01 March 2010
White House Adviser Discusses Climate Change
CO.NX transcript of webchat with Dr. John P. Holdren, February 3
Dr. John P. Holdren, President Obama’s science adviser, discusses the impacts of science and climate change with university students from India, Brazil and China.
Following is the transcript:
(begin transcript)
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
Bureau of International Information Programs
Webchat Transcript
CO.NX Chat: Science and Impacts of Climate Change
Guest: Dr. John P. Holdren
Date: February 3, 2010
Time: 8 a.m. – 9 a.m. EST (13:00 GMT)
Jonathan Margolis: Good morning, folks. My name is Jonathan Margolis, the Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Information Programs. I'm delighted to be here with you at the launch of this series of web chats with prominent U.S. experts to discuss climate issues and climate change policy. Web chats that you-all are participating in are hosted in partnership with East Carolina University and three of its partner universities, Shan Dong University in China, Faculdade de Jaguariúna in Brazil and the University of Jammu in India. Today's discussion is on the science and impacts of climate change, and over the course of the next several weeks, we will be having a number of other discussions on other topics of interest to you all following closely the issues of climate change. I would like to give a special welcome to all of our university students as you have been learning climate change is a complex issue, and throughout the semester you will hear a range of voices on this topic. Let me introduce our distinguished guest, Dr. John P Holdren.
Dr. Holdren will give a short speech, after which he will take your questions. And you're welcome to submit questions at any time during the course of the speech as well as afterwards as well. Dr. Holdren is assistant to the President of the United States for science and technology, director of the White House office of science and technology policy and co-chair of the President's council of advisors on science and technology. He holds advanced degrees in aerospace engineering and theoretical physics for MIT and Stamford and is highly regarded for work on energy technology, policy, global climate change and nuclear arm control, and non-proliferation. He is a member of the National Academy of the Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, American Academy of Arts and Science as well as a foreign member of the National Royal Society of London. Dr. Holdren welcome and we are looking forward to your remarks.
Dr. Holdren: Thank you very much, Jonathan. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm going to start with the proposition that the term, global warming, which is so widely used to refer to what we are experiencing in the world's climate, is in fact a misleading term. It's what we call a misnomer, because it doesn't really accurately describe the situation. Global warming implies something that is uniform across the globe, that is mainly about temperature, that is gradual, and in many people's minds, a little bit of warming sounds like something that might even be good for us. The fact is that what we are experiencing is highly non-uniform geographically. It's not just about temperature but it's about the patterns of all of different variables that make up climate, precipitation, snow and ice, river runoff and much more. It is not slow, but it is rapid in the two respects that matter the most. It's rapid compared to the pace at which human society can respond to a change in climate and it is rapid compared to the pace with which ecological systems can respond to a change in climate. And finally, although in some places, for some period of time, the change we are experiencing in global climate can bring benefits, as it proceeds and gets larger and larger and more and more disruptive, it will become increasingly negative almost everywhere in terms of its impacts on human well-being. For that reason, a thought we ought to be calling it not global warming, but global climatic disruption.
That disruption, that ongoing disruption, is real without a doubt. We are experiencing changes in climate that are unusual, highly unusual, against the backdrop of natural variations in climate. Climate is, without doubt, mainly caused by human activities. Again, there are natural variations in climate change. But we know that the change now being experienced fits precisely with the fingerprint that would be expected from the changes that human activities have imposed on the atmosphere. It is already producing significant harm. There is some people who say, well, this is say problem for our children and our grandchildren but not for us. That's wrong. We are already experiencing serious impacts on human well-being in many places around the world and those can only be expected to grow until we bring to a halt the harmful emissions that are mainly responsible for changing the climate.
