Energy and Climate Change

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Good afternoon! And, you’re welcome! My name is Alex White, chair of the IIEA's energy Working group, and I’m delighted to welcome you to this event this afternoon, which is part of the 2021 lecture series brought to you by ESB and the IIEA. Throughout the course of the year, we've invited international thought leaders and renowned energy experts and political leaders to address critical issues in energy policy. I think if you've been with us even for some of those events, I think you'll agree that it has been, and continues to be, a most stimulating and informative series of engagements. And today, we are privileged to be joined by Professor Megan O’Sullivan. And I’d like to thank Megan for being with us today given her undoubtedly busy schedule.

Megan O’Sullivan is the Gene Kirkpatrick professor of the Practice of International Affairs and director of the Geopolitics of Energy project at Harvard Kennedy school. She's also the chair of the North American group of the Trilateral Commission. Professor O’Sullivan’s an award-winning author, most recently of, “Windfall: How the Energy Abundance Upends Global Politics and Strengthens America’s Power.” I always marvel at how American authors get away with such lengthy titles, and they still appear so punchy when you see them in the bookshops in the States. And that's certainly a very interesting volume, which I’m sure many of you have seen. From July 2013 to December 2013, Professor O’Sullivan was the vice chair of the All-Party Talks in Northern Ireland, as many people may recall. She was also special assistant to President George W. Bush, and deputy national security adviser from 2004 to 2007. She's on the board of Raytheon Technologies, is a member of the International Advisory Group for Linklaters. Professor O’Sullivan was awarded the Defense Department's highest honor for civilians. She holds a BA from Georgetown University, and a masters and a doctorate from Oxford University.

We'll have to stop at this point, or we'll take up the entire period that we have. That’s such a stellar, and interesting, and varied career that our distinguished speaker has this afternoon. The title of Megan O’Sullivan’s address is, “The Geopolitics of the Energy Transition: How will the pursuit of net zero change international politics?” What's going to happen this afternoon is that Megan will speak for maybe 15, 20 minutes. After that presentation, we're going to go to a Q and A session with you, our audience. You can join the discussion using the Q and A function on Zoom, which you should see there on your screen. Feel free to send your questions in throughout the session. Don't wait until the end. Once, if a question occurs to you, you can put it into the chat function and it'll be banked there, and we'll get to it at the end of the presentation. Please do identify yourself, if you don't mind, and your affiliation if you have one, when you ask a question. Reminder that the entire event is on the record and is being recorded as you probably know from an indication point. Feel free, the last point, to join the discussion on Twitter if you're so motivated. And the hashtag is #rethinkenergy. I want to thank, by the way, the ESB for their continued collaboration and support for this series. And we do have with us, Jim Dollard, who's executive director of Generation and Trading at the ESB. We hope perhaps to have a word from Jim, in the course of our afternoon session. So, hopefully we'll come to Jim later. Thank him for being present. And once again, thank the ESB for all of their support. It's over to you Megan O’Sullivan. Thank you for being with us, and the floor is yours.

Excellent! Thank you very much Alex, and good afternoon to all of you. It's still morning in my part of the world, but I know you're well ahead of me. It's a real pleasure to be here with all of you today and to be with the Institute of International European Affairs. This has been an engagement long in the making. I think it has literally been years that we have been going back and forth, and originally I was hoping to be with you in Dublin, a place that is near and dear to my heart. But alas, I am sitting here in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is not a bad place to be, but we're still able to have what I expect will be a really interesting dialogue. And I’m also grateful for the support of ESB to the IIEA for this series.

And as Alex said, and Alex, thank you for that introduction, I’m going to talk about the energy transition. And that is, the move that the world is undergoing right now away from fossil fuels, or carbon intensive energy, to a world of a sustainable energy mix. And of course, this isn't the first time that the world has gone through an energy transition. And if we look at the past transitions, be it from wood to coal, or coal to oil, we can see that this transition will probably have a lot in common with those transitions. You know, for certain it will have the quality of actually taking generations.

It's never a quick thing to shift the fuel mix of a global economy, so it will take generations to do that. It will likely be very uneven around the world and most importantly this energy transition will occur, as others did in the past, not because the world ran out of the energy that was dominant in the mix, but either because of environmental or technological innovations allowed the world to move to what is viewed as a superior energy source. So, there's a lot that this energy transition will have in common with history. But when I really look at it, I think there's much more that will separate this transition from the previous transitions. That this transition is unprecedented in a number of ways that I think makes it much more complicated, much more fraught, than past transitions. And you know, most obviously there is the question of urgency. This isn't a transition we have the luxury of kind of sitting back and watching it unfold and placing bets as to what the timeline will be. This is a transition that we all know, having just witnessed COP26, how much urgency there is around the transition. And unlike other transitions, in this case we will need to displace existing energy sources well before it is economic to do so. And this is also very different than past energy transitions which have happened in the context of glowing, maybe glowing, but growing energy demand. And this has allowed new energy sources to come into the mix without needing to replace the old ones. Here, because we have an issue with the carbon that is emitted from the sources of energy that dominate the global energy mix right now, we're going to have to find a way to retire some of those assets well before we would do so if we were doing it just on economic grounds.

