Buonasera, benvenuti a tutti. In particolarità, ci sono cari in particolarità, ma c'è un settore che sta crescendo, che è stato effettivamente favorito dalla situazione, i cari elettri. I cari per l'environmento, io sono sicura, sono molto simili. Con questo pezzo di notte, le emissioni CO2 sono molto cari, quindi tutte le emissioni sono limitate. E' un buon pezzo di notte. C'è un market low, quindi se la demanda forza, la produzione continua, e i prezzi vengono. Statuzioni recenti di New York Times, dicendo che l'AD.3 per false wagon ha il stesso prezzo di un golf. Tesla 3 è come un BMW W Series 3, e prendere questo caro in liscia è come andare out for dinner in Paris o in Rome. Però, ovviamente, è ancora possibile, grazie a le emissioni e le emissioni, per cari elettri, up to 10,000 US dollars per cari. C'è ancora un gap per rilasciare. Però, la produzione è andata, i prezzi vengono, e le emissioni vengono ad un'endere. Quindi l'avantage di vendere un caro elettri è un fatto. C'è, ovviamente, una rivoluzione in una delle industrie più importanti del planetale. E questo è, ovviamente, un cambiamento ricordato. Tutto è connettato con batteri, che rendono l'autonomia dei cari. Infortunatamente, questo è un po' di punto. I batteri sono diventando più e più effettivi e potenti. Se, se voglio raccogliere l'economista, che è un articolo pubblicato pochi giorni fa, la capacità della nuova batteri migliorerà da 88 gigawattere per ora del 2019. E questo è l'autonomia, che è abbastanza potente per due ore, per circa 1.400 gigawattere per l'anno 2025, che potrà potenziare l'industria del caro elettrico. I cari, i punti del caro elettri, c'è circa 200.000, ma questo è un numero molto limitato, e anche meno in l'U.S. Ma l'industria sta crescendo così molto, che i cari elettrici con batteri sono 2% dei cari soldi in Europa, più o meno the same in l'U.S., magari un po' più in l'U.S. Per questo motivo abbiamo deciso di convincere un pannello piccolo, che è mangiato dall'Institut, che è l'Instituto per la nuova economica, che è un tono americano creato dopo la crisi finanziare, più o meno 10 anni fa, che è interessata in nuove approcce e nuove pensazioni, e sono davvero più rigide. Non è molto avanti a tutte le idee del pensamento neoliberale. Ci sono molti brillanti. Il ordinario, l'attività di ricerca è Thomas Ferguson, che è uno di noi, è un americano, molto prestigio, economista, è il PhD in Princeton, era professore della M.I.T., la Università di Texas, in Austin, e poi della Università di Passaggi, dove è professore di meritori, e qui è il capitolo del settore di ricerca. Professore Ferguson, puoi dare un hand? Puoi dare un hand? Grazie, grazie. Buongiorno. Buongiorno. E poi... right. Niel, e per fare le interduzioni qui, ma anche Tito Boerri e il suo team per la stagione, ma anche le persone e le autorità in Trento, che, dopo tutto, hanno fatto questo in termini di cosa deve essere l'ambiente più difficile per il 17e secolo in Italia, quando hai l'ambiente più difficile. È stato fare un panel di caro che viene... io credo che il tempo è perfetto, lo so, in che abbiamo large scale wildfires in Brasil e in i Stati Uniti. I Stati Uniti, io sono pretty sure che in Trento, puoi trovare un po' di particole adesso. Ho messo la pressa europea su la disseminazione di quei fai. Sto in i Stati Uniti in Massachusetts e i nostri sunsets sono molto effettivi da ciò che è successo in California. In questo ambiente apocalyptic, c'è l'industria di caro e c'è la crisi. Voglio dire un po' di parole per motivare questo. In 2019 la corporazione General Motors ha un strato. Mi ha chiesto quando ho chiesto cosa è questo strato. Mi ha chiesto che c'erano in modo più facile per imparare planti per gele più fringle. Trovo un Australians e si couldno un periodo più balloonsello che fa. Spentano un passaggio t winner di tutti i Ferrero e communiste. Sto sul tempo We need to lengthen the working day and he met with no pay increases so we're looking here at a truly world-shaping event. I mean this is bigger even than the steel industry or even textiles in the sense that so many countries have so much employment and so much at stake and this is quite worth discussing and it hasn't gotten quite the attention it deserves. I do not doubt that has something to do with the timing of elections in many countries, but here we are so I'm therefore very happy that we could get a really good panel and our first speaker is Anna Maria Semenazi at Rome I'm just gonna turn it over to her. Anna Maria. Thank you. Thank you, Tom. I will have a PowerPoint presentation. Can you see the? Yes. Yeah, good. Let me see if I can enlarge a bit. Okay, so my presentation is based on a paper, which is a joint work with Jorge Cañar. I will put the electric car revolution in a broader context to understand what is the future of the sector in the face of a wave of innovations. So in this presentation, I will deal with the following issues, the regional structure of production and trade, the challenges that the industry is facing, of which the electric revolution is one, and the implications for the international division of labor and for jobs, and finally a few notes on policies. So, in the last decade, we observed a huge change in the geographic organization of the industry, which has gone from concentration in core areas to global sourcing. The geographic structure of the automotive industry is now based on the presence of large assemblers and leading global suppliers in all major markets, which are organized in functionally integrated macro regional production networks. The competitive process results in production moving between core semi periphery and integrated periphery. In a recent paper, we studied the changes in clustering of countries in the automotive components trade over the period 1993, 2017, and you can see here on the left in 1993 and on the right in 2017. I cannot go into detail, but what we found was this, the production and trade is now organized more and more in macro regions. Much of the trade occurs within the macro regions. This somehow redefines the global value chains. Global value chains had already been shortened by OEMs localization and follow sourcing. And what we see here, perhaps it's too little, but you can believe me, trust me, we see the emergence of new peripheries which are tightly integrated with their core. Let's look at two of these integrated semi peripheries. Mexico, on the North American hemisphere, and the central in Eastern European countries on the European side. These share common features, cheap labor, geographic proximity to large markets, membership in regional trade agreements and public incentives to foreign investment. So the creation of clusters that bring together a multiplicity of suppliers and auxiliary services around the main OEMs, the exceptional growth in production and exports. The direct and indirect creation of jobs in these semi peripheries have been cited as indication of the activation of positive linkages. However, foreign firms, both OEMs and tiers one, still dominate production. They are based on state of the art factories and technologies. And the research and development still occurs mostly in corporate headquarters. So the literature is divided on the nature of this development between the thesis of a dualistic production structure, which was already evidenced by Singer in 1950, which says that there will be little spillover effects on the domestic industry. And on the other hand, we have the thesis of this development as a stepping stone for catching up. These two thesis are still open to questions, but there is a propensity in the literature to favor the dualistic thesis. The localization of process that brought to in existence these semi peripheries integrated semi periphery puts pressure on production jobs and wages in the core. But here we have different effects on core countries. For instance, there is Germany, which succeeded in defending production and jobs, contrary to France and Italy, which have lost lots of jobs and production. And you can see here the integrated periphery, which is the eastern countries, and the falling down of the line, which is the rest of Europe. So, what can explain the difference between Germany and on the one hand and France and Italy on the other? Well, a more extensive of shoring of car assembly by French and Italian automakers due in turn to a greater share of smaller cars in their product portfolio on the one hand, but also Germany's large exports of mostly premium cars to China. At the same time, German automakers of short a greater proportion of the production of components, especially to Eastern Europe, in order to benefit from its lower labor costs, attaining a more efficient inter-corporate division of labor. But as in other core countries, also German locations were under great competitive pressure. There has been a shift in jobs to low wage countries, which resulted in concession bargaining at many automotive supplier locations in Germany, as in France, as in Italy, to prevent relocations or to gain new products for the plants. Now, if this is the current organization of the industry, of the automotive industry, global automotive industries, now this structure is facing new social, environmental, technological and geopolitical challenges that open new scenarios. For digitalization, which changes the organizational production and puts jobs at risk of automation, the scaling and working intensification. There is the connectivity, autonomy, sharing, electrification innovations that radically change the nature of the product and the way of using it. There are changes in the balance of power between the main countries in the international arena, which influence trade agreements, redefining the convenience of localization. These challenges interact with one another, reinforcing or counterbalancing their effects. So, what are the implications for the structure of the automotive industries and on its geographical organization? I will deal with this question on two sides. First, I would like to look at digitalization and trade agreement in the case of Mexico. Here we have a new