website booktv.org. >> today i've got the pleasure of hosting the event. steve is an eminent scientist. for some and infamous scientist

and the head of the department of energy's research portfolio under the secretary of energy in other words senate approved post under president obama. prior to that, chief scientist for those of you who may remember that used to mean british petroleum and then it meant beyond petroleum and then it went back. prior to that, he was a professor in caltech which is i will go fast i'm jealous because that was my first choice where i wanted to go to school steve is a scientist not a dilettante. we are going to talk about his book if you are joining us you know why we are talking about the book it is what climate

science tells us and it was published on the circuit i know what that's like. it can be annoying but if you write a book it's a lot of work and you hope people will read it. there's this issue of talking about science in the public space and changing civilizations energy. in full disclosure i reviewed the book and i hadn't known him before. i thought i would like him when i read the book but i reviewed it for "the wall street journal" very favorably.

it was good i guess you could say publicity helps people focus on why the book was written. humanity has known that there's been an atmosphere and scientists figured this out carbon dioxide was discovered 250 years ago and the scots invented everything i think. i'm not scottish, british, but they did a lot and 200 years ago almost exactly, a couple years for the anniversary, the idea of the greenhouse effect identified by a mathematician which is kind of fun. transforming anybody in the science or math he was a mathematician and he figured out

the earth was getting warmer than it otherwise would be. if it didn't, there would be no life on earth so humans are interested in the climate science and also interested in the weather. this will talk about different phenomenon even longer because we care about the weather and it affects our lives and nature has been trying to kill humans with whether for most of forever. understanding the climate and the weather matters because it is consequential and interesting so that's my bias and why i'm interested in books like what stephen has written so let's start out with this title because when you're on the circuit, typically you will find people have nothing better to ask you, why did you title the book what you titled it.

enough about me. why the title, and it gets to what we are going to talk about, why did you write the book. >> first of all it's a pleasure to be talking with you. when i found out that the science wasn't as solid as i previously had believed.

looking at the science, not because somebody -- i mean, somebody paid you to do that, the under secretary of energy, but nobody paid you in the kind of world we live now when it comes to the climate issues, nobody paid you to disassemble the narrative that we have for the solid view of the climate crisis. from about 2005 when i joined up until the time i left the government in 2012, i was working to develop technologies of various kinds but in 2013 i was asked by the american society that is the professional society that represents 50,000 physicists to do a refresh on climate change and issued a

statement to controversy among the membership the issue statements rubberstamping what the un ipcc says. we should have a deeper look at the issue and so i convened the workshop. they sat and listened to three consensus scientists and all of them were authors in one way or another and three skeptical scientists there were presentations that were told and i came away with the sense there's a lot here we don't understand and some of it is

very important to know. i was also surprised by how i had not heard about those shortfalls in the time that i had been studying the matter so about the substance of the science and also how it had been communicated. >> similar to mine years ago on a different subject, nuclear energy, which we will come back to. i spent a week at the accident when i first came to the united states as he documented immigrant. despite our trials and tribulations, i'm still proud to be year although it is challenging these days. but enough about canada. i was thrown into the debate around nuclear energy in 1979

and spent the week of the accident immersed in the commission hearings that looked at nonproliferation issues for energy primarily and then the safety issues for the commission. he did a spectacular job at doing what you just described. the accusation was too safe to operate. we should abandon it. they set up the commission to examine the science and engineering of what we know or don't know. great experience but what i learned to your point was this profound difference between what people thought they knew in the public space and what some scientists thought they knew and debated about and the people around were a minority.

a lot of scientists don't want to get in then i can tell you i tried to get a lot of the community to come and join me in the debate. we were being told the world would end. we had prominent scientists to name names and other places like that. we almost lost pennsylvania because of 3-mile island. all these things are going to happen. scientists didn't want to join me. they felt very fortunate for a variety of reasons then on that subject iowa to say it felt a lot like where we are now but on the steroids. you learned there's something to debate, there is a bit of a blowback when you wrote a piece on the journal five years ago now. seven years ago.

i guess i wasn't surprised the blowback i failed because i'd been in the middle of an accident or a trigger event. blowing up a billion-dollar reactor, melting down a reactor and blowing of the investment was a consequential event so you saw a lot of emotion. this was a little different. full disclosure i am a nuclear physicist. we have a set of documents that are in fact the un reports for the government reports and they allegedly define the science.

