Tamara Weintraub:
Good afternoon, dear Brandeis friends. I am Tammy Wientraub, co-chairman with Rhoda Greif of the Gotham Chapter Study Group Learning Opportunities Committee. We are so happy to welcome you to Gotham Chapter's talk on climate change by Dr. Rob Socolow. We have about 250 people joining us, that's quite amazing. It's a sign of how important the topic is and how excellent our speaker is. But I hope you are social distancing.
Tamara Weintraub:
Rob has a PhD in theoretical physics, wow, from Harvard, wow. He's been a professor at Princeton University, another wow, since 1971, when he was recruited by Princeton to invent an interdisciplinary environmental research program. He has done very innovative research partnering with colleagues in his own and related fields. He has won many awards and is a member, often sitting on the board, of many respected scientific organizations. I won't list them, as that would take too much time away from Rob's talk.
Tamara Weintraub:
Rob looks forward to answering your questions, and he will weave them into his talk. You can keep sending them in. To send in a question you click the Q&A box on the bottom of the screen, and then type in your question in the big space to the right of the screen. Please forgive us if we don't have time for your particular question. We will answer as many as we can.
Tamara Weintraub:
I thank you for coming, and I give you, ta-da, Dr. Rob Socolow.
Robert Socolow:
Thank you very much. And thank you, the audience, for setting aside an hour for discussion of climate change. The subject has been relegated to a backseat over the past few months, as first COVID 19 and then minority rights have demanded our attention. We can only pay attention to a small number of subjects at the same time, but climate change is still there. You and I share an interest in the flourishing of Brandeis. My sister went there, a member of my Ph.D thesis committee was a professor there, and some extraordinary alumni continually cross my path. Thank you for your past and future support of Brandeis. I hope we can communicate successfully on Zoom. I am used to watching the faces of the people I am talking to. I miss that.
Robert Socolow:
I know that it isn't easy for a participant in a Zoom event to stay engaged for a whole hour. I'm hoping to hold your attention by breaking the conversation into two parts. We will talk first about how we know there is a climate problem and why it is a danger, then we will talk about what we can do to slow climate change down. I hope when you submit questions through the question slot as Tammy just instructed you, please let Tammy know whether your question is for the first part, the problem, or for the second part, solutions.
Robert Socolow:
The first part will have three elements: introductory remarks, when I will be on your screen, as now; a few slides, where I share my screen; and an integral where Tammy and I discuss a few of your questions about the problem. The second part will just have slides and the Q&A about solutions, and maybe we'll pull it all together.
Robert Socolow:
I tried very hard when I was an undergraduate to learn every big idea that was out there. That was presumptuous but that's what I was doing. Then when I was 30 I asked myself which ideas I had missed. Two ideas stood out: gender, from pronouns to fairness, and the global environment. By the global environment I mean one big counterintuitive amazing idea, that human beings are able to change the planet at global scale doing ordinary things. This has not been true for very long. Only very recently have human actions been sufficient to deplete fisheries on a global scale, to make the surface oceans noticeably more acidic, and to change the global atmosphere significantly.
Robert Socolow:
The anthropocene is a new word, and if you know it, means the geological period when human actions dominate many global scale phenomena. We never were in an anthropocene before. We were puny, those of us on the planet, our forebears on the planet. The Anthropocene has already started. And this messenger is not welcome. The messenger is being shot. The messenger bringing a radical idea has been shot before. Galileo argued that the Earth wasn't at the center of the universe and he was excommunicated. Darwin argued that human beings were part of the animal kingdom, and he was cruelly mocked. The idea that human business can't change our planet is as out of date and wrong as the Earth-centered universe and a separate creation of man. But all three ideas have such appeal that they will fade away only very slowly. The task we are passing to the young people on this planet, the next generation, Brandeis students right now, is to figure out how to fit on this small planet.
Robert Socolow:
I want to show you a few slides. The first slide, very often when people talk about this subject what is called the Blue Marble. The entire Earth seen from space. It turns out that the last time that image was possible for a human being to take was in 1972, when one of the last of the Apollo flights got far enough away from Earth to be able to see the entire thing. It actually shows at the top of my screen, that's actually a cyclone that had been damaging India just a couple of days before. It's one of the most reproduced images in human history. And what are its messages? Why is it so powerful? Earth is our home and we are alone in space. It is beautiful, and we are responsible for it.
Robert Socolow:
Some things the late 60s, as we saw ourselves in this fashion, that brought along something called environmentalism. I was caught up in that wave, and devoted my career to environmentalism ever since. I'm going to show you a poster child slide that you may not know, maybe will not know, which tells a story of human impact on the environment. This is a graph of the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from 1958 till now. We are at, this month, or last month, a couple of months back, a record concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and it's been climbing readily, relentlessly, and it goes up and down as well.