Last key point is that the changes we are experiencing and impacts we are experiencing are now growing more rapidly than anyone expected, as recently as a few years ago. Climate change, in many important respects, is accelerated. Let me say a word about what climate change really consists of. One needs to distinguish between change and weather. Weather is what is happening right now. Climate is the pattern of what happens over larger over larger areas and longer periods of time. That means climate refers to the averages and extremes and the timing and the distribution geographically of hot and cold, of cloudy and clear, of humid and dry, of drizzles and downpours of snowfall, snow pack and snow melt, of breezes, blizzards, tornadoes and typhoons and again not just the magnitude of these things but how they are distributed geographically and in time. And the key point is, when climate changes what happens is the patterns change.
The global average surface temperature, which scientists use as an index of the magnitude of climate change, is only an index. It's what we call a proxy for the wider range of patterns that are associated with that. It's a little bit like your body temperature. If you're body temperature were to go up two degrees Celsius, you wouldn't say, two degrees is just a little warming. You would understand that that two-degree increase in your body temperature was telling you something important about the state of the system, about the state of your body. And similarly when the global average surface temperature goes up two degrees Celsius, as we are on the way to doing, that's telling us something very important about the state of the climate system.
We need to also be specific about all the things that climate change puts at risk, things that matter to us. Climate governs and therefore climate change can disrupt the availability of water on the planet, the productivity of our farms and our forests and our fisheries, the amount of oppressive heat and humidity that we have to live within our cities and countrysides in the summer, governs the formation and dispersion of air pollutants. It governs the geography of disease. What kinds of pathogens and what kinds of carriers of disease can live in what abundance in what regions. It governs the damages we have to endure from storms, from floods, from droughts, from wildfires. It governs the property losses we have to expect from sea level rise. It governs how much money we have to spend on engineered environments to cope with the increase in climate, how much we have to spend on dams and dikes to control water flow, how much we have to spend on air-conditioned environments in order to live in oppressive heat and so on. And it governs in fact the distribution and abundance of all the species on the planet, the ones that we love and the ones that we hate. When you disrupt climate, you create impacts in all of these categories.
If you want evidence of how climate is changing all across the globe, it is easy to find. The air is warming, the oceans are warming, mountain glaciers are shrinking, sea ice is shrinking, the great ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica are slipping, and sea level is rising. And as I mentioned before, consequences for human well-being are already being experienced. We are having more heat waves, more floods, more droughts, more wildfires. Not everywhere, but the places that are prone to each of these kinds of climatic disruption are experiencing more of them. We have tropical diseases reaching into the temperate zones. We have vast areas of forest being destroyed by pest outbreaks that are linked to a warming climate. We are seeing hurricanes and typhoons of greater power, and we are seeing coastal property increasingly at risk from the surging seas.
As I mentioned before, all this is happening faster than was expected. Sea level is rising at twice the rate that it rose on the average during the 20th century. The volume of sea ice in the Arctic, which reaches its minimum every September, was smaller in September 2008 than in any year in the last 30. The volume that is the combination of the surface area and the thickness was probably smaller still in 2009. We are still analyzing that. In the last 30 years, the average area burned by wildfires in the western United States has increased six-fold. Again, we know the primary cause of these perils. It's the emission of carbon dioxide and other heat trapping pollutants from our factories, our vehicles, our power plants and from land clearing. We also know that failure to curb those emissions is going to bring far bigger impacts from global climate change in the future than those we are experiencing so far. Drastic changes in wetlands and sharp drops in the productivity of farms and forests and fisheries, a dramatic acceleration of species extinction, inundation of low-lying areas by rising seas. These are among the possible outcomes. Nobody can predict exactly how fast these will come. Nobody can predict which ones will be the worst. But we know if we fail to curb the emissions that are responsible, we will be seeing larger and larger damages in some, if not all, of these categories.
The good news is that we also know what we can and must do to avoid the worst of these possibilities. We have to work together, east and west, north and south, and above all, the United States and China and India and Brazil, the groups that are participating in this call. Because these countries are today the biggest, emitters, among the biggest emitters in the world. China is number 1. The United States is number 2; India is heading rapidly for number 3. Brazil is moving up the list. We need to solve this problem together. It cannot be solved by the industrialized countries alone, even though they are responsible for the largest part of it to date. It can't be solved by the developing countries alone. We have to solve it together.
