A sustainable future is within reach, but it won’t prevent the world from experiencing the potentially catastrophic environmental and political consequences of climate change and environmental degradation, former Secretary of Energy Steven Chu told a Stanford audience.

Chu, who shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics and served as the energy secretary under President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2013, held a seminar at CISAC on Tuesday on climate change, sustainability and security.

The consequences of the damage wrought by unsustainable resource depletion and air pollution will manifest in a hotter, more dangerous world, said the Stanford physics professor.

Average global temperatures have skyrocketed past normal levels since the Industrial Revolution and have plateaued in the last few months at the highest points in history. Chu said the plateau is likely due to it taking a long time for the lower depths of the oceans to warm up.

“There is a built-in time delay between committing damage, which we’ve already done, and feeling the true consequences. All we can say is that temperatures are likely to climb again, we just don’t know when – could be 50 to 100 years – and by how much,” said Chu.

Even if the world were to stop using coal, oil, and natural gas today, he said, it would not stop the oncoming consequences. “It’s like a long-time chain-smoker who stops smoking. Stopping does not necessarily prevent the occurrence of lung cancer.”

Chu said the battle between scientists and the tobacco industry in the 20th century is analogous to today’s conflict between scientists and the energy industries.

“A lot of what you hear from the incumbent energy industries and their representatives are the same kinds of arguments that the tobacco industry made when the science showing the harm cigarettes caused came out,” said Chu.

Ironically, the same science showing the damage cigarettes cause to health can be used to demonstrate the hazards of air pollution today.

Chu noted that a recent study found that for every 10 micrograms of pollution per cubic meter, the chances of contracting lung cancer increases 36 percent. This lends alarming perspective to pollution in places such as China and India.

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The U.S. Embassy in Beijing tracks air pollution levels daily.

“The average level of air pollution was 194 micrograms per cubic meter. So it’s possible that breathing the average air in Beijing is equivalent to smoking a pack of cigarettes a day,” he said. “Even if it’s a third of that, it’s still really bad. But again, there is going to be a lag time between now and a possible rash of deaths by lung cancer.

In addition to causing large-scale health crises, global warming and environmental degradation may exacerbate, or even cause, potential conflicts between countries.

“I think water insecurity concerns me more than even rising sea levels,” said Chu, noting that today’s conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa are exacerbated by water insecurity.

“India is already nervous that China will direct water runoff from the Himalayas to water-starved Northern China and away from India or Bangladesh, which are also water-starved,” he said. “India is also concerned that millions of Bangladeshis could become environmental refugees and start streaming into India.”

Chu recalled that when he was energy secretary, one of his biggest climate-change allies was the Department of Defense

“They will be the ones called on to help with those stresses and they see serious geopolitical risks due to climate change,” he said.

Despite the dangers ahead, Chu is optimistic about great strides in sustainable technology.

Chu and some of his colleagues studied a phenomenon that may bode well for creating a more environmentally friendly economy: putting efficiency standards on electronic appliances, which eventually could lead to a decline in the cost of appliances.

In addition to economical energy standards, new and cheaper green energy technology is within sight. Chu is working with Stanford Professor Yi Cui on creating a lithium-sulfur battery that may be significantly lighter than the current electric batteries used by cars such as Tesla and charge 200 miles in 10 minutes.

Additionally, wind energy is set to become cheaper than natural gas. Chu said that in the Midwest, where the wind is best and cheapest, contracts are selling anywhere between 2.5 and 3 cents per kilowatt-hour. If you build a new natural gas plant, it would be about 5 cents per kilowatt-hour.

“To be fair, wind does have the benefit of a production tax credit and if you take that away, wind would be somewhere around 5.5 cents per kilowatt-hour. But I think within the next dozen years wind will, on its own, be cheaper than natural gas,” he said.

Solar is even more surprising, said Chu. In July 2008, contracts were going for 18 to 20 cents per kilowatt-hour. In Texas in 2014, two contracts were signed one for 5 cents and the other for 4.8 cents per kilowatt-hour. Solar has the advantage of being scalable and the amount of solar resources available around the world is substantial.

“There’s plenty of solar energy available to power the entire world several times over,” he said.

Nonetheless, public policy nudges are still needed.

“There is still no serious discussion in the U.S. about creating a national grid with long distance transmission lines, which will be necessary for a sustainable future. But before that can happen, the campaign by incumbent industries to discredit and doubt climate science has to be defeated.”