Robert Socolow:
The parts per million, it's 417 parts per million, what does that mean? It means that when you breathe in air right now, about 417 of every million molecules you're breathing are carbon dioxide. If you're indoors maybe it's built up a little bit, if you're outdoors that's a pretty good number. It's rising and rising, and going up and down because the atmosphere is exchanging carbon dioxide with the forest and the plant. It goes down when the forests are going, because carbon dioxide is going from the atmosphere into the trees, and in the other half of the year leaves are decaying on the forest floor, and the carbon dioxide concentrate goes up.
Robert Socolow:
We had no idea that this was going on a very ... It's called the Keeling curve, because a guy named Charles David Keeling thought he could make measurements on them. And I'll show you where this was taking place. Here's the laboratory where this was happening, it's nearly on the top of a mountain called Mauna Loa in Hawaii. It's one of a pair of mountains, you're looking across to Mauna Kea. Roughly the same height. On Mauna Kea they do astronomy, on Mauna Loa they do earth science. The land underneath is volcanic. 2007, I made a pilgrimage to that place hosted by Pieter Tans, who is... People who was at the center of the climate data story. If you look closely between us, it's the very same curve I was showing you, in bronze.
Robert Socolow:
The other slide, it introduced climate science with just two pictures. It's this amazing story from about the same time period, a little later. People were able to drill cores into the ice in both Antarctica and Greenland, going straight down, and as you go down you're going into the past, because the snow has been layered onto the ice sheet, as it's called, and more and more compressed. And it turns out that in Antarctica only, you can go back 800,000 years, which is what that record below looks like. On the left you see a piece of an ice core. Up and down, up and down, as we go into the present, this last period here is the last ice age. And when it's lowest, that's the coldest it gets, and then we come out of an ice age and it gets warmer.
Robert Socolow:
The carbon dioxide concentration is measurable because it's trapped in the bubbles in that ice, just like leaving a tree ring. The bubbles actually can tell you how much carbon dioxide, and it tracks the temperature amazingly closely. Again, nobody really expected that, helped put a story together. This is the ice ages, and here's the carbon dioxide concentrations of today. That's the 417 parts per million, completely out of range of the history of the planet in the last 800,000 years, way outside of that range. Higher than it's ever been, amazing, in a very long time, much longer than 800,000 years.
Robert Socolow:
So that's what a piece of a Greenland ice sheet looks like. This work is done by real human beings, it's a story of science in the making. This particular piece from Greenland is a million years old, and it's brown because of the dirt.
Robert Socolow:
Why do we care? What comes with this climbing carbon dioxide concentration is higher temperatures. Higher temperatures then melt ice. We have a lot of ice on the planet. As the ice melts, the ocean rises. We don't know how fast this will happen. One of the things I want you to come away with is, we know a lot of climate science, but we don't know everything we would like to know. We particularly don't know how fast bad outcomes will..., So we are dealing with risk management, or with hedging.
Robert Socolow:
The before pictures of Florida and the Gulf Coast here show different amounts of sea level rise, and what parts of the land will go underwater. And you can see the 24 feet of sea level rise will essentially cut the bottom half of the Florida peninsula out, flood it all, including all of the major settlements on the east coast with Miami and Palm Beach, and the west coast with Naples. All that is gone. At three feet it's... How much sea level rise will there be by 2100? A sort of round number people come up with is three feet, but they don't know, it could be six. It could be one. And our reference frame is about three feet per century.
Robert Socolow:
There's a lot of ice in Greenland. If you lost it all you would get 20 feet of sea level rise. Separately, from west Antarctic sheet as it's called, you would get about the same amount, 15 feet of sea level rise, if you lost at all. So that looms over us. My colleague Steve Pacala calls this problem the monsters behind the door: the worst credible climate outcomes. So far no monster has opened its door. Climate scientists simply don't know how close we are to when one of them will do so, which is called a tipping point.
Robert Socolow:
With these few slides I hope I've introduced you to a whiff, if you like, of climate science. It's not built on sand, it's got very specific science behind it growing all the time. Tammy and I are going to take a first set of questions on the problem, I hope we haven't been too fast here. You have sent in a few, and when Tammy comes on the screen with me, she and I will actually have a little conversation about her questions. Are we there? Tammy?
Tamara Weintraub:
Coming, coming.
Robert Socolow:
Good. Great. Hi.
Tamara Weintraub:
You want me to start feeding you some questions? Are you hungry?
