Okay, good afternoon everybody and welcome to the Ethics in Research and Biotechnology Consortium series. I'm your host in Sioux Ken. I'm the Director of Research Ethics and a faculty member in the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School. And I'm Director of the Center for Life Sciences and Public Learning at the Museum of Science in Boston. As many of you know, this is a series that brings together science and ethics at the cutting edge of both biomedical research, biotechnology, and also just research more broadly construed. I want to go over some logistics before we get started. In case you don't know. This is going to be a presentation where the main speaker speaks for a bit and then we have Q&A at the end, hopefully about 30 minutes or so at the end of the presentation. Now if you want to submit a question to our speaker, please use the Q&A function at the bottom of your Zoom screen. Don't use the chat function. Use the Q&A function and we'll get to as many of your questions as possible during the discussion. If you have any problems or questions that come up technical issues specifically, then you might want to use the chat function and one of us will get back to you as soon as possible. And there you can look for upcoming events at the website listed there. So let me introduce our speaker for today. Our speaker is Gernad Wagner. He is a climate economist and visiting associate professor at Columbia Business School while he is on leave from NYU. He's a columnist for Bloomberg, writing the risky climate column, and he's also written a couple of prominent books, including climate shock jointly with the late Martin Weitzman. He's recently geoengineering the gamble. So today he's here with us to talk about the ethics of solar geoengineering. And with that, I'd like to turn it over to Dr. Wagner. Welcome. Thank you. Great to be here. And yeah, I would like to sort of guide this discussion through some of the science, little of the science sort of just to get us all on the same page, not a natural scientist myself. I tend to play one on TV, but more importantly, dive directly into social science and the ethics of frankly, one of the more controversial topics within climate climate change and not to be too bombastic here but science more broadly. What is it? What is solar geoengineering? I'll go back to a bit more of the technical details later, but just to sort of give you a bit of a sense of what I mean when I talk about solar geoengineering, I'm narrowing it down already a bit. The most prominent, not the only but the most prominent technology, potential technology that one often hears about in the context of solar geoengineering is what's called stratospheric aerosols. They're producing deliberately tiny reflective particles into the stratosphere about 20 kilometers or higher up in the atmosphere. Those tiny reflective particles reflect sunlight back and cool the planet. So the principle is on the one hand volcanoes have been doing this forever. The principle is why we were white between Memorial and Labor Day and why winter jackets are black. So Albedo, the brighter the surface, the cooler it is or the cooler the space underneath. That's the science and again I will go into this in a bit more detail and happy to go into it in much more detail in the Q&A. The most interesting aspects in many ways and full disclosure I am biased as an economist social scientist here. While there are clearly scientific questions, natural scientific questions, the most interesting and in many ways, most controversial aspects are all about how to even talk about solar geoengineering, geoengineering. I will go more broadly and I will get into the difference there too. And what role it might, emphasis on might play in this broader climate policy portfolio. Right, so there's lots and lots of different ways to describe the sort of controversies here. The first one is this idea of moral hazard. The idea that even talking about solar geoengineering detracts from the need to cut emissions in the first place. And I don't want to dismiss this at all. It is very real. I will go into some of those details of how really truly is. But it's just the wrong way to look at this problem. I would argue strongly, it is the wrong way to look at this problem. The right way in many ways is solar geoengineering as part of a much broader risk risk trade off conversation, right there are risks of unmitigated climate change, there are risks associated with solar geoengineering. There are risks with lots of these technologies, right? Solar geoengineering isn't new, you know, nuclear energy is sort of the most prominent example perhaps within the environmental movement, right? There are risks. Well, it is also a low carbon technology so there are potential benefits. There are very real benefits. It's not about one versus the other, but it is making sure that we put the relative risks in the right perspective. And one way to sort of push this then is to say, you know, ideally, this is about the conversation about this topic, you know, raising the level of the discourse in general, and hopefully, moving from what is often framed as moral hazard into this, you know, into its inverse, inverse moral hazard where conversation about solar geoengineering actually encourages more action on the carbon cutting front, on the mitigation front, on sort of the, you know, the traditional stuff that we know is necessary. This is not either or, it must not be either or. Just to give you sort of a flavor of this, and you know, this is my own stuff here but of course I'm not the only one. So this moral hazard thinking has a long tradition, this moral hazard framing has a long tradition within the broader environmental movement within climate change itself. Okay, we will return to that. So, quick step back, and sort of the broad framing of climate change, what it is we are after here, what are you even talking about when we say we ought to, well cut CO2 emissions, or for that matter we ought to address climate change. What is that portfolio, we are talking. Well, lots of different versions of this graph, of graphs like this, of lines like this, right, this is global CO2 fossil CO2 emissions over time, and they have been increasing ever since we started counting them right there's blips in there. There's the 2008, 2007, 2008 global Great Recession, there's COVID, right, last year, two years ago, CO2 emissions decreased by a lot, quite a lot.  Lots and lots of different sort of real restrictions. And that behavior on our freedom, freedom of movement, right, happened for good reason. Right. Happy to go ahead and do some of those ethics but that's a debate why it happened, it did happen. Emissions that month went down by something like almost 20% or so in that one month, right, June 2020. Emissions decreased by something like 5, 6, 7%, depending on how, who is counting. That's a lot. One view of the world. It's also, frankly, very, very little relative to what we know is in fact necessary. We need to do much, much more. We need to get emissions down to zero, not, right, stabilize emissions, we need to stabilize concentrations, CO2 in the atmosphere, the stuff that goes in, the net flow into the atmosphere needs to go down to zero. Right, and right of the bath, this already can tell us something about how difficult, how truly difficult it is to cut CO2 emissions, right, we shut down the world, North America, Europe, Australia, East Asia, right, everything stood and still CO2 emissions only decreased by these 5 or so percent for the whole year and by the way of course last year by now CO2 emissions are back up again. So for the mathematicians in the room, right, the sort of last year or so, the increase in the increase is still increasing, right, the second derivative is pointing in the wrong direction here, even though we have to decrease emissions and do so at a much, much faster speed in order to stabilize global climates. Okay, now this is a very highly scientific rendering here of what is necessary, but frankly, it's not far off of what any of these model runs will tell us is in fact necessary, which is get those CO2 emissions down to zero. So if we were to be able to do so by mid century, roughly, plus minus couple of decades, I guess plus a couple of decades minus is certainly out at this point. We have to establish limiting global average temperatures to something like 1.5 degrees centigrade above pre industrial levels and that in many ways is a very well founded political goal these days. In lots of different countries, jurisdictions, companies have these net zero emissions goals somewhere around mid century. Europe by mid century or before China by now has a goal net zero by 2060 India 2070 lots and lots of different countries. ExxonMobil has a target of net zero emissions for its operations right they're still going to sell us the stuff for its operations right around that time by mid century by 2050. Okay, now without questioning these goals and the sincerity and the ways we can actually achieve that. Let's just posit that this is a rather difficult thing to do. And when I say rather difficult. Yeah, there is a plan a right and it means cutting CO2 emissions. And that's in many ways, the first and most important step. But there is plenty of hurt already built in. There are plenty of reasons for why we would need to want to adapt for what is already in store right global average temperatures have already risen by body degree centigrade above pre industrial levels, plenty of unsavory side effects already. And then, but by the way, sometimes is called geo engineering as well is very distinct from solar geo engineering and in many ways shouldn't be called geo engineering carbon removal. Right, that's what gets to these net zero emissions. It's taking CO2 back out. Now, different ways of doing that, right trees have been doing it forever.  