The path to a sustainable world with professor Steven Chu | the Royal Society
foreign certainly um is very very much um questions sometimes [Music] uh supposedly yeah and start in two minutes foreign good evening ladies and gentlemen and welcome um welcome to the Royal Society my name is Nigel Brown and I'm head of engineering at Imperial College London just down the road and it's a real honor to be able to chair Professor Stephen Chu's lecture this evening it's really fantastic to have Stephen here in person um the lecture was of course intended to be taking place during the pandemic but of course was understandably postponed and delayed so it's great to welcome Stephen here this evening as I'm sure you're all aware Stephen is a very distinguished scientist he shared the Nobel Prize for physics in 1997 for the development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light other contributions include Precision atom interferometry Optical tweezers of molecules and the first biological studies using single molecule fret his current research is in molecular and cell physiology Medical Imaging nanoparticle synthesis for bioenging Bio Imaging and Battery research and perhaps we'll hear a little bit about those this evening from 2009 to 2013 Stephen served as the U.S Secretary of Energy he was charged with helping Implement President Obama's ambitious agenda to invest in clean energy reduce the US dependence on foreign oil address the global climate crisis and create millions of new jobs Stephen is the holder of 10 patents has published over 250 papers has 35 honorary degrees is a member of the Royal Society the National Academy of Sciences and the pontificial Academy of Sciences and several foreign foreign academies the U.S UK scientific relationship is one of the world's strongest so it's critical we work together to secure clean energy reduce dependence on fossil fuels and address climate change in 2021 the science academies of the group of seven issued a statement making four recommendations to the G7 government and these were governments need to develop their effort at their own evidence-based technology roadmaps to Net Zero that are informed and continuously updated by bringing together scientists economists social and behavioral scientists the pace of change needs to be accelerated by increasing public and private sector investment in the key research and development challenges on the road to Net Zero and effective adaptation governments need to work together to support middle and low-income countries on the road to a climate resilient Net Zero future and we should work together to agree suitable policy packages to economically incentivize carbon neutral options these recommendations still hold today and the scientific Community can assist with this through bilateral and multilateral working on the key scientific challenges in order to reach Net Zero by 2050. so with that back cloth there's not insignificant challenges I'd like to hand over to Stephen and welcome him to deliver his lecture this evening climate change and Innovative paths to a more sustainable future please welcome Stephen to the stage [Applause] thank you Nigel the lovely introduction um on a type constraint I'm told that you don't want to hear me drawn on for an hour and a half so I will proceed very quickly I want to just briefly remind you that we are facing in the future rise in Seas but we see increased heat waves floods forest fires droughts water shortages and these this is a map of the water stress areas around the world today but with water stresses changes in weather patterns that if you're in a fragile nation state you could have a collapsed economy and um there is an estimate from the World Bank that could perhaps be 200 million climate refugees by 2050. so we've seen what happened to the world with 10 million refugees and it is fueled uh populist resentment for countries and uh so imagine if that's 10 million what will happen with even 100 million all right so very briefly there are three major greenhouse gases that uh have started to rise around 1950s and Beyond carbon dioxide methane nitrous oxides and so this is human induced changes there are projections and scenarios of what might happen and depending on what course the world takes and let me just see if I can get my laser pointer and see and so uh we're here in 2020 and we're about here where there was a decrease in greenhouse gas emissions during covid but it is unfortunately bounced back with the Vengeance and so if you look at the current policies and pledges the prediction based on climate models that is that we may go to three degrees so we are seemingly on a path forget about 450 parts per million that will be passed within a decade and I think we're on a path to exceed even 550 parts per million now as a matter of not a climate model but as a matter of historical record if you look at the last warm period before the last ice age the Earth was two and a half degrees warmer than before the Industrial Revolution or about 1.2 or
three degrees warmer than we are today the sea level was six to nine meters higher as measured by the fossil record of Critters that live in the boundaries between land and ocean around the world because land subsides it goes up and down different regions of the world so you have to take a global average and so that's one of the things that's a matter of historical record it's not going to happen this Century but if we get to three degrees or two and a half degrees it would take hundreds of years but it and the only way to reverse that is to actually go down in temperature there's something else you should know and it is analogous to cigarette smoking when you start smoking cigarettes I suppose you start in your 20s and in your 30s and 40s and you stopped in your 40s you've started to induce a chain a chain reaction of mutations that catch up with you much later could be in your 60s or 70s that you will get your on a path to get heart disease stroke lung cancer similarly the full effects of climate change that we've already done aren't seen because the oceans