Transcript: The FY2009 Budget

    STEVEN WEHRENBERG:  Ladies and gentlemen, if you’ll find a seat.  It looks like all of our stragglers are in.  That’s good.  Well, good evening.  My name is Steve Wehrenberg.  I’m the director of executive development for the United States Coast Guard.  And why am I here you might ask?  I’m also a founding director of the Energy Consensus, a non-profit dedicated to doing exactly the kinds of things that we’re doing here this evening.

    I welcome you all to this ongoing series of conversations about our energy challenges and opportunities.  One thing we’ve discovered, for sure, is that everything is indeed connected to everything else.  So challenges and opportunities often turn out to be one and the same for us.  John Mizroch, the principal deputy assistant secretary of DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, was supposed to be here this evening standing where I’m standing, but a tree fell on his house last night and though he was uninjured, he seems preoccupied.  (Laughter.)  Go figure. 
   
    He send his regrets.  He’s also quick to note that climate change had absolutely nothing to do with it.  (Laughter.)  If you will allow me just a few administrative remarks before I introduce our distinguished speaker this evening.  As usual, our sponsors deserve note.  In particular, Al Shaffer and his staff at OSD are always wonderfully generous with both time and resources and make this possible along with now 18 agencies or departments who participate in what has become a true interagency effort.  The CNA Corporation has increased its support, tonight represented by Mitzi Wertheim, as usual, Sarah Minczeski, Louise Bos (ph), Mike Marquez, and doubtless many others that I have missed.  Mark Palfrey from Sapient who I saw moments ago, but I have lost track of is also here and volunteers considerable time and effort, as do many others from just about every conceivable sector.

    I would like to announce – you’re going to just fall apart when I do this, I’m sure.  And with that fanfare – (laughter) – I announce the launch of our website, energyconversation.org.  We invite all of you to take a look at it.  It’s certainly not a finished product at this point by any means.  I believe you can register for these events through that mechanism and, of course, we expect that it will provide a great forum for collaboration and the interchange that has become the hallmark of these events.  We’re looking for your feedback on that website, of course, and on these events as we always do.

    There will be plenty of time for questions after our speaker concludes his presentation.  And you can see the microphones here, which are designed to create kind of a self-queuing process which obviates the need for you to throw things at me to get my attention.  If you’ll be so kind at this point as to put your cell phones on stun – (laughter) – that will make it much nicer for the rest of us. 

    I am very honored this evening to introduce our speaker, the honorable Dr. John Marburger, the president’s science adviser and director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy.  You have his biography, but I do want to highlight just a couple of things that I think are immediately relevant to our conversation here.

    After receiving his Ph.D. in physics from Stanford, Dr. Marburger taught at USC and made contributions to the field of non-linear optics.  Some of you may recognize that as having to do with lasers, non-linear optics.  He chaired the governor’s commission on the Shoreham Nuclear Power Facility and the association of universities that operates the Fermi accelerator lab.  So he is no stranger to energy issues. 

    He was also president of State University of New York, SUNY, Stony Brook, for 14 years before serving as director of the Brookhaven National Laboratory and was appointed from there to the executive office of the president.  Please join me in welcoming Dr. John Marburger. 

    (Applause.)

    JOHN MARBURGER:  Sorry about that.  You lose the logo and I get a place to put my paper, thanks.  This is a low-tech presentation.  You just have to watch me talk, but I will leave plenty of time for questions.  I’m going to talk about energy security and climate change, which are two enormous, complex, and highly interconnected topics that are probably not optimal for an after-dinner talk.  But I’ll try to make my remarks digestible by focusing on the main ideas and leaving specifics for the question-and-answer session. 

    So let me define some terms.  By energy security, I mean, specifically, that desirable state in which public and private enterprises in our country, including individual citizens, can count on having enough energy to maintain and continually improve their standard of living.  Now, there are a lot of unanswered questions hidden in that definition.  What is the standard for a standard of living, for example?  How much energy is enough when choices of personal or corporate strategy lead to widely different energy demands? 

    Standards of living depend on conditions that are affected indirectly by how and where we get our energy.  And those indirect effects can be more consequential than the simple matter of energy supply.  Policies that aim realistically at energy security need to account for all of these factors, which is a very tall order.  By climate change, I mean, specifically, the increasing imbalance between absorption and emission of solar energy by the Earth resulting from the accumulation of so-called greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.  That imbalance is causing the surface temperature of the Earth to increase slowly and nearly all scientists who have considered the matter think this will eventually lead to undesirable environmental conditions in parts of the world with significant populations. 

    One effect of increased atmospheric CO2 concentration is already evident in the acidification of the surface layers of the world’s oceans.  Others are documented in the report of working group two of the fourth assessment report of the International Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, that was published late last year.  The IPCC reports form the scientific basis for current U.S. climate policy and I’m going to talk about climate change first and then energy security although you’ll see that they are entangled. 

    Conceptually, the solution to the problem of climate change is straightforward:  Reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  After all, we are already dealing successfully with the apparently similar problems of emissions of chemicals that degrade the protective ozone layer in the atmosphere and with polluting emissions from cars and power plants.  But the activities that produce greenhouse gases are much more deeply rooted in our way of life.  And how to diminish their production is turning out to be an extremely difficult problem. 

    So let me talk a little bit about climate change.  You know, humans have never been passive actors in Earth’s ecosphere.  For thousands of years, humans have been altering its landscape and the distribution of Earth’s biota.  And some of these impacts have been painful such as the fostering of zoonotic diseases through animal husbandry or the destruction of economically important species through overhunting or fishing, the loss of productive acreage through poor agricultural practices.  We know today that these undesirable side effects of human activity are not recent phenomena.  They’ve been going on for thousands of years. 

    But inexorable population growth and the accompanying evolution of technology have magnified the potential human impact to global scale.  And the impact of anthropogenic global climate change is truly unprecedented.  Global climate change is different in the variety as well as in the reach of its impacts.  And the first challenge to science – I am the science adviser – the first challenge to science is to estimate what those impacts might be. 

If we think there are no impacts or that they are all positive, then climate change is a normal part of environmental science with no special claim on society’s resources.  If, however, we believe that substantial negative impacts will occur, then science must rise to two more challenges, namely, what can be done to avoid or mitigate the impacts and, given that some negative impacts will likely occur, what actions can be taken to optimize the quality of life for the people who are effected by them.  So these are the three science challenges to climate change: estimating impacts, identifying mitigations, and devising adaptations.

These can be reduced to technical issues to which science can contribute, at least in principle.  But beyond these science questions are matters of subjective judgment, the scale and nature of which are also unprecedented.  Last December, countries gathered in Bali to debate among themselves how to balance their national aspirations, where they want their countries to go, against their obligations to humanity in general, side effects that effect the entire world of development that may occur in their countries.  And they discussed how to value the certainties of the president of the present against the vagaries of the future and how to interpret conceptions of justice among people, against the background of the immense and entirely indifferent machinery of nature. 

Each of the countries participating in the Bali conference must also view the challenge of energy security with deep concern.  National leaders are grappling with these issues in a glare of public attention that is as unprecedented as the issues themselves and a blizzard of opinion and commentary that ranges from science to fantasy borne instantly to every corner of the globe by the miracle of modern information technology.

And I want to say a few words about this media situation because it’s become a significant factor in the development of national policies not only in our country about climate change.  Now, just let me say a few words about this.  As a scientist, I am truly humbled by the power of the media in this debate.  Issues that should be matters of fact are lost in oversimplification and hyperbole and issues that are clearly matters of opinion are marketed as scientific certainties.  Climate change has become just a media phenomenon almost.

The complexity of climate phenomena far exceeds the capacity of conventional public discourse, which is not unusual for scientific matters, but rarely do scientific matters intrude so strongly in the public discussion, on the public attention.  The visibility of the climate issue is entirely justified by its importance, but it guarantees that it becomes an object and an instrument of politics.  And many scientists have willingly participated in the inevitable simplifications that are conventional in politics, acting from the same desire that motivates us all, to have our societies do what we think is right.

But, from my perspective, science has lost credibility in this discussion in a subtle way.  Critics and advocates all stamp their positions with the brand of science.  They all claim that science supports their particular views.  And the subtext for this discussion is that science is incapable of distinguishing among their views.  And that is probably more likely than the former.  And the distressing fact is that science is being pressed into an awkward service here and I know I am not the only scientist who is uneasy about it.  And I’ll be glad to discuss this later, but let me get back to the main story.  The point is that our discussion of climate change and the ways that we have to respond to it is vastly complicated by the way it’s discussed in what I call the public discourse, roughly, the sum of all of the media and blogs and everything.

