-
It's easy to forget that last night,
-
one billion people went to sleep
without access to electricity.
-
One billion people.
-
Two and a half billion people
did not have access
-
to clean cooking fuels
-
or clean heating fuels.
-
Those are the problems
in the developing world,
-
and it's easy for us not to be
empathetic with those people
-
who seem so distant from us.
-
But even in our own world,
the developed world,
-
we see the tension of stagnant economies
-
impacting the lives of people around us.
-
We see it in whole pieces of the economy,
-
where the people involved
have lost hope about the future
-
and despair about the present.
-
We see that in the Brexit vote.
-
We see that in the Sanders/Trump
campaigns in my own country.
-
But even in countries as recently
turning the corner
-
towards being in the developed world,
-
in China,
-
we see the difficulty
that President Xi has
-
as he begins to unemploy so many people
in his coal and mining industries
-
who see no future for themselves.
-
As we as a society figure out
how to manage
-
the problems of the developed world
-
and the problems of the developing world,
-
we have to look at how we move forward
-
and manage the environmental impact
-
of those decisions.
-
We've been working on this problem
for 25 years, since Rio,
-
the Kyoto Protocols.
-
Our most recent move
-
is the Paris treaty,
-
and the resulting climate agreements
-
that are being ratified
by nations around the world.
-
I think we can be very hopeful
-
that those agreements,
which are bottom-up agreements,
-
where nations have said
what they think they can do,
-
are genuine and forthcoming
for the vast majority of the parties.
-
The unfortunate thing
-
is that now, as we look
at the independent analyses
-
of what those climate treaties
are liable to yield,
-
the magnitude of the problem
before us becomes clear.
-
This is the United States
Energy Information Agency's assessment
-
of what will happen
-
if the countries implement
the climate commitments
-
that they've made in Paris
-
between now and 2040.
-
It shows basically CO2 emissions
around the world
-
over the next 30 years.
-
There are three things
that you need to look at
-
and appreciate.
-
One, CO2 emissions are expected
to continue to grow
-
for the next 30 years.
-
In order to control climate,
-
CO2 emissions have to literally go to zero
-
because it's the cumulative emissions
that drive heating on the planet.
-
This should tell you that we are losing
the race to fossil fuels.
-
The second thing you should notice
-
is that the bulk of the growth
-
comes from the developing countries,
-
from China, from India,
-
from the rest of the world,
-
which includes South Africa
and Indonesia and Brazil,
-
as most of these countries
move their people
-
into the lower range of lifestyles
-
that we literally take for granted
-
in the developed world.
-
The final thing that you should notice
-
is that each year,
-
about 10 gigatons of carbon
are getting added
-
to the planet's atmosphere,
-
and then diffusing into the ocean
and into the land.
-
That's on top of the 550 gigatons
that are in place today.
-
At the end of 30 years,
-
we will have put 850 gigatons
-
of carbon into the air,
-
and that probably goes a long way
-
towards locking in
a 2-4 degree C increase
-
in global mean surface temperatures,
-
locking in ocean acidification,
-
and locking in sea level rise.
-
Now, this is a projection
-
made by men
-
by the actions of society,
-
and it's ours to change, not to accept.
-
But the magnitude of the problem
is something we need to appreciate.
-
Different nations make
different energy choices.
-
It's a function
of their natural resources.
-
It's a function of their climate.
-
It's a function of the development path
that they've followed as a society.
-
It's a function of where
on the surface of the planet they are.
-
Are they where it's dark
a lot of the time,
-
or are they at the mid-latitudes?
-
Many, many, many things
-
go into the choices of countries,
-
and they each make a different choice.
-
The overwhelming thing
that we need to appreciate
-
is the choice that China has made.
-
China has made the choice,
-
and will make the choice, to run on coal.
-
The United States has an alternative.
-
It can run on natural gas
-
as a result of the inventions
of fracking and shale gas
-
which we have here.
-
They provide an alternative.
-
The OECD Europe has a choice.
-
It has renewables that it can afford
to deploy in Germany,
-
because it's rich enough
to afford to do it.
-
The French and the British
show interest in nuclear power.
-
Eastern Europe, still very heavily
committed to natural gas and to coal,
-
and with natural gas that comes from
Russia, with all of its entanglements.
-
China has many fewer choices
-
and a much harder row to hoe.
-
If you look at China,
and you ask yourself,
-
why has coal been important to it,
-
you have to remember what China's done.
-
China brought people to power,
not power to people.
-
It didn't do rural electrification.
-
It urbanized.
-
It urbanized by taking low-cost labor
-
and low-cost energy,
-
creating export industries
-
that could fund a tremendous
amount of growth.
-
If we look at China's path,
-
all of us know that prosperity in China
has dramatically increased.
-
In 1980, 80 percent of China's population
-
lived below the extreme poverty level,
-
below the level of having
a $1.90 per person per day.
-
By the year 2000, only 20 percent
of China's population
-
lived below the extreme poverty level,
-
a remarkable feat,
-
admittedly with some costs
in civil liberties that would be tough
-
to accept in the Western world.
-
But the impact of all that wealth
-
allowed people to get
massively better nutrition.
