Technology Day 2007 - "Energy in a Global Context"

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HOCHMAN: Hello. Welcome, welcome. Thank you all. Thank you for coming to Technology Day. I am Ira Hochman.

I am the chair of the Technology Day committee this year. And first, I'd like to take you through an honored ritual here at Technology Day. First, I will invite you to join me as I remove my cell phone and turn it off.

[LAUGHTER]

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Thank you.

First, I'd like to thank a few people-- specifically, the fantastic committee of people that I had working with me this year that have put together this program for you. They're very energetic, great ideas and a very fun bunch to work with-- very enjoyable. I'd also like to definitely thank the faculty for taking time to put together these presentations and for being here today to talk to us.

I'd like to also specifically thank Lou Alexander of the Alumni Association, who basically manages the entire process of Technology Day. He's a great guy to work with-- definitely fun and totally reliable. It's great. I'd also like to thank the audience, all of you, both here in the auditorium, and today, we're also being webcast live. So I'd like to thank the audience at home or wherever you are with your laptop who are enjoying this today.

So I'm very excited about today's program. The subject is energy, which has become a major concern worldwide and MIT's response to this has been the creation of the Energy Research Council and subsequently, the MIT Energy Initiative. Today's program focus will be on the evolution of today's energy environment, as well as a discussion of how we can improve security and effectiveness of today's energy programs and systems. The format is a little different than last year.

After we have President Hockfield's remarks, we'll have three faculty members speak. Each speaker has 50 minutes-- there's about 40 minutes for the presentation and up to 10 minutes for the questions. Since that's such a short time, I please ask you to present your questions so that there is time for answers and further questions.

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There will not be a panel Q&A after the talk this year. I'd also like to mention a recent addition to the Technology Day program, which are the poster sessions. You may have noticed outside in Kresge auditorium. These are award-winning student research projects. And we'd like to also thank Sally Susnowitz of the MIT Public Service Center for putting together this offering outside. And I would also encourage you to enjoy a conversation with the students behind these projects during the break.

So with that, I would like to introduce to you Beth Garvin, the executive VP, CEO of the MIT Alumni Association. She's been with MIT for more than 20 years and was named head of the association in 2003. Please welcome Beth Garvin.

[APPLAUSE]

GARVIN: Well, good morning. It's my pleasure to welcome you and to greet so many old friends and meet some new ones. We're delighted to have you here this weekend for tech reunions and for this, our biggest alumni event of intellectual nature. Tech Night at the Pops is probably our biggest in terms of size overall, but we really focus on something important today.

I have the privilege of leading your association, and I do that very ably supported by a couple of folks I want to mention. One is President Hockfield, who has been incredibly supportive of all of the alumni activities, has been out to meet many of you around the world in the two years she's been here, and I just cannot say enough how important her presence is and her participation in all these events. It used to be that the president of MIT would go to three reunion events over the course of this very busy weekend with commencement and the ROTC hooding and all the activities.

Susan likes to do three or four a night. So it really is an extraordinary investment of time and energy for which we're very grateful. The other group, of course, are the volunteers who make all of these activities possible. We have more than an event a day around the world.

And if you add in the things that are being webcast and carried online in various ways, there's just an enormous amount of really wonderful stuff going on, and that's due to the many volunteers who support the association, many of whom are in this room. And you'll see from this program today just how wonderful they are at putting together these events.

And finally, I just want to acknowledge what has to be the best alumni association staff on the planet. I appreciate how many of you have come up and given me compliments on their work. They really are extraordinarily hard working, and we're here to make your weekend as enjoyable as possible.

We always encourage feedback, though. Don't usually have to encourage this audience too much to tell us what they think but please, there are evaluations. We're always trying to make things even more interesting, even more fun.

So do give us your feedback. And I hope I get a chance to say hello to everybody today. Enjoy the program.

[APPLAUSE]

HOCHMAN: Thank you very much, Beth. So it's my great pleasure and honor to introduce someone you may be familiar with, the 16th president of MIT, President Susan Hockfield.

