The Future of Global Governance — 2025 College and University Educators Workshop
About College and University Educators Workshops
In this session of “The Future of Global Governance,” Thomas J. Bollyky addresses the World Health Organization and the global health outlook, Esther Brimmer speaks on the Arctic, space diplomacy, and governing the global commons, and Varun Sivaram discusses climate realism and global climate agreements. The conversation is moderated by Carla Anne Robbins.
The goal of the workshop is to find new ways for college and university educators to encourage their students to learn about international relations and the role of the United States in the world. It provides an opportunity for educators to explore the wide array of CFR and Foreign Affairs teaching and research resources available to the academic community, participate in substantive briefings with subject experts as well as in group discussions, and share best practices and educational tools for bringing global issues into the classroom.
The Future of Global Governance
Thomas J. Bollyky, Esther Brimmer, Varun Sivaram
FASKIANOS: (In progress)—our next session, on the Future of Global Governance. This session, in your program it says the session's being moderated by Charlotte Howard. She had an emergency, so our very own Carla Anne Robbins has stepped in to moderate.
Carla Anne Robbins is senior fellow here at CFR. She’s the Marxe faculty director of the master of international affairs program and clinical professor of national security studies at the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs at Baruch College. So with that, I’m going to invite them on the stage. And Carla will introduce our distinguished panel.
ROBBINS: Hey, there. Sorry that I’m not the Economist. But I used to be the New York Times, and that’s even better. (Laughter.) What can I tell you? We had a daily rather than a weekly, what can I tell you? So, has it been a great conference so far?
AUDIENCE: Yes.
ROBBINS: Hmm. I know it’s tough out here in academia. I can tell you that. (Laughs.) But global governance, yay. So, Varun, thank you for doing this too. My master’s program, we have an unofficial slogan. And that is, global solutions for global challenges. And I still want to believe that’s possible. So, you all have to restore my faith today. Try hard, OK? (Laughter.)
BRIMMER: It’s a tall order.
ROBBINS: I know it’s a tall order, particularly in these days. So, welcome to our discussion on the future of global governance. You have my colleagues’ bios, so I’m just going to give you some quick hits. Thomas Bollyky is the Bloomberg chair in global health, senior fellow for international economics, law, and development, and director of CFR’s Global Health Program. And if you aren’t signed up for Think Global Health, you should be. So I recommend that as well. Esther Brimmer is the James H. Binger senior fellow in global governance. And what should they be signing up for you?
BRIMMER: They could be signing up actually for our Council of Councils newsletter as well.
ROBBINS: OK. I’m sure there’s a list in there. And on Zoom, Varun Sivaram, is the senior fellow for energy and climate and the director of CFR’s Climate Realism Initiative. And there’s a climate realism email now as well, because I just signed up for it. So, I want to thank everyone for being here. And just a very quick word on format. Our discussion is on the record. And Esther, Tom, Varun, and I will chat for about thirty minutes, and then open our conversation up to your questions.
So, Tom, let’s start with you. Since taking office, President Trump has pulled the U.S. out of the World Health Organization again, shut down USAID, ending billions in U.S. funded bilateral and multilateral health programs. And in your recent article in Foreign Affairs—which is really great, I recommend it. I must admit, I only read it today on the train, but I did read it. It was fabulous—you wrote about the critical and outsized role the U.S. has played fighting diseases that poor countries cannot fight alone.
And the data—I mean, the numbers are pretty extraordinary. In 2023, we spent just 0.3 percent of the budget on global health, but that $20.6 billion translated into nearly three quarters of international development assistance for HIV/AIDS, 40 percent of malaria aid, more than a third of global funding to combat tuberculosis. We were also the biggest provider of vaccines to the COVID-19 Vaccine Initiative, and the main player in the World Bank’s Pandemic Fund.
So, if we’re out of the business of doing this, is anyone out there going to fill the gap? And if we want to be utterly selfish about it, which seems to be our way these days, are we going to be in a lot more risk because of this? Are we not going to see the next pandemic coming?
BOLLYKY: Right. Well, first of all, thank you for the opportunity to speak to this group. I am a huge fan of—Irina runs a number of networks. I think they’re among the best parts of the Council. It’s really a great opportunity to be able to speak with all of you.
So, as was rightly pointed out, this has been a period of enormous disruption. Over the last nearly three months, we have dismantled a system of global health governance that the U.S. largely proposed, designed, to a great extent directed, and funded over the last twenty-five years. Really comes in three buckets, that were mentioned before. Disruption to the U.S. support for the World Health Organization, where the U.S. was also the largest funder, responsible for 16 percent of its budget, disproportionately focusing on global health emergencies and polio. We saw enormous disruption to the bilateral programs that the U.S. operates through the USAID. We’ve canceled 90 percent of the grants that the U.S. Agency for International Development funds. And we have reduced the staff from USAID from roughly 10,000 individuals to fifteen, that are now being folded into the State Department. We’ve also seen a disruption of funding for global health initiatives like the Global Vaccine Alliance, called Gavi, and a number of other programs.
Much of the initial response to this disruption that occurred in the U.S. is, well, this is going to open the door to U.S. adversaries, in particular China, to come and take over these programs and take advantage of this disruption. And I’m here to tell you that, I’m sorry to say, the reality is much worse than that. The worst thing that can happen to Americans is not that China would assume U.S.-funded global health programs. It’s that no one will. And the reality is that there will be some competition or some efforts, from China in particular, to take advantage of the disruption in a few countries—Southeast Asia in particular. And they are already trying to take advantage of these programs. But those programs in Southeast Asia represent a very small proportion of what we funded with U.S. global health assistance. The vast majority of that funding was in Africa. And no one is coming to assume the responsibility of those programs.
The cuts that have occurred in U.S. development assistance for health, that gap is not going to be filled by China which, by and large, does not fund multilateral initiatives and has shifted away from funding programs in Africa, for the most part. We can talk about some of the exceptions later. It will not be filled by European actors, who are in the midst of their own cuts in international development assistance in part for the need to shift funding to defense under the perception that traditional military alliances are not what they once were. So you may have seen the UK government is winding down its development assistance from representing .05 (sic; .5) percent of its GDP to just .3 percent. Germany is also exploring cuts. France is exploring a 40 percent cut. So it’s not going to come from our traditional allies.
And it’s not going to come, at least initially, from a lot of the countries that were aid recipients. The average government in sub-Saharan Africa spends $92 per person on health, which is one-fifth of what is spent on the less—the region that spends the second-least on health. Because of demographic property projections of population growth, that spending in sub-Saharan Africa by governments was projected to go down not up over the next twenty years, because it would not keep up with population growth. So, these will—this will not be an easy burden to assume. And unfortunately, it will not be our adversaries’. It will not be, really, anyone that assumes many of these programs.
