history tvdocuments america's stories and on sunday book tv brings you the latest in nonfiction books and authors . funding comes from these television companies and more including media, >> the world changed in an instant. internet trafficking and we never slowed down. schools and businesses went virtual and we powered a new reality because we are built to keep you ahead. >> media, along with these television companies support c-span2 as a public service. >> welcome to the latest in a series of streaming events. today we got the pleasure of hosting an event with steve koonin. steve is an eminent scientist, now a famous scientist, for some and infamous r scientist, a professor at new york university and formerly the head of the department of energy research portfolio for the secretary of energy under president obama prior to that

was chief scientist at bnp and for those of you who may remember that just to mean british petroleum, then it meant beyond petroleum and then it went back to bp . will be talking about that and part of that was a professor and then professor at caltech which is i'll confess i'm jealous because that was my first choice and i wanted to go to school. i went to queens university in canada which you know. i like to think of it as a good business school but caltech is the genuine mothership. so in short, stephen is the scientist of consequence. he's not a dell talkie. were going to talk about his book, if you're joining us you know why we're talking about his book. what climate science tells us, why it doesn't and why it matters which is published on the circuit, i know what that's like. it can be annoying but you

write a book and it's a lot of work and you want people, you hope people will read it. so we're going to talk about the book which is the science of the planet's climate. we're going to talk about the nature of climate debate not just this debate but this issue of talking about science in the public space and we'll talk some about the idea of changing energy and how we get energy , we need energy to survive. we will stop and then a full disclosure i review these books. i've not known it him before, i've gotten to know him but did i like him when i readthe book but i review the book for the wall street journal favorably . caused a bit of a flat which you all can go to the instant website and see what the facebook thoughts of cancellation. which was good. you could say cynically it was published in the and it

helps people focus on why the book was written and as a fellow physicist physicist of less note i should point out the history here, humanity has had an atmosphere for about 400 years. we just figured this out a while ago and carbon dioxide was discovered 200 years ago. the scots invented everythingi think, electricity, you name it . i don't know how scottish british roots but they did a lot and 200 years ago almost exactly, it's a couple of years to the anniversary the idea of the greenhouse effect and the words identified by a mathematician which is kind of fun. create was he transforms anybody who's been in math or science, he transformed he was a mathematician for napoleon. he figured out the old the earth was getting warmer than it otherwise would be if the atmosphere function like a

greenhouse. if it didn't there would be no life on earth. so humans have been interested in climate science for a long time. they've also been interested in the weather which is a related, but we'll talk about a different phenomenon for even longer because we care about the weather. it affects our lives nature has been trying to kill humans with weather ofor most of forever. so understanding the climate and weather matters because it's consequential, it matters because it's interesting. so that's my bias, that's why i'm interested in thebook . like what stephen has written. so let's start with this title because we are here on the circuit. typically find people who have nothing better to ask you, why did you title the book unsettled? i have a specificreason for asking this but enough about me . why the title and it gets to

what we're going to talk about. why did youwrite the book ? >> first of all pleasure to be talking with you this afternoon . i think we will have a great conversation. the title is a double entendre. it refers to the science itself and there are still important things about climate and human influence on it that we don't understand. but it also refers to my state of mind when i found out that the science was not assolid i as i had previously believed . >> this get student an interesting point, there's two things that struck me in your book. you write when that happened and how it happened and that's important for people to understand that the epiphany that the science wasn't assettled as you thought occurred because you were looking into the science .

not because e somebody paid you to do thatyou were under secretary of energy . nobody paid you in the ad hominem world we live in, somebody paid you to disassemble the narrative that we have on the solid view of theclimate science . >> there's a story about that. from 2005 when i joined bp until the time ileft the government , i was working to develop and demonstrate emissions technologies. there are various kinds we can talk about but in 2013 i was asked by the american physical society which is the depression all society that represents 50,000 physicist to do a refresh of their statement on climate change. in 2007 eight issued a statement to great controversy among the membership because it used

the word incontrovertible and ifyou're a physicist you know that is a red flag . so in 2015 there was a look again at the state and i thought rather than like many professional societies just rubberstamping what the un ipcc says i thought we are physicists, we should have a deeper look at the issue so i convened a workshop and my panel which was five physicists who are not climate experts that and listened to three consensus scientists , i think of all of them ipcc authors and three credentialed skeptical scientists . there were presentations and we would talk for a day or so and ice say there is a lot here we don't understand and some of it very important to know that we didn't know. i was also surprised by how i had not heard about those