are very cold a few degrees above zero centigrade and a very slow mixing of the surface temperature with the bottoms of the oceans and so roughly 50 80 year time period before you see the real natural damage you've already done to the climate because of this Delayed Reaction so let me give you some good news there is a remarkable progress technical progress in the cost of renewable energies and I've just shown concentrated solar offshore wind photovoltaics and the prices the so-called levelized costs the prices are now becoming competitive with natural gas fossil fuel and so that's very good news uh the not so good news is the prices have to come down even more because the full cost of Renewables has to also include the standby power generation a much more expanded energy storage and enhanced transmission distribution system and so we don't have yet either in the United States or in Europe uh a grid that can manage this intermittent Generation The increased electrification that's being planned for spacing Transportation industrial processes so we will also need just in case battery storage does run out or pump storage runs out we will need some standby sources that you can turn on and the choices we have are natural gas and nuclear reactors for the cost of nuclear reactors has skyrocketed and we have to learn how to build them on budget on time there is a possibility that perhaps these small modular reactors and on this diagram is a 57 megawatt design from a company called new scale in the United States and that's the entire reactor and containment vessel standing next to a human and if thousands of these could be made in a factory and then shipped on site the chances of being on time on budget are greatly enhanced there's also something new the nuclear reactors are still very expensive and so if you're going to only use these for stand by power which is five or ten percent of the time let's say to replace natural gas generators you still need to use it 100 of the time and so the advantage of these reactors is 95 of the time they can be used to generate hydrogen uh for through electricity there are two issues that occupy the Public's mind one is safety and one is also what are you going to do with the spent fuel let me address the safety this is the death rates uh per unit of energy generated from Brown coal Coal oil biomass and if you look down here at nuclear nuclear is a little bit safer than wind and a little more dangerous than solar but it's in the fourth decimal place compared to coal and it's actually a hundred times safer than burning wood because the burning of wood releases particular matter that causes lung disease problems okay so so in terms of safety uh this is no comparison what about spend fuel well there's great advances now in remote Drilling and so deep borehole drilling also being tested in the UK as well as the United States and other countries means that you can greatly reduce uh the probability that this would be an issue and lots more sites would be acceptable so so the the two major uh you know legitimate objections are going away compared to the alternative which is natural gas and carbon capture and sequestration but let me impress upon you how hard it is going to be to actually do this um in order to get zero greenhouse gas emissions that graph I showed you the ipcc graph on the y-axis is carbon Emissions on all sectors and it has to go to zero before the end of this Century if you're gonna have it goes to the chance of staying below two and a half degrees Centigrade and that means you have to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from steel production concrete Plastics chemicals textiles uh you have to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from the entire food supply chain and we have to make an adjustment in the last couple of decades we got very used to use once and throw away mentalities uh appliances have to be repairable again shells of buildings should be made to last hundreds of years not let's say in China you build it in 40 years you tear it down and you build another building the United States might be 50 or 60 years and so the goal is to get into a reuse or not recycle mentality as an example of buildings I show you pictures of three iconic buildings the Empire State Building Chrysler Building Chicago merchandise building recently renovated these are commercial Office Buildings they're not Landmark Buckingham Palace places they're used in business but they were renovated at large expense to modernize the heating ventilation systems but it's possible to build buildings whose shell can be up for hundreds of years but that allow the renovation of heating ventilation systems cooling building controls and especially in England modernization of toilets um anyway so uh there's something else uh that old London knows about very well and that is uh you can build wooden buildings that last for hundreds of years as well and wooden buildings even structures 10 20 stories high can be built fire safe so with processing of the wood you can make it so that it's as safe as a steel and concrete structure in terms of fire but most buildings are not 100 stories tall they're five ten stores imagine if you build a wooden building uh you've so has to cut in the last 200 years you've just sequestered carbon for 200 years and there's an excuse to grow more trees to build more structures that replace steel and concrete so again the practice of this and getting it out in place will hopefully make this uh competitive with receptive steel and concrete okay energy storage is a huge problem and so um so it turns out in a recent study uh made by some uh Veterans of Department of energy rpe they decided in the United States which has tremendous amounts of renewable energy wind solar four time zones you would only need three days of energy storage to get to 80 percent renewable energy wind and solar and hydro okay that sounds very modest but it means that we need 2 000 times more battery storage than we have today and in order to be competitive with natural gas standby generation the cost has to