Okay, so back to the point – from the point of view of science, the first of the three challenges, the estimation of impacts, is the greatest challenge.  We have a reasonably good big-picture understanding of the response of the Earth’s system to large-scale processes that affect its climate.  We understand it pretty well.  Some parts of the picture are incomplete.  The role of clouds, for example, of aerosols, the behavior of the cryosphere – the ice and the highly reflective glaciers and snow cover that we call the cryosphere – these things are difficult to model and not all of the physical phenomena that we need to understand to model them are well known.

But we know enough to raise the red flag.  Negative impacts are predictable in general if not in detail and they appear to be serious enough to warrant action to mitigate them if possible.  Now, if you want to know more about these details – and many of you probably already know a lot – but the best summaries of our current state of knowledge are these technical reports compiled by the IPCC working groups, number one and two, of the climate change panel.  Let me just remind you a little bit about those reports, where they come from.  These reports are prepared by groups of scientist volunteers.  They are not employees of the United Nations.  There are thousands of scientists around the world that come together.  They don’t perform new investigations for these reports.  They summarize the state of the field and the literature that exists when they come together.  They don’t do original research, but they are the experts and they are often the ones that have written the papers that are part of that large corpus. 

They survey and compile the current status of science bearing on climate change and its impacts.  And, after that work is done, smaller groups convene to craft brief summaries of the longer compilations, the so-called summaries for policy makers.  And then there is a grand summary of summaries that wraps up the whole lecture which, for the current cycle, was completed in Valencia, Spain, late last summer. 

Now, the summaries and the negotiations that lead to them get all of the publicity.  And the media seize on a few striking features of these overviews that they can use as hooks for their stories.  But I want you to know that the IPCC technical reports, even though they’re called technical reports, but they are very accessible.  You can read them.  Probably everybody in this room can read one of those technical reports and get something out of it and I urge you to do that.  They are all available on the web.  You can go – you can page through them on your screens and find what you need. 

They are very easy to use and they are really interesting to look at.  Very few people read these.  You know, the science journalists don’t read these.  (Chuckles.)  They read the summaries or they talk to people.  But I strongly urge you to read through – look at these technical reports and see how they’re written and what’s there so that you can look up things that you need to know when you or if you want to know more about this.  The technical summaries are, in fact, quite accessible for a relatively educated crowd like this one.  I use the term advisedly.  (Laughter.)  So form your own impressions based on the technical reports.  Don’t just look at the pictures in the summary. 

So, now, the problem of estimating impacts of climate change is exceptionally difficult because the impacts are location specific.  They – I mean, what’s impacted?  The environment and people and that’s very local.  And many are sensitive to natural variations anyways.  There’s a phenomenon, for example, called the El Niño Southern Oscillation phenomenon or ENSO.  The ENSO phenomenon – it’s an ocean-circulation phenomenon – the ENSO phenomenon affects the pattern of precipitation in many parts of the globe, but the present IPCC report concluded that the climate models are not yet capable of assessing the impact of global warming on ENSO.  So we’re missing the impact of climate change on one of the more important phenomena that we know affects the pattern of rainfall.  So, in order to find the effect of climate change on rainfall – it’s highly important – we need to do more work.

The situation with respect to modeling cloud cover and aerosols is even worse.  And these phenomena are clearly important in attempts to forecast regional impacts.  Not all impactful changes are that localized.  I mean, sea level rises everywhere, for example.  But assessing impacts even for these things like sea-level rises requires knowing local conditions.  If you want to know the impacts, you want to know who’s there and what parts of the ecology might be affected. 

But despite the difficulty of forecasting regional impacts, some strategies are obvious.  Populations that are already stressed by flooding, drought, and desertification are clearly vulnerable.  Investments in better water management, zoning regulations, agricultural practices will have an immediate impact on the quality of life for these populations.  And they are also an essential part of any climate-response strategy.  We already know the vulnerable regions and we already know the nature of their vulnerabilities. 

    Basically every international aid program for sustainable development is automatically part of a long-term climate-response strategy.  The climate is changing and it is affecting things in parts of the world where there are vulnerable populations.  We know where they are.  We know where the vulnerable populations are.  We know a lot about what they need to improve their standards of living.  So keep in mind that anthropogenic climate change is not the only source of risk to vulnerable populations. 

Population growth, industrialization, global mobility, inadequate public-health arrangements, ineffective governments all multiply the negative impacts of climate change.  Serious strategies to cope with climate change must address all of these along with the more talked about measures to reduce the anthropogenic climate drivers.  It’s not just about reducing CO2.  It’s very clear that the mitigation of anthropogenic climate change primarily by reducing CO2 emissions, is going to occur too slowly to avoid exacerbation of existing undesirable conditions for vulnerable populations.  It’s going to happen.  The CO2 accumulates.  It stays up there.  We’ve already put a lot of CO2 up there.  The Earth’s heat balance is already out of kilter and things are warming up.  It’s pretty clear.

One of the most important decisions that governments must make now is how to balance investments in adaptations versus mitigation of climate change, you know, try to stop it from going farther than it will.  And you’ve got to do something about the impacts.  Now, the tone of current public discourse seems to be biased against adaptation, which is totally incomprehensible to me.  You know it’s going to happen.  Why aren’t we talking about what needs to be done to help the people who are susceptible to it? 

Social returns on adaptation investments begin immediately and they last indefinitely.  Social returns on mitigation investments are likely to be negative in the near term in many parts of the world and produce their positive impacts far in the future.  But both are necessary.  Both are necessary, which brings me to the issue of energy.

Fossil-fuel energy production is not the only factor in the dramatic increase of atmospheric CO2 since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, but it is the primary factor.  You probably know the story.  The carbon from fossil fuels essentially adds to the existing carbon already in the biosphere and ends up as additional CO2 in the atmosphere.  Atmospheric CO2 persists for many decades and, therefore, accumulates to ever greater concentrations. 

As a greenhouse gas, CO2 is far less potent than methane or water vapor, but there is a lot of it and it acts indirectly to increase the concentration of water vapor, which is the major direct contributor to greenhouse warming.  Water vapor is the major greenhouse gas and it’s because CO2, vast amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere trigger increased water vapor in the atmosphere that we worry about the CO2.  As I already mentioned, our models are not good enough to trace this process in regional detail, but we can trace it well enough to estimate certain effects and the size of those effects alarms many scientists. 

So the proper response seems obvious.  In the short run, you should produce fewer greenhouse gases and increase absorption of those already in the atmosphere, planting trees or something.  In the long run, you should eliminate releases of fossil carbon altogether or limit releases to an amount much smaller than the current values.  And you should start doing this immediately because Earth’s heat balance is already tilted and some effects of massive CO2 production are already evident.  

As we contemplate these actions, however, here are some numbers to keep in mind.  The current annual release from the world’s energy economy, which is by far the largest contributor to increase atmospheric CO2 is about 27 billion tons, 27 billion tons of CO2 per year.  Forty percent of that is from coal, 40 percent is from oil, and most of the remaining 20 percent is from natural gas.  These are 2005 numbers. 

Suppose we wanted to reduce that 27 billion tons a year by one billion tons, a little less than 4 percent.  What would it take?  That would require building 136 new one-gigawatt nuclear power plants instead of coal plants.  That’s about one-third of the existing worldwide nuclear capacity.  One hundred and 36 new plants – that’s just for less than a 4 percent reduction of what we produce now. 

Or you could build 270,000 one-megawatt wind turbines, which is about four times the current world capacity.  Or you could sequester come of the carbon.  Norway, for example, has a highly publicized successful coal, carbon sequestration program.  It removes about a million tons of CO2 per year, which sounds like a lot, but a million is 1,000 times less than a billion, which is what our target is.  You’d need 1,000 of those Norway projects and that still gets you only about less than 4 percent reduction. 

And international forums are talking about reductions of more than an order of magnitude greater than this by 2050.  The U.S. consumes more than 20 million barrels of oil per day, 20 million barrels of oil per day, 60 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day, three million tons of coal per day.  That’s about a fifth of the world’s energy consumption.  So multiple those numbers by five to get the world’s total.  Worldwide, coal accounts for about 45 percent of electricity production, natural gas about 24 percent, nuclear about 12 percent.  Oil is used mainly for transportation and feedstock for the chemical industry. 