shortfalls in the time i had been studying the matter so it was both a revelation about the substance of the science but also how poorly it had been communicated to even the literate public. >> it's funny, your epiphany was similar to mine. some years earlier on a different subject of nuclear energy which we will comeback to . i happened to have spent the week of the accident at three mile island as a documented immigrant from canada. and i'm an american citizen now to and proud to be. despite all our trials and tribulations i'm still proud to be . although it's challenging these days. anyway, enough about canada. i was thrown into the debate around nuclear energy in 1979 , i spent the week of the accident at three mile island and was immersed in the he florida commission hearing

which looked at nonproliferation issues for nuclear energy primarily and the safety issues , the kennedy commission, i was a mathematician again. he did a spectacular job at doing what you justdescribed . the accusation then was nuclear power is to say to operate, we should abandon it . the government set up a kennedy commission to examine the science and engineering on what we know and what's uncertain, how dangerous can it be? great experience but what i learned to your point is this profound difference between what people thought they knew in the public space and good policymakers outside the spot and you and what they debated about was a big house them and the people across the chasm were aminority . a lot of scientists just don't want to get in and i can tell you i tried to get a lot of scientists to your community to come and join in

the debate about the safety of nuclear energy and we were being told the world what and . we had prominent scientists at the union of concerned scientists and places like that, today we almost lost pennsylvania. all these things are going to have. scientists did not want to join me. i got a bunch tojoin and i felt very fortunate but they didn't want to join a public debate for a variety of reasons . i would say it felt a lot like where weare now but now it's on steroids . you learned that there's nothing to debate, there was a bit of ablowback on that i think when you wrote a piece in the wall street journal five years ago now . >> 2014. >> seven years ago. >> were you surprised? i guess i wasn't surprised at the blowback i felt because

there was a trigger event that caused hyperbolic media coverage. blowing up a billion-dollar reactor, melting down a billion-dollar reactor was a consequential event that was a trigger. so yousaw a lot of emotion . that was a little different. >> i would say the climate discussion now compared to nuclear energy and full disclosure, i'm a nuclear physicist by training . i think the difference with the climate is 2 things. one is that we have now and allegedly authoritative set of documents that are in fact the un reports or the us government reports. and they allegedly define the science.

more directly in terms of the liability of energy, cost of energy and even they are behavioral patterns. so i think there's a much greater desire now to be looking at allegedly authoritative science than it was say five years ago. or thereabouts. >> i do want to get the one thing you wrote in your book that i thought you handled extremely well. and it's the it's the language of the debate when people have decided to call those who argue about the science deniers. this construct that was created which i was a offended with when it happened, it was created. you wrote eloquently briefly but right up front i think

it's important that you've been asked this by others but it's important in every venue to take had on this issue of being labeled a denier when you try to talk about the science of climate. >> first let me just say were i into micro aggressions i would be really offended i have been called a denier pretty recently in some of the media . 200 of my extended family died in the camps in world war ii mifrom the nazis so i into micro aggressions i would get really mad. but i'm not. this is about science and we should try to take theemotion out of it . when i wrote the book i was very careful to quote almost entirely from the official assessment reports. both the un and us governments. so if somebody takes issue with what's in the book we can then have a hconversation about houston i nvwant because

in fact some of the people criticizing me actually wrote the reports themselves . >> like you, when i write in the public space, and this is just the nature of the space we're in whatever the subject on energy and climate science , one tends to use research others have gotten because no individual can do all the research so you go to the primary sources and then you look what they said. you do your best toaccurately reflect what they said, you can't be perfect and you write your own synthesis, that's what research is like . this particular debate, the science debate around climate this is what struckme early on. i would say 20 years ago when i first darted looking into it . it's that if you read the literature and through the itc reports youfind it is as a friend of mine dick linson you know . dick is and i'm paraphrasing

frequently saying in the public space to colleagues who follow the camp of debating the science, don't keep saying that the science is settled. the sciences are very good. the vast majority of the research is honest, solid and important. it's to the extent dick can get angry he gets borderline angry but it's the translation of what's there. in two public discussion. some by scientists, not all by scientists and in the media where we get those sources but this is not, there's no answer to the question but i want to phrase it this way. science and public policy merge, you can't afford it because public policy supports science.

