08 March 2010

Department of Energy Senior Adviser Discusses Climate Change

Transcript of webchat with Dr. Holmes Hummel, February 24 (Revised)

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
Bureau of International Information Programs
Webchat Transcript

CO.NX Chat:  Mitigation Technologies and Policies

Guest:  Dr. Holmes Hummel
Date:   February 24, 2010
Time:   8 a.m. EST (13:00 GMT)

Jonathan Margolis:  Good morning. My name is Jonathan Margolis and I am the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Information Programs.  I am excited to be here with you as we continue to discuss climate change issues with prominent U.S. experts with folks from around the world.

These webchats that we’re hosting here are conducted in partnership with East Carolina University and three of its partner universities, Shandong University in China, Faculdade de Jaguariúna in Brazil, and the University of Jammu in India.

A few weeks ago we were lucky to have Dr. (John) Holdren; Dr. Holdren is the advisor to the president of the United States for science issues and he is also the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the White House, and he taught us a great deal, spoke to us about climate change and science and its impacts. And, at least from my perspective, we had a chance to talk with him about new terminologies, things like climate disruption as opposed to climate change.

Today we’re going to be focusing about mitigation issues, mitigation technologies, and I’m delighted to introduce you to our distinguished guest, Dr. Holmes Hummel. Dr. Hummel is a Senior Policy Advisor at the Department of Energy and she joins us with a sterling academic background as well.  She’s been a professor at the University of California in Berkeley working at the energy resources group there. She’s also worked on our Capitol Hill as a congressional science fellow through the American Association of the Advancement of Science.  And one other aspect of her background that may be useful for you all to know, her studies were done, her graduate degrees were done at Stanford University and she’s also studied in China at Tsinghua University.  So, Dr. Hummel, let me welcome you to our program here. I think you're going to begin with opening remarks and we’ll jump into the questions from our audience.

Dr. Hummel:  Thank you. Thank you all.  I'm very pleased to participate in this series, I think it's an impressive and important testament to the commitment of the State Department to have such a program and to be engaged in public outreach this way, it's exciting.  I also had the benefit of watching Dr. Holdren's remarks given that they're archived, I think that's a treasure chest in itself, so I'd like to pick up right where he left off where he was focusing his attention and yours on climate science and the challenges of climate change impacts. At the Department of Energy we are focused on addressing the sources of climate change and particularly the human cost forcings that are adding heat to our atmosphere.  That has a very strong fingerprint, fossil fuels and human-caused land use change.  Now, there are questions from the audience that led Dr. Holdren to address land use change in some more detail whereas he said perhaps less than I will this morning on energy, which is where I'll focus my remarks.

In the United States the dominant part of the greenhouse gas footprint is from fossil fuels.  And the Department of Energy is committed to the U.S. 2050 target expressed by our president as 83% below 2005 by 2050.  The challenge between here and there is significant because energy infrastructure is long lived, it takes us almost 40 years to turn over our vehicle stock, or our power plants and about half of the greenhouse gas emissions from the United States originate from coal power, coal power plants.  So one of our primary strategies is to increase energy efficiency, to decrease our demand for electricity by wasting less of it and having more economic productivity for the energy that we do use.  We use appliance standards, building code standards, the Energy Star program and other technological innovation incentives and initiatives for energy efficiency, and we couple that with clean energy incentives for renewable energy, so we have a strong mitigation policy in the United States to bring on more and more renewable energy with the president's goal of doubling our production within two years from now.

This Department of Energy is also committed to revitalizing the nuclear power industry with small modular designs as well as other innovations and giving us an opportunity to subtract greenhouse gas emissions from the atmosphere by using carbon capture and sequestration.  For those of you in the audience who are climate scientists, and interested in the lowest stabilization levels that we can possibly achieve, which is of course a strong guidance offered to policy makers by science, in order to reach the lowest stabilization targets that have been studied, having a negative emissions technology is important, and that’s one of the most important drivers behind our investments, large investments in carbon capture sequestration.

Now I've just spoken with you about our technology set for electricity. In transportation most of our carbon footprint comes from petroleum use.  This Department of Energy is focused on electric vehicles and other technology designs that will allow us to not only improve energy security by reducing foreign imports but also think about higher density, transit-oriented corridors for development that will use mass transit modes, allow us to do mode switching in addition to more fuel-efficient vehicles.  The federal government is doing an impressive amount in my opinion based on where we were two years ago, and I'm pleased to be part of a team that’s working very vigorously in that direction.  But we can't do it alone and we aren't working alone.

