. Correct. But it's not being exploited because of the tariff.

right if you're a geothermal entrepreneur allegedly if you want to break even you got to be able to charge at least 13 cents per kilo oh that's a lot of money yeah i mean we can only afford five to seven cents and the government being a populist anywhere in developing country they don't want to charge to people any more than what the people could afford right so so that's the mismatch right 13 cents and five to seven cents and this has to go up right yeah with jesus GDP growth. And this has to come down with technological innovation.

Right, right. And I don't know when that intersection is going to take place. So I will ask a question out of naivity about the region. I mean, again, we talked about Singapore. They managed somehow. It took them 50 years or so. Is that a model for how Indonesia and some of the other countries can do? Or is an $85,000 GDP per account. Yeah. But they weren't like that all the time. If you go back to 1960. They were actually at par with Kenya in the 60s, right? But with the kind of leadership and governance, they've been able to put a lot of food on a table, a lot of health care on a table, a lot of cognitive capacity. Which, unfortunately, the other countries are bereft off. But I think from a natural resource standpoint is there.

But to get it out of earth and make it, you know, into workable energy, it's still costing more than what the people could afford. Some of the, if I'm correct, if I'm a firm, some of the international oil companies and gas companies are producing in Southeast Asia. They are. They are. And so they're investing. But they're taking the resource and shipping it around the globe somewhere.

No, I think the typical oil, it's there. There's some importation for some countries. but I think with respect to geothermal, with respect to other sources, those I think need to be explored more proactively. I want to ask you a nuclear. Yeah. Because it's, you know, the more and more people I talk to, it just seems to resonate more and more as a potential or viable solution.

So first of all, I will confess to a bias. My research work early in my career was nuclear physics, so I'm a nuclear partisan, but the nucleus is my friend. Okay. But, of course, I'm a scientist, not an engineer, so I can tell you in great detail how fission works, but I would not trust myself to design a reactor. Fine. No, you look at a proven technology. I'm talking about fission, now, nuclear power. as we call it. It's a proven technology. It is emissions free. It's dispatchable. That means you can

turn it on and off when you need it as opposed to wind and solar, which produce whenever the wind blows of the sunshine. And it's extraordinarily safe, despite Fukushima and Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, the number of fatalities or even illnesses as a result of nuclear power compared to, let's say, coal or even wind and solar, are pretty low, quite low. The problem is it's more costly, first of all, and secondly, compared to, let's say, gas or coal, there's a big capital expense up front. The operating expenses are small. So if you build a nuclear plant numbers, I sort of remember, the cost of electricity is only 15% operating expense, and the rest is capital expense.

So you put down a lot of money at the beginning, about $10 a watt, so $10 billion for a gigawatt power plant, which is a typical scale. And then you pay it off, and it takes your 30 years, you paid it off. And then it's a cash cow. And reactors will last for 50, 60 years. So it's a very different economics, but it has all these other positive qualities. So technology is now pushing to try to make small reactors viable. There's so-called small modular reactors. So a big, typical big nuclear power plant is about a gigawatt.

The small module reactors are about a tenth the size. And you might say, why do you want to make it small? I mean, the surface to volume ratio, which is what determines kind of thermal efficiency, goes in the wrong direction when you do that. The difference is, at least in the U.S., every big reactor is different. They're all custom built, and that means the licensing procedure, which is rather onerous, you've got to go through for each one separately. If you build the small ones, you would build it in a factory, not on site.

It would be a standard design, which has to be approved only once, and then you would ship him on a flatbed rail car or truck to the site and install them sequentially. That's also advantageous financially because if you get the first one running, you've got cash flow, which you can then use to finance the second and third. You also save on security and operating and so on.

So somebody said now there are about 40 firms that have small reactor designs, almost all them startups, that are trying in here in the, U.S. and in the West, New York General. How would the cost dynamics differ? Yeah. So the hope is that you could, after, let's say, the 10th one, you have come down the learning curve enough so that the cost per watt would at least not be, or per kilowatt

hour, would not be any more than the big ones. That would be the first goal. Whether you can get below that or not, I don't know. And here at Hoover, we've written a paper, several of us that suggest that six or seven utilities get together, pick a design of the small marcher reactors, and commission a run of, let's say, 10 of them with some budget. That will, 10 is enough to let you see whether you're going to come down the learning curve and have faster. And that the government backstop any overruns or half of overruns or whatever to give some assurance that they won't lose their shirts. You see, the problem is somebody's got to build the first few to demonstrate that the scaling

actually works. So, you know, there's a lot of competition internationally for designs of small module reactors. The Chinese are pretty active in this field. And so I think this administration, and particularly the current Secretary of Energy, is partial to trying to do something like that. That sounds good. So I was just at a big energy conference the last few days. The word on the street was first one in the ground in about six years and then five

years to get down the learning curve. So maybe a decade from now, we'll know whether this is a truly viable technology. What sort of longevity are we looking at here? Well, the SMRs. Yeah, I don't know how the SMRs differ from the B. big ones in terms of longevity, but I do know that are small reactors in submarines last several decades easily, and the big reactors are, they need to be relicensed after 20 or 30 years, but they run 50 or 60 years.