trade agreement, the USMCA, which includes requirements on regional content, wages and labor rights. And we have the digitalization wave. In highly fragmented global value chains, the capacity to track the product that is to verify the history, locations, status, along and across all the stages of the value chain by means of documented identification is a critical issue. And here digitalization can be both a challenge and an opportunity, because making traceability effective by the adoption of digital technologies could start a big transformation across the entire supply chain. It may represent an efficient support to tiers one and tiers two in achieving quality control of products and ensuring the flexibility in the just-in-time programming of the flow of production. But it is also important essential in certifying their compliance with the treaties requirements. So, the question here for Mexico is whether tier one and tier tier two and tier three will be able to plan now the transformation of their organization to keep up with digital transformation. Companies unable to keep the pace of traceability risk losing their customers. This is a serious challenge for the Mexican automotive industry. Now, what for the challenges that are drastically changing what a car is. There is competition, which is no longer between the traditional players but extends beyond the automotive sector to include batteries, software, connection, mobility. Core competencies are changing rapidly and required skills that have not so far been among the core competencies of automotive engineering. Moreover, the shift to electric vehicles will result in a drastic reduction of components, new inputs, new value chains with jobs lost and gained and the new configuration of the comparative advantage of countries. So, the automotive industry confronts deep uncertainty about the future evolution. OEMs and their suppliers need to consider multiple hypotheses in formulating their strategies. Their competencies are no longer sufficient to master the digital innovation. Alliances and flexible forms of collaboration with all competitors and new players in the technology industry alike offer a safer route as a way to share the risk, to gain speed, to gain technological advantage, to share risk as a player in the industry was saying. The increasing relevance of big data and digital devices may shift the power from the OEMs and their suppliers to high tech and IT players and platforms. If the car follows the destiny of the computer where the value is increasingly in the software, a redistribution of profits across sectors is very likely and this is one of the most important transformation of the industry. The second transformation concerns the fact that since research and development in the software and digital technologies are mostly developed in regions other than those dominated by OEMs, even the automotive industry's old core, which based its supremacy in engineering excellence, risks losing ground. So the core also is shifting. If this is the scenario, what is the role of public policy and this is my last slide. Well, competition between technologies that are still in an early phase makes for an uncertain scenario, leaving room for the role of the state in orienting and governing the change. Public policy will be needed also because the shift to electric batteries will impact on suppliers with different intensity and may result in a drastic reduction in jobs. Semi peripheries and integrated peripheries in Europe that specialize in the production of parts and components may suffer more. The two main European countries, Germany and France, are investing heavily in the industry to take all the new challenges. Given the number of people directly and indirectly employed by the automotive industries in Europe, also in semi periphery, semi peripheral countries like Italy, like Spain, like the UK. Well, a coordinated policy at the European level is urgently needed to reduce the risk of for employment and ensure a common benefit from innovation. Thank you. Thank you for your attention. Thank you very much, Anna Maria. Now the next paper is from Nadia Garbalini and Mavio Gatti. So one of you is going to start. I'm going to start. Good evening everybody and thank you for the invitation to this panel. It's also to Anna Maria who actually introduced many of the challenges which are which we are going to face in the future due to the transformations in the automobile industry. I would like to stress again that the key point is that global value chains mean basically mean international division of labor. This in turn implies flows of commodities crossing many national borders and employment being creating in many countries. It is an obvious implication that is to say that any geographical recomposition of these chains generates redistribution of employment between all the areas involved. And this has been already happening in recent years. For example, if we take the automotive German automotive global value chain, as an example, we can see that up to at least 20 years ago Eastern European countries were used to provide German car makers with labor intensive components. Also, of course due to the fact that labor is cheaper in those countries with respect to Germany in those countries. Overtime, these countries actually have specialized and Anna Maria already said something about this, the role of Eastern EU countries in German global value chains. Overtime, these countries specialize in the production of less labor intensive components modules for automotive industry, which have a relatively high technological content. And at the same time, these countries specialize in basic industries. So by basic industry we mean basically metals, chemicals, plastic rubber, textiles and so on. And while changing their role, these countries turned to their own periphery, for example, Turkey, to get those labor intensive components they were used to produce by themselves. In its turn, Turkey is resorting to its own periphery, for example, India to get all those less technological inputs like textiles, rubber plastics and so on. So basically we have a network, which is organized in concentric circles with their center in Germany. And what is important to stress here is that the new business models which are spreading not only in the automobile industry, but in general, and especially in this industry, which are just in time and just in sequence models require geographical proximity in order to work. So this is very important to keep these chains viable somehow. And we could see during the pandemic that actually these chains are very fragile, subject to exogenous events which can break them very easily. Now the point again is that only in the EU there are 2.5 million people which are directly employed in the automobile industry. And to these 2.5 million people we must have all those people who are actually working in the supply chain. So we are talking about million of jobs which are at stake now. And the problem brought about by electrification is that it is an entirely different commodity than a traditional car. As Annamarie already stressed the components which are needed to produce an electric car are totally different from the components which are needed to produce a traditional car. On the contrary for example hybrid vehicles combine both components entering an electric car and components entering a traditional car. We will go back to this later. Now focusing our attention on the EU specifically we have in order to grasp the dimension of the problem we have to start looking at 2 things. On the one side the investment strategy investment plan solves big OEM so car makers and battery producers. And on the other hand we have to look at the policies that the EU is actually adopting. And so starting from the first point currently batteries are produced mainly in Asia. Some producers actually gave some announcements about the opening of production plants in Europe especially in Germany, Hungary, Poland and France. And for example no investment plan at all is investment at all is planned in Italy and Spain for example. So this is going to create probably much unemployment in these two countries with respect to for example Eastern Europe. And so these four batteries as far as the production of vehicles is concerned business plants of main car producers show that about 45% of electric cars will take place in China. So 55% in the rest of the world altogether. Now what is the European Union doing in order to try to govern these changes? Well, EU policy are basically based on public procurement, regulations on vehicles emissions, purchasing incentives, tax benefits, provision of charging infrastructures. And the fact that the EU identified batteries for electric vehicles as one of the strategic value chains to be supported at the European level. Unfortunately, in our opinion this policy are not enough. I mean they're not able to actually face the challenges we are talking about. First of all public procurement. Let's keep in mind that we should not only focus on environmental issues, but also and mainly to occupational issues. So the point is public procurement does not guarantee that vehicles are going to be produced in Europe and therefore does not guarantee that employment is preserved or increased in Europe. Of course we know that giving priority to national companies is forbidden because it's considered state aid. So there is only one way to avoid this problem and be able to plan where to create jobs. And it is resorting to enhanced production which means a public company that takes care of industrial policies and investments. And of course the ideal dimension of this public company would be the European one. Because of course we are competing with macro regions which are continents not nation states. And so this of course is a political contention which is very relevant in our opinion. Then there is the problem of the price of electric cars. The introductory speech stressed that actually electric cars, the price of electric cars is going to decrease in future years. I don't know whether this