We have to create new incentives and agreements to accelerate the transformation we need from dirty and inefficient energy technologies to clean and efficient ones. We need new incentives and agreements to bring deforestation and other destructive land use change to a halt around the world. And we need to invest together in adaptation, measures that we take to reduce our vulnerability to the changes in climate that we do not succeed in avoiding. We can do this together. And when we do, we will benefit not only by avoiding the worst damages from climate change, but we'll benefit as well by reducing our dangerous over dependence on petroleum. We'll benefit by alleviating the air pollution that afflicts so many of our cities. We'll benefit by preserving our forests as havens for biodiversity and sources of sustainable livelihoods and we'll benefit by unleashing a new wave of technological innovation generating new businesses, new jobs and new growth in the course of creating the clean and efficient energy systems of the future.
The key question on which we need to be informed by the science of climate change is, how much progress we need to make with these measures, how quickly in order to have a good chance of avoiding climate changes more extreme than our adaptation efforts are likely to be able to cope with. And then it is clear, in pointing to the conclusion, that a global average temperature increase no more than two degrees Celsius is likely to be necessary in order to keep climate change to a manageable level. The two-degree Celsius level is not a bright line. It's not a sharp limit. We don't know that we are completely safe below that and completely in trouble above it. But we have a lot of reasons to believe that the dangers rise sharply as the temperature goes above two degrees Celsius. It's likewise clear that having a good chance of meeting that goal of keeping global average temperature increase below two degrees Celsius, requires that global emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping pollutants should level off by 2020 and decline thereafter to something like 50% of the current levels by 2050 with continue in emissions after that.
This is a big challenge. This is not going to be easy. But it is something we can do and that we ought to do in the interest of the well-being of all of our countries around the world. And what is needed to get this done, I emphasize, is only going to happen if the United States and other industrialized countries work hand-in-hand with China and India and Brazil and the other developing countries to get it done together. I'll stop there and take your questions.
Margolis: Thank you very much, Dr. Holdren. That's a terrific overview of the issues we face. We have a number of questions that have come in from some of our students already. You mentioned the role of carbon dioxide in climate change or climate disruption as you're calling it. One student asks, if the whole world were to stop using coal, oil, natural gas at the same time, would the earth cool quickly or would there be some sort of a lag affect over time before you see the effects in the reduction of the use of CO2 emissions?
Dr. Holdren: There is, unfortunately, a lag time between reducing and seeing the effects of that in the atmospheric concentrations and the temperatures on earth that result from those concentrations. A major reason for the lag time is that carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for a very long time. When we emit one ton of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, half of it will still be there 100 years later. A quarter of it will still be there 500 years later. And so, when you reduce carbon dioxide emissions, you're making a contribution to reducing the concentration in the atmosphere over time, it is slow. This is one of the reasons that we need to begin now.
There is an old story about a homeowner who is asking his gardener about planting trees that he wants to grow to provide shade for the home. And the gardener tells him, it will take 100 years for a tree we plant tomorrow to grow big enough to provide shade for your home. With respect the homeowner says, then we should plant it today instead of tomorrow. We need to get going even though there is a lag, because if we continue to wait, the amount of climate change we'll experience will be larger still.
Margolis: We have some students who may be anticipating some of the answers you're giving me. Another question directly related to the solution you just raised, Peter asks if greenhouse gas is already in the atmosphere will be causing increase in warming that will affect the earth, are there alternatives we should be looking at in addition to greenhouse gas reductions in terms of combating climate change?
Dr. Holdren: Very good question. There are a number of things we can do in addition to reducing emissions. One is to take steps to try to remove some of the carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere.
A way we know how to do that is growing more trees. That is when trees grow they remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it in the wood and leaves of the tree. And if we could not only halt deforestation but commence a large world-wide project of reforestation and afforestation, we could remove the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere that is already there.