second, this has been building for quite a while but i think it is getting more serious now as you see governments proposing actions that will affect people's lives more directly in terms of reliability, cost of energy and even the behavioral patterns so i think there's a much greater desire to be looking at the allegedly authoritative science than it was say five years ago or thereabouts. i do want to get to the one thing you wrote in your book that i thought you handled extremely well. the language of the debate when people have decided to call those that argue about the science deniers.

i think it's important that as you have been asked this by others it's important in every venue to take this issue of being labeled a denier when you talk about the climate of science. i was called pretty recently in the media 200 of my extended family died in the camps in world war ii. when i enter the micro aggressions i get so mad. this is about science. we should try to take the emotion out of it. from the official assessment reports of the un government so

if somebody takes issue with what is in the book we can have a conversation of who is denying what. they wrote the reports themselves. >> like you, what i write in the public space, and this is just the nature of the space on the energy of climate science one tends to use research then you do your best to reflect on what they said and then you write your own synthesis. that's what research is like.

you find and i'm paraphrasing to colleagues debating the size don't keep saying that he is very adamant about the science and scientists are very good. it's interesting, important. to the extent he can get angry he gets borderline angry when people label it but it's the translation into a public discussion but there's no answer to the question. in the science and public

policy, you can't avoid it because public policy supports science, so it's not like it's a bad future and it's a difficult one but the process of science and reaching a consensus is important to understand and understanding the continuum of knowing the earth is round to knowing the temperature of the planet into centuries are different parts of the continuum. you undertook this examination based on that simplistic premise. how do you, not one but how do you bridge that divide of the consensus when they say different than you say you are cherry picking. the consensus is we've got a problem. you have to distinguish between what the science says from what

you or anybody else thinks we should do about it, and i try to be very careful about that. we can discuss what we might do but let's talk about there's a game of telephone i like to say that starts with the research papers and goes into the assessments for the policymakers and those assessment reports which are heavily influenced. you get to the media politicians and there are so many opportunities to distort the message. as i wrote the book, i tried hard to stick to some of the statements in the report to give the public the non-expert readers some insight into what the science actually says. in the movie he says you keep using that word. i don't think it says what you

think it says. a lot of people are surprised when i say no human influence is detected in the economic impact of what will be minimal et cetera. so those are some surprises that the process has buried. show me the other part. >> i don't think that it means what you think it means we can go back and look it up. >> it's probably more important. that's when they were following them. anyway, so look 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 to reach a different conclusion people use in the same primary sources. perfectly reasonable form of deliberation. >> i would say i don't reach a different conclusion. the conclusions sometimes don't put the proper context in the conclusion and they truncate the history or don't give a sense of scale. >> it is difficult in some ways on tv. if you are lucky you get three or four minutes of airtime like it's a hoax or obama was wrong or trumpeted this or that.

you need to come back with an answer. you have to reach the conclusion and in three minutes, it's hard. it doesn't adapt well at all you and i talked about this after we published the review that i can share with the audience as i look at your book which is very helpful i will tell those listening if you haven't read it you should. it is a lecture in the form where you carefully explain what's happened and where we are and what the data means and where they come from so i look

at the sea level and it also accelerated and d accelerated. what you don't see is a signal saying there is a trend over the last centuries. you don't have a straight line this or that in the race. to your point again 20,000 years. we know a lot about the sea level rise because human beings have had docs at the seams measured carefully for a couple of millennia. there's a lot of other historic measurements because they will have these values.

it's in a soundbite you don't see any acceleration or signal because it is a noisy phenomena which simplistically is for those that say they are accelerating. the sea level rise accelerated for the last couple few decades. it tells you maybe we don't know much about what the factors are. i think you have to add for those that are up to date on the subject the influences were a quarter of what they were today and maybe even less than that so it was ups and downs pretty much on its own.