The Department of Energy and the U.S. federal government is working with our state and our local authorities because they have unique powers, whether it's land use zoning, building codes or the rules for electric power companies as they collect their revenues from customers that may be better off saving energy than buying energy.

In addition to working with those state governments that have climate action plans, and more than half of the states in the United States have a climate action plan, the federal government itself has a very ambitious executive order issued by the president just about four months ago that will give the federal government a goal of more than 25% reductions by 2020.

Not only are we working of course with our domestic authorities we're very pleased to have excellent counterparts in relationship to the Department of Energy, we have agreements with China and India forged just in the last four months.  I'm happy to field a few questions about that, but because I believe it was offered to the students in advance I'll point out that the Department of Energy's contribution to mitigation and mitigation policy includes the technology action plans that were issued in December of 2009 through the global partnership formed through the major economies forum.  Major economies forum includes 17 countries including the largest developing countries and they were all participants in the production of ten different technology action plans, so our challenge is now to put those action plans into action.

Margolis:  Very good.  Thank you for that overview.  Let me begin with maybe just a general question.  We talked quite a bit about mitigation, but is there a definition that you're comfortable with that would help our audience understand maybe for the less technical folks what that fancy word actually means.

Dr. Hummel:  I appreciate that because it's a good point of clarification.  Dr. Holdren is a good teacher in this regard, where he says in the face of the climate challenge we have three options.  We can reduce our emissions, which are driving climate change impacts.  We can adapt to the impacts that we're already experiencing and those that will intensify or we can suffer, and they’re three options.  The more that we mitigate the less we must do to adapt and the less suffering we're exposed to in the process.

The Department of Energy, as I mentioned before, is very strongly oriented then towards mitigation which is the reduction of our greenhouse gas emissions as fast as possible.

Margolis:  Appreciate that.  Let me jump now to a question from Sandeep in India.  What Sandeep is interested in is, I guess it’s almost a philosophical question, can mitigation technologies actually reverse the effects of climate change?

Dr. Hummel:  Sandeep, probably not in your or my lifetime.  But that's not because it's not possible to have our greenhouse gas concentrations peak and decline.  We're clear that that's possible.  But probably not in the time horizon that we're speaking about because of the earth's systems and the way that heat transfers from the atmosphere to the oceans in particular.  Because of the cycling of -- let me just put it more simply, because of the energy balance of earth and the way it settles out, it may take a couple of hundred years for our current pulse of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere to fully settle into an equilibrium.

With regard to reducing or turning negative our annual emissions, the key is as I already mentioned earlier, and it's an important point, why I mentioned it, carbon capture sequestration is the one technology set that we know that we can use to subtract greenhouse gas emissions out of the sky in a large scale over long timeframe, in excess of what we certainly could accomplish in the more immediate imperative which is to stop deforestation and allow earth's natural syncs in the biosphere to continue to absorb excess greenhouse gas emissions.

Margolis:  Another question from Wendy in China.  How does the Department of Energy or even other scientists around the world, how do we evaluate different mitigation policies?  Can we assure that the method we adopt through mitigation is the most effective and represents the interests of the majority of folks?

Dr. Hummel:  Another two great questions in there.  One is about technical feasibility, and the other in my opinion sounded like it was about equity and social impacts, socioeconomic impacts.  The first is very clear, we do not have a silver bullet.  There is again as I call on Dr. Holdren, only silver buckshot, which means a scatter shot of many different types of technologies.  The Department of Energy uses a portfolio of technologies and those partnerships that I mentioned with India include a diversified portfolio of partnerships with India on multiple different technology sets.

So we are managing our risk by investing in lots of different avenues and integrating them.  With regard to what is the best possible solution set there are certainly those who work with cost effectiveness calculations to try to make those choices under the constraints of scarce resources.  There's also a political economy operating at every level, local, state, national to try to adjudicate or to determine the distribution of benefits and burdens.  This is of course the crux of international climate negotiations and even domestic U.S. federal climate negotiations.  It's clear that we are challenged on Capitol Hill to come to a solution set that will satisfy all 100 members of the United States Senate.  And it's no different for the challenges faced by national governments in India, China and governments where other students today are residing.

Margolis:  Let's maybe spend a few minutes on the costs if we can because there's a lot of interest about how you pick a specific technology or as you say a buckshot approach, many different technologies.  Are there now accepted ideas about which technologies cost more, cost less or which ones are more effective?