Because in many ways, trees takes CO2 out, keep it in the biosphere and when trees die decompose the CO2 goes back up right now. We still need to plant more trees. That's a good thing. Well, stop cutting them down. But you're basically keeping the circle going the cycle going within the biosphere, whereas carbon capture carbon removal of trees takes CO2 out of the air, either smokestacks or literally thin air, and buried underground take it from the biosphere back into the geosphere where it came from right where the fossil fuels came from so in many ways, that's the goal here for carbon removal to in fact take CO2 back put it back into the geosphere. That sounds expensive. It currently is. But of course, you know, unless we climb the learning curve slide down the cost curve right about now. We're certainly not doing this at scale anytime soon, unless we get started today. And, you know, in many ways we are lots of research dollars, lots of real investment commitment flowing into this particular plan. So, those three things may not, and I would argue we pretty much know are not adding up to what is in fact necessary. That's not saying that they shouldn't, right, we should do a lot more. We need to, you know, do more on all three fronts, especially of course on cutting CO2 emissions. But of course, there is a difference between the world as it is, and the world how it should be. One reason, frankly, why I've sort of fairly confident to say that it would be extremely difficult to achieve these fairly ambitious climate goals is actually sort of a little historic look. It's a little bit unfair. I'll get into that in a minute. But this major climate economy integrated assessment model modeling effort, Stanford Energy Modeling Forum, they've been at this for for a couple of decades now three decades or so by now. There's a dozen or so 10 different major climate economy models. They have lots and lots of assumptions built in how is the climate going to develop how is the economy going to develop our technologies developing assumptions about the politics policy and so on and so forth. And those models over a decade ago, basically couldn't achieve two degrees centigrade, that's the 450 parts per million CO2 equivalent emissions here of average global warming with mitigation alone. There's massive, massive carbon removal technologies coming in negative emissions technologies. And by the way the assumptions here in some sense sort of crazy right so this is over a decade ago, the sort of parameters given to those modeling teams at the time were assume a global maximum carbon price global. So $1000 per ton of CO2, starting in 2012. Right, so basically, you know, secret 2009 or so, two, three years before that would have could have should have happened, basically say, what would happen. What would be the price CO2 globally at $1000. What technologies would come in, what kind of we expect. And despite these assumptions. And no we don't have a global carbon price of $1000 right not anywhere close. We simply couldn't get to two degrees centigrade of global average. Right, so that, you know, look in the in the history here tells me simply how difficult it is to do this with mitigation with cutting CO2 emissions. That was a bit unfair, because a lot has changed. Right, not just on the climate front also of course on the technology front solar PV is now the cheapest form of electricity in history 10 years ago it was 10 times as expensive as it is today. So it is cheaper than any other form of electricity, didn't happen by itself. Massive subsidies, German solar feed-in tariffs on the demand side, Chinese subsidies on the supply side, lots of ethical implications of that especially the Chinese part here now the Chinese supply side angle here, but suffice it to say, lots of advances. It is now much cheaper to abate to cut CO2 emissions. And that of course is good. It is a big part of why when one looks at these sorts of scenarios I showed before in the table. Right about now. The picture looks, you know, relatively hopeful or more hopeful. It's the same idea now we are extending the 2100 not 2050. Right, so that the dark blue line that was supposed to reach zero by 2050. Well, that still looks extremely ambitious. Right. But even the current path, even the path we are on looks a lot better than some of these extremely, you know, extreme scenarios worst case scenarios, that frankly the climate policy community had been looking at for for quite a while sort of these famous debates about which of these pathways are completely out right about now, right, what is highly unlikely, unlikely, where would we go with current policies, still not good enough. We need to do a lot more, but relatively more optimistic than some of these other scenarios, one might imagine. This is the shift, the immediate shift to the negative state. Oh my God things are potentially much much worse after all. There is this tail story out there the statistics statisticians in the room the sort of the fat tails the heavy tails, the low probability high impact events in this case. Very quick overview of one of my own contributions to this a part of this paper here. Climatic tipping points and sort of major changes to the climate system, or what is their impact what is their potential impact. And in many ways, you know lots of detail packed in here. The most important point is, there is a chance of things going really really wrong. Right there's the likely the most likely. This is what we can expect would happen, and that's bad enough. But there is this long right tail, there is, unfortunately, us being able to cut off the left hand side of this distribution, not the right hand side. Right, things are probably not going to get much better than the most likely outcome, things may well get a lot worse than the most likely outcome. So, ensuring ourselves against these worst case outcomes that to is something were potentially new interventions new technologies, solar engineering back to these risk risk trade offs might come in, might come in, in a big way. So this plan a we had before cutting CO2 emissions, cutting greenhouse gases in general, adapting towards in store, removing CO2 from the atmosphere to get to net to zero emissions also does involve quite a bit of suffering. We can't do it all. I would argue with those three alone, especially when one includes the risks, the tail risks, the uncertainties, the things are the scenarios where things can go really really wrong. Okay, so what to do. One, and maybe the most important point in all of this. There is no plan B. Despite attempts by some, in some case for sort of political reasons, in some other instances simply because oh it sounds pretty sexy or, you know, new so let's play up a super free economics book here if you look at the very first two words in the subtitle global that's basically right to economists or economists and journalists right discover a solar geo engineering and basically right one of these GVS things. Oh my goodness right all these silly people were talking about cutting CO2 emissions look at this. We unearthed or we discovered we found this new thing here. Let's just cool the planet with this really really cheap technology not worry about all this other stuff. And just solar geo engineer our way out of this problem. Now, let me just say, right off the bat right that is the definition of moral hazards right here. The definition of this moral hazard framing that lots of people are rightfully worried about, right, as for the solar geo engineering to basically come in as a replacement to cutting CO2 emissions, and that that this kind of framing that gets exploited by those with a real interest in maintaining the status quo on the fossil fuel side of things, or with real interest on the side of those. This is a very rich statement here is from 2008 he by the way wrote a whole op-ed around the time. What happened in 2008 major push for the Obama era cap and trade climate legislation. Past the House of Representatives failed fizzled failed in in the Senate. And 10 years later, we're still having the same debates around federal policy, what to do. A political actor with real interest in killing that effort in its infancy pointing to solar geo engineering as the alternative, the replacement.  