it's not like it's a bad fusion, it's a difficult one but the process of science and reaching a consensus is an important one to understand and understand the u difference on the continuum of consensus from let's say knowing theearth is round to knowing that the temperature of the planet will be in two centuries are very different parts of the continuum . you undertook this examination as i would say based on that kind of simplistic premise. how do you, not plus one but how do you bridge that divide when people say to you it's a consensus, so many scientists say differentvenues saying . your cherrypicking . the consensus is we've got a problem. what do you say? >> you have to distinguish between what the science says from what you or anybody thinks we should do about it. and i've tried to do the very careful about that. we can discuss what we might do, what you might say and do

afterwards but let's focus on the science. there is this game of telephone i'd like to say that the research paper, it goes into the assessment reports and the summaries and policymakers and those assessment reports which are heavily influenced by government then get to the media and politicians and there are so many opportunities to distort the message. as i wrote the book i tried very hard to stick with tesome of these statements in the reports and so circumvent that whole chain of description and give the public the nonexpert readers some insight into what the science actually says. i often like to quote the line from the movie the princess bride where inigo montoya says you keep using that word, i indon't think the science says what you think it says and in fact a lot of people are surprised when i say no human influence is detected in hurricanes or the economic impact of it will be

minimal, etc. but there are some real surprises that the process has buried and i have tried to elucidate them. if somebody thinks i'm cherry picking, show me the other part of the tree. >> you know your date yourself like me and you join one of the great movies of all time princess bride and the great line but when montoya tells him that idon't think that word thing means what you think it means . . >> we can go back and look it up. >> this is part of what's important . when there are followers, anyway. so you put your finger on something here that's important. and especially in the public policy space. you went to great pains in your book to use primary

sources, the same sources so thatyou reach a different conclusion than people using the same primary sources . perfectly reasonable arm of the liberation . >> i wouldsay i don't reach a different conclusion . i tried to present conclusions or us government conclusions but sometimes they don't put quite their proper context in that conclusion. they truncate the history or don't give a sense of scale and so on i've done that . >> it's right to correct me on that because i think again there's a precision in language which is difficult in soundbites on tv as you know. if you're lucky as you know you get 3 to 4 minutes of airtime . and usually the host once an impact thing like it's a hoax or obama was wrong or biden did this ortrunk did that . and you get hammered for

that. you need to come back with an answer, you can't equivocate. you have toreach a conclusion and in three minutes it's hard . >> i would say this science in particular is so complicated and nuanced that if there's not it's not all at all well adapted to soundbites. >> you and i talk about this after i published my review which i can share with the audience but as i looked at your book and the graphs in it which are helpful, i'll tell those who are listening if you haven't readit, you should order it ,read it . i would characterize my review as a lecturer in the printed formor a carefully explaining what is happening and where we are, what the data means, where they come from. but i look at the sea level rise graphs and of course it oscillates. sea level accelerated and decelerated . you see this graph and what

you don't see is a signal saying there's a clear trend over the last two centuries or hundred 50 years. you don't have a straight line there. you have this oscillation. in the rate. there's actually a to your point again this is precision. there's a clear trend towards sealevel rise towards the last 10,000 years now i guess . >> 20 almost. >> we know a lot about the sealevel rise because human beings have had measure carefully for a long time it's actually one of those measurements that's pretty solid. a lot of other vehistorical measurements are not temperature it is a sloppy measurement because we didn't have to thermometersof any value but anyway, you look at that and you say how do you distill that ? you distill it in a sound bite you but you don't see

any acceleration, you don't seeany signal because it's in noisy phenomena . which simplistically is for those who say well, sealevel is accelerating, but for how long. the sealevel rise accelerated for the last few decades. >> i would say 40 years. >> decelerating sealevelrise. but what does it tell you? maybe we don't know that much about what thesefactors are . that would be the conclusion . >> the thing you have to answer that is for people who are up-to-date on the subject is that human influences were a quarter of what they are today and maybe even less than that so the sealevel was doing ups and downs pretty much on its own and that makes it hard to understand the recent up. >> the challenge you have two one other iconic one which is temperature. they use to call it global

