Humans are not great at long-term things, okay?
So we all know that we should eat right and work out.
Lots of us don't. And that's because the immediate gratification of, oh, I'm late for an interview this morning.
I gotta leave. I don't have time to work out.
That was me this morning.
Or, wow, that donut looks really great.
Or there's an extra slice of pizza left.
Man, we are such suckers for that.
It's ridiculous. Which is why the, if you take the standards of the past, the average American is overweight.
What does it mean to be over if it's the average, if it's the majority?
You know, it's a weird thing.
That's why we do a variety of self-destructive behaviors individually.
As a society, we try to plan ahead a little more.
And for some things, we're able to do that.
But if you take a problem like climate change, it's like the worst case situation.
["The Most Shand Parish"] He's the co-founder of Intellectual Ventures and the former CTO of Microsoft.
Throughout his career, he's amassed numerous patents ranging from inventions that use light for trimming hair to technology that helps create artificial blood vessels.
He's also the author of Modernist Cuisine, a book that applies scientific principles to making food.
I wanted to talk to Nathan because he might just be the most interesting person in the world.
Not only does he have a unique way of seeing the world, but he's got the resources to put his ideas to the test.
In this conversation, we discussed the principles he's used at Microsoft to make decisions, the flaws of autonomous driving, what we've gotten wrong about protecting our world, the science of geoengineering, lessons he wished he'd learned sooner, and so much more.
It's time to listen and learn.
I want to start with your postdoc.
You work for Stephen Hawking.
I did. How did you end up working with him?
Well, that wasn't a surprise in a sense.
I mean, I was a graduate student in physics.
I got my PhD at Princeton.
The kind of physics that I was interested in is the kind that Stephen does.
It was about quantum theories of space and time.
So I applied to a number of places for postdoc, and that was my top choice.
And he said yes. So that's how I got there.
And then where did you go after that?
After that, I wound up taking a leave of absence from that position.
I was supposed to be there for a couple of years, and I was there for one year.
Took a leave of absence to work on a project that I'd started in graduate school with some friends.
And that project turned into a software company.
And I became the CEO of the company.
And then Microsoft bought the company, and I was at Microsoft.
Many, many years later, I retired from Microsoft.
And when that was announced, I got an email the next day from Stephen saying, shall we clear out the office?
Are you coming back? Because he thought you might come back.
You took a leave of absence at first, though, from Microsoft, didn't you?
Well, that was my second leave of absence in life, yes.
And if you hear of my demise, read closely.
Maybe it was just another leave of absence.
So that was to study culinary, like cooking.
Oh, I also, well, there's no other two leaves of absence than Microsoft.
I did go to chef's school while I was at Microsoft.
And then eventually, when I retired from Microsoft, it was initially a leave of absence.
Bill hoped I would come to my senses after being bored at home.
But I wasn't, so I never went back.
So what got you interested in cooking?
Well, I was interested in cooking long before I even knew there was a computer.
And I started, I think, when I was nine years old.
I discovered cookbooks at the local library.
And I announced to my mother I was going to cook Thanksgiving dinner all by myself.
So I got this armload of cookbooks.
And I cook Thanksgiving dinner.
It wasn't that great by my current standards.
But it wasn't such a disaster that it turned me away from the topic.
So I had always been very serious about food and cooking.
And at one point, while I was working at Microsoft, I realized I had all these advanced degrees in topics I didn't actually spend that much time doing.
And cooking is something I did spend time doing.
Why don't I actually get some real education on that?
And so you took a leave of absence, convinced the culinary institute to take you as a student?
Well, I had to convince the culinary institute in France to take me as a student.
I had to convince Bill to give me a leave of absence.
But it worked out on both sides.
Take me back to Microsoft.
You guys made a lot of decisions at Microsoft in a very fast changing environment.
Yep. How did you think about those decisions?
Well, I think there's two things.
One is you try to be as analytical and as careful as you can about making a decision.
But the second is you also have to monitor how it's going and not be afraid to change your mind.
The personal computer revolution was something that we take for granted today.
Back then, not so much. You know what, Microsoft used to have a slogan for the company, a computer on every desk and in every home.
And I took so much grief from people when I would say this in speeches where they would say, oh, I'm never going to have a computer in my home.
That's just an absurd, nerd fantasy.
Well, it worked. Now you have one in your pocket.
Well, I actually wrote a memo about that in 1990 that you also would need one in every pocket.
And that we do have one in every pocket.
And by the way, our cars are basically computers with wheels.
