Which Countries Lead on Energy Innovation, with David Hart

Notable Quotes:

• Innovation is a human effort: “The biggest thing that people should understand is that technology is a human creation. I know that seems obvious on the surface—that individuals are involved in being inventors and companies are involved and research agencies are involved—but there’s sometimes a tendency to think of it as this sort of exogenous force that goes on its own momentum.” (3:08)
• Technology’s benefits are more than twofold: “My strong belief is that innovation is a key to addressing climate change, both on the mitigation side, which is what this work is about, but also I think in the adaptation to climate change … We need new technologies that are hopefully better than what we have now, but [are] at least equally good in terms of price and performance, and also eliminate emissions.” (5:56)
• Domestic innovation can have global implications: “I know a lot of people in this country are worried about US emissions, and they are important, but they’re a shrinking share of the total pie. The United States’ greatest contribution to addressing climate change will be through our innovations. They may be made here, but they may ultimately be adopted more widely in the rest of the world. That’s what motivated the report.” (7:24)

Top of the Stack

• Global Energy Innovation Index by David M. Hart, Colin Cunliff, Mia Beams, and Akkshath Subrahmanian
• Biathlon event in the Olympics
• Semiosis by Sue Burke
• “A New (and Controversial) Approach to Climate Policy, with Varun Sivaram” from Resources Radio

The Full Transcript

Daniel Raimi: Hello and welcome to Resources Radio, a weekly podcast from Resources for the Future (RFF). I’m your host, Daniel Raimi. Today, we talk with Dr. David Hart, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and professor emeritus at George Mason University.

Along with a team of coauthors, David recently published the Global Energy Innovation Index. The index compiles data from countries around the world to determine which nations are doing the best job generating new knowledge, building ecosystems for market innovation, and supporting new energy technologies with public policy. I’ll ask David to talk us through the rankings with a focus on the United States. We’ll talk about where the United States is doing well, where it’s falling short, and how policymakers can do more to support innovative, clean-energy technologies. Stay with us.

All right, David Hart from the Council on Foreign Relations, welcome to Resources Radio.

David Hart: Thank you very much. Looking forward to our talk.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah, me too. I really enjoyed reading your Global Energy Innovation Index report, so I’m excited to talk to you about it.

But first, we always ask our guests how they got interested working on energy issues, whether it’s some early stage in life or later in your career. So, how’d you get into this field?

David Hart: Yeah, so I came into it through the lens of science and technology. I had a revelation when I was a late teenager in the middle of my college years that technology was sort of the tie that bound together all the things I was worried about, including environmental collapse, nuclear war, and things like that.

That sort of set my path in life. I wound up studying science and technology policy in graduate school, and that’s morphed into science, technology, and innovation policy, and now just innovation policy. I had worked on climate issues as a graduate student, drifted away from that, but was pulled back in around 2008 by one of my former professors, Richard Lester. We wound up doing a book together on energy innovation, and I’ve stuck with that ever since.

I did drift away from academia. When I moved to Washington, I had a chance to work in the White House for a year, and that set my path into the world of think tanks, which is where I am now, and have been focusing on energy- and climate-related innovation policy for the last 15 or 20 years.

Daniel Raimi: That’s really cool. When did you work in the White House, and under which administration?

David Hart: In the Obama administration—2011, 2012. I missed the fun, which was when the recovery package was going through, when all the money was being spent. I came in after the Tea Party had taken Congress. We were coping with the aftermath of that, but I learned so much there and made so many great contacts that really transformed my career.

Daniel Raimi: That’s super cool. Well, let’s start that conversation with a little bit of economic theory, which we won’t spend too much time on, but just for a little bit of background: What’s the economic rationale for why policymakers should be involved in supporting innovation in the energy sector in the first place?

David Hart: Yeah. The biggest thing that people should understand is that technology is a human creation. I know that seems obvious on the surface—that individuals are involved in being inventors and companies are involved and research agencies are involved—but there’s sometimes a tendency to think of it as this sort of exogenous force that goes on its own momentum.

Economics used to incorporate that into its thinking about technology—it was just a parameter that was added. Some models still treat it that way. Even under that view, there was a rationale for the government to be involved. There are market failures; it’s challenging to get companies to pay for basic research, because they don’t know what the benefits are going to be. So, there’s a rationale for the government to be involved. And then on the market side, the assumption had often been that the government’s role is just to make sure that markets operate properly.

