rest of their alliances, and threats. this has not happened to just russian threats, sweden and finland, military leaders, not to join nato or there will be repercussions. the danish ambassador from russia threatened denmark, a nato member, that their ships would be face nuclear targets from russian vessels if denmark contributed to nato defense system. now, russia is not the only threat that nato is facing. and the only threats that are nate know are facing are not just conventional.

another significant part is the giuk gap. russia has deployed a far greater number of submarines in the north atlantic, and again, with their technology, they're quieter than we've ever faced before. so the admiral richardson has expressed great concern about the united states to move through the contested sea space of the north atlantic. this is one of the reasons why deputy secretary of defense, bob work, visited iceland and the united states is committed to reopening the base in keplich, and antisubmarine helicopters there. but in addition to that we have the threats from the south. we have migrants, unprecedented movement into europe. in addition to that we have terrorism. now, for many nato allies, the russian threat is the main threat. there are key allies, france and belgium that see terrorism as their number one priority. while the terrorists that attacked paris were about less than a dozen in number, they may be perhaps the most successful

pinning force in military history, because those dozen terrorists are holding down 7,000 french troops that are deployed domestically for counterterrorism operations, rather than being available for other french or nato missions. we have a campaign being raised by russia within nato capitols. we've seen the dnc hacked, but this is not an isolated incident. we've seen multiple types of these attacks, again, in nato territory. british intelligence admitted that in 2015, they foiled a significant cyber attack against the election. german intelligence talks about the increase in russian spies

and their attempts to influence public opinion. these are things that the alliance is facing all across, and needs a much stronger response. if you've heard earlier there have been key deliveries from the summit. these are command cells of about 40 personnel. 20 from nato, 20 from the host country. they're good, helpful, but again, limited. they're to help nato war exercises and to facilitate the deployment of some of these other forces that were agreed upon at wales and warsaw. so the nato response force, which was supposed to be the rapid reaction force, but alliance leaders saw the speed with which russia acted in ukraine was much faster than the abilities the alliance had. it tripled the response force and increased it so nato

response force should in theory be deployable within 30 days. even that was not considered to be quick enough. nato created the vgtf. a smaller unit of about 5,000 troops like infantry that should be able to be deployed within two to seven days. the first units of about 1,500 troops in two days and the rest of the 5,000 within seven days. at warsaw, we saw some of the most -- more significant steps taken. the most famous of which have been the efp, the enhanced forward presence, four battalions deployed in the east, but in addition to that, we must also remember that through the president obama european reassurance initiative, the united states is also putting a third combat team in europe on a rotational basis. we're also seeing greater deployments in the black sea region, with the uk, canada, poland, pledging to send some fighters for rotational

exercises, which the alliance sometimes calls black sea air policing. but they'll be there a limited time. these are the ones nato is making a huge -- russia is making a big impact about and even nato it's self i feel is exaggerated the extent to which the military capability is deployed. as you can see in each of the baltic countries and poland, there will be a battalion. these battalions will be roughly about 1,000 troops. they will be led by one nation nato refers to as a framework nation. in addition to that, other countries will contribute smaller size units to that. what this means basically is

that except for the united nations, which will be mostly close to 1,000 troops, most of the other battalions deployed, even the framework nation won't be deploying close to 1,000 but probably half or a little more, 5 to 700 of the troops. the rest of the battalion will be provided by some of the other nations. nato, i think, is very confident and claiming credit for participation of 20 countries in the enhanced forward presence. i think it's good to have that type of political solidarity. militarily as a strategist i'm concerned it takes 20 countries 4,000 troops. and the reason why i'm concerned about the size of it is this. this a response to russian aggression in crimea and ukraine. after wales nato created, expanded size of nrf and created bgtf, about 5,000. after warsaw nato deploying east

4,000 troops in these battalions. before nato announced this decision at the warsaw summit in july, as far back as january, the russians announced they were going to add 3,000 -- i'm sorry, three divisions to their western military district. since then, they have changed those numbers. they are adding two divisions or 20,000 troops to western military district and one of these has been reassigned to southern military district, which is the one closest to ukrainian border. so this is currently the balance of power in the northeast. you see on the left the size of the nato defense border, the fourth bar shows nato enhanced forward presence. the fifth bar shows if we added on top of that the vjtf. the sixth bar shows greater size

of 30,000 of nato's rapid response force. and then the last before the red one, this is if we added all these nato capabilities together what they would look inside. this is compared to what russia has just in the western military district, the district that borders nato territory. i think i'm having a little trouble. there we go. to put it very briefly, i see that nato has some key challenges, some key vulnerabilities. these are size, which you saw in the previous charts. speed, which requires two different types of speed, and readiness. in terms of speed, nato needs to improve its political decision making speed because none of these troops are going to move until nato provides political

approval for them. also even once that very difficult hurdle that nato has been wrestling with for over two years now, we still have military speed. the actual deployability of these troops, which leads to what i consider nato's main achilles heel, which is there is a very serious readiness problem all across the alliance. nato does not have sufficient military capabilities to face the threat it is seeing from russia. even if it had it, the problem is more severe, not only does it have capabilities nato thinks it has on paper, it has far fewer. more significantly we see this in germany where they have far fewer combat planes than they had before. even the ones that are remaining, about half of them are not combat ready. but this is not isolated just to germany. the readiness problem is all across the alliance. for example, great britain,

royal navy with lustrous career has more admirals than it has combat ships. the french as we talked about are overstretched, not just with counter-terrorism movement operation sentinel but also with their consider terrorism efforts in southern region in africa, mali, central african republic. so in the united states, because of sequester, the commander of ucom had to ground 25% of our fighter aircraft because there wasn't enough funding for them. so my last chart, just a basic comparison of where we are now. the current approach, i see a stronger version among too many political nato leaders to take political risk or spend a lot of

money to actually deal with the threat we're facing. as a result of that, every time russia acts and creates a provocation to the west, we have a very muted response. too often this means a bilateral response. there is a lack of political deterrence within the alliance. when russia pushes one of our allies or partners in europe, i think there needs to be a multinational diplomatic response. this will reinforce our military deterrence. likewise i think nato is taking too long to resolve the decision making problem. i think it needs to remember it has already delegated in the past authority during the cold war and secretary-general during balkans conflict. nato needs to return to these things and not think it's reinventing the wheel. also i think we need to see a

change from basic defense budget planning among alliances. there's too many free riders in europe, but at the same time i feel washington is enabling this because we're doing too many unilateral actions. i feel already two rounds of e.r.i., the united states has put money on the table. according to the nato secretary-general's report, nato defense spending grew in the past year by over $3 billion, over european and canadian allies. e.r.i. itself is 3.4 billion, which is a significantly large number. so they are spending more on their national defense but not committing more to nato missions. i feel that before a third e.r.i. is approved or recommended by the next u.s. administration, it needs to be a multi-lateral e.r.i., one in which both the united states and our allies both put capabilities on the field. thank you very much. i look forward to your questions.