be roughly one tenth to one twentieth of current utility scale batteries today now utility scale batteries in the next 20 years will be cut in half maybe a third but not one tenth or 120th so we need a bit of a breakthrough but before we go into the breakthroughs let me talk about my favorite battery here it is let me explain how it works when the wind blows you do the energy intensive thing which is the pump water from a well and so you have now irrigation water you need the water you open up the valve that's not energy intensive and so it turns out that pumped storage lifting water up a hill is 95 percent of all electrical storage in the world today and in 2021 if you look at the leaders in pump storage around the world it's China with 36 gigawatts of energy and pump storage comes in two units it comes in total energy which are gigawatt hours and power gigawatts and so both are important and so this is a chart of the Google watts and so China leads the way with the United States United States uh has asked for and are getting applications for increased pump storage licenses that may increase the amount of pump storage in the United States by 1.9 which is very good so it would be up here and so you might ask what is China doing well China is planning uh to go off the chart and to the next building they want to go from 34.4 gigawatts to 270 gigawatts the seven and a half times increase because they are very serious about using Renewables and they realize that pump storage if you have an existing dam is the most inexpensive way of uh of storing energy so however not everybody has a lot of mountains I've been told Great Britain doesn't have many mountains and so pump storage requires an expanded transmission distribution system again for the long-term storage uh of utility scale storage you're into different things in addition to pump storage which in this graph is like is the orange it's PHS there's compressed air storage which has not taken off there are some issues and then batteries you see in the lower left hand corner so in this graph on the right hand side on the sorry on the x-axis is the amount of terawatt hours of stored energy and they it's plotted as a number of days you can supply it with so a thousand hours is 42 days by the time you're 42 days you're at seasonal storage and so there's more attention being made now to not using chemical batteries but actually chemicals where you don't use the overhead and so we're talking specifically about methane and methane that is made from captured CO2 okay so let's talk about hydrogen there are different colors of hydrogen there's gray hydrogen which is you take methane gas you there's a process where you turn it into hydrogen and CO2 and that CO2 is vented this is the major source of commercial hydrogen today the dominant source and uh it doesn't actually help with CO2 emissions if you take hydrogen and use it instead of methane the CO2 equivalent is the same there's blue hydrogen you can take the methane from under the ground and you can turn it into a hydrogen but you capture the CO2 and sequester somewhere safely and and then finally there's green hydrogen something made from renewable carbon free energy sources either nuclear or wind or solar or whatever and these are the prices and so these are the prices of hydrogen being delivered to the gate let's say an oil refinery which is a major use of hydrogen okay so a lot of work going into reducing the capital expense of electrolyzers and elimination and precious materials there's a new kid on the Block and that is fuel cells you think of fuel cells as taking hydrogen and creating electricity to let's say run an automobile a bus or truck but you can actually run them in Reverse so that means you can take a fuel cell that converts water into hydrogen and oxygen by supplying with electricity and the solid oxide fuel cells now a former member of the department oh I should say I'm going to brag a little bit about some members of the Department of energy when I was when Obama asked me to becoming Secretary of Energy I said well if you want me you have to agree on one thing which is I get to hire whoever I want not what the politicians tell me I should hire to pay back political debts and he agreed and because he agreed I got on the phone as soon as it became Secretary of Energy and I started calling up very very distinguished up and coming engineers and scientists you know hi this is Steve I want you to join me in the department of energy if it's two years four years I don't care uh we're here to save the world I got half of them and so we had six members of the National Academy of engineering Sciences of which half of them were elected in their early 40s but they were in their middle 40s can you imagine working for the government when you're elected to the Royal Society when you're 43 probably not no one could imagine that but it got a whole bunch dozens of really good people who've since unfortunately left Trump made sure of that but but there are now stars out there in the world and one of the Stars was hired by a solid oxide fuel company and they he just wrote me an email a couple weeks ago and says this thing is great it's going to be four megawatts being installed today as a test site and it operates at 88 efficiency okay so it's going to scale as we speak which is very exciting what's the problem with hydrogen well it's very leaky and then recent studies that have been validated have shown that when hydrogen leaks in the upper atmosphere it prevents methane from being oxidized and turned into CO2 which means it's effectively a greenhouse gas stabilizer of methane which is 84 times worse than CO2 that's bad number two it's very leaky and there's no way of detecting hydrogen except with what's called a mass spectrometry where you analyze ionize in a vacuum and bend in a magnetic field as you detect hydrogen and helium so there's no remote sensing and with the wrap without remote sensing you're a little bit at Sea it's the catching a leak except in a place where you know it's managed so that's a problem nevertheless it has to be