And then lastly, and I’d say most importantly, this is a transition that is going to be governed, or led, or eked out by policy as much as the market. Whereas in the past these transitions have been largely market driven, here we need the governments, because of the time urgency, to take us through this transition in conjunction with the market. But this makes it much more uncertain because as we all know, and I know acutely sitting here in the United States, that policy is reversible so we're facing what will be a massively disruptive transition. And I often hear people talk about the need for a smooth energy transition, and I try very hard you know not to lift my eyebrows, or roll my eyeballs, because I think the prospects of a smooth transition are approximately zero. We are talking about remaking the foundations of the global economy. We're not just moving to a different energy mix, a different use of energy sources, we are remaking the energy system of the globe and that is inevitably going to be hugely disruptive.

And this should be part of our expectations. It should be part of our policy planning process. And we should be thinking very hard about how this transition is going to remake the political order. And, as a former policymaker in the realm of foreign policy, I would say that policymakers are now really acutely focused on how climate change is a threat multiplier. And that's the language that we've really seen emerge from at least American political leaders over the last decade, that anything that was a problem before, is going to be more of a problem as a result of the warming of the planet. So, a huge focus on how the warming of the planet is going to create new security challenges, new foreign policy challenge, a real focus and I know this is true in Europe, the increased number of refugees that are going to result as the world gets warmer. That there'll be new crises prompted by natural disasters, either political or economic consequences of those disasters. From an American perspective, the Pentagon looks around the world and looks at the military bases that America has and, you know, realizes that many of these bases are going to be threatened by rising levels of water. And that this is going to prove problematic to our capabilities. So, there is a real focus on that. And that has changed in the last 10 years. Where I think before, this was not regarded as a major national security or foreign policy issue.

But I would say where we don't yet have sufficient attention, and this is where I’m going to gear most of my comments, is on the geopolitical implications of actually the energy transition itself. So, this is distinct from the warming of the planet. But I’m talking about the geopolitical impacts that everything we do, all of the efforts to decarbonize the economy, are going to have. So, if you think about the effort to move to net zero, as the title of my talk implies, just that effort, even if it's successful or not successful, that effort is going to reorder geopolitics. It's going to create some positive things and it's going to create a lot of new more problematic relationships or challenges. And I really think that policymakers need to focus more on this, because the reality is the transition is still decades in the making. So, we might focus at the net zero point, and we might say a world where we're really down to carbon emissions that are net zero, the world is not emitting any more carbon. And hopefully pulling carbon out of the atmosphere. That geopolitically, that might be a calmer world than the world dominated by oil and gas and coal of the last 100 years. But I would say we can fantasize about that world, but we have a few decades at least before we get there, and that interim is going to be extremely, extremely rocky. And a lot of the conventional wisdoms that I’m going to discuss about what that transition period is going to mean for geopolitics I think, are either wrong, or overstated, or oversimplified. And again, you know, really don't focus on this period where we're going to see not only the emerging geopolitics of clean energy. We're going to see them not replacing the geopolitics of oil and gas. We're going to see them layered on top of the geopolitics of oil and gas. And I think the best example we could have to point to this complex layering of geopolitical dynamics is what we've just experienced you know the COP26 talks happening in Glasgow, focusing the world at the same time of a very serious energy crisis in Europe, and China, India, and other parts of the world. Where you have Russia actually able to influence things geopolitically because of its ability to provide or not provide more gas to Europe in a geopolitical and economic crunch. So, we see both of those things happening simultaneously and that is going to be the mark of the next few decades.

So, what I’d like to do with the remainder of my time is to give a few examples. There are many. I’ll just do a few, a few examples of how these geopolitical shifts are going to arise from the transition itself. Again, from the acts and the efforts to move in a direction of decarbonizing the global economy. And I’ll emphasize how this process of transition is likely to be very different than the end state of net zero. And I’ll start with the most obvious and easiest example, and that is the power of petrostates. I think it is conventional wisdom but also true in a lot of ways that if and when the world gets to net zero, that the power of states that produce large amounts of oil and gas will be greatly diminished in the international system. And of course, oil and gas have been huge determinants of geopolitical power over the last not decade, century, I would say. So, that is true if we look ahead several decades. But in the interim, I think there's too often conventional wisdom that this transition is going to be completely destabilizing and disempowering for most oil and gas producers. I would say that is true in in many cases. I lived in Iraq for two years over the last decade and I’m very sensitive to how that country both has fairly fragile institutions and a budget that is overwhelmingly, and I mean 95 percent dependent, on oil revenues. In a country like that, it is really not well positioned for the years that are to come from the energy transition, similarly a country like Nigeria or Algeria, or perhaps even a country like Ecuador. So, there are many countries that are going to suffer are going to experience potentially big political changes. But I would say an area that we should also be focused on is the power of the gulf states of Saudi Arabia, of the Emirates, of other producers that actually are likely to be able to influence geopolitics even more so than they are now, in the coming decade or two because of the nature of the transition.