The fuel needs to be changed out, of course, in all of these. Every 50 to 60 years. You know the fuel in a, again, I don't know the number for the small module reactors, but the big ones, a third of the fuel gets rotated out every year or every two years. Because as the fuel burns, the reactivity goes down, some poisons build up, and you need to keep refueling it. Now, assuming 70% of the cost is KPEX, right? And if you amortize that over 50 to 60 years, on a per unit basis, it works out to be quite... If you're willing to go 50 or 60 years, usually it's 30. I think it requires long-view thinking, right?

And if you can get that kind of money or the government can step in and do it. You know, the changing the energy system, and I experienced this when I was in the government dealing with these issues. Changing the energy system now, we've got a mature system, is going to require some form of industrial policy much more than we have had over the last century in this country. And there are big political, ideological divides about industrial policy, picking winners and losers, intervening in the private sector. I think it's going to have to happen if we want significant change in the energy system.

Do you see this being applicable to developing economies? Oh, yeah, I think so. I think if you have a wise government that's thoughtful, it can do a lot. to kickstart, jumpstart, the energy system, the economy, and so on. The problem is too much government intervention and the government and to some extent the rest of the country getting addicted to government playing a big role in the economy. What's a great intersection between or amongst policy, academia, and science? I mean, you kind of wrote about that in a book.

Yeah, in terms of, I think we do really well in national security matters. I have been involved with a group for more than now 40 years called Jason. And they were a bunch of academics, mostly scientists and engineers, who provided technical advice to the government on all kinds of matters, ranging from biodefense to nuclear weapons to intelligence matters. And part of my ethos as a scientist was formed by watching the more senior members of that group, including Sid Drell, who was here at Stanford, go about providing advice. and you tell it like it is.

You don't make decisions yourself because usually the decisions involve things well beyond science and technology, values, finance, and so on. But you leave the decision making to the decision makers and not try to spin the decision one way or the other by the way in which you present the science and technology.

And I think that organization has worked very well. It's not too well known, but it's been quite influential in more than a few government matters. I want to take you to AI. I mean, I was talking to some people the other day, and if you do a simple query in chat GPT, 4.0, the amount of energy required is about 50 times compared to a simple search on a typical search engine. If you try to create some fancy dandy AI-generated image on Zora, it's 10,000 times. And at the rate that everybody, not just in the U.S., not just in China, but all across the world, they're all trying to AI themselves, you know, to whatever level, I mean, there seems to be some structural limitation here. It's called energy.

Yeah, yeah. Right. Yes. So at this energy conference I was at, which is all dimensions of the energy system, AI and its energy needs was a big topic. Right. Let me start by noting that if you manage to make AI more efficient, so you can reduce the energy use of the queries or the generative algorithms, you will not save energy. And I think there's a wonderful example of that from the 19th century. It goes under the name of Jevins principle or rebound.

And I'll tell the story briefly. There was a guy named William Stanley Jevons, who was working in the middle of the 19th century in England. And he was an economist. and he was watching the first steam engines get deployed. They were using coal, of course, to run the steam engines. And he started to realize that as the steam engines got better, they would. You would not use less coal, but you would use more coal because the steam engines would get deployed in other applications.

On a per unit basis. Yeah, right? And then he started to, that they would use less. they become more efficient, but you would not conserve coal. You'd use more of it. You see the same phenomenon now with lighting. As lighting shifted from incandescent to LEDs, they got 10 times more efficient. But now you see LED lights everywhere. They're all over your car. We put them on buildings and so on. Yes, I'm sure we're still saving electricity, but not as much as you thought you would. So if you make AI queries more efficient, you're just going to have more queries right now because demand is still growing up.

So that's not really, I mean, we should do it, of course, but that's not really a solution to the energy problem. I think we're just going to need more energy. The projections are significant growth, maybe 30% in the next decade or so here in the U.S. from data centers. And I think the hypers, the companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and so on, who are providing these services are really going to need to get captive power generation so that they will have either gas turbines or small modular reactors of their own that are powering their data centers.