If you had those two pieces together—government funding basic research and a free market operating properly—that would sufficiently stimulate innovation. But I think that that view is simplistic. I don’t think it’s wrong. It’s just not complete. Over the years, I’ve been involved with the literature called systems of innovation.

So, thinking more broadly about how all the institutions involved in the innovation process fit together—whether it’s investors with companies, whether it’s government interaction with business. And then, a lot of those critiques have now been, I would say, adopted into parts of economics. So, thinking about coordination problems, how do you get infrastructure built at the same time that you want to change the products that people are using?

If we take the case of electric vehicles, it’s a big transformation to go from combustion vehicles, where we have gas stations and a whole infrastructure to support that technology, to electric vehicles, where you need a different set of infrastructures—you need chargers and you need the grid to operate well.

Coordinating all that is a real challenge. And then you have questions about information and beliefs. It’s famously known that entrepreneurs tend to be overly optimistic, and it’s very hard for investors to know when they’re being fully objective and when they’re betraying their biases. Those kinds of information problems also may motivate some government roles. There’re a lot of ways that markets don’t fully motivate innovation, and there’s a role for government in assisting that along. That whole bag of things has become known as innovation policy.

Daniel Raimi: That’s great. Okay. Within that context, what is the purpose of this Global Energy Innovation Index that we’re going to talk about?

David Hart: Yeah. My strong belief is that innovation is a key to addressing climate change, both on the mitigation side, which is what this work is about, but also I think in the adaptation to climate change. Sometimes this goes under the heading of “green premium.” We need new technologies that are hopefully better than what we have now, but [are] at least equally good in terms of price and performance, and also eliminate emissions. We have to have innovation to get those, whether it’s in the power sector; the transportation sector, as I mentioned; or the industrial sector.

The classic economic solution, which is to impose a tax on pollution, is both politically infeasible and I think unfair, because everybody needs to use energy for meeting their basic needs, and if you impose a tax, it’s regressive. Now, I know there are ways to fix that, but wouldn’t it be better if we had technologies that were both cleaner and cheaper, and better? That’s the holy grail. To get those, we need governments to invest and to adopt other kinds of policies that will facilitate that—so, going back to my earlier point.

This index is trying to look at how governments around the world are contributing to that global effort, because we know that breakthroughs that are made in one country will ultimately diffuse to the rest of the world. I think it’s particularly important for the United States.

I know a lot of people in this country are worried about US emissions, and they are important, but they’re a shrinking share of the total pie. The United States’ greatest contribution to addressing climate change will be through our innovations. They may be made here, but they may ultimately be adopted more widely in the rest of the world. That’s what motivated the report.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah, that makes sense. It’s quite consistent with the sort of climate realism initiative that Varun Sivaram is leading over at CFR. Do you sort of see them as linked in that way?

David Hart: Yeah. It’s one of the main pillars of the work, and I lead that part of the work at CFR.

Daniel Raimi: Okay, great. Got it. The index is composed of three sub-indexes or sub-indices. I’m not quite sure what’s the right word there. What’s the right word and what are the three sub-indexes?

David Hart: Yeah, I think we can use either word. The editors at CFR decided on “sub-indexes.” I think I had “sub-indices” in my original draft, but let’s go with “sub-indexes.”

So, there are three. One, we call the knowledge sub-index. It’s pretty descriptive. A big part of the system of innovation is the creation of ideas, the creation of knowledge that can be turned into technology. That’s one sub-index.

Second: market sub-index. That’s about adopting the technologies. It’s the diffusion of technologies, ultimately.

And then, policy provides the context for that. So, do you have incentives, institutions that drive both knowledge creation, adoption, and competition in driving down prices and improving performance? Those are the three pieces of the index.

Daniel Raimi: Got it. What are some of the kind of main data sources that you’re pulling from to add these things up?

David Hart: Yeah. It’s important to know that it’s a synthetic work. We’re not really generating ideas here. We’re pulling together threads that are available elsewhere.

We rely heavily on international organizations that collect data about a number of different elements that feed into it. That includes the International Energy Agency. So it’s collecting data, for instance, on national research and development (R&D) spending. The Organisation Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), that’s the economics organization based in Paris. It’s collecting data on carbon prices, for instance. The World Bank, and so on. A lot of it is from those international organizations. I would say that’s the biggest resource.