to say it seemed they would like to have this called a climate crisis rather than climate change so we've got this nomenclature problem pushing towards what's going on and we should get to this because it's an important point attaching whether short-term events that are geographically located to the atmospheric events that are long so i called are related and different. i think it's important to

explain how they are related and different. it's defined as a long-term average so if you tell me the last three or four years have been unusually dry, if you tell me the last three decades are dry, then we can start talking about climate. i have a wonderful graph in the book, it isn't my data at over 1,800 years you see they were very good and precise. it's got long-term trends superimposed on the ups and downs and you can be sure there

were some farmers who got worried when it was going down for a couple decades but then it turns around again and it had nothing to do with human influences because it was wrong. >> that is one of the most delicious graphs in your book and i'm sure you have this experience with graphs and books in the public space generally speaking they tell you to get the grass out of your book because it scares people away. i don't mean an illustration it just is all true. it's very dramatic and then to explain it it speaks volumes to that specific. and it's interesting as i started to put the book together

we had a debate and the publisher, the agent -- the way that you talk about the data and the language of science you can't talk about it any other way although i have had some friends read it. people who look at stocks and so on -- it's like every other skill people are good at reading the reports and can smell a copy

that's lying or not lying. i was working on an investment fund and i would watch some of the guys i work with look at the financial pages and run the numbers. but you are right you explain the graphs and the narrative. let's just stipulate that those who think we shouldn't be in a hurry to change the energy system of the world and for the time being, the loss of debate the audience surely knows they've gotten 3% of their energy from wind and solar and

the other 10% from non-combustion sources and otherwise 80 plus% 20 years ago. here we are spending hundreds of billions of dollars somewhere between one to $2 trillion in europe and the united states on the non-hydrocarbon energy sources. you work for bp in the height of the petroleum days when for whatever reason they had on the public relations side to signal there is a transition to a post-petroleum world i guess. we will talk about energy and nukes but let me ask you this question you are a scientist. it's 2035 and we are forecasting

based on what you know about the physics of energy. as the world still using a lot of oil, supertankers, is the oil spill the source of transportation? >> there are good reasons why they changed. two of the most important are they need to be there every day. that's one. the second is there are large capital investments involved. you put down a nuclear power plant or gas plant and expect it to last many decades and so it is still there and running and it takes a long time and what is being proposed now is to force

the system to do something unnatural. i like to say it changed the system. i've taken the position publicly and it's not a tough one to take but we are going to build more nonhydrocarbon in the system that's locked into the system they are better than they were. but accelerating it and forcing it through subsidies doesn't create new physics or machines easily. it takes a long time.

i learned this when i was much younger. at least in the obama administration i must have been in diapers when i was in the administration the geopolitics of energy matters enormously because the war has been fought for millennia. >> for the challenge we have today the world will use a lot of oil if we stick with oil, hydrocarbon. given who produces the oil and use at in meetings i am sure. the two big players, saudi arabia and russia are the number two and three players. the rest of the world imports

oil primarily russia and saudi arabia. i think it's a formula for the challenges. >> strangling the domestic oil and gas industry and i would remind people it accounts for 80% of the gdp. it produces about 12% of the world's oil or something like that. but if we shut that down, we are still going to need oil and other countries are going to need oil and we will be seeing the leverage that you talked about. that seems to be a pretty silly thing to do. again, for what. we an amount to 15% of the

greenhouse gas emissions and it is declining as the rest of the world uses more and more energy to develop so it is a negligible influence on the climate and i think we would be putting our economy and greater turbulence if we don't do this. >> by not domestically producing but importing it we not only damage 80% of the gdp but we require the importation on 8% at least so it is a 16% hit which is an astronomical hit to the economy. a. >> i would agree. there's another aspect. i don't want to dump too much on the administration because they are doing a number of good things but this notion that you are going to create jobs and

boost the economy by moving to clean energy. remind people where technology gets invented is different than where it gets manufactured and where it gets deployed and you can see that playing out in real time so even if we invent something here. >> the quintessential example they were invented and developed here. 90% of the solar panels as you know they are manufactured largely in china and asia broadly. i'd like to say because it turns out as brilliant as the invention was and it's an incredible chronology, it's easy to make. they are not complicated things. the hydraulic fracturing and oil, making a rock yield hydrocarbon is hard work.