Fossil fuels are in our economy.  These numbers are sobering.  Fossil fuels have made modern economies possible.  The economic development path is paved with fossil fuels.  For any given economy, CO2 production is proportional to the gross domestic product.  The coefficient of proportionality is sensitive to technology and so recently developed or developing economies are significantly more carbon intenser (sp) than older developed economies, which is good news.  It means that introducing modern energy technologies in the rapidly developing parts of the world can slow the growth of fossil CO2 relative to the historical development path.  The objective of a CO2 mitigation strategy should be to reduce the carbon intensity of the world’s economy towards zero. 

Well, so I hear this all of the time, why shouldn’t the goal be simply to reduce the absolute carbon emissions towards zero?  Yeah, that’s sort of what you want to do.  Why bring in the notion of intensity?  Because the cause of our climate anxiety in the first place, the root cause of this phenomenon that we’re so worried about is the overwhelming desire of people everywhere to improve their lot.  And that desire will not be denied.  From all that I’ve ever read or seen about human behavior, the will to better human circumstances must be accommodated in any social plan of action and especially one designed to persist over decades and perhaps centuries. 

If we are to make any progress in mitigating anthropogenic climate change, it will be necessary to break the link between economic development and fossil-fuel emissions.  Simultaneous economic development, that is, growth in GDP, and CO2 reduction implies reducing carbon intensity.  That’s the measure.  That’s what you have to look at.  You’ve got to break the link between economic development and fossil fuels.  This is a point of the utmost importance in crafting a successful global climate strategy. 

The link between GDP and fossil-fuel CO2 emissions is technology, you know, what technology to use to produce your energy and use the energy that’s produced by chemical means or refineries or whatever.  Well, technology choices in a society and especially pervasive technologies like energy technology are dictated by cost.  So what are the prospects for reducing the cost of low-carbon emission technologies to the point where they will replace high-emission technologies in rapidly developing economies?  Now, I’m phrasing the question this way to emphasize that dictating limits on carbon emissions to a developing country like China or India or Indonesia or many others is a fruitless exercise unless alternative low-emission technologies are available. 

I mean, they are not just going to stop developing because we tell them that they are producing too much CO2.  We have to give them some way to continue on their development track.  They will do it.  And let’s be clear that if we are serious about combating anthropogenic climate change, fossil-fuel carbon emissions must be reduced in all major economies.  It’s not enough for only the old, rich economies of Europe and America and Japan to eliminate their emissions.  All populous countries must eventually adopt low- or no-carbon energy technologies, which poses a vexing economic conundrum because adjustments in energy technologies must occur during precisely that epoch in post-Cold War history, our era, when a major transformation in global patterns of trade, wealth, and economic power is also occurring. 

Someone mentioned everything is connected with everything else.  Well, this is one that really is.  Any country that intervenes in its own economy to increase the prices of low-cost, high-carbon emitting energy in order to make higher-cost, lower-emitting technology more competitive will inevitably put itself at a competitive disadvantage with countries that do not have similar policies.  And there will always be dissimilar policies as long as significant differences in standards of living exist among economies around the world.  No realistic response to climate change can ignore the current geopolitical preoccupation with economic competition among nations.

My own science community has identified what they call a gathering storm of global competitiveness as a major justification for increased funding for innovation-boosting research and a major cause of concern for weakness in our education system.  Concern about competitiveness affects immigration policy, tax policy, and trade policy.  And it affects climate policy not only in the United States, but in nearly every other country whose economy is globalized. 

Now, the cost associated with altering the energy technology of a larger economy is very large.  Economists come to widely – there must be an economist in the room or there should be.  (Chuckles.)  Economists come to widely different conclusions about the cost and, frankly, I don’t know how to evaluate the different claims.  What I do know is that today, as we speak, very few low-carbon technologies exist that can be expanded to the necessary scale, scale of those numbers that I mentioned.

I can only think of one scalable energy technology that does the trick: nuclear fission.  That is sufficiently mature and sufficiently scalable to be a serious contender with low-cost coal plants.  In the short term, other renewable energy technology such as wind and solar may help slow emissions, but we do not have low-cost versions of the ancillary technologies of electrical storage and electrical transmission that are needed to scale these up, to scale up wind and solar, even to their current potential. 

Biomass looks promising for transportation fuel, but is not yet very effective in reducing CO2 emissions overall and it is not obviously scalable to the larger electrical-power industry.  Nuclear power is carbon free, but the subject of such public concern, justified or not, that its substantial expansion will certainly be delayed for decades by public opposition.  Nor do we have technologies at hand for ameliorating the carbon emissions of existing fossil fuels. 

Coal – coal is the one that we have to worry about.  Coal is ultimately the cheapest, most ubiquitous source of energy for stationary power generation and it releases the greatest amount of CO2 when burned.  We do not currently have a scalable technology for carbon sequestration and I do not see one coming soon.  The stunningly large fossil-fuel consumption numbers that I quoted earlier create barriers for any carbon extraction and sequestration scheme.  Any industrial-scale process has potential environmental impacts and there are few greater industrial scales than that of power generation.  And the sequestration industry would have to be comparable in scale to the power industry.  We’re talking about big, big, major new industries to distribute and sequester the carbon.

While it’s not my intention to dampen enthusiasm for research on climate-related energy technology, on the contrary, I’m optimistic that acceleration – that progress will accelerate now that society has turned its attention to the matter.  There’s no reason to delay picking the low-hanging fruit of low-carbon technology. 

We can increase the efficiency of cars substantially.  We can convert them first to run on biofuel and later on electricity or hydrogen.  We can capture the energy of wind when it blows and sun when it shines.  And, later, when we have better batteries, we can use such transient sources more effectively.  We can reduce the energy consumption of lighting, of buildings, of domestic machinery and appliances and of industrial processes with existing technology.  None of these measures, however, addresses the very large share of emissions from stationary power sources that burn fossil fuels and particularly coal. 

Now, I have not said much yet about energy security, but you can see where this is heading.  U.S. energy security is at risk from three main factors.  First, we consume much more energy than we produce domestically from all sources by about 45 percent, making us the world’s largest net importer of energy.  Second, the economic development of countries with large populations like China and India is increasing demand in the global energy market.  The second-ranked energy consumer today is China.  China nearly doubled its consumption of energy over the past decade.  It’s rising fast and it’s going after the same sources of fossil fuels that we are, that we would like to have for our economy. 

Third, the largest-scale domestic energy sources that could replace imported fuel are currently either unacceptable to the public – as nuclear – or are potent greenhouse gas emitters, which is coal.  These are the three big challenges to our energy security:  We consume a lot more than we produce domestically, competition for finite – a limited energy resource is increasing rapidly, and the only domestic resources that we have that could replace the – that could reduce our dependence on imported fossil fuels are either unacceptable for the public or are potent greenhouse gas emitters.  And if we take climate change seriously, as many people do, we’re going to have to pay attention to that. 

The simple solution to energy security or energy independence is coal.  The United States has the largest coal reserves in the world and we could burn coal for a long time.  But it creates more greenhouse gases per unit of energy than anything else that we could do.  In the long run, the research and development areas on the supply side that promise the greatest payoff for energy security and mitigating climate change are carbon capture and storage from coal-fired power plants, carbon sequestration.  If we could learn how to sequester carbon and develop an industry that does it – that’s not terribly expensive, then that would be the biggest payoff.

And the second biggest payoff is to make nuclear more attractive by dealing with the – by improving the reduction of waste processing and dealing with the proliferation risk associated with nuclear facilities.  Those are the two big public objections: how do you deal with the waste and what do you do about proliferation associated with the production of more and more nuclear power plants around the world, proliferation of nuclear material that could be used in strategic weapons.

So those are the two big-payoff research areas and, indeed, the U.S. is willing to spend money on those and is spending.  The president has asked Congress for money to do these things and the energy act provides for resources for the Department of Energy to do the research.  Nuclear fusion remains important, but its commercial feasibility is still unproven and it won’t be until toward the end of the century when we will get to use it. 

So who’s doing this research?  Japan currently outspends every other country on energy R&D, more than $3.5 billion in 2006, more than the U.S.  The U.S. was second in that year with more than $3 billion.  No other country comes close.  All of the EU 25 nations together contribute about $2.7 billion.  Most of Japan’s energy research is on nuclear power, by the way, and most of the U.S. budget is for non-nuclear energy sources.  That’s complementary; that’s good.  But there’s much to do and other countries can and should be doing more.

