A New (and Controversial) Approach to Climate Policy, with Varun Sivaram

Notable Quotes

• Climate realism advocates an approach that adequately prepares the United States for the worst consequences of climate change: “If you take 3 degrees Celsius as the central planning scenario and focus a lot of American attention at home and abroad on determining the consequences, they’re going to be horrible. America’s going to have to invest in humanitarian capacity to support allies and partners around the world through refugee crises and disasters, for example. At home, we’re going to have to invest proactively in resilience and adaptation.” (11:27)
• Sivaram argues that US investment in clean technology will do more to address climate change than domestic emissions reductions: “The United States can do the most good to the world by developing technologies that everybody around the world gets to use to make their clean energy transitions cheaper and faster. We don’t do anybody any good by trying to reduce our own relatively meaningless emissions.” (12:59)
• Climate realism treats climate change as a top-level threat to national security: “I do believe that the United States can succeed by treating climate as a true top-tier national security threat on the same level as nuclear war, global pandemics, or great power competition with Russia and China. If we treat climate in a similar way and adopt this realist foreign policy lens, then we have a fighting chance at advancing our interests.” (13:47)

Top of the Stack

• “We Need a Fresh Approach to Climate Policy. It’s Time for Climate Realism” by Varun Sivaram
• “The Most Powerful People You’ve Never Heard Of” episode of the Freakonomics podcast
• The World for Sale: Money, Power, and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources by Javier Blas and Jack Farchy
• “Reflecting on Solar Geoengineering, with David Keith” from the Resources Radio podcast

The Full Transcript

Daniel Raimi: Hello and welcome to Resources Radio, a weekly podcast from Resources for the Future. I’m your host, Daniel Raimi. Today, we talk with Dr. Varun Sivaram, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the founder and CEO of Emerald AI.

In today’s episode, we’ll talk about Varun’s recent article, called, “We Need a Fresh Approach to Climate Policy. It’s Time for Climate Realism.” The article has generated tons of attention as well as considerable controversy, in large part because it offers some hard truths about the direction of US and global climate policies. In today’s conversation, I’ll ask Varun to lay out his key arguments, including the contentions that global climate targets are not achievable, that future US emissions essentially don’t matter, and that the energy transition won’t necessarily benefit the US economy. We’ll talk about some of the critiques of these arguments and discuss Varun’s vision for a constructive and realistic future for US climate policy. Stay with us.

Varun Sivaram, a man of many hats. Welcome back to Resources Radio.

Varun Sivaram: Daniel, thanks so much for having me.

Daniel Raimi: So, Varun, we’re going to talk today about a really interesting article that you wrote focused on climate realism. Before we dig in, can you give us an overview of your career up to this point? We’ve had you on the show before, so you’ve already told us about your early-life inspiration. I’m curious about the roles in the public and the private sector you’ve played and how that fits into the work that you do today.

Varun Sivaram: I’m fortunate to have had many perches to see this climate and clean energy transition from so many perspectives. I’ve devoted my entire career, the last 15 years, and my time in grad school to advancing a clean energy transition: a transition toward net-zero.

In the private sector, I’ve been a C-suite executive at multiple publicly traded companies, including Ørsted, a Fortune 500 company. I’ve been part of a nine-member investment committee that’s made a $10-billion investment decision in an offshore wind farm. In academia, I wrote a treatise on the future of solar power called Taming the Sun, a roadmap for solar to become humanity’s largest energy source.

In the public sector, I most recently served in President Joe Biden’s administration working for John Kerry, the Special Presidential Envoy for Climate. I was his managing director for clean energy, where I created the First Movers Coalition, which brought together over 100 large Fortune 500 companies to make billions of dollars of pledges to buy clean energy technologies and next generation technologies to get them out of the laboratory and into the market.

I also created the US-India Climate Action and Finance Mobilization Dialogue and the US-Germany Climate and Energy Partnership. I’ve been a professional US diplomat, as well.

All of these different perspectives inform the way I look at this challenge of how we advance American interests, as a US foreign policy professional, and how we address this climate crisis.

Daniel Raimi: That’s all useful backdrop for our discussion today, because we’re going to talk about your key arguments in this Climate Realism Initiative, and then we’re going to talk about some of the reactions you’ve gotten—in some cases, negative reactions—to the arguments you’re making. Understanding your dedication to the issue of climate and energy transition is really important.

