lemon would say that is a man in his prime. >> watch coverage of the white house correspondence dinner on saturday with colin jost as feature entertainer as well as president biden who is expected to give remarks. coverage starts at 6:00 p.m. eastern as journalists and celebrities walk the red carpet. at 8:00 p.m. eastern, sights and sounds from inside the ballroom before the festivities begin. watch the white house correspondence dinner saturday on the c-span networks. >> c-span is your unfiltered view of government. we are funded by these television companies and more, including comcast. >> you think this is just a community center? it is way more than that. comcast is partnering with 1000

community centers to create wi-fi enabled listings so students from low income families can get the tools they need to be ready for anything. >> comcast supports span as a public service, along with these other television providers, even you a front row seat to democracy. -- giving you a front row seat to democracy. >> up next, academics and policy advocates discuss environmental policy and weather conditions have progressed over the last few decades. from the american enterprise institute this is just under 90 minutes. >> good morning. i'm the director of domestic policy at the american enterprise institute and it's my

pleasure to welcome you all to this event, 30 years of environmental progress, is it time at last to be optimistic in -- optimistic? in 1968 a book was published called the population bomb. the book repurposed the ideas of 18th century economist thomas malus to argue that population growth would soon outpace agricultural growth leading to widespread famine and other social and ecological crises . these ideas took hold of the american environmental movement which adopted a broadly , pessimistic view of our planet's future. their predictions do not come to pass but alarmism over the effect of population growth on the environment as well as resource scarcity endures among many on the left. in recent years the notion that americans should stop having children to protect the environment has been promoted widely by academics, journalists and other public figures . according to analysts at morgan

stanley, the movement to not have children owing to fears of climate change is growing and impacting fertility rates quicker than any preceding trend in the field of fertility decline. despite these anxieties available data on environmental trends makes it clear that we've made enormous progress in environmental issues over the last 30 years, both within the united states and around the world. we are here this earth day then to explore what that progress has looked like, how environmental data should shape future public policy decisions, and why we should ask and answer why we should be optimistic about america's environmental future. our speakers this morning are stepen f hayward and roger pil jr. from 2002 to 2012 steven was a fellow here at ai where he authored an annual report on environmental trends and controversies titled the index of leading environmental indicators. the index analyzed and summarized overlook government data on the environment most of which demonstrated substantial

environmental progress over the last generation. in 2010, steven published mere environmentalism, a biblical perspective on humans and the natural world which explored the philosophical presuppositions of the modern environmentalist movement. and this morning's discussion will expand on many of steven's themes and evidence contained in that work. today steven hayward is a resident scholar at the university of california, berkeley's institute of government studies and a fellow of the law and public policy program at berkeley law. he's also a professor at pepperdine university, a popular blogger at powerline blog.com . he's written a number of books on the history of the american conservative movement of particular interest to me, including the two volume age of reagan, excellent book, and another excellent book, patriotism is not enough, harry jafa walter burns and the ar arguments that reshaped american

conservatism. roger pil jr. meanwhile is a non-resident senior fellow here at ai and a professor in the college of arts and sciences at the university of colorado boulder his work explores science and technology policy with a particular focus on energy and climate and the politicization of science he writes the popular substack the honest broker which you are happy to host on the ai homepage these days, in addition to the substack platform, and is the author of several books, including the rightful place of science, disasters and climate change, and the climate fix what scientists and politicians won't tell you about global warming . steven hayward will begin this morning with a presentation on leading environmental indicators, roger will then offer some remarks on climate change in particular which tends to overshadow other environmental issues in public discourse, and afterwards steven and roger will discuss what we have learned about the environment in recent years and how the environmental movement should proceed. we will then open the floor to q&a. if you are watching online, you

may submit questions to guydenton@aei.org. please join me in welcoming stephen f hayward back to aei. >> happy earth day, everybody. it used to be a big deal. there was a riley on the mall and festivals and american cities and college campuses. now it happens kind of quietly and i think therein lies the tail -- tale with a very large asterisk. my point is we now have arrived

at a moment for environmental optimism broadly speaking not just in the united states and wealthy industrial countries but increasingly around the world i think. if you cast your mind back to you know 35, 40 years ago, you may remember every january the world watch institute would put out their state of the world report. and it always got a lot of press . lester brown was the chief instigator of this and he was one of the prominent figures of environmentalism in the 70s and 80's and into the 1990's. it got a lot of press and it was all, the world is doomed, everything is terrible. this was reflected in public opinion. a group used to do an annual poll every other year on the environment and found that you know large majorities of americans thought environmental quality in america was getting worse.

the roper poll doesn't exist anymore. i had the question the next 10 years will be the last decade. we started this in 1974 -- 1970. 54 years ago and here we are still with tenure countdowns. everyone remembers the headlines about everything is terrible and we are all going to die. one of the first markers i think of the beginning of a slow change can be traced back to or i like to start with this this is an ad from the new york times from david brower, also one of the great figures of environmentalism from the 1960's to the 1990's.

this is a full-page ad in the new york times. you can see the headline "economics is a form of brain , damage." it was a letter to the clinton administration. please do not use the cost-benefit analysis the reagan administration and bush administration used all these years to stop sensible environmental regulation. not only did the clinton not take that advice and keep using the formulas that developed in the reagan years but when obama came into office in 2009 he installed as head of the regulatory analysis a unit that was started back in the reagan years. he appointed cass son steen.