On the demand side, how much energy we use depends on cultural behavior whose response to policy and public education is very difficult to measure.  This is energy conservation.  We know that lifestyle choices can make a huge difference, but will those choices be made?  One discouraging fact is the current lack of response to known lifecycle financial paybacks on investments in existing energy technologies in many sectors.  From transportation to building, heating, and lighting efficiency, people know that you can reduce your energy bill and your energy cost by putting in more insulation or better windows or changing your lighting or going to more efficient appliances.  And it is known that you will pay less, that, ultimately, if you make those investments in energy – we have the technology, the financial incentive is there.  Why aren’t people doing it?

Obviously, there is something going on here.  It takes more than just having the technology.  It takes more than having the technology and a financial incentive.  How much of a financial incentive does it take?  It’s very difficult to tell.  Already, the price of oil is much larger than the third assessment reports of the IPCC projected back in 2000, 1999 or 2000, when they made their projections about how much it would take to get people to change their modes of transportation.  Well, we’re already far beyond that with 80, $90-barrel gasoline. 

So there’s something important.  Even financial incentives do not appear to be enough to motivate technology choice.  And we need more information on barriers to acceptance of socially beneficial technologies.  That’s another area of research.  It’s social-science research. 

In view of all of these considerations, what constitutes a rational path forward?  First, to address climate change, every major economy in the world needs to make some kind of commitment to long-term emissions reduction.  I don’t think it’s possible to force countries to make a commitment.  They have to understand that it’s in their interest to join in at least what’s been called an aspirational goal.  Developing nations must be included in this framework.

Second, for both climate change and energy security, technology development must focus on scalable sources – nuclear and coal particularly – while maintaining progress in all of the other areas such as renewable power and particularly efficient end uses.  Third, I haven’t made much of a point of this, but we need to have a more or less international agreement on how we’re going to measure things: data, protocols, and standards so we can compare and have – I mean, you can’t have – people talk about international carbon-trading schemes, for example, in the future.  You can’t have such a scheme unless there’s agreement on how things will be measured and in great detail.  This is not a simple thing; I won’t go into it now, but it’s very important.

Fourth, we need to have some sort of international framework that encourages private investment, that acknowledges the importance of the private sector.  It’s not just a government issue; it’s a universal issue, private as well as public.  Fifth, to prepare for the inevitable effects of climate change, much, much more attention needs to be given to adaptation.  And, finally, all countries need an increased focus on research in low-carbon energy technology. 

Now, the reason I’m going through this list is that these are essentially the points that are on the agenda for the meetings of the major emitting nations that the president has called together.  The president has called together major economies, the major emitters of carbon, around the world, a small number of them, to try to work out some sort of consensus about what international goals for carbon reductions might be that can feed into the U.N. process for developing international action on climate change.  So these are in fact goals that the Bush administration has set.

Now, let me close with a few remarks about the administration climate policy, which is totally misunderstood, as far as I can tell.  (Chuckles.)  Already in 2001, before I came – I came in late 2001 to the Bush administration.  Already in 2001, it was clear that a major factor in climate policy had to be a realistic strategy for recruiting large, developing economies – China and India – into an international framework.  It was equally clear that climate policy is strongly linked to energy policy and that the scale of the problem would require a campaign that would have to be maintained over the better part of a century.  And it was clear that the already polarized nature of the public discourse was obscuring the scale and the nature – not so much the reality of anthropogenic climate change, but of the societal response that would be required. 

Many of the most positive actions by this administration with respect to climate change have been taken in the name of energy security.  And the two are not quite the same, the point of divergence being the use of coal without carbon sequestration.  And that’s why it’s so important to invest in sequestration technologies.  Any objective reading of President Bush’s statements and actions on climate change, beginning with a speech he made on June 11, 2001, just before his departure on his first trip to Europe as president reveals a much deeper appreciation of these issues than is generally assumed.

There is no question in my mind that the U.S. has positioned itself to deal more realistically with climate change and its connection with energy policy in all its scientific, sociopolitical economic complexity than most people realize.  The president’s program to bring together the nations with the world’s largest economies is only the most recent of a long history of initiatives to forge a realistic response to the enormous challenges of climate change and energy security. 

Now, this was a pretty high, abstract, philosophical talk.  I’ll be glad to talk about some specific things or answer your questions as far as I can, but there are many people in this room who know more than I do about some of these and I hope if somebody asks me a question I can’t answer, some of you will help.  (Chuckles.)  Thank you very much for inviting me to make these remarks.  I look forward to your questions. 

(Applause.)

So how do I do this, I just look at whoever’s at a microphone and go from there? 

MITZI WERTHEIM:  (Off mike.)

Q:  Okay, my name is Mara Haselstein and I am the director of my own company, which is called Mara Productions, and I’m a scientific artist.  And I also run some environmental think-tanks.  I was wondering about how you briefly mentioned developing nations and a lot of developing nations I think want to be more sustainable and I know in Malaysia they’ve just cut down palm forests and things like that and it was very much against the people’s best wishes.  How does the U.S. government intend to support developing nations in our fight to become a more environmental planet? 

MR. MARBURGER:  Well, people are doing these things because they’re trying to improve their quality of life.  That’s very clear. 

Q:  Right, but it improves some people’s quality of life, but the actual people who live in the country, it does not improve their quality.  In fact, it destroys their quality of life, so I’m just wondering what the governmental policy – our policy is. 

MR. MARBURGER:  Well, let’s put it this way, they’re economic incentives.  And our policy is to try to make low carbon technologies, for example, and other sustainable technologies available to these countries.  We do it by investing in research to try to provide better ideas and innovations for sustainable technologies, and we do it through direct assistance, sending teams and having international agreements with those kinds of countries to help advise them on appropriate measures for sustainable development. 

I mean sustainable development is a very – is a difficult issue and there are a lot of things that get in the way of it.  And we like the idea of sustainable development.  It’s very important for us and we think that there are benefits to American – the American economy as well.  But certainly when it comes to climate change and to factors that affect climate change, getting the countries together, trying to get them to understand that there is a problem that we are all facing, and making arrangements to lower the cost of technology, for example, with trade-tariff agreements and a variety of other mechanisms that can make these technologies available.  Those are the kinds of things that you have to do.  It’s not –

Q:  I just want to add one thing.  Did you think that the – were you in Bali actually? 

MR. MARBURGER:  I was not in Bali. 

Q:  Oh, okay, and did you think that what happened in Bali was useful in terms of creating an international dialogue like that or do you think that it was sort of like the Kyoto Protocol which was somewhat useful but kind of not useful. 

MR. MARBURGER:  Bali was very useful.  Bali was very useful and what you have to remember about all of these conferences is that they are steps on the way.  There is – we’re still a long way from having a conference where everybody gets together and solves the problem.  It’s necessary to do this step by step and I have a great deal of respect for the people in the State Department and the team that they put together to help in those negotiations.  I do think they have a clear idea of what’s needed to draw all the countries in. 

These types of conferences are very difficult to interpret when you read the media accounts because there’s a lot of posturing, there are – you know, there’s more than a hundred different countries that come together and they all talk and they all say they’d all like to portray their countries as doing the right thing.  And they’re all very sensitive about their status and so forth, so it’s very difficult to interpret what’s going on there. 

The U.S. is big enough to afford a realistic strategy, I think, in that context.  And sometimes it doesn’t make us look as good as we might otherwise if we would just posture.  But I think Bali was a positive step and I think that it’s just a step along the way.  I’m not –

Q:  Thank you. 

MR. MARBURGER:  Sorry, I’ll try to answer shorter. 

Q:  This is a short question. 

MR. MARBURGER:  Oh wait, no, I’m going to this microphone.  We’re going to alternate microphones. 

Q:  Oh, I’m sorry – (chuckles) – I thought you wanted – okay. 

MR. MARBURGER:  So those who want to speak sooner, go where the shortest line is on the – okay, so I’m going on the left and right. 

Q:  Dave Kerner, tour group.  I have a question regarding a temporal scale, if you will, of these forcing functions and there’s uncertainty, and this is one of those word problems, a train leaves Chicago heading west at 12 miles an hour, when do we hit the intersection?  A couple of things here: there’s a lot of uncertainty in terms of the environmental impacts arising from global greenhouse gases, but there’s also a concern about energy supplies and when we find the global demand equals or exceeds global availability.  To what point in time is the government looking at where the amount of demand we have for oil rivals the supply that we can get out of it? 

MR. MARBURGER:  There’s a better handle on oil perhaps than there is on coal.  The coal reserves are enormous, just enormous.  Oil reserves are hard to estimate.  The e-energy information agency as part of the Department of Energy has information about this.  I can’t tell, some people think that we’ve already gotten half up the S-curve, whatever, other people say no because there’s no incentive for the oil exploration industry to reveal their reserves, so we may not know exactly how much oil is left.  So there are some error bars on that.  So I can’t speak to how long we have. 