ROBBINS: So did we learn any lessons from COVID? I mean, are we—at least do we have a system, an early warning system out there? Is that all going to fall apart without money? Next big pandemic, and we’re just not going to see it, is that the lesson here?
BOLLYKY: We learned the wrong lessons from COVID. We certainly learned some lessons from COVID. And I think other countries did as well. You know, I think there was a perception that a lot of global health programs weren’t as effective in keeping Americans safe as they might. That runs counter to the fact that global vaccination programs are estimated have saved millions of lives in the pandemic, but there’s a perception that they didn’t keep this devastating disease from U.S. shores, so therefore it may not be as effective. I think other countries learned during the pandemic, and they’re learning anew, that they can’t rely on other nations for their own safety. So, sadly, many countries had to wait a significant period of time before getting vaccines in the pandemic, which I think makes them less trustworthy. And then this sudden disruption of USAID programs in countries now will make them less likely to rely on multilateral initiatives moving forward.
This is a shame, of course, because our safety from global health threats depends on other nations taking actions to contain outbreaks when they occur, and us doing the same when we have our own outbreaks. But ideally, the system around global health security is about keeping diseases contained where they arise, and that’s going to be harder to do in this environment. So, we still have some surveillance programs. We’ll see how much they are adopted, but a lot of that depends on the WHO and other multilateral initiatives. And there’s still much to be sorted out, but there’s reason to be fearful about what proceeds from here.
ROBBINS: I want to move on to Esther, but just one very short question here. Is there a delay process in the withdrawal from the WHO? So, are we still going to meetings? Or are we out?
BOLLYKY: We are haunting meetings. (Laughter.) We go as an observer, but we do not participate. The way the withdrawal occurred, for those of you that saw the executive order issued on the first day the president re-entered office, it was actually written in a way that what it did was withdraw the letter issued by President Biden to stop the U.S.’s previously announced withdrawal from the World Health Organization. This is significant because the legislation that exists in the U.S. around the U.S. entering into membership with the World Health Organization requires one year’s notice. So, we did not—we did not withdraw again. We reinstituted a previous withdrawal so that it could be effective immediately, so we don’t have to wait one year. So, that’s happening. That’s happened now. So we are still observers in some meetings, like around flu and the recent executive board meetings. But we have withdrawn from active participation.
ROBBINS: OK. (Laughs.) Esther—and, Varun, and I apologize, I’m turned away from you. This is not—it’s not the greatest setup there. I can see you over there. So, you work on two domains. There was that movie that said it in space no one can hear you scream, or something like that. (Laughter.) OK, you work on two domains that are sorely in need of governance, space and the Arctic. Very simple question, are we moving into two new cold wars in both spaces?
BRIMMER: It could be very chilly. (Laughter.) So, first, welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations. I too am a fan of the—and appreciate the importance of education. And I train the next generation—I spent half my career, obviously, at universities as well. And I’m just so glad that you’ve taken the time to be here. I’m looking forward to our conversation and discussion, because I know we’ll all learn a lot. And it’s great to be here with my colleagues. I apologize, I’ve been at three conferences this week, so I’m very hoarse. (Laughs.) But that said, it is—I’m delighted to be here and look forward to our conversation.
And, indeed, what I work on is actually areas beyond national jurisdiction because, in a sense, everything old is new again. We are back to an era where great powers are competing in global spaces. Yes, that includes oceans, that includes the Arctic, Antarctic, and, most significantly, outer space. And a conference I was just at this week was actually about outer space. And so I’ll just touch on both of those. So, first, one example is the Arctic. Now, you will have seen the little issue about Greenland, but that’s just the latest version of a return to great-power attention to the Arctic. And indeed, it is where you see—in these areas of global commons, you see intersections of multiple phenomena.
The most significant, of course, is climate change, and therefore the impact on the Arctic, as you know, is happening three to four times faster. And so you have, again, the possibility of navigation in ways that were not thinkable before. Therefore, you also have the return of great powers running their coast guards through there. Also what’s interesting is most of these areas are usually either global commons or areas where we have to put up with our adversaries. So, the United States and the Russian Federation have to talk to each other because we are responsible for the straits. It’s international waterways. We’re the coastal countries. So, for maritime traffic coming through there, we do have to communicate on search and rescue and other areas. Then, of course, you have the important environmental issues. You have key minerals issues. And you have, as I say, great-power competition issues happening in the Arctic.
It’s also interesting, because it’s a global issue. It’s also a domestic issue. There are very few of those. But, of course, the state of Alaska, our longest coastline, is—we’re an Arctic country because of Alaska. And so there’s a very interesting dynamic on the important needs of our fellow Americans in Alaska, and the multiple issues and challenges that they face. So it’s interesting on multiple levels. And, yes, CFR did do a report in 2017 on the Arctic, had a chance to work.
But I’ll focus on space, largely because space is actually crucial to modern life. We’re all saying hi to Varun because, you know, we have satellites that are making sure we can see you. You all have your phones and, you know, were checking, you know, how long it’s going to take us to get, you know, to the train station. And, you know, if you take Uber, yeah, Uber—you know, satellites tell Uber where to pick you up. It’s also at times telling you how to make sure you can withdraw cash—remember cash—from the bank, for example. Or tap with your credit card. There are all sorts of ways in which space is absolutely vital to modern life.
It’s also vital to national security and, increasingly, an important economic carrier. Some of the most dramatic changes happening off planet include the national security challenges. We can talk about that, possible return of great-power competition in this area, and concern about whether, one, at least one, adversary may be considering introducing a nuclear component, we’re not sure exactly what it is, into space. But then also we have the enormous growth of the space economy, and so that there are now companies—some of them are out of the aerospace area, some are out of the pharmaceutical area, for example—that see space as an important place for future economic growth.
But it’s also the zone of competition. At the moment five countries—five countries and two companies have landed on the moon. And we’re seeing the return, I say, of competition. What’s interesting will be to see how—to what extent partnerships grow as states lead the Artemis Accord partnership, and to what extent we see—we see rivalries. But yet again, space is a place where we will have to talk with other countries. Most importantly, if you read the Task Force Report—it talks about a lot of things, but I think one of the most important things it talks important things it talks about is search and rescue. You think about the course of international law, one of the oldest principles going back 500 years is rescue. If there’s a sailor in the water, you’re supposed to fish them out, right? You know you can, then—you might imprison them, but at least you’re supposed to fish them out.