We also borrowed methods from other people and did a little bit of our own data collection. There was some work done by researchers in Europe on publications. The main thing that they did was identify a bunch of keywords.

We searched the scientific literature for those keywords. They had done that in 2020 and we updated that work. Then, we do have some proprietary data that was given to us, thankfully, by a group called Cleantech Group. That’s something called the i3 database, and that collects data on venture-capital startups. So, some things that are a little bit more private-sector oriented, and that is a database that people can get access to, but you have to pay for it. We were granted that by Cleantech Group and we were grateful for that contribution. And so, we aggregate their data so we don’t provide access to the underlying deals, which is their observational unit, but we aggregate that up to the national level.

We pulled together 16 indicators and all from these various sources, and tried to build an understanding of the system as a whole with those resources.

Daniel Raimi: That’s great. People can check out the report to sort of dig into the details there. It’s documented really nicely and clearly in the online report, in the PDF.

One last kind of method question before we get into the results that I think are important: This data is retrospective, right? It’s not capturing things that have happened, for example, in the United States under the Trump administration. Is that right?

David Hart: Yeah, that’s right. It goes through 2024. I would also say the data quality varies. Some of these things are pretty hard to measure. I would take this as an approximation. The other thing I wanted to mention is that we weigh these measures according to our own view of what’s important, as well as where we think the data are strong. We did do a bit of sensitivity testing: we weighed the knowledge piece at 30 percent, the markets piece at 40 percent, and the policy piece at 30 percent. We fiddled around with some other weights, but we are hoping to put out a version of this where you could fool around with it yourself.

We’ll see if we get that done in the next month or two. But if you’re really interested: number one, you can drop me a line and I can send you the data; second, hopefully we’ll have a kind of bring-your-own-weighting feature and you can see how the rankings changed if you weigh different indicators differently.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah. That sounds like a really fun interactive web tool. I look forward to messing around with that. And of course, we’ll have links in the show notes to the report and people can find your contact information there.

So, let’s dive into the results. Let’s start with the big picture and then we’ll break down the sub-indexes. When you look across the whole index, which countries are on top and what are some of the key factors that put them up there?

David Hart: Yeah. So, Scandinavia rules. Sweden one, Denmark two, Finland three, Norway four. We don’t have Iceland. Sorry, Iceland, you probably would’ve been in the top as well if we had your data.

That just reflects a couple of things. Number one, they are strong across the board, across all three sub-indexes, which isn’t true of every country. I would say the index gives a little bit more weight to small countries. If we had Boston in here and compared it with Sweden—which might be a fairer comparison—Boston would probably do better than the United States as a whole.

So, there is some bias toward the smaller countries, because we weigh many of our factors either by population or by the size of the economy, so the GDP.And then the second is income. So, richer countries tend to invest more in innovation and the developing countries tend to be toward the bottom.

Bigger, developing countries especially are toward the bottom and they’re engaged mostly in adopting technologies developed elsewhere. That helps explain why we have these results. Policy also plays a role. I think within those categories—high-income, small countries—you still have some variation, because of the policy frameworks that governments have adopted.

Daniel Raimi: Great. It’s worth noting that there are, I think, 39 countries in the index. So, it’s not for every country. I imagine that’s because of data-availability issues?

David Hart: Yeah, that’s right. We cover most of the big economies and we cover most of the investors in things like venture capital and R&D. So, a lot of the smaller, less developed countries are not included in the dataset, but I think they would be down toward the bottom if we were able to get them.

Daniel Raimi: Right. Let’s break it down a little bit. Let’s start first with the knowledge index. One of the things that surprised me when I was looking at the knowledge index is the United States down at number 29 out of 39 countries, and a couple countries that I wouldn’t expect to be near the top of the list, like Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates, but they are.

Talk us through the knowledge sub-index and maybe help us understand some of those results that might not be intuitive for someone like me who doesn’t think about this every day.

David Hart: Yeah. Well, we were surprised too, actually, that we had some of those outcomes. That was one of the fun things about doing the indexes—that we confirmed some of our priors, but we also surprised ourselves. That’s something we would love to have more dialogue with folks about.