There are real problems if you try to connect the data centers to the grid, and make the electricity available or draw the electricity from everybody. There are all kinds of financial implications, reliability implications. I think they'll get their own. Excuse me. They have, for developing nuclear, they're actually in a pretty good position because they've got capital and they've got a longer time horizon than many. So you start to see, let's see, Microsoft is reactivating,

one of the three mile iron reactors. Google has just signed a deal with one of the local chiros here, small nuclear companies. So that's going to happen, and that may be what gets nuclear, small nuclear off the ground. But that sounds a little bit concerning. It seems to be elitist, right? I mean, sure, these companies you've mentioned, they're going to take a proactive view on the U.S. the Chinese will also take a view on what needs to happen in China, right? Right.

But what happens to those that don't have money in Southeast Asia? Yeah. So, yeah, I think, you know, more and more countries are becoming interested in nuclear. And I think if we in the U.S. and maybe China and France can drive the cost, come down the learning crew, then it starts to become more feasible for the rest of the world. It'll probably still be more expensive than the coal and gas. But if the West really cares about emissions, then you could imagine the West subsidizing that

or paying the green premium, as Bill Gates calls it, and bringing nuclear. There are some proliferation concerns. Nuclear technology can be used for good and bad. And yes, nuclear reactors cannot explode or be, in a nuclear sense cannot explode or be turned into weapons, but the technology is not so different from a weapons program. And so we need to be careful about managing the fuel

and managing the operational reactors so that we at least inhibit that from happening. I want to take you back to the mindset of a typical developing economy. I'll use India and India. Indonesia. Good, good, large developing economies, right? As examples, India has around 400,000 megawatts worth of existing power generation. Indonesia probably about 80, 85,000.

India builds around 20,000 megawatts per year. Okay, good. Indonesia builds about 3,000. Which is the percentage is... Oh, less than... I forgot the Indonesia... the Indonesia less than 5%. Less than 80,000 pre-built

and then 3,000. 3,000. So that's about 3.5% 4%. At the rate that India builds about 20,000 per year, Indonesia builds 3,000. You know how long we're going to reach

6,000 kilowatt hour per capita in terms of electrification? More than 100 years. Yeah, it'll take 4. And we've got to be using the assumption that every incremental wattage will be using

renewables. We've got to be using the assumption that we're going to be able to get the money to build it, right? So, it's completely irreconcilable with this aspiration of attaining carbon neutrality by 2050 or even 2016.

Where's the realism? There isn't. Okay? And that's what really disturbs me about the whole decarbonization discussion. The people who are quantitative and can understand the numbers, as you just went through for two countries, and we can do it for many others, realize on the basis of fundamentals that, as I used to say, this ain't going to happen, all right?

This is just not going to happen. Whereas the politicians and the NGOs who are divorced from techno-economic reality, keep saying net zero by 2050. And I've often asked myself, how did that disconnect happen? Because it's so blindingly obvious when you look at the number. And part of it is, I think the companies feel like they have to go along. The CEOs will lose their jobs or get canceled. The company will be destroyed.

if they don't at least bow to this aspirational goal. And of course, the politicians exploit it for reasons that H.O. Mencken at the studio. So, and I think that's, we need a greater technically informed voice in these matters. I mean, that's why I wrote the book

to just try to get people to understand the science and the technology and what some of the fundamental implications are. You know, politicians, they work on a four or five year recycling. At most. At most. And then academics, they think in decades, right? Then you've got entrepreneurs that probably think in five to ten years.

There's no proper alignment. You know, not talking to geologists because they think in timescales of 100 million years. It makes everything just seem impermanent. Yeah, yes. Changing or constantly changing. You know, there's another problem in this energy climate nexus, and that is, at least in the Western countries, the energy system is in private hands, almost all.

And the academics, if you've been an academic, your life, you have no sense of what the business world is like. It happened to me, all right? I was fortunate. I was almost 30 years in academic at Caltech, and then I jumped into the middle of this international energy company BP is the chief scientist, right? And it was an eye-opener to me in two ways. One is the diversity of skills you need to bring together in a coherent way to make a big company. I don't need to tell you that. You understand that. But the other is how powerfully the profit motive focuses the activity.