part of the solution because with hydrogen you can decarbonize a lot of the steel production Plastics chemicals and fertilizers so it is important but it has these issues what about chemical batteries that you know of this is the Tesla this is energy density on the x-axis's uh energy per unit weight on the y-axis energy for human volume you want to go to the upper right hand corner lots of energy per unit volume and weight and the projection is my projection based on what I see as a member a board member of a battery company and doing battery research is the energy density is likely to double by 2030. why am I saying likely to double because we the company is already shifting samples out to prospective customers today and it will take at least five or six years before it works its way into an automobile for safety reasons so so that's good what about the cost well in in manufacturing in anything uh there's What's called the learning curve the more you produce the more you get better what you're doing and the costs come down and you still produce more and if you plot on the x-axis in powers of 10 how much you produce and the y-axis the cost in powers of 10. once you have established a learning curve it turns out to be a straight line for no fundamental reason it just turns out and so a learning curve has been established for batteries for electric vehicles and this is the learning curve starting 2000 Lithium-ion batteries for vehicles were over two thousand dollars that kilowatt hour in 20 years it dropped to a hundred dollars from 2000 by 2030 it's highly likely it's me less than fifty dollars already GM has said in two more years we're only going to pay 87 dollars per kilowatt hour okay so that means the price of EVS is going to plummet but there could be headwinds for example if all the light duty vehicles are going to be made of EVS well we run out of critical materials what about nickel and Cobalt they've already transitioned away from manganese nickel Cobalt batteries it's now iron phosphate and within the last two years the nickel and Cobalt have become too expensive what about lithium well it turns out there may be progress in extracting lithium from seawater Chong Liu who is a postdoc co-directed by me and each way we published a paper in 2020 saying we think we can get our sea water here's the process and later she is now an assistant professor at the University of Chicago and in 2021 she had an improved method for extracting lithium from seawater seawater is 20 000 times more sodium than lithium after one process of in a half a battery it's H1 lithium to sodium okay if you can get it and the electricity cost is negligible compared to the cost of lithium it's you know a dollar or 50 cents versus twenty dollars for lithium carbonate so if this works commercially then the resource of lithium has just gone up about three orders of magnitude and so we hope that works but when you go to iron phosphate the energy density goes down but if you use lithium metal instead of lithium in a graphite anode it can go back up and not only go back up the energy density of the anode increases 12 volt so the problem in L and then in the end iron phosphate is okay but there's a real goal out there because if you use sulfur and we're up to our eyeballs and sulfur uh and if you use sulfur instead of iron phosphate and you figure out how to make it right you can increase the energy density of lithium metal sulfur battery by about 10 fold now remember twofold means the battery now weighs as much as a two liter engine and gas tank okay so tenfold would be really exciting so but two folders three folds all you really need the trouble is when you have a lithium metal uh anode there are irregularities and and shown in this cartoon and if there's irregularity in this thing these things act as little lightning rods the higher electric field and it draws the lithium into forming these dendrites that Arc over and short out the battery and so the prospect is what can you do about it well if you put in an artificial layer that allows lithium to move easily through this material which is strong enough to prevent it uh it could perhaps allow fast charging and prevent dendrite formation and so so we are in my laboratory uh we are investigating a possibility of this the material is uh hexagonal born nitrite it's like graphene uh and it's really inexpensive stuff um and we found that radiation damage hexagonal bar and nitrate passes lithium quite nicely and in a test case of lithium metal sulfur battery is absolutely stable um performance of charging researchers up to 300 cycles and then suddenly it crashes because the electrolyte we're using is combining with the metal and the sulfur that's another problem we're working on developing new electrolytes but if we get a better electrolyte and this works all of a sudden you get a very cheap battery at very high density it may not work but heck the possibility is some person or persons will figure this one out okay what do we really want we really want to take the products of combustion namely CO2 and water use very inexpensive clean energy and work its way into getting first hydrogen and Co but building your way up the chain to make a liquid hydrocarbon there's a reason why liquid hydrocarbons are really good and especially for sustainable jet fuel which is a kerosene-like compound you you can't beat this in terms of the energy per unit weight the energy per unit volume you know diesel fuel kerosene jet fuel are really high energy carriers comparable only to body fat which is why biology chose body fat because that's a very high energy density and so anyway that's what we want if we start with stop at hydrogen you need to liquefy the hydrogen in some other form and why do you want to liquefy it you want to liquefy it to put it on a super tanker and so uh if you ask how much does it cost to ship and store crude oil anywhere Halfway Around the World in terms of dollars per gallon of gasoline it turns out it's two cents a gallon Transportation costs of crude oil and a super tanker are negligible and so think of the super