Here's the solution. Here is what else you to write and I would strongly argue that that's the wrong phrase. It cannot be must not be framed as either, or there is no planet to be there is no plan. So what's the right frame. Well, maybe we can swap the suffering. Maybe we can replace the. Whoa, there are things that cutting CO2 emissions cutting methane cutting all these other greenhouse gases, plus adapting plus carbon removal can't do that solar geo engineering might potentially be part of this much broader climate policy portfolio, if you will. Some pitfalls in describing it just the way I did as well. There are all these famous political debates in the US often about all of the above strategies. What does that typically mean. Well depends on who uses the term, it sometimes means, well fossil fuels are to play a role after all. Yeah, maybe coal is dead, but natural gas definitely must be part of this solution. Well, no. There's no answer there. First of all, it's not natural gas it's fossil gas and so on and so forth right you see my biases here. But equally important. What I'm trying to do by introducing the overall conversation framing it as maybe solar geoengineering could play a role in addition here. It is not to give those who don't want to cut the two emissions and excuse. It's quite the opposite. Okay, so not a highly scientific graph. This literally actually started as a napkin diagram back of a napkin at one of the earlier solar geoengineering research conferences 2010. In this case, I'm john shepherds famous napkin diagram. How can one think of solar geoengineering playing this role. In one view, what is sort of the, you know, the fossil fuels forever right we just keep going the way we are going. Unlikely, based on what I showed before about how things are actually developing. But if we were to do away with all the existing climate policies and just sort of kept going the way we are. Yeah, climate risk is just going to go up and up and up fossil fuels for if we were to cut emissions to zero and yes we do need to cut emissions to zero what happens. Well, climate risk stops from going up. But there is potentially quite a lot of that climate risk climate hurt still built in to this pathway. That means carbon removal. Right, that's the only way you know in our lifetimes to go back to how climate risks used to be no we're not going to turn off all hurricanes anywhere ever or wildfires or floods and so on and so forth or heat and extreme other event weather events, but that's on average overall, our hope of getting climate risk back down. What's the role of solar geoengineering. It's shaving off this peak. It is reducing climate risk at its peak at its maximum. In the last few decades or so while we get around to cutting CO2 emissions to zero, removing CO2, and yes plenty of adaptation still necessary right the blue horizontal line here doesn't go all the way back to zero. What we see here between the x axis and the blue line is adaptation, but then maybe solar geoengineering might in fact also play a role as part of this overall put full. Okay. Back to a bit of the technology and what it is that we are even talking about here we've seen this before right the principle reflect CO2 sorry reflect sunlight solar radiation back into space, or allow more of it to escape from from the surface from the earth's atmosphere. I have been doing this forever. This is now the part of the presentation where I would have six months or so three months ago, I would have shown you a picture of Mount Pinotubo erupting in the Philippines in 1991 major volcanic eruption. Global average temperatures in 1992 decreased by about half a degree centigrade, which ironically at that time up to that point was global average warming roughly due to anthropogenic greenhouse gas CO2 emissions mainly. The Tonga eruption, not too long ago, turns out to be massive volcanic volcanic eruption massive consequences people died, none of that is good, of course, but it also its plume also introduced some SO2 tiny reflective particles into the stratosphere. Given how little material it was about 150th or so of Mount Pinotubo's eruption isn't expected to in fact lower global average temperatures anywhere close to what Pinotubo did in 1992. Yes, one might expect a global effect, you know point zero one degree centigrade order of magnitude plus minus, not a lot. Certainly, not as much as Pinotubo, but the principle stance. Overall, we have seen volcanoes, in fact, having these real measurable impacts on global average temperatures right that's in some sense what gives us gives the scientific community the confidence, in many ways, that that solar geoengineering would might, in fact, work from a sort of purely technical sense. If one were to do this deliberately. Yes, global average temperatures would in fact decrease. Okay, now. One core characteristic of solar geoengineering is how truly cheap. Um, this is an effort, one of my own efforts to try to make sense of the various ways of frankly introducing SO2 sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere right how can you get that stuff up there. Well, when you do back of the envelope but still what informed by the actual available technology calculation. You come to something like single digit billions of dollars 10 billion tens of billions of dollars per year. So, mask offset roughly one degree centigrade of global average of warming. That's, well, okay, depending on your perspective right that's oh my god billions of dollars. Well that's expensive. Well, one degree centigrade of global average warming costs trillions of dollars in damages climate damages on the associated climate change. Right so in that comparison, that is, of course, very, very cheap. It might also be cheap in the direct narrow narrow minded maybe economic sense of the term, compared to cutting CO2 emissions in the first place. It's not a replacement for cutting CO2 emissions, but just in raw dollar terms. Yeah, we are talking single digit billions here as opposed to let's say single digit trillions of dollars in order to cut CO2 emissions in the first place. Move our entire economy from its current high carbon low efficiency path onto a low carbon high efficiency. That cheap cost, which by the way is not the right decision criteria to decide whether to do anything on the Solergy Engineering front, but the fact that it is so cheap. Just to believe allows us in many ways to look to Solergy Engineering as a potential addition to this global climate policy portfolio, because it has these very different core characteristics from cutting CO2 emissions in the first place.  There are various factors, various definitions of this, but it's basically about it being so expensive, increasingly cheaper but still expensive and a massive coordination problem, a massive problem of all of us together, coming together, providing to cut CO2 emissions. Now, no, we shouldn't be sitting around for the perfect global agreement right and now plenty of reasons to believe that things are really changing on that front emissions are coming down. There could be an a given the investment in low carbon technology on a massive scale, and so on and so forth. Lots of us doing the right thing wanting to do the right thing companies going net zero and so on and so forth. Still the core characteristic could be the very simple terms described as this free rider. And Solergy Engineering has the exact opposite properties. If anything, this is not one of the most important ethical problems here. This is not about motivating more people to do more. If anything, it might be the name of the game here might be stopping people from doing too much too soon. Right back we still may want to do a lot of work research to motivate incentivize guide people in the right direction, your channel these free driver forces in the right direction. But the fact that it is so cheap. An error minded deployment cost sense of the term tells us that there is in fact a different problem, a different question here set of questions here, then the mitigation the traditional mitigation problem of cutting CO2 emissions in the first right that's what that's what makes it interesting academically. It makes it interesting from a policy perspective, it raises many of these ethical. So one conclusion, one strong conclusion to draw from this is no it's not a question of if we are going to do this. It's a question of. Right. Just a matter of time that somebody somewhere some country somewhere, lots of different scenarios one can think of and think about how this might actually happen. Is going to pull the trigger. Right, not if, but when. Now we are to the back to the trade offs and to some very, very hard ethical questions here. If there are in fact at some hard trade offs between cutting CO2 emissions mitigation and so large engineering. And then there is this whole moral hazard concept of how to be react as a society as politicians as policymakers as the scientific community. Given those very different sets of properties of these two technologies so very briefly, the heart trade offs. And when one tries to estimate the direct cost per ton of CO2, the CO2 equivalent cost of solar geoengineering. The numbers are just striking they're very, very low. Now, in many ways, that's