Let’s start off by just learning about your key arguments. In the article you’ve written, called, “We Need a Fresh Approach to Climate Policy. It’s Time for Climate Realism,” you start by outlining what you call four fallacies. So, tell us: What are those four fallacies?

Varun Sivaram: Let me start by saying … I’ve got to tell you, Daniel, I was astounded at some of the negative reactions I got from this article, because I believe these four fallacies we’ll talk about, for example, are just brutally obvious. Almost everybody I talk to—and I’d love to hear where you stand on this—almost everyone I talk to will come back and tell me, “I think I agree with 75 percent of what you say.” The crazy thing is that the 25 percent of my argument with which they don’t agree is different from person to person. Almost everybody agrees with three-quarters or 80 percent of what I’ve written, and the disagreements are always with a different thing. It suggests to me that, overall, if I pick any of the premises or the points of the article, 80 percent or more of people will agree with each of those things. But 0 percent of people will agree with every single one of them all put together. That’s been fascinating for me, because I don’t think I wrote anything that’s not brutally obvious.

Let me walk you through those four fallacies that underpin the constructive agenda I paint for climate realism, which is a US foreign policy doctrine. It’s not a global doctrine. It’s not a doctrine for anybody else. It’s an American foreign policy doctrine.

Fallacy number one is that the world’s climate targets are achievable. This is an obvious fallacy. The world has set through, for example, the Paris Agreement targets to limit global warming to ideally less than 1.5 degrees and certainly 2 degrees Celsius. I promise, if you ask almost any climate scientist, when they’re not in a public setting and completely off the record, what their 50th percentile guess for temperatures in 2100 is, not making aspirational assumptions, they will tell you that we will breach those targets. Just a couple of months ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that by the early 2030s, we’re almost certain to breach the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold.

The UK Met Office published a report a couple of months ago saying that we could actually breach 2 degrees Celsius—just for one year, but this is clearly a signal that this is going to happen this decade—by 2030. It’s a small chance, but in the next decade, the chance rises. I therefore believe that the central planning scenario needs to be a 3 degrees Celsius rise in temperatures by the end of the century.

So, that’s fallacy number one: The world’s climate targets are achievable. They straightforwardly are not achievable. We can go into why, but it’s wishful thinking to think that they are.

The second fallacy is that American greenhouse gas emissions reductions, domestically, can make a meaningful difference. They simply can’t. This is not a normative point. This is just a factual point about our emissions between now and 2100. The only relevant metric for what humanity can change is our emissions starting now and going forward. America’s emissions will be somewhere in the 5–7 percent range of future cumulative emissions. All advanced economies are going to be about 13 percent. 87 percent of future emissions are going to come from China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, South Africa, and other non-advanced economies. Reducing emissions within America’s borders simply doesn’t matter quantitatively. We can have a discussion of whether they matter from a signaling perspective, and I’m happy to jump into that.

Daniel Raimi: Or from a political perspective.

Varun Sivaram: Yes, from a political perspective, or how it affects international negotiations, and so on. I think that American emissions reductions matter far less than almost everybody in the climate community thinks they do.

The third fallacy is that climate change poses a manageable risk to American economic prosperity and national security. I think it is terribly wishful thinking to think that climate change poses a manageable risk, that America adapts because we are so wealthy and so well resourced, that we’re able to avoid the worst catastrophic losses of human life, and the worst effects of climate change won’t materialize, and that the climate scientists have got it all wrong.

I do believe, however, that the tail risks, the greater-than-5-percent-chance risks, are so material that they signal the end of society as we know it in the United States. They signal the need for mass evacuations of many American cities that are either inundated or destroyed. They signal major loss of life. I don’t think that those risks are so trivially improbable that we shouldn’t consider them. As a result, this idea that climate change is just a magical risk that we can adapt our way through is a fallacy.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah, it’s interesting. That argument is very consistent with Martin Weitzman’s famous arguments about tail risks in the economic community, which I think have been very well understood but not necessarily applied in the policy context. You’re making this really clear argument that those tail risks need to be more central in our planning and in our thinking about the future.

Varun Sivaram: That’s exactly right. They’re not central risks. They’re tail risks. But it’s important that we plan for them in the same way that American foreign policymakers plan for the low-probability, high-impact risks of nuclear war or global pandemics. If I had to pick a fallacy that may be the weakest part of my whole argument, it’s this one. If I got this one wrong, that climate change actually is not such a cataclysmic existential threat—as many will say, including Oren Cass on the right and Ted Nordhaus—the rest of my argument falls apart. It is not true that we should do most of the things that I have listed out. So, this is a key potential weak point of the argument.