Obviously, you need engines and lots of other stuff.
But a huge amount of computing goes into the automobile, into the navigation system, but even into how the engine operates.
That's all a bunch of chips.
You know, when I was a kid, you could go to a speed shop and they would have all these fancy accessories that hot rodders would put on.
For a lot of cars these days, the simplest way to change performance is literally with a Neaprom with a new chip.
Where do you think we're going?
Well, you know, in the short run, you can make a whole lot of predictions that I think will turn out to be pretty close to correct.
As you get further out, it gets much more difficult.
You know, in the 1950s, there were a series of science fiction and actually up through the 70s.
Science fiction novels posited this idea of interstellar travel and rockets and space.
That was really cool. The moon landing got people inspired and they don't have computers.
And even in Star Trek and in all of its both original incarnation and the recent ones, they have a human driving the starship.
How absurd. You'd never do that.
There's no modern jet that doesn't have an autopilot, for God's sakes.
And of course, that's because in that particular application, computers do a way better job.
With self-driving cars, that's a little bit more difficult because we have traffic and that traffic is other cars and it's kids running into the street and so forth.
But if you're out there in two dimensions on a boat or three dimensions with an airplane, autopilots work great.
Even auto landing systems work pretty well these days.
Do you think we'll see totally, like why don't we have autonomous trains then?
Because that's a closed network, closed loop, practically speaking.
I mean, there's a couple of intersections.
Well, many modern train systems are autonomous for all intents and purposes.
They will have humans on board as a safety or a backup feature.
But when you have modern trains, by which I don't mean any train in the United States, I'm afraid, but if you have the highest speed trains that are going 300 kilometers an hour in Europe or increasingly in Asia, you can't rely on humans to make all of the decisions.
It's just we don't operate fast enough.
We're not totally reliable.
We can be distracted. We're great for some things.
Don't get me wrong. But those systems are very much controlled with computers.
The same thing is true for most modern subway systems.
You've got lots of subway trains.
You have this complicated thing of different stations and so forth.
And again, automation is way safer than just doing it by human control.
Now, humans are still are involved, and that's for a variety of reasons.
Some of them good reasons.
Some of them are more holdovers from the past that will eventually get over.
But for a whole set of things, why would you use a human?
They are safer, so it doesn't make sense.
But then we have to answer all these societal questions about who's at fault of an autonomous car.
Well, at the moment, autonomous cars aren't really autonomous, and they don't really do as good a job as a human driver does.
That's just straight up the case, where we are today.
Because there's too many random things that can happen on the road that the autonomous systems have a hard time doing.
But over time, that will change, and it wouldn't take very much of an improvement before they're better than we are.
So now you're asking a really important societal question, which is on the day when autonomous cars are actually better than humans at driving, will we accept them?
And for lots of things, there has been pushback.
It's been true for a long time that humans are the weakest part of a fighter jet.
You should use drones. You should totally use drones.
But Air Force, which is composed entirely of pilots or former pilots, hated that idea.
But drones are here to stay, and there will be aerial combat drones.
The thing that's crazy about the new Top Gun movie, which is a great movie, is that you have an air missile, and that missile can take a ridiculous number of G forces, because it was built to, and you can engineer it for that.
And the poor human passes out when you get too many G forces.
So ultimately, the missiles win.
And maybe not this model on this thing, and it sure helps if your Tom Cruise movie you're probably not going to get blown up.
And it's a fabulous human story, of course, in the movie.
And there are pilots that are insanely good at what they do, but they can't take 100 Gs.
And missiles can. Plus, the other thing that is rude about human pilots is you've got to call their mom when they die.
The manned space program is another sort of absurd thing.
It started off wonderfully that the only way we could explore space for a certain class of things was with humans.
Well, it's long since passed.
Today, the manned space flight is a reality TV show.
And in fact, the cutting edge of manned space flight is space tourism.
That's what Blue Origin and SpaceX and others are yearning up for.
And there's no reason to take a fragile human up there.
The amount of cost and complexity that goes into keeping this fragile human alive in a context where it really shouldn't be is enormous.
Mars exploration is a great example.
People want to colonize Mars, I was asked, is Antarctica full?
Antarctica is great compared to Mars.
It's warmer. It has air.
It has water. It's got all these great features.
But to go to Mars, you have to be exposed to a certain amount of radiation from cosmic rays.
It takes a really long time to get there.
And there's lots of other things that are difficult.