Robert Socolow:
Fire away. Or feed away.
Tamara Weintraub:
Let's see. Somebody was wondering how climate change would affect natural disasters, such as earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes, et cetera. What will climate change do to these?
Robert Socolow:
Good. Really important question. The monsters I was referring to include some of those but not others. People talking about monsters are worried about sea level rise, as I mentioned. Major losses of forest. The possibility of gases emerging from the ice in the Arctic, particular, then adding to the carbon dioxide and giving you a kind of runaway. Then especially effects on the hydrological cycle, on the water. Water and the weather. Droughts and floods, definitely we'll have lots of destruction of that kind. Major storms and hurricanes, maybe even affecting ocean curtains like the Gulf Stream.
Robert Socolow:
Climate does not affect earthquakes as far as we know, and the tsunamis that come with the earthquakes. Extraction of fluids from below ground, however, which is another human activity, pumping oil and gas out, pumping water and maybe someday carbon dioxide in, they can trigger earthquakes if put in the wrong place and done in a poor fashion. So indeed we can interact with earthquakes, just not through climate change. As far as tornadoes are concerned, as far as I know we just don't understand them. We don't know whether we can affect them. So we have all kinds of levels of scientific understanding.
Robert Socolow:
How about a second question, Tammy?
Alex Glomset:
I'm not sure if she's still joining us, but let me read you a question that I just saw from the Q&A.
Robert Socolow:
Okay.
Alex Glomset:
This is from Barry, and the question is, "According to the Yale survey, 66% of Americans favor putting a price on carbon. Do you agree with this approach as a best first step, including refunding the proceeds in the form of a dividend?"
Robert Socolow:
The question really belongs in the second half, Alex. If you have any questions that bear directly on the science and the problem, we could come back to it.
Alex Glomset:
Sure. Let me look again. What is the primary cause of the increase in carbon dioxide?
Robert Socolow:
Good. There's a number one and there's a number two that are pretty clear cut. Number one is burning coal, oil, and gas that we bring out from below ground. They have carbon in them, they would never have come to the surface. With the ingenuity of 150 years we're bringing very large quantities of carbon to the surface. We burn it and get energy out, which drives our cars and runs our machinery and makes our electricity. And the carbon dioxide doesn't actually all stay in the atmosphere, about half of it does. Then the other half goes into the oceans or into making forests bigger. Both actually happen. And as carbon dioxide goes into the oceans they become more acidic.
Robert Socolow:
The number two is cutting down forests. If we transfer carbon from the forest to the atmosphere, we have fewer forests, we have more carbon in the atmosphere. That is about a quarter as big today as the burning of fossil fuels. They both have to come way down in order to take control of the climate.
Alex Glomset:
I have another one here. This is from Jeff. What percentage of carbon in the air is attributable to anthropogenic activities?
Robert Socolow:
A number I didn't tell you is that in 1800, and hundreds of years before, as best we can figure out, not perfectly but pretty well, there were about 280 parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere. The curve I show you started at 317, around. So 280 parts per million have been in the atmosphere in some kind of an equilibrium, ocean and land and forests, without any of our help, and we've been adding to that. And we have added about 40% to the original number, so about 30% of the total, 40% added on what we had. That's what's coming from people right now, and it's claiming about half a percent per year. It hasn't really stopped growing at about that rate. In spite of the concern for climate, we haven't turned it into actions that are slowing the climate down, never mind turning it over.
Alex Glomset:
Here's another one, from Michael. How will climate change affect fresh water availability in arid areas?
Robert Socolow:
The world's arid areas are critical. There seems to be a rule coming from the climate science models that wet gets wetter and dry gets drier. We might prefer it the other way, but it means that where there are drought stricken areas, droughts could well get worse, and where there is heavy rainfall, it could be even more heavy. That means essentially worse droughts and worse floods. Overall the planet will have more rainfall than it does now, because as the air gets warmer it can hold more water. So we will have a wetter planet, but not necessarily wetter where we would like it to be wetter.
Alex Glomset:
Here's another one. What is the role of methane in climate change?
Robert Socolow:
A complicated question, and a good one. It's the number two gas after carbon dioxide in warming the planet. It is increasing because of what people are doing on the planet. That includes not just burning stuff, because methane can leak from a natural gas system, but it includes probably how we're handling agriculture and animals. Methane is produced from cattle, actually it's the belch of the cattle. It's produced on the rice patty floor. It's produced whenever we add swamps. And we've received more than doubled, much higher percentage of rise, than for carbon dioxide. And we really don't understand in great detail the methane cycle. We understand it less well than carbon dioxide.