warming. the nomenclature has changed to climate change. i won't speculate on why but just say it seemed like a better description than talking about warming only and then we're now this is not, it reported that carefully but that this coterie would like to have this called a climate crisis or rather than climate change. so we got this nomenclature problem which is pushing it towards catastrophe thing what's going on. and attaching we forget this because it's in your book, it's an important point. attaching whether, short-term events that are geographically located to atmospheric climate variances which are a long cycle. they're related but they're different and i think that's important foryou to explain . we may have experts in the audience but i think it's important to explain how they are related and why they are different . >> weather is what happens

every day. the second day, whereas climate is defined as the long-term average of weather. typically years although sometimespeople talk about 20 years so if you tell me the last three or four years have been dry , that's pretty much whether. if you tell me the last two decades are dry then we can start talking about climate and that this wonderful graph in the book of data but it's the height of the nile river over about 1000, maybe 800 years as measured at the cairo and what you see, egyptians were very good and precise measuring these things for a long time is that it has long-term trends superimposed on the ups and downs every year and you can be sure that there were some egyptian scholars who got worried that they were entering a drought when it

was going down for a couple of decades but then it turned around again and of course that had nothing to do with human influence because it was long before the large-scale use of these. >> that's one of the most delicious graphs in your book for me because i'm sure you have this experience with graphs and books in the public space. generally speaking editors tell you to get the grass out of your book because it scares people away . i see a graph, it's a real graph. it just yells at you, information that we all adding pictures are worth 1000 words, it'sall true . it's very dramatic and evocative and that graph speaks volumes to that specific phenomenon. >> its long-term trends and it's interesting you mention the graphs. as i started to put the book together , we had a big debate with the editor and i and publisher on should he put the graphs in or not and

there's like 70 graphs in the book which is quite unusual for a book but as you say, the graphs are the way in which you talk about data and data are the language of science. and you can't talk about it any other way although i have had some long or less literate friends read the book and say you can read it without looking at the graphs. >> ilike how you qualified nonliterate to less literate . >> anyway, i'm just joking. >> people who grew up with stocks, the graphs are a little more complicated . >> i put friends in these debates and it's like the other skill, people good at reading balance sheets on financial reports and look at it and smell a copy that's lying or not lying and i was amazed when i was 14 and helping out investments and

i'd watch some of the guys i work withlook at the financial pages and just smell it in the numbers. you could just tell . i feel the same way when i was trained. but you're right, you explain the graphs, you don't have to understand them . but let's go to the enough about climate as they say. let's stipulate that those who think that where we should be in a hurry to change energy systems of the world, that for the time being lost the debate and it's because the world, i mean the western world is trying hard to change its energy system. it hasn't changed, i've written about it, you've written about it. the society has noticed the world gets about three percent of its energyfrom wind and solar and another roughly 10 percent from other esnon-combustion sources . and otherwise it's 80+ percent for local gas.

an 84 percent 20 years ago, so here we are spending hundreds of billions of dollars and we spent the last few decades, somewhere between one and $2 trillion in europe and the united states on non-hydrocarbon energy sources where hydrocarbons utterly dominate so you work for bp and the height of the beyond petroleum days when there were ground limits to for whatever reason they had in the public relations side to signal that there's a long transition to both post petroleum world i guess.we ask you and will talk more about energy and new fusion but let me ask you this question and i get all the time to. so you're a scientist, you're an expert, you studied this stuff . you've got to put a marker down, is 2035 for we are forecasting the 2035 and based on what you know about the physics of energy and economics of energy, the inertia system and biasing. 2035 is the world still using

a lot of oil? i don't mean 50 cups worth of oil, is will still main source of transportation? >> energy systems are recalcitrant, they change slowly and they are there are very good reasons why they change slowly. two of the most important are they need to be reliable o, and they don't make changes in the system that's got electricity with full reliability or a fuelsupply that needs to be there every day . that's one atthe second is there are large capital investments involve. you put down a nuclear power plant or even a gas plant you expect it to last many decades so it's still there. it's still running so it takes a long time and what's being proposed now at least

doing less is to force the system to do something unnatural. i like to say your change the energy system by orthodox church, not by teeth extraction. and if you make the kind of radical changes that are being proposed . there's actual detailed trends on how it's going to come about. we could be headed for trouble both domestically and also in our geopolitical posture. >> i couldn't agree more and for me, it's i have taken a position publicly and it's not a tough one to take that going to build more non-hydrocarbon energy machines that's locked into the system. a lot of that is good and normal because machines are better than they ever were. we need lots of energy but forcing it through subsidies doesn't create new physics of energy, those will create new machines and it takes a long time. geopolitical parts and when you were in the department of energy , i know you learned and i learned this when i was much younger as i would guess