will happen or not. The point is that right now the price of these cars is very, very high. So they are not very spread among consumers because of course the price is not to be something that the family can afford. So also in this case a policy based on incentives without active participation is not in our opinion enough. Then charging stations. As we were already told infrastructures are still highly insufficient. Moreover they also create another problem which is that of the production and the distribution of electricity. Because right now we don't have a production which is enough also to cover charging of all. I mean if all cars were to turn electric we would have a serious problem if we don't increase energy production and manage peaks and things like that. Again this is something which was beyond the single automobile industry and we think that a public company could be a good way to face this challenge. Another question we have to ask is whether focusing on electric cars is really the answer. For example hybrid cars have excellent environmental performances comparable to that of electric cars and they also reduce charging problems. So probably trying to invest more in the production of hybrid cars could help in facing the environmental problem without generating a trade off between environmental and occupational objectives, policy objectives. Another point is that less polluting cars alone are not able to solve the environmental problem. First of all we would need sustainable mobility plans because we need to relieve congestion in cities and to reduce traffic otherwise the simple fact of having electric cars wouldn't be enough. Again public transport would probably be an answer or part of the answer to this problem. Of course these challenges are often at odds with the goal of the main OEMs which is basically that of generating profits and so all the public can face these challenges without having necessarily the aim of generating profits. Finally we have also taken into account that about 20% of total emissions generated by automobile industry is generated by the transport of these intermediate components from one country to another and so it seems contradictory to focus only on the diffusion of electric cars without trying to think also to some kind of dismantling of this model of productive specialization which could be again solved by some kind of public European level would be better but some kind of public intervention aiming at having some kind of this specialization. So homogeneous distribution of plants in Europe which could also preserve employment in all European countries. So this is probably the answer to nationalistic ideas spreading over Europe. So now to conclude and then I will leave the floor to Matteo. Now after the pandemic we are discussing of the so-called recovery fund and European countries are preparing investment plans in order to be able to get advantage of European money, European resources and so the question is whether or not EU countries are taking advantage of this momentum to try to strengthen their automotive industries and the consequences of this possible restructuring. Matteo. Good evening, I share my charts. Okay, Nadja and I we analysed the main policy adopted by some European governments about automotive sector and this the government plan defined by Germany, Spain and France. Not Italy because in Italy a government plan don't exist. So we try to define a kind of taxonomy of this government plan and as a general remark we can say that this government plan provided two main pillars of measures. The measures demand oriented that is incentive to buy new car to renew care fleet etc. And measure to support industrial structure in particular from the point of view of the complete industrial network of supplier of parts components and obviously final assembly of car. The first plan is the German government plan. The Germany is the first producer in Europe of cars with 4.6 million vehicles. And at the same time regional state, better a lander, the low Saxony is one of the main shareholder of Volkswagen group with about 12% of the share. We can see that the measure, the German government plan involve both measure of incentives to acquire to buy new car to renew private and public car fleet etc. And at the same time public incentives that is public fund to support industrial production of car parts and components and infrastructure. In particular, the focus of German government plan is the network of supplier of parts and components to help this sector to address the great ecological and technological transformation pushed by the shift toward electric of new vehicle car. And further, we have also general measure of the of the horizontal kind such as supported to new energy policy, hydrogeners, research and mobility in general like new train, new railways, new chip building sector etc. The second plan analysed is the, I'm sorry but the scroll okay, perfect, is the Spanish government plan. Spain is the second producer in Europe with 2.2 million vehicles. In Spain, there are no local car maker but there are multinational group like PSA, Renault Nissan, Volkswagen, Ford, Opel etc. Also in this case we can see major subsidies incentive to the renewal of the vehicle fleet and to realize recharging infrastructure for new forms of mobility, but at the same time a strong commitment to supporting industrial investment for the competitiveness and sustainability of the sector. In particular, Spanish government will use credit tool, fiscal tool and legal tool and in particular about the fiscal tool to support industrial investment. Spanish government would reach industrial and social goals. For example, to maintain employment level to attract new share of electric vehicle production and to involve local companies better. The company is located in Spain in the so-called life cycle battery and infrastructure of recharge for electric vehicle. The Spanish government plan involves also an addendum that is the so-called sector commitments. I mean the commitment adopted by private firm and in particular from the point of view of the number we can see that companies located, car maker located in Spain, adopted the commitment to produce 700,000 of new electric vehicle, both bev, battery electric vehicle and fev, plug-in electric vehicle by 2030 and to realize 400,000 of new point of energy recharge. Finally, the French government plan is from my point of view the more important because in this case we can see the involvement of public sector to support the technological and ecological transformation of automotive sector. Also in this case, we have both the kind of measures incentive to acquire new vehicle but at the same time a strong involvement of the French state which create public fund to support the industrial transformation and the entire network supplier. In particular, with the use of BPI, Banque Publique des Investments, the French state created a fund to support the so-called automobile of the future. This is a fund participated both by local car maker, PSA and Renault and at the same time but the Banque Publique des Investments. The French state created also a fund to support the industrial development in particular from the point of view of the supplier of parts and components made in France and also supported the new joint venture created by PSA in total to create the before mentioned plans by Nadia that is the new grid plant of battery production in France. So the Italy will be one of the two may western European countries without a grid battery plant in the western, in Europe, in all Europe. And also in this case, the French government plan involve a paper with the commitment of the sector and in particular I would stress that a goal defined by French government is the strength of the supplier and car makers located in France. I mean that the French government want to strengthen the linkage between final car makers and the network of parts and supplier located in France. In this framework we can see the merger between the so-called Italian because the head of this company shifted from Italy to USA but we can say it about the Italian FCA and the French PSA. FCA begins this merger with at least four disadvantages. The first one, the before mentioned goals of the French government to link strongly final car maker in France and the supplier located in France. And this can put every linkage without any other supplier located abroad for example in Italy. The second one, the presence of the French state in the PSA with bank public this investment, which is one of the main share holder of the PSA with 12% of the share. The same share of the Chinese don't think. Third, the sales level. In the first semester of this year PSA in Europe sold three times vehicle then FCA and finally PSA maintained the ownership, the control of the supplying company for Asia. On the contrary, FCA sold their supplying company, lablet Magnetti Marelli, to a Japanese companies lablet Calsonic Kansai. And in this framework PSA announced, imposed the use of the CMP common modular platform to realize the new vehicle of the B segment. The platform is the core of the car because is the architecture involving care floor, suspension, exhaust system, brake system, etc. The space for the engine, the space for electronic components, etc. And obviously this imposition, the platform by PSA, obviously will involve the production of the new five models, Junior Jeep, Alfa Romeo Kid, Cinquecento, the new Lancia Y, CC4, the former Panda with strong consequences for Italian supplier. I mean that Italian supplier without links with PSA can be displayed by this decision adopted and imposed by PSA and accepted without any claim by PSA and without any claim by Italian government. So already the main components of electric car in the case of FCA are supplied from companies located abroad. For example, the battery for electric vehicle are supplied by Samsung with a plant located in Hungary. The battery for the hybrid model of the Jeep Renegade and Compass will be supplied by the Korean LG Chem and maybe from the Chinese company CHTL. And the