could see this edition of climate science on tap all right thank you so much this edition energy and climate policy at the crossroads will the world act on climate change fast enough after discovering that field during a search for an impactful climate change related career was not a google search use google it is also the founder editor and system administrator of the public education website what is nucular dot com which gives roughly two thousand unique hits per day from curious people in apparently some bots as well he's married to a resident the do physicians university of washington and is a mentor with big brothers big sisters if you could sound so let's go ahead and give it up for n thanks a lot thanks everyone thanks for coming in pretty excited for this evening i'm just going to kick it off with the brief ten minute history of how humans and energy have interacted for all of history and how we're going to be able to interact in the future so you get started i think we have to talk a little bit about what it is energy i think you all kind of have heard that it's the capacity for doing work that's too abstract for me sorry tried some other definitions like the antithesis of the heat death of the universe that work better that didn't work too well for you it's really i mean without energy nothing would move nothing would have any temperature of a horrible but working definition for tonight is really going to be this last one which is a replacement for the labor of human beings that's not an all inclusive definition of energy but that's you know or humans are are inherently lazy and when we find some energy that we can and do stuff for us  we can use it and that's generally good right that's quality of life so just to make that concrete i have a couple examples you can imagine construction with human energy are oring  but today using energy you can go like union by clicking this link in your wrist on this power crane and it's just there you go and pop up everywhere thanks to energy army how many of you grow all of your food for you and your family your route we got a little bit over there not many of us because of energy we used all of that and now we have a few people riding around in combine that provide parts of water huge deal and that's still happening in the world today and all sorts of other things energy really helps us do incredible amount of things that give us our quality of life and indeed if you plot energy usage per capita as a function of quality of life it looks like this this is the human development index which is the raw correlation with quality of life it's hard to quantify and this is how much electricity used per capita these different countries you can see united states up here and you can see china india and pakistan down here they want to come up here they are more energy is replacing their labor and they like to use more energy and get a better quality of life so what fuels that we use to replace human and human labor throughout history on the united states it looks kind of like this we started with this water wheel fire and human animals and that worked great for a long time and then thank goodness and eighteen hundred coal came along and i know you're thinking thank goodness but actually people were totally deforest in all of the north america and europe to make charcoal to smell iron and the forests were in severe danger of being totally wiped out to get charcoal  green guys wind and solar with their rapid increase very recently so that's what we use so far and this is the united states the rest of world looks pretty much like this so a little bit more on how awesome fossil fuels are ari it really i mean it's easy to hate on them now and there's reason to but it's good to sort of step back and realize that we have fossil fuels you wouldn't have any of this stuff you wouldn't have the quality of life that we have eighty six percent of the world is powered by pos of fuels it's giving us a lot of good this is sort of i don't really recommend this book but there's a whole book about how fossil fuels and energy is good even if it comes from fossil fuel but there's a problem possible fuels produce greenhouse gas and we now know this is dangerous and there's climate change and i think everybody in this room probably agrees that there's climate change and the big great chunk here is the fraction of world greenhouse gas that's produced because of fuel making energy so how do we get high quality of life without greenhouse gases simple question right and here's a simple answer there are low carbon energy sources and i'm sorry probably can't read this at the bottom this is in order this is the grams of c o two equal and produce per kilowatt hour of electricity generated this is from the i p c c you know the u n organization of climate scientists so you can believe it coal is no good here is this sort of error bar hydro power which is super interesting and it turns out that there's people know about this but it's getting more study it's not very well known but if you have a very large reservoir particularly in  boom i looked into it and that's actually true i can give you references super interesting so anyway but most hydro plants are are find they're really low if you just put a turbine in a river and don't have a big reservoir that's great some big reservoirs are ok for certain reasons it depends how deep it is or shallow or how new it is the point is that it's very nuanced so if you just want to build a bunch of hydro make sure you check it out on a case by case basis because this is really important what do you guys want to do parody no you want wind and you want solar they are extraordinarily popular with like ninety percent acceptance rate they have tons of political support there is why tax credits everybody loves them and nobody doesn't love them it's like incredible you don't like offshore drilling you don't like nuclear power plants you don't like fracking the don't like coal mining i would call you but i think this is pretty representative and this is great the tax credits for these renewables so expected so that's that's great news