Fallacy number four is that the clean energy transition is necessarily a win-win for American interests and for climate action. It’s not at all obvious to me, given the way we are headed with China dominating the development of the electric vehicle industry, for example. It’s not at all clear to me that the energy transition advances American interests, American economic interests, American security interests, American interests in the great power competition with China, or American interests in our current dominance of the geopolitics of energy by virtue of being the world’s largest oil and gas producer.

This is the most brutally obvious point to anybody who studies American foreign policy and is not in the climate community. They will say, “Yes, duh.” But those in the climate community will say, “We have staked our entire political agenda on the fact that the clean energy transition necessarily brings co-benefits, that investing in clean energy at home is necessarily a good thing for American interests and for the climate.” I think the global and the domestic clean energy transitions are not necessarily win-wins for American interests in climate action.

So, those are the four fallacies.

Daniel Raimi: We’ve got those four pillars in place, and we’ll come back to some of them in just a moment.

Next in your argument, you outline what you call the three pillars of climate realism. What are those three pillars?

Varun Sivaram: If you agree that the four fallacies are wrong, there are three constructive ways that American foreign policymakers should approach this issue.

The first pillar of the climate realism doctrine is: prepare for a world that dramatically blows through its climate targets. If you take 3 degrees Celsius as the central planning scenario and focus a lot of American attention at home and abroad on determining the consequences, they’re going to be horrible. America’s going to have to invest in humanitarian capacity to support allies and partners around the world through refugee crises and disasters, for example. At home, we’re going to have to invest proactively in resilience and adaptation. And, of course, we’re going to have to decisively make moves to protect our geopolitical advantage, for example, in areas like the Arctic that are fundamentally reshaped by climate change. That’s pillar number one.

Pillar number two is that America should invest in globally competitive clean technology industries, industries where we can actually win or at least have a fighting chance. Those industries almost always are ones where American next-generation technology innovation has an opportunity to give us a comparative advantage, where we already have industries such as the oil and gas industry that are adjacent to clean energy industries, like next-generation geothermal, or ones where there’s an obvious national security nexus, like next-generation nuclear. I would like to see America win in the next generation of batteries, solid-state batteries, even though we’ve already lost decisively in the existing generation of batteries, which are lithium-ion batteries, to China. This approach, the second pillar, has the benefit of squarely aligning American economic prosperity with climate benefit. The United States can do the most good to the world by developing technologies that everybody around the world gets to use to make their clean energy transitions cheaper and faster. We don’t do anybody any good by trying to reduce our own relatively meaningless emissions.

The third pillar is to lead international efforts to avert truly catastrophic climate change. I struggle on nomenclature here, because 3 degrees Celsius is in fact potentially catastrophic, but I want to prevent 4 degrees and worse. To do that, the United States might take various approaches.

I have very little faith that we will succeed in international negotiations through the Conferences of the Parties, but I do believe that the United States can succeed by treating climate as a true top-tier national security threat on the same level as nuclear war, global pandemics, or great power competition with Russia and China. If we treat climate in a similar way and adopt this realist foreign policy lens, then we have a fighting chance at advancing our interests.

For example, we might adapt our trade policy with our like-minded partners and allies to ensure that the major economies that are rapidly increasing their emissions have a real disincentive to do so and a real incentive to invest in clean energy. We might utilize American purchasing power to incentivize or encourage emerging economies to produce advanced zero-carbon industrial products. And yes, we might invest in geoengineering, because as a break-glass option, or even an option well before the break-glass moment, as David Keith would argue, geoengineering may be our best bet to avoid the worst, most catastrophic consequences of runaway climate change.

Those are the three pillars of climate realism.

Daniel Raimi: These are strong arguments. They’re not commonly made in environmental policy circles, as you’ve noted, and there’s been some pushback online on some of these arguments, as you’ve said. Let’s talk about a couple of those critiques.

First, I’ve seen an argument that your characterization of US emissions as not meaningful going forward absolves the United States of responsibility for its historical emissions, which I believe are larger than any other country’s, and that this argument absolves the United States of future emissions mitigation, even though we are still the second-largest emitter on an annual basis. How do you think about that critique?

Varun Sivaram: Daniel, I’m not a priest. I do not offer absolution. That was a glib comment, but I’m dead serious here. I’m making no moral arguments.