Former U.S. Sen. Mark Udall remembers how members of Congress gathered on the steps of the Capitol Building on the day of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. They clasped one another’s hands and spontaneously broke out singing, “God Bless America.”

It was a moving moment of patriotic bipartisanship. “It was our generation’s Pearl Harbor,” he recalled, and politics were momentarily subsumed by love of nation.

Then it was time to investigate and bring those responsible to justice.

“For many of us who were policymakers, it was time to take a crash course in understanding the tools of terrorism, trying to penetrate who al-Qaida was, who was this figure, Osama bin Laden – and then how do we respond?”

But the government went into overdrive, the Colorado Democrat believed, and put civil liberties at risk. He recalled other decisions in American history – such as the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II – that were made in panic and secrecy.  

“It became clear to me that bin Laden’s motive was to create greater suspicion in the world, to incent us to build higher and higher walls,” he told a sold-out crowd at CEMEX Auditorium on Thursday night. His talk was part of Stanford “Security Conundrum” lecture series co-sponsored by CISAC, the Hoover Institution, the Law School, Stanford in Government and Continuing Studies.

“And in an interesting way, it led me to look at civil liberties and civil rights, which are the biggest, baddest weapons that we have,” he said in conversation with Philip Taubman, a CISAC consulting professor and a former reporter at The New York Times.

Taubman is one of the organizers of the special series has brought together nationally prominent experts this academic year to explore the critical issues raised by the National Security Agency's activities, including their impact on security, privacy and civil liberties.

On April 10, the speaker will be Judge Reggie Barnett Walton, former presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court. California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, will close the series before the end of the academic year.

Udall told the audience that in the powerful wake of fear that swept the nation following the 9/11 attacks, the House was presented with the Patriot Act “to strengthen and broaden our capacity to surveil those who might do us harm.”

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Udall was a congressman from 1999 to 2009 and then senator from 2009 until losing his seat in the mid-term elections last year. He had been a one-term congressman when the Bush administration put the Patriot Act to a vote on Oct. 24, 2001.

He was one of only 66 House members to vote against the act. It would then also pass through the Senate the following day.

Udall called his no-vote an unpopular one and a lonely period of his political life. But he believed the Act had been hastily drafted without due process and that some of the law’s provisions could lead to violations of privacy and freedoms.

“I was very conscious of what Ben Franklin famously said. He said that a society that trades essential liberties for short-term security deserves neither,” Udall said. “And I believed that we were strong enough to stand behind the civil liberties included in the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment and the Fifth Amendment – including the explicit right to privacy – and that we would outlast these adversaries that were in front of us by hewing to those principles, not abandoning those principles.”

Udall also voted against the Obama administration’s four-year extension of three key provision of the act in 2011, which included roving wiretaps, searches of business records and conducting surveillance of those suspected of terrorist-related activities.

He would then gain notoriety for his vocal opposition to NSA surveillance programs in the wake of the Edward Snowden disclosures of June 2013. He became one of the staunchest critics of the U.S. spy agency for conducting massive, warrantless data grabs on millions of Americans without their knowledge.

Udall said the NSA gathers more than 700 million data sets from phone calls each day.

“I was told, don’t worry Mark, this is metadata. We just collect it; we don’t do anything with it,” Udall said. “But I realized that it wasn’t just metadata, that it was how that metadata was being used and the fact that it was a secret program and under a secret interpretation of the law.”

Udall said the metadata can be manipulated for form a pattern of an individual’s behavior, of his religious and political beliefs, his medical issues, his likes and dislikes.

“We haven’t done anything with this data and that’s all well and good,” he said. “But history shows us that the government will overreach, particularly when it operates in secret. The Fourth Amendment was put in place for a reason.”

He also worries the metadata program has undercut the trust in the intelligence community.

“I want to be clear: We need to gather intelligence,” he said. “There are forces at play in the world that would do us great harm. But again, we ought to gather that intelligence in ways that fit with what the public understands.”

Udall called on the audience to push for transparency reforms to the FISA court – which oversees requests by the NSA and FBI to issue surveillance warrants against suspected foreign intelligence agents. From 1999 to 2012, the court has granted nearly 34,000 warrants; only 12 have been denied.

Udall believes that privacy, which is implicit in the Bill of Rights, is essential to all other American freedoms that are protected by law.

“This has long-term and important ramifications about how we look at ourselves as Americans,” he said. “We all need to be in the mix; we all need to be having these discussions to be ever-vigilant and protect these fundamental freedoms.”