>> thank you, very much, for your assessments. the imbalance as you mentioned and vulnerabilities and particularly your maps, and we'll come back to it. i would like to develop a discussion first among the panelists and then with the audience. i have one general question. i think it was already referred about the next administration, let's say the first 100 years -- i'm sorry days. first 100 years would deal with the challenge. but anyway, i would like the panelists first to respond to that or respond to some of the other perspectives in regard to the agenda of the next

administration. secondly, the agenda of the many summit in brussels in early 2017. we have at least two dozen challenges or issues that ken weinstein and ambassador voelker and other speakers mentioned. can you cite, for example, some five top concerns that the administration should consider and then, of course, the nato mini summit in brussels in early 2017 should consider. we'll start with you, maybe. >> why don't i defer to my colleagues that are not in the government. >> thanks. you and i did include that in my opening remarks. just to recap, for the 100 days i think it's important -- dan

hamilton stressed this point, too, can't wait for a summit. the new u.s. administration needs to come out strongly on collective defense in article 5. i'm calling on nato to join with u.s. in doing crisis management with these major crisis surrounding nato territory, to renew a call for building europe whole, free and at peace that's inclusive for all europe's democracies and to offer to work together with russia. the post-1989 security order. when you come to the nato summit then, i think it should be an affirmation of all allies on those things. and i would add to that as what i said and as others said, we need to have a greater emphasis on capability development for the future. nato's behind. >> well, i think i think i try to outline some of that.

i think the main point about the political statement, political affirmation is the most important. i think there's an agenda as was underscored here about developing capabilities to move forces to forward defense. i do think the resilience agenda is quite important and it's new, it's different for nato. it's not only for nato, but it's important piece now within that framework. and the south needs huge amount of attention. at which nato will fit somewhere. it won't be the answer. it's not going to be the answer. but there are many things that nato can do. but i think overall, especially first 100 day type of thing, it is this political statement of affirmation. europe free, that's been our focus, but today, europe is fractured and anxious. and unless we sort of get that discussion going again about how we work on these things together, not just how governments do it, but how

populations think we're working on it together, that's probably the more important job, as public diplomacy part of this, getting government i think is going to be very hard. >> i agree with what dan and kurt said. having a strong political declaration at the outset of the next u.s. administration is extremely important. not least because of what dan noted about the burden sharing debate and the extreme criticism of nato at some points in this presidential campaign. so i think, you know, addressing the way forward with our nato allies is extremely important. and keeping up the momentum on resources which has been built up so effectively over the last couple of years. and is, you know, bearing fruit perhaps slower than some would like, but is moving in the right direction. keeping that moving, it would be important as well. >> i agree with the good ideas

that have been proposed already. i'll just reinforce too that i've made and one i didn't get to a chance to include in the presentation. i think it's important right off the bat that we change to these unilateral and align these bilateral responses to russia by having multi-national political and diplomatic responses to russian provocations. if russia threatens any one of our nato members ever again, there needs to be a unified nato response from all 28 perhaps we should all dispel some of the members from their embassies in the national capitals at a sufficient level, but i think there needs to be that kind of a message, that where ever russia pokes any of our nato members, they will face political will he, diplomatically, military, and even economically, they will face unified nato response. i also feel in the same way that the next level of e.r.i. that the president, administration should say, start off working with the new summit by saying

that we expect there to be a multinational e.r.i. with a proportional and tangible european contribution to it as well. and then lastly, i'll also say that part of these things that are consistent with these two things is there is a lot of talk about the a2 threats in europe and the u.s. military are particularly moving and having to deal with it. but, i am concerned that there is very little attention and very little activity being seen publicly about a european contribution that nato is facing, and that should be one of our friers going into the next summit. >> before i turn this over to richard, i would like to ask the questions of the panel, obviously we focussed on nato, nato membership, do you see any role for the partnership for these countries, all the way from finland to sweden and the ukraine and so north and the

istanbul cooperation initiative on the gulf states, for example, and the mediterranean dialogue, some of the countries like egypt and israel and morocco, tunisia and so forth. in other words, non-nato members who can also participate in the strategy whether it is in europe and elsewhere. >> i will start off on this one. i think you've touched on something that's very important. and i think nato partnerships have greatly extended the reach of the alliance. the great thing about the partnerships is they are demand-driven. no one is required to be a nato partner. nations decide to become nato partners because they think it's

in their own interest and in turn the allies also see the interest in having a partnership. so in different ways because the partnership activities are tailored to each nation many countries have drawn closer to nato. we have very close relationships with finland and sweden. also a close relationship with jordan. we have increasingly an increasing tempo of activities in kuwait and in tunisia, so there are a lot of countries that see it in their own interest and security terms to draw closer to nato, and this is a real resource going forward. >> just to make the obvious point that those partnerships, the last few that you cited down in the middle east are tremendously helpful going forward as to my area of interest, the counterterrorism area and the more we can foster that and translate that partnership into actual operational coordination and cooperation with others.

>> i would say that the partnership of peace efforts offer a tremendous opportunity to blend them into the overall strategic thought process. discussions like this don't get anywhere, unless you have a master tragedy. you can't tell the nato countries to do this or that if you don't have a nato strategy, for example. i think some thought ought to be given to that. >> exactly. and again, the bridges the communities try to develop one is the partnerships for peace review that cherokee was -- turkey was mandated by nato to combat terrorism and beyond that, and i would say they tried to reach out, of course, now the

situation is uncertain how things will develop in the region. but at any rate, we did produce journals in this particular area, partnerships for peace review as well as terrorism. anyone else? >> just briefly. i think, i mean, i think partnership for peace sort of needs a re-think. it has worked well for 25 years. but in a different, very different context, why it was created. for all the reasons jorge said, we're facing new kinds of issues, and many of the partnerships have now become nato members, and others have sort of graduated. but it is not really coming together in any way that i think is as attune to the challenges as it could be. for instance, the enhanced opportunities partner, now we have the five countries that joe mentioned, it is kind of a grab bag, and you know, it is good do that, but you know, let's take that further.

finland and sweden are frankly in a class by themselves in terms of the value added they could provide, and we could take that even further. i have argued for a whole other tier of partnership that would basically get them as close to being a member as they can. i think the strategy frankly give the swedish and finish debates is to get as close as you can, so by the time the question is really asked in sweden or finland, everybody knows what the answer will be. instead of trying to push it too hard, have it backfire. but also, that means incremental partnership, get them to be value added contributors. i mentioned resilience. that's a whole other area. why wouldn't we do partnerships a in the resilience, forward resilience. we need to know how resilient ukraine is. all sorts of way it could be disrupted. otherwise, a lot of our he have -- efforts won't be that useful. we have proposed resilient

support teams, nato support teams, go in, experts, work with a country on where they need help, with their problems. that's applied at the moment only to nato space or eu space, but i don't know why we don't do advisory support teams like ukraine. it gives us a new plank. japan and south korea wanted to be partners, they have a he been rebuffed. we have an article 5 commitment to those countries as well. in we really want to harness combined assets, we should see how we should develop that so they could also provide activities. australia's an enhanced opportunity partners. why weren't they given the opportunity? i think there is a rich area for new thinking in the partnership project. beyond where it is. >> anyone else? okay, richard, do you want to -- >> do you want to open it up to

the audience to have questions? i think we have colleagues with -- >> please identify yourself and make your questions brief. we'll go a little over the -- >> yeah daphne, patomac institute. in view of the upcoming elections and the changes in europe, where do you see the u.s. support for nato going at this point? i know it's everybody's guess, but in any case, where would the pendulum swing in terms of u.s. support for nato? >> could we take a couple of questions, sir? >> thank you so much for your panel and insights. mr. weinstein, i guess how you can fit in this panel, you

mentioned, but there is -- being from the russian embassy, definitely support as main threat in the world as part of terrorism, which our countries russia, better position to eliminate in this world if you work together. speaking of advantages in 2001, september 11th, you might remember, president putin was the first one to call president w bush and offered assistance and federally, sympathy for the people who were killed in new york. also, russia supported the information, isis information in afghanistan, security council in new york, providing logistics. now we don't have it.