All major spacefaring countries have signed the Rescue and Return Treaty, which says that, you know, your capsule comes down, Chinese coast guard picks you up, they’ll return you and your capsule back to the United States. The idea—one of the places where we have to decide now about how we want to go into space, do we want to go as one nationality, or do we go as human beings? If we go as human beings, then we need to work on search and rescue. We need to make the engineering choices now so that all of—so that you have interoperability to allow you to rescue each other. We are going in space where we’ll continue to send more people in space, including more civilians as our space economy grows. We’ll actually have to figure out how to work with our adversaries in order to make it a success.
ROBBINS: So, you mentioned—thank you. You mentioned the Task Force Report on space. And the recommendations are both unilateral and multilateral, in your report. You note that the United States has more strategic and intelligence assets in space than any other country, which makes us hugely vulnerable to attack by China and Russia, potentially, which takes for granted that—basically, that space is inevitably going to become a militarized domain. At the same time, you also talk about the other danger, which is traffic accidents. It’s getting really, really crowded up there. And you talk about the need for multilateral negotiations, for building on old treaties there.
So, first of all, have we just given up? Have we accepted that space is going to become a militarized domain? That this whole notion of the Conference on Disarmament, I remember all that stuff from the old days. I’m an old—an old arms control nerd. Have we just given up on that? Or can we potentially build on the notion of we all have this very strong economic interest to deconflict, and maybe we could move back into potentially negotiating lessening the potential for military competition as well?
BRIMMER: So, indeed, this is the crucial question on national security issues. And just to take a moment to draw a picture for you. That if you’re thinking about—if you think about the Earth, then there are at least three bands. There’s low-earth orbit. And much of what we’re discussing is focused on low-earth orbit. Within low-earth orbit is where we have the International Space Station. So, people have—you know, live in this area. There’s medium-earth orbit. And then there is the geosynchronous orbit. The geosynchronous orbit, very, very high up, about 22,000 miles up. And they—and what has been traditionally the case is that the United States intelligence and other satellites are at the very high altitudes. And for years, you know, decades, you know, they were beyond—you know, no one else could get up there, and they could be a threat.
But with the—with changes in threats, there’s also now a greater proliferation of satellites, military satellites, at lower levels. And they’re not just intelligence satellites. They’re also satellites for communications, so that the breakthrough of the Gulf War was the United States was able to give commands via satellite. That is much more developed now. So, one of the key—the two key concepts are militarization versus weaponization. And as you can imagine, there’s a discussion. You could argue that space is already militarized. That, yes, there are military uses of space, one of—a larger which is communications, and observation—Earth observation. We actually monitor our arms control agreements from space. And so all that says that, yes, those are military uses. Those are people, militaries, who are doing that.
However, the question is, are there weapons in space? And this is where there’s a real question as to who is doing what. And you will recall a year ago that there was quite a lot of public discussion in the Capital and elsewhere, saying—arguing that the Russians were actually in the process of introducing possible weapons back into space. There’s also a question whether you use the term “nuclear,” because there are—one idea, of course, is for nuclear energy to be used to power those—
ROBBINS: For propulsion, yeah.
BRIMMER: Yeah, because not everyone can be powered by solar energy. So, there’s a real—there are debates about terms, but there are more fundamental issues about to what extent do we think that the Outer Space Treaty, one of the most—the foundational document for use in space—to what extent that can exclude the use of weaponization of space. And so those are live issues—really current issues now, about what that means. And that’s all before you get to this latest golden dome issue. So, indeed, the taskforce was concerned particularly about the possibility of, particularly, the Russian Federation moving to change the norms in space. There also is important competition with China as well. And there’s also important possibilities of partnership. So it’s a complex, complex relationship.
ROBBINS: Lots there. That’s great. We are going to get to questions. We can all nerd out together soon. So I want to move on to Varun, so I’m going to—I apologize—(inaudible)—back to you.
So, Varun, lovely to meet you. You’re the one person I haven’t met before.
SIVARAM: Great to meet you.
ROBBINS: So, I read your April 7 article on CFR.org, which I found both compelling and, frankly, disturbing, since it seems to jettison nearly all hope for global governance in the climate space. So forgive me, I’m going to quickly set the stage. And I may get it somewhat wrong, and you can correct me. But you argue first that the Paris targets are unachievable. And you write that even if multilateral climate agreements were possible, that a global transition to clean energy would degrade U.S. economic and security interests while bolstering China’s, since the U.S. is the world’s largest oil and gas producer and one of its largest exporters, while China has emerged as by far the dominant producer of clean energy technologies.
So, this climate realism argument that you’re making, which is really quite compelling, what should the U.S. be doing? You know, we just can’t sit back and deny. You paint a pretty terrifying image of the coming climate disasters. And you also write that we have a strong interest in other countries’ climate policies, since by the end of the century the U.S. is expected to account for only about 5 percent of the global greenhouse gasses. So, can you give us an argument? How much—is there any room for multilateral action in this? Or is it basically every country for itself?
SIVARAM: Great, great questions. First of all, I’m so honored to do this. I’m sorry I couldn’t be there with you, but this is a great event.
You know, ordinarily I’d go to an event like this and I’d say, climate is the threat that should scare all of us in the room the most. But of course, I’m up here on the screen with Tom and Esther. Tom’s got the specter of a civilization wiping out—wiped out by a pandemic, and Esther’s got the specter of a civilization being wiped out by some space threat. So, I want to be clear that climate is, in my opinion, a top tier—(laughter)—and I don’t think it’s been considered one. I don’t think we take it as seriously in our foreign policy as great-power competition with China, or Iran’s nuclear weapons, or North Korea, or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Frankly, climate scares me much more than any of the latter do.
What should we do about it is your question. Let me first say we should all agree that all-out war is about as scary as climate change at the three degrees of average global warming level. That is an extraordinarily scary level of climate change. It is one of the greatest threats to the American homeland. And I think from there, the disagreement becomes violent. Because there’s been this convenient narrative historically that, well, if we all agree that we’re super scared about the climate threat to the homeland, then naturally the obvious thing we should do is get together as a global community and agree on emissions reductions.
And the amount of scientific consensus on how scary climate is, and the amount of consensus from so many people working the climate field that the obvious solution is to get together 192 countries in the United Nations conventions and try and solve the problem, is incorrectly parallel. It is, in fact, the case that climate is a serious threat. But for this forum of educators, as we educate the next generation of international relations and foreign policy talent, we should be blunt. It is not at all obvious that this problem is solvable through multilateral cooperation.