-
It allowed water pipes to be placed.
-
It allowed sewage pipes to be placed,
-
dramatic decrease in diarrheal diseases,
-
at the cost of some outdoor air pollution.
-
But in 1980, and even today,
-
the number one killer in China
is indoor air pollution,
-
because people do not have access
to clean cooking and heating fuels.
-
In fact, in 2040,
-
it's still estimated
-
that 200 million people in China
-
will not have access
-
to clean cooking fuels.
-
They have a remarkable path to follow.
-
India also needs to meet the needs
of its own people,
-
and it's going to do that by burning coal.
-
When we look at the EIA's projections
-
of coal burning in India,
-
India will supply nearly four times
as much of its energy
-
from coal as it will from renewables.
-
It's not because they don't know
the alternatives.
-
It's because rich countries
can do what they choose,
-
poor countries do what they must.
-
So what can we do to stop
coal's emissions in time?
-
What can we do that changes
this forecast that's in front of us?
-
Because it's a forecast
that we can change
-
if we have the will to do it.
-
First of all, we have to think
about the magnitude of the problem.
-
Between now and 2040,
-
800 to 1,600 new coal plants
-
are going to be built around the world.
-
This week, between one and three
one gigawatt coal plants
-
are being turned on around the world.
-
That's happening regardless
of what we want,
-
because the people
that rule their countries,
-
assessing the interests of their citizens,
-
have decided it's in the interest
of their citizens to do that.
-
And that's going to happen
-
unless they have a better alternative,
-
and every 100 of those plants
-
will use up between one percent
-
and three percent
-
of the Earth's climate budget.
-
So every day that you go home
thinking that you should do something
-
about global warming,
-
at the end of that week, remember
-
somebody fired up a coal plant
-
that's going to run for 50 years
-
and take away your ability to change it.
-
What we've forgotten is something
-
that Vinod Khosla used to talk about,
a man of Indian ethnicity
-
but an American venture capitalist.
-
And he said, back in the early 2000s
-
that if you needed to get China and India
off of fossil fuels,
-
you had to create a technology
that passed the Chindia test,
-
Chindia being the appending
of the two words.
-
It had to be first of all viable,
-
meaning that technically, they could
implement it in their country,
-
and that it would be accepted
by the people in the country.
-
Two, it had to be a technology
-
that was scalable,
-
that it could deliver the same benefits
-
on the same timetable as fossil fuels,
-
so that they can enjoy the kind of life,
again, that we take for granted.
-
And third, it had to be cost-effective
-
without subsidy or without mandate.
-
It had to stand on its own two feet.
-
It could not be maintained
for that many people
-
if in fact those countries
had to go begging
-
or had some foreign countries say,
I won't trade with you,
-
in order to get the technology
shift to occur.
-
If you look at the Chindia test,
we simply have not come up
-
with alternatives that meet that test.
-
That's what the EIA forecast tells us.
-
China's building 800 gigawatts of coal,
-
400 gigawatts of hydro,
-
about 200 gigawatts of nuclear,
-
and on an energy equivalent basis,
-
adjusting for intermittency,
-
about 100 gigawatts of renewables.
-
800 gigawatts of coal.
-
They're doing that knowing the costs
better than any other country,
-
knowing the need better
than any other country,
-
but that's what they're aiming for in 2040
-
unless we give them a better choice.
-
To give them a better choice, it's
going to have to meet the Chindia test.
-
If you look at all the alternatives
that are out there,
-
there are really two
that come near to meeting it.
-
First is this area of new nuclear
that I'll talk about in just a second.
-
It's a new generation of nuclear plants
that are on the drawing boards
-
around the world,
-
and the people who are
developing these say,
-
we can get them
in position to demo by 2025
-
and to scale by 2030
if you will just let us.
-
The second alternative
that could be there in time
-
is utility-scale solar
-
backed up with natural gas
-
which we can use today
-
versus the batteries
which are still under development.
-
So what's holding new nuclear back?
-
Outdated regulations
and yesterday's mindsets.
-
We have not used our latest
scientific thinking
-
on radiological health
-
to think how we communicate
with the public
-
and govern the testing
of new nuclear reactors.
-
We have new scientific knowledge
-
that we need to use
-
in order to improve the way
-
we regulate nuclear industry.
-
The second thing is we've got a mindset
-
that it takes 25 years
and 2 to 5 billion dollars
-
to develop a nuclear power plant.
-
That comes from the historical,
military mindset
-
of the places that
nuclear power came from.
-
These new nuclear ventures are saying
-
that they can deliver power
for 5 cents per kilowatt/hour,
-
they can deliver it
for 100 gigawatts a year,
-
they can demo it by 2025,
-
and they can deliver it in scale by 2030,
-
if only we give them a chance.
-
Right now, we're basically
waiting for a miracle.
-
What we need is a choice.
-
If they can't make it safe,
if they can't make it cheap,
-
it should not be deployed.
-
But what I want you to do
is not carry an idea forward,
-
but write your leaders,
-
write the head of the NGOs you support,
-
and tell them to give you the choice,
-
not the past.
-
Thank you very much.
-
(Applause)