tankers as InterContinental and energy transmission lines for far higher far better far less expensive than any high voltage line and so the liquefication of energy renewable energy where you can do it and ship it around the world is important okay let me I've got 40 minutes 10 more minutes sorry left 15 minutes okay uh anyway uh let me talk about agriculture and um and let me start with the third agricultural Evolution we need a fourth agriculture Revolution the third one was the ability to make fertilizers nitrogen fertilizers based on what is called the hopper Bosch process for tabra got a Nobel Prize in 2018 for that and then they realized well they should have given it Hopper as well so they invented a reason they said he gets a Nobel Prize for a high temperature high price pressure catalytic conversion which was the hopper bash process of 2010 and so it actually got a third Nobel Prize much later was doing surface chemistry and the Nobel Prize citation says at last we're beginning to understand atomically what's really happening with the hopper Posh process okay two and a half Nobel prizes another Nobel Prize Norman borlag created these disease resistant dwarf strains of wheat with thick stems that could grow much more productively on a given set of land and his Nobel Prize for Peace was amazing because from 1960 he did this work in the 50s from 1960 to 1916 the population went from three to seven point four billion people the land put under serial production did not increase because the land put under cereal production went up threefold four-fold averaged around the world just not in places like the United States so it was remarkable but there are some real issues with agriculture both the energy used to make the fertilizer but also the methane the n2o are really changing our climate so we need this fourth Revolution now very briefly I just want to remind you that we've been modifying plants and animals for a long time if you look at these pictures of corn can you guess what the native corn was this stuff and so this is not recognizable if you look at the animals we eat the full circle is the natural lifetime of the animal but those little sections in red are the times in which the animals are slaughtered and so these animals grow up very quickly very fast for example in the odd States after 24 weeks from birth the average United States Pig weighs 280 pounds okay and so they've been bred to grow very much quickly sometimes unrecognizably quickly these are domestic U.S turkeys which are three month half months before Slaughter but some of them are so breast heavy they can't mate so they're reproduced by artificial dissemination they look different than wild turkeys that's a wild turkey of unknown ages this is wild turkey where we know how old it is 101 is eight years old okay so so beef uh burp a lot of methane and if you look at the greenhouse gas emissions from beef compared to fish pigment poultry eggs types and tofu beef has three times more greenhouse gas emissions than tofu and 62 times more than wheat okay so your carbon footprint of what you eat is substantial but it has to be volunteer because in the outside it is absolutely a third rail to even talk about suggesting you're going to regulate what people eat but nevertheless younger people seem to be making this transition but if beef and dairy cattle were a country they will have more greenhouse gas emissions than the United States through EU Plus Great Britain only China would lead the way and so by the way talk about geoengineering agriculture is extremely geoengineered if you put on a scale humans and the Animals we eat on the rest of the scale all the other mammals in the world we're 96 of mammal awake okay and so roughly half of methanes and a three quarters of end tools from agriculture but you can't do without fertilizer because we have a growing world of 8 billion going to probably 11 billion and so you need High productivity organic farm is only for rich people in rich countries not for the developing world so what's the solution well I think synthetic biology could be a solution and by that I mean you can introduce into microbes the ability to enter into a symbiotic relationships with plants like corn and so they're right at the rails on border between the roots and the soil they can take nitrogen that occurs naturally in the soil from the air and turn it into plant food is eaten by the plant so because of that the nitrate fertilizer doesn't turn into n2o which escapes from the ground and as I said it's 200 times worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and lasts for 100 years so this is a really serious issue however this company pivot bio took them seven or eight years to develop these microbes and it was too slow I was in the board of a company that helped them develop this using new methods but the problem with this is that you can only alter one gene at a time and perhaps the solution is maybe five six eight chains and so you have to work your way through it over years and and so if you so the prospect is one of the Hang-Ups is if you can change 10 genes at a time instead of one a gene at a time you you it could be transformative and very recently my lab has figured out how to do this that we can introduce long pieces of DNA 50 100 000 bases that could enable DNA editing at the level of 10 genes at a time and so you know hopefully within a month or two we'll submit a paper but then synthetic biology can provide answers for how to get rid of fertilizer anyway okay so let me just say that carbon capture is going to be essential because we're going to go over 450 500 550 parts per million and we have 100 years to reverse this before the glaciers really melt there are many ways of doing this but the cost is too expensive now and so this is some of the limitations but having said all of that and the and the fact that I'm working on ways to capture carbon dioxide Mother Nature has given us the best way and there's it's called solar powered photosynthesis and it makes biomass and the amount of crops captured in biomass each year is variable