nato suspended all the military cooperation very much intel cooperation. i have hardships to go through pentagon and so on. it doesn't contribute to security. that's the situation i have now. i understand the electoral mood within the belt way and definitely russia, it is kind of supports, you know, to put russia in front of this campaign. war mongering, opportunity and draw circles and say what will russia do next, threaten united states. that's -- i understand it is a fading political campaign election, electoral campaign. >> sorry, is there a question? >> yeah. to be short, i don't approve the

messages that my country, you know, broke the trust and did everything wrong, and, you know, doing hardships for the united states and other world. let me remind you that nato was the first one to break trust by building up personal around the borders. and provoking arms race. what kind of resilience does the alliance project forward, like in ukraine? supplying arms there and many here go for more robust measures. so is that the kind that you call stability, peaceful alliance, which doesn't dictate new one. >> that was the question? >> the question, do you see

any -- what exactly can nato do to resolve the -- resolve the crisis in ukraine and stop building up military, build up from this -- on its eastern, secure of europeans, russians, americans. thank you. >> thank you for the questions. the two questions are on the new u.s. administration, and what's the view of the panel, vis-a-vis -- and support for nato and the second is nato's role in ukraine. probably time for one more question. sir, right here. and while -- take the third question. right here in the front, sorry. go ahead. >> yeah, just two very quick -- just building on the administration -- yeah, sorry. embassy of canada. just building on the question from the potomac institute, if we have a trump administration

who has already talked about japan and south korea and needing to better support themselves, how does that translate potentially to allies, allies, especially those who don't go after the 2% defense spending commitment. and then just about resiliency. late last week we saw maldova elect a pro russian president. how do we go forward with other countries in that area who may be leaning away from europe. thank you. >> thank you fort representations. there would be a lot of time limits. so i will be very short.

one of the abilities is the time which is used to decision making process. and some of the aspects have been improved. eventually it could be an appointment of the new assistant of the secretary-general for intelligence due to the fact that it is one of the most important issues a lot will fend on. do you see any other possibilities to increase the speed of the decision making process in nato in that situation? thank you. >> i'm happy to touch on this quickly. unfortunately, i'm going to have to run too. u.s. support, i think the american public has great reservoir of support towards nato and the countries that make

it up. a degree of frustration we don't want to feel like we are doing things the europeans don't want to do themselves. and it gives the u.s. president a lot of room to exercise leadership to define issues about what the u.s. interests are with nato and to lead a path forward that affirms that commitment and tries to tackle that sense of frustration. so i think there is a lot room for the president given the state of the public. the question on what nato can do to increase stability in ukraine. it's important to remember it is because russia invaded and has separatists there, troops there, and has annexed part of the country. and as long as russia feels it can continue in that path, there is not going to be stability in ukraine. i think what's important is nato provide additional support,

political, economic, financial, military, to the government of ukraine so that it is able to resist this more effectively and create some stability. as far as maldova goes, unfortunately there is not a lot we can do in the short-term about reversing this. one of the things we do claim to is the ability of countries to have their own political systems and make their own decisions. what we see is through sur repetitious means, countries like russia influencing that. i think what we can best do is continue to support our own values and do that in a very visible and public way, which i think will resonate with publics over time and make sure we are communicating that effectively. and finally, on speeding up decision making, it is an excellent question. jorge was right to put that into a slide. to me the logical thing always

would have been to make a clear distinction between political decisions and implementation of political decisions. and it is possible, i believe, to preserve for consensus at the north atlantic counsel, political level, decision making on political issues. but then once decisions at a political level on taken, even if it's well, well in advance, it ought to then be able to be implemented through the nato authorities, civilian and military, without having to go back for additional political decision making. that is the part that always slows things down. i remember in the kosovo campaign it was about targeting. when it comes to deployment of forces or how forces would act in a given situation in, say, afghanistan. always came back to further decisions. that's something we should try to separate out.

we can take further big political decisions. but in between we need to let nato get on with their work. >> i just wanted to on maldova and the point, we have about europe's gray zone. the reality is we are facing a vast space of euro's east that is turbulent, it's violent. there are lingering issues not only russian engagement but corrupt elites, legacy issues. those try to block it within many of these countries. and i would argue we haven't been all that engaged to help them find that out. this is my other point. i don't know that nato leads on

that. frankly, the european union should have a real think in their policies. the ones we are talking about. and i think people in the region don't understand because this is a process like many of the eu processes where a country like maldova has a stack of paper and has to do all of this stuff in order to move forward. it is not going to become luxembourg tomorrow. it is so far removed from public attention that people ukraine, these countries, they don't know what the eu would mean to them. there's nothing tangible. so i think a tailored approach to the eastern partnership to the tune of the basic need of those countries and how you deal with it, and be a bit more

willing to do the corruption issue, in fact, how we enabled corruption. all the money that they funneled through latvian banks. there are thousands of examples in this. we don't evenen norse our own laws. so things we can do to help ourselves for maldova, we don't even need to go there. we will be facing this unstable east for some time. i bet there is no enlargement the next commission. we are facing a decade of instability and uncertainty. we have to create new tools in which we engage. nato is one, but not the only one. this is the europe we're facing. it's not fixed. it's not a stable place.

it is the potential for violence is very high. if there is one lesson of history we learned, hope, whenever we turn away from the gray zones, we always go higher. we need to engage up front and think about these things right now. >> if i could add with respect to the public support question, pew center has done amount of research on this. if you look at their data from april of this year, among people who lean republican, 75% of them said nato was good for the united states.