And in fact, three decades of that approach have demonstrated that multilateral cooperation just has not worked very well. I say this with the scars of having been a climate negotiator myself, right? I was a negotiator at the Glasgow summit in the UK, after that at Sharm El-Sheikh in Egypt. We’ve made—we’ve made progress. Look, I worked for maybe one of the master negotiators and diplomats of all time, Secretary John Kerry. I think the world is farther along thanks to his remarkable efforts. But we have also seen the limits of diplomacy. If Secretary Kerry can’t get the entire world to agree to two degrees Celsius, there is no human on this planet who can.
So, what should the United States do? I still think there are three constructive things that we can do. The first is United States needs to prepare, far more urgently than we have, for a world that is at least three degrees warmer. That world is going to implicate, for example, some of the things that Esther was talking about. As the Arctic melts, for example, the race for geopolitical advantage, the race for critical minerals in that region will intensify. It’s incumbent upon America to say, it is in our interest to look to where the puck—to skate to where the puck is headed. I’ve just used an ice analogy for an ice sheet that’s about to melt, so forgive me.
But that requires the United States to make clear and decisive decisions. I’m not saying we should annex Greenland. I am saying that we should plan for far more of the ice sheet to turn into water over the rest of the century. And at home, of course, we need to increase our investments in adaptation and resilience a hundred- or a thousandfold. We should be prepared to evacuate large cities and states. This is very scary, folks.
The second thing that America should do is to invest in our own competitiveness in the emerging clean energy transition. You know, I was looking at a chart yesterday. There are two ways of looking at clean energy. In the electric power sector around the world, clean energy has achieved a 40 percent market share. That’s good news. If you look at the curve, the market share of clean energy has risen over time and in 2024 hit 40 percent, a world record. The bad way of looking at the chart is if you look at the actual quantities, the actual quantities of fossil fuels have gone up, just more slowly, and the actual quantities of clean energy have gone up just more quickly. We are actually not living through a clean energy transition right now. We’re living through a clean energy and dirty energy addition—everything is growing.
And as a result, greenhouse gas emissions are growing. You know, you mentioned at the top of your question—you said, hey, Varun has written that an energy transition is not in America’s interest. What I wrote in that article, just to be clear, is an energy transition is not currently in our interest because China dominates electric vehicles, solar panels, and battery manufacturing. But it could be. It could be in our interest, if America develops globally competitive industries where we can actually compete with China and other countries in technologies where we are good. Those technologies include areas of comparative advantage such as solid-state next generation batteries. It’s American companies that have invented these technologies.
Next-generation geothermal energy. Advanced nuclear, where we once had a large lead but ceded it to China and Russia. And digital technologies for the smart grid of the future. These are all areas where the United States can go toe to toe with China, but only if we invest in innovation and the next generation. I have been publicly critical of the Biden administration, for which I worked, for spending far too much money on existing technologies—technologies China has already won. So I think it can be in our interest. And I think if America develops the next generation of technologies, we actually help the entire world out because India, Indonesia, South Africa, everybody gets to use American technologies and drive down their emissions if they are cheaper and better. And we have the capability to make technologies cheaper and better.
And then the third thing we should do is we should urgently find ways, through limited multilateral cooperation, through American leadership, and, yes, to your point, through coercion, to limit catastrophic climate change beyond some of the planetary tipping point, extinction-level events that could actually happen. Again, ordinarily I would scare everyone in this audience but I’m just I’m just watching Tom’s reaction, because every time I say something about extinction Tom can probably come back with something else related to a pandemic. (Laughter.) So I want to be modest in what the harms of climate can be, but let me be clear.
Four, five, six, seven degrees of warming will have extraordinary impacts on the globe. It’ll threaten American society as we know it. And they will have knock-on health effects. That will be one of the principal vectors through which climate affects human well-being, is through global health. Given this, the United States has a couple avenues to go. We can invest in this highly speculative concept of solar radiation management, or geoengineering, just to be ready in case we need to spew aerosols into the atmosphere. Some have said, let’s actually be much more intelligent about it. Don’t save it as a break glass option. Invest in it and start doing it at small scales right now.
There are lots of questions of moral hazards and perverse incentives, but given a civilization threatening threat like this one, we should—we should consider every option on the table. And then, of course, I did mention in that essay that nearly 90 percent of greenhouse gas emissions for the rest of the century will come from outside advanced economies. China and emerging economies will drive them. That means we’ve got to do everything we can to reduce the emissions in those economies.
One very odd and unintended consequence of the trade war with China may very well be that by the Western world erecting barriers to Chinese production, Chinese overcapacity in solar panels and electric vehicles, wind turbines, will spill over in a very cheap way to emerging economies. That could actually be very good for emissions. This is paradoxical, that by China being the exporter of choice to the to emerging economies—Pakistan, for example, already imported 22 gigawatts of solar last year from China—there really is a chance for some good to be done.
Let me just pause there. Those are three constructive avenues the United States can take, both to protect our interests, selfishly, but I also believe to help the world achieve a better outcome than we’re currently on track for.
ROBBINS: So, can we talk a little bit about how we get—if 85 to 90 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions are going to come from developing economies? Originally, the notion was we broke it, and it was unfair, and we were—we were the ones who were going to have to fix it. But, you know, physics isn’t fair. And the reality of it is you’re not going to solve the problem of greenhouse gas emissions by being fair. If you don’t get China and India to restrain their emissions of greenhouse gasses, not going to happen. So that’s why, you know, Paris seemed to be the important change here. The difference between Paris and Kyoto was you couldn’t do it in a fair way anymore. How are you going to get these countries to not do what we did, which was to base their development on burning dirty fuel? You used the word “coercion.” Can you talk about that? Are we going to bully them? Are we going to threaten them militarily into not developing at a pace that we developed at?
SIVARAM: Yes. Excellent question. Let me first say, I want to reiterate, the work of diplomats like John Kerry, the work of the Paris agreement, made progress. We probably got countries to increase the awareness in their domestic publics, thanks to the fanfare of the Paris agreement, of action on climate change, created domestic pressure groups. And every one of these countries have probably reduced the counterfactual emissions compared to a world in which Paris never existed. I want to make that point first. In India, for example—I used to live and work in India. I care deeply about India’s development. I was the chief technology officer of India’s biggest renewable company. And India has actually been a dramatically successful country in terms of its renewable energy adoption, compared to the rest of the emerging economies.