I tried to look this up but it's within a factor of two between 10 and 18 gigatons per year equivalent that's a lot we're 50 gig tons of old greenhouse gases now today and we will need 10 gigatons of carbon capture because there's stuff we can't get rid of but if you put in plants that aren't food crops they can actually do two or three times more biomass and much less virtually no fertilizer input and so that's a one year's growth of oh this is stuff okay but in closing I want to get to the real issue the real issue of sustainability is we have population growth it took one and one million years to get a population decrease so a third of a million uh the projection of this article in 2011 would take 13 years to add the next billion it didn't it uh they did in 11 years and so by 2011 probably 11 billion okay here's the problem increase economics Prosperity virtually all countries in the world are based on having more young people to support a smaller aging population okay in the United States we call this a Ponzi scheme it's a form of fraud that lures investors and pays profits or early investors with funds for more recent investors it has the illusion of a sustainable business as long as more new investors contribute new funds okay so having a growing population is a Ponzi scheme now what do you do with this because if you have more retired people and fewer older younger people to work doesn't that mean your economy will Decline and the answer is no it is not written there's no law of physics that says this so we look at the countries who are expecting population declines and leading the way is Japan in 2020 the population there and the projections are in the next 20 years it'll be plungy so what what are you going to do well it's actually not productivity because we have profound productivity our factors can produce a lot with much fewer people our Farms can produce them with much weary people it's actually finding them good jobs and so what do you do with this well what is Japan doing with this it turns out they're beginning to develop robots that people like that can take care of old people and actually can talk to them in fact with artificial intelligence you can program the robot to have your voice your thoughts your everything you talk to your aging parents and then the same artificial intelligence gives you a quick download of for a half an hour what your avatar told your parents in the last six hours okay so it's not fraud it's it's just keeping them company okay however finally we need an enclosing we need a different measure of wealth we need a model new model to improve our standard ultimate does not rely on population growth it doesn't mean increased production you make something you throw it away it doesn't mean you should own not one car but two cars not one home but two homes and things like that and so it's in this treadmill of making stuff using it and throwing away that increases GDP uh but not real wealth so what is real wealth what do we care about in our lives well we want to feel that we're safe our families are safe our neighborhoods are safe our country is safe from foreign invasion we want to maintain health and vitality in old age we want to remain emotionally connected in our age and so with that I want to end by quoting Robert Kennedy he gave a speech one month before he was assassinated in 1968 and he said the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children the quality of their education or the joy of their play it does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages the intelligence of a public debate or the Integrity of our public officials it measures neither our wit nor our courage nor there are wisdom nor our learning neither are compassion nor a Devotion to our country it measures everything in short except that which makes wife worthwhile thank you [Applause] Stephen thank you very much and it reminds us that politicians at times have said wise thanks um so I we we invite questions from the floor at this point and Stephen will take those questions if I could ask you to raise your hand and a microphone will come to you and there's another question down here so yeah we'll start with the with the lady at the back thanks hi um thank you for your really interesting lecture it was great to hear about some of the novel Technologies um on energy production and agriculture yeah um just a little yeah of course um I'm always a bit worried about the dangers of framing the solution to the climate crisis as purely a technological one without considering the systems of Oppression that caused the climate crisis in the first place um so I was wondering how can you communicate the importance of new technologies and renewable energy without presenting it as the problem to fix the solution to fix the whole problem of the climate crisis and without glossing Over The Wider issues and inequities but rather integrating them with a climate Justice based approach right well first I completely agree with you and that's why in the later part of my lecture I was talking about a new set of values uh and for example in the developing world what we should be doing in the developed world is to use our resources to help their economies grow as fast as possible and they have and achieved a level of prosperity that we enjoy uh with that guess what you're going to have fewer babies and you can have the luxury of saying I can now worry about other things and just worry about survival and the survival of children who you know in sub-Saharan Africa half will still die in before reaching adulthood so so I think um that's one of the things a new sense of what we value what we really want to do is part of this so while I talked about technological solutions you have in back of those technological solutions you need the will to change the whole boundary of what we want if if economists tell politicians you want to grow the GDP Above All Else there's a tyranny there and there's a rat race and there's a Ponzi scheme because they're also telling politicians you want to have more babies but we don't want immigrant babies