with regard to the question on ukraine, i agree with the answer. i don't agree with the facts as you laid them out. i think the facts are quite different. even if you take one bit about the allegation that nato is moving its military infrastructure closer, i think if you look at the numbers of forces that nato has placed in the east, they are in no way a threat to russia. and it was oy done after a long and careful evaluation. >> it is not military

implementation business. it has created these forces. it can create whether they can enter combat. but it should defer to other nato military commanders the authority to train these forces to snap exercises. it will improve readiness, which is the key need for the alliance. >> let be be be the first to admit there is room for decision making after having spent many meetings in windowless rooms like this. it is also our experience that in a time of real crisis nato can take important political

positions very quickly. i was at the u.s. delegation at nato on 9/11. and within 24 hours of the subject being put on the table of the declaration of article 5, they agreed to declare article 5. so when there is a crisis in the offing, sometimes it can move quickly. that doesn't mean we can't do better. >> once again, we are way over time. i want to thank our distinguished panelists for the discussion today. i'm an old timer today and over the hill. when i had the privilege of commanding the nato strategic reserve forces in the late 70s and early 80s, we didn't worry

so much about central europe. on our whole effort really was on the flanks of nato. and we had a maritime thought process and maritime strategy. we talked about a much larger kind of thought process and a much larger integrated adaptable strategy. and i go back to what i said earlier. you should have -- the there should be a nato strategy. there should be a free world strategy. we don't have to worry so much about russia, i don't think if we just put our thinking caps on and remember it is is in nobody's interest, russia or anybody else to get too fancy or start too much of a problem anywhere in the world. we're in an area of globalization now. any strategy has to be an economic thought process,

political thought process, a societal thought process. technology is a part of it. and of course the military. and we simply don't seem to have that kind of not only national but international thought process going on. if i were asked to advise the new president and i would think along those kind of lines. don't worry. they're not going to ask me. thank you all for being with us. [ applause ]. >> join us later today for discussion about trade policy with republican congressman kevin brady and u.s. trade rap michael furman. look at trade in the 2016 elections and what to expect from the trump administration t. hosted by politico live at 5:00 on c-span2. and president obama will hold a press briefing expected to talk with reporters about transition issues and other

topics. the day before president obama embarks on his trip. traveling to greece tomorrow. he meets with the president and prime minister. on thursday, president obama makes his sixth visit to germany with angela merkel and other leaders from france, the uk and it la. on friday rg the president will attend the asia-pacific before returning to the u.s. next, the impact of renewable energy on the economy and the climate hosted by the brookings constitution in washington, d.c. topics included obama administration policies and whether current policies are on the right path. the discussion ran an hour and 45 minutes.

ladies and gentlemen, welcome to pwraogings. i'm bruce jones. i co-chair along with david victor the cross brookings initiative on energy and climate. on behalf of that group and char ellinger, it is is a real delight to welcome you for an extremely special event. it was just over four years ago, just after the 1973 oil crisis that shocked the american economy and our national security thinking that an article was published in public affairs that radically altered the strategy and thinking. he argued that we should move away from fossil fuels and towards energy efficiency and renewable energy as a core strategy for both our economy and security.

it was an article lauded by many. it became the most reprinted article to this day. the issues emery tackled four years ago are still critically important for this country. how we think about energy security, the role of energy in our economy and climate change remain crucial in the national debate. granted, you would never know that from watching the current election. but there are still crucial issues in the debate. i work for an ngo, so we have to do a little. brookings 2016 you will see

climate change. it doesn't mean that we should as citizens. so i would encourage you to take a look at those. the ideas that emery talked about four years ago and the notion of what was then a radical idea of low cost. it was a potential reality as technology shifts and the urgency of tackling climate change close. a nuclear proliferation and energy security remain vital aspects of american foreign policy. at the same time, of course, there is a growing concern with questions of energy access for the poor, energy use in the developing world. i am delighted to welcome emery here this morning to talk about

his article and what happens in the four years since. as you know he is the co-founder and chief scientist at the rocky mountain institute. he served as consultant and adviser to 65 countries, published 31 books. we like to think of ourselves at doing a good job publishing books, but avery is outclassing us. he was named by "time "as one of the most 100 influential people in the world. we will follow a panel that charlie will introduce to give you some reelections on his thoughts and where we are in energy security today w. that, please join me in welcoming avery to the stage. [ applause ].

>> thank you. that article, the most reprinted in the longest in the history of the foreign affairs meeting was published, first edition, 17 september 1976. with the help of many friends, it had worked through a dozen drafts spanning over a year i wrote it starting in 75 because u.s. energy policy was simply stuck. the initial policy responses to the '73 oil shock was confused, simply drilling more oil and gas wells, mining more coal, building nuclear power plants. they were starting to the look, as people dug into the numbers,

too costly, dirty, slow. their marginal costs were so high you would have to raise the price high enough there would be no demand to pay for the supply unless it were zero as many utilities at that time tacitly assumed. it seemed to me these unworkable solutions came from having more. so i introduced end use, asking first what services we wanted to provide. then asking what kind of quality, what scale, what source could do each of those tasks in the cheapest way. soon by end use melded with

roger is sant's with the free market under president reagan. that is now called the end use least cost approach. it has provided superior foresight in competitive market outcomes and has become widely accepted. many considered renewables practically impractical. his wife mary bundy, who we have with us today, lee atchison's

daughter, by the i what. mary and another lady, janet lowenthal, whose husband worked on the council for foreign relations, they had been feeding bill supportive articles. he was a little bit softened up but quite skeptical that the article belonged there. mary told us about a long, difficult evening in which she struggled to persuade bill to accept the paper and finally succeeded. and i think either the mother or the midwife of the modern energy evolution is here among us.

he sent it to harvey brooks at harvard. harvey said he had serious problems with the numbers. carol, for whom bill martin is and i were working at the time, said they were probably right. to his everlasting credit, it is a great indicator of his quality. he said i will publish it. probably doesn't like it. he can write us a letter. so bill did some wonderful developmental and structural edits. by about draft 60 it was ready to go. bill was temporarily in the hospital when we did the final line edit in, as i recall, a 14-hour phone conversation from a pay phone in the maine woods with a hurricane approaching

which, if it happened to veer our way, would take down the lines and delay our release to the press. the article towards the back of this big issue got little attention. they didn't do features of titles on the front cover in those days. but it turned out that there was an article. were the third article. mine was fifth. so this is really official. happens to have an article in which somebody made a mistake drawing the map. this was taken as an esoteric but important restatement of israeli official about borders in the middle east. so everybody went running to this issue to see what the fuss was about. then they couldn't help running across my paper because it was 31 pages. that's the longest they had ever

published. so some people started to look at it. and pretty soon the newfangled xerox machines started humming away with mass mailouts. it was the equivalent of a twitter storm. we didn't have internet, but we had a lot of places to those, stamps and envelopes. some people told me they received 50 to 100 copies from their friends. everybody was saying, you must read this thing. and the general reaction was either you must read this because it changes everything, or how on earth could such an imminent journal at the heart of the establishment publish such nonsense. so so tbill was quite proud of what he had done. incident was the first time that

energy policy and foreign affairs, foreign policy got mixed. they had been in completely different silos. but bill had the courage to see it was time they talked to each other. energy would be at the heart of how the world evolved. the effect to me as a 28-year-old author was like that of dropping a seed crystal into a super saturated solution. there was a crackling noise and suddenly everything takes shape. the energy policy that was stuck suddenly had a different way to look at the problem. that started to open up solutions that might actually work. the response was swift and rather ferocious. edison electric institute, they put out a special issue of electric perspectives debunking this article.