combustion internal engine for mild hybrid model is realized in Pernambuco in Brazil. So I conclude because I'm very concerned for employment level in Italy. In Italy without public intervention inside the capital of FCA and without a public government plan I'm afraid that the employment level in particular from the point of view of the blue collar will be strongly affected. And I'm afraid that the consequences, the social consequences for workers will be very, very dangerous and disastrous. Many thanks for the attention. Thank you very much. Now we shift gears a bit in an automotive thing. I think that metaphor is perhaps perfect. There is a question about what you get at the end of all this and how much you've moved to electric cars. And how much you'd actually save in pollution. Ryan Rafdie at Oxford has been working on this. And so we'll just turn it over to him for his paper now. Thanks Tom. Yeah, like Tom said, the rest of the speakers earlier did a great job looking at the kind of overlapping crises facing the automotive industry kind of from an internal lens a lot of the external forces that they're not in complete control over. And I want to look at another one of those which is perhaps a largely un foreseen possibility in the automotive industry which is namely the possibility that we might see some unexpected reductions in energy demand in the sector in some places at the level of end users. We already see signs of that possibility with the switch to a kind of Uber, Uber fleet business model. Some anecdotal evidence as well from the decline of the rate of young people getting driver's licenses in some places. But that's in that context I'd like to look at one thing in particular which is the possibility of the increase in telework which we've seen a lot of during this COVID period. So I'm just going to pull up a slide here if you don't mind. That should be full screen now. So I'm going to look at this effect on emissions specifically. So COVID actually, you know, it marked a quite a step shift in the industry not seen perhaps since the last financial crisis in many ways though it was a continuation of what we've already seen with respect to environmental policies which is at times of crisis the industry looks to not only in some cases get bailed out but you see in the case of the European Car Makers Association and other supply chain groups the demand that they delay implementation of vehicle CO2 regulations and this is a common theme in many places but it's part of a longer term trend the cost component of a lot of these regulations is not trivial and a lot of these companies are under pressure now to develop alternative powertrain technologies in addition to the other supply chain demands and moving to a largely software based automotive industry you see these powertrain technologies that they don't really know which exactly will prevail in the end and the industry really needs to buy time if any of these countries are going to reach their CO2 emissions reductions targets and that's the case just about everywhere transport CO2 emissions continue to rise globally despite the manifold targets everywhere transport CO2 emissions on road transport comprise about a quarter of global final global final energy demand and that percentage is expected to grow in the years ahead as for example electricity and heat get decarbonized relatively easily to decarbonize electricity but with respect to road transport a lot of the main policy mechanisms have not performed up to speed so fuel prices and CO2 taxes I show with colleagues in a recent paper that the price elasticity of emissions and vehicle miles traveled in the sector is a lot lower a lot less than expected at least based compared to previous studies and this is easily explained by the fact that path dependence in the transport infrastructure stock you get the carbon lock in when you have cities without mass dense public transit systems and if you impose a carbon price in those places people are constrained with respect to easy shifts in the mode of transportation so the price mechanism doesn't the price signal doesn't work as intended and the emissions reductions from that have been far lower than expected by neoclassical economic theory so we need to take a more evolutionary perspective with respect to vehicle efficiency standards incremental improvements in the efficiency with respect to power to mass ratio have been greatly offset by the growth in engine power think of the fact that you have relatively lower grade Nissan these days that can go up to I don't know 200 miles per hour why it needs to go that fast I don't know but we haven't really looked at some of the irrationality with respect to the power the power in the engines with respect to electricity like it was mentioned earlier in the panel even if we had a 100% electric vehicle fleet tomorrow you still need to triple roughly triple by some estimates double but I think it's closer to triple if we have renewable energy electricity and so we need to triple that generation capacity within a few decades and that's not trivial and of course with the switch to autonomous vehicles they're heavily dependent on machine learning the computational demands of that are extreme and that's a continuous thing it doesn't go away over time it's a constant learning and inference activities that are going on at data centers and that's going to contribute to higher electricity demand indirectly so let's think about these simplify this look at the climate models and what they say about emissions pathways consistent with 1.5 or 2 degrees celsius so nothing like this has occurred before and it's a sobering graph for me someone who works in the climate policy field it's my focus I mean how are we going to get that curve to bend and this is total global CO2 emissions and we're looking at transport in particular if you were to look at the transport sector road transport alone there's actually not much optimism about the idea of bending the curve towards zero there's going to be positive emissions in transport it's assumed up through mid century this graph basically requires the zero is actually any positive emissions will be counterbalanced in terms of emissions technologies and those technologies a lot of them are not yet proven at scale so I'm sort of interested in what are the other options because there's not much discussion of things that might actually reduce emissions greater than 3 or 4% which is the kind of effect we've seen from taxes so with COVID we see something pretty extraordinary which is about a 33% reduction globally in road transport CO2 emissions more than any other sector in this presentation the rest of it I'd like to talk about some of the findings from my working paper in which I take daily data on daily road transport CO2 emissions newly available from Carbon Monitor I take the government response tracker at Oxford for the COVID containment policies the diversity of policies that have been implemented cross-nationally during this period and some human mobility data from Google and I wanted to ask which policies actually contributed most to this reduction in road transport CO2 emissions and of course I can't go through the details of the econometric specifications here but we cross-checked them across three different estimation strategies and we got pretty much the same result every time which is that workplace closures contributed to the vast majority of the reductions and importantly about 8% to 40% depending on the country 8% to 40% of vehicle emission reductions were due to or could be attributed to teleworking in occupations where there is the capability to work from home and that varies by countries due to the availability of transit systems and the variability in occupational structures but with the financial services sector and basically any industry that works where the occupations are working from computers there's a lot of capability to work from home and so it's not attributable to economic calamity and this is just a few graphs showing over time these are daily emissions data for 2020 and this is a change relative to the same day in 2019 I shaded these areas in gray to show darker gray areas show when they had the greatest stringency of workplace closures the light gray shows a kind of relaxation where it's a kind of partial work closure but you see where you really get the step shifts where we had pretty widespread workplace closures of course not all of those companies were out of business and bankrupt many of them did make the most of the circumstances and workers had to adjust and businesses had to adjust from working from home I put this quote from Robert Pollan here to show what the kind of mainstream view is right now and a lot of the green new deal discussions and there's the assumption that there's not really much to learn here the emissions decline because of economic calamity and unemployment and it's a disaster and who would wish that upon anyone in the future certainly there must not be something to draw from and this is sort of what my paper is trying to challenge to get us to think wider about the energy demands demand reductions that we might still achieve if we extend teleworking beyond the covid period so I mentioned earlier that the climate energy models really don't account for the possibility very well except this article by Brubbler the low energy demand scenario where you do see about a 40% demand reduction in road transport so not so far off from what we've already seen from the teleworking and globally one sixth of workers recent studies showed could perform their job remotely and greater than one fourth and developed economies and the US using more micro level data which I think is very well done I think the studies may be more accurate it's closer to 44% of all jobs that can be performed from home but less than a quarter ever choose to do so or perhaps their employers don't let them so beyond emissions even if we didn't care about CO2 emissions and there's lots of other benefits reduced congestion road fatalities nitric oxide emission pollutants around the world are