To be clear, foreign policy is famously a relatively amoral field of study or field of practitioners playing out in an anarchic, nasty, and brutish international arena. That’s why some of these arguments might seem surprising to those who are not foreign policy professionals or spend their lives immersed in foreign policy. Because you and the folks you’ve mentioned as the critics are absolutely right.

It’s probably immoral for the United States, or it probably absolves the United States’ responsibilities historically. The United States could say, “I am the largest contributor to historical climate change. I’m the largest historical emitter, so I, therefore, should be responsible for cleaning up this mess. Industrialized economies together should be responsible. We should spend trillions of dollars helping emerging economies reduce their emissions, or at least compensating them in reparations.” This is a very sound moral argument. It’s one that personally resonates with me.

There are a lot of other moral arguments that resonate with me. For example, the British Empire probably should spend a lot of money on reparations for the former colonies. I do not say this glibly. I’m from Indian ancestry, and my family and I, when we go and visit the Crown Jewels in the Tower of London, feel very deep resentment. There are a lot of things that may be morally true, but just because of the way that foreign policy works, these moral considerations tend to be irrelevant to the conduct of foreign policy. I’m not saying that morality is always irrelevant. There are certain red lines that foreign policymakers in the United States and our like-minded partners and allies simply don’t cross. You don’t commit a genocide, for example. But the role of morality in foreign policy is more muted than you might expect.

Therefore, the arguments that I’m making are pretty standard within the realist doctrine of foreign policy. American foreign policymakers exist in order to advance the interests of American voters. What are the interests that American voters express?

Well, American voters today have made it very clear that they want to spend about $7 trillion every year, and that almost all of it should go toward domestic priorities: Medicare, Social Security, the military, interest in the national debt, Medicaid. These are all priorities that would cause voters to reject reducing expenditures in order to send funds abroad. There’s no option for American foreign policymakers to send trillions of dollars abroad.

Moreover, the last thing I’d say here is that, when you think about what the correct role of an American foreign policymaker is, it’s kind of analogous to what the correct role of any other branch of government is. The correct role, for example, of the justices of the Supreme Court is to uphold the United States Constitution. It’s not to use their own personal moral compass and come up with activist rulings. It’s to uphold the Constitution.

American foreign policymakers similarly are trying to uphold the interests of everyday Americans, and everything that I’ve laid out in this article follows logically from the four fallacies. Unless, importantly, you believe that climate change is not as existential a threat, as I believe it could be. If that fallacy goes away, the whole argument falls apart.

Daniel Raimi: Let me push you on this morality question. When I think about the problem of climate change, it’s a problem about the present, but more importantly, it’s a problem about the future. It’s a problem that’s going to mostly affect our kids, our grandkids, their kids, and so on. So, does it even make sense to talk about climate change as a policy problem, one that’s worthy of addressing, if you’re not accounting for the moral realities that we are caring about future generations rather than ourselves or voters today?

Varun Sivaram: To be clear, American voters care, probably, about themselves first, but also about their kids and their grandkids. American voters care about future American generations. Everything in the climate realism doctrine, which is an American foreign policy doctrine, seeks to protect future generations of Americans. This is central to the argument, because if this were not the case, America could largely do nothing. We could even obstruct the clean energy transition and existing Americans who live today probably would have reasonably good lives. It’s what happens from the years 2050 to 2100, where American society potentially collapses.

Daniel, you and I are both fathers. That’s your kids. That’s my son. That’s the real full part of their lives and their kids’ lives. I care so deeply about this because of what it’s going to mean for my kids.

You’re making a separate argument, though, when you ask about the world’s future generations. It’s morally a very good idea to try and protect future Bangladeshi generations because they will grow up in a world that is horrific. And on top of that, they won’t have the wealth and the power of the American government to protect them. Isn’t it morally incumbent on the United States to try and protect future Bangladeshi generations?

I think, morally, you’re right. I agree with you. I personally believe very strongly in this. I lived for years in India, where I worked on the clean energy transition. I want India to both prosper but also be insulated from these horrible climate impacts. But American foreign policymakers have a very straightforward duty. It is to protect the interests of Americans today and tomorrow.

So, I want to make clear that there is a very sharp divide between philosophical or priestly moral arguments and the exigencies of American foreign policymakers.

Daniel Raimi: Got it. Let’s talk about some of your prescriptions for moving forward. I’m curious about how you think about emissions-mitigation policy in the United States. You’ve talked about how, from a pure physics argument or a mathematical argument, US emissions don’t matter very much going forward. So, what, if any, sticks would you advise if you were the climate tsar, like carbon pricing, emissions caps, or some other way to reduce US emissions? Should that be on the table from a US policy perspective?