But I can say that when it comes to fossil fuels in general, there are lots of them out there, I mean still quite a lot, especially coal.  And that’s – this is an important issue because there is so much coal that we have to deal with coal.  It’s – there’s so much, you can’t just ignore it.  It’s going to get used and that’s why it’s worth investing a lot and figuring out how to capture the carbon, either will coal-located chemical plants of carbon sequestration and develop a sequestration industry that can handle this.  So I mean, that’s what I see happening. 

Q:  Thank you. 

MR. MARBURGER:  I don’t think we will run out of fuel, of fossil fuel, before fairly serious climate change effects occur, if it goes without mitigation and we just continue the way we are. 

Q:  Thank you.

MR. MARBURGER:  Oh, you know, on the other hand, there is something that’s happening.  I mean the fact that other countries, big countries, are developing, increasing the demand for oil, certainly has got to have an effect at some point.  And just as we’re seeing the price going up now with relatively modest increases really in the world’s population that’s becoming developed, I expect that the price of oil will go up in the future despite efforts to control it.  And that will have a behavioral effect on people, particularly on the transportation side of it, but I don’t think it will have much effect on the power sector. 

Let’s see, now I’m going over to this side.

Q:  Sir, my name is Esan Khan.  I’m in the Department of Energy.  And I’m speaking for myself, not for DOE.  I’m a bureaucrat, and since I have a Ph.D. from MIT, I pretend I’m a technocrat, and so I have to make some judgments and decisions.  Recently, based on a number of presentations at the MIT club in Washington and other places, there appear to be two sides to this story.  One is the anthropogenic effects and the other is natural effects of climate change where temperatures have gone up by two degrees centigrade 1,000 years ago and four degrees centigrade 5-6,000 years ago.  So I have to make some decisions as to whether is it really anthropogenic carbon emissions that is doing the job or is it something else?  And we have to – it’s very important. 

If we spend trillions of dollars into something and find out it’s the wrong place we spend the money, we will have some real problems.  Our economy cannot withstand the jolt anymore.  So with all due respect, you gave a great presentation, but I’m asking, is it possible to put together a forum formally where we can listen to the other side of the story.  Dr. Fred Singer is here and some of the other people, Dr. Lensen from MIT, others.  If we can do that, just listen to the story and see if the other side makes sense.  That’s all I’m asking. 

MR. MARBURGER:  Sure.

Q:  Can we do it at the White House? 

MR. MARBURGER:  Why not do it here?  (Chuckles.)  You know, the best source of information that I know of that encompasses the widest spectrum of opinion that is readily available are the IPCC reports.  I’ve looked very carefully myself at how those reports are made.  They’re very credible.  I’ve looked at the data; I’ve talked to Dr. Singer, who is indeed a distinguished scientist, and others who have very strong views about climate change and the origin of climate change. 

But I must say, with the responsibility of advising the president about what is likely to be the case based on discussions with science and examinations of all the material, I believe that the story that I told is the correct one, that there’s simply no question to 90 percent confidence, which is the way the IPCC expresses it, that the production of greenhouse gases by human activity has indeed led to increases in temperature that cannot be accounted for except through this rather complex greenhouse gas effect.  I believe that’s true and that’s what I advise the president.

Yes, now? 

Q:  Yes, Dan Win, I’m with Curtis Wright and more importantly, State University of Stony Brook class of ’79. 

MR. MARBURGER:  Oh, congratulations, the year before I came. 

Q:  Right, yeah – well, you were there but you weren’t president at the time.  But I do remember you.  You know, I’m an engineer and I’ve spent my whole career in engineering, moved into other areas in the company now, but a couple of things that really strike me is first, I appreciate your remarks, but the one item that you didn’t mention was in addition to energy security, national security is a real issue with energy here.  And we’re spending dollars overseas to support our enemies by buying fossil fuels overseas.

There are two obstacles to moving our energy policy forward in a productive way.  Number one is fossil fuel is still the cheapest thing out there, and number two, not in my backyard.  And we need courageous politicians to be able to stand up and do something about that.  You know, I went into engineering because a politician back years ago said we do these things not because they’re easy but because they’re hard, and he inspired me.  And we need an inspiration.  How do engineers and scientists become at inspiring our politicians to be more productive and to say the right things? 

We have an enormous economy that is the most powerful force in the world.  We have a tax code that can really move the economy in ways that are productive as opposed to counterproductive, and gasoline is just too damn cheap.  And we interview people on the street and some soccer mom is filling up her Suburban and saying, the politicians need to do something about lowering my price of gasoline as opposed to doing something about getting rid of the Suburban. 

MR. MARBURGER:  Yeah, you know, it’s a real problem when you have a democracy. 

Q:  We need brave politicians.  It’s up to us, the scientists and engineers, to inspire them. 

MR. MARBURGER:  Let me tell you a story about a brave politician you might have run into when you were living on Long Island at that point, Congressman of the first congressional district of New York, Bill Carney was, I think for a while he was the only registered conservative in Congress and he was strongly in favor of nuclear power.  And there was a power plant out there on Long Island in his district, the Shoreham nuclear power plant.  And his support for that power plant, he took the courageous stand.  He was all for it, and he lost the next election after making that statement. 

Now, I think that it’s good to have courageous politicians, but the fact is that when the people really don’t want something in this country, sometimes it happens that they have their say.  That doesn’t happen for everything.  There are cases when the public is by and large known to now favor something or favor something and it still doesn’t happen.  But on this issue, I think it’s important that the politics are very important.  And it’s not just lack of courage that leads to these behaviors; it’s that the politicians are representing what the people in their districts really want.  Yucca Mountain is caught up in this problem right now. 

So I don’t know what to do about that.  It is a fact that we live in a country where the people have a lot to say about the behavior of the nation.  We don’t have a command and control type of government, as many other governments in the world are, and that is a liability for us.  So we have to be clever.  We have to educate people.  We have to find ways of making the benefits of changing our way of life more visible.  And I think that meetings like this, conversation groups, neighborhood study groups, whatever it takes, are going to be important in making these behavioral changes.  So I’m optimistic that already you can see people accepting the notion that something has to be done, around the world even in these other developing countries, accepting the notion that they’re probably going to have to do something. 

Q:  I also think that we can do a better job of educating our scientists and engineers to be better salesmen to try and arm the politicians to make our case because you could have the greatest idea in the world and if you can’t sell it, it’s worthless. 

MR. MARBURGER:  I agree, I agree.  Great. 

Q:  Yes, my name is Bahri Aliriza.  I’m with Polytrade International Corp.  And you mentioned during your speaking that we are the second nation right after Japan as far as investing money in research and development.

 So my question to you is, for small companies such as mine that does have a technology to help reduce global warming, what companies or technologies companies out there that we can do where was can provide and give our technology for free, for them to give us some kind of a certificate that says that yes, this product does really work without us having to pay from our pocket to get anything done because I know at the EPA they do have a program, but I’ve got to spend $100,000 just for them to verify it.  And then that’s just a start and then I’ve got to pay more money and I haven’t really achieved anything.   So what is the Bush administration doing to help small companies such as mine? 

MR. MARBURGER:  I can’t answer that question.  I don’t know enough about those programs.  I know about the EPA program; the Department of Energy can undoubtedly help, but I don’t have a direct answer to that question.  I’ll be glad to try to find out more about that. 

Q:  But I think it’s important; otherwise we can keep talking about environmental problems and we’re not going to get anywhere.  Thank you. 

MR. MARBURGER:  Right. 

Q:  Good evening, Dr. Marburger.  My name is Tony Maul with Ernstein (ph) Young Global Infrastructure Advisory focused on renewable power generation and smart grid technology.  One thing, I hope it was a slip of the tongue to think that not having a command and control economy is a liability.  It’s an amazingly dynamic comment. 

MR. MARBURGER:  I didn’t mean to say that.  We happen to not have one; other countries do and they have their own problems. 

Q:  They do.  My question is, have there been – is there a view on population growth or lack of it in the developing world and its impact on emissions.  An example, fertility rates in Western Europe are extremely low, down around 1.1, 1.2.  Japan, in the next hundred years if they don’t change their stance in regards to fertility, the population of 120 million people could decline down to 30 million people.  So what does that do as far as greenhouse gas emissions? 

