Energy Transitions with Tim Gould

This transcript is from a CSIS podcast published on February 5, 2024. Listen to the podcast here.

Tim Gould: And we are in a world where a solar project can be turned around in two or three years, but a transmission line takes at least double that.

Lisa Hyland: Hello and welcome to Energy 360, the podcast from the Energy Security and Climate Change Program at CSIS. I'm your host Lisa Hyland. This week, Joseph Majkut talks with Tim Gould of the International Energy Agency. Joseph caught up with Tim when he was in Paris for an IEA workshop. Recently, Tim discussed some of the key lessons of the IEA's world energy outlook, which highlights that clean energy deployment is gaining momentum. They discuss some of the uncertainties surrounding this, such as whether national governments can actually achieve their climate policies. The report emphasizes the need for scaling up renewables, improving energy efficiency, reducing methane emissions and more. Finally, Tim and Joseph touch on the importance of balancing energy security concerns with emissions reductions. I'll turn it over now to Joseph for the conversation. 

Joseph Majkut: So, Tim, I wanted to talk to you because you just published the World Energy Outlook. I've spent much of the last year looking at the various outlooks from IEA, from a lot of the IOCs, trying to understand as we enter a period where the energy system is changing pretty rapidly, how are our modeling tools keeping up and how are we looking at forecasts of the future, where do the uncertainties lie and what's the picture that we should be preparing for? So, a great to start would be the key lessons that you took out of this most recent forecast outlook exercise.

Tim Gould: Well, thanks very much for the chance to talk some of that through with you. As you know, this is scenario-based work at the IEA. When we look beyond the next few years, we do move into the realm of scenarios. So, you need to look when you are comparing scenarios from different institutions, you need to look quite carefully at scenario design. But I think some of the interesting things for us that for the first time this year in a scenario that's based on today's policy settings, it's the thing we call the stated policy scenario. The momentum behind clean energy deployment is sufficiently strong that we get a flattening, a high point, a peak, call it what you will, in each of the fossil fuels before the end of this decade. Now that's the first time we've had that in aggregate before, but we've never had it for each of the fossil fuels individually. And I think that speaks to a few important elements of the picture. One is that things are moving and we've had a 40% rise in clean energy investments since 2020. It's been concentrated in the advanced economies in China, but we're starting to see some quite significant shifts in the way that we think about mobility and the way we think about power generation as a result.

Joseph Majkut: So that finding met with an incredulous response by some. I'd like to unpack it a little bit. You're not doing a formal uncertainty assessment, but what kind of uncertainty do you think sits around this when we find peaks and what are the important uncertainties for policy makers and thinkers more broadly? Secondarily, what assumptions does that hinge on? Do governments need to achieve the climate policies they set out for themselves? And what kind of risks does that world create? I realize that's an hour's worth of discussion.

Tim Gould: Well just to pick up a few points on that. So, this is based on the things that governments are actually doing. So, it's not on the aspirational targets. What we would need to do to get to net zero by 2050 in certain jurisdictions, it's on the things that we can actually see governments doing, being implemented and so on.

Joseph Majkut: So, for a U.S. audience, the inflation reduction act means there is now a lasting investment or production tax credit for wind, solar power until emissions in the power sector hits some low level and that is now baked into this assessment.

Tim Gould: So, the inflation reduction act, some of the infrastructure investments that are underway, that's all baked into that kind of scenario. The one that sort of gives a sense of the direction of travel based on what we can see today. And of course, the developments in advanced economies are an important element of that. But as we all know, a lot of the increase in demand for energy services is coming from other parts of the world. So, you have to look very closely at what is happening in different parts of Asia, Latin America, Africa, and so on. And there one element of uncertainty that we focus on in this year's report is around China, because China has been so important to all sorts of energy trends for as long as most of us can remember. But say over the last 10 years, two thirds of global oil demand growth has come from China, one third of gas demand growth.

China's the extraordinarily dominant player in everything that's happening in coal markets. So, we're used to China driving fossil fuel market developments. But what we're seeing is that that is likely to change. That's likely to change over the next few years because the Chinese economy is changing, China's population is changing, and China is also a huge player in some of the big energy clean energy technologies as well. So, we think, and this is an insight derived from of course, broader economic analysis done by many other institutions that China was reaching the limits of a very infrastructure heavy energy intensive model of growth because there are some sort of saturation effects already visible. And if you look at built space per capita in China, it's already at the level of Japan, but GPD per capita is considerably lower. So, you've had this massive build out of infrastructure which is necessary, and it’s involved lots of steel, lots of energy being poured into that.

