The Practical Impacts of Climate Policy

>> Raina: My name is Raina, I'm a sophomore at Stanford. As you can tell by the accent, not from the US originally. So my question is about your argument from the developing world's perspective and how it's immoral for the West to essentially, for the lack of a better phrase, tell us what to do.

But my question to you is regarding fossil fuels. Nine out of ten people today breathe polluted air as according to WHO standards.

>> Steven Koonin: I missed, nine out of ten people?

>> Raina: Breathe polluted air as per the WHO standards. And looking at India, for example, where I'm from, every time I go back there, I hack up a lung the minute I step out of the airplane because of how bad the AQI is.

So my question is, how do you justify not using, or rather the US working with these countries to diversify their energy supply, if for nothing else, to prevent the sort of lung damage that this pollution has caused systematically? Thank you.

>> Steven Koonin: So good, so what you're really talking about is local pollution, which is terrible, okay, agreed.

However, we have the technology to control that, okay? If you look, for example, here in the US, I lived in Los Angeles when I was at Caltech for 30 years, okay? And during that time, the population of the LA Basin doubled. But the PM 2.5, if you wanna take that as a measure, went down significantly because of catalytic converters control on coal fired sources, and so on.

So we have the technology to control local pollution, all right? You just have to implement it, it costs money, okay, but we have it.

>> Karina: Good morning, Steven, my name is Karina, and actually I'm a native of Los Angeles city. So I live in the jurisdiction of Los Angeles city where politicians and non-profit organizations really talk about the climate change crisis.

But they're saying it's a climate crisis, but also an environmental justice issue, and that's the narrative that we're hearing where I live. So Governor Newsom has a 2035 plan to make California the first state that would stop the sale of gas cars. If I wanted to do a cost benefit analysis and specifically looking at disadvantaged communities, where could I start this research and to educate on the other perspective?

>> Steven Koonin: Well, I don't know if it's another perspective, but if I were to try to do that, right, I'd look at the mobility needs as a function of income. If you wanna talk about poor folks, I would look at the costs, and then vehicles. And right now, electric vehicles cost a lot more than internal combustion engines and have somewhat downsides in their operating characteristics.

And then I would look at how do I improve the general welfare of that lower income strata. And my guess is it's mobility that they need and any reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Look, how can you say that making California zero emissions, right, is going to directly help those folks?

It's not, of course. The best way to help them is to bring them up to the standard of living that the upper half of California needs. That's most direct and probably cheapest, all right? I think that's the argument, and it's true for the globe as a whole as well, all right?

Yeah.

>> Sadie: Hi, my name is Sadie Golan. This is not working, but-

>> Steven Koonin: I'm sorry, I can't see where you are.

>> Speaker 5: Turn it off.

>> Sadie: Hello?

>> Steven Koonin: I see you, very good, thank you.

>> Sadie: Hi, my name is Sadie Golan, I heard you mentioned the Maui wildfires.

I'm sure we've all been hearing about that in the news, floods in Vermont, tons of extreme natural disasters, heat waves, droughts, floods, etc, that have been happening over the last couple decades. And as we know, climate policy is often used to respond to these disasters, as well as prepare for these disasters.

So if you think that climate change has no effect on these events, how do you propose that we use policy to prepare and respond to these disasters?

>> Steven Koonin: So let's take Maui as an example, right, Hawaiian. When you look at the analysis, it was due to three factors, okay?

One is a progressive invasion of Hawaiian fields that were once used for sugarcane and are now lying fallow, the invasion by various grass species. And those species have the characteristic that they grow in the wintertime on the West side of Maui. And we had a particularly wet winter, this last winter in Maui, so they grew up a lot.

And then every year, like clockwork, they dry out, and so you got a lot of fuel there, first of all, okay? The second is you need wind, and there were particularly strong, although not unprecedented trade winds that were blowing over the last couple of weeks in Maui. And then the third thing is you need an ignition source.

And the power system in Maui is notoriously prone to the wires coming down. And if they didn't cut the power in the wires, which they didn't do, then you've got a wonderful ignition source. So those three human factors, well, the wind you can't control, but the grass you certainly can, and the power you can.