MR. MARBURGER:  Well, you know, there’s a complicated relationship between development and fertility rates.  And I don’t completely understand it.  There have been recent studies and reports on changing fertility rates in different countries.  And undoubtedly, population growth and population dynamics are a very important contributor to economies and to energy production, energy consumption.  So this is an important thing that has to be included in the models that project climate change and energy, future energy use, but I don’t understand it very well. 

There’s no question that it is an important parameter, and that it is a much more variable parameter than we expected 50 years ago, 30 years ago when people expected the population simply to rise.  But there are many places in developing countries where fertility rates have declined and the standard of living hasn’t gone up particularly much, but conditions have changed in those countries.  It’s correlated with education, correlated with opportunities for jobs and so forth.  So it is an important factor to be able to understand and model in all of these projections about the future, but there’s no specific policy with respect to it that I’m aware of. 

Let’s see, you’re next?  Yeah, go ahead. 

Q:  My name is Mike Keller. I work with a little five and a half person company in Annapolis, Maryland, called Sonics Research Incorporated. We’ve had the good fortune over the past five years to have Defense Department sponsorship of a new what we call a lean-burn combustion process, which is based on a patent we hold for the design of a piston for piston engines.  And we believe that our data firmly demonstrates a 25 to 30 percent reduction in fuel consumption for engines producing X amount of power over useful RPM and all those kind of good parameters. 

The sign behind you reminds me of why I’m standing here, particularly the last word collaborate, because as a creature of Washington myself since 1962, anytime an industry wants to get its message across, it puts phony ads in the newspaper, usually spread across two pages.  And I can give you an armful of ads that have been placed in The Washington Post over about the last 18 months by the oil industry, which says, we want to collaborate, we want to help people conserve, we want to do this, we want to do that, signed by the presidents of these companies, chairmen of the board, and so on – by the way in full color, not in black and white.  These are things done in color and they invite us to get in touch with them. 

I have done that in response to at least every other ad.  I have signed all kinds of non-disclosure agreements in order to present our data, and we do so asking for them to help us move this technology forward.  And you know what we get back?  Not even the courtesy of a reply.  Now, how do we break this false advertising and deadlock while these companies continue to accumulate $40 billion plus profits when the country needs to benefit from some of that profit and get them to do a little truth in advertising with respect to the engineers and scientists who are trying to really accomplish something? 

MR. MARBURGER:  You know, I don’t know the answer to that question, but this is a story that I’ve heard a lot.  And I’m aware that there are a lot of small companies in this country, and entrepreneurs and people who have good ideas that could be useful in the future.  All I can say is that I think that ultimately having people like yourself out there trying to make it work is good for the nation and that – don’t give up.  I don’t know where to send you or how to do this, but I think it is important for you to try and to continue to find partners and hopefully it will work. 

There are a lot of other people who have similar experiences, but there are also people that have found partners and venture capital and so forth that can do it.  It’s not an easy thing, there’s no magic bullet here.  I hope the Internet can help somehow to find people who have similar products might be compatible with yours or something like that.  I’m not in the tech transfer business right now, but if I were you, I wouldn’t give up. 

Q:  Thank you very much.  My name is Phil Grossweiler.  I work for Congresswoman Heather Wilson.  I’m a science and technology fellow in here office.  I hear a lot of complaints about we need to do something immediately and why hasn’t the Bush administration done something.   And I’m always tempted to ask, well, what would it cost us and what are you willing to pay to get some climate change treatment?  So, you know, if we move towards the cap in trade, for example, that if we maybe set carbon at $50 a ton or whatever range of numbers are out there, have you begun to come up with some kind of an education for the public as to what they will have to pay because this won’t be free?  And we will have to somehow make a sacrifice and what can we tell the public? 

MR. MARBURGER:  Well, the media that I read are full of stories like that about what it would really cost.  And I think that word is getting out that there have to be some sacrifices.  There is going to have to be a behavior change if we want to reduce carbon emissions.  As far as this administration is concerned, as you know, one of the objectives of this meeting of the major emitters that the president has convened, one of those meetings took place about a week ago in Hawaii as a matter of fact, one of the objectives is trying to agree on international goals for reduction and the numbers like 50 percent reduction by 2050 are being thrown around.  And I think that very few people expect that those types of numbers will be achieved without some kind of policy incentive. 

But once again, it’s very difficult to predict what it will take to do it and how it should be applied.  Our country has various forms of regulation and incentives, their cap-and-trade on power plant pollution, currently not CO2 emissions, but others, and there’s direct regulation of gasoline consumption and automobiles through CAFE standards.  So this country is no stranger to that type of regulation.  I expect something will happen.  Sure, there are discussions all the time about what kind of policy will work, but from my perspective it’s only been quite recently that enough politicians, people in Congress, are talking about this to make it seem that something like this could happen. 

I’m encouraged by increased discussion of this issue among presidential candidates, although they aren’t saying too much, and other people in the House and Senate.  So I think the last year or two have seen an increased interest and a deeper level of sophistication about this issue.  It’s no longer just an argument about is it anthropogenic or not, which was in fact a pretty bitter argument some years ago.  But most people, and still, there’s a spectrum of opinion still out there.  Dr. Singer is an example, someone who feels very strongly about anthropogenic warming.  But most people have moved beyond saying okay, what do we do?

 And that’s the really important thing.  And that’s what brings us to energy policy because energy policy is the key.  And things – I mean, the good news here is regardless of what you think about climate change, things that you would do to mitigate climate change are also generally good for energy policy as well, the only exception being the cost of carbon sequestration.  And if you don’t worry about climate change, you can achieve energy independence by going full-boar on coal as a power source.  So anyway, that’s the way I see it. 

Q:  My name is Lou Rivlin.  I am essentially an ancient person.  I retired as a commander before the chairman of the joint chiefs joined the Navy; former lawyer, former venture capitalist.  My mind doesn’t stop though, unfortunately, and as I’ve heard your presentation, I’ve been interested in the omission or at least no emphasis on making what we have more efficient.  And it seems to me that if the addition of hydrogen to coal will increase the BTUs and the power output by as much as perhaps six, eight, 10 times, then we should be looking at ways of taking smaller amounts of coal and deriving quite a bit of power from it by tweaking it in different ways.  And I think that a lot of clever scientists will do well to pay attention to how to get more energy out of the energy we consume. 

MR. MARBURGER:  I agree.  And the Department of Energy does fund research of that type.  And it’s – I think there are funds available for doing that type of energy research.  And I didn’t mean to slight energy conversation, making things more efficient.  That is really important.  I think that’s part of the low-hanging fruit and we should take advantage of it.  And it is something that I think responds to price incentives, which will certainly will be there. 

Q:  Good evening, sir.  My name is David Gomez and I’m here just as a private citizen, not as a company.  I guess there’s a lot of talk, but the question is where is the government going to put its money, given the need that you mentioned, battery – not battery, but energy storage technology, which certainly would help in the transportation sector and is certainly required in order to go be best productive for putting intermittent sources onto a national grid.  And you talked about transmission lines.  I don’t if that’s a back-hand high voltage DC or some other type, but those are types of things that require great research and development: money. 

So I guess my question is, and I’m not part of the Department of Energy, should we expect that the president’s next budget would have large increases for EnRel and for energy efficiency, the renewable energy sector, the Department of Energy and other groups, rather than focus on the oil and gas sector?  And the reason I ask that is because in this latest energy act, there were some movements of money at the very end that took away tax subsidies for, I think it was wind and solar and put it into other areas which caused the big rollercoaster which happened in the ’70s.  And so the question is, there needs – are going to see a 10-times increase in EnRel or DOE or whatever? 

MR. MARBURGER:  Well, the president has asked to double the budget for the Department of Energy office of science for like three years in a row now.  And indeed, Congress has increased funding for, not necessarily for the office of science so much, but for those other areas outside – the EnRel and energy efficiency and renewable energy are not in the office of science.  And those agencies have received fairly large budget increases. 

It’s interesting, battery technology is something that is so important to industry that there is a lot of industrial research, using nanotechnology for example to improve certain characteristics of batteries, their capacity, and how fast they can be charged and discharged.  And I am aware of a lot of industrial research in this area so that in a way, although there has been much basic research in the Department of Energy laboratories on materials for batteries and fuel cell membranes and things like that.  It looks like this is one of those areas where we’re either at or past the tipping point where the industry is picking up and moving forward.  There’s such an advantage to having better batteries for almost every electronics product; that industry is making the investments in research that we like to see. 