giving a lot of cities in China and India especially a headache with air pollution and health care costs of course there's also a good behavior economics literature out there showing that longer commeting times are associated with lower satisfaction on day to day basis and there's a good tendency especially if you depend on private cars there's a systematic reduction in subjective reporting of wellbeing and a classic study from Putnam showed 10 minute longer commutes associated with 10% lower social capital people get to spend less time with family and loved ones if they're spending so much of their day on the road and of course this would take a lot of adaptation from businesses if teleworking were to expand beyond the COVID period we see a geographical redistribution of commercial activity like we've already seen in many places from the inner city to the outskirts where people are spending more of their money during this period it's revitalizing a lot of local store owners in some places it's not entirely such a bad thing businesses will need to adapt and rethink office space planning especially where we might have rotational schemes where workers only come in some of the time so it's an important caveat not everyone will like this not everyone wants some people like their colleagues want to be at work sometimes and you can't blame them so this could be easily solved with going into the office a couple of days a week but the key is the flexible workplace culture that could be driving some of this and I think many more people will start demanding in the months and years ahead anecdotally in the financial services industry apparently this is already happening there's of course a risk of exacerbating existing inequalities not all occupations can work from home and the need to extend greater financial support to families with children and to support child care facilities and in general to increase enrollment in education and training at universities and continuing education of all sorts would be a very wise investment regardless of whether we take this path towards emissions reductions but just to conclude of course this is just a speculative activity here that I'm presenting based off of pretty robust empirical evidence recently that doesn't change what's happening in the automotive industry and the need to adapt and the challenges for employment moving ahead if anything it might just compound them but it's something to keep an eye out for I'd say thank you thank you very much Ryan thanks to all the panelists actually these were great papers that were well delivered very clear I actually most panels I'm on I confess I sometimes suffer through I didn't on this one thank you all now I'm the official responded and I will just make a few remarks because I am certain we want to I think we can probably deal with questions from people but I think a few remarks on several topics I think maybe one on Ryan's which I was extremely interested to see the rundown of in the Wall Street Journal the other day on asking executives top executives what did they really think of work from home and I noticed that most of them were basically negative there were a few financial firms and a few Silicon Valley firms that were a little more positive though even some of the Silicon Valley firms were saying no and this is an interesting question it might be an avenue for public policy obviously you decide there's a massive externality in telling everybody to come in to work well you know how to fix that just as well as I do even if the chances of getting it done in some places are not necessarily high you can tax it I mean this is a case where public policy could make an intervention but well now let me go on more broadly about the car industry I think I put my comments under three headings one is data one is infrastructure and a third what I'm going to call process and I don't mean driving to work or something like that now let me just talk a bit about the data story I think all these I've said I think these papers are great they're really good and I would add that you know of the two on the car industry were commissioned by INET although there but I think they underplay a really important theme on data which I'll just sort of make the point by telling a story a friend of mine once was talking to a person who just closed down they just decided to shut it and the guy was saying to him well we've sold all our office furniture and we've sold our place where we had our headquarters and all the stuff the thing I'll never sell is my data and that I think happened about 15 years ago that was sort of the first point where I got the idea you know data okay this is maybe more interesting than I thought and in fact when you go to an electric car and particularly if you try to do self-driving cars which you know nobody actually mentioned those today that's because when they try them in Arizona somebody gets run over periodically there but and they're obviously not ready for prime time but on the other hand they are being tested in cities in and out of the United States and it's there probably going to happen but to make this stuff work really well in a fantastically powerful data capacity the so-called 5G systems can perhaps make that work the earlier ones really can't and it's quite instructive to look at debates within countries not just within the United States say within Germany too I have seen research institutes in Germany saying it just wouldn't pay to do really big tech system in all of Germany that's a claim now in the US that decision is left largely to oligopolies in the telecommunications industry and they have quickly decided no they will not be doing rapid build-ups of wifi really good wifi connections in say western Massachusetts big chunks of New Hampshire and lots of other less densely settled areas you know other countries like Korea do run these systems very heavily connected and they'll obviously probably do better in this but the point about the information levels here are enormous and when you go to public transport systems I know that in Italy for example Milan has been restructuring up data plans and there's a huge question about who owns the data I mean there's all kinds of brave talk about trying to link say some self-driving cars to the public transport system so you could get out of your house you could hop the self-driving car go I'll speak in the American style a couple of miles and then you know go switch on the Milan subway and then emerge into perhaps another self-driving car whoever owns that data has a fantastic advantage over the people who don't now I guess this is a case where the public character of the data is of extreme interest and if you think this question is going to get settled out of the free market you're simply mad it's not anymore than that's sort of like asking folks who settled to use a nice contemporary example who arrived from Europe into the north and south American expecting that sort of free market to just settle up with the natives on how who owns what in the jungle are in the prayers it's not something, it's not an experiment I recommend running yet again ok the data question here is enormous a second one is is the infrastructure problem because of course just laying these data channels if you like is very very expensive and it's also true what all of the speakers mentioned it's not absolutely sure which technology wins out so you get these you can see Silicon Valley well Detroit and Germany and perhaps as Matthew remarked France and others and all saying how much of this can they swallow my sense is again that the public infrastructure component on this is inevitably going to be very interesting you could perhaps get more competitive lanes in some places I know that for instance electric utilities in the United States have gone to various large cities and said ok we will guarantee you places to charge your buses if you'll convert your bus fleet to all electric that pulls you out of the oil complex which you might have noticed in the United States is quite powerful but again when you get to large scale infrastructure you are pretty much demands if you're not to have absolute nonsense some fairly serious public planning that doesn't mean you do it like it was done in the Soviet Union in the mid 30s that's stupid ok that doesn't work but you're going to have to be doing bodies that review because if you don't the private producers are going to run as an oligopoly you're not going to like those results even if the oligopoly widens over time now a few remarks on process now by process I mean especially this how does this business of channeling get in effect to speak perfectly straight forwardly to get rid of the old producers and get the new ones to produce now they may be the old producers but there are lots of people thinking that maybe you can get new ones now the reason I'm so interested in this is that this is a lot, we've done this we've turned this track both in Europe, the United States and elsewhere many times before an exceedingly interesting thing to look at is the question of how bankruptcy legislation and labor legislation collide or they harmonize in particular what happened in the United States in coal mining and steel where lots of firms went bankrupt as the workforce was typically left with nothing not pensions some cases they had to leave with unpaid wages in the auto bankruptcy which was managed by the Obama administration it wasn't wonderful but you got a somewhat different outcome they saved the pensions of the workforce now the question is as the squeezes develop on auto producers how much if you like to put it somewhat loosely this is after all a very brief comment how much bankruptcy versus how much state aid did the existing producers you can see a clear debate in Germany where a lot of order liberals for example are talking up creative destruction and when you hear folks talking up creative destruction your rabbit ears should go way up because it means that somebody is about to pick your pocket there and it seems perfectly obvious to me that a lot of folks are hoping that lightning