KERRY EMANUEL: I'm Kerry Emanuel.
I'm a professor of atmospheric science here at MIT.
I've been at MIT for 36 years.
Before that, I was at UCLA for three years.
And I've been interested in the atmosphere
since I was a young child, and dreamed
that I might make a profession of it some day.
And I have.
Over my professional career, my interests
have shifted a little bit more in the direction
of tropical meteorology and climate.
Most of the scientists who study these things
tend to ignore or brush aside the politics.
There are a few of us, and I guess
I'm included in this, who try to make politicians,
policymakers, and so forth aware of the risks
that we're incurring going forward,
so that they, hopefully, some day,
will pass intelligent legislation and other policies
to deal with those risks.
Politicians need to understand that we scientists are really
trying to understand how the climate system works.
And some of us are also trying to quantify the risks
associated with climate change.
We don't have a political agenda.
We're simply trying to understand the risks.
It's very important for people working on solutions--
and that includes the [INAUDIBLE] political
scientists, social scientists--
to understand fundamentally where
the science is in terms of the assessment of risk
going forward.
What are the risks?
What is the time frame over which
we must deal with those risks to be effective?
In other words, that sets the foundation for everything
they would do to try and deal with or mitigate that risk.
There are some potentially very large risks to civilization.
Those risks have to do mostly with the consequences
of sea level rise and the fact that the distributions
of rainfall favor both more droughts and more floods.
And historically, in human history,
whenever we see climate change that leads to food and water
shortages, that, in turn, leads to political instability.
And political instability in a nuclear armed world
is something that ought to be avoided.
The good news is that we can transform our energy economy
very quickly to get away from carbon
and/or extract carbon from the atmosphere.
We need to very rapidly put in place policies that encourage
innovation in those directions.
And if we did that, I'm confident that science
and engineering would very rapidly solve these problems
while probably improving the economy.
Let me say this.
Two numbers on the table--
the global energy market is $6 trillion annually.
US GDP is $17 trillion.
So energy is more than a third of the US GDP.
Right now, the energy markets are transforming away
from carbon toward innovative new sources.
And right now, China is leading that charge,
with America talking about going backwards to coal.
We can't afford to cede a $6 billion
market to the rest of the world.
We should be the leaders in that innovation.
And we should be capturing as much of that market as we can.
This is good and necessary for our economic well-being,
even if you don't particularly care about climate change.
There are whole other disciplines
in science and engineering that are
trying to understand, what are the solutions that
are out there that could help us mitigate the risks?
I don't think we've been talking nearly enough as a society
about those solutions.
Because some of them are really exciting.
Unfortunately, they're portrayed,
in the media and elsewhere, as sort of economic armageddon--
that we're going to have to go back to the Stone Ages,
where we don't have electricity, or it's very expensive.
On the contrary, there are some interesting alternative energy
sources-- and I don't just mean renewables--
that could drive the price down and could make power even more
plentiful than it is today.
I think there will be bipartisan unity if policies are proposed
that make sense economically-- if they improve the economy.
And I think that's where the focus should lie today.
How can we best transform our energy, not just
to solve the climate problem--
although that, to me, is very important, but to give us
a competitive edge in energy?
There are many reasons to think that we
ought to be transforming our energy economy,
even if climate were not on the table.
First and foremost, eventually we
will run out of fossil fuels.
The projections on the table now is
that oil and gas will be exhausted
at the current rate of consumption
and projecting forward about the end of this century--
coal a little bit later than that.
So eventually, we have to transform away.
If we can get a 50-year head start on that transformation,
not only might we solve the climate problem,
but we might, as a nation, get an edge
in this very, very strong market of energy.
That's what I think we need to be doing.
And rather than holding that innovation back
by subsidizing old means of energy production,
we should encourage, perhaps through carbon pricing,
the development of new sources.