The knowledge index has basically two sets of data. One is about publications, and these are publications in specific fields. As I mentioned, we use keywords. We’re trying to search for energy-technology-related fields of science. So, there’s obviously a little bit of uncertainty there.

And then, the second part is patents, and patents are classified according to technology areas as well. As you mentioned, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates popped up—they came in third and fourth. So, Denmark, number one, again, and South Korea number two. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates scored really well in the publications.

They’re not very strong in patents, but their rankings in the publications push them up to those higher levels. I think that reflects the investments that they’ve made. I’m not an expert on those countries, but I know colleagues from leading universities that have spent time there, that have opened branches there. They’ve made a real push to transform their economies from some degree of resource dependence into a more knowledge-intensive one. I think the results of that investment show here.

The United States’ weakness is concerning. Now, I do think that that reflects the bias in our system toward medical and information-technology fields. So, as I mentioned, we’re searching keywords related to energy technologies primarily, and in engineering, the United States doesn’t do as well, especially compared to Asian countries like South Korea and Japan. So, I think that helps explain why the United States is low, but I do think it’s something to worry about.

As you mentioned, this predates the Trump administration, when major cuts have been made to US science agencies—or at least attempted. I think it is something we ought to pay attention to. China actually does better than the United States, and that I thought was also interesting, and that correlates with other work that scholars are doing elsewhere.

There’s a group called the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, or ASPI, that tracks publications across a whole range of technology-related fields and finds that China is rising very rapidly. We haven’t thought of China as a scientific superpower, but we need to start doing that.

The last thing I might point out is that South Korea and Japan do really well on the patenting side and not so well on the science side. I think that kind of corresponds with our general views of those systems—that they’re not as good in the academic world, but they have lots of really strong companies that do a lot of patenting. Those results sort of correlated our priors.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah. That’s interesting. Going back to your China point, I recall recently reading some analysis about top-ranked global universities by publication scores and other metrics. These things, of course, are hard to measure. There’re some arbitrary judgments that you have to make, but just noticing that Chinese universities are increasingly being ranked at or near the top and surpassing some of the US leaders.

David Hart: Yeah, absolutely. It’s a time trend. Even if you have the same, flawed indicator, if you look at it over time, you’ll see this trend, no question that that’s happening. The United States had a lot to do with it. I had fantastic grad students from China. It was a very productive relationship I think for lots of people in academia, and I would argue for the country as a whole. I think it’s something that’s really being lost right now. Again, another thing we should worry about, not directly related to the index, but a broader policy question that people should be thinking about.

Daniel Raimi: Right. I mean, it correlates with this trend that I’ve seen at universities, where the number of foreign exchange students coming from China and elsewhere is going down in this era of concern about immigration enforcement and things like that.

David Hart: Absolutely. It’s a deliberate policy and it has been imposed arbitrarily in many ways.

Daniel Raimi: Let’s move on and talk about the next component of the index, which is the markets component. So, who’s looking good on markets?

David Hart: Yeah. So, markets are a little bit of a hodgepodge. It has stuff on early-stage innovation, like startup companies and venture-capital investment and demonstration projects. It also has some diffusion indicators like: who’s exporting clean-energy technologies, are countries adopting clean-energy technologies? So, it’s a little bit of both.

This is where the United States does best, and it’s especially strong in this sort of startup and venture-capital system. The United States is number four, that’s its highest ranking across the three sub-indexes. The United States doesn’t do quite as well on the diffusion measures. In terms of sort of clean-energy consumption, the US system is so big that it takes a long time for it to adjust. There have been some counterforces pushing against clean-energy adoption, even before the Trump era.

But still, this is the United States’ area of strength. Again, we would hope that the United States would do well on the markets front. China doesn’t do well here. One thing that surprised us and something I’m digging into further is on the export indicator that we have.

We think of China as this export powerhouse and no doubt it is. It dominates solar-panel exports. It’s emerging to dominate electric-vehicle exports. For some reason, that’s not reflected very well in our data. And so, I’m looking more carefully at that. This is also somewhat of a hard thing to measure. The different categories that are used in trade data don’t align very well with the clean economy. We’re getting figures that aren’t a perfect measure of that, but keep your eyes peeled. I’ll be publishing something on that, I hope, soon.

