David G. Victor

It’s not surprising that the most ardent nationalist populists—in Brazil, the US, EU skeptics in Britain—are also the most skeptical of Paris. But that whole agenda is deeply problematic for climate because ultimately what you need is a set of institutions and some measure of cooperation that helps diffuse good ideas and products around the global economy.

[On the Trump administration's rollback of vehicle efficiency standards] In the march of rollbacks of climate rules, this is the biggest step.

[On the Trump administration's rollback of vehicle efficiency standards] One thing we’ve learned from the Trump administration is be careful what you ask for. The auto industry wanted a smoother glide path to a more efficient future. Instead what they got was the populist politics of the far right, which is blowing up in their faces.

[On climate change and the U.S. presidential election] The Democratic base is fired up and fed up.

[On the future prospects for electric planes for short-distance flights] There is no question that this will be unbelievably complex and costly. The only reason to do it is if we think that opening niches in the U.S. (and in other countries) will be the starting point to a broader application — eventually to medium-haul flights and beyond. One does this only if we need to make deep cuts in emissions. If we do shallow decarbonization there are other options that are cheaper — more natural gas, more renewables. But shallow decarbonization doesn’t fix the climate. Only deep decarbonization fixes the climate.

The world’s diplomats have spent 30 years talking about the climate problem. That hasn’t achieved much. Global emissions of warming gases keep rising. Electric planes could be part of the solution. It’s possible that we’ll see people using them to take flights between cities like San Diego and San Francisco.

[On climate change and the challenges in reaching the Paris Agreement goals] From a modeling point of view, the reason we see so much carbon capture and storage is because models see the existing energy system, and they see this incredible heroic goal. So they move all the chips on the board into these deep reduction technologies: carbon capture and storage, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage … and they do all that because they can’t solve the equation. They literally can’t get there from here. We need to grapple with the reality that we’re not going to meet the goals that we’ve talked about.