Robert Socolow:
So as not to run out of time, Alex, suppose I go back to the slides and go into the second half. Is that okay, or do you want to ask me one more?
Alex Glomset:
We can do one more. Another one from Jeff. Is there any developing technology that would remove carbon from the air?
Robert Socolow:
I've got that in the second part also, okay, and the answer is yes. That's happened to be one of the subjects I worked on.
Robert Socolow:
Let me try to go back to the slides. This isn't where we should be, we should be over here. Are you indeed, Alex, seeing my screen?
Alex Glomset:
Yes.
Robert Socolow:
Good. So I talk about what we can do about climate change. Sometimes I show a slide which I call the Seder plate. I haven't shown it in a while. For some reason this audience brought it back to mind. We go around the six side dishes of the Seder plate, and we have six ways of solving the climate problem in part. We would do all of them in some fashion or another.
Robert Socolow:
Let's start at 12:00. We have never really taken energy efficiency to anything close to its potential. Buildings are built with lots of leaks. Appliances could be made much lower energy demand. As we all know, our cars could get much higher miles per gallon. And it turns out that, in an industry where sometimes more attention is paid to energy because it's a cost of production, a steel mill or a chemical plant or paper mill, will use much more energy than it would otherwise need to. So the number one strategy, which has been staring at us for a very long time, is to get systematically serious with measurement, with policy incentives, on energy efficiency.
Robert Socolow:
Number two, and this is the exciting newcomer, wasn't there as an important option 20 years ago, is that solar and wind power have come way down, I'll be saying some more about them in a minute. As you all know, they are variable, and so they don't really do our bidding until we add a lot of energy storage so we can put the power in when the sun is shining, when the wind is blowing, and get it out when the wind is blowing less. They make electricity. And so one of the things that is going into the package for dealing with climate change is to make more things electric that are not electric now.
Robert Socolow:
So jumping to 6:00 for a moment, making vehicles electric only works as a carbon strategy, a climate strategy, if the electricity is produced without producing a lot of carbon, so a solar and wind energy system with electric vehicles gets your carbon dioxide emissions out of the transport sector, but not otherwise.
Robert Socolow:
The question I told you I'd come back to here is at 4:00. Because natural gas, and even coal, can be used to make electricity in a climate friendly way if carbon dioxide that is emitted from the fuel is captured, typically in the flue gas on the way to the atmosphere, not allowed to reach the atmosphere, and taken somewhere else, typically pumped below ground. I don't have on here a related strategy where the carbon dioxide comes from the air. A similar chemical capture and is put below ground. That is harder to do by a lot, but it is an additional strategy. We want to come back to that.
Robert Socolow:
At 8:00, as I said before, a lot of the carbon dioxide is going into the atmosphere from cutting down forests, but in principle we can grow new forests, and we can find plants with deep roots that gradually build up carbon, not carbon dioxide, in soils. In both of those strategies we're basically transferring carbon from the atmosphere to below ground. So that's an important strategy too.
Robert Socolow:
And at 10:00, a whole set of questions about what we want from life, how much travel we want to do, how much consumption is important to us, and think what is our diet, what do we want to eat. The lifestyle on this planet of eight billion people living like Americans in principle can be accomplished with a lot of technology, but it sure gets easier if in some way or another we find ways to ease up on the demands we make from our lifestyles. Very controversial. Young people are challenging the way we live as older folks. How will that play out?
Robert Socolow:
In the middle you have this thing I call the stabilization triangle, and these numbers, 35, seven, and 70. This is in billions of tons of carbon dioxide emitted per year in the atmosphere, through the atmosphere. At this time, on the left, we are putting about 35 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by burning coal, oil, and gas, and that number has been steadily going up. 70 is what's called sometimes business as usual. Pay no attention to climate at all, the economy keeps growing, developing countries develop with fossil fuels. Doubling the carbon dioxide emission rate in 50 years is quite credible. What is the challenge we're demanding of ourselves? It's essentially to get most of that fossil energy emission out of the economy in 50 years, maybe down to one tenth of what it would otherwise be.
Robert Socolow:
So for solar power, I've got three images here. Because they have three very different applications. What I find somehow technologically exciting is, they all use the same panel coming out of the same factory, more or less. So the left hand panel is centralized solar. Huge areas, hundreds of acres, maybe thousands of acres, of solar panels on a kind of support, tilted. The sun may be not. This one is in China, but there are similar fields, solar fields as they're called, in the southwest of the US in the desert. A very large fraction of the solar contribution to a low-carbon economy will come from facilities like this.