there was grumbling from environmental groups about the appointment they got nowhere. then the idea of cost benefit analysis went mainstream, in particular 2009 had richard rz and his co-author william lever mole. and then center left conventional environmental thinkers i think they published a very serious book saying i'll paraphrase it this way let's not leave cost benefit analysis to those libertarian right-wing fanatics, we ought to embrace it too because it makes good sense . i don't think very many environmentalists today would use that slogan, environmentalism is a form of brain damage. environmental economics is now pretty mainstream, even if often poorly done. i'm tempted to just use that old dr johnson line that it's not

that it's done well, like you know women preaching or dogs standing on their hind legs if you know that famous old quote from samuel johnson. there were simple charts and graphs of all bad stuff happening. teenage pregnancy and crime rate and test scores and drug dependency and welfare dependency. rush limbaugh picked up on it and it became a book sensation. knowing about air quality statistics in california where i grew up with really bad smog in la, i got to thinking you know the same kind of treatment in the u.s. would show mostly improvement. not on everything, but on a lot of big things, and so i thought i'm just going to copy that format. i put out an annual report, short enough for someone to get through it but have enough

substance to say something. it did well with the media. it never was quite the sensation of bill bennett's report because as i put it once to bill, his report was about sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. mine was about polychlorinated biphenyls. who do you think will get more press? greg easterbrook came out with his monumentally large book a moment on the earth and the subtitle is the coming age of environmental optimism. i think greg was just 15 years too early his book got savaged by environmentalists for some reason the environmental defense fund took a such a disliking to it that they set up an early website this was still the early days of the internet nitpicking you know factual claims and and statistics that could be contested an error here and there but the sweeping point was

the entire book should be discredited because he had written in the book environmental commentary is so , fog bound in woe that few people realize measurable improvements have already been made in almost every area. you could not say that then without attracting widespread scorn. economist magazine at the time observed that suggesting the environment as a cause for optimism is beyond the pale of respectable discourse. within a few years you began to see the media taking notice i remember in 2000 after i talked to the editorial board at u.s.a -- usa today they talked about hidden environmental gains they -- gains. they were hidden in plain sight. things improved but things are still terrible and a lot of environmentalists cannot take yes for an answer.

the other thing at the time that i made a not really a stink about but you know the united states still does not have a bureau of environmental statistics to go along with the bureau of justice statistics, the bureau of labor statistics, the bureau of education statistics. meanwhile almost almost all of our european peer nations have a bureau of environmental statistics and produce annual reports on environmental trends and conditions in their countries. we haven't. that did finally change with the epa around 2006, they now have on their website that of course is huge and sprawling and it's hard to find things but they have a report on the environment that pulls together the data on environmental problems not just the ones that are under epa jurisdiction, but from other cabinet agencies and other regulatory agencies in the government. you can download the data sets to analyze. when i started 30 years ago i had to do it the old-fashioned

way. i had to go to the epa library in san francisco and look up printed reports and enter those numbers into a spreadsheet by hand but now all the data is available for anyone so that is a step forward but we still do not have a bureau of environmental statistics or any consistent reporting format tell -- format. tell a little story about that. i teamed up for several years in the ss with paul portney the longtime president of resources for the future recommending that we ought to have a bureau of environmental statistics, and we testify a couple times before some house committee on government administration and environmentalists would show up to oppose the idea. i can be cynical about it but one person who spoke against it said we do not trust the bush administration to do it fairly.

but the bush omb had put out a big report about how massive the health benefits of the clean air act were. the epa started putting out this lovely chart every year which could be summarized under the heading of decoupling showing the that you can have lots of economic growth, population growth, vehicle miles traveled, and falling conventional air pollution, and here in the last few years falling carbon dioxide emissions at the same time. i'll come back to that. today we see the six main air pollution pollutants of the clean air act era have all fallen well below the national

standards, which we keep lowering every so often. there are stubborn pockets like parts of l.a. but when i grew up in the 70's in the l.a. area, i mount in the san gabriel valley, 2 miles from the mountains. you could not see them. most of the l.a. basin now doesn't violate the old one hour standard even one day of the year. but even on the worst days the peak level of ozone is less than half of what an average day was in l.a. in the 1970's and a lot of it is the story of automobiles.

here's the decline curve from 1972 now. i like to point out that it's really an automobile story i like to say the real heroes of the clean air act are not so much environmental lawyers and judges or even epa issuing mandates, those all play a role, but the real heroes were the engineers who wore pocket protectors who figured out how to redesign our entire combustion systems for autos and lots of other things. the same story is true of nitrogen oxide emissions, both totally and from automobiles and i can say a lot more about the conventional air pollution story in power plants on coal but it's true that not everything has improved or things that have improved have stalled out. for a long time we were losing a lot of wetlands. we reversed that the by the beginning of the new century and

in the last for years we have started backsliding a little. not all land is created equal. another area where we have made no progress at all would be hypoxia in the gulf of mexico which really is a story of runoff from the huge mississippi river basin. here you can implicate conflicting environmental policies. we'd like to get the area of hypoxia and nutrient runoff down but we are also saying let's have a lot of corn ethanol which is the wrong thing to do if you were trying to control a runoff in the mississippi basin. i've got some old data showing that the general trend of nitrate loadings has been going up. a lot of that very choppy variation really does depend on how much rainfall there is in a year in the mississippi basin. what we are not having a lot of quick progress there.

trends have been flat on nitrogen loadings into the goals . other areas have shown better performance like the chesapeake bay, puget sound data has not been looked at for a long time. another interesting effort to do serious environmental analysis happened in 2006 when the hind center did the state of the nation's ecosystems. this was an extraordinary project involving about over 100 scientists of various specialties, and of course one problem is what's an ecosystem ? they had worked very hard to define different kinds of ecosystems in different scales . an ecosystem can be as small as a petri dish or as large as the whole country. they developed about 120 indicators of ecosystem condition and what they found was they only had decent data

for about half. others had some data but there were gaps so they could only draw conclusions about a few of the different ecosystem conditions they thought were important. about 25% of them showed improvement, others just too much uncertainty, but above all the process of doing this took several years. we hosted the project director for this here at aei when the report came out. it was saved -- it was so labor-intensive they didn't keep the project up but it's the kind of intensive investigation you've seen a lot more of as environmental studies has matured in the last 30 years. other people are starting to get into the game and i think maybe the turning point toward environmental optimism started with bjorn lor's book in 2000 . it was very controversial. you may remember that some