not the right way to think about it. It shouldn't be it must not be for lots of good reasons. But again, this free driver property, the fact that in this scenario here, if one were to turn off global average warming for the rest of the century. Once and for all through solar geoengineering. It's actually turning off carbon cycle feedbacks, right more CO2 more warming more CO2 being released. If you turn that off. Not that that's the right thing to do, but if you were to do that. You could decrease global CO2 burden. By the end of the century by somewhere order of magnitude five to 25%. The cost is just really, really cheap, less than half a dollar per ton of CO2 reduced. Not the full answer, not the right answer. Not in many ways the desirable outcome, but yeah, given the fundamental calculation we are once again faced with this heart rate off between solar geoengineering on the one hand and cutting CO2 emissions on the other faced with this free driver effect. Happy to go into details I see a couple Q&A questions coming up here I will actually let me pause here quickly. Did this model pre-audate is asking that this model account for carbon capture or simply decreased emissions. That was a Stanford model. Oh, got it. Sorry, I'm way behind you. Okay, sorry. So, actually, you tell me should I address the questions now or should I wait till the end. We will. Okay, awesome. Sorry, I will. Sorry, I will ignore questions for now. Okay, so, right, it's very cheap. But again, maybe some of the more interesting questions are in fact about the moral hazard of it all. The interactions here between solar geoengineering on the one hand, and mitigation efforts on the sort of on the front of how do we actually react to the availability of this technology. Okay, just to put sort of some structure to this. And I can tell you this is sort of a very, a very personal decision matrix here. I was the founding co director, executive director with David Keith at Harvard of the solar geoengineering research program. Frankly, right now when one tackles one of these new efforts right it's sort of it's it's good to sort of take a step back and say hey is this a good idea to do. Right and, you know, we can think of sort of this decision matrix right should we start a serious research program. Yes or no. Well, if not, what happens. Okay, if you believe this not if but when scenario, what you're essentially doing. This is the bottom branch here of this tree you're slittering into this uninformed deployment decision. Right, and then if you decide not to do it. Fine. Nothing happened. If you do decide to deploy solar geoengineering not having done the hard work, not having done the research. Well, all bets off. Okay. What if you decide to do an active research. Well if you find that it might actually work. That's all engineering can reduce climate risks. Now suddenly you're able to make a more informed decision of whether to deploy it. Yes or no. Right and then if you decide to do it. And in fact, believe know that climate risks are going to be reduced as a result of course if you still decide not to deploy solar geoengineering nothing happens. Right. Okay.  And of course, in many ways is one to rational a few of the world, a view of the world, right, this is just not how the real world works, or put differently, there is such a thing called moral hazard. What is this real trade off between, you know, going down any road, frankly, and the implications of what it might do to our other decision making so in this case right the sort of claiming that there is no change. Research in solar geoengineering just isn't really true there is change.  You give others who vested interest, new ideas about, wait, this allows us to point to solar geoengineering now right now those Harvard folks are doing that research so look they're going to bail us out this new technology here. It's just not worth it it's too expensive and so on to cut the two inches. That's the moral hazard, it might be wrong, rationally on the substance, but if that's where the op-ed pages are going right if this is where some trying to push the conversation. At the very least, it's not legitimate to claim that there's not going to be a change. Okay so let's try to make sense of this moral hazards framework a bit more right theoretically very well founded. That's a long history of this idea. Yes, there are trade offs. It's also misnomer. So in this case, it is not in fact the same as the moral hazards definition that economists often use when they talk about health insurance or any kind of insurance. Right now you're protected against the worst outcome by somebody else. So now you engage in risky behavior. Right, lots and lots of different examples from health insurance on the one hand condoms, lots and lots of different technologies if you will. That depending on your political leaning, right, you will claim are simply a distraction, create a moral hazard, therefore shall not be even considered. What might be health insurance or reproductive technology on one side of the political spectrum might be nuclear power on the other, and of course, solar engineering potentially as well. Now, yes, some of that moral hazard trade off is really rational. There is a trade off right if you have a seat belt on it is rational to drive a little bit faster. Yes, true, but most of it is in fact this behavioral idea, the lack of self control, whatever you might call it but it goes through behavioral changes how we as individuals react. Now, what can we say about this. Well, turns out lots of research has been done on this idea of right what people actually think when you think about solar geoengineering. Frankly, the most important characteristic. Nobody knows what it is. 20 30% and your average survey might claim that they have heard of it. When do you then probe a little bit more hardly anyone can define it. What's also true is that we ought to have not always apparent but we ought to have very nuanced views. A difference in views here between the research right decision of whether to research the technology versus decision of whether to deploy it, whether to actually have global impact through this. Okay, now in many ways you can say look what uses their doing the research if it's not about eventual deployment. Yes, lots of interesting questions that they are to. But at the very least we have to draw a distinction here. Uncertainty right crucial component here. When one asked the general public about perception of solar geoengineering risk and uncertainty certainly play a large role as the art. Meanwhile, there are surveys out there on sort of probing this moral hazard versus inverse moral hazard idea and I can tell you there's something like as of this time five years ago when we did the survey, there are some like 30 or so. Soler geoengineering public opinion surveys and essentially every single one of them showed the existence of moral hazard. Every single one of them showed that there is a problem of introducing solar geoengineering vis-a-vis the desire to cut your two emissions in the first place. But two points. One is based on a survey conducted by Christine American at all. Also published five or so years ago for disclosure Christina but now is a co author. I'm certainly not involved in this study. It was her asking and asking in a revealed preference setting right actually observing people's behavior, this case, 660 Germans but people nonetheless. How do you actually react when you hear about solar geoengineering. I'm happy to go into the details but you know one of these experiments right certain part of the population gets told about solar geoengineering. Are they now more or less likely in this case to offset their own emissions with their own money. The actually is the actual difference in their behavior once they're told about solar geoengineering. So what did Christina Merk et al find. They found inverse moral hazard. Those who were told about SAI stratospheric aerosol injection, solar geoengineering were more likely to offset more of their emissions, because they had just heard about solar geoengineering So actually, in this revealed preference setting the exact inverse of moral hazard right now lots of questions there. Lots of questions about offsets right are the really useful in combating solar geoengineering climate change and so on and so forth right and of course lots more work to be done and that's where my joint work with Christina Merk comes in now. I've worked lots of other studies to of course, but still the one revealed preference survey out there shows the exact inverse of moral hazard. Meanwhile, I set up with actually a professor in the government department Dustin Tingley and the PhD student from a PhD student there. We did a solar geoengineering survey opinion survey, but ask questions of 1000 group of 1000 participants in the US, right around the time of the 2016 election, by the way. And what we did there was probe a little bit further into this moral hazard question. Frankly, you're not the first ones to do this of course in different contexts lots of people have discovered the fact that how you ask the question