Robert Socolow:
Very different are the panels on the roof of a middle class home. All over the world, south-facing or flat, capable of producing quite a lot of energy all by themselves. This can also be on commercial buildings or rooftops of warehouses and things of that sort. Adding a different kind of, with a different social interface, people have to want them, use them, take care of them one at a time. They have to connect to utility, typically.
Robert Socolow:
And third is the one on the bottom right. The same solar panels, one and two at a time, are making an enormous difference to the world's poor. That panel will probably fit to a small battery, it might even be an old fashioned lead-acid battery. Will produce electricity for a few lights in the night time, perhaps for a refrigerator to keep some medicine cold, a really small one, and for charging a cellphone. With those three changes, the life of that family living in New York might be entirely different.
Robert Socolow:
All three of these impacts of solar are coming with this dramatic, amazing reduction in cost that is making us all far more optimistic about our ability to deal with climate change than ever before.
Robert Socolow:
As far as wind is concerned, there's lots of things to say. This is an offshore wind, actually, in Germany, if I'm not mistaken. Germany and the Netherlands and Denmark all have offshore wind, and Britain. We have exactly one wind farm offshore right now, but a tremendous interest in the northeastern states building sites that will look like this. And a very interesting question that I can leave with the audience to discuss over the dinner table tonight, is this ugly or beautiful? We have a lot of trouble citing offshore wind when this is dimly on the horizon, but it's there. And if you go out in a sailboat it might dominate your landscape.
Robert Socolow:
We've had a hard time with the siting of offshore wind turbines. We have a hard time siting onshore wind turbines. They make some noise, they can kill birds, they're not totally benign. They are partnered with solar in people's minds. Costs have dropped dramatically. They're much larger as a unit. The solar panel has to be about 10 acres to equal the electricity that's going to be produced from one of these turbines. I'm sorry, about 50 acres. So they have a somewhat different story, but they are part of that future too.
Robert Socolow:
We have to connect those solar and wind turbines with infrastructure. So that picture is a Rorschach test on the left, it's the US highway system. What do you see there? You see at one level an amazing success of a federal program able to impose a single vision over several decades. It was first on a piece of paper. We also see trucks displacing rail. We see, if we look more closely, some of those highways have disrupted cities and disrupted. I'm thinking of New Haven. Many roles. But we have to do something similar in scale and impact to deal with climate change. We have to overhaul our electricity system, although we can keep a different story. We certainly can keep the system, we don't have to get rid of it. We have to add on top of it other systems. Let me show you one more picture first.
Robert Socolow:
This is a similar picture of what the power plants of the country look like, where red is coal, yellow is nuclear, blue is natural gas. It's somewhat out of date. In this case we're not talking about adding to it, we're talking about swapping it out. More solar and wind, lots of solar plants in the southwest. Lots of wind farms, and the strongest wind is, as you may not know, right in the middle of the country at a vertical right angle, east of the Rockies where the wind has had a chance to build up over flat land. Piping that with electricity all the way to the east coast, all the way to the west coast, all the way to the southeast, with electric power lines. Possibly a carbon dioxide pipeline system as well to take the carbon dioxide from plants that do capture the CO2, and put it in places where it can be used below ground. Because the best places to put below ground are typically where oil and gas were produced, so the industry have a new role, but they're not everywhere. And we might have an infrastructure for hydrogen.
Robert Socolow:
So it's a tremendous challenge, this low-carbon world, but these are the principal elements of it: wind and solar and new infrastructure, a national scale. Around the world it's a pretty similar story. Not every place has the solar and wind endowments that we have, so there may be hydrogen that's... One part of the world to another because... Less well endowed. If you add the carbon capture and storage option in most parts of the world, you can take care of things.
Robert Socolow:
A solution that is often on people's minds in my field, but that many have not heard of, called solar geoengineering. That's a picture of an explosion of a volcano in the Philippines in 1991. No volcano that large has exploded since, although there were many volcanoes that were much larger than that in historical time and in geological time. Of course many more. In the early 1800s there was the explosion of Krakatoa in Indonesia, much larger.
Robert Socolow:
This was big enough to lower the temperature of the planet for about a year. Cooled it off by about a degree Fahrenheit. The reason is that it was big enough to loft particles into the stratosphere, the highest part of the atmosphere. And in the stratosphere particles stay a long time. They don't immediately know because the words stratus means it's layered. It's not very turbulent up there. And most particles were reflecting sunlight. When they reflected sunlight, less of the light warmed the planet, and that's what cold us down. Gradually they settled out in about a year to two, and the planet went back to its initial state.