There is also interest in technological ways to do this. Developing technologies to remove carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, in other words, artificial trees, if you will, and storing that in various geologic formations in the earth which would hold it for many thousands of years. We could also arrange for some uptake of carbon dioxide by changing agricultural practices in a way that increase the amount of carbon that is stored in the soil.
These are all ideas that need to be explored and pursued in the combinations that analysis shows will be most effective. But it's important to understand that we do also need to invest in adaptation, because we are not, with any combination of measures we can take, to mitigate climate change. We will not avoid it all. The time lags are too great. The momentum in the current set of activities causing climate change is too great and therefore we need to invest in measures that will make us more resistant to the changes in climate that we are going to experience.
Margolis: You a number of times referred to models or scientific projections about impacts. Another student asks, how can we ensure the prediction models we use are constructed scientifically and objectively?
Dr. Holdren: Another very good question. And the answer really has two parts. The most important thing to understand, and this is widely misunderstood in the public and by many decision-makers, is that our understanding of what is going on in the global climate does not depend primarily on computer models. Our understanding depends primarily on observations, what we can see and measure happening in the world around us and the evidence we have that enables us to compare what is happening now to what happened before. Computer models are useful. But they are mostly useful for trying to understand the range of possibilities that exist going forward from now, because of course we have no measurement to the future. We have to use models of various kinds to try to project the different possibilities.
The question remains a good one. How can we be sure that we are using the best, most objective, most accurate models for those efforts at projection and forecasting? And that answer goes to the heart of the scientific method. The way science works is you have lots of people looking at the important problems independently comparing their answers, criticizing the answers that other people get, trying to understand the differences, publishing their results in scientific journals and in other forums where we have what we call, peer review, where other people working in the same field look very critically at the results. And the result of that process accumulatively over time is that errors, whether in models or in measurements or in other aspects of the science being done, errors tend to be discovered and corrected over time. That doesn't mean that everything is exactly right, that you read about in scientific journals. It means that the process as it moves along is quite effective at weeding out the errors.
We know the models are getting better and better over time. They are still not perfect. One of the ways we know that are best models are quite good, is that if you feed them the conditions 100 years ago, and ask them to project, for example, over the 20th century what the climate will do, the models succeed with very impressive accuracy in reproducing what the climate really did over that period. If you ask the models to reproduce what has happened over the last 700,000 years, and we know quite a lot about that from the study of ice cores, from the study of fossil pollens, sediments and so the models reproduce quite accurately what we have reason to believe happened for the last 700,000 years. And it's on that basis of the capacity of the models to quite accurately reproduce the past that we believe that they are at least reasonably good at projecting the possibilities going forward.
Even then, we know there is a range ever possibilities going forward, but the range of possibilities does not give us any reason for complacency because if we allow the greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere to continue to increase, the full range of possibilities laid out by current models indicate that we are in trouble no matter where in the range we end up. We really understand with great clarity now that we need to reduce these emissions or the impacts on our global climate are going to become unmanageable.
Margolis: Let's talk a little bit about the solutions. We have a question coming in from Sandeep Singh of Jammu University in India. And I'm going to paraphrase it a little bit. But it deals with the costs of solutions. And the way he is framing the question is, does the question of the financial costs or the budgets that is going to take to solve the problem, are they in the minds of maybe many policymakers more important than actually solving the problem itself?
Dr. Holdren: Policymakers want to know that the costs of not solving the problem will be bigger than the costs of solving it. To spend a lot of money to avoid small damages. We should only be willing to spend a lot of money if the damages that will be avoided by spending it are larger than the amounts you have to spend. So it is not crazy to look at this comparison. It is difficult, because our projections of the damages are not very accurate. We don't know exactly how these various forms of harm will revolve. But there is strong reason to believe from all the analysis that have been done, that the damages of unmitigated climate change going forward will be much larger than the costs of mitigating that climate change.