Retired Pakistani Lt. Gen. Khalid Kidwai told an audience of some 50 South Asia and nuclear experts at Stanford that India and Pakistan need a joint strategic vision to attain permanent peace and economic stability on the Subcontinent.

Kidwai, addressing a CISAC seminar on March 30, 2015, said the enmity between India and Pakistan - born from the partition of the subcontinent in 1947 that effectively divided Hindus and Muslims into two separate nations - will never be resolved until people are brought out of abject poverty.

"The obvious is not sinking into our regional calculations," he said. "The obvious is the elephant in the room: sustained socioeconomic progress."

More than 22 percent of Pakistan's 196 million people are living in poverty and 46 percent of its rural population falls below the global poverty line, according ot the Sustainable Development Policy Institute.

"Conflict resolution without socioeconomic progress will never work," said Kidwai, who is one of the most decorated generals in Pakistan. "There is no running away from this stark reality. For 68 years we have blustered and blundered our way through solutions, leaving 1.5 billion people condemned to hunger, filth and squalor."

He offered hope, in that there are two relatively new, democratically elected leaders now leading the nuclear-armed neighbors, which have gone to war three times since partition. Narendra Modi became India's 15th prime minister last year; Pakistan elected a new president, Nawaz Sharif, the year before that. They represent two political parties with strong elctroal mandates.

"We are waiting for the two leaderships to grasp, sit together, explore conflict resolution and go for it in a manner that all partners on all sides win," Kidwai said. "It needs vision, statesmanship and guts."

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Kidwai is advisor to Pakistan's National Command Authority and was the inaugural director general of the country's Strategic Plans Division, which he headed for 15 years. He conceived and executed Islamabad's nuclear policy and deterrence doctrines. He also is the architect of Pakistan's civilian nuclear energy and space programs.

Kidwai, who was hosted by CISAC's Siegfried Hecker, told the Stanford audience that he wanted to dispel what he called "two fallacious counter-narratives that have taken root in our neighborhood."

The first, he said, is that Pakistan supports and conducts terrorism inside India. "What would Pakistan attempt to achieve from this strategy?" he said, adding that the Mumbai terrorist attacks of 2008 were not backed by Islamabad. On that day, 10 Pakistani men associated with the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba killed 164 people during four days of attacks throughout the city. India has repeatedly accused Islamabad of supporting the terrorists; Islamabad said non-state actors were responsible for the attacks.

"Terrorism is not a Pakistani invention," he said. "What would Pakistan attempt to achieve from this strategy?" 

The second myth, he said, is that the Pakistani military purposely keeps tensions at a high boil in an effort to boost its defense budget.

"Nothing could be further from the truth," he said. "The Pakistan Army is all for an equitable, just and ordinary peace with India. We recognize that war is not an option."

Kidwai believes the presence of nuclear weapons in South Asia is a stabilizing force and that any new peace initiatives lay with India. 

India conducted its first "peaceful" nuclear explosion, code-named "Smiling Buddha," in May of 1974; it would then conduct five nuclear tests in May 1998. Seventeen days after the first of those tests, Islamabad announced that it had detonated six nuclear devices, which happened to match the Indian total.

Today, India is believed to have between 90 and 110 nuclear warheads; Pakistan has between 100 to 120, according to the Arms Control Association.

Kidwai said the tried-and-tested concept of Mutually Assured Destruction has maintained a tenuous truce between the two nations. MAD follows the theory of deterrence, where the threat of using nuclear weapons against the enemy prevents the enemy's use of those same weapons.

He considered the concept of space for limited conventional war highly problematic and explained that Pakistan opted to develop a variety of short-range, low-yield nuclear weapons as a defensive deterrence response to what he called an aggressive Indian doctrine.

Kidwai assured the Stanford audience that Pakistan's nuclear weapons were safe, secure and under complete institutional and professional control. 

"For the last 15 years, Pakistan has taken its nuclear security obligations very seriously," he said. "We have invested heavily in terms of money, manpower, weapons and preparedness."

Kidwai was challenged about the deterrence utility of tactical, or battlefield, nuclear weapons compared to the increased security and safety risks of their potential deployment. Although Kidwai made a convincing case for improved security of Pakistan's nuclear assets during his tenure at the Strategic Plans Division, concerns were nevertheless expressed because of Pakistan's challenging internal security environment.

You can listen to the audio file of his talk here.