Robert Socolow:
People noticing this with an engineering disposition say we can do this, but on purpose, by lifting particles into the stratosphere with either aircraft or balloons or rockets, in quantities that are not so immense that it would break the bank, and we can layer those particles out. They will fall out, so we have to keep doing this over and over again. Every week, and putting more particles in, some are settling out. You call it a perpetual volcano.
Robert Socolow:
And do we want to do this? There are many people who do not believe, in my field, they do not believe that we're going to be successful with the solar wind infrastructure story I just gave you, or we won't get it done soon enough, and so they're urging that we get on with this alternative, plan B if you like, which many others just roll their eyes when they hear about it. Do we really want to take charge of the planet? There's a philosophical question there. Can we make this work? can we learn enough about it before we actually do it that we don't get it wrong? And how on Earth would we have... If this were our strategy? I showed here in part a dangerous strategy for sure, but really all the strategies one can think of have their own dangers, and so we have to be vigilant about all of them.
Robert Socolow:
When I think about this and try to generalize, what are we actually dealing with here, we're not dealing with a short-term problem, but we're also dealing with an unfamiliar problem. And I've been struck with how much we have learned in my academic career about the past, the deep past. The left-hand picture shows the total universe, with its structure, that we have learned from satellites measuring the infrared radiation coming at us from space. In the 1960s we learned a lot about how the continents were formed, and how the Earth has developed over its own history. That's a picture of what's called sea floor spreading that explains why Africa and South America kind of fit together when you move them around. And the right hand picture is DNA. We learned how the genetics worked, we learned about our heredity.
Robert Socolow:
Immense achievements. But we have not put our mind to the future. It's not the same kind of thinking. Nor have we really defined until now what it means to think about a collective future for human kind. We've thought about individual futures, national futures, but there is something new going on, which is to understand the fate of the species, our collective future, and I call that destiny studies. I think we're nibbling at it. But it won't be long before, especially given the level of interest that we have from young people, that we have a program in destiny studies at many universities. How soon at Brandeis? I bet within a decade.
Robert Socolow:
I'm an optimist. Why? Well the world has a terribly inefficient energy system and there's room to make it a lot better. The costs for solar power and wind power have fallen precipitously. We have lots of new construction ahead of us, we're not stuck. Especially the rest of the world. The developed world, Europe, US, Japan, is more stuck than India, China, Africa, because they have all of their construction ahead of them and they can do it right. And very smart young people now find climate and energy problems exciting, that's my number one reason. It wasn't true 20 years ago that people wanted to consider this a major thing they could commit their careers to. Enrollments were not large in department majors called environment. Now they are.
Robert Socolow:
With that upbeat moment I hope we can turn to the next set of questions, and I will again be available for Alex or Tammy to ask some more. Hello.
Alex Glomset:
Hi Rob. Tammy's still unable to join us. We have a lot of questions here, 18 right now, but I was thinking-
Robert Socolow:
We're not going to get through 18, because I think we want to stop at 4:00, right?
Alex Glomset:
Of course. I was thinking I can-
Robert Socolow:
We could have a vote how many want to go to 5:00, but I think we should...
Alex Glomset:
Let's group a few together, because I think there are some similar topics here. There's one question that I'm seeing, how will this affect international relations? There was another question about, how important is the Paris treaty and US participation. And then a third that talks about, how much damage has been done by the climate policy in the Trump administration, is the damage reversible, and how long will it take?
Robert Socolow:
Those certainly are related questions. Hello Tammy, welcome back. You're muted, Tammy. You're muted. Say hello.
Tamara Weintraub:
Hello. Hi, sorry everybody, go ahead.
Robert Socolow:
You're aware that Alex has been subbing for you?
Alex Glomset:
Yes, I'm most appreciative.
Robert Socolow:
Okay. The US has been a bull in the china shop for the last three years as far as global agreements are concerned in general, and one of the most peculiar, self-defeating steps was to withdraw from what's called the Paris Treaty. We haven't actually withdrawn, we just notified the world that we would withdraw, and I believe that withdrawal ... WE had a three year waiting time, and it just ends at about election day, within a couple of weeks of election day.
Robert Socolow:
The Paris agreement was an achievement of the diplomats of an extraordinary sort. Many people thought nothing like that could be done. Obama and some of the staff worked extremely hard to first get a written agreement between China and the US that we would both acknowledge that climate change was a national priority, and on the back of that bilateral agreement, the world came along, with a lot of initiative by world diplomats aside from the Americans and Chinese. I call the Paris agreement a potluck dinner.