For example, the best estimates are that achieving the kind of emissions trajectory I have described as being insistent with avoiding an increase of more than two degrees Celsius in the global average temp would cost something in the range of 2 or 3% of world GDP in 2050 and in 2100. Now that is a lot of money in absolute terms. But if you think of it this way, that the world economy has mostly been growing and is expected to continue to grow at about 3% per year, then having a GDP that is 2-3% lower in 2050 than it otherwise would have been is the equivalent of asking people to wait until 2051 to be as rich as they otherwise would have been in 2050. This does not seem to be too high a price to pay to avoid what could be a climate catastrophe. The estimates of what the damages to world GDP could be if we do not abate climate change are much larger in range to 10, 20% and more of global GDP.
If that's the particular measure you want to use. I, myself, don't believe that GDP measures capture everything that we should be worried about. There are a whole variety, for example, of environmental goods and services on which we depend, which nature in a sense, provides for free and which we do not include in our GDP but which could be very substantially impacted by climate change.
There are potential social disruptions even conflict, that could arise from the stresses imposed by climate change. If those materialize, all bets about GDP are off.
Margolis: In your talk in answering the questions, you mentioned deforestations and that seems to have generated quite a bit of interesting among the audience. We have a number of questions that have come in on that. I was wondering if you could speak in more detail about the value of forest as well as the potential impact if forest station continues, what would be the impacts? So the values and the costs.
Dr. Holdren: First of all, just to put the problem in perspective in numerical terms, the best estimates are that deforestation is contributing something in the range of 15-20% of the carbon dioxide being emitted by human activities around the world today. So fossil fuels are 80-85%, deforestation is 15-20%.That means that deforestation is as important as all the vehicles in the world, all the cars, trucks, buses, planes, trains, all their CO2 emissions are about equal to the deforestation emissions. That's a big piece of the problem. And we cannot really imagine solving the problem as a whole unless we include the deforestation component.
The second point I would make about deforestation is that just as reducing emissions in the energy sector is not easy because we get so much of our energy from fossil fuels and the technologies are so expensive and they have such long operating life times that you can change the energy mix only slowly, it is also true that deforestation cannot be changed overnight because it's being driven by economic and social forces that are very deeply embedded in the societies that are experiencing this deforestation. So like the fossil fuel problem, we have to start working on it sooner rather than later because it's not going to be fixed overnight.
Second important point is that forest are valuable for a great many reasons other than avoiding carbon dioxide emissions by keeping the carbon stored in wood. They are extremely important as sources of sustainable livelihoods for the people who live in them. They are extremely important as habitat for biodiversity from which new food crops, new drugs and new vaccines and other products come. If only we don't burn down the genetic library the forest represent before we have a chance to read and view the books. We have every reason to start doing a better job of reducing deforestation.
The good news is that this is starting to happen. Brazil in particular has made great straits strides in the last couple of years in reducing its deforestation rate. And President LULA is to be congratulated for the efforts that Brazil has devoted to this and the success that has been experienced. But ultimately, one of the things that we are going to have to do is increase the financial incentives not to cut down forest. In other words, we have to make it more profitable to keep the forest standing than to cut them down. And that is going to require, I believe, some help from the industrialized countries to the developing countries whose tropical forests are the ones who are most rapidly disappearing.
Margolis: Let me ask you to take a step back for a second. You mentioned something in your opening remarks about climate disruptions and the overall negative impacts we are going to see. There have been a number of questions that have come in that talk about climate change that is might be specific areas, specific parts of the globe, that the results of changing in climate may be positive for isolated areas. How would you respond to people who find themselves in a circumstance where they are saying, climate change for me personally, for my area, maybe not so bad?
Dr. Holdren: First of all it is true that up to a point warming, for example, which is part of the pattern, just not the whole pattern, warming can be beneficial if you live in a part of the world, for example, where the deaths from excessive cold in the winter are greater than the deaths from excessive heat in the summer, you might have a beneficial affect on life expectancy if things warmed up a little bit. If you live around the Arctic ocean, there can be some attractions to having ice-free ports in places that previously were locked in ice for most of the year. The trouble is that with those benefits in most cases, go liabilities.