And that model is going to shift, that model is going to change. And with the increase the very large investments that you're seeing in China in all sorts of clean tech. So, China accounts for almost half of all wind and solar deployment at the moment, more than half of EV sales. And that also means that in our view, by the middle of this decade, you start to see total energy demand in China, flattening emissions peaking and starting to come down because that clean energy deployment starts to push other bits of the system into at least the flattening and then a decline in the case of coal.

Joseph Majkut: So, in the case of coal, that's the one in your stereo that really sees a drop in consumption over the next, let's say decade, decade and a half. And this is one of the results that I think can confuse some readers because we've seen over the past few rising coal consumption and then in your chart somewhere in the mid-2020s, it sort of goes off in the other direction and it's like an isosceles triangle in the 2020s. So, what explains that outcome and what should the reader look for that that is actually happening given that if we take a backward-looking view, growing consumption or static consumption seems more likely.

Tim Gould: So, China's a big part of that. So, a lot of coal in China, not just in the power sector, but also going into some of these big heavy industrial steel cement. So that starts to tail off in our view. And then China's trajectory also helps to determine what happens in global markets as well. Elsewhere it is around that expansion of renewables in some jurisdictions. It's also about the fact that in our view, by the end of this decade, we're going to be in a very different gas market situation from the one we've been in. The gas market conversation today dominated by fears over security of supply price spikes, at least here in Europe. I mean in the U.S. of course you view that, and the rest of the world has benefited greatly from those outflows of LNG from the U.S. which have done a lot to help us weather the storm of the Russian cuts and pipeline gas supply.

But nonetheless, that conversation is around worries on the supply side and worries about prices. But there's a huge new wave of LNG export capacity, which has been approved for development and is going to come into the market in the second half of this decade. And so that conversation around gas is going to change and there's going to be a lot more downward pressure on price because that LNG is going to be competing for consumers in Asia that are price sensitive because the established markets in Europe, Japan, Korea, they're not going to be taking a whole lot more gas. This is a story about what China's going to do, what Southeast Asia is going to do, what India's going to do.

Joseph Majkut: Right. And just to make sure I'm following you correctly, that's part of the decrease in coal consumption, a shift towards more LNG consumption. Is there a positive climate story there?

Tim Gould: I mean, to a degree, yes. That's more of a market driven thing. I wouldn't overstate the influence of that on the coal trajectory. I think that's much more of a clean energy story in many markets about that incremental electricity consumption being met by lower emission sources.

Joseph Majkut: Let me actually shift gears slightly because it's an exciting headline. Fossil fuel demand will peak across the different major fuels this decade. But part of what this report also does is look at what takes you from the steps scenario where peaks are real, but for oil and gas are precursors to plateau more than harbinger of a strong market decline, to what takes us reaching climate goals. The report is really clear about that. What are the differences between the scenario where things kind of progress as you expect in steps versus one where the world meets its climate targets?

Tim Gould: So that's a really important question because I think it is possible to sort of interpret the finding that fossil fuel, each of the fossil fuel demand peaks by 2030. I personally feel that that is not as controversial a view as some have made it out to be. If you look at many other outlooks including outlooks from international oil and gas companies, they're not so far away from the sorts of things that we see in that kind of scenario. But you're very right to point out that it matters what happens after that high point. The impact on the global climate will depend on the degree to which we succeed in bringing down emissions and that necessarily means bringing down demand for the fossil fuels over time. And there there's a lot of work still to do because certainly in the case of oil and gas, you enter into a sort of high plateau of consumption. And what that means in the stated policy scenario is that emissions remain at a relatively high level. You do see a high point in the middle of this decade, but they remain at a sufficiently high level. We don't get anywhere close to net zero. So at the end of this century still emitting into the atmosphere and we are 2.4 degrees above pre-industrial levels, two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels in terms of the rising global leverage temperature.

Joseph Majkut: And that’s a tough thing to think about because I mean you've been in this field for a long time. I have too. That's a real success compared to where we thought we would be 10 or 15 years ago. But it still keeps us very far from under two or under one and a half getting to between two and one and a half ends up being a lot of work. So what's the energy system change have to look like to accomplish that?