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HOCKFIELD: Good morning, everyone. It's not so sunny today, but you know what? It was sunny yesterday. We were blessed with a glorious day for commencement, and we are blessed, I say, with a fabulous program for today. Thank you, John, for your great introductions and for your work pulling today's event together.

And I want to just use a minute to thank Beth and her amazing team. She talks about how I wanted to three or four events a night during reunion weekend. It would be absolutely impossible without this crackerjack team that actually does create schedules for me that I describe as a jigsaw puzzle. The events are knit together like this.

So I know I saw many of you last night and at your fantastic events. The mood is among you-- I think, reflects the mood on campus, which is optimistic, ebullient. I'm very much excited about what MIT is doing on campus and frankly, what we contribute to the world.

Tech Day is always one of the highlights for me and partly because I get to see so many of you but also because we get to hear from MIT's faculty leaders about the work that they're doing and how the Institute addresses the pressing challenges of the world. Today, we're going to focus on what many people consider-- and I'm among them-- perhaps the world's greatest challenge right now. It's a challenge-- energy, sustainable energy, how we can use it without using up our important resources. Those resources include the capacity of the atmosphere to take up CO2. It's also an area where we believe MIT can make unique contributions.

Now while I'm going to provide a little bit of an introduction to the energy talks that you're going to be hearing, we will have Q&A at the end. And I welcome questions on any topic.

Now, interestingly enough, the best way to think about MIT's work on energy is to begin not here in Cambridge, but in Switzerland at this year's World Economic Forum in Davos last January. At Davos this year, we had a very strong MIT presence. We had more than a dozen faculty members who accompanied me.

Over the course of several days, we had 17 faculty presentations at the World Economic Forum. And there were several MIT events in Zurich and at Davos, including a dinner that we hosted on disruptive energy technologies. We were agreed with enormous enthusiasm, and rather than brag about it myself, I thought I'd just read from you from what the Time Magazine's Davos correspondent wrote.

At a certain point during this year's World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, the gusts of self-regard became a little too much to bear. I found myself wondering whether any of this high minded talk was worth a dime. Fortunately, that's when something came along to remind me of what Davos is good for. My breakthrough session turned out to be a guided tour of the future-- MIT's dinner session on disruptive energy technologies.

Now at the dinner we had three of our faculty speak. Angie Belcher talked about the viruses that she's persuaded to make batteries. Vladimir Bulovic talked about solar photovoltaics and quantum dots. Greg Stephanopoulos talked about a very large and fascinating biofuels project. And Tom Friedman who you know from his work for the New York Times was our introducer and moderated the discussion.

Back to Time Magazine-- no wonder MIT President Susan Hockfield, seeing those sorts of discoveries taking place in nooks and crannies all around her Cambridge campus decided to gather scientists into an Energy Research Council and declare war on the energy crisis, accelerating the switch to clean, efficient fuels. Solving this crisis, as Hockfield told us as candles flickered in the little stone grotto in Davos, will take not one solution, but a portfolio of solutions. It's a sprint and a marathon.

Learning what her scientists are up to made me feel better about our chances in this race. And that's what Davos is good for-- helping of authentic reality-based hope right when you need it the most. And that is where I begin what MIT is good for-- a dose of authentic reality-based hope that we can help address in a real way the most serious of the world's great challenges.

Now I'm sure I don't need to rehearse for this audience what actually frames our global energy challenge. There is accelerating demand. China alone is increasing its energy use by 10% a year. The world over is on track to double our energy use by 2050. The security of our sources of energy are historical sources of energy are, shall we say, not so stable.

Increasingly, those energy sources-- the energy there itself, oil-- is in the hands of companies that are controlled by states. Those states are, shall we say, can't be relied upon to be the most friendly to our country. And then the environmental implications of our current technology-- people may argue about the cause of about whether the increased CO2 in the atmosphere is the cause of global warming. I personally believe what the preponderance of scientists say about this.

But if you look at the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, that was about 280 parts per million in 1900. It is 380 parts per million today. It is rising at a rate that is absolutely unsustainable. Whether that is the cause of global warming or no, we are using up a limited resource, and that limited resource is the capacity of our atmosphere to hold CO2 in a way that is sustainable. It's consistent with life as we know it on this planet.