So the government doesn’t necessarily have to carry that whole burden for battery technology.  There’s been some amazing announcements just over the past two years of improvements in batteries from Intel and from other electronics companies.  So I’m very optimistic about those particular technologies and yes, I think both Congress and the administration have favored certain of the Department of Energy to do that work.  That looks like that’s happening.  If you look at their budgets, they have increased.  Yes? 

Q:  Hi, my name is Martin Oval.  I am here an individual, as a private citizen.  I wanted to go back to the exchange on courageous politicians and democracy in just a second because I do agree with you.  We see that phenomenon but there’s also a two way street all the time and particularly in one aspect that you mentioned that’s education and not just traditional education which needs to happen of course, but also the bully pulpit of the administration, not just the presidency, but the administration.

 And I’ve been wondering why there isn’t more of that and I wonder if you might give us some indication that his might change or where it’s going.  For instance, if we do know it’s going to happen, the global warming, if it’s going to happen and that’s your stance on it, then shouldn’t there be a firm rebuttal to those who would say otherwise or at least a firm statement of that belief so that we can put that behind is and get moving on these things? 

And then the second one is the conversation, whether it be just efficiency conversation, but also actual changes in lifestyle.  Shouldn’t there be a bully pulpit on that just like there was during World War II when there really was a need to do that and everyone recognized it?  And then third, to things like we heard tonight, like the exchange of technologies, those things are probably critical to solving all this and yet, where’s the bully pulpit in changing that? 

MR. MARBURGER:  You know, the president has spoken fairly clearly on this and starting back in 2001, but this is an issue that became politicized early in his administration, just probably, just even during the campaign in 2000.  And it’s – I find it inexplicable that the work that this administration has done, with the support of Congress in most cases, on developing climate-friendly technologies and on working to international agreements for climate change in a practical way has not been acknowledged in the public discourse.  It’s a mystery to me. 

If you read the president’s speech that he gave in 2000.  It’s on the web, probably hard to find, on the White House website, but there’s no question that in early 2001, after the president was criticized for his position on Kyoto, he asked the National Academies of Science to advise him on the third IPCC assessment reports.  The National Academies made a report, turned around pretty quickly for them, and that report from the National Academies formed the basis for, the technical basis, for subsequent policy in this administration.  That’s the document that I use when I talk about it. 

After he received the report, the president gave his Rose Garden speech saying that the earth is warming and scientists say that it’s most likely due to human activities and there are still uncertainties, but we don’t have to wait until all those uncertainties are resolved before we act; we can act now.  We’re plenty established – a reorganization of the climate change science program for the U.S. and created a new climate change technology program that has a roadmap and all of the trimmings.  It’s – you’ll find it all on the Department of Energy website; some of it’s on the White House website.  And I mean, there’s a lot of activity that has happened, culminating in these recent meetings where the president has called together all these major economies.

Now, admittedly, a lot of the work, a lot of the investments that have been made that have huge relevance to climate change also are relevant to energy security and energy independence.  And the president has, in his public statements, the State of the Union messages and so forth, has made much more reference to energy security and energy independence than he has to climate change.  However, if I had been giving the speeches, I maybe would have given more equal weight to both of them.  But the point is that what has to happen is we have to reduce the cost of low-carbon technologies.  That is the key to this whole thing.  We have to make those technologies available for sustainable development with low-carbon emissions around the world.  And those investments, that type of investment in low-carbon technology has been consistently from the beginning of this administration. 

The president started with talking about hydrogen, hydrogen economy; he announced an advanced energy initiative several years ago.  He got us back into the international ether fusion program.  There were a number of things that almost every year in his administration, he’s announced a new program, gone out to talk for it.  He’s visited – he’s the only president that’s visited national labs, Department of Energy labs.  He’s gone around the country talking about this advanced energy initiative, so forth, so I feel comfortable about what we’ve actually been doing. 

Does the public need to understand more about the consequences and about exactly what’s happening?  Yes, probably, but to tell you the truth, it’s complicated. We – this climate change business is very complicated.  There are huge error bars, particularly on the regional effects.  It’s fairly easy to estimate the – I mean, it’s actually very difficult, but you can estimate the annual average, global average temperature as a result of these greenhouse gases, and it’s going up.  But to go much farther to say exactly what the effects would be and when they will occur is very due. 

We did not predict the rapid ice breakup in the Arctic, for example, that is not something that came out of our models.  Ice is breaking up and high altitude glaciation is melting faster than anybody predicted.  So there are obviously things that we still don’t understand.  If anything, the effects that were predicted are happening faster than we – they’re at the high end of the ranges.  So I think people are learning about this stuff and I’m happy to see the direction that the public discourse has taken.

    Q:  Well, those things are out there, but, especially if it’s getting worse, there should be even more mention of it, not less.  And as far as conservation goes, the stance until recently has been that it’s a fine personal virtue, but it plays no role in our energy policy.  And it’s that direction that needs to be changed.  It needs – all of these things need more talk, not less.

    MR. MARBURGER:  Good.

    Q:  My name is Kathryn Walzer (ph) and I’m an environmental engineer.  I think that when we talk about energy consumption, obviously, behavior is a huge part of it.  And I was curious if there was a campaign targeted at, say, our youth, you know, kindergarten through eighth grade, high school.  And then, as a part of that, is there a way to measure something – the effectiveness of that or any sort of public education programs that we put out there?  Is there a way to measure its effectiveness?

    MR. MARBURGER:  Well, there are a lot of programs out there about energy conservation and energy usage.  I’m not an expert on the educational programs.  I know that many people are talking about this in school districts and so forth.  A lot of material is available from the Department of Energy.  If you go – even the Energy Information Agency has a kids page on its – here’s a highly sophisticated statistical study – table after table – and on their website, you can find kids pages for energy statistics.  I didn’t – I haven’t looked at the kids pages, but clearly there are people who are turning out large amounts of curricular materials.  And teachers that are interested in teaching this have a lot of access to materials. 

I’ve seen it myself on the websites and some of it is quite good.  Just the websites of the agencies that do climate change research, particularly NOAA, are extremely informative.  They are really useful for kids as well as for teachers.  NOAA, NASA, National Science Foundation, Department of Energy all have copious amounts of material that are useful for education and very clear, complete discussions of climate change.  Every aspect can be found on these agency websites.  There’s an extraordinary amount of information available just from the government websites.  If you go to environmental organizations, there is even more with links to all of these other sites. 

MS. WERTHEIM:  We have time for two more questions.

Q:  Hi, Doctor, thanks for coming tonight.

MR. MARBURGER:  That’s your time.  I’d stay here, you know, I can stay here all night.  (Laughter.)

Q:  Nick Tasta (ph), 20/20 Institute – and I know you’re a science advisor and not necessarily a policy advisor, but I wanted to ask you a question.

MR. MARBURGER:  I advise on science policy.  I don’t advise on environmental policy.  There’s an environmental policy office, but – that does most of the climate change policy.

Q:  Let me preface my question by saying I’m a diehard Republican.  I voted for your boss twice; I’m going down with the ship.  (Laughter.)  But, at the same time, on October 7th, when we started bombing Afghanistan, bin Laden released a video tape where he was preaching our death and what was going to happen to us because we were, you know, in Saudi Arabia and all of this.  I’m wondering, from what your perspective was at the time, what was the dissonance?  Why didn’t we announce a campaign for energy independence effective immediately? 

I think the president had the nation at his hands, you know, and every resource at his disposal.  And we waited, I think, until about the 2005 State of the Union address before we really articulated, this is where we are going.  And I, you know, just from a laymen’s perspective, I was overseas at the time, but I said, you know, immediately, this is what we need to do and I don’t know why it took so long for the administration and the, you know, enlightened thinkers to make up their mind that that was in fact what we should be doing?

MR. MARBURGER:  Well, I can’t really answer a question like that because I haven’t been involved in strategy and everything, but also, you know, your perception of what the president did or didn’t do or what the administration did and didn’t do is shaped by what you read about and there are sources of information that you have.  My perception was that the president expressed interest in energy policy early on in the administration and, you know, unfortunately, the media were preoccupied with who it was that was advising the vice president about energy policy and his energy strategy.  But the administration rolled out an energy plan early on and it was given a lot of publicity.

And, certainly, the president asked for support from the – for the agencies that were doing energy research and early on in the administration.  I recalled going to visit Argonne National Laboratory with Secretary Abraham at the time and the president where he talked about energy.  He talked about energy and homeland security, as a matter of fact, and the importance of energy research at that time.  So that was probably 2002. 