matters. It matters a lot. So, frankly, what we found here was the moral hazard. The findings of these 30 plus past surveys, most likely were subject to what's often called aqueous and spikes. How you ask the question matters. We asked the question two ways, right is the does the availability of solar geoengineering make it more likely. Do you want to cut emissions, or the other way around right. Do you want to make you less want to cut emissions, depending on how you ask the question. People agree with you, aqueous and spires, right so in other words, yes, we also would have found moral hazard. A weak version of moral hazard, had we asked the question only one way right will motivate society to cut emissions less. In other words, we found both results. So in other words, acquiescence bias if anything dominates moral hazard may not be such a strong result. After all, that that too should make us a bit dubious of these moral hazard findings out there that says oh you know introducing solar geoengineering is going to decrease our desire to cut emissions. Now, there's another sort of component to this and I will end on this thought, but there's a lot of conspiracy theories out there. They're very prominent conspiracy theories. This is us analyzing social media discourse, if one we can call it that on geoengineering. And what we found was the vast, vast majority of this discourse off the conversations tweets, Facebook posting on geoengineering basically were chemtrails conspirators, talking about right to me no opinions differ on what the actual theory is here but essentially contrail up there any any plane currently flying in the sky is some sort of chemtrail, some sort of chemical attack on the rest of us and your opinions differ whether it's for weather modification. On the one hand, or you know mind control or worse right so there is lots of different versions of this so another sort of layer here to the you know discourse if you will, where you can probably say that, look, given those conspiracy theories, it's very hard to say what quote unquote the public truly does think about this potential technology geoengineering. If what's currently out there is sort of this morass off right taff the tweets, more than half, depending on which month you look at either which weekend you look at. So 8090% of what you can read about geoengineering online is, in fact, conspiratorial, right, not a hopeful picture. Quickly, I have one more slide to go but instead of flipping through the rest of my presentation here, let me fast forward. There are now very different sort of ways to to talk about the implications of moral hazard. Lots of different policy implications of it. Let me just end with this here, which is to say, here we go, which is to say, at the end of the day, lots and lots of good legitimate concerns about solar geoengineering about solar geoengineering research. Absolutely. Now I would argue, that's what points to the need to do more research in the first place, right, nobody here is talking about should we be deploying solar geoengineering today or tomorrow. What it's about, should we be doing more research in order to have the potential, the possibility of doing the deployment eventually down the line. Meanwhile, and actually, I should mention here that usually whenever everyone writes in column or so right, that's usually sort of, you make fun of the editor, or you complain about the editor right you, you wrote those well crafted words or so. And then the editor comes in and sort of, you know, clickbait right comes up with a title that just sort of doesn't quite capture what you're meant to say. In this case I can say my editor who did come up with this title I didn't this is one of my Bloomberg columns capture precisely what I meant to say, and much better than I had done before with whatever title I suggested. The fear of geoengineering, geoengineering 90 all encompassing sense both carbon removal, but predominantly maybe solar geoengineering is really the anxiety that lots of us do legitimately feel about us not cutting CO2 emissions greenhouse gas emissions in the first place, fast enough, ambitiously enough. Alright, so in many ways, you know this is a paraphrasing of this moral hazard argument, if you will. Yes, it's a legitimate fear. Absolutely. I fear it too. And of course the real question is, should that dominate the solar geoengineering conversation, or should we try to do something about precisely this legitimate fear, try to address it. Maybe try to find ways to have me a talk me a conversation about solar geoengineering. In fact, allow us to have a better, more recent, more all in conferencing dialogue about why it is even more important to cut CO2 emissions in the first place. Thank you. And I look forward to no longer ignoring the questions in the Q&A and discussing this. Well, terrific. Thank you so much. I was such a provocative and interesting presentation, we're getting questions coming in. So while I'm grouping these questions into various categories, let me just start by asking one of my own questions. I didn't really get a sense for a couple of things about the technology. So whenever you have these proposals for a new technology, new technological approach, a lot of people who are concerned about risk will ask things like, how reversible is the technology? How avoidable are the harms? What are the harms? And like how often would you have to deploy this technology? So let me just ask those very basic questions to you directly. Would you have to do this often? How would you control where the shading happens? And if one country decides to do it, how can one actually control it in a way that does not affect the neighborhood which did not want this to be deployed? So just some of those like control questions, reversibility, how often do you can address those? Absolutely. Okay, so a couple core features here. One is, this is in fact a global intervention, a global potential intervention. Right, so to your last part of your question about right, if one country were to want to do this and another one doesn't, right, what happens? It turns out that it is, right, a global thermostat. One is setting here. This is not, right, one country, Philippines, somebody, right, wants to cool the, you know, air above its territory and nobody else is effective, right? And that's just not how this works, right? When Pinatubo erupts in the Philippines, within weeks, the SO2 has spread around the globe and global average temperatures decrease, right? Now, okay, that's both a feature and the flaw, right? It's a feature because, well, no, solar engineering is not a weapon, right? This is not sort of directing at somebody, you know, freezing them over there kind of thing, right?  No, it can't be used as that, right? Because it doesn't global. Now, that's the feature, right? The flaw, yeah, this is an extremely powerful potential technology where in some sense, the big question is, how can we globally come together and govern such a powerful technology? What do you do? If we're since, in many ways, it is available, right? It's not a, again, that they're not if but when, right? It's also part of that, you know, me talking to you about this right now isn't going to make it more likely that somebody somewhere is going to deploy it, right? We know it's out there. It's been out there for decades, right? We know about this. Okay, so that's, that's the second point. What are some of the risks? What are the some of the consequences? Well, depends on who you're asking, just to be clear. There are risks. Yes, there are. The overall broad conclusion of if one were to do stratospheric aerosol, solar geoengineering, gradually, globally, and it's very hard not to do globally, just to be clear. Essentially, what you do is you bring radiative forcing, how much solar radiation reaches the surface, closer back to pre-industrial levels, right? So what does that mean? You decrease climate risk. You lower global climate risk. Now, why am I so confident? There are, in fact, hundreds, thousands of climate model runs simulating what would happen, what might happen. And if anything, this is sort of, you know, both surprising and, you know, frightening, if you will, but this technology looks too good. Global average temperatures, extreme temperatures, global average precipitation, extreme precipitation, all those metrics sort of on a global level disaggregated and how it affects individual, you know, pixels on the, you know, one by one degree grid cells on the, on the, on the globe brings them brings the vast, vast majority of these grid cells closer back to pre-industrial and basically none go further away, right? So some might be sort of unexpected and statistical uncertainty and so on in any of these model runs, of course. But that's the, you know, that's sort of, that's what gives me the confidence to, in some sense, want to continue this conversation, right? Because, you know, it seems to work, you know, it seems to work as habitat. Now, just to be clear, it's not anti-CO2, right? It doesn't solve climate change. It just doesn't. Ocean acidification, not addressed by solar geoengineered, right? It's