Varun Sivaram: That’s a great question. Again, reducing US emissions is not a useful policy goal unless it’s tied to everybody else reducing their emissions. So, as a negotiating chip, I’d be fully in favor if, for example, the United States and China were to sign a legally binding agreement to reduce both of our emissions. I think that’s a great opportunity for America to use our own emissions as leverage. I don’t believe that the frameworks we have achieved through international negotiations come anywhere close to legally binding or enforceable in any material way. And, therefore, by reducing our own emissions, the United States is not causing anybody else to reduce their emissions. Some make the argument, for example, that we can solve a coordination challenge if we reduce our emissions through the Paris Agreement and signal broad political support to reduce their emissions to everyone, and it’s all going to work. I’m highly skeptical.

Those of us who come from the realist school of thought of foreign policy rarely believe that these problems, such as overhauling global economies, can be solved without an appeal to true national interests. It is frankly not in America’s national interest to unilaterally reduce our emissions. I think,however, there are really important things that we can do.

You mentioned next-generation technologies. As I mentioned, I think the number one thing we can do is develop technologies that make it cheaper and cleaner to reduce emissions both at home and abroad. I wrote a whole book about this. I believe solar power is a fundamentally superior technology with greater resource abundance. The United States should be solar powered.

Beyond that, we can develop learnings that the rest of the world can learn from. For example, how to operate a high-penetration, variable, renewable energy grid. We just saw a grid collapse in Spain. Those are lessons that we can help to develop, learn, and export around the world, so that when India has high-variable, renewable energy penetration and low inertia on the system electrically, they’ll know how to operate that grid. In fact, India is probably ahead of many other countries and can teach those countries a thing or two. So, learning is important.

And finally, I’d mention purchasing power. I would love to see a world in which America imports zero-carbon industrial goods like steel, for example, from emerging economies around the world, whether that’s Mexico or India. To do that, I believe we first have to de-prioritize certain domestic political interests. There is no good reason for us to try and do this at home, despite what the American steel industry would have you say.

Second, it’s also using our purchasing power, both as the US government and as US private sectors, to encourage this next-generation innovation—zero-carbon steel, zero-carbon aluminum—in emerging economies to give them an economic incentive to decarbonize. There are real things that we can do, but a policy to reduce American emissions makes no sense to me unless we use it as leverage internationally, and so far, we haven’t.

Daniel Raimi: One other argument I’ve seen out there about your piece is that it’s akin to giving up on emissions reductions. People might be thinking that, after your response to the last question and that you’re dooming the world to a catastrophic level of warming. What do you think about that critique?

Varun Sivaram: It couldn’t be further from the truth, Daniel. If anyone has heard what I’ve said, I believe climate change is an existential national security threat. It feels to me like missiles being launched at the American homeland. When Los Angeles burns under wildfires and whole communities are just wiped out, it’s almost as if there was a missile attack.

I’m absolutely not giving up. I don’t want to resign the country to just enduring these missile attacks. I want to reduce emissions around the world where they are, which is, again, where 87 percent of future emissions will come from: not the United States, not advanced economies, but emerging economies around the world and China. I want to reduce emissions there as fast as humanly possible.

Now, again, Daniel, we’ve talked about how that is fundamentally unfair. I agree. It is fundamentally unfair, but it also, factually, is where the emissions are going forward. The emissions that we can control are not the ones historically but the ones going forward. The historical moral appeals are irrelevant. But I don’t believe we should give up. I believe we should be realistic about what the central planning scenario needs to be. Three degrees Celcius is the central planning scenario. It’s not because I’ve given up and relegated myself; it’s because I’m being as realistic as possible about where the climate system is headed. Building on that central planning scenario, I want the United States to do everything it can possibly do to avoid those catastrophic impacts.

We talked about geoengineering as one of them. We talked about applying extreme pressure on the major sources of emissions—China’s, foremost—to reduce those emissions around the world. We talked about some innovative things we could do. We could develop next-generation technologies. We could help other countries deploy next generation technologies for clean industrial products. We can teach them how we develop next-generation, variable renewable energy, high-penetration grids. There’s a lot we can do. I’m not giving up. I just think that it’s folly for us to assume that 2 degrees or 1.5 degrees Celsius are realistic if they obviously are not.