And very briefly, as many of you may well be familiar with, the reality is the world is not moving to a world where there will be no use of oil. I think a lot of the rhetoric that we hear would suggest that's the case. But if you really look at any of these energy projections, let's take the ones from the international energy agency in Paris, and you'll see that even in the net zero world, the world is still using a lot of oil and gas. I think the net zero 2050 projections of the IIEA that came out in the spring said, in a net zero world, so if we are successful in moving to a world of net zero which is compatible with climate ambitions, that the world will still be using about half as much gas as it's using today, and about a quarter as much oil as it's using today. Of course, that scenario assumes that there is viable and commercially sensible carbon capture technology.

So, it's not that these energy sources will be emitting carbon the same way, but they're still going to be a vital part of the energy mix. And countries like Saudi Arabia, and the UAU, and others, potentially Russia, actually have the ability to continue to be dominant producers in that landscape. That they have low cost, particularly the gulf producers, very low cost and actually very low carbon footprints of their oil production. And the result will be that as other producers around the world fade away, or just it becomes not commercial to produce anymore, those producers will be, as they like to say, the last producer standing. So not only will they continue to be able to produce oil, but they will be producing the overwhelming majority of the oil that the whole world consumes. And that of course brings more geopolitical power than we're seeing from them today in OPEC.

So that is one example about how some of the conventional wisdoms about this energy transition really deserve a second look so that we can better anticipate the politics going forward. I’ll give a couple of more examples, and I’m sure the other ones that I’d like to touch on can come up in our Q and A. I’d also point out that as people are well aware, that clean energy will itself bring new sources of geopolitical power and I think this is really important and interesting, and to the extent that I am concerned about the conversation about clean energy geopolitical power, it is that it is a little bit too high level. I think it's important for us to really kind of look more deeply at what the sources of geopolitical power are going to be from a clean energy superpower. Like, what actually makes a country a clean energy superpower? And there, I would say it's two things primarily at the high-level, innovation and access to cheap capital.

But when we dig down there are several other areas where a country might actually be able to exert geopolitical power on account of its clean energy status. And I would say one is the ability to set standards. Which I won't say much about, but happy to return to if people would like. Two, is this issue of critical minerals. Which I think is worth saying a few issues about here at the outset, because it is really, I think, capturing the attention of people much more than it did a few years ago. And essentially, as many of you may be aware, even though we're moving in the direction, and hopefully we'll move even more rapidly in the direction, of energy sources like wind and solar, and will deploy electric vehicles. These innovations require very high concentrations of some critical minerals. And I’m talking, you know, nickel, cobalt, lithium, rare earth's elements, these types of minerals are needed in much greater quantities than they currently are produced in the world. And in fact, the EIA says in 2040, if we're actually on track to hit our climate goals, we'll be using six times these critical minerals that are currently produced in the world today. So, that creates concerns about you know, can the world ramp up this production sufficiently to actually enable these technologies to grow at the scale that these projections would seem to suggest, or is required to make the transition? And it also raises questions about supply chains. And here, China has a very dominant role not only in in producing these critical minerals but even more so, in the processing and refining of these minerals.

And so, right now we can go into more detail, but China does have a very dominant role in the supply chain. And I think it's quite reasonable for people to be concerned that China might use that role to exert geopolitical power in the future. We can look to 2010, when China did decide to stop exporting rare earth elements to Japan. In the context of a dispute over the Senkaku islands in the East China Sea. So, China has demonstrated, you know, a willingness or a propensity to do this in the past. And, you know, this is a reasonable concern going forward. And to make a long story short, which we can dig into in more detail, I think that the main point that I take away is that in the short to medium term, that China’s real lock on the supply chain I think, is going to have big geopolitical effects. But over the longer run we're going to see the market and governments respond to this dominance. And we will see the development of more production, more refining, more processing in other parts of the world as people are no longer simply focused on the fact that China can do this cheaply, and China is willing to bear the economic cost, other countries will step in. But there will be a window between now and then which may be 10 to 15 years before either there is more supply of these critical minerals, or people have come up with alternatives and substitutes for these minerals, and no longer are they needed quite so much. Other sources of geopolitical power in a clean energy economy I think is the ability to manufacture inputs cheaply. Again, China very much dominant particularly in the solar panels, as we know. And here we should say yes, this this gives them some real economic and potentially political influence. But it's not the same as the 1973 oil embargo. Being able to withhold an input into an energy process is different than actually withholding an energy source itself. So, we should be cognizant of this power but also not overstate it.