danish scientific committee formerly charged lomborg with scientific dishonesty. i read the report and i couldn't find a single factual claim disputed, although there were many factual claims in the book you could dispute or hasty conclusions and so forth and they ended up retracting that finding but that shows you how politicized the matter still was . that was just the beginning. by 2005 we have jack hollander a meritus physicist from uc , berkeley who described to me that he got in the environment back in his days as a bobby kennedy liberal. this began to be a sign that environmental thought was now environmental optimism was not only growing but was more bipartisan. it was not limited. the one that especially jumped out to me was seymour cart. it's a professor of public health at the university of

pittsburgh and he told the story of how he was at a conference one day of public health experts and a speaker said well of course you know air pollution is falling almost everywhere, and he said we all looked around each other. none of us had heard this. we didn't believe it. we had never seen it reported anywhere. he decided to look into similar trends. that's where he came out with the surprising look at the real state of our planet and we had seymour here at ai to talk about this book because whenever a book like this came out from some unexpected quarter i thought that person needs some attention. the late hans rosling he died a few years ago too early good friend of nick abat here and he's a demographer who covers a lot of the waterfront but environment was one of the issues he liked to talk about . and if you've never seen his gap mind or website, he was one of

the designers, it's this wonderfully interactive site where you can plug in from any databases for individual countries and countless variables and then generate these really wonderful animated graphics. whenever i teach the subject i make students learn how to use gap minder and do various research projects. i think it is a fabulous resource. hannah richie is just out with a brand-new book, not the end of the world. this is the kind of optimism that used to not be allowed and now you see more mainstream books like this. hannah is part of this terrific project out of oxford run by max roser called our world in data . it does a lot of things. environmental issues on a global scale extremely well.

and there is a project on human progress. energy environment is prominent. ted nordhouse and michael selberg's book from almost 20 years ago, a breakthrough. ted will be here tonight along with roger to talk. this began a self-conscious new movement called ecomodernism and to make a long story short look up ecomodernist manifesto online . it is explicitly anti-malthusian , explicitly pro technology, and optimistic about the future . i never would have experienced this -- expected this 10 years ago. matt mentioned the population bomb in 1968 which corresponded

with the peak of fertility rates around the world and that is when they started falling. interesting timing. matthew connelly, a historian at columbia university published this book around 2010 i think and it is a lacerating criticism not just of the outlook on population but especially he's very critical of in particular the planned parenthood international and their birth control efforts around the world which were often quite coercive and even in some cases violent . the title has it right. there is a reaction has grown to the eco-modernists and there's now a self-style degrowth movement.

when you ask people on twitter what they mean, it is often confusing and contradict very. they'll say we don't actually mean negative growth, just some different kind of growth. the way i put it is the old malthusian environmentalists or -- are like alcoholics who have been to a 12 step program and they are determined to get sober and then they walked by a well lit tavern and go on a bender. here is the later -- latest

series from gallup. pollsters aren't even asking about the environment much anymore. they used to do exit polls and ask if the environment was one of the top two issues. i think they stopped asking after 2002 because the number of people who said it was was below 2%, below the margin of error. there are large majorities that think things are getting worse and then suddenly in 2009 that gap narrows and there is a conspicuous jump. barack obama was elected.

i think it is not new a partisan division on the environment has opened up and been around for very long time but it stayed that way through the obama years and then trump comes and takes us out of the paris climate accord and then joe biden arrives and the number of people goes down and the latest go paul reflects the political divide and then you see this and and when biden is still in office what is going on?

gallup speculates this increase is coming from republicans. they do not really explain why and what. i have a lot of thoughts about what it means. it's interesting and unexpected and might be a reason for optimism long-term. i want to get to climate change. my proposition is climate change has eaten environmentalism alive. if you bring up any other problems that deserve policy work, water quality, loss of habitat, toxic exposure, what you often hear is, it does not matter if things have gotten better, climate change is going

to stop everything and make it all worse so therefore the solution to loss of forests and habitat destruction is we have to solve climate change, it will solve everything else. which seems wrong to me. to cover that part of the waterfront i will defer now to roger. thank you. we ll good morning. it's great to be here with stephen. a decade ago steve was at university of colorado boulder and he chose to sit in my department and when he was wrapping up his year he told me when i first came i was worried i would come to an environmental

studies department in boulder colorado and it would be all politics and when i went to the faculty meeting it was who gets what office, just boring. we are academics. my talk will be shorter, narrower, and deeper. i'm going to talk about climate change. this is me marching in at birthday parade. this was 1973. i was an environmental optimist. let's start with john kerry. he has been a longtime advocate on climate change. in 2021 he said as we are

talking we are on course to hit somewhere between three and four degrees at the current rate. two years later, the same sort of speech, a change was made. we are currently headed towards 2.5 degrees of warming on the planet. that is a significant change. so it is fair to ask what change. he is accurately reflecting the science where many people still have not. if you ask him what changed, he said recently we are headed towards 2.5 degrees now. when i took this job on, we were headed towards four degrees. that is not exactly correct.

i will tell you why perspective has changed. i call it the best-kept secret in climate science. everyone in and around climate science knows everything i'm going to tell you right now. most people do not. this is a spaghetti diagram. these are carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels. all of this colorful spaghetti is projections that were developed starting 20 years ago on how the future might play out under different scenarios. climate science is based on scenarios of the future, which are complicated and have aspects of economics, energy consumption and production, land-use, population growth. this figure shows 1200 scenarios that were developed.

the world scientists obviously cannot deal with 1200 scenarios. it has to be simplified. so in 2005 they said let's pick four scenarios and that will be the focus of our research. they have these names. they said let's have a high one, let's have a low one, that is the blue one, and let's have two in the middle. if you put one in the middle everyone will focus on the one so let's do two. it turned out at that time the high one, rcp 8.5 for a lot of reasons was designated business as usual. this is that we world is hitting -- heading. a temperature rise to 2100. this is where john kerry got the three or four degrees celsius that he repeated in 2021. so what has changed?