Dr. Hummel:  I would say with confidence that the first fuel is energy efficiency.  And in all cases and multiple international declarations efficiency is a priority.  It has the potential to save costs that then can be dedicated to those technology sets that might be more expensive than the prevailing costs.  But it also relaxes a host of other environmental harms that may be associated with energy production, whether it's mountaintop coal mining or water impacts associated with other types of energy use.  There's no question.  The priority by order, magnitude is energy efficiency.

We have looked at biomass, wind power, and several different forms of solar power as the crux of a long term portfolio for sustainable energy use in industrial economies.

But it is because of the two following reasons that we cannot ignore nuclear power and carbon capture sequestration.

For nuclear power, the Department of Energy's primary purpose is to make sure that we have a source of base load power.  The kind of power that can be available at all times even when maybe at night time or winds may be slow or you may not be living in a forested area with a strong biomass supply.  Carbon sequestration is important because of the negative emissions potential, but also because we know that some of our international counterparts are well endowed with coal and need to have good technology options in order to use that domestic supply.  And so they’re also part of the essential set.

Margolis:  You had mentioned earlier deforestation issues.  There's a lot of interest in our audience for that.  We have a question from Brazil, actually a number of questions from Brazil asking about the question of deforestation, could you speak a little bit more about how mitigation can be used to combat deforestation issues?

Dr. Hummel:  Well, that's a good question, particularly for Brazil.  The Brazilian government has made a most significant commitment to reducing its deforestation rates by 2020.  And the efforts to do so are not necessarily tied in to the energy strategies that Brazil is using.  There are sugar cane plantations in Brazil through which biomass becomes a primary fuel for electric power generation.  And there has been an effort, Jose Goldemberg, who is a luminary in energy development in Brazil, an effort to take advantage of agricultural practices as part of an integrated sustainable energy production profile for Brazil in a way that also can protect further rain forest conversion to plantation production.  So, I think it's an integrated set of questions.

Now, the Brazilian government has led in the international analysis of deforestation strategies and the Department of Energy really focuses on the energy sides of things.

Margolis:  Okay.  Let me then jump to another question from Ivy Zhang in China, who is wondering, whether the types of new technologies that you're describing, wind power, solar power, do you think they will ever replace oil and fossil fuels as the main power resource?

Dr. Hummel:  I do.  I certainly do.  And I think that's the technological imperative that we face.  I think that the climate change challenge is significant and relentless in its physics and the forms that we experience its impacts today.  We have multiple co-benefits from making commitments to clean energy technologies including energy security, urban air pollution, health benefits and other types of domestic energy supply, energy production, economic benefits.  We are seeing very strong indications that the integration of our renewable energy technologies can give us the resilience that we need, but we do have much more technological innovation yet to accomplish.  Particularly I'll point out, in the area of energy storage.  And it’s a primary research and development focus of the Department of Energy.

Margolis:  You had talked earlier about how long it might take for us to see some of the changes that you are describing with these new technologies.  And we have a question from Carlos at East Carolina University.  And he's wondering how long it would take for the United States to switch to a majority of carbon free or carbon neutral methods if we started right now.

Dr. Hummel:  There are lots of different versions to that question.  Let me see if I can take a couple shades of it.  Let me point out that it depends on the scale.  The state of Hawaii, for instance, today has a target of reaching 70% renewable energy in -- renewable energy and energy efficiency by I believe 2030.  That would be the most aggressive benchmark we have in the United States for that sort of transformation.  We have an energy information administration that tells us that under a policy that would be consistent with the President's goal of a 2050 target we could certainly accomplish those goals, though it would be challenging, with the cap and trade type policy that the administration supports - which gives you that timeframe for the nation. It could happen even faster, with the political will to put the policies in place that reward private investments in the clean energy technologies.

So, I would not put a definite answer to the question, though I know, Carlos, that may be disappointing, my point is that it depends on what your policy context is and political will at all levels makes the big difference.

Margolis:  Let me raise one more technology question that is out there.  There have been a number of questions coming in on this particular technology, biofuels.  The question I want to ask you is this.  Are there any risks associated with some of these technologies? You hear some discussion back and forth about biofuels that maybe if we invest heavily there it starts becoming a food issue as well as a fuel issue.  So, the general question is, are there any risks associated with some of these technologies?  The specific question on biofuels is, are there costs to the biofuels, what's your view on the possibilities provided by biofuels in particular?