i don't think it's an accident they are the biggest importers. >> also geometry and geology working against them. the availability and facts they haven't built the system that says they are not going to produce gas. >> since we are both physicists, i was a physicist for a while. i quit graduate school as my colleagues know because not that it was too hard but because i wanted to work on building stuff and in those days you didn't get to build anything in the universities. >> one of my elders once said something. he said it is a license to poke

your nose in anybody's physics and i had great fun doing that. my family will attest to so let's turn before we go to the q and a. then i get to include solar energy. the only in the history of humanity which is excited by photons and then tinkering with the nucleus which is nuclear energy so we have a nuclear fission and fusion. as i said earlier, i was branded in the intellectual sense of defending nuclear energy for years. i think there is no phenomena that is remarkable and challenging as making nuclear

energy viable and, i mean, safe and low cost to deploy but i'm encouraged by this new class of small reactors. i wonder if you are encouraged by how interesting. >> to get the modular reactors now we see at least one of them moving into licensing. it's not a new idea. we've got dozens of them around and they run just fine. now it's not quite the same as it is 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. 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 d carbonized electricity system and run its transportation on electricity as well, it's going to have to have vision as an important part. to me what is interesting is not that there is no question. it's like the energy density. it's just they disappear in the noise of the fuel material perspective but to get to the next stage more quickly given the nature of the environment that we have you know full well having worked in these days if an administration were serious

about the energy transition, wouldn't that be the first thing we tackle? >> this administration has been a little bit shy about talking about nuclear. remember the private sector is involved here as well. if they can to get an initial deployment in the u.s. then they try to go elsewhere and i'm sure there are many that would be interested. if you think about the cycles they think they are up to three years or five years between fueling's. the idea that you could build a reactor that small and be buried next to a town and run the town for five years and then every

five years trucks show up what a magical thing. they run on highly enriched uranium which you do not want floating around in unprotected spaces but you don't refuel them very often. that makes them wonderful and we have ways of handling the waste safely and economically. it's not a technical problem. it's a political perception problem. a. >> it's so small and volume and we can track single atoms. there's nothing else like it.

radiation stands up and wants to be counted is the way i say it. one place we do it is very small amounts. i have a good friend who is a physicist asked by his advisor probably 75 how many fusion reactors he thought would be in the world in 20 or 30 years by the year 2000 and his answer was a couple. he was overly optimistic because we still have a couple.

i have my opinions about how hard 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 shipping port reactor. so the world is focused on either which is enormous and the southwest france i think they expect and about 15 years if i'm not mistaken and from then you've got to do a demonstration plant and it starts to get commercial. i'm something of a fan about this effort and for full disclosure i sit on the science aboard of a small commercial form and i've been watching them for more than a decade as an advisor and they are again good

progress if things turn out well for them, we could see within six or seven years something that has got a positive that means you get more energy out of then you put in and from there, it's probably not so different. so i think 15 years the earliest at some scale may be 12 if they are lucky or 20 to 25 years. i keep asking why do we need this. it's got to work better than the alternatives. fusion, wind and solar. the commercialization is going to be an issue. >> if i were the given the timelines described to say 12 to

15 years then you and to that to get the commercial data 15 years from now and then you start scaling the design it's another ten to 20 years so you are half a century out before you start scaling which is typical. we've touched on some of it but it was a very specific question of what could specifically be done to accelerate the next generation reactors. pretend this administration actually asks you that question to get to that there are some lessons to be learned from the commercialization of the first generation of reactors where the government first of all had the military need to build reactors

for nuclear weapons and submarines and then in some ways the commercial effort was an offshoot from that, but the government promoted the technology and released liability from the reactor operators and in general it is stimulated through regulation and financial help to get the industry off the ground. whether you could do that today for the new emerging generation i think it would be more difficult to do that in the present political climate. as you know there's always been a big debate about the proper relationship during the private sector and the government in stimulating and deploying new technologies. there is a wonderful line in one of the federalist papers i think it was madison who wrote it and asked the question if he would

stake his business on government regulation because it is sickle and can change every four years. i think using the regulation is currently a hurdle to get over but we can make it loyal by educating them and then some financial land concessions in order to get the first couple running. >> here's not a new idea but it's an idea that i'm sure you've heard before which of course are the natural size for towns, cities, military bases, so the potential fire that can stimulate a market for the

defense department by hundreds if not one to run the contest the way they run contests for new aircraft. when i first got to new york he says i want to make brooklyn the clean energy capital of the u.s. and i suggested to him how about we put a modular reactor and things got very quiet after that. >> new york city is a classic example of the kind of geography where that makes sense because we will call it the profile from nature and bad actors getting energy into a city like new york

means that geography is not your friend. here's a question getting close to wrap up time i think, but i have a question that brings us back to where we started. you can choose how to answer. my answer is to say i was trained in physics, not psychology when i'm asked this question but you can ask all the time. when you hear about climate science and read your book if one does as people should, it begs the question of why is it, is it because the other analysis are subpar, they are just not genuinely good and analysis? to stipulate there are people is