can strike and that existing firms might go out of business forcing complete renegotiations of wage contracts and that folks are just going to have to be alert to this because the legal systems are very different set between the US and Europe and how you trade off labor rights under labor legislation against bankruptcy it's complicated but people need to start thinking about this because lots of people are and particularly under COVID you can see that exactly as some of our speakers mentioned you can see there's all this talk of European Union intervention on the other hand I think when you sit back and you study what is actually being talked about it's mostly at the country level there's not a lot of coordinated European level discussion here and so this is an area where I think you want to pay close attention and in particular I will close with this observation as you bust up firms and you see newer ones come into being you want to watch for things like the role of finance and in particular private equity groups it is perfectly obvious to me I can see the private equity groups flying around in both the US and Europe like myself would say like a bunch of vultures but you can get into situations here where with incredible speed you can get institutional changes that might take 20 years in a situation where if you get into a series of weak firms the wrong bankruptcy procedures and then financing that is enthusiastic about blocking out older forms of labor relations you can get some really striking outcomes you know if you think therefore that a pandemic is a problem wait till you have a pandemic and some mass bankruptcies on that sure you know I'll stop and we can perhaps respond briefly everybody could have some maybe any comment or anything any of you feel like commenting afraid that we are a little out of time sorry because you know we have limited time and we have already exceeded it sorry about that ok niente scusate questa brutale interruzione per I'm so sorry that I had to stop you so abruptly but our time is over maybe we'll be able to speak about the implication of using rare earths see you next year bye bye


10 o'clock Mike. Are you ready? Are you back here and ready for zoom? Okay, let's get started then I'm dealing like built this or assembled I should say this this build last winter and That was after the Horrible horrible fires in Australia, and I did not plan on doing another session here this year but the end of September I Was waking up early to see the dawn to see the sunrise and I didn't see it it was hazy and cloudy and No beautiful dawn and at first I thought it was just the weather in the northeast of the United States and That was not going to be such an issue but Day after day It didn't change and that's really unusual So finally dawned on me that it wasn't my normal weather in the northeast it was that the smoke from the fire maelstroms in California and in Colorado they were Denying me Of a sunrise, but that isn't the important thing they were denying people in California and Oregon and Washington and Colorado their homes so if you have been to this build before You might notice a few changes here They're more houses and They're burned out. There's more smoke because there are more fires and the Most recent research that has come out The last week or two from various sources are showing that We have underestimated the effects of climate change We have underestimated the rapidity of The change that we will be undergoing And so I thought maybe we needed to revisit this and do it more like a a survey Yeah, underestimated is terrifying max so that the most recent one that has come out is saying that the increase in Air surface temperature the warming over the next 80 years to the end of this century is not going to we're not going to be at 1.5 degrees centigrade increase or two, but they're now saying or Now whether this will bear out or not But four is really terrifying so the presentation today the slides are More than anything just a survey of Of where we are globally and what some of the issues are But more than anything that is on the slides what I feel is Essential is that we get into very serious conversation about some of these issues So the the this morning we are focusing on fire Drought and flood and although I pulled the slides together Thomas is part of this presentation to and Thomas. I am certainly hoping that You will speak up at any time as well as anybody else This is not a presentation about my work as much as it is a presentation about the the state that we find ourselves in drought fire Flood and We are here in this build so that we can feel it we can hear it we can almost smell it because it's a natural cycle that has been ongoing for millennia for eons But right now the cycle has gone wrong and humans have Interrupted this natural cycle Today we are learning that this year We're now into November. So it is Close to the conclusion of 2020 It may beat out 2016 to be the hottest year on record Siberia we think of Siberia as cold Siberia had a hundred degree days not one Numbers of hundred degree days last year Norway and again this year Norway and the northern parts of Sweden and Finland Had a hundred degree temperatures and as of the end of October The winter ice had not yet started to form in the Arctic Ocean. There are always droughts There are always droughts in some of the Mediterranean type biomes in some of the savannah type biomes around the world but The last few years drought has been worse so that Although it's lessened a little bit Australia had 34 months straight of drought in Colorado Where we've had some enormous fires there saying that this is the word worst drought that Colorado has had in a thousand years the Southwest of the US and California have been under drought conditions for years now and they're wondering if The Southwest may go back to the drought conditions that haven't been seen there in over a thousand years Drought that was excessive for hundreds of years And I got to put it aside here that one of the cities that is growing The most quickly in the US is Phoenix right in the middle of drought area so it's important I think to reframe some of the the conversations About drought and about humanity. This is our problem We're going to focus although there are Many layers here of nature and humans and the interruption of the cycles we're going to focus today mostly on the landscape characteristics and human land and water use Because if we're going to interrupt if we are going to do anything to Lesson this or have it not be as drastic as it looks like it's going to be this is where we need to focus global fire map This was January of 2020 now you notice here down here in the lower right-hand corner you see you know fires in In Australia and the southeastern part of Australia what it doesn't show is by the next month This was all the way down and covered a good chunk of New South Wales what you do see here along the central part of Africa is the Angola and Democratic Republic of Congo where there were lots of fires you see Brazil which has had fires all year Including in the it's going to be the almost the center of the South American map I'm a little bit toward the left-hand area where you see a lot of the yellow interspersed in the red along the the border with Peru and Chile that there was an enormous fire and that that part of the Amazon and rain forest If you go up north This is also January. So in California. It is the time of year that is not Heavily fired, but there's still fires in January By the time summer came along All of California was in blaze Look to the right on the map and you see the fires never went out in Siberia So we really have had a fire year Yeah, Vic that that's The drought that's what I was talking about in the the southwest of the United States there that Off and on it from the historical records. It looks like there was about 500 years of extreme drought This is going a little bit deeper into Australia where Not only do you have the The dry lands, but they're and we showed this before Some of the primeval forests there burned out So it's not only drought that is caused by climate change here and this is true not only of the southeast of Australia, but it's also true of the central part of the United States and California it's true of Some of Brazil and Argentina is That the water table has been drawn down so that the land is drier the dirt is drier these are grazing and forest and Farming areas around the world So the fires in the south the deep south were the mega fires They were small fires that got put out, but they show up on the map so To emphasize that this is a global concern we have Australia and the extent of burning in Moose, New South Wales over the a year's period is just mind-boggling So we know that California's far fires and and it's a lot higher this year Have been bad, but compared to what they had in Australia and I chose Pictures this time that have structures because unlike other Previous centuries We're now burning down neighborhoods and towns Yeah, I Latitude yes, I think latitude To the extent that It reflects the different kinds of biomes, but I think it's more you know, it's more complex than that but when the Climate warms when the surface temperature warms when we have the chain in climate when we have More than that the extremes of climate You're going to get the the and we'll talk a little bit more about this the the cycle of Drying out and flooding and drying out and flooding And and this is pretty much exemplary of that now the Indian Ocean Dipole is not the only whether Related or ocean related Incidents that affects Australia and East Africa but it is a major one and when you have the winds going One direction you have flooding in East Africa and you have the Fires in Australia winds glow go the other direction and you have the Fires in East Africa and you have the the flooding in Australia. So these two areas are Are Interrelated Right now it looks like that might be more neutral and that would be good because then Australia would get a little bit of water without getting Extreme flooding this