here's what's expected to happen so this is world energy consumption projection out to twenty four to this is one from energy information administration and it shows that re a really respectable rate natural gas is going up right with them coal and oil are holding steady and going up a little bit nuclear hold steady not acceptable this doesn't decarbonise at all so if this business as usual plan which is what it looks like we're serious challenge and this is where i get controversial this is wind and solar are on less than thirty percent of the time it's dark sometimes and it's not windies and i'm like if you go outside right now it's both of those things  california when the sun goes down thirteen gigawatts of new natural gas has to fire up in three hours that's a big challenge and it has limits or you can just put batteries in there is a lot of us getting batteries yes you can it not impossible it is a challenge though imagine a football field six meters high that's like eight hundred feet those lithium ion batteries are going to cost you four billion dollars and you have to rebuild them every twenty years that's for a single power point me to about six hundred of those  get through one night but if there are two cloudy nights in a row or worse what if there is seasonal intermittency which there absolutely is the sun is a factor of four less intense in january than it is in july can't store your energy  batteries from july and bring it out in the summer or sorry in the winter what if you have multiple cloudy days in a row yeah you could build a battery bank that big but it would be extraordinarily large and it would have a footprint way bigger than the problem you're trying to solve so anyway it's a challenge it can be and there are things that can help about it you can do pump hydro or you actually take the excess energy during the day pump water up into the dam into the reservoir remember that th let it come back down at night that's an ok option but you have to be careful because what i mentioned earlier so anyway quick plug for my favorite energy source nuclear power as i'm a nuclear engineer as you have heard i got into it because i thought it's extreme energy density could help with climate change you can get all of your energy for your entire life in one soda can and that makes one soda can of waste it's not nice waste but it's a waste james hansen the climate pioneer has very pro nuclear and has published a paper with nasa that's as nukes have prevented two million lives and that if you take all the deaths from accidents and all the lives saved by displacing air pollution  has saved two million lives and it's definitely offset sixty five billion tons of carbon dioxide twenty four seventh's so not intermittent and it produces right now sixty percent of the carbon free electricity in this country so it's our climate champion nuclear guys it's a known tactic we can expand it you can expand hydro very well but we can build a lot of nukes there is a legitimate problem with cost westinghouse just went bankrupt because of  south so the industry better figure out how to build it cheap if it wants to actually be relevant but we know it can be cheap because south korea right now is building them cheap in the seventy's france filled their you know lecture for their whole grid with nukes and it was cheap and the way that both of those people did it is by standardizing they chose a design and they built it again and again and again without change and if you do that you can make it cheap plus there's a bunch of advanced reactors like this that bill gates is paying me and some other people in the audience to work on that have really awesome people so anyway if you want to discuss that later in the q and a and last point is that if you think we can just reduce the amount of energy for using maybe we can but there's stuff like big coin coming  online this is a pretty modern example you've heard of this big coin right now the network could power three million homes that's how much electricity bitcoin is there any way you just have to be careful this kind of thing can really affect our climate future for increasing energy like this we've got to have a lot of very clean energy or else we're going to be in trouble and so the way i see it we need every thing on the right hand side of my clean energy graph everything we've got we need as fast as we can and that's negotiator he manages the u s diplomatic effort to galvanize all countries in the world to submit ambitious climate action targets and lead the u s technical group to analyze these targets reduce conducted research in urban development transportation and sustainability as a fulbright fellow he has recently and of the switzer fellowship for environmental leadership and a graduate of the moment won't come on a college and yale law school lives in south seattle with his wife ashley and a little baby named so i'm going to talk to you about a few things i'm going to give you a brief history of the international negotiations on climate change it sounds a little silly to do that in five minutes but you just got a history of energy consumption over world history in about five minutes so that makes feel less ridiculous and i'm going to talk about what the election of donald trump meant for the international climate seem to preview about is it was bad and then i'm going t a little bit about washington state and my boss governor inslee and what we're up to so sort of started off the first phase of the kind of international discussions for tackling the global challenge of climate change came states will continue to lead the world in taking economically sensible actions to reduce the threat of climate change so we can take a few things from out one george h w bush was over confident about federal leadership in the u s on climate change  we've come very far and very negatively in terms of the political divide on climate change it's amazing to think not only that a republican president submitted this u n treaty on climate change to the senate for ratification but the senate where we were than and where we are now i mean other hand that