For example, many people in Russia, particularly across northern Russia and across Siberia, had been thinking that global climate change would be good for them because it would warm things up. It's a part of the world that is cold a lot of the time. A lot of ice. What they are discovering is that melting permafrost is the say big problem. They have roads cracking. Building foundations are collapsing. Power lines are falling over. As the permafrost melts on which these various structures are built. So the question is, whether on balance they will continue to believe as climate change goes forward, that the benefits that are experiencing are worth the cost.
A larger question would be, suppose you find a place for which climate change is all benefit for the time being. If the rest of the world is suffering as a result of climate change, while this one region is doing okay, you have to expect because of the interconnectedness in our world today that the region in question is also going to suffer in various ways. I like to say we all live under one atmosphere on the shores of one ocean. Our countries are connected by flows of people, money, diseases, ideas, weapons. We are not a disconnected world. And so, it is hard to be complacent about a situation in which very few places do better and every other place does worse.
Margolis: And you mentioned already some of the activities that individual countries are undertaking. We talked about Brazil's efforts on forests and some of our participants from Brazil are raising the whole question of biofuels, very popular in Brazil. And the question for you, on biofuels, do you see that as a potential -- there is a bit of controversy as to whether that, environmentally, whether biofuels are positive or have additional costs. And some of our students from Brazil are noting their extensive use of biofuels. Even with that, Brazil's emissions are also rising. So the question boils down to, what is the role of biofuels and does the Brazilian example provide any useful guide for the rest of the world?
Dr. Holdren: Let me say a couple of things about that. There is no single solution to this problem. There is no one technology we can embrace and say if we do this, we'll fix it. That is certainly true of
biofuels. They are not a magic bullet. They are not going to fix this problem alone. The second thing is that the term, biofuels, describes a great many different technologies using different kinds of plant material, different conversion methods, different cultivation methods, and some of them are much better than others. The controversy that has arisen about biofuels largely relates to circumstances in which the land use changes associated with substantially increasing biofuel production lead to carbon emissions that are greater than those saved by using biofuels in place of fossil fuels. And the implication of that is, we have to be careful how we do it. We have to do biofuels in a manner that does not fall into that trap of entailing land use patterns that release more carbon dioxide than we are saving. With that said, biofuels could be a important part of the solution, along with many other approaches, including more use of wind and solar energy, including more use of nuclear energy in ways that we can make sufficiently clean and safe, including modifying fossil fuel technologies so that the carbon dioxide can be captured and stored rather than released in the atmosphere. These are all things that we need to be looking at and doing the ones that make the most sense.
Margolis: You were describing a number of issues that cut across not just science but economic issues and social well-being issues. And a number of our students in China are raising the following question.
Does this issue, this issue of climate change or climate disruption, force almost a choice between environmental protection and development? Economic development?
Dr. Holdren: I don't think it does force that choice. I think what we need to promote, and I think this is happening in both China and India today and in Brazil as well, is economic development in a manner and along a pathway that avoids the worst environmental consequences of the way today's industrialized nations developed in their time. In other words, to say we are not going to do it with the same technologies that were used a century ago is not to say we are not going to develop. Toots say we are going to do it smarter. What you see today actually in China and India and in Brazil is very impressive.
You see in all of those countries rapid expansion of the use of renewable energy. Wind power, rapidly expanding in both China and India. Biofuels expanding in all of these countries. Increased interest in solar energy. Increased investment in advanced fossil fuel technologies.
One of the myths that is prevalence in some groups in this country is the proposition that these developing countries aren't doing anything. They are doing a lot. China and India and Brazil are doing a lot. We all need to do more. The United States is doing a lot. But we are not yet doing enough and we are not doing enough together. And one of the things that I'm very preoccupied within the White House and that President Obama puts very high priority on, is building up our international cooperation on these proposition of clean energy in a manner that facilitates development without entailing the damages of unmitigated climate change. One of the things that, again the most fundamental insights about this problem is that human well-being depends both on viable economies and on a viable environment. And we cannot advance human well-being successfully by favoring one of those ingredients over the other to the point that we undermine either economic viability or environmental viability. We have to proceed in a way that enhances both. And I happen to think and President Obama happens to think that there are a lot of ways to do that, and that is what we ought to be working together ongoing forward.