altogether there were 36 at least critiques which the late ray watts, gaylord wilson lovingly compiled in this senate hearing record over the next year and its fine print. they range from sputtering with outrage together with my tedious responses. it makes for amusing read today but the critics were not moussed. it is hard to remember how many experts in '76 considered efficiency minor or unreliable or risky, threatening economic come lapse. collapse. they said nothing more can be done. and renewables were thought strange or ridiculous or

technically absurd. after a year or so, david sternlight captured the conclusion of many observers when they said i for one doesn't care if he is half right. now, around that time president called me in for a long, substantive conversation with him and shresinger. when jim made three comments, he directed him on all of them. he told me the article had been important in framing his energy policy. that felt good. because i thought apart from the attempt which soon died of incurable attack of market forces, carter energy policy was

the most coherently pro efficiency and pro renewables and visionary architecture before or since. it laid vital foundations for the investments and tension that led to today's energy revolution. many of the harshest critics ended up hiring me and my team at rocky mountain institute to help adopt recommendations. so let me rattle on a bit about what did we learn and what should we have learned and where are we headed. first, we learned the value of energy scenarios which had been pioneer

pioneered. these were redrawn from the article. i'm told it's the first time they had ever had graphs. they first take shape in 1975 on garrett price's blackboard in london. scenarios are not for the benefits yet powerful vehicles for telling stories that help people understand unfolding events. and at the time, a few groups like the energy policy project led by freeman here, from whom we will hear shortly and even the academy's study were introducing scenarios. they were often scorned by traditional strap active or metric forecasters. but it turned out the tools turned out a lot more useful. i mentioned in the article backcast canning. one contemporary antidote to

forecastitis is the three decade lack of relationship between the wholesale gas price and the official forecast in blue. they believe they had lost their shirts three time now. the fourth is under way. they have a constant price that beats the fuel price. and they competed with efficient buildings, industrial processes, co generation, solar process. so the new story about abundant and affordable energy is less about fracked guess than inexhaustible carbon-free stably

priced hedges, efficiency renewable that are outpacing and outcompeting it. $630 billion of global investment. is so that transition is well under way. back to the scenarios, the second thing we learned is to start with why, start with purpose, start with end use. what's the job? what's the right tool for the job. the article was so influential because it didn't propose yet another portfolio of investments. because it redefined their purpose and their logic. here redrawn from the same data is my '76 datament the hard path as i dubbed it noted the official forecast at that time in the industry which extrapolated historic growth. and on the right, assuming the same gdp growth, it combined end

use and diversion efficiency with right quality, right size, renewable and widely accessible supplies, which i dubbed soft technologies. friends like anthropologies margaret meade. by then it was too late to change the language and it was accepted now when joe nye spread soft power all over, that seems to have been more accepted in this gender balanced age. let's start on the demand side. that's the good news. my soft path graph was specifically not a forecast. it described what i felt was plausible however unfamiliar.

and this eye chart is from a paper by john cooley, who we will hear from later and paul craig at berkeley lab 2002. they found my soft path curve was the only published mid-70s view of u.s. energy demand in 2000 that actually proved accurate. it was 4.0% above actual demand with or without renormalizing actual gdp growth. so the big black dot for 2000 energy demand is rightly described as impressionistic but driven by a large number of energying and economic calculations. those ended up typically to 50% to 100% too high or sometimes more. berkeley lab study assembled

raids from reformist energy for ava right of studies. in fairness to the reviewers, the book length technical backup wasn't published for another half year. i think a lot of realized i wasn't just making stuff up. and the authors of this two paper commented one thing that emerges is the interviewees differ and there was no correlation between the two. they observed they tend to be noncontroversial in reflecting ideas already noted and accepted. as studies with striking and fiery conclusions. another thing they continued, is the assessment of analytic strength is correlated with the views of the reviewers.

so my paper ford energy policy product showed both found favors with viewers favoring renewables. little has changed in the intervening quarter century. and the same is now true 14 years later. minds in this business arrive with what an throw policies even that is no longer a reliable method. some of the first generation advocates like my late friend were expert and well informed and honest. but i can't say the same for the new general generation that is often under informed and continue to historic policy in this capital. what happened after 2000? let's do the math at energy savings. you remember that in 75 our

government straoerp virtually all in agreement that they needed to make a dollar gdp. a year later my article suggested a good drop 72% in 50 years. so far it has dropped 56% in 40 years. and yet just the innovations already made by 2010 in far more powerful technologies and design methods and regulation, marketing and delivery channels can save another threefold, ties what i originally thought and, third, the real cost. six years later, even that looks conservative. an important feature hidden within the aggregates, by the way, is so far u.s. contends it has fallen only half as much as fuel intensity. there are 10 good reasons for that.

as that perversity and other causes fade, electricity demand too has been falling in absolute terms since 2007. on the supply side, the soft path happened only in states like california that consistently pursued it. on the left, i've redrawn my 76 soft path graph based on the information available to 76 both nuclear power and hydropower, which the original draft many left out. they were relatively small and

constant. then came my sketches of how soft technologies, oil, gas, and coal could behave. okay. what actually happened. what happened on the right differs for three main reasons that effect each element of supply. first of all, natural gas in gray was thought in '76 to be a scarce biproduct of dwindling oil. so federal policy outlawed its power plant use from 1978 to '87. and strongly promoted massive coal fire generation in red, instead of as well as nuclear power subsidized to 100% of his power. it is only now fading as the rules start to be enforced, even as the new surge in gas

persists. happily and more plants were built in the '80s. driven by policy and subsidy and so far was the first big shift. then how about oil. well, once president ford got auto efficiency standards passed into law in '75, effective '78, u.s. oil intensity fell by an average 5 on.2% a year. and it turned out we had more market power than opec because we can save oil faster than they could convenientry save less oil. so the resulting 1985-86 oil price crash fostered complacency. everybody hit the snooze button. lobbyists were able to ignore 20 for autos, 17 for light trucks the legal mandate to wrap up efficiency standards in

technological process. so light vehicle efficiently worsened from '87 to '04. the pace of saving oil fell by two-thirds. about 99% of the major gains and powertrain efficiency boosted acceleration. john dingell unlocked all legislation until president george w. bush's '07 update. so this stagnation wasted two whole turnovers of the car fleet that were supposed to be used to implement the available and cost-effective efficiency. and that's why we have this big fat oil demand continuing while we have competing soft fuels. then thirdly, soft technologies.

well, they didn't do that. the main reason is rapid process was explicitly predicated on aggressive support. it got largely hostile for 32 of the past 40 years. it's become a political football. even the fossil fuel firms that invested in renewable the and dumped them just as they were poised for success. the big structural change that did go well over time was president carter's perpa law. that enabled renewables at the early to mid 80s. though it was weakened by force legal and legislative attack, it did destroy the rationale for monopolies and laid the groundwork for markets and placed perpa in half the nation

n. three fifths of the state, they can now compete directly against supply. i've been asking for that since '73. it's coming. so after a long, bumpy detour, renewables since about 2010 had finally taken off as originallienvisaged. and of course the forecasts have wasps been coming down to real. it achieved only half the results sought from my soft path portfolio. if america's total energy use had grown with the economy at the '75 level of energy use per dollar ddp we would have used that much energy. instead, we cut that by more than half. roughly two-thirds through

technical efficiency and one through through structural change. output doubled. and that's wonderful. yet it had a cumulative impact 31 times less the savings. no energy company foresaw this efficiency revolution. none today fully realizes that the low hanging fruit will keep growing back faster than we can pick it the. and there are a few other things about the article i would like to mention. what is my time, charlie? okay. on so among the many elements on of that '76 article with a familiar ring 40 years later, readers will pick out some there are still current.