So if you look at the history of Mars space probes, we've lost a ridiculous number of them.
And you can say, oh, well, that was a mistake here.
And I'm gonna say, well, yeah, because it's really complicated.
So it's literally rocket science.
It is literally rocket science.
And for the rovers and the drone that they have on Mars right now, they have this problem that you can't control it from Earth anymore.
Because the amount of time it takes a signal, even traveling at the speed of light, to get to Mars, it's minutes.
And so if you were using that to drive in a typical remote control, radio-controlled carway, it would never work.
So they have to make those things semi-autonomous.
And over time, they'll become more and more autonomous.
Do you see the need for interplanetary travel, or would you focus on something else?
Well, I'm a huge fan of science.
And I'm a huge fan of exploring the solar system and having both interstellar, inter-solar system and interstellar probes both.
They're both ultimately fantastic things for us to do to explore the world.
But it's vastly cheaper and easier and better to do it with machines and to do it with humans.
In terms of a need to colonize the solar system, I don't think...
I think people believe that that's an imperative as a holdover from the ideas of the age of imperialism when we thought, oh yes, we have to go conquer and colonize the whole world.
Well, it did work. There were a whole variety of cultures that at different points in history went and colonized various parts of the world.
We're most familiar with the most recent ones, the ones that, for example, European countries did.
That's how we got America.
You know, they went to South America.
They had colonies in Africa and other places.
But even earlier than that, the way humans got to Europe was they left Africa.
But at this stage, you have to say, well, gee, if we really need to leave this planet, A, we must have screwed something up pretty badly.
Some people say, well, that's why we should go to Mars, so that we have a second home for humanity.
Well, if you really had to do that, the moon is a lot closer and has a variety of advantages.
Or you could build large habitats in space.
There was a physics professor named Gerardo Neal at Princeton who was a big fan of this idea.
But so far, we don't have a need to do that.
And it kind of makes a lot more sense to try to take care of this planet and not screw it up than to treat Earth as being disposable.
And so it's okay. We'll have Mars.
Because if you keep thinking that way, you're going to screw Mars up too.
Where are we going wrong in taking care of this planet?
Humans are not great at long-term things.
So we all know that we should eat right and work out.
Lots of us don't. And that's because the immediate gratification of, oh, I'm late for an interview this morning.
I got to leave. I don't have time to work out.
That was me this morning.
Or, wow, that donut looks really great.
Or there's an extra slice of pizza left.
Man, we are such suckers for that.
It's ridiculous. Which is why if you take the standards of the past, the average American is overweight.
What does it mean to be over if it's the average, if it's the majority?
You know, it's a weird thing.
That's why we do a variety of self-destructive behaviors individually.
As a society, we try to plan ahead a little more.
And for some things, we're able to do that.
But if you take a problem like climate change, it's like the worst case situation.
I like to compare climate change to ecological disasters.
So in Spain, I don't know, 20 years ago, something like this, there was a flood, the flood washed over the banks of a river near where there was a gold mine.
Gold mines use cyanide to help recover the gold from the dirt.
So there's a cyanide spill into the river.
And it killed like a quarter million fish, which floated down river and piled up in the city of Seville in Spain in August.
Now you've got a quarter million dead fish rotting in a river in the middle of hot August.
And boy, you know, you have a problem.
And whenever we have an ecological problem that is localized in space, localized in time, and is easy to trace responsibility, we fix it.
Love canal, in the United States.
This is a superfund site, huge amounts of chemicals were dumped for many years by a company, made the ground horribly poisoned.
It's a tragedy. It should never have happened.
But it did happen. So, okay, we fixed it.
We even fixed a slightly less localized issue with, you know, most air pollution and most water pollution in the United States is solved.
And it's lived in Beijing.
Beijing has horrible air.
And what happens this summer in Seattle, we've had horrible air because of wildfires.
That's not a controllable thing.
And that is in part due to the climate thing and part it's due to forestry practices.
It's a whole set of stuff.
So as much as we can say, oh, we can feel superior that Los Angeles used to look like Beijing in terms of air and Los Angeles is way, way, way better.
Yeah, we did fix that. And China will fix it too because eventually the people living in Beijing will say, hey, this is screwed up.
Let's fix this. The forest fire problem is more diffuse.
It affects lots of things over a long period of time.
You know, the forestry practices that mostly in government controlled national forests are there in part because they valued timber and they never they wanted to stop all little fires.
And it turns out if you stop all little fires, you leave tons of fuel for a big fire.
We got to change that mindset.