Nevertheless, I think there’s so much more room for them to invest in clean energy and shut down coal, and meet their development objectives. But now I want to answer your hard-edge question, which is the correct question. It is fundamentally unfair. It is historically unfair that emerging economies did not get the century or more—century and a half of development of fossil fuels that advanced economies did. It is unfair that now, as you said, physics doesn’t lie, and 85 to 90 percent of emissions are coming from China and emerging economies. That’s where we have to reduce them.
But let me say one more thing, physics, of course, does not—does not think about morality. Realpolitik and realist foreign policy also probably has a limited place for purely morally sound policies. It would likely be morally sound, under many philosophers’ conception of the world, for rich countries to simply pay reparations and pay for the clean energy transitions of poorer countries. That is not what’s going to happen. And after thirty years, it’s important for the world to recognize that will not happen. Our domestic public won’t let us do it. The United States voter, on average, is not going to support a several trillion-dollar transfer payment to multiple emerging economies.
Given this reality, what can we do? What I have shared in the essay is what some might consider odious, a policy of coercion. For example, you might apply all the tariff leverage that we’ve just applied for the purpose of supporting emission reductions. Imagine if Vietnam faced a 50-plus percent tariff, but the goal for Vietnam was not to fix the trade surplus with the United States, it was instead to reduce its carbon emissions. Vietnam may very well comply. And there are multiple tools the United States has at its disposal, alongside its advanced economy allies, which collectively will account for less than 15 percent of future emissions, whether that’s trade, economic statecraft, diplomacy, and, yes, military tools.
The question is, is this so odious that we should not be talking about that today? Open question. But I can commit to you that in twenty years or thirty years, everybody will talk about it. And I would prefer to have that conversation today, decades before we absolutely have to, than at the point where there’s a world war fought over the disasters that threaten borders and that threatened the existence of societies.
ROBBINS: Well, you guys have really failed at my request to cheer me up. (Laughter.) But very compelling arguments. At this point I want to turn it over to the group to ask questions, and maybe you’ll get—persuade them to give us a little bit more hope than I’ve been able to do. Thank you. These are all compelling. Raise your hands, stand, wait for the mic, and then state your name and your academic affiliation. So who is first? And I always call on women. It’s a reminder. It’s a Council thing. So, yeah, right there. (Laughs.) I call on men too.
Q: Hi. Thank you so much for your presentations. My name is Ashley Valanzola, Middle Tennessee State University.
And what I’ve been thinking in trying to solve and tackle some of these problems you’ve laid out before us is that you’re simultaneously combating so much misinformation, what’s circulating on social media. And so I wonder if you have thoughts on that, and also about messaging and in terms of this larger policy conversation.
BRIMMER: I will pick up on messaging, because part of it’s explaining to the public what’s important to them. And I will say, one of the—one of the expanding, space economies is challenging, but one of the exciting things is that it is uplifting. It is exciting to think about return—you know, return to the moon. It’s exciting to think about some of the possibilities. And why was interested, and where I think some of our fields overlap, was that one of—one of the industries that is interested in manufacturing in the in orbit is, of course, pharmaceuticals, because of the ability to actually work on certain compounds without gravity. And so there are various companies—so just yesterday I was sitting in this conference in Colorado, you know, with all our people, foreign policy people and national security people.
But I was in the space economy session. And to hear people at companies who are positive. They’re saying, we can see how we can actually produce products that that’ll be good for people. You know, I hadn’t realized that there’s even some companies who say, you know, we can even take some elements of automotive manufacture and take them to space, again, keeping costs down and seeing new ways of producing products that will actually benefit people back on Earth. And so I’d say that some of that, I think, is helpful in terms of—and the messaging is that it’s by cooperating that we actually can do this, that keeps costs down, which means more people would have access to certain medicines, because we work together on this. But it has to be together.
BOLLYKY: I’ll just say a little bit on the messaging issue. So, of course, in public health, particularly after COVID-19, this is an important topic. It’s not just in the United States that you’ve seen vaccination rates drop. You’ve seen it in other countries as well. There is absolutely a tie both to misinformation and, state sponsored in many cases, disinformation as a driver of that. There is a good amount of research going on about what we might do. I’m sure you’re probably familiar with some of this around pre-bunking or other ideas of what we might do to try to defang that phenomenon of misinformation and disinformation.
We’ve, here at the Council, worked a lot on the issue of trust and the role that it played in the pandemic, both in explaining differences on how countries perform but also differences between how U.S. states performed. Even when you control for all the relevant biological factors, in the United States there was a fourfold difference between the best performing U.S. states, which performed like countries in Scandinavia, and the worst performing states, which performed akin to the worst performing countries in the world. And the role of trust has a big function in that.
Misinformation, disinformation is a part of that, but one idea that we’ve put forward and we’ve been developing a lot is, for the purposes of preparedness, instead of having an agenda of how do we rebuild trust in societies and make ourselves more cohesive, because it is primarily social trust, the way we feel about one another, that’s a driver—we should take the world as the dysfunctional place that it is and assume we’re going to remain low trust in some capacities. And from that standpoint, have more ongoing monitoring and strategies that target cooperation in low-trust societies. Because there is good research on that, on what we might do. And some of that might fold into this notion of misinformation and disinformation as well. Instead of assuming for our purposes of preparedness that we are heading towards a better world, that we take the world as it is and start to be more proactive about designing strategies that account for those changes.
ROBBINS: I want to ask Varun a question about that, but I want to ask the group a question about climate for a minute. How many of your students have given up on climate? Do you find this? Or how many of your students are really engaged on climate issues? Not an overwhelming number. I mean, I find my students three years ago overwhelmingly wanted to write about climate, study climate. And it’s not that they aren’t aware that it’s a disaster. They seem to be—it’s not that they’re burned out on it. They feel—if anything, they feel helpless, which I find extraordinary for a group of students who really want to fix the world. But not—they feel like they can’t on climate. So, Varun, how do we—whether it’s going to be a question of using tariffs, or whether it’s going to be—whatever it is they’re going to do, how do we get people to feel that it’s not just an overwhelming threat but it’s also something that it has to be acted upon?
SIVARAM: Well, first of all, I think there is a hopeful story here. There’s a hopeful way that we avoid the grim future where there is war between nations or necessary coercion. But we do ourselves a disservice by offering very unrealistic avenues for solving this problem. I think that for educators in this room, telling your students about the real limits of cooperation internationally is important. Your students should know that international cooperation actually has been fantastic in getting the scientists of the world together and the countries of the world to agree that climate change is catastrophic. But it’s been abysmal at getting the countries of the world to actually overhaul their economies to the tune of $10 trillion of investment every year that’s necessary to achieve net zero emissions. And that’s not surprising.