Margolis: We are running a little short on time and we have two more questions and the second to the last question would be this. You have come from an academic background and now you find yourself in the would you say working for the President of the United States. Could you give our students a sense of how the White House in your experience, looks at these scientific issues and tries to make long term policy decisions that affect all elements of society starting from a scientific premise in what has been -- how is that policy process work?
Dr. Holdren: The first thing I would say is that this particular President, President Obama, was very clear already in his campaign for the presidency that his was going to be a fact-friendly administration. And that he was going to put science in its rightful place. He used those very words again in his inaugural address. I spoke to him before he was elected about this and after he was elected. This is a President who really understands both the importance of science and technology for addressing the challenges that the United States and the world face, but understands as well the importance of being clear as policy is being made about the importance of being clear as policy is being made about the scientific and technological facts. So he has broad science back into its rightful place in the White House.
The Office of Science and Technology Policy, which I direct, is very much involved jointly with the national economic council and with the council of economic advisors, with the national security council, with the office of energy and climate change in the White House. We are all working together to make sure that the proposals that go to the President are based on the best understandings of the relevant science and engineering. And working together to make sure that the President is completely informed about all ofthe facts that matter. And that's the way he wants it. That's happening because the President wants it.
The other thing that is working well in this administration, in this respect, is that the various cabinet departments, the Department of Energy, the Department of Interior, the Department of Commerce and the big science agencies, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. National science foundation, NASA, are very tightly coupled into this process. A talk to people in those agencies virtually every day. So we are getting the benefit of all of those capacities across the government in making sure that the folks at the top making the decisions, and right at the top is President Obama, know what they need to know. This is a President who respects the facts and has set up a White House and a whole executive branch designed to make sure he has the facts.
Margolis: Thank you for the answers to these questions. I wonder if I give you the opportunity if there is anything you like to say to the students, very interesting on climate change issues. Any advice on what they could be doing in their own communities?
Dr. Holdren: I would say the first step is education. The students who are participating in this call already, I can tell from their questions, have a far greater understanding of this issue and its importance than a great many other people in all of our countries. So the first thing I would ask of the students is become not just students but educators yourself. And talk about this with your fellow students and others with whom you come in contact. Talk about the ways in which we can address this challenge in a manner that respects both the importance of our economies and the importance of our environment.
The second thing I would say is there are many, many opportunities in your careers going forward to make contributions to the solutions that we have been talking about here. Those opportunities range from full-time work-related to clean energy to climate change adaptation, to working at the boundary of science and technology and public policy, to a degree of engagement that is less than full-time that is still very important. People who become engineers, scientists, lawyers, accountants, political appointees, officials of various agencies, everybody can do a better job if he or she spends a bit of time thinking about the corrections between their immediate professional responsibilities and the wider challenges that we all face together, including those in energy and climate and their intersection with the economy.
Basically, my recommendation is that it is always helpful to think a little bit outside the boundaries of your own work. About the connections with what you do to what other people are doing and what the largest issue that is society faces are. And if we could get everybody to do that, if we could get everybody in a sense to devote 5 or 10% of their thinking time to thinking about the big picture and the connection of what they do to the big picture and how they can help with addressing those big problems, we would certainly get it done.
Margolis: Thank you again Dr. Holdren for your time today. Let me thank everyone who joined us today from China, Brazil and the United States and other countries around the world. We apologize for not getting to everyone's questions. As you can tell from the range of questions and the quality of answers, this was well worth the quality of time spent.
I hope you will be able to join us for our next discussion which will be Wednesday, February 24, at 8:00 a.m. and then we'll be discussing mitigation policies and technologies with David Sandalow, Assistant Secretary of Energy for Policy and International Affairs.
Thank you again and enjoy the rest of your day or evening, depending on where you're joining us from.
Dr. Holdren: Thank you.
Video of Holdren webchat