so yes there's a lot of Injustice thanks Steven so we had a microphone here and then if I can see another show of hands for questions down the front we'll take one and then we'll take these yeah hi I'm a volunteer from a creative Society project my name is Ed and I've got a question for you we have a group of scientists that found sorry that found that the massive effect of global crisis is caused from an external source as well as obviously our own doing are you familiar with any information on that yeah it's very hard because the speakers are looking this way behind it so your question was what the external effect of from the outside it's the global crisis that we're experiencing currently and a massive change in the weather and patterns and obviously the earthquakes and everything flooding and all of that it's in a great increase are you familiar with the fact that it may be an effect that comes up from the outer space because there are changes that's been noticed on other planets as well well I'm not sure what the question was I think it's things like planetary influence or things from the Sun solar yes yes um and the fact that the planet is warming from the inside from the core and is destability well the planet is there's way activity in the inside which is why when you go deeper the the core is hotter uh but um uh I think what we're our current understanding is the changes we're seeing in temperature rainfall patterns whatever are due to this greenhouse gas affects the sun and the monitoring of the Sun and all the emission the solar winds all that stuff is heavily monitored and measured by satellites and it has a is that a 10 year 11 year solar cycle that's pretty stable now in the end we do know that the sun will warm up and within a billion years we will be cooked by three or four billion years it becomes a red giant engulfs our planet but we have a billion years to figure that out I'll be happy we figure it out for the next couple hundred years but uh so there these are the things at least the best of scientific understanding is is what is going on is that does that answer your question and well this is the common thought of science today but as I said there's a group of scientists that have found evidence that we don't have even 20 years well um I'm going to suggest that you ask Stephen that over a glass of wine or something right so I'm going to move on to Martin at the front please there's a light moment um you mentioned the global South to developing world uh which one wants a narrow the Gap with but they are going to obviously use more per capita energy than they do now and be more of them at least four billion by mid-century and how can we ensure that they can LeapFrog directly to clean energy and not track the same kind of path that we did in this case our efforts to get to global net zero for the north will be completely neutralized by the increase in the CO2 from the global South your your question had its answer already and it is how do you what's the leapfrogging mechanism yeah and and so in Communications very famous you know we go cell phones and people in South Asia and Africa have cell phones no longer telephone lines um you need two things to bring energy to people to substitute for imported diesel oil or natural gas or some uh you need cheap energy and you need a means of storing to give you some stability so solar is becoming very cheap the batteries are not cheap enough and the batteries have to work in hot climates which we still need and so non-refrigerated batteries and hot climates all of a sudden imagine you're in a Countryside you have solar power and you pump water for irrigation you you purify the water you do all those things and a small compact refrigerator not an American sized refrigerator but you know well insulated uh it can store a block of ice and so you can actually begin to think of uh not having a continuous supply of electricity but enough storage and LED lights so a lot of that is going to help LeapFrog and so those but that is the key but inexpensive solar and energy storage will be the key and and and the communications to allow much more efficient Society is also part of that key so I can see everyone's getting their questions in now so we have a question here and then there's a lady with their hand raised there so let's take two questions at once yesterday we're ramping up the speed there we are okay so the gentleman first Steve let me simplify things by saying I I agree with everything you say right up until the end point and then he's an economist how he's a friend of mine you and I both moved from science into politics and back into science so the question is related to the problems that we have in the transition you've been living in the United States where the power of the fossil fuel Lobby is simply amazing and if I then take you to uh countries like Saudi Arabia the Emirates and so on these These are countries who believe their economy and their economic future depends on fossil fuels we also have the following little problem as you I'm sure know in China and you said China is trying to shift away from fossil fuels as quickly as it can but when your economy is growing at nine percent per annum energy demand is going up faster than that the over the last 20 years we're estimating there's a question in this somewhere yeah there is we're estimating the Chinese government has taken something like 850 million people out of poverty there's the the cost of their energy production and staying on fossil fuels how do we manage these challenges okay to meet what you want and then the next question my questions will work well with the economist questions um it seems to me like you are talking about degrowth but you're not using that word am I right in understanding that this is what you're talking about um with the the value piece of your presentation and if not and if so why do you not use that word if not then you can just explain to me why um you're talking about GDP and and not degrowth um and also if you are talking about the growth then how do we get there um okay two questions