that's right with us. the article said in contrast to the soft path depend owns phraouristic consumer choice in deploying a myriad of small devices and refinements, the hard path is large scale projects. the hard path would instead be a world of subsidies, $100 billion bailouts, imminent dough tphaeupb, corporate status. sound familiar? or if we go down the list, there's a lot of quite rich intellectual capital that popped up in here that is still being exploited. i want to focus now on the last one. the commitment said the paper

the a long term coal economy as today, 1976, make the doubling of carbon dioxide early in this century virtually unavoidable with the prospect of substantial and perhaps irreversible changes in global climate. only the exact date of such changes is in question. are we there yet? cue the clean power plant and paris agreement. it has been a long slog. the first change was in 1968, 48 years ago. had the scientific community not just a few industry visionaries like my friends bob heffner and the late george mitchell that u.s. gas is unassociated with oil and recoverable from

formations at least with high prices, i would have treated it separately from oil and emphasized natural gas rather than advanced coal as a transitional technology used in quotes briefly and sparingly to build a bridge to the energy income economy of 2025. fair enough. that wasn't clear until the last decade. i did expect coal mining to peak twice the 1975 level and hit 2.18 x. but now coal is squeezed between efficiency, renewables and gas and has a smaller share of u.s. primary energy than the previous world war ii 1972. as my article warned also, dangerous delays in transition to a post fossil fuel and climate safe energy system are exactly we can expect if we continue to devote so much money, time, skill, and political will to the hard

technologies or that are so demanding of them. and our continuing failure to exploit the power of example of the market advantage to speed the orderly terminal phase of nuclear power which provides an innocent looking civil is yann cover for weapons programs continues to blow back on us and create self inflicted threats from the likes of north korea, pakistan, and iran. and that was the article's biggest failure. i didn't get that across effectively enough. nonetheless, slowly, but with gathering speed, markets have begun to triumph over political means of enforcing the natural desire to protect their leg is seu assets and capabilities. yet the challenge of speeding that shift remains and the imperatives of climate, public health, security, development and democracy heighten its urgency. i had a number of other slides

about the energy revolution now coming at us. but i think it's better to go right to the panel and some of those points will come up in discussion. which i think is going to get pretty much. [ applause ].

>> while getting miked up i think i would be remiss one of the people -- (inaudible). deputy secretary of energy and involved as chief of staff of the original founding of the international energy agency. delighted to have you here today. it's my great honor to -- i cannot imagine. i don't think in my professional career i have been on a platform with four such distinguished observers and many go back many years. i'm not going to read the

individual bios. simply to say on this panel we have phenomenal regulatory experience. we have entrepreneurial experience. we have someone like david freeman who transformed the way the tennessee valley authority thought about their long term energy planning. we have john comey who is one of the most prolific writers in the energy field today. and my colleague david victor, of course, who has been in the forefront of the ipcc and international climate policy. without further ado, i will start the panel i will start with you, peter. we'll then go to david and john and david. i want to urge the panel to stave within five minutes if at all possible. >> normally i write my remarks

while the other panelists are speaking. with apologies to those who heard me say this last night, let me begin with the observation that i -- when i first met emery the first time this came out he was dominating a basketball court. if i have your attention now, in the state of maine there are not many hearing rooms large enough for a major occasion. so an awful lot of the important proceedings take place on basketball courts. and that was the case with the 1975-76 central maine rate case, which was about raising the

money of the nuclear power plant in which the mp was an owner. and emery arrived at the hearing with a suitcase and then light bulb and a promise that it could replace electricity used for lighting and therefore also the heat that had to be taken away by air-conditioning. two 30-year-old utility commissioners trying to grapple with the various pinnacles. nuclear power controversies. this was a window opening on a very different world.

but the challenge was how to move the actual infrastructure in that direction. after all, emery would be going plane in 24 hours leaving behind utility executive who didn't regard this as particularly congenial set of insights. and that struggle really has continued ever since. just a few observations, things that struck me in thinking back over these years. dick cheney was the white house chief of staff when the article came out. 25 years later, as his energy task force laid out the energy plans for the bush administration, a hard path

recipe if ever there was one, he said energy efficiency might be a sign of personal virtue but it was no basis for a national energy strategy. so the point rim has already made and has made in the early article as well about exclusivity, about the fact that choosing one path excludes the other, is one of the most important points that one has to the absorb. and to illustrate how important and how unabsorbed it is, consider that in many conversations today, in the media and the congress, it is regarded as a solemn and wise statement to say i'm for an all

of the above energy policy. well, what could be more contradictory to exclusivity than an all the above energy policy? you can't have one. when i wrote a few years ago that we're not going to fight world hunger with caviar and we're not going to necessarily eliminate energy shortages with nuclear power, one of the most flattering things that happened to that statement was that it popped up a few months later as a quote from emery. and it does have a lovens like ring to it, i must say. if you want another illustration of the fallacy of the all the above with the nonexclusivity

arguments that were made vigorously when the article came out, just look at what's happening now in illinois, ohio, new york, california where reactors are threatened by a combination of things. low gas prices, their own rises costs. but also renewable energy. and the owners of those plants have turned on renewable feeding with benign neglect and going after production tax credits. and seeking to curtail the place of renewables and efficiency too

in those state energy futures in order to keep the reactors running and in order to keep the price of electricity high enough to support the reactors. in fact, interestingly, no reactor ever taken after emery's article came out was ever completed. so in that sense the proposition that we need not build more plants and that the lights would stay on, and for that matter that we would still reduce oil dependence in the electric sector, has proven to be true. a number of reactors under construction were completed. some of those are the plants that are closing now. but no new ones were built from

then on. and the fact is we haven't missed them. we have missed the ability and the dollars we spent on some of the ones that were canceled, but we haven't missed the plants themselves. when confronted on the basketball court 40 years ago, as emery said, some states have now adopted great making methodologies that carmenize energy efficiency, renewable and paying for their existing infrastructure. but many have not. the entire south is still on a hard path rate making structure. and i think that in the utility sector remains the greatest

challenge in furthering and speeding up the transition to a soft path energy future. it's not really a soft path kind of comment, most succinct statement came from john rowe, at the new england electric system, when he said of rate making and energy efficiency, you know the rat has to smell the cheese. and we're still working on getting the aroma of the cheese to drift into the offices of the -- well, let's not call them rats, but the folks who will build the system going forward. >> thank you, peter. very interesting, as always. david. >> you know, speak about amory

in five minutes is the challenge of a lifetime. i've considered myself a first lieutenant in amory's army for over 40 years now. and of all the people, including myself, in the energy arena, amory is the only person that i know that has said the same thing for 40 years, and has been right ever day, every hour, almost for 40 years. and the frustrating thing is that even now, when the evidence is overwhelming that amory foresaw what the future needed to be, we still have intelligent people that are fighting city hall that are not accepting the

fact that the renewable efficiency option is the low cost option. and what is frustrating is that the environmental knowledge has reached the point that what amory is preached, advocated and sold to a lot of people, over a 40 year period, used to be desirable. now, it is a matter of life or death for the planet, and we still have people with over 100 iq that fight it. including some people in this room, i suspect. you know, the issue is whether we human beings are a modern day version of a dinosaur. are we using our brains? are we willing to accept, yes,