The other set of countries that’s kind of interesting in this sub-index are the central-European countries, like the Czech Republic and Slovakia. This is where you have a lot of investment in factories that are making clean-energy products. There are still a lot of other European countries that do well in this indicator, but some of the central-European countries are not as strong on policy or on knowledge, but do well in the markets, largely because they’re now kind of industrial bases for Europe.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah. I was noticing Hungary and Slovakia coming in number one and two on technology exports and the United States being 36 on technology exports, which is near the bottom.

Does that concern you, given what you said earlier about the United States sort of innovating new energy technologies for export?

David Hart: Yeah, it does. It’s something I’m really concerned about and something our program at CFR is going to really focus on in the coming year. Tesla is kind of the shining example of a company that the United States, through its venture-capital and startup ecosystem, created a whole new product category for—really breakthrough—and yet now China has really overtaken it. Tesla, of course, has a big base in China as well now. So, I do worry about that, and I particularly worry about that in the current administration.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah. It’s also probably worth noting, you might know this better than I do, but significant policy support for Tesla at an early stage, both in sort of helping it build its first factory and also sort of California’s low-carbon fuel standard really helped to grow that company in its early years.

David Hart: Yeah, that’s right. That’s a hidden thing that is definitely worth bringing to light. It is true that it was a breakthrough entrepreneur and visionary investors, but it was also a policy context. As you mentioned, both the state policy and the federal policy contributed to it. It went through various near-death experiences, as a lot of startups do. And especially the loan from the federal government, the US Department of Energy’s Loan Program Office, got it through one of its low spots in the 2010 era.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah. Really interesting.

Let’s talk about the third part of the index, which is policy. So, this is the area where our listeners might be kind of most familiar with what the trends might look like, but talk us through what you find on policy.

David Hart: Yeah. So, there’re a number of different components here. The one that the part we weigh the most heavily is investment in research development and demonstration—public investment—because, as we’ve talked about, this is an area where the market tends to under-invest and the public really has to step up, but it also includes the sub-index also includes a measure of standards and regulations related to energy efficiency and renewables. It includes what we call carbon rates or carbon taxes. That’s something that the OECD—the international organization based in Paris—collects.

We looked at pledges that countries have made in the international climate conferences. So, we have a pledge to triple nuclear power generation. We have a pledge to accelerate energy efficiency. We look at whether countries have A: adopted those pledges, and B: actually created policies that would act on those pledges. So, we have an effort to do that.

Then we have something on international research collaboration as well. That’s what the indicator is made up of. Here, again, we have a little bit of a different set of European countries that come to the top. I’m not really sure why. Spain is number one, which is really fascinating, because if we recreated this index five years earlier, they wouldn’t do very well. They’ve really changed their, especially, their R&D investment policies. Then France, Austria, Belgium come in next. I’m not sure exactly what keeps those countries together at the top, what distinguishes them from the rest of Europe, but that’s where they landed.

The United States was in the middle and we don’t have a very strong carbon-tax policy. There are some at the state level, and the measure does incorporate those state-level taxes, but we don’t have a national policy like a lot of other countries do.

We score poorly in that area. It’s a little bit of a mixed bag for the United States on this one.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah. One of the things about the United States that I was curious about is in the index, it says that there’s no data on public investment in low-carbon energy research development and deployment in the United States. Can you help us understand why that is? I was thinking about the US Department of Energy and its labs, and the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy, or otherwise known as ARPA-E. These are pretty big policy efforts. I’m curious why there’s no data on that.

David Hart: Yeah. It’s a little bit misleading, because we do have a lot of data on that and I published a lot on that topic elsewhere. The problem was we used a dataset from the International Energy Agency (IEA), which tries to be consistent across all the countries. For some reason, the United States didn’t report its data in this format to the IEA, especially in 2024. So, we have an incomplete data set there. We do try to adjust for that.

Let me mention a couple of things about the index that I left out. One is I have three wonderful coauthors: Colin Cunliff, who helped me with an earlier version of this index when we worked at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF); and Mia Beams, who’s with the Council on Foreign Relations; and then Akkshath Subrahmanian, who’s a senior at Georgetown University and our super intern that did a lot of the nitty-gritty work to pull the data together. So, I’m sorry—I should have acknowledged their roles earlier.