And the fact that the buildings were not particularly fireproof, that's how you fix those things with policy. The same is true here in California, forestry practices were abysmal in this state. The governor has woken up to that fact over the last couple of years. PG&E spent a lot of money on renewables, but not on clearing the power lines.

Again, they're subject to the whims of the PUC. And then finally, building towns like paradise in the middle of the forest is not a particularly safe thing to do either. So there are policy actions you can take to prevent wildfire disasters.

>> Clayton: Howdy, my name is Clayton Elbel, and I go to Texas A&M, and I study agriculture and natural resource economics.

This summer, I got to work for ExxonMobil, and one of the things that was really emphasized to us is that it's an add equation. So both meeting the world's demand for energy through current fossil fuels, but then also investing excess capital into innovative technologies. So my question is, you mentioned that a gradual decarbonization approach through technology like CCS.

There are studies that show the public is mistrustful of that, or just ill informed on some of those really innovative yet technical opportunities. So how can the private sector or corporations, both informed policymakers, and then the general public about these opportunities that are often very technical in nature?

>> Steven Koonin: Yeah, one of the dysfunctions of the current scene is that if you know something like you're in industry or you're an expert on power system, or whatever. You're discounted and do not have a seat at the policy tables. I know that, one of the things in my bio which was not mentioned, I was for five years the Chief Scientist for BP, the oil company, all right?

And so I had a kinda inside seat into how the big energy companies respond to decarbonization and how they do or do not influence policy. And I can tell you that even now, 15 years after I left BP, they're still afraid to speak up, all right? They will say, yes, yes, we're researching, and so on.

But in fact, some of the facts I told you about, which are just facts, they are afraid to say in public. I think the situation will fix itself in the sense that if you try to go too fast, these restrictions are gonna bite and people are gonna say, wait a second, why are we going so fast, and what about these technologies?

You see it already with nuclear fission more acceptable now in the public discussion than it was ten years ago. Because people are starting to understand, if you want an emissions-free, reliable grid, nuclear power plants are gonna be really important in that future. So slowly, slowly, techno-economic realities dominate.

>> Speaker 7: Thank you for the talk. So my question is about how we can benchmark the impact of climate change. So in the first part of the lecture, you talked about a lot of climate variables that you showed their averages, didn't really change much. But I'm wondering whether it would be better if we use variance as another measure.

Because in the case of climate change, what actually matters is the low probability, but very high damage events like the extreme weather. And also, if you average over every country, some countries might be getting hotter and some countries might be getting colder. So when you're averaging them up, you don't really get a lot of changes.

>> Steven Koonin: Right, yeah.

>> Speaker 7: So what do you think about that?

>> Steven Koonin: So those are excellent points. It's very hard to predict extreme events because they don't happen very often. And often they have a small spatial scale. The drought in the Midwest might be a couple hundred kilometers, or more than a couple 500 kilometers on a side.

It's localized, and the models have a hard time with that kind of spatial resolution. One thing you can say is that extreme events happen all the time. Somebody in a previous question remarked about the growing number of extreme events. Well, if you ask how often does an extreme event happen anywhere in the world, the answer is a couple times a month, whether it's drought, flood, storm, etc.

And so the media can pick this stuff up and make it look like it's happening more and more. You have to look at the data, and you have to look at the data over a couple decades at least, to see if anything is changing. I think on a decadal scale, we've not seen any changes so far in the variance, right?

For hurricanes, for example, are no more frequent. So your point is a good one, but the data just aren't there right now, and it's really hard to model that stuff.

>> Charles: All right, hello, my name is Charles, from the University of Washington.

>> Steven Koonin: Hi, Charles.

>> Charles: And yeah, I love physics, and I love your work.

And I always love the sparring that you have with people from Scientific American.

>> Charles: But my question to you is, what are the key limitations or challenges in climate models that lead to these inaccurate projections? And how can these limitations be addressed to improve accuracy of future climate predictions?