And just as one example, I was involved in the research end of BP, and we were working on, actually we had one of the research institutes working on a catalyst that would do something unusual for turning gas into plastics. And we got all excited because the catalysts showed favorable properties, but then somebody pointed out that it would take the entire world supplier platinum to build one plant using this catalyst. So that was the end of that. But as an academic, you would have been on the ceiling for having discovered this thing and

publish a paper and so on. But the practical implications are really what matters. And I keep telling academics who want to work in energy, go spend a year in industry so that it will condition the way in which you think about your research. You attach this idealism with realism. Yeah, yeah. And you've got, I think, much wiser. And, you know, the students who want to work in energy, it's okay to be.

be idolistic there, right? I'm okay with that. To have imagination and so on. I'm okay with that. But the faculty... You've got to understand the realities. Yes, of course. Look, I love the chart you showed me the other day, how these, the stickiness of how these

four megajoules will translate into one dollar worth of GDP increment, right? There's a lot of stickiness. There's one or two outliers, right? Yes, and you can explain those outliers. Yeah. But for example, Bhutan. Yeah. Bhutan and Norway.

And Norway, of course, for similar reason. So Bhutan is a relatively poor country on GDP, but it probably uses three or four times more energy per capita than all the other countries with that level of income. And the reason is that China built a hydro plant in Bhutan, and Bhutan gets to siphon off some of the electricity for their use. So it's there and they use it. But it's an anomaly.

So apart from it, the very few anomalies, there is a universal correlation between how much energy a country uses and its GDP. Yeah. GDP is putting food on the table. Yeah. It matters. To somebody in Africa, somebody in most countries in Southeast Asia.

Yeah. For most of the poorer countries in the world, it means putting food on the table. Absolutely. You get up here in the U.S. or even Norway or even Singapore, then it means luxury goods or fancy consumer products. So if that stickiness is pretty, seems empirical, right? And it's likely to stay that way for a long time. And then if you take a look at Indonesia exported about 250 million tons of coal to China last year.

And the number seems to be increasing every year. There's just no shortage of demand for the old paradigm. And it's probably mainly because of China's thirst to AI, you know, itself to a greater level. Although China also has a lot of heavy industry. Oh, absolutely. They bend metal and they built. Absolutely. Right.

Yeah. And they built, I think about 43,000 megawatts worth of power generation using coal in addition to the nuclear, wind, solar, whatever. And that's 13 times the amount we built. in Indonesia last year. So are you comfortable in predicting that the old paradigm is going to be sticky for a long time? I think so. I mean, because energy is the foundation, and you might ask, why do you want to change the paradigm? You might want to change the paradigm because of energy security issues, but you're not going

to run out of coal when you're trying to. If it's oil, you might want to change the paradigm. a transport paradigm, and China is moving big into electric vehicles, as you probably know. Why else might you want to change it? Local pollution, dirty sulfur in the air, or we have technologies that control for that, and we run coal plants here, which actually are quite clean. You might also want to change it because you care about carbon emissions. And yes, the world, some fraction of the world, does care about carbon emissions. But it's so low on the threat priority list that it's, I don't think it's enough of a driver

to get China or the developing countries to do something besides coal. The only way you're going to get them to do that is to make something else cheaper. And that's why we've got to try to bring nuclear down in cost. Wind and solar will not do it. That's worth talking about a little bit. Wind and solar are the cheapest way to generate electricity right now. The cost of solar has come down enormously and wind has come down some. It's already pretty cheap.

We're talking a few cents a kilowatt hour. There are two problems if you try to build a grid that's dominated by wind and solar. One is that the wind and solar don't generate all the time. Certainly the solar doesn't generate at night, and the wind, when it's be calmed, it doesn't work either. And there are, in Europe, in Texas, in California, places where we have a lot of wind and solar. There are long periods up to a couple weeks or more at a time where the wind and solar both don't generate. The Germans have a word for it. It's a thing.

It's called don't clout. which means dark stillness. And so if you rely on wind and solar too much, you're in big trouble when there's a dunco flouter. And actually there was one two months ago in northern Europe. So Germany became power-starved, and they had an import power from the Scandinavian countries who have hydro and nuclear.

And it was so much going into Northern Europe that it roiled the power markets in Sweden and Norway, to the extent that Sweden and Norway now want to disconnect from Germany, because they don't want these Dunklefrenner to happen and raise the power price. So you need a backup system to ride through the Dunkle Flouten. and that backup system, where I say batteries, but batteries are so expensive now to provide two weeks' worth of multi-gigawatt power just is much too expensive now. So you say, well, gas turbines or nuclear, that's fine, but you wind up running a separate power system that's dispatchable, that you can turn on and off, that's at least as capable

as the wind and solar. And so then you ask yourself, why am I running the wind and solar at all if I've got this backup system that's sitting idle most of the time? So that's one reason you don't want to build a grid that's heavy on wind and solar. The other reason is a little more technical, but is also worth explaining. The grids run on alternating current. 60 cycle in the U.S. 50 cycle in Europe, I would guess 50 cycle in Indonesia, but I don't know for sure. Sure. Okay. And that means that when you connect up to the grid, you're pushing and pulling energy into and out of the grid from a generator. And the generator's got to push in synchrony with the grid and pull in synchrony with the grid. Otherwise, you start to get very destructive flows of energy.