And then lastly, something that I think I will leave for Q and A, but I hope very much we’ll come back to, is this whole question of geopolitical influence from being a low-carbon fuel producer. And there I’m talking mostly about hydrogen and ammonia. And I think that is a very important and interesting sector that will develop. And it could have a lot of the hallmarks of the natural gas, both the kind of the infrastructure, the supply chain, but also the geopolitical dimensions that the liquefied natural gas market has had in the last several decades. So, I hope we will return to the hydrogen question.

Just a couple more ways in which the world is going to change geopolitically because of the energy transition. One of them that I wanted to touch on is the whole issue of globalization. We've all been very much beneficiaries of globalization of this trend. It really depends on who you ask when globalization started. Some people would say after World War II, some people say the collapse the Soviet Union, others go back into the 1800’s. You know undoubtedly, it's been a process that has shaped the world and has shaped economic and political relationships for many decades. And under covid we saw a little bit of a step away from globalization and things moving more in the direction of deglobalization. And there is an open question about whether the energy transition will reinforce these deglobalizing trends?

Without being definitive about it I would say, on balance, I do expect that the energy transition will move power, or will move away from energy being a globalizing factor to energy being more of a deglobalizing factor for a few reasons, two of which I’ll mention here. We certainly know that energy trade is a major component of the global economy. Energy trade binds the world together. People are consuming energy from all over the world. And a world that is net zero, or is moving in that direction, is much, much more likely to be a highly electrified world. A world where the economies or a lot of what we do today using other sources of energy, will be electrified. And if you look at some of these projections, there was a Princeton study that looked at what America’s economy would look like in a net zero scenario, and it anticipated that America would use two to three times the amount of electricity that it's using today, to power cars, to power you know virtually everything that it's possible to electrify and still work well. Of course, there are sectors of the economy that are hard to electrify. But if that's the case that the world is more electrified and that electricity comes from low carbon or zero carbon energy sources, then that will remove a big part of the global trade economy. And it is simply the reality at least right now, and probably for the foreseeable future, that it's not very economical to pass electricity over very long distances because of transmission losses. And as a result, countries will be consuming more energy that they either produce within their own borders, or that are produced maybe in adjacent countries. So, there'll be that move away from a global energy market trade to much more domestic or regional energy market trade.

I’d also say one of the deglobalizing trends that I’m particularly concerned about as it relates to the energy transition has to do with the rise in protectionism. And this is something I’m actually hoping that I will learn from some of you today more deeply about some of the initiatives that the European Union is thinking of taking, having to do with trying to levelize the costs of manufacturing and other things by instituting what we're calling, carbon border adjustment mechanisms. Of course as conceptualized that tool is simply to level the playing field between countries or regions that actually put a price on carbon and those that don't. However, it is not too hard to see, and this is not directed at Europe, per se, but just that countries whether it's eventually the United States or somewhere else that use these mechanisms, that this could become you know a steppingstone to a larger protectionism that actually creates a lot of barriers between a developed green economy and a more developing dirty economy. And this of course would be very de-globalizing and would have a lot of implications. We can talk a lot about great power dynamics as being another thing that is going to be influenced by the energy transition and I imagine that some of the comments and questions we'll take in our in our discussion will bear on that. I think that this energy transition is going to have great bearing on the relationship between Russia and Europe, between Russia and China, between the U.S. and China, between India and China. There's all kinds of great power relationships that will be perhaps fundamentally affected by the energy transition.

The one I’ll just say a couple of words about is that U.S. - China relationship and again happy to go into it in more detail if people would like. As is very evident I think to anyone who would be inclined to call in this afternoon or join this call, you know the U.S. - China relationship is you know perhaps more fraught than it has been at any point really maybe since Tiananmen Square. And the relationship is also a lot more complex. There has been a lot of hope and expectation that climate would be an area around which the U.S. and China can find common ground. That climate could be a little island of cooperation otherwise in a sea of confrontation. I would say you know the last week we've had a few indications that there's still an aspiration for that to be the case, both on the part of Washington and Beijing. But I think over the last, well almost year that President Biden has been in office what we've seen is actually the opposite. That it's been very hard to detangle climate from the rest of the relationship and that if anything, I think the climate relationship between the U.S. and China is likely to be more competitive than it is going to be cooperative. And the big question that remains is actually will a competitive rather than cooperative relationship between the U.S. and China be conducive to a successful energy transition? Or will it be an obstacle? Will it be a roadblock in the effort to get to net zero?

