Speaker unverified: evaluation

Transcript context

…It's such a prisoner's dilemma on the sustainability versus dynamism front, because, okay, let's just simplify the problem and say the US spends more money to make the very same steel, but does way less pollution. China does weigh more pollution to make cheaper steel of the same quality. I know those things aren't necessarily true, but let's just assume that it's a clean box problem. We all live in the same atmosphere. If you take it as a given that they're going to keep doing that as long as we're willing to keep buying it, then are we actually helping the sustainability goals by saying, hey, let's not produce here because that would be a way to contribute to solving the problem by being the leader and the first mover. That's why I think from a policy standpoint, it's so important that we, at the government level, invest in the R&D necessary to literally invent the answer to that question. My belief is the answer to the prisoner's dilemma is we have to invent the answer. It doesn't exist today. There's no obvious answer to that. You are literally in a prisoner's dilemma. Unless we find a way to develop cheap but also sustainable steel, we're going to forever be in that particular box. Some legislation that I hope will pass very, very soon that I'm working on would basically fund demonstration projects for clean steel to do exactly this problem. I think steel is one thing. That's on the manufacturing side, but you can also look at agriculture, transportation, energy generation. Most of those sectors have similar trade-offs to what you just described. My view is, the only way we can really do it on a global scale, is if we make the green alternatives so cheap and reliable that everyone everywhere would say, hey, this is the best thing to do for all sorts of reasons. That's way into the future, what I just described. That's probably a 20- to 50-year journey. I don't know how to solve the sustainability goals otherwise, because I think something like 50% of the people born in the world in the next 50 years will be born in Africa. How do those economies power themselves? They power themselves largely on fossil fuels, and then they're developing the economy. So what are you going to tell them? Hey, sorry, you have to take this really expensive steel and your people have to stay impoverished? Absolutely not. It's deeply oppressive to say we spent the last 100 years expanding unbelievable amounts of energy to build this incredible nation that we live in. But sorry, the atmosphere is super polluted now, so none of you are allowed to do that, and we're going to use military muscle to make sure that's true. That's oppressive. You need to innovate your way through this problem.…

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