Dr. Hummel:  I appreciate the question.  I'll actually make a broader statement to start, which is that all of our energy technologies involve some level of risk.  And risk management is the charge of both the public policy makers and investors, and it's that constant negotiation that keeps us at the edge of the energy policy environmental protection policy development line.  With regard to biofuels in the United States there is undoubtedly a very strong controversy over what I believe that Dr. Holdren also addressed as the indirect impacts of biofuels feed stock cultivation.  In the United States currently, most of the biofuels are sourced from corn-based ethanol.  Well, corn is obviously a feed stock, it's also used for other purposes including food supplies and so on and so forth – which created a large public controversy when the price of oil spiked and then concurrently the price of fertilizer spiked, and the price of the value of the corn ethanol rose and we saw price spikes over multiple commodity sets.  That's one risk to manage.  But the long term technology goal for biofuels production is actually in the second and third and fourth generation feed stocks for biofuels, and not in corn-based ethanol which is a feed stock supply for food.  Algae-based supplies for biofuels is something we're very interested in, investing in heavily, but between corn-based ethanol and algae we also have investments in Cellulosic ethanol production.  I think these are long term questions that public policy analysts at all levels in all places will be asked to manage for quite some time, and I wish that there were a way to relieve us all of that burden.  But I think that vigilance and careful analysis is the only response.

Margolis:  You had talked earlier about some of the activities that the Department of Energy is doing internationally.  And we've got some questions about the international arrangements that might exist to address issues like mitigation.  One question from Peshawar, for example, in your view what specifically is needed to enhance developing countries’ ability to implement mitigation policies?

Dr. Hummel:  We are working very, very strongly to support developing country partners in the use of low emission development strategies that allow for an integrated investment perspective using both multilateral development bank investments that continue as well as foreign direct investment and private capital investment flowing into those countries and local small business development opportunities in developing countries.  From all three vantage points, there is a challenge – if in coherency, there are multilateral development banks financing fossil fuel projects at the same time local governors and mayors are trying to institute clean energy programs. So we are trying to support the concurrence and the convergence of a long-term view that in the 21st century a move to a clean energy technology base is not only important for environmental protection and climate change mitigation purposes but also the key to economic development and competitiveness in a global economy that will depend upon clean energy technology set.

The low carbon growth strategies or low emission development strategies are programmatic priority of USAID, and the Department of Energy – I should mention to everyone here – has in the last three months opened U.S. OpenLabs specifically for our friends in developing countries who are looking for analytic tools, data sets and some of the best resources that we use to evaluate clean energy projects and policies.  It can be found at openei.org or open energy information.  Or by searching "U.S. open labs."  Those are all contributions from our DOE national labs and we're very pleased under the Obama administration to have made them freely available to audiences around the world.

Margolis:  I'm going to ask you now just a question not so much maybe about government, but also about universities.  You come from a university background.  Dr. Holdren was talking last week, he focused quite a bit on the science side of things.  What is the science component of the university aspect to mitigation issues?  You've talked quite a bit about technology development, is that something that gets done in the universities or is there a difference between science and the technology?  What's the role of the universities here?

Dr. Hummel:  What a great question.  I think there are three.  The first role in my opinion is in public engagement and taking responsibility for the corporate management of the university itself.  Because that affects all members of the university community and all thought – leaders and all fields that emerge from it - the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, which is AASHE.  That organization, for instance, is a very large coalition of universities in the United States and I believe they have international partners focused on sustainability in higher education and driving down the greenhouse gas footprint of the university itself.  That's a microcosm for the problems that we have to solve at the local, state and federal levels.

Then there is the technology innovation piece that you mentioned, which is the R&D strategies.  A much smaller slice of universities are even prepared to undertake cutting edge, clean energy research and technology development exercises.  We work with them very carefully. There is in the United States an association through the National Council for Science and Environment specifically focused on those energy oriented universities, where we work with them as counterparts in our R&D strategy.

But then more broadly beyond the research institutions again both here in the United States and abroad, the third strong role for the universities is workforce development and job preparation.  In the United States the workforce that manages most all of our power plants and other major energy infrastructure is aging.  Even in this recession there are significant employment opportunities in the energy sector.  And our universities face a challenge of providing compelling and well-supported education programs in science, technology, engineering and math in order to provide those industries with the talent and the skills that they need.  That's I think the third enduring role for the universities.