International cooperation has its limits. The vast majority of investments are done through national policies, not through international policies. The places where international cooperation has, in fact, succeeded, in addition to the scientific consensus, are areas like bilateral cooperation. For example, the United States and Canada have a very integrated electricity grid, and we’re able to import clean energy from Canada. Europe has an integrated electricity market, and they’re able to use wind power from the north and use it in the south. This is all manageable, achievable international cooperation. Our students need to come out learning what is realistic and not what is unrealistic.
But what’s the hopeful future? How do you get people excited? For me, it comes down to technology, technology, technology. Some will call me naive about being a techno-optimist, but I see no other solution here. Because what’s really exciting and optimistic for me is that clean technologies are inherently thermodynamically better in many cases. I wrote a book in 2018 on the future of solar power, called Taming the Sun. Back then nobody really thought that solar was going to be a big deal. And I said solar will produce a majority of humanity’s energy in the second half of the century. There’s only one prominent person out there who said a similar thing to me, and you don’t think of him today as a constructive force. His name is Elon Musk.
I believe that solar is inherently a superior energy source to many of the sources we have today, if we can find ways to buffer its unreliability. I think that nuclear fusion, harnessing the power of the sun, is actually a source that’s within our grasp in the coming decades, but well before that, nuclear fission already is within our grasp and demonstrated. There are so many clean energy sources that truly are achievable, but only with much more technology innovation. Innovation, for example, to make that iPhone in your pocket last five days, not one. Or to make an electric vehicle charge in the same amount of time as it takes to fill up gas at a gas station, and work at negative 30 degrees.
We can do that. That optimistic future, where the world doesn’t have to painfully tradeoff between its existing fossil fuel infrastructure and inferior clean energy and expensive infrastructure, but rather it just gets to move to superior technologies, that’s a world we can all believe in, and one that avoids a lot of the grim conflicts. So let’s teach our kids—our students the limits of international cooperation, and to be realistic. And, second, let’s emphasize that if you want to make a meaningful career in this space, technology innovation may be your best first port of call.
ROBBINS: The gentleman right here. Yeah.
Q: Hi. Thank you all. Brian Alexander with Washington and Lee University.
Particularly on climate and global health, one way to characterize the problem is a collective action problem, right? All of us would be better off if we coordinated in the long run, possibly in the short run, but none of us are individually incentivized to do so. And sort of, Carla Anne, to your point on whether our students are engaged or not, the challenge I see for students is kind of where is the agency? What can they do? What’s in it for me? They’re both planning their careers, but they’re also just looking at, even in the most idealistic senses, what can I actually do to engage this?
With the withdrawal of the U.S. from a lot of the climate efforts, and, of course, from the global health efforts, it becomes even more difficult to have this conversation, because you don’t have the state sort of involved in providing what the state does, which is solutions to collective action problems. Where, in both climate and health, and if it applies to space, sorry, can—what role should the state be playing in, let’s say, economic innovation on this technology, or other types of innovation? Because we do need to have this conversation, particularly as the United States is retreating and doing whatever it’s doing. At some point, hopefully the grown-ups are going to arrive and say, OK, we know we can’t go back to the past, but we have to do things looking toward the future.
I like the idea of technology innovation and technology investment, but is that coming from the private sector? Is that coming from the state? In that individual level of what’s in it for me, for our students, right, what role should, let’s say, the state, play? Thanks.
ROBBINS: Jump in.
BRIMMER: I had to start, because you challenged me to say, what about space? So, indeed, of course, the federal government remains the major source of funding for space issues. And some of that—some of that’s continuing. So, obviously, we’re all concerned about what’s happening on federal funding. But that said, there’s still a special role for NASA. We’ll see what actually happens. We have watched the appropriations this year, but there is at least—you know, all of the administrations at this point, of both parties, do think that space is important, for different reasons. But I think that there is a key role that remains, and will continue to remain, an important role for the federal government in direct, straight research. Because we think about the division of space into civil, commercial, and military uses, civil, of course, the first part of that, is scientific research. And that will be a federal issue.
That said, there’s much more international cooperation in this as well. Many more types of joint products and projects. So the U.S. doesn’t have to, you know, bear this all. There are many other countries that have an important contribution to the scientific area. The other thing is to say, in terms of jobs, what I’ve been interested is to see the number of young people, you know, at thirty and under—to me, not very young—who are looking at space as places for careers, because of the expansion of the companies. And then some companies are very small. Some are very large. But you have the legacy, you know, aerospace companies. And you have these new upstarts who are looking for talented people. And in these days, to be able to sit down and talk to people who are excited and felt they were actually going to have a career and people who wanted to invest in them is interesting. I think that’s, again, a ray of hope on the—we’ll see where the jobs go, but there are some jobs.
ROBBINS: Tom, can I sort of put this—a little converse side of this? Which is how much of the dismantling of the government, whether it’s support for university research, NIH, and all the other structures, can that be recovered? How much has already been lost? And how much more is going to be lost?
BOLLYKY: Great. So I’ll try to weave these two in together. I think on—I’ll start with yours first, on how—there is permanent damage that’s been done. I think from donor governments and populations, states that gave money before, the fact that aid has been characterized either as charity instead of investment, corrupt, ideologically driven—I think one of the lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic is it is hard, particularly once those types of narratives have been associated with a particular political party—or political identity, is probably a better way of describing it—it is hard to reverse that. That probably sticks. On the aid recipient side, for governments the loss of trust of these programs collapsing overnight, both in terms of patient populations and those governments, it’s hard to see how that trust could be easily rebuilt. So all that is a challenge moving forward.
Very briefly, on the collective action issues, I would think of it as three sets of issues in global health. There are some issues you can absolutely deal with locally, whether public health systems, or sanitation, some treatment programs. Countries can and will—some of them will deal on their own. The challenge we have for many aid recipient countries is this happened extremely abruptly. Particularly post COVID-19, many of them have very limited fiscal space, high levels of national debt. And the ability to reprogram budgets to the health sector overnight to assume responsibility for some of these programs is going to be a challenge. Some governments will do it. And, frankly, more efficiently than aid-driven programs did. Some other governments will use the disruption to point to external actors as being at fault for why those programs aren’t being met.
Then, there’s the set of things that can only be done efficiently at scale, at least regionally. So a lot of the manufacturing, the supply chains, the distribution, many of these are very small-value markets. They may have a lot of people in them, but the amount of money involved is very small. Hard to do it just on a country-by-country basis. Many vaccines have a lot of components. It doesn’t make sense to make them in just one country. You need to see that more distributed. Can we, coming out of this, have like-minded countries work together at least regionally on some of these challenges?