The synchrony of the grid, the fact that all of the generators push and pull at the same time together, is maintained by heavy speed. spinning metal. There are big flywheels in the generators that keep the frequency accurate to a part in 10 of the 4th. Wind and solar do not have heavy spinning metal. Wind has got turbans that, yes, they spin, but not at 60 cycles. And solar doesn't have turbines at all. And so you have to have electronic alternators and inverters that will try to keep things synchronous. And we don't really have that technical problem solved yet. Wow. Not to mention the stuff that goes into the batteries, the inverters, they're not necessarily environmentally friendly.

Right. Or really, yes. So the processing of the rare earth. and the lithium and so on that you need, and the fact that those minerals are maldistributed over the globe. And right now, China is, I don't know, 60% of the world's rare earths, 90% of the processing of the rare earths. So the U.S. is taking some steps to try to onshore

or at least trench shore some of the rare earth minerals, critical minerals, as they're called. But it's not enough for the globe as a whole. So another thing that surprises people if electrification of vehicles proceeds at the pace people are aspiring to, we're going to be about, I think it's a factor or two short in copper by the middle of the 2030s.

No kidding. Yeah. And it takes a decade. Indonesia has a lot of copper. Well, hey, you know, there's an opportunity there. So does Congo. Yeah. Yes, right, right.

But at least in this country, it takes 15 years to get a copper mine up and running. No kidding. Yeah. So is it just bureaucracy or technical? I think some of it, some of it is bureaucracy. I'm sure you can do it faster. But also, again, in this country, a lot of the good ore has already been found and exploited.

And so you're looking at lower grade oars. There are, excuse me, environmental issues with how you extract the copper and so on. So we are going to be, the new energy technologies, wind, solar, electric vehicles take eight to ten times more expensive stuff, rare stuff, than a conventional internal combustion engine or gas turbine. So the world hasn't thought that one through either. You know, people were saying that we're going to enter the Euro of abundance predominantly on the basis of solar.

What's the truism with respect to that statement? Well, the world is deploying a lot of solar. I'll quote Elon. I mean, he goes, all the energy that the United States would need would just involve about 100 square kilometers, I mean, miles of solar panels. You could draw a patch in Arizona and say we can run. First of all, again, it gets cloudy sometimes. What do you do?

Okay. You know, the bulk power system in the U.S., not your local electrical service, but the bulk one that runs on the big transmission lines, this federal state. standard is 99.99% reliable. Less than one day out of a decade, it should go down. And of course, all kinds of havoc happens when the electricity does go down. So you need a backup system, right? You might say, well, batteries, thermal storage.

But again, you add up how many batteries you need to ride through the once in a decade cloudiness in your patch in Arizona. You got a problem, right? And what happens when there's a hailstorm or a thunderstorm and it wipes out some fraction of your panels? There are all kinds. Renewable energy is very diffuse and so it takes large structures to collect it. And those become very difficult to put up and maintain. And, you know, in California, people wanted to put up modest-sized solar panels and there was the desert tortoise.

You know about that? There was some tortoise, which I'm sure is a perfectly fine animal. Its habitat was threatened by putting these solar panels up, and so it never happened. You know, the Japanese were the preeminent automotive players in the 90s. They could have been way ahead of time in pushing this EV narrative, right? But they held back. They seemed to have held back, right? Is it because of their visionary thinking that all these structural limitations you've laid out,

they probably thought about these back then or they just kind of missed the plot? First of all, I wouldn't agree quite that they missed the plot. When I think about the major automotive manufacturers and who is forward thinking, I think Toyota. And they're gang busting on hybrid. Yes. So. Not EVs.

Well, okay. So let's talk about that. No, no, but let's talk about that progression. But let me tell you a mistake I think they made first. They're not infallible. They bet on hydrogen a lot.

I tried it. You did. Yeah. Well, it's a smooth ride. But just refilling the damn thing just was more complicated than a physics class. The hydrogen also leaks. I mean, it's hard to keep contained because it's a small molecule.

And with any of these new vehicle technologies, you have to have simultaneously the vehicle, the fuel, and the fueling infrastructure. Right. And you probably couldn't find a hydrogen filling station close by, right? In California, there's probably a couple in Berkeley. One didn't work. Right, you know, travel a few miles. So Toyota bet on hydrogen. I think they have been backing off of that.