Let me mention one last dynamic and then close. And I look forward to comments. The last dynamic I’d like to mention, the geopolitical dynamic that I think will be greatly either altered or exacerbated by the energy transition, is the relationship between the developed and the developing world. I think over the last several decades the world settled into a trajectory, and I’m looking at this from a fairly high level, but where the developing world was growing more quickly than the developed world. And that there you know was a phrase in development economics called convergence, where you know eventually the developed world would grow and the developing world would grow more quickly. And that these two types of economies were both growing in tandem. We're now I think in a different kind of landscape. And part of that has a lot to do with covid, as we're well aware. And how covid has exacerbated inequalities within countries but also between countries and certainly between the developed and the developing world. And I think the energy transition is going to have the same effect and it's likely to be even greater. We certainly saw the tensions between the developing world and the developed world well on display in Glasgow. And those tensions I think are only going to intensify as sense of climate injustice increases as countries in the developed world become more and more impatient and more and more focused on the need to decarbonize economies. I think what we're going to see hopefully is more aid and cooperation given to the developing world. But the reality seems to point in the direction that it is plausible to imagine we're going to see more frustration, more pressure, and potentially the use not only of incentives but also penalties to try to get countries to move to decarbonize their economies without addressing what the developing world looks at as a huge injustice. If we think about the cumulative emissions in the in the atmosphere today, twenty five percent of them are from the United States, going back to the industrial era up until today. Only two percent of those emissions are from Africa. And so, you can see this is the grounds for I would say a very contentious relationship.

So, I’ll stop there, and I’ll say you know pointing out the ways in which geopolitics are going to be exacerbated, complicated by the energy transition, in doing this I’m not at all trying to argue against the transition. There's no question in my mind that there is great urgency associated with this transition. And my intention is much more to highlight to policymakers that we need to pay a significant amount of attention to how the process of decarbonization is going to upset geopolitics in international relationships. And it's important for us to do so for a number of reasons, most obviously to any foreign policy maker you want to anticipate new tensions, new threats, new dynamics in relationships. Some of them will be opportunities, some of them will be challenges. But I’d also say it's really important that we do this if we're interested in keeping the possibility of a successful energy transition in our sights. Because certainly the ability for the side effects of this energy transition to undermine the transition itself are evident. The possibility that the transition fuels populist parties that oppose the energy transition is certainly something that we can easily imagine, or actually might be seeing, in different parts of the world. And certainly, if we get to a place where national security considerations are seen as being at odds with moving forward in the energy transition, this could be extremely problematic for the speed and the scope of the energy transition. Which is where I started this talk, by just underscoring how urgent both of those things are.

So, with that, Alex and Jim, I’d like to stop. And I’m looking forward to comments and questions. And as I said, feel free to disagree with me or educate me. Not everything needs to be a question.

Fantastic, thank you so much for that. You've covered so much ground. And I’m sure there will be many questions. And you've stimulated a lot of thoughts and ideas, I’m sure, in all our minds. Jim, we had some slight difficulties with the connection to you earlier. Do we have your audio? Can you hear me, okay? I can hear you, Alex. Can you hear me? Oh excellent! And I can hear you, which is even more important. Do you have any thoughts, or just some insights? We were, we were going to have you in, to you know, before Megan started. We're very happy to have you now with any thoughts that you have.

Just briefly, chairman, and good afternoon, everybody. I hope you'll all agree that was a really interesting lecture from Megan, the latest in the IIEA Rethink Energy series. I think it is very timely, Megan said that it's very timely in the context of COP26, but also in our own country in terms of the climate action plan, revised plan, that's going to put climate action at center stage for us in every aspect of our lives. I suppose for ESB, you know our strategy is to deliver secure, affordable zero-carbon future in terms of energy. And that's going to be a significant change. It's going to be very demanding right across the value chain from networks generation, and right through our customer-facing businesses. I’m responsible for generation within ESB and I suppose you know at one level the renewables challenge is very significant. But it's a known challenge. It's one we can see. And it's one we're intent on delivering. I think the storage challenge, and Megan mentioned green hydrogen, for Ireland storage is going to be huge issue in the delivery of the success of renewables. How do we manage intermittency? And I think green hydrogen is a really important play for Ireland. And ESB strongly believes that, and that's why we launched this year, the Green Atlantic project at Moneypoint. But we see that becoming a major energy hub for the island. I think, over the next 10 years though, gas in particular will be a critical part of our transformation. That is a reality in this country. We are moving to net zero, but gas will be a reality. We've seen what's happened in gas prices in the last, I suppose two months, they've multiplied by between a factor of six and ten. And the impact that's already having on our economy and the issues even this week with North Stream II in terms of its certification in Germany with Russia. And so, the issues Meghan talks about are really timely, really interesting and are framing, I suppose, our immediate future. I think in particular, I really liked Meghan your comments about a smooth transition. I think that's particularly noteworthy the way you put it. I really recognize what you've said because it's a massive transition. I think your comments on a role of existing players on the world stage is to be noted given our dependence on gas for the next 10, 20 years, really relevant. I think there's something for Ireland, what you said about role of new players. Can Ireland innovate? Can it bring enough capital in in hydrogen and other places to play a big role beyond what it currently sees maybe? And finally, your comments around supply chains. We can see what's happened in solar. We can see there's a race in hydrogen now as well. And the economies are competing to be the supply chain into the future. So, I think your discussion, your presentation, was really fantastic and very timely in the world we live in.