Tim Gould: So, we came up with a few things that we think are really important to have in mind as we move into COP 28, but also beyond what's an agenda that gets us beyond that kind of outcome. And some of the headlines there, we need to be scaling up renewables much more quickly. So, we talked about a tripling in renewable capacity by 2030. We also need to be using energy much more efficiently. So, we talked about a doubling in the rate of energy efficiency improvement also by 2030 worldwide. A third element there is also helping us to think through the things, the complimentary measures that can bring fossil fuel demand down. And there it's very important for us to stop making the problem worse and do things like no new coal fired power plants. Now that cannot be considered just as a finding on its own.

You need to be doing something else in order to allow for that to happen. So of the scaling up of renewables is also to allow for no more coal plants coming into the system. Another big one is on methane emissions. In our view, there's a whole lot more that can be done to reduce methane leaks to the atmosphere from fossil fuel operations. And that is you don't get the sorts of reductions in methane emissions that you need just from tackling the demand side. There are specific things you need to be doing to plug leaks and to make sure that you're not emitting needlessly a very potent greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. And then the final thing is something that we've been particularly concerned about, and I mentioned that most of the increase that we've seen in clean energy investment has come from advanced economies in China. There are some bright spots elsewhere, but by and large, the picture in other emerging developing economies remains quite difficult and it's made even more difficult by today's high cost of capital, high borrowing costs, high issues of, so tackling that, finding ways to bring capital in at scale to emerging and developing economies is a really crucial part of the picture.

Joseph Majkut: I mean I'd love to unpack that whole answer. I mean on methane emissions, I completely agree. This actually seems like one of the places where this energy access, climate agenda, energy security agenda are all kind of aligned, right? Getting methane emissions as low as possible in the energy system. Are you also worried about methane emissions from other sectors, or do you think the energy system is the lowest hanging fruit there?

Tim Gould: So, by most calculations, the energy sector is the second largest source of methane emissions worldwide. The largest is agriculture. But we feel that the easiest opportunities to abate are in the energy space. And I think particularly when we look at the oil and gas sectors sector, that's where we feel there are big opportunities to bring emissions down and bring emissions down quite rapidly. And of course, we're aware there's a lot of discussions around what could COP 28 bring to that? Are we going to see some sort of new initiative there that would bring a wider coalition of oil and gas producers on board around those kinds of reductions? We're certainly looking out very closely for that.

Joseph Majkut: And the administration in the United States is I think doing a lot of work in that regard too, looking at how do you build markets that are going to care about upstream methane emissions, right? Can we actually have a differentiated gas market or differentiated oil market in the future so that buyers and traders are incentivized to buy cleaner upstream goods?

Tim Gould: And that starts with good information, and you've got to have reliable sense of is that sort of gas demonstrably better in terms of how it's being brought to market than an alternative? You need to have systems that start to assign value to that. That's not simple to put together, but you’re not going to able to do anything on that unless you have credible information, measured information from companies, from satellites, from all sorts of sources that allow you to make those kinds of designations.

Joseph Majkut: And you and I as we were walking in, we're talking about carbon pricing and its challenges and potential. This seems like a place where pricing instruments could be really valuable, but who's going to assign that price?

Tim Gould: That's a very good question. Within individual jurisdictions, you start to see movement in that direction. And certainly, the inflation reduction Act also has some interesting provisions in there that start to put pricing incentives into this debate on upstream methane emissions. But internationally that's going to be tough. So, it really comes down to can importers work with their suppliers to ensure that that is also built into the expectations that you have about the way that gas trade is conducted around the world.

Joseph Majkut: One of the other things you mentioned is making the key difference in climate outcomes is stopping new coal infrastructure. You didn't talk about unabated versus abated. What role do you and the team at the IEA see for carbon capture utilization and storage as part of the climate solution?

Tim Gould: So, I think formally speaking, you are completely right that we wouldn't want to see any unabated new coal by power plants coming into the system. We do see that there's a case for CCUS in different areas. I mean, I think if you look back, this used to be a discussion that was really dominated by the power sector in recent years, you've seen it move much more towards certain areas of industry.

Joseph Majkut: Cement, iron making.