i would call myself a kid, a young man. i was at the reagan white house and at least you were in the obama administration, i musthave been in diapers in the reagan administration . the geopolitics of energy matter and honestly because wars have been foughtfor millennia over energy . if and to distill it to the challenge we have today if the world is going to use a lot of oil in the futurlet's stick with oil . natural gas and hydrocarbon or cousins . but given who produces the oil and use at meetings on the geopolitics i'm sure. you've got two big players, saudi arabia and the middle east and russia. there the number two and three players. and the rest of the world d imports well. the exporting reasons are us, russia and saudi arabia. i think it's not just

frightening. i think it's a formula for serious challenges. >> the current administration seems to be headed for slowly strangling the domestic oil and gas industry here and i remind people that attended the half-million people and it accounts 40 percent of the gdp. and it doesn't produces about four percent of the worlds oil or something like that shut that down, we're still going to need oil and more importantly other countries are going to need oil. and we will be receiving the geopolitical leverage to the countries that you talk about , russia and the middle east. and that seems to be a pretty silly thing to do. again, for what we come out to 15 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions and that fraction is declining as the rest of the world is more and more energy to develop .

so it's an influence on the climate and i think tewe be putting our economy in great turbulence if we don't do this in smart way out of the obvious, by not domestically producing where actually self-sufficient in either carbon, it's a net net. not domestically producing it but importing hydrocarbon is more important alternative. we not only damage eight percent of our gdp, we require the importation of eight percent of our gdp at least so it's a net 16 percent hit which is an astronomically big hit to our economy. >> i would agree. there's another aspect, i don't want to dump too much on the administration because i think they are doing a number of good things but this notion that you're going tocreate jobs and boost the economy by moving to clean energy , i'd remind people that oil technology gets

invented, it's different than where it gets manufactured and it's different yet than where it gets deployed and whether you use solar or wind as an example, if you see that playing out in real time so even if we invent something here it's not obvious we will reap the economic benefits . >> is a quintessential example is solar electricity, they were invented here, developed here, first floyd here. we import 90 percent ofthe solar panels in america as you know, there manufactured largely in china and asia broadly . i'd like to say because it turns out as brilliant as the invention n was and it's in incredible phenomenon, it's easy to make solar cells, they're not complicated things but hydraulic fracturing oil getting it out of iraq and making a rock yield hydrocarbons is hard work and the chinese are net importers. the biggest importers of

wealth. i don't think it's an accident therethe biggest exporters of the easy to make stuff . >> and there's geology and geography working against them also. the water availability, the fact that they haven't built a gas transport system. also says they're not going to produce gas. >> but you're a real physicist, i'm a, i was a physicist for a while. i quit graduate school as my colleagues know because not because it was too hard, it was hard but because i wanted to work in microprocessors where i was building stuff and in those days you didn't get to build anything in universities. >> one of my elders once said something, a guy named jim langer who was a wonderful material scientists . he said you know degree in physics isa license to poke your nose into anybody's business . i had great fun doing that. >> so did i. but my family will attest toit .

so let's turn before we go to q&a to the physicists favorite energy sources. the nuclear phenomenology. i want to call them the common phenomenology because then i get to include solar energy, the only new phenomenology is one of those things that are composites and tonics. the electron layers being excited by protons and then tinkering with thenucleus which is nuclear energy. so what we have a nuclear fission and nuclear fusion . as i said earlier i was branded in the intellectual sense at the accident at three mile island defending nuclear energy for years. i'm a nuclear ball. there is no more phenomenology as challenging as making nuclear energy while and by viable i mean safe and low cost and easy to

deploy but what i'm encouraged by this new class of actors, not just marginal reactors and i wonder if you're encouraged by how encouraging these designs are . >> when i was in the department of energy i would promote getting some loans out to get the first small modular reactors design and now we see at least one of them moving into icy season. small reactors generally are not a new idea. we've got dozens of them out floating around the world and aircraft carriers and submarines so they run just fine . it's not quite the same as putting a reactor in a boat as it is to put one on land but there are many of the same principles and when you look at the new designs, we hope to be able to build them in a factory. there will be much safer. they will be modular so you can build one and use the cash flow to build the second one. licensing should be a lot easier. and if the nation really wants to carbonized its electricity system and run