But that mindset is very ingrained.
Now you get to climate change writ large and you have the worst of all situations because currently we're doing the first order approximation exactly nothing for climate change.
You might say, oh, what about all of the renewables?
What about these other things?
Yes, we do have some very admirable work that's going on.
But the trouble is the world's also growing economically, which is a good thing mostly.
But as a result, the percentage of renewables, even if we grow renewables really fast, it's hard to grow it fast enough that it makes up for all the coal plants that are being built in China and India and other places whose economy is booming.
And if you measure CO2 up on the top of Manukai and Hawaii, that's where the best measurements come from, every year it's higher.
So no, we made no progress.
But to make progress, we would have to do one of two things.
We'd either have to invent a technology that was just totally superior to fossil fuels.
And someday we will. When fossil fuels came in, fossil fuels were superior to directly harvested fuels.
So coal pushed out wood.
And it was a good thing because England, I was just in Scotland a few weeks ago, Scotland used to be covered with trees.
It's a barren tundra today, lots of peat.
But the huge amounts would used to be forested.
Well, you cut the trees down, if your fuel needs and also your shit building and house building needs grow faster than trees can replace, you get a totally deforested land, which is to first approximation what Britain is.
Still a wonderful place to visit, I love it, but it's a problem.
The petroleum pushed out certain other fuels.
And one of my favorite little historical artifacts is there's a British humor magazine called Punch.
It's still around today.
And in the late 19th century, I think like 1875-ish, they published a cartoon.
And the cartoon was a fancy dinner and ball that was being thrown by the whales in honor of Colonel Francis Drake, Frank Drake probably.
Drake is the first guy to drill for oil.
And he drilled for oil in Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania is blessed with having, or at least the time they would have said blessed, you can argue that today, of course.
It has a crude oil that came out of the ground and didn't need very much refining to be a replacement for whale oil in lamps.
You know, people are aware of the horrible slaughter of whales that went on in the 19th century, almost drove a few species extinct, almost drove all of them extinct.
That was primarily to have fuel for lamps for reading at night.
Okay, it was indoor illumination.
So it turns out that petroleum based oil was just better and it stopped quailing.
Then within a few years, the electric light bulb that stopped using any kind of a burning fuel.
And so the light bulb was just ridiculously better than having a flame.
And so except for very niche applications like a camping stove, maybe, of course these days they're electric too.
It won. Now we don't have those solutions yet.
And we also were just not serious about climate change.
You know, in 2005, 2006 you have inconvenient truth come out.
The world was rich. Okay, we didn't know it at the time, but the last few years of an incredible cycle of prosperity around the world, 2008 there's an initial crisis.
It took a lot of the momentum out.
You know, today similar things are happening.
Okay, we had the pandemic.
Slowed a little bit of fuel demand, not that much, but we'll take what we can get.
Well, okay, out of the pandemic, now maybe we can roll up our sleeves and do the thing.
Only we're now flirting with World War III.
And energy sources that seemed like they were both clean and reliable, like natural gas in Europe.
Well, actually it was never clean.
Natural gas actually produces more global warming in almost every case than coal.
The gas industry loves to say, well, when you burn it, it's half of coal.
And that's true, but of course you also spill a lot of methane into the air.
Methane, on the first year you spill it, it's 120 times higher global warming impact than CO2.
Over time the methane decays into CO2 where it only becomes just as bad as CO2.
It doesn't take very much of a leakage of methane to make it worse than coal.
And all current scientific estimates say that natural gas is worse.
But at least it was reliable and convenient.
No one has to shovel coal, it burns cleanly, and it's so reliable until your main supplier is the one flirting most with World War III.
So, whoops, they don't have Russian gas anymore.
Big, big problem for Europe.
So asking Europe to make giant progress this winter seems kind of tough.
Yeah, they're cutting down old growth for us now for wood.
Yes, going all the way back.
Back to pre, yeah. Which, I mean the trouble is the old and old growth forest, you know, you cut the trees down, it takes a long time to grow back.
So we have a long duration problem, so it's not right in front of us.
We have no sort of sourceability to what's really causing the problem, or do we understand what's causing the problem?
Well, I think, so there's another factor which is just jealousy and human nature.
Yeah, I think we understand what's causing the problem.
You know, it's a whole variety of things around modern life.
Transportation, you know, fossil fuels are great for transportation.
The density and the convenience of a liquid hydrocarbon fuel is just enormous.
So we're making more of these electric vehicles.