Tim Gould: Exactly. And then there's also a big element here about how you produce hydrogen. And if you're producing from fossil fuels and you capture and store the carbon, then that can be a route to bring low emission hydrogen into the system. And then the final element there, which I think is a very important one for CCUS, are you're going to be able to do things with direct air capture or with sort bioenergy with CCUS would actually would take carbon out of the atmosphere, take carbon dioxide out the atmosphere and put it underground. And so there's different elements to the CCUS picture. I think power is probably less dynamic elements of that and some of the other elements are becoming that much more important. We do think that that's a real growth opportunity there. And again, if you look at some of the sorts of incentives that are built into the U.S. system now, we are seeing companies talking very seriously about some really sizable investments in this space project for themselves, but also working with, I mean oil gas companies working with big consumers. And so it's growing. We wouldn't like to see this being portrayed as a catchall for the emissions. So there is a tendency in some parts of the debate for us to say, well actually what we can do is continue with something that's pretty much like the system we have today, and we can just mop it all up with CCUS. That's really a long way from where we're, there's a whole lot of other changes that need to be seen.

Joseph Majkut: Should government see carbon capture and storage, which is costly, as a hedge? f it's harder to build solar to 80 or 90% of electricity system and energy security remains to be a big concern for countries in the state plan, their power systems in particular, should carbon capture and surge be seen less as a tier zero solution and more as a technology that we need to be ready to deploy in the event that these other things are harder to do than we currently expect.

Tim Gould: So, I think there's elements of that, but I think the power discussion for us is all about where do you have young assets that are you need to find a solution for if you're going to tackle climate change. Because we're used to a debate in the North America and in Europe where by and large our coal plants are pretty old. The average age of a power plant of a coal fired plant in North America and Europe is well over 40 years, but in Asia these are all teenagers, there's new plants there. And imagining that the plants with unrecovered capital are going to quickly sort of be pushed out the system I think is very challenging. So, what happens in practice is that you need to find some other ways of managing that and retrofitting with CCUS is one aspect of that. One other aspect that we think is very important is can you retool some of these plants so that they provide valuable systems services but without necessarily running them hard so they could be repurposed to provide the flexibility that is going to be very important in tomorrow's power systems. The emissions associated with that would be seasonal or depending on other aspects of system operation.

Joseph Majkut: If you have a net zero world, you'll be able to offset.

Tim Gould: That allows you to move in the direction of a much more renewables rich system. And then you can also build up some of the other stuff that we don't yet really have at scale. Some of the low emission’s dispatchable options.

Joseph Majkut: Long-term energy storage…

Tim Gould: Things like that, that would be, that would then emerge over time to take a much bigger share of that kind of (inaudible).

Joseph Majkut: You mentioned tripling of renewable capacity. This report is, I would say, bullish on solar. One thing I found that was interesting is the extent to which the manufacturing supply chain for solar looks like it really could provide a lot of panels for the world, yet we under utilize them. Something like 40% of solar manufacturing capacity is used today if you compare it to deployment. Why do we underuse solar manufacturing capacity so greatly?

Tim Gould: I mean there's a number of different aspects of that, but essentially what it boils down to is that you've had a massive expansion in that manufacturing capacity, particularly in China. And there are limits to how quickly you can push solar into systems around the world. Sometimes there are policy barriers, sometimes there are financing challenges. And so, we are not absorbing as much solar into the system as we could. So that's a little bit also of a corrective to the idea that that stated policy scenario is something where we are pushing everything to the limit. Because if you look at the 2030 numbers and you look at the amount of manufacturing capacity we would have for solar PV and if announced projects come through, we would be able to produce worldwide well over a thousand gigawatts of solar panels each year, but we'd be deploying less than half of that in that scenario. So, there is clear potential to do more. We would need to be doing other stuff as well. We would need to be building out grids. We would need to be building in those flexibility mechanisms that we've just talked about for countries to be taken. But that is an opportunity for us, that's an opportunity for the world to go faster than it is.

Joseph Majkut: Do we need to change the way that we make financing available in emerging markets? A lot of the build out of clean energy infrastructure has to happen in places where it's not currently happening. And could a lot of that excess solar capacity go to the developing world? What do we need to do to make that happen?

Tim Gould: So, in our view, there's a clear opportunity there, but again, you need to have the policies that allow that to happen. You need to have the infrastructure that allows that to happen. Grids are a constraint in some markets to allow for that. 

Joseph Majkut: Grids are a constraint in the United States.