its transportation on electricity as well, it's going to have to have fission as an important part. there's no question. >> i think this is to me what's interesting is not thatthere's no question . it's nothing like the energy density of nuclear fission. the quality materials you need are so irrelevant, it's just disappears and the noise from a fuel and material perspective but to get to the genext stage more quickly , to those who want to have a transition happened faster, there's nothing that would be as effective as accelerating nuclear energy. so given the nature of the regulatory environment we have, you know it. from having worked in the doe days, if an administration were serious about energy transition, wouldn't that be the first rgthing we tackle? >> i should hope so but this administrations been a little bit shy about nuclear.

as you know, again it's not tell the whole truth. i think you know, remember the private sector is involved here as well and the companies doing this, if they can't get an initial deployment in the us then they tried to go elsewhere. and i'm sure there are many countries who would be interested in hosting a demonstration . >> if you think about the refuel cycles and major reactors to your point about small reactors, the stakes are up to three years or five years to fueling. the idea that you can build a reactor that's small , be buried under two in town and run the town for five years with no fuel showing up. and every five years, trucks show up, swap the poor out, go away. what a magical thing. this is something nobody's

ever had. >> you have to be careful it's not quite as nice an analogy between the naval reactors and civilian. they run on enriched uranium what you don't want floating around in unprotected spaces but you don't refuel them very often and that makes them wonderful. the waste, people worried about the waste. we have to waste safely and economically. it's not a technical problem. hnit is a political perceptionproblem . >> as you know it's so small in volume that and it's easy to monitor, radiation is easy to monitor so single atoms if their radioactive. there's nothing else likeit . if you want to tracksomething that's hard to find , you can get somethingradioactive to follow it around . >> but we don't do that

becauseof safety issues. radiation stands up and wants to be counted is the way i say it .>> the one way we used to do it as radio waves. >> very small amounts. >> trivial amounts. before we turn to that question, confusion. i have a good friend who's a physicist . he was asked by his advisor because he 75, how many fusionreactors would be in the world in 20 years or 30 years . his answer was a couple. and he was overly optimistic because we still don't have a couplei have my opinions about howhard fusion is . it's fascinating physics . where is your head on the

visibility to what i would guess you would call the equivalent of a shippingport reactor . >> let's step back and ask what's going on. so the world is focused on an enormous mac being built in the south of france. i think they expect to see the first plasma in about 15 years and from there you got to do a demonstration and from there it's more commercial. i am an interesting observer and something of a fan of small commercial efforts and full disclosure, i sit on the science board of a small commercial firm pursuing fusion . in a different way and i've been watching them for more than a decade. as an advisor and they're making good progress. if things turn out well for them, we could see within six or seven years something that has got a positive evto greater

than one which means you get more energy often you put in and fromthere is probably not so difficult . i think powering into the grid 15 years at the earliest some scale, maybe 12 is probably more realistically 20 to 25 years. it's but i keep thinking why do we need this.remember it's got to not just work but it's got to work betterthan the old physicists . it's got to work better than fusion, wind and solar and so on . i think it's perfectly fine to try to develop it, it's wonderful but the commercialization is going to be an issue. >> if i were given the time as you describe to get to to greater than one, i'd say 12 to 15 years. then you add 10 to 15 years after that to get to commercial will call beta and

its 30 years from now and then you start scaling which as you know the time looks like another 10 to 20 years. half a century out before you canstart scaling . which is typical of big systems. like, the first question is coming from the audience. we touched on some of it but it was a specific question about what could specifically be done to accelerate the next generation of reactors. what things, pretend the s.administration asks youthat question . they get to that aand what would they proposeto do ? >> i think there are some lessons to be learned from the commercialization of the first generation of reactors. where the government first of all it had the military needs to build reactors for both smaking nuclear weapons and compelling submarines. and then in some ways the commercial effort was an offshoot fromthat . but the government promoted

the technology and it released liability from reactor operators. in general it stimulated through regulation and financial help to get the industry off the ground. now, whether you do that today for the new emerging generation of reactors i think it would be much more difficult to do that in the present political climate. as you know there's always been a deep debate in the us about the proper relationship between the private sector and the government and stimulating new technologies. there's this wonderful line in one of the federalist papers i think it was madison who wrote it who asked the question what businessman would stake his business on government regulation because it is fickle. and can change every 4 years.