year, but you know, that's that's still it's only November. Who knows what will happen in January But these are very very complex Patterns that we have and and we're getting better at modeling them, but we're not yet good We almost forgot about drought and fire in Europe But they they got it too Spain in particular has had years of extreme drought It's bad enough in the Amazon when We have fires set and logging and clearing of the the areas that are The carbon sinks and the the lungs of the earth the the rainforest but here we had the fires take off on in areas in the Northwest of the rainforest the Amazon rainforest Where they have not typically been so strong and so there was real devastation there Siberia continues to burn and Now they're saying remember I said earlier that the Arctic had not frozen started to freeze 10 days ago and They're saying that the smoke from the fires is partly to blame here Not only that but it is melting the tundra so that we are Having more methane released into the air, which is a very potent greenhouse gas Imagine this for a minute, and I was gonna pause zoom in on this This was a neighborhood it wasn't one neighborhood like paradise in California two years ago in Oregon the wildfires destroyed five towns and Almost without warning The fires just raged through towns Let this sink in this is forest land These are towns So well, we'll talk about that in in just a minute about the trees We've gone now from Oregon to Estes Park Cal Colorado now Estes Park is in the Northern part of Colorado, and it is a little bit to the east but you know fairly central It's not far from Fort Collins. It's on the edge of the Rocky Mountain National Park Roughly 6,000 people live in Estes Park When This building started burning they evacuated all 6,000 people These folks were really lucky because this was the troublesome fire, which you may have heard of Troublesome boy, is that an apt name for this fire? But it I say they were lucky because When the people were evacuated on Saturday Saturday night and Sunday morning they Colorado had a snowstorm and so This area right here had a foot of snow overnight It did not even a foot of snow did not put out the fire but it damped enough that the Firefighters were then able to get this fire under control Now let's get to some of the contributing factors here in addition to the Human building, yeah, we've had over the last number of years Infestations of bark beetles, and it's not just in Colorado all those This is a picture of Colorado. Yeah, these are Huge swaths huge stands of dead trees It's also throughout the the southwest. It's also into California and surprisingly there are Bark beetles in the southeast of the United States so one of the I Mean the bark beetles have always been around I mean this is not new what is new is that the with the change in the climate with the warming of the climate The larvae don't die off in the winter It has not gotten cold enough for a prolonged period of time Periods of time to kill off these beetles.  Yeah, it's a little hard to Yeah, right, right. Yeah. Yeah, so this gets back to the question earlier about the trees and the in the the former natural cycle of You had the fires burn. I mean this is this is something that has always happened But when you didn't have prolonged drought like we have now when you didn't have the the Very very hot temperatures for prolonged periods of time you had healthier trees And the fires would lightning would strike the fires would take out the underbrush and the lower Limbs of the trees, but the trees with the mature trees would survive for the most part That is no longer the case The mature trees are now under great stress from from drought and from infestations one more piece to add to this and that is the Ogallala aquifer is an enormous aquifer and it Runs underneath eight states in the central US If you zoom in closely, you'll be able to see that There are areas that have been drawn down particularly in the south particularly in the northern part of Texas where the aquifer has been Not only drawn down, you know 150 feet in many instances where it does not show here on this map But it is in this lower area The aquifer it's shallow to start with in in general and it has collapsed so that in these areas of Texas you will never ever get the aquifer filled again, it has collapsed you have where the For the land just sinks 10 15 feet and so No amount of rain will refill that But we are paying farmers and we are allowing other people to Draw down the water. I mean we are literally paying farmers to draw down this aquifer so Policies of government it are not Not helping here Yeah, so let's get back to Colorado for a moment here. We I don't know if you can see up there Just below where it's gray and blue. You'll see kind of an L shaped yellow and orange area. That's the Northern Colorado area that is where the Work for Collins is and where SS Park is and You can see that that has been drawn down like a hundred feet of the aquifer. So the ground is dry It's not only that the air has dried out. It's that the drop the ground is dry Let's skip over Skip over the mountains here and into California for a bit So the Creek fire in California early September it Ended up being the largest fire in California history and in California just this year Almost four and a half million acres have burned out some of the fires were started by dry lightning Because of the the weather and the climate There were storms in September in California, but no rain, but not all of them some of them were started in In fact, the major ones really have been started by people Accidentally by smoking But worse than that by partying So some of the worst fires that we have had have been Careless people some of the fires burned right through Wine country now this actually is the glass mountain in in flames and I thought It might be appropriate For us to have a memorial to this and so you'll notice up on the hill We have the glass mountain in burned out and Even the wineries here in Napa and Sonoma that did not get burned because of the smoke many of them had their their whole Produce for the year their whole winemaking Smoked So that it became useless so here you have in the left-hand side on the Just above the middle you have the August complex which ended up being a million acres in one enormous Gigafire and This didn't spread over weeks. This spread over hours Hours so by the time you realize there was danger you were already in great danger For those of us who live in the the northeast of the United States and or who have visited there and have some sense of The size of the state of Rhode Island the fire that single fire Was larger than the entire state of Rhode Island Wildfires or the effects of wildfires don't just go away Because you have millions of acres burned you have millions of acres then of burn scar and Coupled with drought you have ground that has no roots Ground that is dry and so when you have An area like California that is prone to mudslides anyway You have mudslides For years it takes a very long time for the to develop or redevelop the kinds of root systems that you have in a forest so Thomas put together a list of some of the things that are contributors here or To the wildfires particularly in California, but to any of the areas and Take a minute and read this and Thomas, please do chime in at any time But take a minute to read it and look at what are the things that you would have Thought of and some of the things you might not have thought of You'll you this might be a good time for me to introduce myself and give everybody a perspective of The drought fire flooding from Ground zero view in California would that be acceptable and everybody Yes now yes, okay great well My name here in second life is Thomas. I am a consulting hydrogeologists. I live in The Central Valley of California I've been a practicing professional hydrogeologist for almost 40 years and Let me give you some perspective About where Fresno is so you can have an idea Fresno lies in essentially the geographic center of California. I Have lived here long enough that three of the largest fires in California history. I've been able to see the direct impacts of either from my front porch or Through the eyes of my very many friends. I Think some of the things that people need to grasp About California's we are a very unique geographic and geologic environment We have all every single kind of climactic microclimate and combined Environmental conditions in the United States the deepest or I should say yes that the Deepest place in the continental United States is in California Which is Death Valley and the highest place In the continental United States is in California, which is Mount Whitney We have four major mountain ranges that produce their own Climactic conditions whether it's rain shadow or depletion of Rain reaching one side versus the other We have massive forests and we have a lot of people that demand a lot of water one of the things that you're going to learn about and Through Delia's presentation and she's done a tremendous job here is droughts in California droughts are normal In the southwestern United States, but they can be exacerbated by a number of different conditions Fires are normal in the southwestern United States As an example native Americans up until about the 1900s Actually were allowed the cultural practice of burning the forest floor because it replenished nutrients that they needed but that was stopped and Created its own conditions and began a practice of forest management to this day, which is still controversial And then flooding in California. We've done a tremendous amount to control flooding because of the Millions of acres of farm land that we have here in the Central Valley The Central Valley of California is one of the largest food producers in the world Providing roughly 40% of the world's food the valleys roughly 300 kilometers north to south and 100 kilometers east to west We consume Millions and millions of acre feet of groundwater and surface water To supply that irrigation or to supply for irrigation of