Tim Gould: We produced some analysis a few weeks ago where we tried to put a number on the amount of renewable capacity that's currently waiting in the queue for grid connections. And we came up with a large number, so about 3000 gigawatts, 3000 gigawatts. There's a whole load of underutilized potential to speed up the pace of change. And we are in a world where a solar project can be turned around in two or three years, but a transmission line takes at least double that. So, your transmission planning, the way that you think about infrastructure needs to be ahead of the curve if it's not going to become an obstacle to the way that sort of change in the power sector. And that's simply not the case at the moment. There's regulatory issues, there's permitting issues, there's all sorts of stuff that means that there's a risk that the price will be set by the slowest moving component and the slowest moving component in many instances at the moment is on the grid side, system integration.

Joseph Majkut: Now, if you look at the energy system as a whole and WEO points this out, there's also the question of critical minerals availability. What minerals are critical to what function is always a little bit of a discussion, but we're talking about copper, nickel, lithium cobalt. It appears from my reading of your document that we're under investing against net zero scenarios in critical minerals production. Same problems with transmission. It takes 10 years, 20 years to get mines online. What's your sense of that challenge both for our future energy security, but also for the pace of energy transition?

Tim Gould: I think that's another very good example about how you need to have coordinated actions across different parts of the system because at the moment the things that we're doing well on are small modular aspects. Solar heat pumps, solar PV, electric vehicles and EV batteries, that's all moving quite quickly. But in the end, that will also be constrained by some other big stuff that we need to get. So, grids we've mentioned and critical minerals I think is another area where we need to be watching very closely. And that's something that the IEA has really picked up our own activity on in the last few years. So it's true that we have seen an increase in exploration spends, in spending on new projects in the critical mineral space. But what we point out in the new analysis is that a lot of the new projects that are coming through, particularly in the midstream, are coming through from the incumbents.

So, China in terms of midstream lithium, Indonesia, in terms of nickel smelting. The midstream is actually an underappreciated point of concentration because we tend to think about the mining side and that's of course important, but the midstream is even more concentrated in many respects and it's quite difficult to shift because there's a host of intellectual property issues. There's environmental issues associated with many of these kinds of midstream operations as well. So, it's tough. We are starting to see a more diverse pattern of investments coming through, but that will take time to work its way through into a much more diverse picture on the supply side.

Joseph Majkut: Yeah, our own work on that is focused on the policy priority and the extent to which we diversify. The midstream also I think helps on the extraction side. It just creates more buyers that can distinguish on human rights, on environmental quality, on all the things that people are concerned about exacerbating other environmental problems in the process of trying to address climate change.

Tim Gould: Yeah, no, I think we'd certainly agree with that. There's an important element of responsible operation along the value chain, and I think that also sits alongside some of the ways that we can think about diversifying elements of the supply chains in the critical mineral space. I wouldn't like to overstate the way the critical minerals plays into transitions. I mean, there's a sense that we might be moving away from vulnerabilities that we see very clearly on the fossil fuel side into a kind of similar setup of vulnerabilities in the critical mineral space. But let's just have in mind that when it comes to fuels, if the oil price spikes, everyone who's using oil, oil products, is affected. Whereas if there's a spike in the price of a rare earth or a spike in the price of a battery metal like lithium or cobalt, that affects the input to manufacturing for new clean tech that's entering the system. So there's a sort of category difference there, but it's still, when we're trying to build a new energy system, those costs matter. And we've seen very clearly over the last few years that price pressures in the critical mineral space can really affect the way that the competitiveness and the price associated with getting some of those big-ticket clean energy technologies into the system. 

Joseph Majkut: Yeah, it's fascinating. And I think this is a place where analysts at IEA, at CSIS just generally are going to have to get better because the price vulnerability is completely different. I think it's right, it's less immediate and less severe. But look what happened with chips during Covid. Chips weren't available, made new cars in the United States almost unavailable themselves, used car prices went up in response, and that set off a cycle of inflation that lasted almost two years. And that then creates all sorts of effects as the Federal Reserve and other central bankers try to control inflation. There's a way in which I think we need to be much more keenly aware of how price signals in the manufactured good space, because our energy system gets infrastructure heavy, and less fuels dependent, could affect economic growth, productivity, and competitiveness in ways we're just not quite accustomed to.