what i am doing here on this graph is i have taken every one of these spaghetti scenarios. this was recently published if anyone wants a copy. i'm taking these scenarios and i plotted them on the graph. total fossil fuel carbon dioxide emissions all added up to 2100 on the x axis and then on the vertical axis is temperature change to 2100. so the increased carbon dioxide, you increase temperature. it's not exactly linear but it is close. you have the extreme scenarios here and less extreme here consistent with the paris agreement. the intergovernmental panel on climate change is doing its job. it says when we use emission

scenarios they have to be plausible, they have to be capable of occurring in the real world. so i use this green oval and i drew a circle around all these because these are the 2005 to 2010 scenarios that were developed. because they were put in the database we can conclude they thought all of them were plausible. so my colleagues and said, a lot of time has passed since 2005. we know what has happened with the mission so we can compare the real world to what the scenarios put forward. the other thing we can do is that the energy system modelers produce short-term energy outlook that are updated every year. so they are the best view into what will happen next year and the next five in the next 10 so we ask, of this big body of 1200

scenarios, which one survived the test of reality and where we think we are headed today? here is the answer. all of the scenarios that survive the test of reality and the test of near-term projections sit between two and 3 degrees, and in our study the plausible scenarios were centered on 2.2 degrees celsius changed by 2100. the narrowing of expectations is perfectly normal. it happens in research. if you have long-term scenarios, as time goes on some of them will survive and some of them will fall out. economists know this, anyone who deals with data and projections knows the future is a difficult place to predict and doesn't always evolve as we think so let me go back to the spaghetti

diagram. if we apply this test of plausibility, we find that these very extreme scenarios are implausible, in fact this business as usual rcp 8.5 is already falsified. just to give you a sense of how ridiculous it is, it assumes that the world is going to build something like 30,000 new coal fire power plants by 2100. there are 6000 in the world right now. some countries are building more like india and china but others are going off of coal, particularly in the eu and the u.s. so once we look at these plausible scenarios based on where we sit today, the world looks a lot different and let me say this is not a unique view just to me and my colleagues we happen to be one of many

researchers around the world. this is a figure that's put together by zeke housefather . and it's in time order of publication. here is our study with the graybar between two and three degrees and these different publications have different projections of temperature out to 2100 assuming different policy paths and so on, but one of the things that you can see is that five degrees is way up here. four degrees right here. there are no more studies there. john kerry was saying it looked like the world was headed towards two point five degrees by 2100 he was accurately reflecting the state of scientific understanding now. if you go to the major media, the biden administration projections on the costs of climate change and the social cost of carbon, you will find the old extreme scenario

dominates public discussion. so there is a dissonance. the old outdated scenario, the climate apocalypse scenario, still has a firm hold on public discourse and on the media and almost all the time in policy. john kerry is interesting because he kind of stands alone in accurately reflecting the science. the iea came out in 2023 and i am pretty sure this is where the 2.4 degrees came from. you see it goes through the studies. this is the new scientific consensus on climate change. last summer in reading, england about 50 of the world's scenario experts that create the scenarios that inform the ipcc gathered at a workshop to create abstract art. no they didn't.

they gathered at the workshop to develop the next generation of scenarios. this is a big problem for climate research and climate policy because once scenarios are created, they last for 20 years and i can tell you the scenarios that we create this year are going to be out of date in a couple years and so there need to be some rethinking, we need to be more like the the energy system modelers and update scenarios every year. they came up with a proposal for a new set of scenarios. they took the extreme scenarios and put them in this hatched projection here. i took the graphic and tried to turn it more into something consistent with what i just showed you. up here is the rcp 8.5, you can see between four and 5 degrees . this is where we thought we were

headed. the new scenario does not even come close. climate science community is well aware of this. there is going to be a profound reckoning in public discourse and discussions when the world realizes that where we're headed is lower than what just a few years ago was called a success story. on climate change. so let me just conclude and i look forward to having a discussion with everyone, climate change is real, it is a problem, but in recent years our understandings of how future emissions are going to evolve has changed and the good news is it has become less extreme. we should be able to comment on that good news while also at the same time recognizing there is a lot of work left to do. here is how you can find me for

questions or comments and i look forward to chatting with you. thank you. [applause] >> do you want to go straight to questions? >> i don't know. let's go to questions. >> we have some online ones. >> my name is joe. i have two l.a. questions because i grew up in the san fernando valley in the 1950's and we burned trash in the backyard. question number one, when did l.a. stop being smallville -- smog ville? and has anyone done any long-range studies of long-range

health effects on those of us who grew up in smogville? >> good question. the l.a. story happened slowly. i used to have the data memorized of when things peaked which was the late 60's and early 70's but things did not really start dropping substantially until the 80's into the 90's and then it started going down fast by the year 2000. one of the things about the clean air act generally is it was well understood as early as the 1950's that los angeles has a big problem with carbon monoxide. smog was not well understood. but once the clean-air act passed and we started monitoring the whole country we were surprised to discover that milwaukee and other places that were never as bad as la also had elevated levels of carbon monoxide.

there was a study on asthma in 2002 that i thought was mixed and there was another study recently, i can't remember the citation. i remember as a kid you could not play outside in the afternoon in the summer because your lungs would just hurt. you could not go swimming because within 15 minutes you were gasping for air. i was a track athlete in the 70's and i cannot believe they let us run. unbelievable. i look back on that now. it's an interesting question. there is a range of opinion. i have seen studies that thought the health effects were overestimated and that we were more resilient.