MIT's response to this energy challenge is the MIT Energy Initiative. The initiative grew out of interest I heard from faculty, students, staff, and alumni as I was learning about the MIT community. When I asked our community, what are MIT's responsibilities and opportunities over the next decade or two? There was an overwhelming call for MIT to do more to help solve this global crisis.

The Energy Research Council released its report after a year of study just about a year ago. It was released concurrent with an Institute-wide energy forum that was about the busiest week of the year. We held it in Kresge. Kresge was packed.

This past fall, we announced the formal begin of the MIT Energy Initiative. The initiative is headed by Ernie Moniz with the deputy director Barb Armstrong.

One of the most exciting things about MIT's Energy Initiative is not the huge number of people who have begun to participate, but the fact that people are participating in this from all five of our schools. The Energy Initiative has drawn out three main themes. The first is new technologies for a cleaner future, and there, we're focusing on solar, on biofuels, and on energy storage.

The second theme is improving today's energy systems for changes in the near term, and there we're focusing on nuclear, clean carbon, and carbon dioxide capture and sequestration. The third theme is addressing the challenges posed by the emerging economies. And there we feel we can be particularly helpful in the areas of transportation, and construction. And our three faculty speakers today will lead you through a few-- let's just say three of the very many important strands that comprise the Energy Initiative.

As I said, an important aspect of the Energy Initiative is that it reaches across all of the schools. Every theme, every research direction requires collaboration from many different departments in many different schools. Each research area that I hear described by the Energy Initiative participants is not an area that could be addressed by one faculty member or one department or one school. Each requires participation across MIT, and each also requires not simply new technology or new science. Each requires technology and policy working together.

The Energy Initiative is not just about research. Importantly, it's also about education. There is enormous student enthusiasm and interest, and one of the first activities of the Energy Initiative was to put together a task force on education. We have a marvelous committee that's addressing that, and we now have a website that presents to our students the range of energy-related courses available on campus. And the student interest, as I said, has just been overwhelming.

It's also important for MIT to, what we say, walk the talk. So one of the initiatives first task force is a task force on campus sustainability to use our campus as a living laboratory, so we can do what we're talking about and what we're urging the rest of the world to do.

The most important message emerging out of our work is that we have to develop a portfolio of solutions. There is not a single silver bullet. We can't focus on one solution to address it. We have to at the same time pursue many different avenues.

When I first heard about the energy challenge, I thought about it as a challenge and you know with all seriousness about wearing extra sweaters and turning down the thermostat. And it seemed like, boy, it was kind of a sorry thing.

After talking to our faculty being in my own energy course from our faculty and students over the last two years, I now see this as a fantastic opportunity-- an opportunity not just for a campus, but an opportunity for the nation. It's an opportunity to inspire the young people of the nation around a bright future that they can help invent. I see this as a possibility of having the same kind of catalytic and inspirational effect that the Apollo program had on my generation.

The other great opportunity is the possibility that new energy technology will fuel the next cycle of the innovation economy that has made this nation so strong. We see that around here where energy startups and actually, large energy companies are moving into MIT's backyard. It resembles, in many ways, the beginning of the life science revolution and the marvelous life science companies that have come out of places like MIT around the world. Now, of course, energy is not the only way in which MIT's faculty, students, and staff are working together to address the world's most critical needs, and we could have picked any one of a number of topics to present to you today.

But I would say, overall, there is a huge sense of optimism and opportunity on campus about what MIT is good for-- a dose of authentic reality-based hope that we can contribute to solving the world's great challenges. In this role, MIT has been for decades and decades a real beacon for the world. Now thanks to an extraordinarily generous alumnus who is inspired by the idea of taking the basket off this beacon, off the lamp, tonight, we're going to celebrate a symbolic way of taking the basket off the lamp. And we will reignite one of my team's most powerful symbols.

After sunset tonight, which occurs late because we are near the longest day of the year, for the first time in more than three decades, we will fully relight the great dome. The relighting is possible because of advances in energy-saving lighting technologies. The power consumption of our new lighting techniques is going to consume energy that's equal to two hair dryers, or I've been told the amount of energy that's currently is consumed by lighting in my office. We've got to get to work on the lighting in my office.