favorable facts. you know, i view amory in a different perspective than i think most anyone else. because i had been advancing these efficiency ideas in the federal government ever since the late '60s with some modest success. but i didn't have a voice. i was talking to myself primarily. and the world at large didn't know about this. amory gave a breath, depth, understanding and coherence to the notion that a combination of efficiency and cleaner technologies was an option that made sense, and he has taught

the world in a very unmistakable manner, in a way that people like me just never had the a bi -- ability to do. i feel like we've had an unwritten partnership where i ran over my lifetime five different utilities and tried to implement with some success occasionally his ideas, whereas he was educating the world, i must say, though, that amory's numbers are now as solid as gold. but they haven't always been. his ideas have always been solid as gold, but i have to recite once when i was running the utility in central texas and he came to austin to teach the city of austin efficiency, and he gave a lecture and he was up there with his chalk, and he was

telling them they could save this percentage on this and this. i was his buddy i just came there to listen. but i do math in my head. and i realized that amory had them saving 110% of their loan. and i went up and whispered to him, and he made a few corrections. didn't phase him in the least. he t w it was all okay. the important thing is the impact that he had on president carter and some of the other, the rest of us. the breakdown in american energy policy was the election of ronald reagan. i mean, plain and simple. we were on the soft path in '79. the projections were pretty much in line with what amory was saying, and we haven't been on it since then, you know.

the great tragedy was the clinton administration, where al gore is a personal buddy of mine and i know bill clinton. they know as much about this subject as anybody. they didn't do diddly-squat in the years they were in office. and that's another story. but amory is a young man. he has reached the midpoint in his career, and i think that he is going to be around to witness an all renewable, all electric economy that is emerging that will hopefully, the real issue is will it emerge in time. and that is the big question. can we persuade the people on earth that this is not something that is desirable, but absolutely necessary.

and it is cheaper. what is so frustrating to me is that we fought this fight when it wasn't at all clear that we were right. you know, renewable energy is kind of a dream back then. now, it is a reality, and still, we do not -- we're not able to move to a simple law like all new car plants have to be greenhouse gas free. no one is even suggesting things as simple as that. that are absolutely necessary. why are we fooling around with taxes, which for 41 years, no one has been able to get enacted. a tax on carbon -- why are we fooling around with things that incentivize and maybe when it is life or death, when the ddt was killing the birds, we outloud it.

-- ought lawed i-- outlawed it. it is poise nioning it. we can outlaw is for the future, and we have a better product, we are fooling around with complicated measures that nobody in peduca, kentucky can understand. somehow or another, we are so wedded to a market solution to things that we forgotten that the only reason on god's green earth that we have a government is to do the things that we can't do individually, and you can have a carbon tax as high as it is, rich people will buy gas guzzling cars if you they want to. this is an issue that requires

100% participation. and it requires that we take mandatory action in my view. the big fight now is are we going to implement amory's dream, which has come true, but are we just going to sit by and let the market do it, which it will do over a 50 year period. but which may very well be way too late. so we've got a challenge, and that's the challenge that we face. are we nimble enough of mind to break the habits that we've had all these years. and recognize that even though we don't trust either candidate for president, that the governmental tal structure is the only structure we can make things happen that are life or death matters. this has got to be thought of in the category of a health issue. a health of the planet. so that's kind of where i am. but i will always be a fan of

amory lovins. >> thank you, david. [ applause ] >> jon. so i want to call out three conceptual changes that amory's work first encouraged in us. one is lease cost energy services. another is economies of scale. and the third is path dependence. we'll talk about each of those in turn. in the '70s, it was widely believed that energy and gdp had to grow together. electricity had to grow at twice the rate of gdp growth. this was known as the ironclad link between energy and gdp. and now we know that people are smart and institutions are innovative and faced with policy changes and price changes that they will change their behavior, they will modify their

structures, they will change property rights. and they will alter how they think about a product, given the right incentives. but it was a radical notion back then to say if you focused on energy services on the tasks that people wanted to perform that you would be able to substantially increase energy productivity. and what we now know is when you think about energy in terms of the tasks we want to perform there are many options for improving efficiency. in 1974, the american physical society published a now famous report that talked about looking at tasks, and then thinking about what is called the second law efficiency of those tasks, and what they found at that time was that the overall second law efficiency of the economy was only about 5%. so that meant the prospect for improving energy efficiency was

much greater than if you focused just on the first. if you look at a power plant, new gas may be 55 or 60%, your likelihood of improving that efficiency is limited at 100%, right. well, no, even less. the point is that if you think about the task and say what do we want to plesh aaccomplish an is the least admitting way to do that, there are many different possibilities and that allows you to achieve very substantial improvements. the second important point is economies of scale. now in the utility industry, historically it has been very important to scale up the unit size of power plants. it was very rapid improvement in efficiency over time, that drove costs down, drove use up. it was very powerful. you can call this economies of unit scale. the industry had it in their mind that this was the only way that you could do anything.

you could only improve by making bigger and bigger reactors or bigger and big coal plants. one of the big insights is there is another economy of scale. economies of manufacturing scale. if you build a lot of something, you're able to drive down the cost per unit. typically, this is characterized in terms of what is called a learning rate. so the percentage change in unit cost for a doubling p cumulative production. what you find in phototaix, 25-30%. costs come down 20-30%. and we've shown historically for solar, wind, co generation, mass-produced technologies, that these rates of learning can continue for decades. and so that power of economies of manufacturing scale was something implicit in amory's analysis that i think many people at the time didn't

understand. but now we know because of historical developments that that was true. in the last key point is path dependence. the idea that our choices now affect our options later. that the future is not a question of fate. it is a question of choice. and that's another radical shift in how people in those days thought about energy futures. i think there are still many people who have this idea that the future is something that just happens. but really, the future is what we choose. and economies of scale and understanding those energy service task level analyses give you more options, allow you then to choose a future that's inherently more hopeful, lower emitting, lower cost, and allows us to accomplish our tasks in a way that is simply better for the planet and better for

society. >> thank you. david. thank you very much. so it is a year anniversary. brookings turns 100 this year. amory, your article turns 40. i first learned about this from bill and murray bundy, my aunt and uncle, actually. i learned about it mainly from mary, who told me my great grandmother cooked hand burgers about the insight of this. i have to say, i want to echo something you said about the editorial process. because i think it is very easy in this business to be controversial. it is hard to be insightful. it is extremely difficult to to be controversial and insightful. it is maybe even harder to get that published. it is telling that the most controversial insightful article about energy policy probably ever published was published in a journal to that date published

almost nothing about energy, very little about energy. and i think it is hard to -- it is very hard to work in the established jauournals and swim against the tide and i commend you for constantly swimming against the tide. i want to make three comments in my five minutes about the substance of the article and the debate and the technologies that have unfolded since then. first comment is that when i re-read the article, i see it as really two broad arguments. one argument is an argument about efficiency, and there is a lot of data and insight about how it is cheaper to save energy, and to focus on tasks, as john says. and a function, people care about, you know, cold beer and warm burritos, and they don't want warm beer and cold burritos, so they're interested in performing the task on the beer and burrito world and don't care how much primary energy is used, and we can improve that radically.