But what they did bet on successfully is you can go from an internal combustion engine, an ordinary car, which you could make much more efficient than we do, to have to pay more money, to a hybrid like the Prius, where already you get a good boost in efficiency, to a plug-in hybrid, like, well, there was the Chevy bolt, I think, the bolt. Yeah, not the vault, the bolt, which had a 40-mile electric range, and then the gasoline took over. They called it an extended range EV in a wonderful bit of marketing to a fully battery vehicle like a Tesla. And that's a very nice, and I was touting this already when I was in the government 15 years ago,

that's a very nice progression. it lets you gracefully put the infrastructure in the charging points, and you don't have to go all the way to batteries. You could quadruple your mileage with a good plug-in hybrid in the right driving conditions. So in the U.S. in particular, we got this obsession that it's got to be full EVs, and the government has been pushing that, whereas you could do just as well with a mild hybrid or a plug-in hybrid. They're not completely infallible.

No, no, no. They bet pretty well on, yeah, they're not infallible. But look, these are complicated decisions which involve not only the technology, but the regulatory regime and the economics and people's behavior. But I got a lot of admiration for them. Among the U.S. companies, they've been a little bit slow.

The U.S. has distorted. the domestic market by putting in mandates of you must sell so many electric vehicles by a certain time or giving subsidies to battery vehicles, $7,500 a vehicle. That distorts things tremendously. People, so more surprising energy and facts, transportation globally is only 14% of emissions. industries make up and agriculture industry and so on in the US it's 40% of emissions because we're a very mobile country

a big country good high lease so and we're a big country so there are other reasons perhaps to focus on improving the efficiency of road vehicles

security of supply, many countries have to import oil or diesel and gasoline, local pollution. They may have a lot of electricity. Norway, for example, a tremendous amount of electricity, and most of the vehicles there are electric vehicles, at least there are a lot of electric vehicles. So, you know, the notion here that we, in the U.S., we're going to save the planet by electrifying all the transportation. Misplaced. Misplaced. Again, you don't understand the numbers, then you're going to do silly things or ineffective things or expensive things.

How would you rephrase peak oil then? So to remind you're a friend of Dan here again. Yeah, so to remind people who don't know, peak oil is the notion that the production of oil will peak at some point. Right now, the world produce a better. 100 million barrels a day. It's been fairly constant for the last decade or so. Of course, the people who worry about the markets worry about every last million barrel a day because it determines the price. But from a physicist's point of view, it's about 100 million. And the notion is that we will run out of oil and it will therefore become more expensive. It's more scarce.

and eventually the demand will drop because it gets too expensive. We switch to alternatives. My counter to that is that people try to put together what's called the supply curve, which is how much oil is there at a given price. If you go to Saudi Arabia, you can produce a lot of oil at less than $20 a barrel. and any price above that, they're just raking in the cash. In the U.S., if you try to produce shale oil, the cost of like $50, $60 a barrel, if I remember, right? And so a price of about $70 a barrel is about where it is at the moment.

As you have to go to more and more difficult oil to produce offshore, for example, we will find more oil, but the costs will go up. And eventually it will become so expensive that something else will take over. It was famous. I can't remember the Middle Eastern Oil Minister, Sheikh Yamani, I think, said. The Stone Age didn't end because we were out of stones, right? And the oil range won't end. The supply curve goes on forever.

If you really wanted to, we can make oil or female fuels out of coal. That's what Germany did during the Second World War. That's what South Africa did during the embargo. You know how to do that. It's expensive. It's terribly polluting from a CO2 point of view. But the supply curve never gives out. It's only a question of how expensive are you willing to tolerate before you start to shift to some things.

So that 100 million barrels a day is probably not going to come down anytime soon. I don't think so. But, you know, there are people who credibly debate that. The IEA, the International Energy Agency, who's supposed to project and worry about all this stuff, issued a projection a couple years ago that got a lot of people riled up because it had too many impossible things happening to take the world to net zero in a couple of.

decades. So you'd be in a camp that would not be objecting to the idea of further exploration. No, absolutely not. And you know, the world is doing that. My famous example of a, I'll make the Norwegians mad, but I'll say it, hypocritical country is Norway. I know, man. They're telling everybody else to be renewables. Yeah. And they're selling so much awesome. And they're producing three million barrels a day, all right, and exploring for more. Yeah. And their excuse is, well, the world demands it. If they didn't explore... That's bipolarity. Yeah, of course.