so i am agnostic about it. there's unquestionably health benefits especially from getting lead out of the air but that's also a national story. i think we are still war -- waiting for long-term data about l.a. i think the younger people coming up will have lower incidence of asthma. i convinced the sign will be positive. >> mark? >> mark mills with the national center for energy analytics. would you speculate on what form and when the reckoning will happen? i think this is relevant to both your views. >> this is one of those where things change in underlying scientific understandings and it

can take a really long time for that to percolate into the future. i will go back to the population bomb. you do not hear people, you can find them, but you don't hear it pronounced like it was in the 1970's about population crisis. we might say when did that reckoning happen and the reality is i don't think it ever did. we just kind of moved on and other issues like climate change took its place. i think it is conceivable that in my children's generation, climate change will still be as an issue but it will be like how we think about population today. it matters, it is important, population policy. we talk about health care are an indication in women's rights which are all relevant to population so i do think that

new understanding quietly replace the old without people saying we were wrong about that. i have noticed that as the new understanding starts to be discussed that the storyline is we are being successful on climate policy. all decisions with the paris agreement have led to bending the curve. i think the real story is we adopted as the leading scenario a flawed scenario and it defeats the whole purpose of scenario planning. we do not know the future. we bet on one that was politically convenient for

alarmist narratives but not particularly realistic. >> one caveat. none of the other scenarios became passé and had roughly a trillion dollars a year of spending programs in place in the u.s. and eu. so we have these massive entitlements and direct spending . mandates and subsidies that are unprecedented. we did not have that for population control. >> as matthew connelly says in his book, fatal misconception, there was a lot of bad things done in the name of population policy for a long time and you know i'm very much of the view that good or bad policy doesn't emerge from scientific understanding. one thing i am pretty sure of is

that politics is self-correcting, maybe in some cases on a faster scale than is science. and as we see as people feel the consequences of higher price energy, they lash out. farmers taking action in europe recently. so i think one thing i have written about in my book is called the iron law of climate, which is people respond to economics and they do not like higher priced energy. so if the subsidies put in place, in the u.s. or europe, do not lead to accelerated economic growth, better per capita standards of living, obvious improvements and technologies, the policies will not sustain. policies could have inefficiencies, absolutely, i do not think that is unique to

climate or environmental issues. >> my answer is the same. i don't think you ever get a reckoning on just about anything. like the emissions forecast, it used to be the u.n. population agency did a century long predictions of population growth rate. it would have a high case, middle, low. in the last 25 years the highest case is lower than what the lowest case used to be. now it is not unusual to see the new york times saying there is a birth dearth. the way i think of it is climate

change will become a normal issue. it will not go away but it will not be the extraordinary climate crisis. you need to have a population policy. nixon set up a commission. someone said, you realize if we

have a population policy in the country it will disproportionately affect minorities because they have the highest fertility rates in that commission was never heard from again. it quietly disappeared. you have to work really hard to find this. that is a certain echo of current policies were current political current and so you know that show of the uptick that gallup people thinks it's actually republicans as my mind a hopeful sign that in some sense it might mean that environmental issues including climate will start to reset a normal and something looks more normal like education and health care we fight over that but the point is both parties fight about it and ways of trying to look for solutions and a game and one last anecdote almost 30 years ago now i get invited to the rnc's meeting of team 100 which was 100 thousand dollar

donors and now rnc would say small donors and i can talk on the environment i sort of go through with these bunch of people said that's very interesting but why are we talking about their issue and that is when my head hit the table. that's not ok. you get the point. when the two parties compete for an issue, that's when we make the most policy progress even though nobody's happy about it at any particular moment. >> jp hogan. it's a few questions in one but on the sign in 2006 they started doing the eu. eu and the u.s. did a lot of cutting of co2 tyrannically i guess but so we had the reductions while then china india increased so we had a flipping of the daily greenhouse effect from one side of the

northern hemisphere to the other that is almost a man-made climate change from the cuts. so i wasn't sure where your science is? i was always annoyed that they weren't like controlling their solutions and checking the science on whether their solutions were causing problems. you have studies on where that flipping has caused weather changes? so that would be the first question. i will leave it at that for now. >> yeah, i mean, on the science of climate change and the effects of carbon dioxide cuts, i mean, the the answer is that if you take a look at the the historical record of carbon dioxide accumulating in the atmosphere and it is the whole

atmosphere not where it's produced it's been going up up up up. there is a seasonal cycle. if you take a look at the data, there has been actions taken but the global rate of decarbonization which is carbon dioxide per unit of gdp has been pretty much linear for the last 50 years so carbon dioxide emissions have not peaked. they're not going down in some places they are going down as , you say correctly. the united states saw peaking emissions in 2005 and it's gone down since then but largely due to the deployment of renewables and solar and wind but also probably more significantly natural gas from fracking has displaced coal in europe. it's been similar the biggest advance in carbon free energy

was actually deployment was in france in the 1980s with nuclear power so there are predictions the international energy agency thinks we're going to peak all the fossil fuels by 2030 we will see but as of this moment there's no reason to expect that climate policies as climate policy focused on emissions have any discernable influence on the climate system. >> i met a nasa engineer and he said oh well the co2 isn't escaping what came to mind was well did it used to go through an ozone hole so where having heard a scientist say well it isn't escaping how did it used to escape and was is was was an ozone hole helping co2 escape where it built up? >> i mean, the short answer is no. the co2 when it's emitted for purposes of human society and the climate system co2 is in the atmosphere for not forever but from a policy standpoint it might as well be. thank you. >> ruie has a. >> ruie toara. what i am curious about and what i worry about is not that i think these you know sort of the median model can go down to like 2.4 degrees or 2.3 degrees and that could be a more widespread understanding but it's not clear to me there have any effect on the climate debate at all.