treaty was not one that required a lot of action it basically said a few things that said climate change is important we all need to work at it and let's keep talking it's an easy thing to sign up to and indeed the world kept talking they met every year to talk about new add on portions of the treaty the next big step was killer protocol and i do not have time to go into that  action since the early ninety's and basically twenty years the world talked a lot and did nothing and that's represented in carbon dioxide concentration charts that many of you have seen and i have no slides because i'm lazy but trust me if you haven't seen  it carbon dioxide emissions have been rising and i am the international negotiations were really falling apart based on two questions and those two questions were what countries need to take action to reduce emissions and how do we decide how much action they need to take and developing countries said one hundred percent of the action needs to come from developed countries and we will collectively specify exactly how much they need to do and for a variety of mostly political reasons that was unacceptable and surprisingly to the developed countries of the world and increasingly that became a not very appealing solution when in fact the majority of the world's emissions today are from developing countries of course they've been developing later they have less historical contributions but they're a significant part of the problem now so any solution that was only going to come from less than half of the world's emissions was not going to cut it so the parents agreement had i would say a breakthrough mechanism for dealing with the problem and this mechanism is both the greatest strength of the paris agreement and it's also its greatest weakness and i think most of the people involved with it and following it agree about this and that is the paris agreement calls for every country in the world to participate and to participate by developing its own target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that each country gets to come forward and say here's what i'm willing to do and if you don't like it shame me for it basically tries to create a political platform where all the countries of the world can scrutinize each other's action and say you know that's not enough or that's a strong target but you didn't achieve it and it's basically a system of peer accountability now i don't know whether that sounds strong enough to all of you to solve the problem of climate change it doesn't to me and i don't think it is but as winston churchill said about democracy the worst form of government except for all the others i think that applies to the paris green on climate change it's the best thing we've got right now and i think the next speaker lewin is going to show you a little bit about the impact that these targets have collectively made on the trajectory of global emissions and the answer is that it made a significant impact and in particular if you look at the later term impact of we need to see a lot more action and the paris agreement calls for five year cycles of countries coming back and saying ok here's my new target here's my update so there's a lot of work ahead of us this story is just now continuing to be written with the peers agreement was a big step forward in that it was the first big set of consensus among all the countries in the world to move forward and so the parents agreement in twenty sixteen i think most people thought it was negotiated it's done everyone's a part of it what people forget about the horrible and but now world treaty negotiation is that you're just kicking off another process of countries ratifying music agreements and that can take years and years and years and years  amazingly the paris agreement had sufficient global political consensus that enough countries joined the agreement to bring it into force within just one year that's basically unprecedented i'm not sure that's that's ever happened and if it has it was something that didn't matter trust me i haven't looked it up but i think that's true and so so that was an extraordinary level of political consensus around the world that we needed to take action and we had a basic way of doing it and then almost immediately after that happened trump was elected president of united states the world was not quite sure how to absorb bad news on many levels but climate change was a particularly worrying one to say the the election happened i was at the annual climate talks that were in morocco that year watching the election returns with a group of other american climate change negotiators and that was a room full of two years there as i'm sure it was here in seattle and our international colleagues were the world were absolutely stunned the obama administration spent eight years slowly rebuilding the credibility that was lost during the george w bush years and saying you know sorry about that would have but it was basically a hick up on the national stage and we're back and climate leadership is here to stay and then we have the elections that was a pretty profound loss of american credibility in the international climate arena at a time that we could ill afford to have it in the in the lead up to this year's climate talks what we'd like to say was there are only two countries in the world besides the united states that have not indicated that they want to be part of a paris agreement and those two countries are syria and nicaragua and syria is in the middle of a catastrophic civil war and it's run by a bloodthirsty dictator so you know not a great peer group nicaragua had actually said the paris agreement didn't go far enough which is hard to disagree with so it was minimal company there and they both of those countries actually decided that they didn't like being used as a talking point and in the wake of president trump's announcement that he wanted to withdraw from the paris agreement they actually both signed the paris agreement so we're alone now we no longer get to hide behind syria and nicaragua those two global leaders on this issue and now it's only the