And so it’s – I don’t want to – I’m not prepared to give you a long list of things that the administration actually had done, but it is my impression that there’s been a fairly consistent focus on energy policy.  Everybody knew – my own personal conversations with the president, I know that he was concerned about energy security and energy independence, you know, almost immediately when he came into office.  So I can’t explain the dissonance or, you know, the difference in perceptions here.  Many people have the same, you know, impressions, but I can’t explain them.  One quickie follow-up and I’ll steal a line from Jerry Maguire:  Show us the money, show me the money.  There’s a lot of people in the room that could do some pretty good stuff if they had the funding.

MR. MARBURGER:  Good.  Okay.  One more, huh?  Is that all, Mitzi?  Do I have to go after this?

MS. WORTHEIM:  No, no, no.  They’ll hang around.

Q:  My name is Kathleen Sheehan.  I’m actually with the transcript service.  I was curious, based on I’m sure you have the most up-to-date knowledge, on what the state of clean-coal technology is right now in this country?  It sort of seems to depend on, you know, who you ask.  Is it more of an idea or are there contracts or that type of thing?

MR. MARBURGER:  There are different meanings of the word clean coal.  For a long time, clean coal has referred to the chemical pollutants and ash and so forth and sulfur and mercury and so forth that comes from a coal-fired power plant.  And there are lots of technologies available for removing that.  So that’s one form of clean coal.  But in this context, we’re talking about taking the carbon, CO2, that comes from combustion of coal and removing it before it goes out into the atmosphere and doing something with it.  And there’s quite a lot of research on that. 

One of the scalable ideas is actually to capture it and liquefy it and pipe it to a location where it can be injected into the ground in certain geologically stable formations where it will stay there and not leak out.  And there is one such plant that I mentioned in my talk in Norway that’s operations, takes out about a million tons a year.  It’s working.  They pump it down.  Typically, they will pump it down into an oil field that’s been – that’s of a certain type to force the oil out so that they can recover some oil this way so there’s an economically advantageous cycle there.  But in many future applications, one expects it will just be pumped into the ground.  So that’s also being done I think on a pilot basis in Canada and, in fact, if I’m not mistaken, CO2 is used commercially by oil companies to force oil out of porous material and increase the yield from oil fields.  So the idea is to try to scale that up. 

And there is an initiative by the Department of Energy that has been formed with a group of utilities that, up until a few weeks ago – (chuckles) – had agreed to build a pilot plant with some features that would make it into a pilot that people could learn from and improve the technology.  The name of the project was FutureGen and it involved a number of companies who agreed to share cost with the federal government.

Now, the agreement for that program was negotiated under the previous secretary of Energy.  The current secretary of Energy has determined that the agreement was highly unfavorable to the federal government and saw the cost of this thing escalating.  And a few weeks ago, he said, I want to restructure this.  It’s been reported as canceling it, but that’s not his intention.  His intention is to restructure it and build more pilot plants, seven instead of one, and they would be built under a slightly different agreement. 

So at the present time, we are in a kind of a transition mode where the previous effort has been dissolved, as it were, by the Department of Energy, but the new one hasn’t been rolled into place yet. 

I don’t know how far the design for FutureGen had gone, but my understanding is that the work that has been done will be available to the future project when it gets started and we will see seven pilot plants for carbon sequestration rather than just one.  So there are experiments with this around the world, but they are still relatively small and relatively few in number.  And part of the reason is there’s still a lot of unknowns, a very expensive technology right now.  And until it’s better understood, it will be hard to get the utility companies and their financial backers to invest in the necessary multibillion-dollar infrastructure to do this. 

But I have – I’m pretty sure it will happen.  This is one of the big, high-leverage things for climate change.

Q:  Thank you.

MS. WERTHEIM:  Someone snuck in!

MR. MARBURGER:  Okay, one last question.

Q:  Thank you very much for your kindness.  I’m Dave Goldstein, the president of the Electric Vehicle Association of greater Washington, D.C.  Dr. Marburger, it’s been my privilege to observe the efforts of six different presidential administrations here in Washington in the area of advanced technology, advanced transportation, advanced batteries.  And every different administration that’s come to town has generally put a different spin on the ball.  As a result, as you’re well aware, we get many different starts and stops and there’s no consistent energy strategy, one of the great complaints about our national policy.  At the same time, we know that to resolve the problems that we’re addressing today will take many decades to truly work out. 

In that regard, during your administration, during this administration, the Department of Energy launched a 50-year energy study that’s really quite interesting.  I don’t know whether many people have heard of it, but it looks at a number of different scenarios for how we might address these needs.  But, again, there is no consistent mechanism that I’m aware of to bring this about.  Are you aware of any such organization within this administration or anything that may proceed beyond this administration that might proceed looking ahead and might be able to actually effect such a workable strategy over different administrations or are we unnecessarily intruding into the area of sort of the centralized government planning that we’d find in China where they have a 200-year plan?

MR. MARBURGER:  First of all, there is a remarkable amount of continuity of energy initiatives within the Department of Energy and some other agencies like EPA, particularly.  I think of the Energy Star program, for example, and there have been other energy programs run out of the Department of Energy that have really made some big differences in minor – in ways that you would think would be minor, but have had, because of the volume, have big impacts, things like solid-state lighting, advanced lighting concepts, improvements in the efficiency of oil burners.  Things like this have huge leverage ultimately. 

And those programs go on year in and year out.  And I think that there is continuity in certain aspects of energy policy.  When it comes to technology transfer and commercial applications, there is a difficult interface between what government does, which mostly is to do the research and come up with physical phenomena that can be used in technologies, and what industry does, which is to take fairly safe ideas, low-risk ideas, and develop them into products. 

And battery technology is an interesting example of something that is being worked on simultaneously both in the private and the public sectors over long periods of time.  Catalysts is another one.  The Department of Energy has a catalysis program for many, many years and that has successfully transferred into the chemical industry and it’s had enormous impacts on green chemistry and cost savings and so forth. 

So there is a lot of continuity in areas where people – which are not very visible to the public.  And what you hear about are flashy things or big, you know, there are big issues that sometimes are controversial that become politicized and therefore unpredictable.  (Chuckles.)  But I think there is more continuity in energy policy than you might think in these base technologies.  And, mind you, there has been steady improvement in solar-cell efficiencies and battery efficiencies and components for fuel cells in superconducting transmission lines.  And, on the other hand, we see or I see the automobile industry as a primary source of ideas for increased efficiency in automobile, in internal-combustion engines. 

They have the ability to do it, we know, but that is, you know, I’ve seen some very impressive research on these things in the Ford research labs.  Whether they actually use it in their cars or not depends on economic factors and regulations and CAFE standards and things like that which are much less predictable.  But I think there is a fair amount of continuity of effort and I think the climate change issue, I mean, the climate change and the energy-security issues are more, are environmental factors that are guaranteed to keep the pressure on these things.  They have now loomed very large.  I see no chance of them diminishing in the future as drivers for these areas.  So my prediction is that you’ll see continued government – in our own inimitable way, in our form of government, we will continue to work on these problems until they are solved.

MS. WERTHEIM:  Dr. Marburger, before we thank him, there are two things I want to share with you.  One was – I don’t know how many of you happened to read the article in the magazine section of the New York Times yesterday about Secretary Gates called “The Professional” by Fred Kaplan.  And there were a couple of sentences that really caught my attention because I have really been trying to push this whole idea of consequences of choices, that we have – I’ve spent my adult life living with lawyers.  And, somehow, in the last few weeks, all of the sudden it dawned on me:  Washington is run primarily by lawyers and they come up with one-off solutions.  And that may be one of the problems we face in Washington. 

So let me just read you what came from Dr. Gates:

“Gates also noted a lesson from his years as deputy national security adviser, deputy director of the C.I.A. and director of Central Itelligence during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. ‘I learned to ask the question, What’s Chapter 2?’ he said.” Quote, “‘If we do this, what will they do? Then what? Then what? Try to think two, three, four moves out.’”

I think that’s something we all have to learn how to do, particularly in this enormously complex globalized world we now live in because whatever choices we make set up the conditions for the next problem.  And, in fact, everything is connected to everything else.  And, finally, our next meeting will be on March 11th; that’s a Tuesday.  And Amory Lovins is going to come back and talk to us.  He’s been one of the members of the Defense Science Board so we will get some insights from what Amory learned there and whatever thoughts he has.

Dr. Marburger, this was an absolutely fascinating evening.  Thank you so much for sharing it with us and giving us an insight into how you see what the White House is trying to say, which the rest of us may not always have heard it, but thank you for letting us – oh, he tried to say it?  Thank you all. 

(Applause.)

(END)

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