because you know, there's a built-in, you know, button that can be pushed on this issue constantly which is weather. right. the weather attribution industry is like incredibly powerful it gets this huge section to the democratic party massive interest groups. there's foundations putting hundreds of billions and what do they have to point to at this point they can always point to the weather there's always something going on. and the dialogue at this point and in sort of overall i am completely impervious to what the actual underlying findings from the ipcc are in these weather trends and weather events as you written about in your blog and in other places so i guess i am just saying -- i'm

not sure that, you know, a bit more common sense and what the models really say is actually going to have that much effect and that the real problem is you know the weather attribution thing there's always going to be something going on like the ocean, look at how hot it's been. -- this last year. unbelievable. this is so extreme. we're all about to blow up so what do you do about that? >> if you're here at six o'clock tonight right it's a great question and of course you're absolutely right i mean one of the other responses to this changing perspectives that is out there is that that advocates the apocalyptic language they used to use to describe four or five degrees celsius they just , recalibrated and said it's at , oh my gosh, two celsius now. ok. the weather attribution industry so that's a technical term but that means something happened

can we pin it on a cause and usually the cause is emissions of greenhouse gases. it's really interesting because the science of so-called attribution has departed from the so-called gold standard of the intergovernmental panel on climate change for a long time now the the ipcc has been pretty stalwart and and i have a lot of respect for them have called things straight on extreme weather most of the policy world the advocacy world the journalistic world has decided to ignore the ipcc so there's been people to fill that gap there's a new industry of weather attribution. there's good work by people like mike hume who have looked at how we think of climate going back 150 years and it turns out there is really, i mean we have , a different media ecosystem now. but there's really not that's changed in how we see portense in the weather. it used to be, you know, drought follows the plow from the time that that the we were colonizing the american west. the idea that when you farm it it brings drought and we're causing it it's it's our fault

so i don't know that that ever goes away and there every time there's a weather event anywhere in the world and extreme weather is actually normal on planet earth so you actually have to go into the statistics to identify changes it's pinned right now on human climate change. and i fully expect that to continue. that'll be a tool of advocacy going forward. and smart climate and energy policies are going to have to be put in place in that context because i don't think it's going to go away. >> i have for the longest time and still to a certain extent tried to resist making the comparison to a lot of environmental activism to religion. i prefer to stick with the data and the objective realities of the world and not traffic in what can quickly become a just a overgeneralization. it's getting harder and harder all the time. people often ask me, why are environmentalists so gloomy? because it makes them happy. i actually kind of believe this. it's a secular apocalypse

without the promise of redemption. but then equally obvious is there is very much the the the you know the heretics vibe about it. i wrote an article that was a cover story for the weekly standard, don't know whether that still exists, about a republican made his money in electronics wants to do something on climate. but he didn't subscribe to the party line so tom styer had to damn him in the new york times. it's like no here's a person who's halfway with you but he's and tom styer who made rogers life miserable behind the scenes. as we know. so there's this demand for absolute conformity to i hate to say a religious orthodoxy and i don't know if that's ever going to end or not and i you know that that seems to me as a sociological matter is very much evident and it drives a lot of the a lot of the trends roger pointed to and i think it's a shame. and is it going to go away?

maybe it'll be something new so actually it was brett stevens the wall street journal when he was still there said climate change may go away someday what something must replace it and my nominee was you may every once while hear a story of the news about how the polar magnetic poles are weakening or moving a bit and if they actually collapse it is a apparently a really big calamity for the planet and surely they will figure out a way to blame it on human activity. you know the electricity grid or , something. hasn't happened yet but that would be my nominee for what will replace it for people who really like apocalyptic thinking because i think human beings may be hardwired for some element of eschatology and apocalyptic thinking and once conventional religion starts to erode as it's been doing for 200 years, what replaces it? >> well, let me add to that. i do a lot of work with folks at insurance and reinsurance and i've noticed in the last few years not out in public and and not in the discussions out in in in front of people but these are folks who who who make and lose money based on their bets on the weather. and one of the things that i've seen is more realism in the closed door discussions over

trends in so for example -- in weather. so for example, i was at lloyds of london last fall we were at a chatham house rule event and the the head of of disasters and i can violate chatham rules because it was published in the financial times later. she said, you know we believe in , climate change. we think it's real, it's serious. but we haven't seen its effect on our portfolio management and so that was headlined in the financial times a couple months later where the financial times says head of lloyds of london , you know, you know private , meeting says exactly that i do think if you're someone who manages risk that's related to accurately understanding climate and weather trends people are starting to realize you can't get caught up in the hype in the public discussions. so i think it's perfectly reasonable to expect we may have a a two-path dialogue going on

and there's the public dialogue and you know as you say it's you know if you know it's it's cold today, that's climate change. i mean, it's fine, it's part of the times. but i think for people who make decisions where they have to know, you know, i'm putting in you know $100 million worth of , agricultural product this year. i have to have a good understanding of those sort of decisions will necessarily be grounded in reality. >> just to add quickly i saw a , headline yesterday i'll try and find it for you i forget was reuters or somewhere and it said insurance companies charging higher premiums for climate risk and making huge profits. i thought, i wonder if they connected the why. ok. you get the idea. >> there is a -- excuse me.

thank you. prince from london with apologies for being late complications with airlines. and things two brief comments and then a question if i may the comment, first to you, stephen, and all of this is to do with framing and the nature of the moment we're currently in yes i think you're absolutely on the money we the apocalyptic religion analogy is more than an analogy. but there's another which is closely associated which is bankruptcy and typically people who are going bankrupt are the last people who know they're going bankrupt and as you know the saying goes when you go bankrupt you go bankrupt slow first and then suddenly right so there is a collapse dynamic about these sorts of belief structures. specifically if they're , misframing the nature of the problem, the second is to the question that was asked over here which is about what happened last year. well, mother nature as i'm sure everybody in the room knows is sometimes bountiful to us and she's just given us this magnificent work example of what produces global warming and it was not systemic. it was a weather event.