Thanks very much Jim! That's terrific. And we've got lots of questions coming in here. And I’m just going to go first of all to one from James Libsy. And in a way he's sort of summarizing some of the key themes of what you presented. And he's asking the question back to you in the following way. He says, “Thank you, first of all, for a fascinating talk.” And says, “Can we anticipate whether the strains of the energy transition will strengthen the role of international society? International society is an interesting concept and a rules-based order? Or will those strains drive us rather more towards greater competition between trading blocs? And is there anything we can anticipate around migration in this regard?”

Sure, it's a great question James, and I think it kind of gets at the heart of the whole question you're asking. Look at the whole geopolitical order itself. And I would say you can argue this both ways right now. Being an optimist, I’d like to say that there's certainly opportunities to rebuild some parts of the international order around these new realities. That even before the energy transition was so front and foremost in the minds of so many people around the world, there's an acknowledgment that the international order that has buttressed much of the globe over the last 70 years was under strain for a variety of other reasons, be it the rise of China, the diffusion of economic power. There were lots of things that were putting that order under strain. And so, I think there is, and was, a need to re-look at that international system, that international order, even before we start considering climate and the energy transition. But now that we are so squarely in that transition and our success in that transition is so urgent to, you know, the success of peace and prosperity. As we think about remaking the institutions of global governments, I think having the transition be central will be a part of that. The downside of the glass half-full part of that question, I think, has a lot to do with the U.S. - China relationship. In my mind when I really think about a successful energy transition, it's hard to imagine that it can be done without U.S. - China cooperation. That U.S. - China cooperation you know, part of the success of Paris, I think, was really built on the back of a successful and an ambitious U.S. - China agreement that was made in 2015 between President Xi and President Obama. And that you know Glasgow was really apparent, that and it was really apparent that that relationship no longer existed. That kind of willingness to join, to link arms and march forward, and demonstrate global leadership in tandem for this issue, I think was apparent. And I think does kind of undermine the sense of how this might be a more globally orchestrated transition than it will be otherwise. Do you, in saying that do you discount the, you know, that joint declaration that was made just in the first couple of days of Glasgow between the U.S. and China? Or, how do you assess that?

Yeah no, thanks for bringing that in, Alex. I don't discount that. I see it as a positive development. But you know when you really compare it to the U.S. - China climate agreement of 2015 between Obama and Xi, it has far less meat in it. It's really largely aspirational. And the reality is, now that you know we learn more about the enormous efforts that went into getting what is a positive, but fairly meager in terms of substance, statement you know you could see how much harder it was to get something that was so much less. So, I think it's positive in the sense that both countries I think are eager to avoid you know there's a lot of talk about a new cold war here in the U.S. between the U.S. and China. And I think there's a lot of interest on both sides, in Beijing and in Washington, in avoiding that. And I think there is this hope and expectation that climate could be an area where we could at least carve out some amounts of cooperation. You know we saw after COP just in the last few days, a very long meeting, virtual meeting between President Xi and President Biden, and by all accounts it was a warm and friendly meeting. But there was no real deliverables, which as a former US policymaker, it's really striking that you would have a summit of these two leaders. And normally you would have a whole raft of things that would be announced and would be rolled out. And here, you know success is gauged simply as a lack of ranker, you know, and that just demonstrates how much this relationship has, the distance it has to travel in order for it to be a driver of the climate debate. On that question of deliverables. And of course, you're right because political leaders where there's international engagement, or indeed when there's engagement between political figures and policy makers at the domestic level, people look for deliverables, quote - unquote, that you know, what came out of the meeting? But is there a case I mean when you look at Glasgow, and you start to assess what happened in Glasgow, I mean there are different views anywhere between failure to disappointment, to a good start, to a great success if you're Boris Johnson? So, it's all somewhere, it's somewhere along that continuum. And doesn't it become harder in this whole discourse to look for big moments? I mean Paris is a big moment. There are other big moments. There's so much happening, so much that needs to happen, not necessarily slowly, but more and more is happening and therefore it's harder to put your finger on. It’s harder to have an expectation of a big moment. If you have lots of smaller moments, or lots of movement you’re still perhaps getting success.