The last set of issues are problems that can only be dealt multilaterally, nationally. And surveillance really falls in this camp, as does some standard setting activities. Can we still find a way to work together on those challenges that really require countries being able to see what’s emerging around sharing on samples, on influenza, emerging trends, so that they can inform their own policies and product developments? Can we still find a way to work together? And on that last one, I think, is the one where really the jury is still out. Can more sober minds emerge? There was some notion—or, some reports that the Trump administration might still participate in the WHO Coordinated Influenza Surveillance Network. We should encourage those kinds of initiatives to at least keep us in that third band of working together, because it’s not replicable through other means.
ROBBINS: Varun, where is the innovation going to come for technology if the Trump administration seems more focused on drill, baby, drill than anything else?
SIVARAM: Well, I’ll first say that under Trump one he was also—is that any better? Yeah, the network isn’t great. In Trump one, R&D funding for clean energy technologies increased year on year every single year, even though President Trump aimed to zero them out. In Trump two, this current term, I continue to believe that there’s bipartisan support for clean energy technology funding. We may have to call it something else, like emerging energy technologies, but there is bipartisan support for that kind of funding. I also believe that there’s a lot of funding for basic scientific innovation that has spillovers for clean energy technologies and non-clean energy technologies. And that funding, through the NSF, through the DOE—the DOD and the DOE is very important to continue.
So, there is a lot that we can do to hurt ourselves if we cut them. And there are danger signs. But none of them directly oppose the president’s push for drill, baby, drill, or for energy independence, or for energy dominance, et cetera. They are largely technocratic and bipartisan and non-threatening. The other thing I’ll say is the question was just terrific. By the way, I loved your bow tie. The question was, this is a collective action problem. All three of us, Tom, Esther, and I, we all deal in collective actions. What hope is there for our students?
And I’d say, look, in climate, three things at least that they should be excited about. If you’re going to go into the private sector, you have a chance to develop technologies that the rest of the world can use. You go into the public sector, there are two options. Option number one is you can work on enabling American innovators. And I think that’s what the NSF, and the DOD, and the DOE do. And option number two is American foreign policy makers occupy a different and privileged role to almost—for policy makers of almost any other country on Earth. We may not be the single world hegemon, but we are in a world where the United States and China have outsized leverage, particularly the United States with our alliances which we really should be careful about.
Being an American foreign policy maker gives you an outsized role in international leadership and cooperation. So, yes, this is a vicious and ruthless prisoner’s dilemma game. It is a collective action problem. But as we discussed earlier, if there’s any country that has a chance to hasten the net zero transition through its unilateral actions or its ability to corral allies, it is the United States. I think, not all is—not all hope is lost if you’re an American foreign policy maker.
ROBBINS: This side of the room. Gentleman, there.
Q: OK. My name is Kwaku Obosu-Mensah, Lorain County Community College in Elyria, near Cleveland, Ohio.
And I think this question is for Varun. My understanding is that the developing countries are using dirty energy. Let me use it this way. And it is not good for anybody. So, in fact, I know that the argument from the developing countries is that the developed countries developed by using dirty energy. So, let us also use dirty energy to develop to your level. Then we go to the clean energy. You say, and I agree with you, that is disastrous for the word. And you said they should be coerced, in a way they should be forced to use clean energy. Don’t you think the developed countries should rather meet them halfway through incentives or, let’s say, to entice them, instead of being coerced to use dirty energy—I mean, clean energy? Thank you.
SIVARAM: The question is whether you’re asking me, sir, as a philosopher, or a student of ethics, or as a foreign policy practitioner beholden to the wishes of the American voter. I am afraid that if your answer is the latter, we’ve tried this experiment and failed. We cannot raise American will to send trillions of dollars abroad. Just not going to happen. And so I’m so sorry that there’s a divergence between what is morally right and what is actually going to happen. A difference between “should” and “will.” And the Climate Realism Initiative lives largely in the in the realm of “will.” But, again, technology breaks that Gordian knot. If America makes technologies that are cheap and superior, America has a chance to enable emerging economies to grow and to decarbonize at the same time. Thanks.
ROBBINS: OK, right here. And then go back to that side.
Q: Hi. I have a two-part question.
ROBBINS: Can you stand up and tell us you are?
Q: Two-part question. Sokol Celo, Suffolk University in Boston.
Part one. All three panelists talked about multilateral collaborations or organizations. There is one way to—very rough way to categorize those, into the so-called one country one vote organizations versus one dollar one vote organizations. And in my view, it seems as if the current government has some sort of an allergy against the one country, one vote organizations—be it in healthcare, in climate change, or UN. However, we have the other part, the one dollar one vote. And I’m talking more specifically about World Bank and IMF. Is there any hope that this type of organizations might actually pick up the tab, and feel a little bit the void left by what we did, from USAID? Whether there is any hope or not.
Second question. All three panelists—
ROBBINS: Let’s just—let’s deal with that one, OK? I mean, it’s a great question. And certainly, during the pandemic, there was all this talk that the bank was going to pick up, and, you know, have a COVID initiative. And even the Fund was talking a little bit about that, when the Fund sort of gets a little bit of envy for the bank and wants people to like it. So, Tom, and then Esther?
BOLLYKY: So, I think international financial institutions do play an important role on health, the World Bank in particular in funding health system resilience. The Bank, as you know, World Bank, has an arm that works with the private sector on making investments. That’s an important function moving forward. Whether or not the distinction that you’re making between international institutions where the U.S. is the shareholder versus where it’s a member-state driven organization matters to this administration, I do not know. There is a widespread perception that there will be a more—a broader multilateral institution—or, a broader review of the U.S. government’s international commitments and how it works with other institutions. People at the Bank are expecting it. Other institutions in Washington are expecting it. I don’t know what that will do, and in what form those changes might come. But I think it’s too soon to know whether or not the administration is making the distinction you’re making. But certainly those types of institutions play an important role on health.
BRIMMER: I would just add that there’s another way of slicing international organizations, and that is the division between our political organizations and our functional organizations. Because there’s a whole set of international organizations. The most obvious of them is the International Civil Aviation Organization headquartered in Montreal. Everybody’s a party. Everybody is a member. Even, you know, Taiwan appears. It gets renamed different things, you know, but obviously for civil aviation to function everybody has to be part of the same system. And so it is a United Nations agency. It was part of the Bureau of International Organizations. And it will be part of looking at some of the rules for—you know, from ground to the edge of national airspace. Then there’s a gap. And then there’s, you know, actual space.