Tim Gould: Yeah, I think there's a lot of truth in that. And one thing that we're feeling here was we are now talking regularly to central banks in a way that we didn't before because they're looking at developments in the energy sector and of course the most recent crisis wasn't a clean energy crisis, it was a crisis that was intensified by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Russian gas supply. But we saw the sort of implications that those types of price spikes have on all that sorts of aspects of our wellbeing and our economies. And so, it reminded everyone if they needed reminding that we need to think through very carefully the way in which we managed the future transitions of the system to try and keep that as orderly as we can and think through carefully the sequencing of different bits of change because there's no single technology that's going to deliver all the things we need. We have to be managing things in a very holistic way because the energy system is big and it’s competent.

Joseph Majkut: Well, let me close that on one last question, which completely reflects this question of orderliness and attempts to keep the energy transition from driving too much inflation, and that is the fact that we still need fossil fuel resources for decades. One of the concerns that you hear from industry folks, from producers is when we start calling for peaks in consumption and that's going to limit investment and we're going to have energy chaos in the incumbent system, are you worried about that? And what are the signposts we need to look for that we really do need to be worried about under investment price effects on the other side of the ledger?

Tim Gould: So yes, we're worried about that and I think it's an important thing to have in mind that for the duration of energy transitions, neither the emerging clean energy bits of the system nor the, if you want the legacy fossil fuel bits on their own, will be able to deliver all the things we need. So, we need in different proportions, both bits of that to be functioning well. And of course, there's multiple interactions between those two systems as we move forward and multiple ways in which infrastructure can be repurposed and so on. So, I think that's very much the cast of mind that we have in here about the IEA of how we think through energy security in transition. So that's the first point. I think the second point on the adequacy of fossil fuel investment for our future scenarios there we have seen a shift.

I think it's important to bear in mind or have in mind that a peak in fossil fuel consumption doesn't mean the end of fossil fuel investment. In all of the scenarios including the net zero emissions by 2050 scenario. We do see a continued need for investment in fossil fuels in different proportions as we move forward towards a net zero emission system. But a couple of findings that I think are relevant to this debate because there is a discussion out there to say the world is systematically under investing in fossil fuels and that is going to drive us into a difficult situation in markets down the pipe. So, if we look at our own numbers, there's roughly 1 trillion today each year going into coal, gas and oil, mostly into oil and gas, coal upstream extraction. It's not a huge amount. If we look at our numbers for 2030 in that scenario in which we reach those peaks in our stated policy scenario, 2030 investment is also around 1 trillion, slightly different proportions, more gas plateau.

So, we don't see the argument being borne out by our analysis to say that we are systematically under investing in fossil fuels today relative to that scenario. And we also need to have in mind of course, that there's a cost associated with those investments in terms of the emissions that they generate and what they mean for our climate. And so, what we've argued consistently over time is that the lasting solutions there are really to focus on that scaling up of clean energy deployment in ways that allow us to meet our energy services demand, all the lighting, the heat, the mobility, everything that we need without these associated environmental damage. And then that will in turn determine how much we continue to need to invest in those traditional sources.

Joseph Majkut: And do we think enough about what the distribution of investment will look like? I get talking about the top-level amount, but if we think about emissions intensity and price and margin and energy security, are we really thinking hard enough about what the distribution of fossil investment looks like In the same way that you and I have had a really interesting conversation about the distribution of renewables investment looks like.

Tim Gould: So, I think there is an important discussion to be had on those topics as well. And I think that's very much in the minds of many policy makers as they've come through the shocks of the last couple of years. People are looking closely at who their suppliers are and there are concerns about increased dependencies in the fossil fuel space as well as we move through transitions. But let's also have in mind that in the end, we are trying to reduce those emissions. We are trying to reduce those dependencies. And so you can't approach that kind of discussion with a sort of business as usual mindset. And so we need to be, in a sense, finding a new synthesis of those energy security worries with the imperative to bring emissions down. And that's something that we're also working closely on. I mean, there's a tendency sometimes to put energy security at one end of a spectrum of worries and emissions reductions at the other end and saying, well, here's your choice. What do you want? What you prefer as if these are antagonistic? And you can find instances where there are tradeoffs, but we are very keen to try and find ways to bring those elements together and to highlight solutions for policy makers that hit multiple benefits or bring multiple benefits at the same time.

Joseph Majkut: Tim, I think that's a great place to close. Thank you so much for spending few minutes with me.

Tim Gould: My pleasure. Thanks very much.

Lisa Hyland: Thanks to Tim for joining and for all the work he and his colleagues do on the IEA Outlooks. You can find more episodes of Energy 360 wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find us www.CSIS.org and follow us on social media for the latest updates from our team. As always, thanks for listening.

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