about sustainability okay so first the one question is is that in what China's done in the last three or four years is kind of a miracle I've lifted many many hundreds and millions of people out of poverty based on access energy as a crucial part of that and so that was the engine that was the since the industrial level of Industrial Revolution the engine for economic growth has been accessed to inexpensive energy when you had just people power and animal power wasn't good enough and okay so so so then given that given what's happening given the fact that we have built our society and our industrial growth on access to inexpensive energy there's huge and oh by the way trillions of dollars of money underneath the ground and so and and the temptation to use those trillions of dollars of money to grow more wealth and have a happier population is counter to what we need to get in order to stay below three degrees okay so this is the Crux of the matter and this is why it's really really hard and so um and so the only thing I can say is yes that the American oil companies are amazingly powerful and they've written into the inflation reduction act some really bonuses before the oil companies for sequestion carbon dioxide 100 a ton uh to make hydrogen uh and so they're going to get a lot of money out of this and so what do you do about all this well I still go back to this thing that we really need to think about what we value and tell our politicians what we value and which means that if you know access more and more energy between our standard of living Japan standard living Denmark standard living Beyonce Standalone Saudi Arabia standard living the standard living gets to be pretty flat but the consumption of energy varies more than tenfold so there's an existence proof that you can do this now Japan wants to reduce their energy consumption from person twofold which means the assays should reduce it five or six-fold I think it's possible but you need more political will to do this and so and so the political will part is to encourage the carrots to actually get this to happen because you can't wait for a technology alone okay so again I'm going to go for two questions the lady in the back of the gentleman who's had his hand raised just back there there is so we'll take the gentleman's question oh take the gentleman's question and then the latest question oh sure thank you very much Professor really insightful I will be less philosophical and my question is mainly around battery storage you put a heavy emphasis on lithium ion lfp batteries but what's your take and what's basically in your thoughts is potential of the sodium ion batteries for the kind of lower density edge of the spectrum okay and the next question sorry my embarrassing yeah a question is what are your hopes for cop28 oh okay I'll take the easy one first sodium ion batteries they work at a higher temperature they're much more Earth abundant they not sure it's going to be if we solve the lithium problem then we don't need them but we will need something for utility scale batteries and so zinc sodium iron manganese aqueous solution because there won't be enough lithium for utility scale and so we already know that and aqueous solution is a lot safer energy density far lower but two-fold threefold lower doesn't matter uh cop 28. um
I don't know I I think um you know there's uh starting with the Paris conference uh there's really great intentions and there are pledges uh sincere pledges I believe made by countries but um I don't think any country is on target for the pledges they've already made as pointed out by ipcc the pledges are on track for three degrees okay so let me say again they're making pledges they're not strong enough and they're not even fulfilling those pledges we're ahead of your it's more business as usual and and so we have to figure out and they already said in Paris and beyond that they have to revisit them and what happened most recently is the Russia's invasion of Ukraine just says oops energy security trumps climate change by far and that's what we see and so we're snapping back uh because the short term tragic things are going to Ukraine are really bad uh but but we also have to keep in inside the long-term goals because these things have a way of catching up with this the time scale and the inertia to change it doesn't change on a dime it takes a half a century and for one more question if there is one there we are gentlemen and then we'll take then we'll close make a cheerful question just a bit of a political question which I guess is um do we have enough Technology and Engineering brain power to get us where we need to be as fast as we can we're getting there there's a whole bunch of younger people who I see this as Stanford I see this around the world who say this is what I need to do it doesn't all have to be science and engineering it could be in the political political science it could be lots of things so a lot of the younger people are saying we've got to solve this problem because my parents and grandparents are letting us down okay and so uh and we are I'm doing my best but you know it's the younger people who are going to have to carry on the best you can do is the younger people tell your parents and grandparents I said this I don't really understand this I said this once to a bunch of senators I was told by my political staff never say that again so I said you know look imagine you're on your deathbed you're surrounded by your family and one of your grandchildren says Grandpa you could have done something about this climate program but you chose not to didn't you care about us my political staff said never say that again why not because it makes them feel uncomfortable which was the the point Stephen I think that's a really compelling point and note to end on so thank you so much for your time this evening thank you for the breadth of your presentation and the range of subjects you've covered and thank you for taking the questions so so eloquently so please join me in thanking Stephen [Music] thank you [Applause]
2023-06-05 00:29