Margolis:  I'm going to turn to a question now from -- Brazzaville and this one maybe goes a little bit beyond mitigation but I hope you'll give us your views on it.  It comes from the Congolese NGO, called the Association in the Fight against Climate Change.  The question is, is it possible to measure -- again on the science side, is it possible to measure greenhouse gas emissions in developing countries like the Congo? And how would it be done? How would one go about measuring greenhouse gases there?

Dr. Hummel:  What a great question.  The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which many of your students I suppose would be familiar with from Dr. Holdren's remarks at least, have provided guidance on a protocol or a standard, literally a recipe and method for counting greenhouse gas emissions, including those that would dominate the Congolese greenhouse gas inventory in land use change or forestry or deforestation.  Developing countries in the past had not been obligated under the United Nations framework convention on climate change to conduct annual emissions inventories.

But more recently with the Copenhagen Accord, there's an indication on the part of a large number of developing countries that they can and could produce their emissions inventory on a bi-annual basis which would give scientists and policy makers everywhere much better information about where to address problems and find solutions.

Again, the United States EPA and the United States Agency for International Development, USAID, have programs that support our international partners in developing their own domestic programs for annual emissions inventories and the Congolese challenge is certainly significant but not unprecedented and can be supported.

Margolis:  Talking a little while back about the costs of some of these technologies and -- and you hear a number of different solutions that look not only at the technologies, but at the whole issue of carbon itself.  And one of the things that you can read about is this idea of a carbon tax.  So we have a number of questions coming from our audience about a carbon tax.  What does it mean to put a price on carbon?  And if you could, what is the status of those kinds of efforts around the world?

Dr. Hummel:  Well, I'll see if I can answer the first question first.  The second one is a massive inventory of international climate policies.  With regard to price-based policies, it's actually extremely helpful to be able to distinguish between the use and purpose of non-price-based policies and price-based policies. Price-based policies can send good information to private decision makers in well-functioning markets.  The first assumption there, however, is that you're working in well-functioning markets, which may or may not be the case.  So there's a complementary set of non-price-based policies and price-based policies that I think make sense, it makes sense to work with them as a set.  The price-based policies address the fundamental market failure that we are allowing private consumers and producers to use our shared atmosphere as a sewer.  Without making any payments or compensation in consideration of the damages that it would cost.  And that's the economic theory behind the public policy for imposing a cost on carbon.  Whether that price is set by the government as a flat rate, which would be the tax-based policy, or determined through a cap and trade process among private actors who are negotiating among them who has the least cost ability to reduce their emissions, that's of course the major dynamic in U.S. climate policy today, and perhaps around the world.

There are very few instances where there are carbon taxes in place compared to those countries that are trying a cap and trade type approach including the EU, ETS, the emissions trading system, and even in the United States perhaps overlooked by many of our international compatriots there is a well-functioning greenhouse gas trading system in the power plant sector, the electric power sector of the northeast.  The regional greenhouse gas emission -- I'm missing my i for it -- Rggi.org.  We'll get you there, it's a little early in the morning for me to remember my acronyms.  But if the -- if you do visit the website, rggi.org, you'll learn about a price-based policy that is functioning in the United States.  If the target or if their level of ambition were higher, their price would be higher and it would be a more significant policy.

Margolis:  Thank you for that.  I think you know we have an audience composed not only of universities but also there's an ongoing discussion on Facebook – on our global conversation site on Facebook - dealing with climate change.  There's been, I don't know whether I’d call it a debate but an ongoing discussion at least there about whether adaptation and mitigation, whether there's a tradeoff between the two.  So we have couple of folks that are engaged in this, I'll mention two names in particular, Andre and Samara both in Brazil were wondering is one more important than the other, adaptation versus mitigation?

Dr. Hummel:  Such a critical question because all public policy makers operating under budget constraints have to make this very difficult decision about how to apportion scarce resources to address one or another problem.  It's my personal opinion that we can't afford to not address adaptation.  Because climate change impacts are occurring now and mismanagement or nonresponse to those dislocations caused by flooding, storms, droughts, fires, cause cascading problems that are even more expensive to deal with if we're not integrating them into our planning, into our risk analysis and into our overall long-term investments for urban growth and human settlement.

That being said, at the Department of Energy, the dominant investment is in mitigation because that's where our strength is and overall if you looked at the United States budget I think you would see that taking responsibility for our very large greenhouse gas footprint compared cumulatively and in annual proportions to our companions on planet earth makes it a very strong imperative for us to focus on mitigation.  In other countries that have relatively small greenhouse gas footprints and relatively large vulnerabilities to climate impacts the balance may be different.  That's the negotiation by public policy makers in different places that's up to them.