Yeah, no. I think that's an interesting perspective Alex. And I think it is very hard, you know. We all knew that regardless of what happened in Glasgow, it would be touted as a success. And so, as an observer you're trying to figure out well, how much of it was a success, and how much of it was not? And you know I’d say on that that broad question in my mind, you know Glasgow exceeded the bar, that of expectations that had been set, but that bar was incredibly low. So, you know, if I were asked you know how much of the glass was full, I’d say it was about a quarter-full and three-quarters empty. But to your point, I do think that we are going to see progress more marked by a whole series of initiatives that may not have the stamp of every country in the global community. So, one of my concerns about Glasgow was, what if it was so unsuccessful that it kind of discredited the whole COP mechanism as a way for the world to come together to talk about and address climate change? Like that was I think a legitimate concern. And that certainly didn't happen. You know certainly I think we underscored the importance of these meetings. Now we're going to put more emphasis on them in an annual way and trying to spur countries to up their ambitions in an annual sense.

So, that's all good. But what I’m really struck by is that COP, because it is so difficult to do anything unanimously with countries with so many disparate interests, you know COP has become really useful for side agreements that actually matter a lot. So, when I think about the biggest, the things of greatest note coming out of COP they actually have to do with agreements that not everyone signed up to. And here I put the methane agreement on the table as something that is potentially very significant. A lot of countries signed up to it, not everybody, but if you know the world is able to bring down methane ambitions by 30 percent by 2030, that is going to be really beneficial to climate change. You know the deforestation side agreement, also something significant. We had a number of announcements on coal, I think none of them added up to what we were really looking for when it came to coal, but they are you know, they're notable. And hopefully they will be, and they will expand. So, to your point, I think there's going to be less of a moment where we actually think we're on track. And increasingly, again I like to think of myself as an optimist, but increasingly I find myself really hoping that technology is going to deliver us that “aha!” moment, not politics. That you know if we do find ourselves able to exceed the expectations and the pledges that have made thus far, I think it is much more likely going to be because of the technological advance than it is going to be because of a new-found political will. And certainly, if we look at the IIEA's predictions, and they talk about you know net zero 2050, they say, no a significant percentage, I think it may be half of the technologies that we need to get to net zero in 2050 are not commercial today. So, big role for technology.

Michael Connery has an interesting question. “You've touched on protectionism, and I suppose there are different layers of protectionism, and different kinds of protectionism.” He says, “To what extent do you believe we will see a continuation of the existing global patterns of wealth accumulation and resource transfer during and after an energy transition? And, in particular has Covid 19 and protectionist vaccine policy for example, provided a bell weather for this?” Yeah, so I think that's a very interesting question. I’m not sure exactly when he's sent it whether it's before or after I talked about the developing world? But of course this I think is one of my real concerns that the inequities in the global system are, that we have seen and that have been I think incredibly reinforced or exacerbated by covid, will be doubly reinforced by the energy transition. Now again, at the start of my talk I differentiated between that there's actually the net zero world which may be very beneficial for the developing world. You know the developing world has a number of assets and advantages that will be important and will be beneficial in a world of net zero emissions. You know they have potentially big areas where they can store carbon if carbon capture becomes, as is expected to be, an important part of getting to net zero. The developing world has a lot of landscape where it can be very competitive when it comes to renewable energy power. And that could give many countries a leg up on producing green hydrogen and ammonia, which is expected to be a very important part of the global energy mix. So, in the long term I think the developing world has a number of ways to really prosper from an energy transition. But in this interim period, where we're seeing the continued, the continued ravages on the developing world of the actual warming of the climate, and the continued shortages of the developed world in providing for the developing world, I think it's a real cause for concern. As probably many people on this call know in 2009 the developed world pledged that every year by 2020 it would be providing 100 billion dollars to the developing world to help with both mitigation and adaptation for climate change. Now we're 2021, everybody has a different measure, but nobody argues that the developed world is close to transferring that amount of money. And we now have an appreciation that actually 100 billion dollars a year is grossly insignificant in the face of what's actually going to be needed. Where estimates that say there's going to need to be 100 trillion dollars of investment between now and 2050 if the world is going to get there. And a lot of that will be in the developing world. So, I think there is a really very good reason for not just concern, but good reason for thinking about how some of those inequities can be headed off, can be addressed. And as much as I am on board with trying to phase out or phase down, whatever phrase you want to use, of coal. You know we also have to couple that with initiatives that don't only block off pathways of development for the developing world but open new avenues. So simply to say we're going to take away your most cost-effective way of getting energy that can actually drive economic growth, we also have to say we're going to help ensure that you do get alternative cleaner energies. And I think there the mechanisms are not as well developed yet.