So the lighting itself is very low energy consuming. But in addition to that, again, because of the generosity of this alumnus who has insisted on remaining anonymous, we are also going to be installing 40-kilowatt photovoltaic cell, actually, which greatly exceeds the call on energy by the dome lighting. But we see this dome lighting as a way to walk the talk times two.

The first is demonstrating energy efficient lighting. We don't have to give up a lot of the wonderful things we enjoy. We just have to do things in a more energy-efficient way. And the second really important part of MIT's contributions is inspiring. The nation the world about the wonderful promise of a brighter future for all through Science and Technology.

Let me just close by echoing some of the things that Beth said when she introduced the sessions morning. I cannot overestimate the importance of alumni engagement. Of course, you should go without saying that your generous financial support is essential for us to be able to do the kind of extraordinary frontier advancing work that we do and to bring the most able and ambitious students in the world to this campus. And I'm going to thank you a little bit more in that domain at lunch. But for now, I really want to thank you for the very many other roles you play as members of the MIT community.

One especially critical role is as ambassadors from MIT to the world. And I very much hope that all of you will continue to spread the good news of MIT's contributions to solving the world's great challenges and how we educate young people from MIT to be the people who engineer, who develop the science, who understand the policy of bringing those solutions to bear on these great challenges. Thank you very much for joining us for this reunion weekend. Let me stop there and take a few questions before we move on to our faculty presentations. Thank you.

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Any questions from the floor before we--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

HOCKFIELD: Yes, there are mics. Oh, you're up there. Okay, so you'll have to speak very loudly, please.

AUDIENCE: Obviously, [INAUDIBLE]

HOCKFIELD: Yeah so the question is, it's obvious that MIT can make major contributions in science and technology. But are we also working on the policy, the economic piece of the puzzle? And indeed, we are. The Energy Council, which

is the five faculty who are primary advisors to Ernie Moniz and Bob Armstrong come from each of the five schools. And we have a number of faculty in humanities, arts, and social sciences and MIT Sloan who are actually very interested in these policy, economic issues. And I think you'll be hearing a little bit about some of that today looking at Nazli. And she's not nodding. We're going to hear a little bit about some of their policy work today.

And we actually feel that for a couple of reasons that MIT can knit the science and technology together with the policy in almost unique ways, partly because we have people on campus who are working on both sides of that equation, but also because MIT has an almost unique practice of faculty working across what in other places are departmental and school boundaries.

As I think about-- at least the parts of MIT's history that I know-- what I always think about is the study that led to the book Made in America that was brought forth during the Japanese threat on the American economy. Made in America was done by a group called the industrial Performance Center, which is a group of economists, people from MIT Sloan, engineers and scientists. That group continues to produce a bunch of a number of books and actually their most recent book out of that group.

The main author is Suzanne Berger. It's a book called How We Compete, and it's exactly just exactly what you asked. It's a study of economics and business practices in the context of globally successful businesses. So indeed, the short answer I should've said is, yes, we are going to be we are doing both the economics and the technology around the energy challenges.

Other questions? You'll have to actually speak up because it's hard for me to see if there's anyone at a microphone. If not, we will proceed with the-- oh, thank you.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

HOCKFIELD: What can we do to persuade our government leaders that we need programs like Apollo in this area? Well, I think we all can lend our voice to that call. Like MIT presidents before me, I spend a day every four to six weeks in Washington, working to persuade them actually on these issues. I spent time in Congress at the White House with the heads of the various agencies actually making this call.

And I think we need to as a nation articulate our interest in a very loud way on our belief that the energy challenge could represent the kind of issue to which the nation as a whole could direct its interest, its enthusiasm, its ambitions. So as I said, you are very important as MIT ambassadors to the world. If you all lend your voice to this possibility, it will amplify the things that I can do in person 120,000-fold I think is a number of our alumni right now. Anything else?

Well, again, thank you very much for joining us for Tech Day. Thanks for coming back to campus, I hope you like what you see. And as Beth said, this is not a shy group. We look forward to hearing from you about your reflections on this week on campus. Welcome to MIT.