Except today, most electric vehicles are filled up with fossil derived electricity.
If you drive a Tesla and you live in the east coast of the United States, statistically speaking, you're hurting the climate.
Not helping it. Washington State, we can feel slightly better about it because we have a mix of nuclear and hydro, so most of the power in Washington State is at least clean.
So if you charge your Tesla up, that helps.
But anyway, here's the worst part of it.
Humans will typically put stuff off and put stuff off and put stuff off, and then you panic.
We saw that with the pandemic.
I had been publicly saying that we had to worry about both a natural pandemic and or a bioterrorism thing.
I've been saying that for 10 or 15 years.
Other people have been saying it for longer than I had.
In 1918, you had this horrible pandemic that killed 3% of the people, 5% of the people worldwide, something like that.
That's a giant number. It's a bigger number today than it was then.
That was without airplanes and without masks.
But no matter how much you pound the table and say we need to take pandemic seriously, 1918 was a long time ago.
People forget. In the trade off between what's our immediate gratification issue and the long term.
I had some very reasonable people who would argue with me on this pandemic issue.
They would say, but look, I study heart disease or cancer or HIV or some other terrible disease.
And yeah, it may take, you know, we may have a pandemic at some point, but shouldn't we put our first priority towards diseases that kill people every day rather than disease or situations that occur once every 100 years?
Well, you have a mix. And my example there is fire sprinklers.
So if we look up in this building or nearly any building that you would go in that's a modern building and most older ones even, you see fire sprinklers.
But you also see lots of 100 year old buildings.
Sure, in Seattle than the East Coast, the East Coast is 200 year old buildings.
So the probability of a burning of a building burning down is not very high.
But we have millions of buildings.
So every day, some building burns down.
And fortunately, it's not a coordinated thing.
It's just one building will burn down or maybe you have a tragic wildfire that like destroys a whole town as occurred in the mountains in California a few years ago.
Those fires happen often enough that even though you have a low risk on any individual day, we say, right, this is bullshit.
It's it could happen. We're going to put sprinklers everywhere.
The trouble with the pandemic is that if it happens, even though the probability of a pandemic happening in a year might not be that different than the probability that a building burns down.
One in 100 say. In a least within a year.
It does happen. And then when it does happen, it affects society in such a profound way, because we're so dependent on transportation, logistics, all of these things in modern life.
That yeah, you should put some effort aside for pandemics guys.
Now, it seems obvious today.
The hope which is not. I can't say as I feel terribly confident about it.
The hope is that the world will remember this and will take more precautions because guess what, there will be another pandemic.
And I don't know when and I don't know how bad, but it will occur.
And the fact is, as you mentioned a moment ago, modern life with air transportation and this incredible flow of people and goods around the world.
It makes it worse. Plus, it's it's asymmetric, right?
If you're a nation and you want to cause harm to another nation, you might not be able to forward tanks and missiles and all this other things, but you can do cyber.
You can do biological weapons.
You can do other things.
Yes. This will sound very strange, but thank God for nuclear weapons.
In that most countries with ill intent really they see the United States or the Soviet former Soviet Union now Russia as superpowers nuclear weapons.
They want a nuclear weapon and it's really hard to make a nuclear weapon.
And it's so hard that even though a few countries have gotten them, it's not like everybody has them and it's cheaper.
It's easy. Bioterrorism is potentially worse than that because it's potentially much cheaper and much easier.
And it's also much harder to control.
That whole thing makes it a way worse thing.
So I think we'll see a bioterrorism event someday.
You know, if just two years ago, I had said there will be a war of conquest in Europe.
You would have said I was nuts, right?
It's like the EU is already one uniform thing.
What is Switzerland going to attack?
I mean, come on, there can't be an attack in Europe.
And as we speak, there's a war of conquest going on in what is geographically Europe.
You can say, oh, well, historically Ukraine wasn't Europe, but okay, it's right beside all these other places that are legally and treaty-wise.
Part of Europe. And we don't know where that was going to end.
We don't know anything about it.
So unfortunately, it's too easy to think ill of people.
They will eventually prove you correct.
It's, you know, I try to be an optimist about things and it takes some willpower because pessimism is just so damn easy.
Anyway, with the pandemic, we did panic.
And when we panicked, we did a lot of the right things quickly.
So I heard a speech by the CEO of one of the companies that developed a vaccine and Pfizer, I believe it was.
And he said, you know, if I had told everybody that we needed to do it in eight years, they would have said, you're crazy.