Not hypocrisy. Very good. I like that. So the world, we're not going to run out... We're not going to stop using fossil fuels for a long time, many decades, I would say. And we will explore and... Okay, I'm going to... This is about an hour and a half already. Do you believe in non-linearities?

technologically, that would help calm down the politicians, the academics, the entrepreneurs, the point everybody's happening. Non- lunarity is in a positive sense? In a positive way. Yeah. That is going to work out for us to embrace, you know, the new paradigm. Well, first of all, we haven't talked yet about adaptation. and I think that's one example of non-linearity.

I like to say, you know, if you look from 1900 until now, so 120 some odd years, the globe has warmed by 1.3 degrees Celsius, and that was not a detriment at all. In fact, some would argue it is a positive because humanity has flourished like it never has before. The population went up by a factor of five. The GDP per capita went up by a factor of seven. The literacy rate went from 20% to 80%.

And the death rate from extreme weather. If you're worried about warming, the death rate from extreme weather went down by a factor of 50. And we've adapted, if not exploited, the changing climate during that time. So that gives me a lot of confidence, but not a guarantee that as we want another 1.3 degrees, which is about what we'll see by the next hundred years, that we will do just fine as a species, maybe even as the richer half of society, there will be differential impacts, both in space and in time, but existential is not a word I would use for that. And in fact, the official projections say that.

Will we see non-linearities in technology, particularly energy technologies? And there I have a harder time. You might say, well, you're just an old guy and you have no imagination. But you got the charts to back it up. They got the charts to back it up. Energy likes to change slowly. We've already talked about that. Also, I think we have, one's always on a little bit of thin ice saying this sort of thing, but I'll say it anyway.

We have a pretty good understanding of all the chemistry and physics that's relevant here. There are sometimes some surprises, room temperature superconductivity or high temperature. That was a surprise, maybe the last surprise that we've had in a really a qualitative sense that might be relevant. On the other hand, I would not exclude, you know, alloys are very sensitive to minor impurities. You can mix in 1% of one metal into another and change its properties. And there may be a lot of potential in finding new alloys that have interesting properties, whether it's conductivity, thermal properties, mechanical properties. And AI will help with that because we can do combinatorial synthesis of alloys.

make a thousand different combinations of three different hours at once, screen them, model them and use AI to select the next round and keep iterative refining that. So maybe there's stuff like that to be doing, but I wouldn't count on it. And I don't think we need to. In a meantime, if you're somebody born in Africa, somebody born in developing countries,

in Southeast Asia, whether you're a policymaker, politician, or the head of a household or a teacher, you wouldn't care if you'd have to take a couple of hits on the GDP in the next few decades, a couple of point hits, right? From carbonizing. Yeah, yeah. I mean, if your GDP growth is going to take a two to three point hit in the next few decades, as long as I know I can put food on a table and send my kids off to school, it's a no-brainer. Yeah, of course.

All right. And we in the West... I can live with linearity. And we in the developed world might fret about, you know, maybe something bad's going to happen with the climate if we don't decarbonize. But people in the developing world have much more immediate, serious, and soluble problems. And I think as a species, that's probably what we need to attend to first.

And take the time to develop the low-emission technology. and bring down the cost and not try to shoehorn everybody right now into a low-carbon lifestyle. It's what's going to happen anyway. If you listen to Modi talk, you listen to the Chinese, they're going to do what they need to get the energy they need. The leadership in Indonesia, that in Cambodia, that in Malaysia, Philippines, much less, you know, sub-Saharan countries, my gosh.

And I like the attitude that President Xi has. in China, he says we're not going to get rid of our existing energy system until we got something better to replace it. Whereas in the West, we're sort of doing the exactness. I think he might have been referring to non-linear. Oh, right, right. Right. You know, Bill Nordhaus, Yale economist, who won a Nobel Prize for Environmental Economics about, I think 2018. One of the fundamental insights he had is that you shouldn't try to decarbonize too fast. If you decarbonize too fast, you deploy immature technology and you're very disruptive. Take your time. Overkill. Yeah, right. You said it right there.

Yeah, right. And, you know, there's no rush because there is no existential threat, at least over the next century. Wow. Steve, I'm going to ask you something else. It's my last question. It's in regards to education. You know, if you walk from the westernmost town of Southeast Asia to the easternmost town of Southeast Asia, which is in Myanmar and Indonesia, Philadelphia, Philippe Papua, skip over Singapore and Brunei, you're likely to walk into a household that's headed up by somebody without a tertiary education, 80 to 90%. And if you take a look at the electorates of most countries in Southeast Asia, most of them, 80 to 90%. 80 to 90% don't have tertiary education. What would be your message? I mean, you went through a fantastic education,

despite the fact your father, your mother, didn't have tertiary education. What would it take for these or most of these 700 million people in Southeast Asia to be able to just be a little bit like you, hopefully like you, if not better? I wouldn't want them all be like me. That would be a pretty boring society. Well, let's put aside the fallacies.