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HOCHMAN: Thank you, President Hockfield, for those very interesting information, particularly hearing about the exciting research and implementation going on at MIT transporting us to Switzerland and also for sending us on edge for the words of our next speaker. There are detailed biographies of the speakers in your program books, but I would like to highlight some facets of our next speaker, Professor Nazli Choucri. In addition to being a professor at MIT's political science department, she is also associated director of the technology and development program and head of the Middle East program at MIT.

Professor Choucri's primary research focus is in international relations and international political economy with a special focus on conflict, connectivity, and the global environment. This puts her in a particularly advantageous perspective to comment on the broader context of the energy challenges we now face-- political, economic, and strategic, as well as the types of coordination that the major nations of the world will need to develop to ensure our energy future. I'd also like to mention that there are microphones located in the aisles. If you have questions, please feel free to line up at the microphones. So please join me in welcoming Professor Nazli Choucri.

[APPLAUSE]

CHOUCRI: Thank you, Ira, for this very gracious introduction. I'm going to ask you to work with me as we place energy in a global context. And part of what I will say will not seem obvious as to what the energy connections are, and this is where your homework comes in helping me out on this.

So am I doing this right. Hmm. This is not my machine. I have no clue how this thing works. Okay we'll try again. Ah, it's this way?

HOCHMAN: It's it right here.

CHOUCRI: Yeah. Good. This is the social sciences. I'm going to be talking about three issues, and each one of them is really quite important. The first is to take stock of the legacy of the 20th century.

What is it that we're carrying with us today? The second is to look at the global system as a whole and in what I will refer to as some odd views of the system and finally, some political realities for energy in the 21st century. So we'll take those one at a time.

On the legacies, I've chosen to focus on four core ones and then look at some of the surprises-- the good news, the bad news, and the unexpected from which I will ask. So I will propose the balance sheet.

What do we have? What do we get out of this? What are the net effects? So on the legacies, the ones that I have chosen are self-evident, but there are surprises in each one of them.

The first is population dynamics, and we're all familiar with the rabbit population growth almost in one word. Then the issue of some issues related to technology and implications for energy use. Some energy basics in the really most basic sense is seen from a political scientist. And then a reminder, the fourth legacy is a reminder of the new global agenda-- the new global political agenda-- the world out there that is changing, perhaps far more rapidly than we are able to understand or accommodate it.

So one legacy at a time-- on population dynamics, we all know that there are more people on this planet. We also know that there's some important demographic shifts. We're not exactly sure what the shifts are or how important they are, but we know they're out there.

And then finally, the biggest legacy we have of the 20th century is the matter of crossing borders. Just about everybody on this planet is on the move for one reason or another. And every move is related to some increment of energy use. The statistics that we have about mobility of people and the venues and the duration and the location and the sources and the consequences are not quite synchronized with the knowledge that we need with respect to the associated energy uses.

So first, the familiar which is more people on this planet that I don't need to say anything more about it. The insert here is perhaps a little less familiar, and this is, believe it or not, there has been a slight improvement in the human condition since over the past century or so in the sense that the share of the poor has declined. Now you may consider that good news, but placed in the context of the demands and the needs of the poor population, that's not as good news as we would want. And then let's factor in the energy requirements almost by necessity, as we all become wealthier, richer, better off, and so forth.

And here's a minor footnote-- the individual-- Joe Smith, let's say, John Doe-- living in China is embedded in an energy infrastructure that is quite different. So his own individualized per capita consumption is very different than if Joe Smith or John Doe, whoever it is moves to Los Angeles. And the same individual, nothing is strange about him or her-- simply the infrastructure within which he works has changed. And there the energy numbers look quite different.

As a simple reminder as to the mobility of people-- now this is very misleading because I should give you the other side of it, which I'm not going to give you-- and that is the percentage of the migrants to the total population, which is not in this case. The only thing I want to draw your attention to is that movement across borders generating a stock measured at one point in time is very, very large.

And the word migrant here refers to a voluntary movement-- people who willingly decide to cross borders. Most people, let me put it differently. That's a large fraction of crossing borders that is not voluntary. That too carries with it some energy-related coefficients, leaving aside the coefficients related to justice, quality of life, et cetera.