about global average temperatures, potentially precipitation as well, sort of the atmosphere. It's not about many of these other nasty, unsavory consequences of unmitigated climate change. Thank you. So we have several questions that are coming in about governance. Let me, let me frame the governance question in the following way. So some group of scientists and climate researchers had recently, just I think in January of 2022, submitted what they call the Solar Geoengineering Non-Use Agreement. And then there, among the many claims they make, which I think in many ways you've already addressed in your talk, but one of the claims that I was fascinating was that they argued there's no current global governance system for something like this. For example, United Nations General Assembly, United Nations Environment Program, these other United Nations groups, they argue are not capable of equitable and effective multilateral control over this technology and deployment. The UN Security Council, which is dominated just by, I think, five countries, they lack the global legitimacy that would be required to effectively regulate this. So two thoughts come to mind. I mean, one is you're advocating for research and how do you distinguish between research and actual deployment? Like how would you do research without some form of deployment? Let me bring back to the governance issue. And again, I think several people had the governance question. Steve Latham, hey Steve, from Yale had that question. John T. Lunchoff at Harvard had that question about decision making. Can you address the governance issues there? Let me try. So yes, I'm very familiar with this non-use agreement making the rounds. Well, there's a lot to say. Let's put it that way. There is a lot to say about how this came about. And not to dismiss the entire effort completely, but there was a version of this non-use agreement with the editor of the journal which ended up publishing it as a co-author. It was published just when it was published, that editor's name disappeared from the co-author list and he is the editor-in-chief of the journal where it was eventually published. Now, okay, without getting into sort of the research ethics of that, lots and lots of questions here. What about it? What about a moratorium, right? I mean, non-use agreement, fancy word for or longer phrase for moratorium. Let's not do it, right? And yeah, their argument is in some sense twofold. Basically, it's not a good idea. So the reason for this non-use agreement, just to be clear, it's a collection of scholars who strongly believe solar engineering is a bad idea. Deployment is a bad idea, right? We can't do it. We shouldn't use it. It's ungovernable. It's just something Thou shall not touch. Therefore, and actually opinions differ among the co-authors just to be clear, and therefore we shouldn't be researching it either, right? Now, again, so I'm biased here. Let's put it that way. But I can tell you, the co-founder of Harvard Solar Engineering Research Program, in many ways, is a much more visible figure, David Keith, who is still running the Solar Engineering Research Program. And in many ways, it's sort of the standout figure, right, sort of the person who everyone associates with this desire to pursue solar engineering research. He, almost a decade ago, co-authored an article, Science with Ted Carson, that called for a moratorium on solar engineering deployment, that basically called for a non-use agreement. If you define use as deployment of the technology. I just wrote this book called G-Engineering the Gamble. In it, second to last chapter, I call for a moratorium. I call for a non-use agreement. All the deployment of the technology. Okay. Why? Why would he do that? Why Ted Carson, David Keith? Why did I do this? Why do lots of others talk about this? Because there is, in fact, a real difference between research on the one hand, and deployment on the other, right? The sort of, you know, the sort of research, the most ambitious research projects proposed on the solar technology engineering front are, you know, outdoor experiment, fly balloon into the stratosphere, release material. This is one of the more prominent proposals. Hasn't happened yet, but proposals that the Harvard group that I was affiliated with no longer is suggesting to do, wants to do. There is a direct impact of this experiment, even if we're, you know, not even proposing to release SO2, but even if that were the case, the total release of substance here into the stratosphere. So this whole experiment would be less than one airplane releases in one minute of flight. And there's what 40,000 of them up there right now with the US. And, you know, as many over Europe, 20,000, 30,000 solar. In other words, the actual real world impact of this experiment is basically zero. Now, of course, that's not what this is about. Right. It's not about the direct impact. It's about opening the floodgates. It's about slippery slope arguments. It's about this balloon flight, proposed balloon flight, being a symbol for much, much more, right, being sort of for all the person writing op-eds about how solar engineering might be a good idea, wants to do an experiment that might show what you're doing could be a good idea. Right. It's about that. It's about much, much more.  And in many ways, and there, you know, just to be clear, I am biased, right. I'm fully biased. I'm fully acknowledged. Don't understand how the distinction between research and deployment got lost in the process of writing that non-use agreement you mentioned. And in some sense, how they got away with it, right, or how they sort of how it's possible to write a non-use agreement that in some sense explicitly, when you look at the terms, basically talks about, oh, legitimate climate research, of course, you know, full permission for research. And then, you know, if you follow some of the co-authors of this agreement on Twitter, let's say, or various email lists or various conversations since it came out, not everybody, but many co-authors of this agreement then say, no, no, no, we are also meant to research. Or, you know, opinions differ at the very least. Right. Now, okay. What does that tell me? Right. So, you know, sign-on letters are always hard, right. Everyone has their own opinions. How do you agree to sort of a complex topics like this? Really impossible. Really, I guess, what is reflected here in the in the actual publication of this is simply, look, it's a group of scholars who in part viscerally, in part for good reason, are opposed to solar geoengineering, don't like it. And therefore, you know, let the outcome justify the means, if you will. Even though, right, and this is the, you know, as somebody who was called for a non-use agreement himself, basically, right, I would say there would have been, there could have been, there should have been, there should have been a better way to make this point, the same point, except of course, well, frankly, back to my very last slide, right, the headline I showed, right. Really, what we're showing here is that there is a more visceral opposition to solar geoengineering research, even precisely because of this fear of moral hazard, and you know, very real fear, right. Yes, Newt Gingrich is going to exploit it. He already has. Saudi Aramco is going to exploit it. Every dollar of their $25 billion of raw profits last quarter, right, points in the direction of this being in their narrow self-interest to pursue, play up and therefore delay cutting sea terminations. Okay, sorry, that was a very long answer to a good question, but you know, there's a lot packed in here. And frankly, I guess, as a, as a, as an op-ed, as an argument, perfectly justified in some sense, right, they don't like solar geoengineering, they sign something that says that they don't like it. The fact that it is disguised as a scientific paper, as a peer-reviewed paper, which it is, it's an peer-reviewed journal, just adds a whole different layer of complexity here that frankly, yeah, I'm biased, but will tell me that this was not the cleanest, clearest way of going about making this. I have another question that's come in that's actually, I think, pretty far along the spectrum of supporting solar geoengineering. So what she wrote was, Assuming research on solar geoengineering continues, unhaltered, and with sufficient investment funding and global coordination, what will it take to get governments, let's focus here just on the US, not only to listen, but act and move towards deployment. So more on the positive end of this, yeah. I think you're on mute. Sorry. It took me like 80 minutes to finally make the mute mistake here and so. Okay, so what would it take. So what it takes really is to elevate the level of discourse on solar geoengineering. What it takes is to have, you know, reasons, non-conspiratorial and so on, conversation about how, no, it's not a solution. No, it doesn't detract, it shouldn't detract from the need to cut emissions and so on and so forth, but should, and this is very concrete sort of addressing the US question, should there be a research program in the US federally