those crops from a drought standpoint when we're faced with a changing climate and An increasing population the demand on water in California is Insufficient to meet that As a consequence we experience something called subsidence the ground actually drops in certain parts of the Central Valley of California due to Water withdrawals groundwater withdrawals. We've seen upwards of 40 meters of ground subsidence and this has created all kinds of problems for infrastructure With the changes in the climate what we experience then is these massive fires That are not normal we see these gigantic Gigantic mega fires Much like the complex is up north I got to watch the Creek fire and the campfire and we had Almost 20 days of smoke conditions here in the Central Valley that made The air quality so poor that people were asked to stay inside Just yesterday the University of California at Los Angeles through some modeling efforts are Predicting even worse flooding here in the Central Valley Much like we saw in the 1850s where the state capital of Sacramento was Essentially inundated due to what's known as an atmospheric river But we have a combination that's occurring here that is Replicated around the world changing weather conditions creating drier climates Lower humidity it is affecting the forests Two of the major Utilities electrical utilities here in California estimated that as a result of climate change and the bark beetles There's somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 million dead trees in the Sierra Nevada Mountains and They can't remove it. There's no place to take it. There's nothing to do with it Other than watch it burn At which we managed to accomplish here just recently so from the standpoint of Climate change what we're seeing is the extremes are being driven Further and further towards an unsettled or unbalanced situation human demand for water is Increasing despite efforts to manage that the atmosphere is becoming more conducive to extremes and Now as Julia showed in one of her slides We face the possibility of a great deal of runoff due to weather in the mountains where we have rain and snow melt driving flood conditions and Soil erosion so what we're seeing is this spiraling Upward or downward I suppose it depends on which way you want to go with that But this spiral towards more extreme conditions here in California But I think that what we're Experiencing is just the beginning and I'm going to turn it back over to you, Delia This is only the background information in my opinion So I Think the question is how should we think about wildfires and in what context so we're going to go in a Little bit different direction here and a month or so ago month and a half ago, I I was not able to Participate in the ethics conversation Because I was unavailable that weekend, but ethics is a more and more critical area In any of the scientific endeavors and it absolutely is so far as environmental issues are concerned so As we keep saying fires are natural drought is natural Blood is natural We now have human settlements that have encroached Significantly into those areas and human decisions that are impacting those natural cycles and breaking them down some of the things that are happening is not only the The interruption whoops. What's that happening? We're getting back wrong direction. Sorry about that Not only The interruption of the national cycles, but as Thomas was talking about the Central Valley of California is a farming area it has produces much of the not only the country's US Produce but shipped around the world. That's also true of New South Wales of the Australian The Murray Darling Basin is the Australian red basket When you look at Brazil, how much meat comes from what had formerly been Rain forest So all around the world we have Turned these forests into cultivated areas we have introduced Non-native species to do that and Monocultures for the efficiency in farming We assume we have a right of ownership, but do we? So there are three very short little videos and I'm going to put the first one It's only about a minute and a half in here for people who don't know the All of the tragedy of the commons, but when you're watching this think about not what was done originally and how it was Conceived, but what was how we would apply this to more development worldwide So just click that and let it go for for a minute and let me know when when I put the next one in Well, let me try to answer that real quick with regards to Land stewardship policy if you're referring to fire management, there is a great deal of fire management in place Both at local and state levels with various agencies involved, but there's also a great deal of Count there are great number of challenges with regards to that You've got two large utilities that run electrical lines through the forests that have responsibilities For managing those electrical utilities and not causing fires which they have in the past And you have various agencies whether it's the federal Forest Service or the state Cal fire and Are trying to find ways to fight these fires So much of their budgets have been Utilized or used in fighting these fires in the last 12 years that it leaves them very little for active and effective forest management, and I just put the second video in Eleanor Ostrom was Awarded the Nobel Prize for economics a few years ago And she talks about Reclaiming the commons in many ways so in conclusion Here Let's talk about a couple of questions, and you may have other questions. These are just three But the ethics of How we are managing our resources The ethics involved are Unfortunately little discussed in my opinion. They are absolutely critical We are Going along as somebody said as though the resources are endless they will take care of themselves and We we can keep Abusing them and and I don't use that word lightly because we are abusing the and wrecking Ecosystem after ecosystem after ecosystem In my opinion, we are not even asking the right questions We are asking questions related to what we have set out as Isolated areas isolated situations rather than seeing Ecosystems as systems rather than seeing us as part of the natural world so what are some of the questions we should be asking and How are policies that humans make? Within the mindsets That run us. How are they maintaining the practices that are Driving us more and more rapidly into Situations of environmental collapse and who needs to be part of these conversations Are we talking? With the people the right people are we talking with Are we talking with people are we? convening people together with the expertise with the understanding with the actual experience Are we helping policy makers Have these experiences and and one of the reasons that I built this out the way I did is so that you can go and you can stand Here on the edge of a fire walk into the fire and get a sense of the terror And even that is only the tiniest tiniest sense of What that would be if this were even more widespread than it is So what are some of the questions we ought to be asking and who should we be asking? And who should we be engaging? It's not going to go away by itself if it were If it we're gonna get better by itself it would be getting better and Instead it's getting worse. It's not the Cougars and the kangaroos That are Exacerbating this It is not the birds That are making the fire spread. We are part of it is And it's been alluded to and I put it a little bit into the presentation is that instead of seeing ourselves as embedded in nature We behave as though we have rights and ownership is that valid and what does that stand on? humans didn't used to believe That they could own the land but today in many places humans do believe that healthy ecosystems Withstand natural fires much much much better than The stressed Boris that we have now and what would it take to be wild? what would that difference be what would What would be the trade-offs here and and by the way I have I think I have made The slides the whole slide show that so that anybody can take a copy. I hope I have made all of the The slides themselves with the perms that people can use change whatever so when we have concentrated centers of population Like the the four towns in Oregon that were just wiped out this year Virtually overnight wiped out were they building in areas that were That made controlling fire Difficult and should people be able to build in any area that they want When you have as Thomas was saying the Central Valley of California or the Central Plains of Texas and Colorado or the Murray Darling Basin in Australia and you draw down the water So that You have increased your production and increased the Mostly monoculture that again makes the the general ecosystem less healthy What are the consequences and the consequences don't fall equally on people? So these are tough questions. We're not going to answer them today but I hope that we will Keep mulling these around and I hope that every time each one of us reads an Article on the web or in the paper or here is a conversation That touches on these areas. We'll start thinking of some of these questions and we'll start following those threads as to What the consequences are what the benefits are what the risks are what the challenges are? and As we do this we will engage more people in conversation and Keep those conversations going Because if it's just me if it's just you We are going to have this as an increasing spiral so I am More than inviting I really am begging people to have these conversations Daily With ourselves and with other people that we come into contact with So thank you for coming today. It is now 1102 and I did want to keep this to an hour But I hope we have provoked some serious thought here Do take a copy do bring other people up here bring classes use it for teaching space That's why we have it It was my pleasure and Thomas. Thank you for participating. It was fun to work with you today Thank you, Delia. I appreciate the chance and thanks to everybody for allowing me a minute to Interject my observations from what I refer to as ground zero