So what I've covered so far are related to basic facts. Let's talk about some surprises. And this is where I ask you to consider the implications.

The first surprise has to do with the unexpected, declines in fertility. We had never thought 50 years ago, 60 years ago, 30 years ago-- over 30 years ago when I joined the MIT faculty that we would consider this an issue decline. And I'll get to do that in more that in a minute. The second surprise is the dependency ratio in population. And then finally, the aging society-- the aging society is a correlate. It is connected to, tightly coupled tightly with the industrializing society.

So the question to you is the quiz for this morning is, do you see any energy-related impacts either on the demand side or on the distribution side or other infrastructure requirements side, or is this just a blip in our statistics? And hey, life is complicated. So let's look at the fertility declines.

What you see here is a fairly good representation of what we now understand to be a basic fact, and this is in industrialized countries, the populations are not reproducing themselves. Now we consider that a problem. One could consider that a problem. In the old days, the only problem we're familiar with is rapid population growth. Too many people are having too many children.

And I'm not passing judgment here. I'm simply saying that this is a surprise because we had not expected it. We had not looked for it. We had not anticipated it.

And this comes from the economists. And I just love this one for the following reasons. There were plenty of clues before the popular press picked up the fact that the Russians were disappearing. And here it has to do mainly with the fertility side that the death rate and the life expectancy of Russian-- then the Soviet population-- was going down, having to do with health-related issues, having to do with inhaling too many stuff that's not good for you, et cetera.

And we saw that long before were able to connect energy, climate change potentials, pollution, and health-- pieces that we now take for granted as going together. This is not very good news for the Russians-- at least I don't think it's good news for them. And the standard policy that countries have when faced with news that they don't consider good is to try to do something. And we know based on the history of the advanced industrial countries that it is any policy to try to increase the fertility rate.

And an advanced industrial country is doomed to failure-- has failed to no end. Case in point here would be France. This is probably more than you really want to know, but it's not connecting much more closely to the energy issue. And I just want to draw your attention to the solid black line, which is the rising dependency ratio, which is the ratio of the non-working population to the working population. And we really don't want to have this dependency ratio go up because it means that the working population has to support a larger fraction of the total population.

So on the quiz sheet for this morning is, is this trend that we now think is fairly robust-- is it neutral with respect to energy effects on any dimension of the energy issue? Now we move on to the technology parts. And in this audience, I will not presume to say anything technical on the technology aspect. But I will focus specifically on three issues that are fundamentally important legacies of the 20th century and are going to face shape how we deal with the 21st century on energy issues and just about everything else under the sun.

The first is globalization and the persistence of this thing that we call globalization. We did the rough census of what globalization means, and I won't bore you with varieties of definitions that we came up with in the literature and in the popular press. But the fact is everything is crossing borders, whether it's people, ideas, things, and so forth.

The second issue is globalization. And no, I did not make this word up. This comes from the United Nations' coining of this concept to reflect the conjunction of globalization processes but the localization effects of globalization-- so the linkages between globalization and localization.

The interesting thing here is that we now know that are many local effects that have been generated by the globalization process. So it's not a decoupling. It's a recoupling in a different way.

What we don't yet know is how we can connect this fact, I would say, to our energy policies, our energy strategies, and of course, to the application of innovation in this area. So consider this the next item on the quiz.

The third energy issue that is very, very important goes without saying is the global race for knowledge. It's not the global arms race of the olden days. But it is a race, nonetheless. And what I will draw your attention to in just in just a minute is the impact of this race on one particular domain, and that is the shifts. What has this done to shift the way in which we organize and think about our social activities and about where value added is or added value is-- sources of added value?

There are multiple indicators of globalization. I don't need to persuade you that there is something going on out there in the world.

At the simplest, a trend I could get around which there would be no controversy more or less is world trade. So take that as an indicator. Most interesting, however, is the impact of knowledge and density-- the impact of shifting this structure of economies and the structure of societies. And we're moving in that direction.