Robert Socolow:
The idea is that everything is voluntary, and it's going to get better and better. Each country brings what's called a nationally determined contribution, voluntarily, to an international process, which would've been this past year, it's been postponed till next year. This will be a set of policies they've instated to bring about a more efficient car, or perhaps reduce travel in cities, or improve their buildings. And they come and they put it on the table, and they say "Here's what we're bringing today." Nobody makes fun of it. Nobody makes fun of what you bring to a potluck dinner. They compliment you, they encourage you, you spend your time looking at some of the other dishes, and you say "I could do that, I could practice that." And the idea is that three years later you come back, everybody comes back, with the next set of nationally determined contributions.
Robert Socolow:
It's called a race to the top. It's a clever idea. It probably can work. But it cannot work if a major emitter starts saying, "I'm going to stay home." That's what's happening right now. It is to the world's credit that for the most part people said, "Stay home, we don't need you." But that's wearing a bit thin. I don't know that we'd survive four more years of saying that. But if we rejoin, we have stories to tell, and more stories if we get to work. So I think the Paris agreement is tremendously important.
Robert Socolow:
The question was, why is it especially important now? Because the biggest decisions being made now that have impact on climate are actually not in America, except because of our influence on others. But in a country like India it's up for grabs right now, the policy makers are trying to find their way through the choice between building and industrializing, at a very large scale, cities and highways, on the basis of coal and oil, or on the basis of wind and solar. Wind and solar is not as easy to do, probably more expensive for a while, but the world should be focusing on those decisions. We focus on those decisions through international processes. It does matter to us the choices that India makes, as well as Africa, as well as Latin America. China is well along on this thinking with us. And it may be that we need to help with technology, we need to help with money, investment, but above all we need to listen and understand their issues. It's not on our radar screen, which I think is really quite serious.
Robert Socolow:
Alex, there were a couple more aspects of that question that I think I may have left aside.
Alex Glomset:
You touched on the Paris agreement, the Trump policies, how much damage have those inflicted.
Robert Socolow:
Yep, I've said all that. Was there another part of the question, or should we go on to another one?
Alex Glomset:
We could go on to another one. Tammy, do you want to pick the question?
Tamara Weintraub:
Sure, and I hope this wasn't asked while I was away. How will climate change affect our food and water supply, and how will it affect migration?
Robert Socolow:
Good. We didn't talk about that.
Tamara Weintraub:
Oh good.
Robert Socolow:
Whenever we talk about climate change affecting something, I worry that we're going to kid ourselves. Because there are always other co-factors that sometimes may be even more important, and it's kind of a bandwagon to say "This is due to climate change." But climate change contributes many things. So let's take a drought.
Robert Socolow:
We build a dam, we change the flows of rivers. We put in irrigation, increasing the yields of agriculture. We reduce the flows of water down the river, the Colorado now ends up dry by the time that it goes into the Gulf of California. Nonetheless, climate change, if it melts the ice and the snow, it changes the snow pack in the Rockies, it will reduce the flow down the Colorado River. Or change its timing. Probably both. So hydrology is affected by climate change for sure. That can affect food supply. It can affect floods and storms, as I said.
Robert Socolow:
Then there's the question about migration. Again, we can expect that people who are confronting environmental consequences in their environments are going to leave, move. Migration is partially caused by climate change, but a very substantial role is rising expectations in the ability for some young person in a poor area to find his or her way to a wealthier area, earn enough money to send money home. That's a tremendous pull. And large family size, which means there are too many people, there's not enough employment for the people who are young and able, so they move on. Climate change contributes to what are called environmental refugees, but we really can miss a full picture if we're not careful. That's how I would answer that question, Tammy. Will that do?
Tamara Weintraub:
That's good. We have time for one more?
Robert Socolow:
We have, I think for a few more actually.
Tamara Weintraub:
Okay. How about this. What can we learn from how the Earth has been different during the pandemic? We've certainly been using less energy.
Robert Socolow:
That is an interesting question indeed. Every once in a while, because of human events, we have an experiment being done to our planet that we are essentially controlling. With the power blackout, I forget how many years back, in the northeast US, we had visible effects on the environment. Now we have a bigger one. The carbon dioxide emission rate has dropped by about 10%, I think, in the last ... Not more than that, but substantial all the same, in the past couple of months. I wish I knew the number, maybe 15. So there are going to be multiple signals, not easy to find. That Keeling curve of going up and down and climbing will hardly show it, but there may be some rainfall patterns that will reflect these differences.