so it's got to have let me just say in truth and merit. to get down to brass tacks i think easing the regulation of the nrc is currently properly a hurdle to get over but we can make that hurdle lower by educating the nrc better. and then some financial land concessions in order to get the first couple right. >> this is not a new idea but it's an idea i'm sure you've heard before which is the small monitor reactors of course are the natural size for towns, cities, military bases so the potential fire that can insinuate the market is a buyer. which is the government of the defense department buying hundreds, not one reactor. you run the contest the way the dod run contests for new

aircraft. you got two or three, you put them with the contract and build them . >> when i first got to new york from washington or back to new york i lived with the brooklyn borough president, a wonderful guy . he's not in it long enough and he says i want to make brooklyn the clean energy capital of the us and i said i suggested to him how about we put a modular reactor and things got very quiet after that. >> it was the right perception because it's exactly. new york city is classic example of the kind of younger feedback where that makes sense because it will collect the rent for a while goes from nature and bad actors of getting energy into a city like new york needs that geography is not your friend. but here's a question, we're getting close to wrap up time

i think but i have a question that brings usback to where we started . and i'll tell you what the question is, you can choose how to answer it . i have opinions on this matter to and my answer, you usually say i was trained in physics, not psychology but i'm bored to ask this question and if you can ask this question all the time. when you hear what you said about climate science and the study of science, you read your book and as one does and people do as they hope they should. then you beg the question of why is it, is it because the other analysis are subpar, they're just not genuinely good analysis or is it because, and to stipulate puthere are concerned people but there genuinely wrong or there are other personal or political agendas animating the system.

i get asked that, i'm sure you get asked that all the time . it does require perhaps a response so what say you? >> my first answer is of course the way you do, i'm not seeing to get any five people sick but you can see that there is a confluence of interests among the various players. the media, if it bleeds it leads so dramatic whether stories are blaming it on climate will get my eyeballs. for the sciences i think some of the scientists genuinely do feel the earth is in peril and want to help but there are the usual motivations of academic prestige and so on and then for the politicians, i like to put hl mencken was a journalist in the early part of the 20th century and he's got online to check within the book, i don't know if i get it exactly right but politics is to keep the public along by a series of mostly imaginary hobgoblins

so that they will be to safety and whether it's the climate or immigration or any one of a number of other things you can cite i think that is also something that's motivating people. >> a related question came through about it was phrased the deficiencies in will call it the educational system, the pipeline of bringing scientists into the work and the public policy debate. i'll expand by not asking about deficiencies per se but the characteristics of the system that lead to tikind of the nature of the debate we have which becomes often heated, emotional and ad hominem. this particular debate seems to really ignite that. the question is as phrased is that a deficiency, i would ask for is that the nature of the system we have or is it

deficient now compared to way it used to be when you and i went to school? >> people who go into physics have a different degree of curiosity and skepticism and people who go into some other field but i've not interacted with students in k-12 level but i do teach a graduate class in energy and a regular class in climate to mostly engineers and mbas. and it's such a joy for me to say we're not doing politics here, where doing technology. we're doing regulation, where doing business. and going to show you the science and the reports and department ofenergy . and you see the eyes open up for these students who most of whom had no exposure at all to either the climate or energy system except through

the papers so part of our book is to just kind of educate and inform people not to persuade them but just these artifacts and they're not these facts but what you find in the government reports. >> i have the same experience. what you get as you know is one of two reactions. you get one of two, one is often justamazement, people say they can do their own research which is interesting . if you're interested in's stuff, don't read what i wrote about what the itcc said, go read the source. most people can't do that so you end up not being capable, either their lives or busy but they make a certain amount of faith and admit you're being honest which is the nature heof it but i'll tell you, i get this question a lot and d you must have for the last particularly seven years as what wrote a wall

street journal piece. okay, what you say is true and i accept what you're saying is probably true, it seems reasonable. but what's going on mark it's sort of the whiskey tango foxtrot. look at the trillion dollars that essentially, maybe is 1.7 trillion now this administration is proposing to spend on ostensibly to toaddress change although a lot of that we know is in the penumbra which really typical pork butt but ignore that. again, it gets back to the political and psychology question but you can't dodge it's hard to god rather if you've actually worked in public policy like you did. there is a public policy sphere and people feel like, what gives here? >> i can't and shouldn't try to account for the policy