But one of the things we talk about in our report is to what extent can we introduce some of the space governance issues through existing mechanisms? It would be great to start a whole new international organization. Not going to happen. So, the idea is to look at what do you do? What do you borrow from the International Maritime Organization? We’ve seen there was just a recent agreement there, on a particular issue. What do you borrow from the meteorological organization? The whole set of organizations that are basically considered apolitical, extremely important to national governments functioning, and important to commercial function as well.
The most visible, of course, is the International Telecommunications Union, one of our oldest. Goes back to being the Telegraph Union. Their next meeting will be in 2027. And one of the big issues is, yes, they’re going to be doing the issue of time and communications on the moon. Everybody cares about that, because the companies care about it. And so, there’s this whole set of international organizations that if we, like, don’t call them international organizations but would, say, recognize that global business needs those to function, there might be some surprising allies and support for working through some of these issues.
ROBBINS: Varun—I would love at some point to talk about time on the moon, but not today. (Laughter.) Varun, the Bank and the Fund on climate, do they have a role to play in this?
SIVARAM: So, yeah. First of all, it’s a really good question about the distinction between one—you know, one country one vote, and one dollar one vote. Nevertheless, you know, I have long been skeptical that the Bank and the Fund can marshal the funds, even at their extraordinary scale, to overhaul the global economy. Again, I want to make a distinction here. When we talk about climate change as a collective action problem, compared with almost any other collective action problem, climate change is maybe the thorniest. Again, my copanelists on stage may push back on me on this one, but it’s because we have to fundamentally change the way our societies are structured. Every element of our GDP, every cent, comes down in some way or another to using units of energy. And if you have to change those underlying units of energy that underpin every single economy, there aren’t enough trillions that the bank or the fund control to do that.
Ultimately, it comes down to reordering society. That’s why this is so fundamentally difficult, and why there hasn’t been a quick fix. You know, there’s been a lot of Bank presidents and a lot of Fund presidents who will come and say, hey, we will mobilize capital for the developing world. We’ll get solar projects and wind projects and manufacturing projects. And they’ve absolutely—they’ve done a marvelous job. When I served not only did the international financial institutions do things, but we ourselves, the United States, sent, for example, $500 million to build a solar panel manufacturing facility in India.
It is a drop in the bucket compared to reordering an entire economy. Now I can walk you through the list of things that you can do to enable India to run off of clean energy and not dirty energy. Most of these things, by the way, would be highly salutary for India—widespread deregulation of their electricity markets and liberalization, for example. It would be great for the country. There are entrenched political obstacles, however. And beyond that, the series of things that have to happen are national, domestic policies, not international policies, and likely not things that international aid is going to particularly be helpful with. These are fundamental domestic regulatory reform initiatives. And they have to be undertaken either with domestic political will, external inducement or coercion, or some combination of the two.
ROBBINS: Here. Another woman, please?
Q: Thank you. My name is Daniel Banini. I’m from Providence College.
Now, when it comes to the climate change literature, one of the things out there is that climate change will have a lopsided effect on societies. And the literature out there indicate that developing countries are going to be at the receiving end of the climate change. So, they’re going to be much more impacted. So my question is, do you agree with that statement? Because one of the things that has also been mentioned is the role of technology. And you have alluded to technology as a very important intervening mechanism when it comes to climate change and how it impacts societies. Now when we talk about technology, we understand that developed countries do have technology. So that might even be one of the reasons why we may not have that level of agency that they have to have to act.
Now, if—another part of my question is in terms of climate change, which we all understand is going to have a lopsided effect on developing countries, then there have been a lot of studies looking at the relationship between climate change, conflicts, food production systems, and all of that. Now, when it comes to the developed countries, we don’t see the impact—the direct impact how climate change will manifest locally, and how climate change will affect people. This is the kind of conversation that we don’t normally see or have. In your opinion, how do you see climate change manifesting locally in the U.S., if nothing is done in the next ten, twenty years?
SIVARAM: These are great questions. First of all, I agree with your initial premise. Climate change will have lopsided impacts, for two reasons. One is that a country like Bangladesh is just very vulnerable to flooding, for example, from sea level rise. And, two, is that a country, like Bangladesh—I’m just picking a particular country—may not have the adaptation or resilience resources available to it, may not have the fiscal space available to it, to protect its economic development from the ravages of climate change. So to answer your question first, yes. The developing world will face far more brutal impacts of climate change.
Your second question is correct as well, which is climate—as my friend Sherri Goodman has argued—is what’s called a threat multiplier. You know, you can’t attribute 100 percent of a conflict to climate change, but you can attribute some portion to the fact that the higher number of heat wave days, degraded resources caused droughts, created scarcities of resources, and therefore contributed to a conflict breaking out, or contributed to a wave of migration. By 2050 we could see hundreds of millions of climate migrants around the world. All of these are very true.
Your third question was, what are the effects that the United States will see in the next twenty years? So that means between now and the year 2045. And I have kind of a good news/bad news part of this. The good news is the effects in the next twenty years are going to be manageable by the United States. That’s a prediction. It’s not a fact. They could very well be unmanageable. We’ve already seen an LA wildfire this year that felt like a tactical nuclear weapon had fallen on the city of Los Angeles, or on the communities of Palisades. But, however, in these next two decades I anticipate that the rate of climate disaster increases is going to be—you know, it’s going to be bad. It’s going to cause billions, if not hundreds of billions, of economic damage. But the United States will survive.
The bad news is what to come after. The second half of this century, when global temperatures breach an average rise of two degrees Celsius, two and a half degrees Celsius, and reach three degrees, that’s when we’ll start to see the requirement to evacuate whole cities. That’s when much of Florida and its coastline will be underwater. So the time delay here is meaningful. At our launch of Climate Realism, Secretary Ernie Moniz, the former secretary of energy under President Obama, said: We all love our children, and we love our grandchildren, just not enough—or, not as much as we love ourselves. Now, that’s very true. The impacts to those of us in this room are going to be more manageable than the impacts to, for example, my fifteen-month-old son in his life. And that divergence, that asymmetry of interests, is going to lead those of us in power, those of us who are voters and policymakers, to make suboptimal choices compared to what would be optimal for our children. It’s a sad but true reality.
ROBBINS: Well, with that happy thought—(laughter)—I want to thank Varun.
SIVARAM: I’m so sorry!
ROBBINS: I want to thank Varun. I want to thank Tom. I want to thank Esther. All extraordinary insights. And you have a fifteen-minute break. And after that, you have the CFR Education Presentation. And I’m sure that if they haven’t already shared the links to their stuff they’ll share it with you later. (Applause.) Thanks.
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