Robert Socolow:
I think what I decided to do is put it into three categories. For sure we're seeing improvements in air quality. There are things that are very reversible, there are things that are not at all reversible, and there are things that are partially reversible. Fully reversible is the air quality of a city. Los Angeles used to have terrible air, we got control of the emissions, power plants and cars and so forth, changed the cars with catalytic converters, and we made the air as good as it had been, if I'm not mistaken. But many cities have not been cleaned up, and they're experiencing a cleaning-up right now that is presumably loved in many of those cities.
Robert Socolow:
Then as far as irreversible, it would be species loss. If you have, from climate change, loss of habitat, again, human actions unrelated to climate change can play a big role. Hunt the passenger pigeon to extinction in the 19th century.
Robert Socolow:
Then the partially reversible, and I think we may stop with this, is to take the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and bring it back to its present level. There was a question that alluded to that. It is possible to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere by growing trees where they weren't there before, yes. It turns out with vegetation strategies alone, I think you can't get anywhere near all the way. You essentially take as much carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, as much carbon in that carbon dioxide, as you took carbon into the atmosphere by fossil fuel industry over a whole century. That's just an immense amount.
Robert Socolow:
But you can use chemicals and blow air over chemicals, and capture the carbon dioxide and pump it below ground, into an enormous industry for more than a century. And not starting for the next several decades because it's not sensible to do it while we still have fossil fuels in the energy system. It's possible to imagine, 2200, getting down to an atmosphere like today. So it's partially reversible. But it's not really part of what we need to be focusing on at this time. It's fascinating, people like the idea that they can get it done, I think it's important that we know we could get it done, but it's not at all our first or second order of business.
Tamara Weintraub:
Here's one more that is so-
Robert Socolow:
Fair enough.
Tamara Weintraub:
Okay. We always say things come down to dollars and cents. So somebody asks, how would a carbon tax, a tax on carbon, help as a tool to reduce climate-
Robert Socolow:
I'm so glad you got back to that, because it's the question I punted on, or rather postponed, in the first part. I didn't punt, I wanted to get back to it, I remembered just now. So a favorite policy of economists, and one that's discussed a lot in national capitals, is to make fossil fuels more expensive so people use less of them, and so that the competitors are more attractive.
Robert Socolow:
Be very careful about any conversation about a carbon price that doesn't include some conversation about how high the tax is going to be. There's a fear on my part that a token tax will make people feel as if they're doing something about climate change, and will not actually drive much change of technology. The eastern states of the US have such a token tax right now called the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative that just about pays for the price of people who administer it. It was kept low because people don't want disruption. We can't make it high instantly. A number that I have in mind is $100 per ton of CO2. $10 is token, $100 is a big impact. You would ramp up to 100, maybe over as much as 10 years, maybe five, in steady increments, and you would have investments that reflected that. It would really happen.
Robert Socolow:
One of the most important things, though, is to have it credible that it will not get reversed. In Australia they went flip-flop. They're on-off, on-off because they changed government several times. No investor is going to invest in something that can come and go. So a commitment to a carbon policy that has 55% of the senators is just not robust enough. We should have as our expectation that we can make the case for climate change credible enough, earnest enough, sympathetic enough to the reasons why people are concerned about it, that we can get the 70% commitment to making something happen with climate change that we need. This is in America and it's in the world. We can't think of this as some kind of 50-yard line battle. It's just not going to work. Just because there are strong policies that would make a difference, they have to be convincing to get the investments to make a difference.
Robert Socolow:
Tammy, I'll stop there. I think we're close to the ... I know you want to say a few things to wrap up. You have four minutes.
Tamara Weintraub:
Okay. This is such a good one here, can I ask you one more question?
Robert Socolow:
Sure go for it. If I can answer it I'll try to be very brief.
Tamara Weintraub:
Somebody says, very brief, that natural gas gets thrown in with all this. But perhaps, do we need natural gas as a bridge if we're getting rid of other energy?
Robert Socolow:
That is a 20-minute question, not a two-minute question.
Robert Socolow:
However the answer is, I'm intrigued with natural gas plus capture and storage, which does allow you to ... And it would be a more advanced form of natural gas. We do need it now, it is a good compliment to solar and wind, and I think it is a good idea to think of it as a bridge strategy.
Tamara Weintraub:
Okay. Rob, thank you so very, very much, and thank you our audience for joining with us. Please forgive us if we didn't have time to answer all the questions. Rob, you've done a great, great job. We at Gotham are making a small donation to the Brandeis library, which will go towards the purchase of a learned research journal in your honor.
Robert Socolow:
Oh, in my honor, thank you.
Tamara Weintraub:
And we just thank you so much for joining us. We hope we'll have-
Robert Socolow:
Been a pleasure.
Tamara Weintraub:
Thank you, thank you. Thank you all for coming.