My wife would say absolutely not. Right. I mean, what would it take for most people to go to Caltech at MIT? Right. Well, I don't think you want that either. You know, our society for our nerds is not the right thing to be aiming for. But look, culturally, certainly some of the Asian societies put a great value on education. And that's a positive.

I don't know whether that's universal across all of Southeast Asia. Yeah, some, many, but not all. Yeah. And then, you know, we've seen instances where the governments make education a priority. They'll take the elites, the students who do best in secondary school, and send them off to quality universities, and sometimes then bring them back to contribute, or they come back to contribute at a sense of patriotism. I think that's important, but there are also secondary educations that can be a great benefit to the country. We call them here trade schools or you send people off to learn how to weld or things of that. Vocational skills.

And I think the government has to catarize that. It can't come from the private sector. The government has got to want to do that. So forward-looking governments, again, can make such a big difference. So I would put money. I know Indonesia has got some government money already to send students. In the Dahlon program. Yeah, right?

And so I think that's really important. You see it work. I mean, I know a bit more about Singapore than other countries there. I've seen that. I mean, they're well into it. They're decades into it. I see it in Saudi Arabia, particularly in the petroleum sector. They send them off to the best schools in the West.

And then they come back and they enrich the country. So government's got to act there. And you've got to convince people that education is the path to a better life, which I think we all believe it is. I mean, you've got great schools in China, in Europe, in the U.S., Australia, Japan, Korea. Yeah. You know, to go back to, let's say, 2021 or 2,

There were more than 6,000 Chinese that got PhDs in STEM all across campuses in the U.S. More than 2,000 Indians in STEM PhDs, right? More than 1,000 South Koreans, only 82 Indonesians. 80, 82. Yeah. And even with the difference in population, that's still much too small. Yeah, for a population of 280 million people. So population factors about a factor of five.

Correct. So to match the 6,000 trainees, you would look for 1,200, right? Yeah. And you got 80. Yeah. 82. Right. But, you know, with the money in place, the endowment, I think if we take the long

view, we shouldn't be that discouraged, you know, as to be able to move up. You have the human capital. Correct. And you need what I'd call maybe cultural capital to realize this is important. And then it sounds like you've got, it's not that expensive to send on the scale of national budgets to send a student off to the UK universities or Singapore or the US. Yeah. And then, as you know, educated in the U.S.

One final question on education. Your parents played a great role in motivating you, right? What about teachers during secondary school? Anybody comes out? Yeah. That inspired you? I was fortunate to have an excellent fifth and sixth grade teacher. So another story quickly, if we can do that.

I was getting kind of bored in science classes in fifth and sixth grade. And so she let me just spend the hour or two in the science supply room where there were batteries and wires and switches and unbelievably barometer tubes with mercury that you could play with. And I did. Okay. So she encouraged me. I was fortunate to go to one of the special high schools in New York City, Stuyvesant. Where I had great focus on science and math, a cohort that were academically among the top in New York City. Many of them immigrants, by the way, or children of immigrants.

And then I was fortunate to have one or two professors at Caltech who kind of, you know, mentored me and took me under their wing. And I have to say, as I interact with students now, that's the attitude I have when I mentor them. So, you know, it's passing it on. It's not going to have an enormous effect because you can only do it one or two at a time, but it makes a difference. Fantastic. So I was lucky. And I always tell people, I'm a much bigger believer of teachers than curricula. Curicula are important, but if you don't have the right teacher. And I would say teachers are even more important than the institution.

I mean, you can have a spectacular teacher at a second or third-rate institution. You could have gone to some community college, but if you ended up with some inspirational teacher. Right, right. Absolutely. And in this country, at least we don't pay the teachers enough at the lower. Oh, man. let's talk about my country and some other form. Really? Or many countries around the world.

They're not investing in good teachers as much as what we might have been seeing in South Korea or Singapore. Yeah, yeah, right. In China. You've got to give it at the lower levels is to give the teachers the freedom to be creative and not just teaching to a rigid curriculum. It makes it much more interesting. Thank you so much, Steve. Wonderful. Good conversation.

That was Steve Kuhna, senior fellow at Hoover Institution. Thank you. This is Endgame.