Daniel Raimi: Varun, we’ve covered a lot of ground. I want to ask you just one more substantive question, and then we’ll go to Top of the Stack. We could keep talking about this for hours, and I’m looking forward to getting together and doing just that in person. One other point you just touched on was geoengineering. Your article calls for robust research into geoengineering, so that the world can be ready for that break-glass moment when it does come. Can you say more about the role of geoengineering and why you think it’s important?

Varun Sivaram: At our launch of the Climate Realism Initiative at the Council on Foreign Relations, I was onstage with David Keith, where I asked a similar question. I said, “Should we wait for the break-glass moment and then deploy geoengineering approaches and be ready for them?” And he said, “No, no, no. Why are you thinking of this as a break-glass approach? We should consider geoengineering as one of the arrows in our quiver and maybe the most powerful arrow in our quiver all along, starting right now.”

I think he’s right. I think we are all in denial. Not climate denial, but climate-solutions denial. If we think that a $10-trillion-a-year overhaul of the global economy is the central planning scenario, it’s not. We are nowhere near achieving that. Much of this investment is investment in profitable enterprise. But, nevertheless, the sums of capital are so gargantuan and are changing the very basis of human infrastructure so much that a much more realistic scenario to avert the catastrophic impacts of climate change is to do geoengineering.

Now, geoengineering is relatively untested. David Keith will tell you that we know so much about sulfates given the last 50 years of science, and so we know exactly what’s going to happen, but there’s a lot that’s untested. There’s a lot that’s speculative. I believe that we should get smart as fast as humanly possible. This might be one of our best opportunities.

Solar radiation management has these scary moral considerations. You’ll end up killing people because you’re creating air pollution in the atmosphere, but you may end up saving an order of magnitude more people. It’s a real-life trolley problem. I think it’s important that we get ready to deploy every tool in our arsenal, and we currently don’t have this tool. We don’t have the geoengineering tool. We should research it with the same amount of zeal as we research next-generation batteries or solar panels, because it’s going to be an important climate solution.

Daniel Raimi: Varun, this has been a fascinating conversation. I appreciate your arguments and your willingness to take on the critiques out there.

I’d love to ask you, now, the last question we ask all of our guests, which is to recommend something that you’ve read or watched or heard that you think is really great and that our listeners might enjoy. So, Varun, what’s at the top of your literal or your metaphorical reading stack?

Varun Sivaram: I just listened to the Freakonomics podcast and then bought the book called The World for Sale by Javier Blas and Jack Farchy. It’s about money, power and the traders who barter the earth’s resources. It’s about commodity traders, oil traders, rice traders, wheat traders, cobalt, and so on. It’s an extraordinary book about real resources, the extraction of which causes environmental damage. But these resources also power much of the clean economy, as well as the dirty economy. I think it’s an under-studied part of the global economy and operates under the radar, but for a foreign policy buff like myself, commodity trading is actually at the center of coups d’etat and international political intrigue all over the world. I highly recommend it as a primer to understand a part of the economy we don’t think about very often.

Daniel Raimi: It’s such a great book. It’s on my bookshelf. I’m looking at it right now, and there are so many great anecdotes in there. But it’s also, as you say, so important for all sorts of foreign policy issues. I think specifically about sanctions and price caps on Russian oil and how commodity traders play such a huge role in evading those sanctions or price caps. It’s central to the economics and the policy of energy and commodities around the world.

One more time, Varun Sivaram from the Council on Foreign Relations and Emerald AI, thank you so much for joining us on Resources Radio. It’s been a fascinating conversation.

Varun Sivaram: Daniel, thanks so much for having me. Really a pleasure.

Daniel Raimi: You've been listening to Resources Radio, a podcast from Resources for the Future, or RFF. If you have a minute, we'd really appreciate you leaving us a rating or a comment on your podcast platform of choice. Also, feel free to send us your suggestions for future episodes.

This podcast is made possible with the generous financial support of our listeners. You can help us continue producing these kinds of discussions on the topics that you care about by making a donation to Resources for the Future online at rff.org/donate.

RFF is an independent, nonprofit research institution in Washington, DC. Our mission is to improve environmental, energy, and natural resource decisions through impartial economic research and policy engagement. The views expressed on this podcast are solely those of the podcast guests and may differ from those of RFF experts, its officers, or its directors. RFF does not take positions on specific legislative proposals.

Resources Radio is produced by Elizabeth Wason with music by me, Daniel Raimi. Join us next week for another episode.