funded? Well, to the tune of, let's say, $10, $15 million per year, which by the way, the National Academies called for, the National Academies Report on Governance of Solar Geoengineering Research that came out last spring, it calls for that order of magnitude. And just to give you a sense, $10, $15 million compared to something like $2, $3 billion of federal climate research funding overall. Now, you know, in some sense that might be an inflated figure because it counts satellites and other things, right. You can get to a couple billion very quickly that way, but GCS, a global change research program that coordinates this climate research within the White House. Yeah, Tali's $2 to $3 billion of climate research. So should solar engineering ever dwarf that figure? No, absolutely not. It must not be the case. Is it justified to look at $10, $15 million, which by the way is $10, $15 million more than currently is spent at the federal level? Yes, absolutely. And frankly, in many ways, that is the path toward having a more reasoned, well-informed conversation on this topic. It's the only path. We have to do the research in order to figure out whether we should do anything more. Right. And again, there's the rational view. Like I showed this little matrix where you do the research, you figure out some beautiful unexplained risk and suddenly right you trying to kill this program in its infancy basically, or in some sense the opposite that says, look, we're doing the research. If there were these risks, we looked at them, they don't seem to be a problem. So let's go further down the slide, which actually the one, the first half of your very first question, and so that I didn't respond to before was to sort of control nature, right. One feature of Solergy Engineering is that you do have to continuously do it. Right, it's not like CO2 every time emitted today sticks up there forever, right, 40% of what's emitted today is still there a thousand years from now. No. The CO2 from the stratosphere falls out with 18 or so months. It's gone.  Yeah, several other questions have come in that I'm going to put into a theme but but in order to sort of transition over to that. It's interesting to me that a lot of the conversation I've heard so far from you reminds me of conversations people have around human genome editing of the germline research versus deployment which might be in reproductive use right and how it's kind of a global like the gene pulls a global resource and just because one country does it doesn't mean that it won't then leak out to other other germlines. So, can you, I mean, many people think that they know that global warming will disproportionately negatively impact poor nations, people living in much, much more socio economically dire situations, closely equator etc. So do you think that they should they should have a greater say in in the debate. What are your thoughts on that because it seems like from what you're saying this is a technology that will likely develop in a developed country, much more much more so than somewhere else. It seems like the potential impact, maybe even benefits might disproportionately fall on other communities other nations. Should there be, should there be a greater weight placed on people who normally don't get get a voice at that table. Yes and no right so actually there's a there's a one sentence in this non use agreement that basically says this technology must be governed by giving in some sense the global south, you know, giving control of governance to the global south, to which my response would be I think we do at the international level has this sort of structure right we could argue that it will be desirable right that the UN Security Council is a highly imperfect way of organizing ourselves and that the P5 to five permanent members, you know, post World War two is a representative of the world order and fine to do that in, you know, the 50s, or to stick with that order in the 50s, but right about now it's just a sad reflection reflection of the inadequacy of the United Nations right and the way we organize our international governance you know so yes to all of the above. Now, to your more substantive question, should those who are most affected have a larger voice. Yes, the voice should be right commensurate with how one is affected in many ways, which, by the way right, this is sort of, you know, both the global level and the, and domestically to of course but in this case matters and primarily is the global level. Of course the poor are more affected by climate change they are affected more by unmitigated climate change, they have a higher stake in the outcome here. They do right is sort of the usual right the rich adapt the poor suffer. Yes, of course. Okay, so solar geoengineering, the potential use of solar geoengineering. Yes, it has that larger positive consequences on the world's poor on the poor within the US on the poor within New York City right within Cambridge and Massachusetts right the poor are more affected by unmitigated climate change than than the rich. And yeah the global level. Same thing. Yeah, well that's the perfect then intro to this next question I think I know what you're going to say. And, and he asked, do you have thoughts on whether a reframing of solar geoengineering as a humanitarian intervention potentially capable of reducing the total human suffering in the world, or maybe in this case and disproportionately a lot more suffering in some parts of the world might change the debate surrounding research. Yes. I can go into detail but but yes right so precisely because it is in many ways right so okay so not to be too philosophical here but why do I care about, you know why am I, why am I an environmentalist, because I care about people. Right.  Thank you very much I mean the rock right it's going to be fine ecosystems, of course not will suffer. But yes of course this is about being a humanitarian in the all encompassing sense of the term. Now, as soon as you say that right as you know middle aged white guy in my case right so now paternalism comes in and so on and so forth of course right. And, you know, the, the old world order and the very wrong world order so no this is not about right us with the savior complex in the global north right trying to pretend or pretending to have all the answers of course not. So, yes, it's about reframing, or so it's not it's about reform. Yes, reframing it as a humanitarian intervention will certainly change the debate. And, you know, yes now we're you know instead of the day to day politics of it all right there are NGOs who are working on doing just that. And in some sense they're NGOs who are so opposed to the technology that they're working hard not to have this reframing happen. Right, that's happening to and yeah that both of them are happening precisely because it would, it would make a difference. I'm intrigued by your idea of inverse moral hazard as basically as I understand it, the opportunity for people when they consider geo solar geo engineering to have a discussion about these other climate mitigation efforts and not. And so actually it's a conversation starter not something that that shuts or demotivates people from looking at other alternatives. I get more and more skeptical about the ability of people to have these kinds of conversations and to learn from one another's perspectives I just think that we're just so polarized. What do you think practically speaking if it's just make if it's just better strategy, because we have to do something better strategy to get trusted groups sort of endorse it right so I can imagine that can be some people who identify very strongly with the Sierra or Greenpeace if they came out in a supportive or even people identify very much with Newt Gingrich and they like him right and if he endorses it. Maybe Bill Gates supports it there could be that could be good or bad because there are people who are very very concerned about Bill Gates motivation separately, but just getting like key, key people like that or organizations like that to back it up and so those kind of take that support as a surrogate for the conversation that I think maybe they really are not capable of having politically and the overall effect is basically that you get movement in the right direction you get support. And maybe that's the case where we really do want conservatives and you know, those who don't identify as conservatives to come out and support this what are your thoughts about that kind of more pragmatic things. It's not ideal. Hey, this conversation started we should have a discussion but I don't know if people are really capable of that these days. I don't know either. Frankly, you know, I, let's put it that way I spent too much time on Twitter. Pro's no failing. And, yeah, let's put it that way there is a, like the level of this cause and of course you know Twitter it's just a micro car right it's not the real world and so on. But, you know, much like the chemtrails. That's the extreme end of the spectrum. Right. This is sort of the, like, I mean just to give you some like my wife is literally an abortion doctor.  