it was a combination of hthh, the volcano which increased the water vapor in the atmosphere by 10%. it was a big elino and it was a solar maximum you don't need more stressors to produce what happened during last year and i by the way in london and in the groups which i'm in i've noticed a significant early movement beginning. which is that there is a mouse of doubt creeping into the minds even of the most fanatical that , firstly, they're not breaking through with the public. and secondly, maybe actually there is a big difference between climate and weather and with all due respect, i think that you were roger in one or two of those answers. eliding the two and i think maybe here's my question maybe it's time for us to be a bit more severe with ourselves and systematically to divide climate which is is a wicked problem and weather which is a much more bounded problem. this is where we all came in 25 years ago. i live not very far away from the met office and i do

occasionally interact with them and that's the seat of the religion in my country. and i do notice the mouse of doubt is beginning to creep. also because, of course, why are we in this mess? it's because of the misapplication of weather models to climate. as we all know. so what last year showed us supports what we know from the long-term record which is that there is a relationship between co2 and temperature except it doesn't actually work the right way around because the temperature goes up before the co2 goes up. this suggests that it's not really that causal. and so we have to i would suggest start to ask ourselves fundamental questions which some of us began 20 odd years ago and then they became completely taboo. because that meant that you were a denier and you are this and that and you are you an apostate , the religious analogy is correct. we, and i merely report, i mean,

there is, i've been in discussions in the last six months which i've not been in for the last 20 years, people are beginning to realize that climate change as an issue which is about to be inscribed by my next government and will bankrupt the country if they do it this actually is going to bankrupt us back to my first observation so are we given our responsibilities in an organization like this which is to be ahead of the curve is it time now to take a deep breath and to consider whether we've been too genuflecting to general framing because of the fear of all those accusations which are out there? maybe it's time for us to go back. climate the movie is quite helpful in this regard. isn't it? >> so, for a long time. and it's great to see you. welcome to washington. for a long time, i've argued that arguments over climate science are probably the least productive way we can address issues of energy policy and climate policy. people can have legitimate views

here are there. the core understandings of the intergovernmental panel on climate change have accurately reflected the core understandings of the climate community going back 30 years and these haven't changed and this is something that i think we should really take note of is that climate science doesn't turn on a dime. we don't change our understandings today or tomorrow. we've known what we've known for a long time but we also know that if we don't have low price energy, expanding energy access in parts of the world, energy security pretty much everywhere, we're not going to make good decisions about energy. the other thing to understand is that the world has been decarbonizing for a century. and so when we talk about mitigation policy and climate policy what we're talking about is accelerating a trend that's well been in place. we will achieve absolutely nothing on energy policy by arguing finer points of climate science. you know, call me up after the

hundreds of studies are published on the hunga tonga volcano and tell me what they find. my views on adapting to extreme weather or mitigating climate change are not going to change based on any of those studies or any 100 of those studies. i appreciate that that there there's interest in these topics but for me, finer details of climate science, as interesting as they are, you know, hi, dad, are are are are not where the action is. >> i'll profess admit to being negligent. i've quit following climate science intensively. i used to try and read large chunks of the what i thought were the most relevant chapters of the ipcc reports that came out over a few years. and they're you know they're difficult for a non-sp specialist and i think even for a specialist. i'm sort of amazed they're able to put together a report of that size at all and i agree that they mostly play it straight i actually i think the scientists who do the main chapters do play it straight and then it's the

summaries that's where okay when the mischief enters. and the energy question is much more important because we're doing that and that's also a little more approachable for the layperson. so i think so i'm going to tie two things together here. i mean, i'm only following british politics from afar but my perception is that the net zero pledge of the tory government is one of the things that's gotten into such deep trouble in heading for landslide wipeout after a landslide triumph four years ago. that's a real case study of political incompetence across the board. but i keep hearing and net zero is one part of it and here and there i'll read stories of the labor party exploiting this and it's not clear to me i may be right that the labor party will be just as committed to you know a general net zero goal more so you think really okay but then then i read ruy the other day actually haven't read your latest piece it's in my reading

queue about what it why liberals are going to embrace energy realist. i'm lo to make predictions too but i think we're going to look back on especially in this country i think we're going to conclude that we're overdoing it with wind and solar now that it was high price to pay for not that great of improvements i i think. i'll say the last thing one thing i never expected to see well two things that are related two things i never thought i'd see in california specifically and more broadly are more and more you might call old-fashioned mainstream environmentalist saying we made a mistake on nuclear power 40 years ago. and then second in california is which invented sort of anti-growth land use policies 50 years ago, there's now a very leftwing dominated what's called the yimbi movement and there yes in my backyard and these are people who are typical leftwing organizing efforts and energy and all the rest that are saying good grief, we've got to get rid of a lot of land use and housing regulations. they're just strangling affordable housing. i never thought i'd see that and yet we have both of those things happening. that's a little bit of reason for optimism i think.

>> let me, i'm going to comment on ru's piece on why liberals are going to be energy realist with a real world example picking up on this point. so i live in boulder colorado wonderful place probably one of the most liberal places on this continent. so about two weeks ago the there was a forecasted wind storm and just several years ago there was a big fire burned a thousand houses just outside of boulder and so the local power provider excel energy who has fears of liability said okay you don't want any fires from power lines down, we're going to shut down the the electricity in boulder and they shut it down for two days. and everyone i know, everyone i spoke to, the response was this is unacceptable. this is not going to happen and huge complaints, we had to convert a lot of energy realists , were born that weekend. and so the reality is and and again i think politics is going to be self-correcting. the u.k. is an example.

germany is an example. there may be some significant short-term damage done but people are not going to sit by and let their economies go bankrupt. it's just not going to happen. and so if there are disastrous policies or politicians, liz truss, for example. and there are consequences economically, you will see a backlash. the frustrating thing, of course, is that democracy is very blunt instrument. and that correction can take a long time and it's it's not precise. this is why i think policy matters. and i know it's not popular in an era of politics. this is why, you know ,eggheads and wonks need to have good ideas good plans in place so when that moment comes when people are dissatisfied it's not let's just put the other political party in power somebody needs to have the good ideas. and so i think this is why i'm i focus you know kind of like a laser on energy rather than on climate because i don't think we have smart energy policies just waiting on the shelf to hand to to policy makers when that

moment opens up -- policymakers when that moment opens up and we have a chance to change policy course. >> my question is about whether we need to open up the -- >> this is a slightly broader question. but there's been a lot of push back against the sg. -- against esg. do you think it's basically just gone underground in corporate america? >> the environmental part of it, yes. i say underground, i mean these , things tend to reinvent themselves so again back around 2000 the big enthusiasm for corporations was the triple