united states all of the world of all of the hundred and ninety three parties the united nations we are the only one in the world that have said we don't want to part of the paris agreement and that's a tragic thing my boss governor inslee in the immediate aftermath of that announcement formed the u s climate alliance which is a coalition of now fifteen governors it's co chaired by governor inslee governor cuomo of new york and governor brown of california and it's a bipartisan coalition there are only two republican governors but there are two  and that's a coalition of states dedicated to fighting for the goals of the paris agreement dedicated to saying despite what's happening at the national level we're still going to see this thing through we're going to work to achieve the u s target on greenhouse gas emissions we're going to work in our own states and between states to achieve these things and that's a group that's now talking directly to the rest of the world so we just came back from the climate talks in germany where governor inslee and other governors met directly with the heads of other national delegations and  you still have a partner in the united states on climate change action it's just not at the federal level anymore it's governor it's mayors it's faith groups it's activists it's business is it's just not the feds and that's a tragic and unfortunate thing but there are so many people many of them here in this room working on picking up the pieces and so there's a lot that can still be done you know it doesn't fully make up for what's happening at the national level but now is the time to work as hard as we possibly can to manage the impacts to take things forward ignore the federal government where we can i never thought i'd be saying that and taking things into our own hands but there's a lot that we can do i mean is a lot that needs to be done so let's let's keep working on it learn now about the ramifications of all of these actions for the climate so my pleasure to introduce our next speaker lynne thompson she's the walters professor of oceanography at the university of washington she obtained her ph d in oceanography from the massachusetts institute of technology in the woods hole oceanographic institution she's a physical climate scientist who uses observations in climate models to investigate the role that the ocean plays in climate variability and change in his of a member of the nasa ocean surface topography science team so so clearly her resume is much better than mine to get her mind off of climate change because everybody needs to do that every once in a while she loves to play with fiber and read mysteries and is married to another climate science and so she just can't get enough of the stuff it was the pair of an almost twenty one year old daughter who grew up listening to discussions about fluid dynamics and climate change around the dinner table so without let's go ahead and give it up for a way of thompson i don't want to talk to you today about is carbon emissions carbon dioxide concentrations and warming and just thinking about where we need to go into the future to reach some of the to sort of keep our climate in a habitable and pleasant place that i think all of us want so to start off i just want to give you the take home messages before i forget that the par agreement is a really an important first step as we said future missions of carbon dioxide reduction reductions are necessary and the other thing that i want you to take away that it's really important to not to cut carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions because they accumulate in the atmosphere so the longer we the worse it's going to be and then the final thing is that a peak temperature gain of one and a half degrees c is actually better than a peak temperature game of two degrees and every half degree c increment will be give us a worse climate ok so i'm going to give you since i am a professor am going to make this sort of pedantic but hopefully that will be helpful so first of all when i define emissions what i mean is the input of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere from human activities and the units are in the head of grams of carb and per year so it's a rate that we're putting carbon dioxide or carbon into the atmosphere and then there's also the time of peak emissions the time of the maximum yearly emissions and we'll see that we really need to start reducing emissions as soon as we can so there's a time where we're actually going to turn the corner and then nationally determine contributions are those the actions of each country will undertake for the paris agreement and we talked about that as well and here will be the emission targets for the twenty twenty to twenty twenty five time and then negative emissions are actually removal of carbon from the atmosphere through things that we do whether it's replanting forests or some sort of carbon capture and storage so how much of the pedigree macartney it's about ten it's ten to fifteen temperature goal under the paris climb i'm going to cream it actually became explicit unlike the earlier three months and that is to hold the increase from eight hundred fifty in the global average temperature to well below two degrees c pursuing a target one and a half degrees by twenty one hundred and that in the long term that he can mission a mission shoot occur as soon as possible with zero net or negative emissions by the second half of the century and then the future global commitments are these new national determine contributions that are going to happen every five years so there is going to be a constant reevaluation of those what everyone has agreed to in terms of their emissions ok so now concentration so concentration of carbon dioxide is currently four hundred five parts per million i hope i have the most recent number and the pre industrial concentrations were about two hundred eighty parts  million so it's helpful for me to think of this visually so if you all those dots or other molecules that are in our atmosphere and the red sox are carbon dioxide so it's actually a very