choices people make. i've talked to some old-fashioned attitude about science advising. i'm going to inform the decision that it may involve a host of other factors in which i'm not particularly expert, intergenerational equity, there's all about a person's environment and so on and i don't know about that because that's the political debate we should be having. and if the country decides to go one way or the other, okay, so be it.at least they've made it with a full understanding of what we know and what we don't know about changing climate and right now they're not getting that inventory and the book is an attempt to do that. >> you put your finger on the right answer when it comes to the sciences, having worked

in the office of the science advisory years ago what was clear to me is a politics matter. one has one's political opinions, policy opinions but you want decisions to be made as best they can around what the best information you have so let's get back to this question because a big question now. it's been elevated by the debate around the corona pirates and how they've disrupted the world. so it doesn't matter whether it's koonin or about an environmental effect of something. you remember the odious nuclear winter debate. we don't have an technology assessment anymore. the science advisory department is important in my opinion, i worked at it but that's a political office. what's to your point, is these policy debates take

place in congress. that's where theybelong . and the equivalent stage. congress doesn't have an advisory body anymore. there are reasons that ota suffered the fate it suffered but without goinginto that , i'm curious what your view of a resurrecting something like an ota, i think it's a good idea to guess your answer but be in a few minutes we have left this debate touches on the importance of it. how do you do that? what's the framework for consensus? >> there's another set of hires in the advising world that can do something like what ota does and that's the national research council that these days we just talk about the nationals and they won a host of studies and by

and large i think they do a very good job. i was part of the organization as you may know for six years. i chaired a couple of studies on fusion for them over the decades . i think on climate they need a refresh of the players in the academy. it is the same old gang so you kind of get locked in and fresh eyes would be wonderful. on the climate side and then there are the think tanks. mostly for the defense department but ida, institute for defense analysis which grand, cna and so on so these are sources of real analytic device and they do provide input to the legislature. but ota would be good to have an organic set of analysts in the congress that would be turned to for a short

turnaround. >> you know better than i do that whole organ of other kinds of institutions that exist are designed to provide input. they could be raised a notch but the velocity of responses require a different feature of policymaking. and the science doesn't like to be rushed. so i guess in my mind i'd like to believe that if one were to create an ota, it's called a office of science and technology assessment, those are different things pa which should be obvious but it clearly is not. >> ..

that model strikes me as if it's packaged correctly might be sellable because money distributes funds but as a practical matter abie it's a way up to actually achieve what you described. >> so the academies to function like that a bit pretty slow. they are trying to get better, i know. i've been a member of the group for 30 some m odd years which provides detailed technical advice and contracts to many of these other equations in them and turns around the a study ind about a year. more important, what the policy was providing technical input to

clinton's decision to abide by a comprehensive test ban in the early '90s. that was very significant and pretty quickly done piece of work. >> i think that's a great example. we can close on that note. it would be terrific and obviously it has a cost but it's a pretty low cost by washington standards. let me, i'm getting an wrapup signal. you've been very generous with your time. i know you're crazy busy on the circuits it's kind of to do this. i really do, again, tell anybody who's listening, who listens later, you should read the book. steve is an excellent writer, clear at explanations. i can't more highly it. thank you for joining me, steve.

appreciate it. >> this is been a great conversation. i hope we can continue on at some point. >> my pleasure. i get too close by paying homage to my masters of the manhattan institute, the commanders, great institute.do for those of you who don't know much about it if you're watching, i'm assuming you if you don't go to the website. the lots of newsletters. lots of reports, , great scholas in many other areas. obviously it's a nonprofit, to steve's point about think tanks. it's a think tank that's involved a lot of things. if your potential support take a look. should they could use your help. i would appreciate it i guess because they support me in work like this. thank you all for watching and listening, and thank my new friend, the brave scientist, steven koonin. >> weekends on c-span2 are an intellectual feast.

every saturday you will find events and people that explore our nation's past on american history tv. on sundays booktv brings you the latest in nonfiction books and authors. its television for serious readers. learn, discover, explorer. weekends on c-span2. >> my name is kate cole and i'm investment specialist focusing on the impact that environmental and sociall factors have on financial performance but before that i was in activist, i am an activist because of the often we get to speak to today, bill mckibben. i can even -- bill is a big deal. actually bill,. [inaudible] we've got to do this. bills book "falter" that will be discussing this morning and you can purchase using the by the