And as we go down that path, what implications are there for energy? I would like to think that it's got to be only good news, but I'm an optimist. So what we've already started to see as a legacy from the 20th century is a gradual shift from the strict thinking about supply chain requirements as being anchors of meeting supply chain requirements as being anchors due to the economy and to the social order to thinking about the knowledge chain.

And what we're doing here at MIT is beginning to formalize and clarify what would be meant by the knowledge chain and at which point societies gain by reducing disconnects among various links to that chain. We've also seen shifts from material output that wish to have expanded material output to the wish to have better ways of meeting social needs. We're seeing shifts from knowledge access reducing barriers to access to enhancing, facilitating venues for knowledge generation and knowledge creation.

So we're beginning to think of knowledge not as the residual in the proverbial textbook case of the production function in the old days, but as really endogenizing the entire process. And then the final shift that is the most fabulous of all at this point in time-- and it was alluded to earlier by President Hockfield-- is that the interest that we have in contributing to the diffusion and the distribution of knowledge.

Now this sounds very much like motherhood and an apple pie, and I certainly don't mean to sound that way. What I do want to say is that if we can understand and unbundle the knowledge chain and if we can locate the value of doing this with respect to our energy dilemmas, challenges, problems, we might be one step ahead in framing our response policies.

Surprises-- what are the surprises from a socioeconomic and political point of view. And to me, the most obvious surprise of all, looking back at the 20th century and if we were anticipating technological changes would have been very difficult then at the beginning of the 20th century to have correctly anticipating the forging of virtual space-- cyberspace, the internet, et cetera. To the architects of this space, the focus has been on the internet and the wires and whatever else goes into this thing.

But for the social scientists and for the users is the creation forging of new spaces, new arenas of interactions and new voicing and new opportunities and again, connect new voicing and new opportunities to who is doing the voicing and who is doing the opportunities and what difference it might make. The last piece-- the last mile, if you wish-- is the wireless connections as part of this bundle of surprises. I'll get to that in just a moment too. The second surprise is that environment does, in fact, matter. It's not something that we would have anticipated early in the 20th century.

And then the third surprise is the dark side-- that states are at risk from factors that we did not expect them to be at risk from. So what now who or what next?

Opportunities-- this is an example of internet generated revenues. I don't have the sources here for which I apologize, but it comes from an economist report. And the amount in the axis is in the Bs, of course, so more. With more comes more regulatory stuff. As a political scientist, I take it for granted that any new activity creates a new bureaucracy of some sort.

Now that is not really good news. It may be necessary, but it's not really good news because we know that major, major, major disconnects in just basic communication among bureaucracies and among agencies who have the same mission statement create. We're creating a headache for ourselves that we may not necessarily want to. Another part of the technological surprise-- and I put it on the side of technology here as opposed to on the side of the ledger of the social scientists who could have tried a little harder to anticipate some of those differences-- there are two pieces of the surprises that are important in terms of the environmental effects of our industrialization trajectory.

One is the differential impacts across and within countries, which you know. But second is that there are going to be already but will continue to be more burdens on the poor everywhere in all societies, this society as well. Does energy policy factor into this at all? By now, you may think that the connection between energy and the issues that I'm raising is far too long. The chain there is too long. But let me assure that it really is not if you consider it carefully because we're also seeing, anticipating the prospects of more social cleavages as potential effects of climate change arise.

The next item on this checklist is the erosion of the power of governance and the power of institutions if they get overloaded by the effects of the transformations in the natural environment. Without spending too much time on this, the other side of the loss of law and order is the growth in individual entrepreneurship-- self-help, if you wish. And remember societies are organized to prevent excessive self-help. So what we worry about here is that we have not thought enough about the potential consequences on the social order of this particular surprise.

And now we understand that this is terrifically important and where are-- the at least in the [INAUDIBLE] science department-- spending serious time looking at that issue. There is some attempt to measure the international impacts of potential climate change. If you notice a highlight potential just in case the controversy is on this issue. And the climate change index is now considered as plausibly accurate with respect to countries at risk-- at risk with respect to health hazards, physical, and physical conditions as well as immediate environmental impact or environmental dislocation.

This is not really very good news. But I think that as we think about the energy, climate or energy environment linkages, we're going to have to recognize that there are significant high probability outcomes that we're going to have to deal with somewhat seriously. And I identified sharing with you two of those here.