small percentage of the atmosphere  ok so what is going on right now this is a budget over about ten years and right now the sources for carbon are fossil fuel burning which you can see there in r and r and then there's also a source from land use change so if you cut down trees you're actually emitting carbon into the atmosphere and then there's two really important sinks one is in the land when you when you grow plants photosynthesis you actually fix carbon and then the ocean actually takes up quite a bit of common as well and those of you who are worried about ocean acidification that's related to cation and so if you look at the net so you take those positives and you subtract the negatives then you actually have atmosphere growth had a grams of carbon per year so that's what's going into the atmosphere and stay in the atmosphere and every year you add on ok so if we think about this is sort of a very optimistic scenario that i plotted up here so if we think about emissions and then the actual carbon dioxide concentration that three hundred fifty parts per million or four hundred or five parts per million or two hundred  parts per million so you can see that the peak emissions in this particular scenario is in about twenty twenty and then you get to negative emissions at about twenty the concentration you can see is a much smoother picture and the peak concentration happens actually much later than the peak emissions because you're still even though you're lowering the emissions you're still adding more into the atmosphere and the concentration will not go down until the emissions are smaller than the land and oceans so that's the other thing to think about it really it's a hard it's a hard thing to turn around so does it really matter when we stop emitting so much or when we turn th corner and these are three scenarios from a recent paper in twenty sixteen and there's sort of three different plans for the future and once again this is a fairly optimistic scenario for the future so we can reduce  emissions starting in two thousand and twenty and then have a sort of a constant sink much later and that like blue line here we can rate way to reduce emissions until twenty thirty and then we come down here and then we'll have to actually go a pretty big negative mission down here or you reduce emissions turning twenty twenty and then you have sort of a bigger singh so what does that mean in terms of temperature so from temperature from emissions we go to concentration and then the concentration determines the amount of warming the climate system has and so you can see that under the pink scenario we actually get the peak temperature well after the peak emissions and then we sort of level out here at a certain level for the blue and then if we look at this darker blue emissions her it actually starts to go down in the future and you get a peak warming here at one point eight degrees c it's actually not at the end of the century peaks mid century and then goes down here it's one to have to grease year and one point three degrees c here in twenty one hundred now the slow ok so where did the paris agreement get us and i like these three scenarios a sort of thinking optimistically where we want to get so the current n b c z's national term and contributions are about here so we're kind of on this per this magenta   but to do that we're going to have to rapidly decreased our mission so let's see what difference it would me to to have you know sort of reach this almost two degree that so we're going to ask the question or i would say that closure at all recently asked this question a climate that is one point two degrees warmer than today versus a climate that is point seven degrees warmer today how much of a difference does that make and is that something that we have to worry about so they did a calculation based on past operations just looking at past climates and looking at differences between climate periods or warmer or cooler and they calculated sort of what some of the extremes in climate you would experience and how they would be different so if we warm to two at one point two degrees c vs point eight degrees c heat waves will be about two to fifteen days longer heat waves will be about one to three degrees warmer and heat extremes will be zero to one degree warmer so of course i had to put up the picture that california fires just to remind ourselves that much of what we experience under climate change is not going to be this slow warming but rather the extremes it will experience through forest fires or other sort of episodic things that really can impact lives the next one is that it's one point two degrees c warmer that state versus eight point eight degrees warmer than today the annual maximum daily rainfall would be five to ten percent bigger and of course i put up a picture of houston i know that's a tropical cyclone so it doesn't really it's not really part of this analysis but it does give the picture that if you really increase the maximum daily rainfall then your chance for flooding is really going to go so i wanted i know that's kind of a bummer isn't it to talk about really rapidly decreasing our emissions and going negative mid century despite all of the bad things are going to happen in terms of extreme events but i wanted to give us points of optimism before we finish with the formal presentations first of all the paris agreement was a huge step forward it was very aspirational and it really set the framework for future future negotiations and all of the countries parties to the u n framework convention on climate change signed on i had one hundred ninety seven i make might be wrong reed is probably right about that but the other thing is that the nationally determine contribution requires  where are you where you need to go and the other thing is that the u s is abiding by a four year exit process so they're not removing right away it's not an indian teeniest thing where we'll just leave the whole negotiation table but we're we're biding by this four year exit process which the date of that is november or the day after the next presidential election