i think clearly that part of the article has been really stood the test of time. there were other people at the time and since who have been working on this, dave freeman, talked earlier. art rosen fold, john holdren, harley brooks's colleague. a lot of people talking about this, but you gave the argument voice. when you first wrote the draft of this piece, total primary energy consumption was about 75 quaddrillion, and it was 120 quads, some were 200. we showed a chart earlier and even corrected productions were lower, but still much higher than today. total energy is basically flat. it is really impressive. it is because of this focus on efficiency, partly because the tasks themselves have changed. smaller primary energy output.

you focused that debate. that's been an incredibly important, not always pleasant so folks who are in the incumbents, most of the power industry, it is flat. if you're in a business that in some states in this country require increasing power sales, that's not a good business to be in. when you look across the entire industrialized world, you see the same story, you're starting to see telltale signs in china and maybe in india. second thing i want to talk about is the other part of the article, which is kind of soft versus hard. i guess maybe to kind of paraphrase bill clinton in a set setting, depending on what you mean by the word soft. and i think when i -- when you go back and re-read the article, the soft vision was a much more decentralized energy system, probably less dependant upon

electricity, much more lower production from coal and combustors and so on and a lot of renewables, what has happened since then is we've seen a lot of renewables in particular, but i think in some sense we've seen the hard green version of the original path, which is more renewables, lower emissions than we would have seen otherwise, but much more interconnection through power grids. in some sense, we've continued to build out a vast machine, vast electric power machine. i think one of the interesting points of debate is whether that's good or bad, whether we are on a cusp of seeing or maybe the opposite centralization. i was -- as charlie mentioned, i spent some large fraction of last few years of my life working on the inter government climate change reports and one of the main findings radically reducing emissions, and think you one of the open questions is whether that's a decentralized

or centralized electric power system. i had some insomnia last night, so i watched the keynote address for the annual update on the state of renewables, cured the insomnia, but one of the things that's interesting to see that in that annual address is they talk about the world, you know, the world leaders, the best renewable energy contracts. and they're all grid connected. large grid connected power systems. so some parts of the world you see decentralized power is becoming more viable, maybe india and so on, but i think the centralization around the grid is actually one of the most interesting things. third thing is what would you do if you wrote the article differently than before. part of amory's answer is right. gas, the world in the 1970s was one where we were grappling resources and we were looking beyond oil and gas. and what has happened since then is innovation has made scarety

almost a non-problem, in a physical sense. the world is awash in hydrocarbons. we have in this country moved to gas and not beyond oil for a number of reasons and amory talked some about that. i think it is interesting to look back at history and realize that in the 197 0s, where will e build the reactors, and we're in the process of retiring one-fifth of the fleet and what does that do to the energy system. if i were writing it today, and looking at new questions, i think there are two that really stand out to me. someone climate, amory mentioned it was discussed in passing, and it seems to me climate changes almost everything. if you need to get to zero emissions, not small reductions, but zer zero, you've got to see possibly

is he delaware centralized or centralized. the role of other countries is different. in the 1970s, amory could say the united states could make choices about the nuclear fleet and the rest of the world will follow. the situation is very different today. much of the frontier of innovation is playing out in the emerging economies. frankly what we do in the nuclear fleet is borderline irrelevant for what the rest of the world does low cost construction has moved to korea, china perhaps, and it is a really difficult world to operate in, where there is no country that can set the tone. thank you. [ applause ] >> i'm going to ask one question and then in the interest of time, since the expertise we have on the floor, we want to hear from you all. the one thing that bothers me

about some of the things we've heard today is yes, we have made phenomenal strides in the united states, and we know a number of other advanced countries, particularly in scandinavia, japan and elsewhere, have done so too. but how do we -- how do we really embark on the soften eney path. amory has shown us that forecasts can be dead wrong. but yet, most of the forecasts still show that if we look out in say 2040, that over 90% of the growth and primary energy demand will be in asia. in asia, we have literally hundreds of millions of people that don't even have a light bulb. we have unfortunately in many of those countries also very large low cost to produce not if you count the environmental coal. india is a wash in coal. ten million people are employed

in the coal production movement, whatever, of coal in india. so my concern is when you have societies like this that do not have cost reflective tariffs, so markets won't get you where you want to go, when you have massive power theft that despite billions of dollars by many, many different donor agencies around the world have not significantly improved in the last 30 years, and you have, noy, billings and collection systems and fast growing economies that often don't get -- bills don't get to where they're needed, or bribery bills don't get paid, how do you make the utilities functionally solvent and yet at the same time, do what i think david freeman has said, we've got to move way from fossil fuels altogether. this is where i think we sometimes get too caught up in the tremendous progress we are making in the developed world and not recognize the very real challenges that if we're really

going to deal with climate change, we've got to do something about them. don't expect a response, unless you want to and then we'll go to the floor. >> five years ago, published a best -- so five years ago, we published reinventing fire, which showed how to run a 2.6 volt bigger economy in 2050 than in 2010, using no oil, no coal, no nuclear energy, and third less gas. $5 trillion cheaper than businesses usual requiring no new inventions and no act of

congress. but instead, policy shifts at a sub national, mainly state level, where we regulate the utilities for the most part and the transition led by business for profit. so far, first five years, that is on track. it is what the market is doing, because the private sector smells the $5 trillion, which is just what ought to be happening. this got the attention of china's national development and reform commission that tells most of the other ministries what to do. so they tasked their top energy analysts at their energy research institute in beijing to see what this would look like for china, with support from the ndrc sponsored china energy foundation china, the department of -- u.s. department of energy, lawrence berkeley and rocky mountain institute. 50-odd experts worked on it for three years and it was published

last month. the finding was, again, this is their best energy model examples, not foreigners telling china what to do, that china by 2050 could have a bigger economy than in 2010, but using today's energy. in other words, seven fold higher productivity. shift 62% of their primary supply off fossil fuel, so that absolute carbon emissions would go down 38%, while the economy grew seven fold, a 12 fold gain in carbon productivity. $3.5 trillion cheaper. and the customers were the authors of the 13-five year plan and it strongly influenced and informed that plan and all of chinese energy strategy, thus helping create the trust and confidence that were important to the u.s./china climate

collaboration at presidential level that then was important to the paris agreement. so i feel good about how this is turning out. and now our beijing office and many partners are pivoting to that. to charlie's important point, colburn has declined in each of the past two years, despite roughly 6-7%. they have a large surplus of capacity and in the process of canceling 1 or 200 giga watts that are prestranded assets. the new international development agency is in effect the eighth biggest country k in driving carbon emissions, because it is mostly financing coal plants elsewhere, just like the bank of japan is, to try to keep the power plant vendors in business, without being properly aligned yet with national climate policy.

in india, there are similar things going on. the energy minister has done a brilliant job of using competitive bidding to bring down renewable cost, and within less than a year, less than domestic coal power. so he has recently been remarking that the coal expansion he thought he would need will not be so necessary. because renewables are taking over. and as we have a team now at rmi, raising rwandaian noy 24%, i just want to call why you're tension to to what efficient technologies can do in a centralized context. the $1.2 billion without light that charlie referred to typically $2 a less household