The first bullet is respective 10 countries that are high in terms of overall risk, and you have the list of the countries here. But these are countries that so far account for a very small amount of greenhouse gas emissions. Some of these countries will be going under reconstruction programs. And so the challenge is how can we best engage in reconstruction without putting in place the energy economy interactions that were destroyed to begin with?

And President Hockfield referred to efficiencies on the MIT campus. Can efficiencies be imposed upon, transferred portable to large-scale reconstruction efforts. We hope so, but the records so far in terms of the reconstruction of destroyed economies over the last decade or so shows us that we are very good at reconstructing what we've already destroyed. We're not good at putting in place the new generations of technologies that are already available to us.

Okay, this is a simple reminder of the distribution of who's going to be in pain on this one and without any statement about the nature of the pain. And now I get to the darker side-- the countries at risk-- at risk of conflict or at risk of being the recipient of unhappiness that is generated elsewhere associated with climate-related issues. There is a concentration, as you can see, in the African continent.

There are also a bunch of other concentrations. The interesting thing about this is that this assessment comes out of the community that focuses on climate-related impacts, and the fact that they're concerned with conflict at exactly the time in which the political conflict community in political science is beginning to think about the environmental effect is an example of the type of coupling that we've started to do and we're getting to be much more involved with.

And let me stress the obvious by way of indicating how important this is, the coupling part, and that is the social sciences as all of the sciences but only with the social sciences were framed and developed over time by very carefully carving out, partitioning human activity out of the natural environment and looking at the space and then very carefully cutting out pieces of human activity. So you have the politics for the political scientists, economics for the economists, and so forth knowing that the world is not that way, but understanding that this is how we will generate knowledge faster. Now we realize that the strategy that has been very successful throughout the 20th century and before is a major liability today.

So now what we're trying to do is put Humpty Dumpty together again but in a way that does not undermine the growth and the strength of the individual disciplines and in the individual fields. Needless to say, this is easier said than done. But the more important and the more serious part of this is that the need to reconnect is one that comes from within the fields, so there's a very powerful realization that we have to reshape our system boundaries and our field boundaries. Now the issue of energy basics, the third set of legacies.

Fossil fuels, the usual-- I don't need to review that with you. The second legacy has to do with the continued politicization of energy. Energy, as you know, is intensely political issues across the globe-- maybe with the exception of legislation budgets. There's a search for alternatives-- the usual, maybe more than usual.

But then we have the mess in the Middle East, which is clearly more than the usual. When you put all these things together, we have some immediate short-term dilemmas. We won't call them crises. And Professor Deutsch may address those in a few minutes.

But what I'd like to do is share with you the view that the usual is a bit more messy than it has been in the past. This is a simple reminder of the flow of exports of oil and global oil. I just picked this one up because the message is very, very clear.

And you see the salience and the centrality of the Middle East and followed by a vision from The Boston Globe in 1986. This actually is very accurate. '86 is decades ago.

I mean, you're familiar with this, but there is, unfortunately, one more angle on that, which is this way. The message here may not be what you think it is. It has to do with in addition to this mess, we have a mess where the many, many players-- not all of which are controlled by states, and not all of which define winning and losing the same way.

This is the complexity of the Middle East. The good news is that this particular cartoon is not about a major oil-producing or natural gas producing region. It is differences of perspective over a non-oil-producing area. So if we take this cartoon and put it on the future of Saudi Arabia or the future of Iran or the future of you name your favorite oil producer, we have a slightly complicated situation that's going to create imperatives for us right now.

This is one of the most powerful legacies of the 20th century. Just to show you that I'm able to be even-handed on this comes from Time Magazine. You may not be able to see it. So I'll tell you why this is interesting. It is a set of instances in which the good guys-- by the good guys, I mean countries like Norway-- begin to do some rather unpleasant things over resource-related matters and energy-related matters.

And the case in which the clashes-- this is a case of Japan between Japanese fishermen and the Russian Navy. And then we have the Chinese and [INAUDIBLE] this right-- oh, sorry, shouldn't touch this stuff-- help. Can somebody come?