I get him to from the chemtrails, right, she at least does what people accuse her of doing. And sort of that's the world we live in, right. And it's just crazy right now okay it's not to make too much of the, you know, the 100 increased letter from you know a couple weeks ago kind of thing, but on the other hand. Right, so what hope is there now, okay. That's the crazy end of the spectrum that's literally the conspiracy theory right sort of what you talked about in some sense you know you mentioned the king which I did, of course, right. That's the former leader of the house. Right, who, you know, one might argue in many ways has himself turned into a more polarizing figure very consciously precisely because that's how the conversations go.  One side moved much much further from the center than the other side. Right. And the fact that somebody very much part of that one side. Right. Then also uses climate as a wedge issue right is clear. That's clear. The hope of having so much engineering elevate that part of the climate conversation. Yeah, I don't. There's no hope. Right, like, so much engineering just introduces yet another wedge. Right. So, I mean I can tell you during the four Trump years right like the biggest worry I had while I was, you know, executive director of the soldier research program was basically serve the presidential tweet right like sort of, you know, you know, like 4am right change right here go do that right and here's the site to the Harvard program kind of thing right the link to the like, can you imagine sort of what that sort of the polarization now turns out it never happened. Which is good right but of course you know who knows right next time around right. And it's one of these things were, well in this case right this very real question right I was talking about the need for federal research money. Well, right about now. Well, why there is a lot of happening in sort of the science policy community in the White House or STP and so on right and while they're, while there are lots of good things happening, moving in the right direction. Should there also be the 1015 million dollars in solar engineering research. Yes. Back then, during those four years, right. That was the last thing we needed. Can you imagine basically everything else gets scaled down, and that's the one research program being emphasized by the White House as the one right that would have been detrimental to sort of a semi rational debate here so yes right politics day to day politics, clearly figures into this and sadly not always in a good way. Now you're not the victim of a Donald Trump tweet. And with that I'm going to have to conclude because we're out of time, but I want to thank our speaker, Gernot Wagner for presenting today. I would also like to thank the Harvard Medical School Center for bioethics for their support and sponsoring this event, and and Helen, Seth, and I just for their help in organizing today's talk. And I also want to thank you our guests for joining us today. This series will return next month on March 25, where our speaker will be James Fishkin who is the director of the Stanford University Center for Deliberative Democracy if you're interested in more these issues of deliberation and public engagement, please join us on March 25. We hope to see you then. And with that, I hope you have a great weekend. Thank you.


And now, starting with this glimpse, we had still, within the memory of millions of Americans, let us step into the record that tells of one of the great technological romances of all time. The telephone art had yet to be developed. Electrical engineering was not yet a course of study in American colleges. There were only about 200 communities where a primitive service had been introduced to a doubting public. In all America, there were fewer telephones and you will find today in seven or eight New York office buildings. A telephone circuit was part wire and part earth with the speech it carried of course at the mercy of any electrical disturbance in earth or air. A thunderstorm would completely prevent conversation. Not for many months was it discovered that an all-metal circuit would result in clearer speech. It was truly a daring experiment that was completed in 1884, a two-wire circuit for speech between Boston and New York. But it led to an historic decision. Yes. Well, as soon as possible, Mr. Cahill. Oh yes, yes, they're all here waiting for you. Very well, thank you. Mr. Cahill will be here in a few minutes with the certificate of incorporation ready for our signatures. This draft of it seems all right to me. And to me. Well, it certainly takes in a lot of territory. How do you mean? This section here. It says that our lines will connect one or more points in each and every city, town or place in the state of New York with one or more points in each and every other city, town or place in said state and in each and every other of the United States. Yes, it's pretty inclusive, but then Vail's been talking about a vast system for years. With his ideas, he's certainly the man to beat the new company's first president. This language makes me smile when I think of the trouble my company has had right here in New York City trying to get subscribers. It is rather optimistic language. Of course, some of these electrical experts are mighty skeptical. I've been looking for a certain editorial in the electrical world. No, here it is. It is probable that in the near future, business communications by telephone between cities separated by hundreds of miles will be an everyday occurrence. But it will be a luxury for the few, bearing the same relation to telegraphy in general that traveling in Pullman cars does to ordinary railroad travel. That may be the way it looks now. But the line to Boston is being used by all sorts of people, even though it isn't very good. We'll find ways of making the service popular. Well, let's hope the next line down to Philadelphia will work better. A lot of my New York subscribers say they need it. Good morning, gentlemen. Good morning, gentlemen. Sorry, I kept you waiting. That's perfectly all right, my boy. Well, I've got the final draft. Have any changes been made, Mr. Cahill? Only one. Now, if you gentlemen will turn to page three where it says, In each and every other city, town, or place in said state, and in each and every other of the United States, and in Canada and Mexico, got it? This is to be added. And each and every of said cities, towns, and places is to be connected with each and every other city, town, or place in said states and countries, and also by cable, and other appropriate means with the rest of the known world. The rest of the known world? Sacred codfish. Well, why not? Ten years ago you couldn't talk by wire at all. It's a legal precaution, gentlemen. Mr. Forbes and Mr. Vailfield, the new company, should not be limited in its future activities. Whatever can be done, they want the company prepared to do. The rest of the known world, eh? Well, gentlemen, we're certainly starting from scratch. Will you sign first, Mr. Hall? Gladly. Sign your name on the top line, please. So it was that in February, 1885, there came into existence the organization you called the AT&T Company, founded in the infancy of the telephone to pioneer long-distance service, but destined 15 years later to become the central company of your system. While transmitters, receivers, and switching devices were being improved, an important development came from the study and introduction of the principle of transposition. The application of this interesting principle involved shifting the current path by interchanging the position of the two wires of the circuit. The change of the pin position of the two wires at carefully determined intervals helps to reduce the interference brought to the circuit by induction from parallel electrical currents. The part of accuracy of transposition is playing in the modern art of transmission is evident to any expert eye that scans the complex wire facilities of today. Thus, with all wire circuits, the transposition principle, and organized laboratory investigation for every department of telephone activity, there was encouragement to the effort to link together the growing telephone organizations. Yet, when wires were made to talk a thousand miles in 1892, the accomplishment only emphasized the character of obstacles still to be overcome. Well, this new service to Chicago is going to be very useful to us. Our agents there think so too. We usually can understand each other fairly well if we speak carefully and not too loud. But how about the forest? We have important agents on the Pacific Coast. When can we telephone to them? We've had something nobody knows. But surely you're going to put up more wires? Of course. But a thousand miles is about the limit for talking. But, sir, I don't understand. A wire is a wire? We can telegraph to the Pacific Coast? Yes, a wire is a wire. But a telephone circuit and a telegraph circuit are entirely different things. Let me explain it to you very simply. Here's a receiver. Here's the battery that furnishes the electrical current. Here's a wire circuit.