>> Steven Koonin: Right, so, great question, there's a little bit of that in the book if you've read it. So why are the models so bad? And can we make them better, if I could paraphrase, right? So you gotta ask, how do we build these models? And the way in which you do that is you cover the earth with a grid, squares, typically 100 kilometers on a side.

And then you build layers in those squares, say 20 layers up into the atmosphere, and 10 or 20 layers down into the ocean. And then you use the basic laws of physics, conservation of energy, momentum, matter, and so on, to track the air, the water vapor, the pollution, sunlight and heat radiation, through those boxes as they move around ten minutes at a time, okay, and you got to do that for a couple centuries at least.

Now, the problem is, if you make the boxes 100 kilometers on a side, which is kinda the state of the art, you get about 10 million boxes that you gotta follow, all right? And you gotta follow them ten minutes at a time for a couple of centuries, big, big computer problem, okay?

It takes the world's fastest computers running for months to do one simulation. The simulations that get done do not agree with each other. And the reason they don't agree is that within those boxes, 100 kilometers on a side, there's lots going on. Clouds, for example, are a few kilometers on a side.

You cannot describe that detail within just one large box. And so you've got to make assumptions, if the humidity is this and the temperature is that, the clouds are so much, for example, right? Different people make different assumptions, and so you get different answers. You might say, well, let's make the boxes, this is such an important problem, let's shrink the boxes down to ten kilometers on a side.

Well, if you do that, then the computational load goes up by a factor of 1,000. So you need 1,000 times more powerful computer than you got today. And yes, computers are getting better, but it's gonna be a long time before they get 1,000 times better. So that's the problem, and you might ask, how do we fix that besides faster computers?

There are people trying to use, of course, these days, AI, machine learning, to say, can I learn if the conditions in the box are such and such, how many clouds will be there, and that sort of thing. So, application of machine learning technologies is currently, I would say, a promising area that's being investigated, all right?

>> Josiah: Dr. Koonan, thanks so much for being here. My name's Josiah, I'm a junior here at Stanford from Washington state. So, Alex Epstein argues that the drastic climate alarmism, or as he calls it, climate catastrophizing, stems from this anti-human framework that prioritizes the preservation of the environment as the highest moral good, rather than prioritizing human flourishing framework.

So given the data on the benefits of fossil fuels, given the data on climate change, what do you think is the underlying reason that there has been such pushback, or such climate alarmism, climate catastrophizing policies?

>> Steven Koonin: Yeah, let me just say first, for those of you who don't know, Alex Epstein is a philosopher by training and writes about the importance of fossil fuels.

When I first heard about him, I said, what's a philosopher gonna say about this that's of any use? Typical physicist's attitude, right? I've gotten to know Alex, I consider him a friend. And he's got a lot to say, and so I learned a lot from him. Why is climate alarmism so prevalent?

I think it is not a conspiracy, but an alignment of interests among different factions. So the media, if it bleeds, it leads. And so weather stories, as opposed to climate, are wonderful for getting clicks and eyeballs. Politicians, I like to quote HL Mencken, who in the 1920s, or maybe even a bit earlier, said, the purpose of practical politics is to keep the electorate alarmed by a series of mostly imaginary hobgoblins so that they can be clamoring to be led to safety.

And you see the politicians do that not only for climate, but for immigration on the other side. For some of that we saw in COVID, I believe, many issues keep the public alarmed, missile gap. None of you were old enough to know all about that, but that was a fear of the Soviet Union in the early 60s or 1950s.

So that's the politicians for the NGOs. If you have set up your NGO with the purpose of saving the earth and suddenly the science says it's not such a big deal, you're not so happy about that. And finally, the working level scientists, I find, are pretty honest when you sit and talk with them.

But by the time it gets to the summaries for policymakers, and then on to the press releases, it gets terribly distorted. So there are motivations for everybody to kinda not tell the truth or to tell half truths about this.

>> Josh: Thank you very much.

>> Steven Koonin: Okay, very good.

>> Josh: Appreciate it.

>> Steven Koonin: Yeah, good.