It takes us 10 to 12. He says, so I told him they had to do it in eight months because if I told them eight years, they would have taken the old process and tried to fix it in little ways.
And that would never work.
I was a brilliant. Whether he really thought all this up front, I don't know, but it's a brilliant analysis, even if it's after the fact, because what you would have to do is break everything you knew.
Yet, you still care a tremendous amount about safety and all these other issues.
And by God, the both the Pfizer vaccine and the Moderna vaccine, not only did they develop them in record time, they are among the best vaccines we've ever made for anything in terms of their efficacy.
Now, the damn virus keeps evolving as viruses do.
So that has might make people say, well, what do you mean after you've been getting boosters?
That's that's no good. But without this, these techniques from modern biology that allowed them to engineer these vaccines in a fundamentally different way, we never would have made it.
But here's the problem with climate.
So OK, there will be a day when we really panic on climate.
I predict. I don't know when that day will be.
I don't know what set of effects or problems it would take to make us panic.
But let's say that there's a day when we really panic.
In World War Two, the America had after World War One was tremendously isolationist.
We neglected our defenses.
But then there's Pearl Harbor, and that was a wake up call that you just couldn't ignore.
Most people don't realize we had not declared war on Nazi Germany before Pearl Harbor.
And in fact, we never declared war on them first.
Within a few days of Pearl Harbor, Germany declared war on us.
So it's like, oh, right, we have a multi front war and America got serious.
Half of the officers in the US Army were let go within three months of that.
Because they were what people call parade generals.
They were a bunch of maybe distinguished people, but all they had done for the last 30 years is lead parades and marching bands.
Well, here's the problem about climate change.
So suppose that we panic one day and we say, right, from tomorrow onward, there will be no more emissions.
Well, unfortunately, the chemistry and physics of climate change is not very forgiving.
So when you emit CO2, it stays in the atmosphere for a really long time.
Thousands of years, tens of thousands of years.
People argue, but you wouldn't be totally wrong by saying there was a 20,000 year lifespan.
Now, that's the same as never from a human life perspective.
So it turns out if you stopped all emissions on day one, the climate will continue to drift upwards for about 100 years.
I've written a bunch of papers on global warming.
I've done this calculation.
Other people have done this calculation.
You know, you can quibble as to whether it's 85 years or 110 years, but it's something in that range.
Then it'll slowly start going down.
It will take 145 years for it to equal the same temperature on the day that you panicked and shut it off.
And that was assuming you did it instantly.
Now, usually with Pearl Harbor or the pandemic, we don't do the panic.
We didn't panic in the pandemic when we first heard, oh, there's people getting sick in China.
No, no, no, when people started dying, actually first in Seattle, that was one of the first sets of cases in the U.S., was a nursing home just a few miles from here where unfortunately someone who's in contact with someone who had flown from China recently and it killed a ton of people at the nursing home.
Well, that gets your attention.
You know, what will it take in global warming?
I don't know. But we have this problem that at the moment we're not developing alternative energy sources fast enough.
As I said, perhaps extremely good reasons like, hey, we can't because winter is coming and we have a war on.
I get it. But once we get there, just switching over, and of course you can't switch over the whole economy in a day, if you then get more realistic about it, then that says you probably are going to have increasing temperatures for more than 100 years after that day.
Now, it turns out there's a technological, a possible technological fix to that, which is something called geoengineering, which gets people very riled up because they think, oh, that's terrible for X, Y, and Z reasons.
What is geoengineering?
So geoengineering is a way to directly combat global warming.
Walk me through. I don't understand.
What's the deal? The Earth is kept warm by sunlight from the sun.
That is our primary source of heat.
We would be all frozen here on Earth if that wasn't the case.
The problem that the CO2, the enhanced CO2 in the atmosphere and other greenhouse gases is that light will come from the sun.
It bounces off the Earth.
Some of us absorb by the Earth and warms the water or warms the land that it hits.
Some of it reflects off as light.
Then of the heat that goes into, say, the ground, that makes the ground hot and it gives off a little bit of infrared radiation.
And the infrared radiation used to just pass right through the atmosphere, back out into space, still does, mostly, but a tiny bit of it gets trapped.
Now, to put this in numbers...
Is it trapped by the carbon?
The CO2 traps it. So if you have a flask of CO2 or other gases and you shine infrared light of the appropriate wavelength through it, it absorbs it.
So the more CO2 in the environment or in our atmosphere, the more we're going to retain...