so it's something to think about as we look forward to the future and i think that's it for me or obviously we is part of has had a cascading climate actually host these climate on tap events the website has a lot of really useful information some things that you can do for the climate things you can find out about on the cascading climate action website first lobbying your elected officials for climate action including price on carbon emissions or support for clean energy you can comment on proposed projects such as fuel export terminals clean energy and climate change but a geisha in getting letters to editors environmental impact statements and in public hearings all of which you can find out about on cascading climate actions website and then lastly you know you can join groups that plan in action and quite a few of those groups are represented here at the tables a typical that is the exactly the kind of feeling that a lot of people have towards clear and as somebody who should who was looking for a climate change action career in finding nuclear i knew i was coming we kind of up against  however the koreans are building them extraordinarily cheaply right now again by standardizing and the french when they electrified their whole grid in the one nine hundred seventy s by standardizing did very cheaply the plants we've been building in the united states have been one offs and there have been supply chain issues design changes in design as you go along and all those things cost a ton of money that's obviously not acceptable but we know for a fact that we can build nuclear chiefly because the koreans are currently doing that the plants and e right now are quite cheap and their love lives cost of electricity is very reasonable so that's cost now your other question was on nuclear waste which is a very important question the fact is if you had all the nuclear waste that we produce in this country for the last sixty years it would fit in a football field about as big as batteries would be even a little bit less it's like ten feet high or something like that it's very toxic waste but we know exactly what to do with it geologically we can put it into deep crystal and bedrock just like the fins did when they just opened up their first high level waste repository the only problem is that there's political challenges people don't want it people are afraid of it there is a huge amount of culture and you know vitriol against hear about it actually plane travels one of the safest ways to go is the same with nuclear power produce nuclear is one of the safest energy sources and that is supportable fight true facts so i'm going to leave my questions for diplomacy so we also occasionally are trying to make sure that we're not running afoul of any criminal statutes that's not quite what you're asking about i don't think we are and i you know i think that i think that you want to make sure that you're not in the long run setting a precedent that states in any country can say don't listen to the head of my country because that gets messy to say the least in international negotiations so i think it's tough on the other hand i think you know whatever states are pushing for more action and not less wherever they're not trying to destabilize the global system but they're trying to shore it up when they have a dangerous person at the and in particular i think with this issue that is such a high priority it's such a crisis i think the need for action you know basically justifies states taking the pretty unusual step of stepping up and talking to  international level but it's an interesting issue and there are probably some political scientists writing more insightful stuff on what it means and whether it's going to get too messy at the international level for states to be picking up on this stuff it's also not totally i'm new in that you know mayors and governors have been more and more active on the international stage i would just say it's reached an unusual level of intensity important so you know there are a couple of camps of americans who are still at the climate talks and one of those camps is the civil servants people like me who still work for the government and are not having a very good time of it and those people weirdly are right now mostly being allowed to do their jobs in this very quiet way where you actually have u s negotiators still at these talks negotiating the rules of the paris agreement despite the president having said that a poll out so that's weird the governor did have informal interactions with some of those people and basically said you know what's going on what can you tell me and they can't say much i mean those people are in pretty awkward situations then the other camp besides these poorer nonpolitical civil servants who are hating their lives the other camp are the political representatives of the white house and they were at the climate talks too and they were there to hold an event promoting fossil fuels kind of like this presentation but more intense and so so they had like a thousand people lined up at the door to watch this event i would say nine hundred fifty of those people were there to protest the event and the other fifty were there just to you know watch and marvel so that's an awkward interaction the way the governor handled it was to push to the front of the lime walk into this event and hijack the cameras that were all lined up there for the event and say don't listen to this this is crazy nonsense they're just trying to be provocative and then he left before actually talking to the white house guys i so that's a great question who you can see the popularity of women's hole it's real so that's actually a really good question and thank you for that i will start with the first question about the book i mean i haven't read the book i looked the guy up and i knew that he was total fossil fuel guy but there were a few interesting points on the wiki pedia page or at least controversial in part provoking and the fact that fossil fuels has provided a huge amount of good in quality of life for the world is incontrovertibly and if you want to read