genuine or are there some other personal or political agendas in the system. i get asked that and i'm sure you get asked that all the time. my first answer of course is the one you gave. i'm not trying to get inside people's heads but you can see there was a confluence of interest among the various players. i think some feel they want to help but there are the usual motivations and then for the politicians i like to quote hl mencken who is a journalist in the earlier part of the 20th

century. it's the purpose of practical politics is to keep the public by the series of mostly imaginary top so they can be led to the safety and whether it is the claimant or immigration or any number of another thing you can cite is also something that is motivating people. >> we had a question about the phrase deficiencies in the educational system in the pipeline of bringing scientists into the work and public policy debate. both of the characteristics for the system that lead to the debate that becomes often hated, emotional not that that's new in human history but there's particular new debate that seems

to act ignite that. i would ask is that the nature of the system we have or is it efficient compared to when you and i went to school? >> people go to physics for different skepticism's. i've not interacted with students at the k-12 level but i do teach graduate class in energy and climate to mostly engineers. it is a joy for me to not be in politics here we are doing technology and regulation and business. i'm going to show you the reports and the department of

energy and to see the eyes open up for these students most of whom have had no exposure at all to the claimant or energy system and so part of our book is to just educate and inform people. these are the facts you find in the government reports. >> i've got the same experience. what you know is one of two reactions. people can do their own research and if you're really interested in something don't read what i wrote about what they said in the source. they place a certain amount of faith in the nature of all

teaching but i tell you i get this question a lot and you must have for the last seven years since you wrote the piece if what you say is true and i accept what you are saying is probably true, it seems reasonable. what's going on? look at the trillion dollars that may be it's the 1.7 the administration is proposing to spend to address climate change although a lot of it is you can't dodge if you've worked in public policy like you did so you're in the public policy and

people say why. >> i can't and shouldn't count for the policy choices people make. i've got a somewhat old-fashioned attitude about science advising and the decisions that get made involve a host of other factors in which the environment and so on. that's the political debate that we should be having. if the country or the world decides to go one way or another so be it but it's a full understanding of what we know and don't know about the changing climate and right now they are not getting back and the book is an attempt to do that. >> you put your finger on first

the right answer when it comes to the science advice and having worked in the office of the science advisory years ago the politics matter. what has one's political policy opinions, but you want the decisions to be made as best they can on the best information you have so it's a big question now elevated by the debates. so you get expert advice and and an environmental affect and remember the earliest nuclear winter debate. we don't have a technology assessment anymore. the advisory office is an

important one in my opinion, but that's a political office. to your point, these policy debates take place in congress. that's where they belong. congress doesn't have an advisory body anymore. i'm curious about your view of resurrecting. in the few minutes we have left, this debate certainly touches on the importance of it. >> i would say there's another set in the world that can do something like ota and that's the national academies research

council in these days they run a host of studies for government agencies and by and large i think they do a very good job. i was part of the organization and shared a couple of studies over the decades. i think on climate we need a refresh of the players. it's the same old gang so you kind of get an opt in and fresh eyes would be wonderful mostly for the defense department but the institute of the defense analysis so these are sources of advice and they do provide input to the legislature but they

would be very good to have an organic set of analysts in the congress that could be turned to for a short turnaround advice. >> that whole other institution that exists to provide input and advice the response required is a different feature of policymaking so you know and science doesn't like to be rushed but that's life and i guess in my mind i would like to believe that if one were to create and ota let's call it the office of science technology assessment which should be obvious but apparently it is not. that entity could have a budget

and do sort of what the pentagon has done where you have an orbit of talent that is available. it could be turned on with a basis with surge capacity as we will call it and that strikes me as if it is packaged correctly as a practical matter maybe it is a way to achieve what you described. >> the academies do function. they are trying to get better. i've been a member of the group for some odd years that provides detailed technical advice and

turns around the study in about a year. the policy was providing technical input to the decision in the early 90s and it was very significant and they quickly done piece of work. >> it would be terrific and it's pretty low cost by washington standards, let me i'm getting a wrap-up signal. you've been generous with your time steve is an excellent

writer and i cannot more highly recommend it. but thank you for joining me. at the manhattan institute and commanders for those of you that don't know much about it if you don't go to the website there's lots of newsletters and i think they are all free, i know they are all free. there's many other areas and they work like this so thank you all for watching and listening and i thank