bottom line well that was just the early version of esg it was you know i i forget what the three parts were but it was just ordinary profit but the two other ones were you know doing good and it's exactly the same as esg but it it didn't you know there's a there was a environmental sustainability index as part of the dow jones which i think still exists but no one pays much attention to it so when esg came along, i thought, oh, it's the same thing with a new label. and there's been a very swift backlash to it as you've seen and so it'll still be around you know. your public affairs and environmental compliance you know units and big corporations there you they're sort of down with the underlying ideas behind them so i don't know if it will come back as prominently with a big flashy label but it's still going to be around but it is kind of interesting how quickly that whole like slogan got a black eye. it used to take longer for these things to cycle through and get a backlash and now it happened pretty fast. so it's really funny there's actually saw this the other day that on earnings calls that all the big companies do quarterly mentions of esg have just plummeted in the last two years.

used to be, you know, a lot of them that just just dived and well never heard of it right and you know, even larry fink at blackrock says we don't use that term anymore. so there you go. do we have any online questions ? oh. you got to look okay cuz there's you know it's roger's father maybe watching i don't know you said hi dad i hope so yeah who knows i always had mixed be the only one [laughter] watching. i don't know. >> i revisit these things is i i get optimistic and then i get pessimistic again at the same time when i think about optimism makes you pessimistic it could work that way. >> by the way, my recollection of your department was not just the usual bureaucratic stuff but i was actually sincerely impressed that it was not politicized i mean everyone there was mostly pretty left or far left but they were serious about the issues and it wasn't and i thought that was a good

that was a to my mind a sign of health. >> we had a very healthy department. >> two related questions one is what's the best way for the to make inroads into the biden administration? i think this is directed at you roger but probably applicable to both. to make inroads into the biden administration for applying the results of the latest studies on climate? do you agree that it's likely that the old scenario implications will continue to be applied until after the presidential election to help the president mobilize his base? >> yeah. i mean, -- i'd probably have a different job than i have now, i mean, this is the the perennial problem of trying to get good policy analyses into political processes. the biden administration is is very quickly painting itself

into a corner on climate it it has its social cost of carbon calculations the epa regularly uses another methodology that depend upon this most extreme scenario rcp 8.5 the biden administration's national climate assessment which unfortunately is run out of the executive office of the president has in its last two iterations so going back it was under trump also it identified this extreme scenario this is the one one that we're headed towards and then this less extreme scenario as the 4.5 scenario this is policy success now if you go to the framework convention on climate change and look at their annual report you'll see that the real world trajectory is undershooting the success story. so let me repeat that, the real world in terms of emissions is undershooting the biden administration success story. now, this creates a situation, how do you emerge from that? how do you come to the public and say, hey, you know that scenario we told you was success just just two years ago oh we're

eating that now -- beating that now? we're well ahead that's a real hard message to get to put out because you look like you're either being disingenuous or you didn't set the right target to begin with so i do think and all right. then the second part is that the emissions reductions promises commitments targets of the inflation reduction act something like 50 to 52% by 2030 or 2035, the biden administration is not going to hit those. the biden administration based on its own energy information administration is going to have an emissions reduction record of 0.7% reduction per year when its target implies it's going to be 8%, 9% or more. i wouldn't put that out before the election. but there's going to be some very dissatisfied, disgruntled people on the left in the progressive side when they realize that those aren't happen happening. so for me, i would go to the biden administration and say hey your political fortunes going forward are going to be compromised by the fact that you painted yourself in a corner on climate. maybe you should have some better policies. rather than saying hey here's some better policies.

>> you know, one of the ironies of the last few years, i think this is still true, that coal fired power plant retirements happened faster under trump than they have during biden. now that's not the whole story there's probably more parts to that but here's the broader point which one problem especially in this issue more so than many others is the siloing of the way this modern government is because it's so big. and so, i've long had the perception both here and also with a lot of european governments is that you'll have the people in the you know the environmental advocates and people who've got various appointed jobs and then you have the people in the finance ministries or in budget offices who actually know the score what it's going to cost and what it actually do. and they often don't talk to each other. so you know, if you go back to give one example the the kyoto protocol in the late 990s and -- late 90's and you know it was larry summers as treasury secretary who said this treaty is way too asymmetrical in its economic impact. and telling the president clinton privately, you really

can't have this ratified, we can't really go with this thing this thing is ok. now fast forward the trump years so trump and his big tax bill what was it regulation 45 i forget there was this little feature that had a tax credit for lower carbon energy systems and they like $7 a ton was the tax advantage of it and i thought oh wait a minute that means the trump administration just put a price on carbon. i wonder if the trump administration knows that's happening. right? so the point is, is that there's somewhat more continuity between you might say the people you never hear about people of the energy information administration people in the e some of the people in the epa and then the people driving policy for you know the mix of reasons many of them political in the white houses and all the rest of that. that's an ongoing problem with both parties. and you know i don't know if we'll ever make much progress on all that. but that's the background dynamic is the different actual practical real world differences between the two parties are not as wide as you would think from reading the newspapers. >> let me just respond to both things -- one thing.

presidents sitting presidents , don't close coal fired power plants. and if you want to know why coal fired power plants are closing you know this decade in the previous decade you have to go back to the 1970s to to you know to jimmy carter richard nixon to policies put in place that laid the foundation for theal that would be the fracking rtion and -- fracking revolution. this is why smart energy policy is important because the decisions we put in place today are going to be powering the united states and the world in 2050. and it's not, oh, we're going to pass a law today and then tomorrow we'll see these changes . i see we're getting the the the the the hook is coming out so -- >> i think we've exhausted everybody so yeah gone all day but that would be bad. you got to tonight yeah do all come back tonight for the more detailed part of it. it'll be fun. >> i'll be here. >> good. >>'s all right.

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