the vaclav smil book at the end that's the one that makes the point that particular book you're right i don't recommend reading that the guy is not he's not out to help us but read vaclav smil instead of just put it the just kind of to get everyone to pay attention all the more cases they're falling asleep your second question which is very important is the speed of deployment of different energy sources and so my suggestion for the world is to build wind and solar as fast as you can do not stop build it as fast as you possibly can dedicate all your resources that you can that you can afford to wind and solar that will not be enough to be carbon and right now because of the written see problem again when solar only on thirty percent of the time i need massive storage infrastructure and that's where you run into a problem right now you can build up tons of wind and solar because we can handle the ups and downs with natural gas peakers and hydro plan and that is a high carbon fuel and methane is very high warming and so if you want to get serious you better start building every low carbon energy source as fast as you can and nuclear is a massive it's again it's currently producing sixty percent of the carbon free energy in this country china is building them like crazy india is going to serve building them and they are there carbon free and if you don't build them as fast as you can you're not even if you're building wind solar as fast as you can use will not be carbonized at the rate that these models are telling us  yeah yeah i wanted to focus this presentation on going forward from where we are right now because we can't go backwards so if we look forward to the end of the century or to mid century weirdly and that's what i wanted to focus on here and you're right you could talk about we know that there's been changes in extremes there's no question about that we know that the temperature has changed for zero people died from radiation precisely zero and i will give you sources the sources they take  un and world health organization sources the same organizations that say climate change is real and when people debate those organizations you say they're climate change deniers and they're anti science but when those same organizations come out and say zero six first responders heroic people went in there to try to put the fire out and they died of acute radiation poisoning after that enough radiation was released to the surrounding area to cause for a thousand premature cancer deaths or the lives of the people who lived there four thousand out of several tens of millions and these are numbers from very legitimate sources and so when james hansen of the climate scientists who first testified to congress in one thousand eight the climate that global climate change is real when he published a paper that said if i take all the deaths from fukushima three mile island also zero and compare them with all the lives saved by the fact that nuclear energy is totally emission free air pollution free and when they build nuclear plants they don't build a coal plant that does kill people through upper respiratory disease through air pollution that doesn't even consider levels it turns out that nuclear fleet has saved one point eight million lives and displace sixty five million tonnes of carbon dioxide and so i say to you nuclear is extraordinarily safe even even given the fact that there have been several accidents simple to suggest that it did is a progressive city take some more significant action in places where we can make a difference and someone had indicated that maybe we have a need to ban internal combustion engines in the city of seattle and if you've heard this before ice free by two thousand and twenty three it is a slogan it's used so obviously this would require substantial changes in our transportation infrastructure and i'm just kind of curious if anybody on the panel would speak to that and in particular transportation is a bigger share of our emissions than a lot of places so the shift to electric vehicles in washington state is going to be really important and it's a key part of making that transition happen there are a bunch of countries and some cities around the world that have announced they will ban the internal combustion engine or they've announced that they have a target to basically phase it out my understanding is that almost none of those places have a real plans to do so but those are still important symbols of the transition and i think they're being well received in some places so i think it's provocative i think there's about a zero percent chance that seattle has the legal capacity to ban the internal combustion engine you know maybe if they try it'll still help get some excitement and enthusiasm and generate some momentum for the transition but i think that there's more symbolic power than substantive power in those announcements right now but that's not  that's not saying it's not worthwhile one of the one of the best ways to get people to move to clean energy sources is to make it cheap make it so that they personally benefit by being should have an electric car and you live by a coal plant you're only helping a little bit because the you the father of one of those kids talk to the governor recently at a town hall and you know those people are passionate about the same thing achieving great reductions i'm not incredibly conversant with the details about lawsuit but i think that you know there are there are a set of admission goals right now that are statutory goals that the washington state legislature has embedded in the law and then there are much stronger limits the department of ecology is recommended they said we should be pursuing a much more aggressive outway i'm a legislature as an act that you know the governor is i would say obsessed with reducing emissions and you know constantly dissatisfied our current efforts so he's pursuing emission reductions wherever he can and he's trying to get action to ramp up so it's not as simple as just saying here's the world's most ambitious goal and then assuming everything will fall into place i'd