Okay, thank you. I’m going to, I’m going to put two questions to you. A lot of people are asking about nuclear, interestingly enough. So one of the two questions I’m just going to ask you to consider is about nuclear. Alexander Conway who is the EU affairs researcher here at the IIEA, says that you didn't get a chance to mention nuclear, but you mentioned a lot of things. You can't, I suppose, cover everything, but I’m sure you have plenty to say on that topic as well. “Given the expansion of mini reactors in the United Kingdom and the inclusion of nuclear as a green quote-unquote energy source under the EU taxonomy rules, would you like to comment on the role of nuclear and its potential geopolitical implications as part of the green transition?” So that's nuclear, and if you don't mind, I’m going to pitch a second question to you as well. I was going to say it's related, it's not really, but everything's related. Peter O’Shea at the ESB, “President Biden is targeting a decarbonized electricity system by 2035. How bought in our society and the industry itself to the scale of investment and change required in order to achieve that? And how widely are the geopolitical aspects of the transition being considered, especially given the US current position as a net exporter of energy?” Sorry, there's a lot there the two questions but I’m sure you'll pick up on them no problem. Right, two questions and three minutes so let me let me do my best here. So, first on the first one having to do with nuclear power, and I certainly am aware that I didn't spend time on it, but it is a huge component of this conversation. And there are some people who are real advocates for climate in the environment to also put nuclear in there as something that needs to fade away in terms of our energy mix. I would be on the opposite side of the equation there. And that you know I almost feel you can't really consider yourself to be serious about the climate if you're against nuclear power, because if we look at the kinds of the energy sources that are going to be required, that are going to be zero or low carbon energy, we can't get there without, not just nuclear power as it exists today, but a pretty substantial ramp up in nuclear power going forward. So, I would say there is unquestionably an important role for nuclear power. And I think that this is an area where some new technologies could really be helpful. These small modular reactors actually being among them. You know any, I think modification, or technological advancement that diminishes concerns over waste and over proliferation, I think is going to be welcome. There's a huge geopolitical component here, which I won't go into in a lot of detail. But simply to say from an American perspective this used to be an area where America really was very dominant in terms of countries that wanted to build civilian nuclear power capacity. That America was very much on the forefront of that and that gave an American ability to really influence standards proliferation you know, considerations and safety measures. And now, America, because of our own industry and constraints on our own industry, has taken a bit of a back seat and we see Russia and China as really being very dominant global players. And seeing that the expansion of their ability to help countries build civilian nuclear reactors as being a real advantage to them not just economically but also politically and geopolitically. Just to leave some time for the last question about you know the questioner was right of course that President Biden, one of his very ambitious goals is to have an energy, an electricity sector in the U.S. that is 100 percent emissions free by 2035. And this will require massive changes in infrastructure and I would say, in attitudes in the United States. And the question I think was like, how bought in is the American political system and industry? And here I would distinguish between the two. Really I would say that industry is eager for very clear signals. They’re eager for certainty. They're eager for signals about where the future is going to go. Where the government is going to subsidize? Where the market is going to be buttressed by different kinds of policy signals so that they can set themselves up for success. And I think that we're talking about a very significant transformation of our electricity model. And our utilities and their business model will need to change significantly. But I think there is an awareness of this within the industry. I think politically this is still an issue that is very wrought here in the United States. As you see America is trying to get through an infrastructure bill that basically would provide a lot of money to bring about a more climate-friendly economy. Some of this has bipartisan support, but a lot of it doesn't. A lot of it is not seen as essential. And so, I think that this is you know very much a work in progress. There's certainly more bipartisan support for addressing climate in some respects than there was in the past. Nuclear energy, carbon removal, these are things that are bipartisan which wasn't true before. But I think we have a long way to go before we have the kind of political consensus that will be needed to drive the kinds of changes that will be required to get our economy anywhere close to net zero.

You've taken us directly to the top of the hour. I think you've got another commitment. And I’m sure many people on this call do. I’m headed to the airport of all places! Is that right? Well then, we're not going to delay you any further. But it's just been a fascinating 55 minutes, whatever we managed to do. Sorry about the delay at the outset. It's just been terrific. It's a conversation that I’m sure we'll continue. And I suppose it's a truism that the climate issue, no country's climate change problem can be solved by that country. So that the geopolitics of what is happening, what needs to happen, is just you know just self-evidently center stage. Last Saturday afternoon we were watching the tv, most of the time when people think of geopolitics they think if something happens over a period of time, happens behind closed doors. It's the sweep of history. You read books about it rather than see it in the newspaper every day. But last Saturday afternoon, I mean we just saw it play out on the floor of the exhibition center right there in Glasgow, where you had the intervention with Saudi Arabia and India, and so on. So, it's really brought, I think, brought it home to us how critically important your agenda, the agenda you've been speaking to, actually is in this entire debate. And you've opened I think, a number of different aspects of that for us in the last hour. So, I just want to thank you so much for joining us this afternoon, for being so free with your time, and being willing to address and field so many questions. There are so many more there on the chat, or on the Q and A we just don't have a chance to get to. Hopefully see you again sometime before too long. Professor Megan O’Sullivan thank you so much for being with us. Thank you, Alex. I want to just also extend my thanks again to the IIEA for hosting me. It's been a pleasure. I want to apologize to people who asked excellent questions in the chat we didn't get to. And I very much am interested in continuing the conversation and welcome the chance to interact in the future. Have a good afternoon and a good weekend.

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