When we did this at ITIF earlier, when we didn’t have data, we assigned zero value to that. That was a mistake. We got some error in the results, I think. This time, even though we have no data for the United States, we’ve corrected that. So, we haven’t put zero in, but we’ve adjusted and re-weighted everything else.

So, the United States and others, if you look at the chart on this policy index, you’ll see some gaps in some other countries as well. We’ve tried to correct for that. The United States wasn’t being penalized, but I think it probably would do better if we had full data, because the United States does spend quite a bit of money on research development and demonstration in this area, and particularly in the 2024 period.

Daniel Raimi: Right. Yeah. With the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and things like that probably—

David Hart: Exactly, yeah.

Daniel Raimi: —would prop that up a bit.

David, this has been fascinating. We only have a couple of minutes left, but I’m curious if you can finish this conversation off with a couple of high-level policy implications, particularly for policymakers in the United States.

So, based on what you’re seeing here, where would you recommend policymakers direct their focus?

David Hart: Yeah, so I’ll make a generic comment for everybody. We all need to do better in innovation. We’re not putting enough energy into it as a planet, as governments across the world—and I would say the United States as well. I think we can do better on all three indices. As I mentioned for the United States, I am concerned about the science base. We saw that the numbers weren’t very good. They’ve been trending down and they’re going to go down further if we look at it in the post-Trump period.

I would say although the United States is doing well on startups and venture capital, we shouldn’t take that for granted. There are a lot of other opportunities out there, especially with the rise of artificial intelligence, that is pulling venture capital in new directions. So, I don’t think we should take that for granted, but we may need to nurture that ecosystem.

Of course, the science base feeds into that. It’s really star scientists and star postdocs that go off and start some of these companies. If we damage the science base, that’s going to feed up into the startup and venture-capital space as well.

The area that I’ve been most interested in is the so-called Valley of Death, where you have something that we know works technically, but doesn’t necessarily work in practice yet, or you can’t mass produce it. That requires investments in demonstration and pilot projects and in early adoptions. So, for the first group of people that may be willing to pay more for a new kind of power plant or a new kind of vehicle, the tax incentives can really help with that or regulatory incentives can help with that. This is an area that the Biden administration had focused on and now the Trump administration is reversing course.

And the data … They’re not reflecting the Trump period, but I am worried about that. This process of scaling up technologies is really the key thing to get from a breakthrough that seems exciting to something that actually makes a difference to carbon emissions. This is a global problem, but it’s where the United States really should be making a difference taking these startups and making them into full-scale companies the way that Tesla did. So, that’s an area that I hope policymakers here will focus on more.

Daniel Raimi: Great. Those all make sense. And again, we’ll have a link to the report in the show notes so people can check it out.

I’d love, David, to close out this conversation with the last question that we ask all of our guests, which is to recommend something that you think is great. It could be related to energy innovation or not. We don’t really care. We’re happy for you to pick whatever you think is cool.

So, what would you recommend to our listeners and what’s at the top of your literal or your metaphorical reading stack?

David Hart: Yeah, this was fun to think about. I had a couple of ideas I thought I’d share. One is, just over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been blown away by the biathlon competition at the Olympics. This is a competition that involves cross-country skiing and shooting. It’s an amazing combination of skills. If you miss that in the Olympics, you can probably find it on YouTube. I guess it’s biased again toward the Scandinavians—Norway seems to dominate. France did pretty well as well. But every four years, I just watch these athletes and there’s just an incredible combination of skills there.

On the reading list, I thought I’d just offer one thing that’s a little off the beaten track. This is a book I read recently, although I think it came out in 2018. It’s a science-fiction novel called Semiosis, and it’s about human colonists that land on a planet.

This is a planet that is the home to an intelligent plant. So, it’s about intelligence. It’s about communicating with a life form that’s really different from yours. And they’re coping with a set of environmental challenges. This plant is very knowledgeable about the environment, and when they figure out how to communicate with it, it helps them sort of cope with the challenges of colonizing. It’s not exactly energy innovation, but I enjoyed it and maybe some of the listeners will like that too.

Daniel Raimi: That’s great. Sounds super interesting. Well, one more time, David Hart from the Council on Foreign Relations. Thanks so much for coming on Resources Radio.

David Hart: Thank you for having me.

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