Margolis:  In your opening remarks, you described not only international activities, but you made a point of mentioning local level action.  Many of our students, they're going to school wherever they go to school, they're very interested in knowing, what can they do personally and so I guess the question that I wanted to ask you, and I'm borrowing the words here of Maricus, who is a student and asked a similar question.  Are there things at the local level that an individual can do beyond making a new technology or biofuels or whatever it might be, are there things that the individual can do at the local level to mitigate climate change?

Dr. Hummel:  Absolutely!  In fact, personal choice is a very powerful form of contribution, statement and participation.  I think that behavioral change overall is an overlooked area for both public policy and research.  There is a behavior, energy and climate change conference in the United States that is widely attended and I can recommend its web-based resources as all of the presentations there are available online.  I think many of the students and researchers may find how interesting it is to think about what can be done on a personal level, or with social media tools like Facebook, for instance, in terms of outreach and engagement.  There's another angle on this which is the research that tells us how difficult it can be to have a technology-only perspective without taking into account sociology, consumer preference and so on and so forth.  I believe that personal choice is powerful, I believe that local leadership is essential and that all politics, as the adage goes, is local, and that if we feel like addressing climate change as a political problem then local action is definitely a first step in the right direction towards a solution.

Margolis:  Maybe we could just spend a minute talking about local actions, and believe it or not - you and I have something in common that I'm going to tell you what it is, but you don't know what it is, but it's about local level action - we both bike to work.  I biked to work today.

Dr. Hummel:  I did, too.

Margolis:  Are there -- do you have in your mind examples of things that you do personally at a very local level that you’d like the students to know about regarding climate change and mitigation?

Dr. Hummel:  Making transportation choices whether it's doing my errands in a batch so that it's a one-trip ordeal or choosing public transit or choosing my bicycle, for instance, as I do even in this urban setting here.  Those are day-to-day choices.  But there are also important personal choices that get made once in a while. That includes things like making the effort to address leaks in a house and insulation in the attic.

I had to talk I want you to know with my family for almost ten years before they finally arranged for an energy audit to the house and found out how much money that our family had been wasting on energy losses every year since I was a child.  And making that choice finally to be aware of what our options were to improve and making -- saving money and making the investment to make that upgrade became a boon to our family, but it was a choice.  It was one of those choices that different from bicycling to work every day, it's a personal choice that you make once in a while.  So I would characterize those as two different options, and there are, since your web-savvy audience is probably well familiar, quite a host of places where you can go online to look at all the ideas that other people are using.  Without endorsing websites like these, you can find creativecitizen.com, or Kenso, I believe kenso.com might be working right now for a public audience, if it’s not, please forgive me.  But these are communities, online social networking communities saying hey here is how I saved my greenhouse gas emissions today.  I think it's very exciting.

Margolis:  We're coming to the close of this session but I wanted to just give you an opportunity if you’d like to, the audience, many of them are students, you come from an academic background, is there any personal advice you'd like to give them about mitigation issues or climate change in general as they figure out where do they go next in their interests and their academic and professional development?

Dr. Hummel:  I'll tell you that though this conversation has been themed on climate change, it's not the only energy or environmental challenge that we face.  And I came to this issue from other vantage points.  What I'm convinced of now is that in my lifetime this will continue to be a driving context in which we make lots and lots of other decisions.  And taking advantage of this opportunity in this lecture series to gain access to expertise, facts and insights on what we're doing today will also help inform students’ understanding of the long-term nature of the challenge, the enduring call to action and the need for committed leadership over a long period of time.  So my parting message would be, that in taking advantage of this unique and privileged opportunity, that you also think about no matter what your career interests may be, the way that climate change and energy security and human development and energy development can be integrated into the responsible choices at a personal and a public policy level as well as a private investment level over the decades to come.

Margolis:  Dr. Hummel, let me thank you for joining us today and taking time from your busy schedule to be with us, really appreciate it.  And for riding your bike over here, we appreciate that very much.  To our audience, I hope you will be able to join us for our next discussion which will be Wednesday, March 17, at 8 a.m., that is 8 a.m. on the eastern coast of the United States.  Wherever you are in your time zone you'll have to figure that out yourself.  Our discussion topic then will be adaptation and we’ll be very fortunate to have with us Dr. Marsha McNutt who is the director of the U.S. geological survey and also serves as the science advisor to the secretary of the interior.  Again, let me thank you all in various audiences and look forward to seeing you all on March 17.

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