Yes. And the classic metaphor for this is a greenhouse.
If you're in a greenhouse, the visible light of the sun goes through the glass or the plastic that makes the greenhouse.
The infrared radiation from the things inside that are heated up doesn't pass through.
It gets trapped and that's why a greenhouse can be so warm, even if it's the middle of winter in Alaska.
You can be much warmer in a greenhouse because it traps the heat.
But the amount of heat that's trapped is tiny.
It's about 1% roughly of what the sun produces.
So if you average the sun's output here on Earth over the whole Earth and over the whole year, it's about 300 watts per meter.
Rough numbers. The amount of extra heat that's trapped in the atmosphere is a quantity called radiative forcing.
And that's about 2.0 something, a little less than 1%.
But is that compounding every year?
Yes. So that's an exponential...
This is how banks get rich from an ATM.
When you take money out of an ATM, there's a little charge that occurs.
Maybe it's not directly visible there, it's just a monthly charge or this charge, but they take a little bit and they don't take very much.
But 1% of a ginormous number is a lot.
But here's the thing, if you could make the sun 1% dimmer, well, that would solve the problem, wouldn't it?
Now there's natural things that effectively do this.
One is certain kinds of clouds.
Clouds, it turns out the physical clouds is very complicated, but clouds up in the high atmosphere can reflect the sunlight, doesn't hit the ground.
That helps. Ice helps. So one of the big problems in the Arctic is you have all of this area covered with sea ice.
Sea ice, to first order of approximation, is white.
It reflects all of the light.
If you replace that sea ice, if the sea ice melts, now you have water.
To first order of approximation, deep ocean water is black.
It absorbs all of it. Big problem.
Deserts actually reflect a lot.
The Sahara Desert reflects a tremendous amount of heat.
So if you could reflect enough of this sunlight back into space, you'd solve global warming.
Now there's simple things which sound dumb, but they're a good idea.
They wouldn't fix the whole problem, but they would go a little ways, which is we should have white roads.
You should always have a white roof.
Black roofs are terrible from this perspective.
However, if you really wanted to affect this, what you'd have to do is put particles in the upper atmosphere.
And there's a bunch of ways to do this, but one inspiration is volcanoes.
So when volcanoes erupt, they put gases and particles into the atmosphere.
A very strong volcano puts it in the upper atmosphere, the stratosphere.
And Mount Punitubo did that in 1991.
It changed global temperatures by 1 to 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit for a year.
After about a year, year and a half, it falls out of the sky.
So there are people that want to put these particles up there, and there's ways that you could engineer to put those particles there.
And that is one of the methods of geoengineering, that one's called solar radiation management, just so you can have an acronym.
How do you think about the second order consequences?
So there will be second order consequences.
And my analogy there is if I had a heart attack right now, they would take me to the hospital.
They'd split my sternum open, crack my ribs, break every one of them with a big spreader, and do open heart surgery.
It'd be terrible consequences.
But it might save my life, so it's worth it.
The big fear that people have about geoengineering falls into two categories.
One is something I call the little engine that could, and this book is a kid about little trains, and they have to take some important thing.
I think it's medicine actually, over a mountain to a town, and the big trains won't do it.
And the little engine that could says, I think I can, I think I can.
And there are people who view this climate situation that way, that if only we just had the willpower, we could just do the right thing.
And if we all just say, I think I can, and our politicians make tough choices, and we cut back on a whole variety of other things that, oh, we could do it.
And my answer to that is the little engine that could ought to mean that no one is overweight.
And I don't mean to fat shame people, but the number of people who wish they could lose weight.
Just to, if there's people who are happy being overweight, I'm overweight myself.
Let's be very clear, this is me I'm talking about.
But willpower is extremely hard when there are lots, A, you're a human being, and B, there's lots of other intervening factors.
So one idea is, hey, if you offer geoengineering as a solution, people will gravitate to that solution rather than making hard decisions.
And they'll do that even if global warming, or even if geoengineering doesn't even work yet.
It's a fair comment. But to that I say, okay, on the day that we have every year there's lower CO2 measured in the atmosphere, then I'll shut up.
Until then, and not so much.
The other concern is, oh, well, if you do that, you will get some other big problem.
And I'll say, oh, you're just trading one problem for another.
And to that I say, yes, exactly.
Just like all of human history.
Yeah. You know, we were hunter-gatherers.
Then we invented agriculture, which was great.
We could have a larger population.
The population didn't have to migrate with wherever the food was, so we could have a civilization.
We had leisure time, we invented art and culture, and all these wonderful things flourished under agriculture.
But then we discovered, oops, there's things called droughts and crop failures.
And so for the first time, you had catastrophes where hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of people died.
You can't have a million people die at once and hunter-gatherer thing.
You don't have enough, A, there's not enough people.
And B, they're all dispersed and they all have their own situation.
Then you could. So yeah, agriculture was terrible.
But then we've learned to fix those things in agriculture.
We've learned to fix more and more and away you go.
Another one that people love to bring up, which is a funny one, is that around the turn of the century, our biggest cities, New York City, London, and so forth, were drowning in horse urine and buried in horse shit.
Because they were full of horses.
And it was this giant problem.
And people could figure out quite what to do.
They would build street cars and trains helped in between things, but they couldn't build enough trains inside.
And then the automobile came along, which it sounds funny, but the automobile helped fix an ecological problem.
But it had lots of other problems.
It has a pollution problem.
It also just kills a lot of people, still kills a lot of people.
Because more people will die in car accidents in the United States this year than died, you know, by like a factor of 10, died in 9-11.
Usually the number of people killed or maimed in car accidents is about double the number of murders.
We're outraged about murders.
We're not that outraged about car accidents.
And partially that's because we're addicted to the freedom of mobility that cars and other motor vehicles give us.
So yeah, humans, there will probably be some consequences.
So you should only pull out the geoengineering fix if it's otherwise unmitigated disaster.
Just like they wouldn't crack my chest open if I went into the emergency room with a hangnail.
They reserve that for a very special set of circumstances.
How do you think about the global cooperation that's also needed between nations because you, as one nation, can have an impact, but if another nation defects?
And in some cases they would get an advantage from defecting in terms of cost of manufacturing, cost of energy.
Huge advantage. So of course people are jealous of other folks that don't do the same thing.
You know, that's one of the problems with global warming or global climate is that it affects all of us.
I'm involved in a nuclear company and for a while we had a deal to build one of our brand new plants.
We've invented a new type of nuclear plant that's way safer and it's got lots of other benefits.
We were going to build our first one in China and there were lots of people in the U.S.
that said, how dare you build it in China?
Why would you let them have it?
And I said, because we all share the same atmosphere and they're the ones that are building new coal plants.
We're not building new coal plants in the U.S.
So actually that's what the problem is.
Now as it turns out, that project didn't go forward and we're currently trying to build our new plant in Wyoming.
We have a deal to do that, which is very exciting.
You know, you have this issue that the developed countries of the world, the United States and the U.K.
is an example. We've both been burning lots of fossil fuels for 150 years at least.
And yet we want to tell China and India that they should not do that.
And those people say, hey, what do you mean?
We have people who are living way below your standard of living.
You got rich this way. It's our turn, dammit.
And irrespective of what you think about the moral imperatives there, short-term trade-off versus long-term and so forth, we just don't have a way to force them unless you want to go to war over it.
And that would be insane and would have more climate, in particular be insane for the climate.
Besides the war in Ukraine cutting back on Europe's climate obligations, you can't blow up whole cities and set them on fire without having a lot of emissions.
That's a terrible emission event.
It seems like because the human tragedy is so, so, so much worse, it seems weird to call it that.
It's mostly this insanely tragic human and humanitarian issue, but it's also as bad for the climate.
I want to switch gears just to the last question that I have for you.
What do you wish you knew today?
What do you know today? This is a better way to word this.
What do you know today that you wish you knew earlier?
Well, there's tons of ways of answering that question.
Clearly in retrospect, in 2008, I should have shorted Lehman Brothers.
And I should have gone long on Peloton before the pandemic and sure, she sold at the peak.
Of course, you can have those things, but that kind of second guessing isn't particularly helpful.
At the moment, I can't think of any giant...
Is there anything about life that you know now that you...
Well, God, I would hope so because it would mean I hadn't grown as a person.
If there was nothing that I wished I knew.
That said, it's hard for me to come up with an exactly...
What was the the epiphany that I had that taught me this great lesson for life on this particular day of my life?
So I don't have a great single example.
I'll think about it. Something will come to me later tonight and I'll think, damn it.
If only I had thought of that, just in school, I would walk out of a test and in the hallway walking away suddenly the answer to one of the problems would like top into my head and it's like, damn it.
That's how it works. I want to thank you for taking the time today, Nathan.
We're being told that this is the end.
Okay. I appreciate it. Well, thank you.
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