Thank you. You're way too kind, Amar. And you've done way more from founding Indiaspora to all your work with the corporate eco forum. We are all grateful MR for the community you've created. I'm just delighted to be here. I get to do this every year. It's one of my favorite Earth Day events. I'm going to try and not take the full time to just talk at you. I hope we can have a nice conversation, have some questions, and Amita, you'll let me know when I have to stop talking.
I thought I'd say a little bit about the climate realism framing that Amar alluded to because I want to address the elephant in the room upfront. Look, we are in a far more dismal state of affairs when it comes to climate than even we thought a couple years ago when I worked for Secretary Kerry from 2021 to 2022 and 23. We all thought that we were in the midst of this moment of political will around the world where we could actually solve the problem. We turned out to be dangerously misguided. And since then the attitude has flipped in this dangerous pendulum swing. I don't think we do ourselves any favors to go from unconstrained euphoria to now unconstrained depression. We should live somewhere in the middle by methodically chipping away at this problem over the next 70 years to try and get the world to net zero emissions.
And so what I wanted to do here is share climate realism and why it's important to me. Now, what I launched at the US Council on Foreign Relations is a perspective focused on American foreign policy, US foreign policy. I was a US diplomat, right? But the United States is not the center of the world. And for this diaspora, which includes folks from all over the world, I'd like to globalize it a little bit. So, I'll set aside some of the America first elements of climate realism. The climate realism framework starts from saying we should be a little less magical in our thinking and we should accept some hard truths.
Hard truth number one is that the world is going to miss its climate targets. This was, by the way, this is true under President Biden and it's true under President Trump. It was true in 2021. It's true in 2024. We are going to dramatically blow through a two degrees C limit to global warming, a net zero by 2050 global target. We will never meet those targets. And I promise you I have positive things to say at the end, but this is a really depressing thing because it means the world is on track for a three degrees Celsius or 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit average temperature rise around the world and away from the equator. Those magnitudes are even larger and that's going to mean catastrophic impacts here at home in the United States, in India and everywhere else this diaspora.
The second hard reality is that 87% of future emissions from 2025 to 2100 will come from China and emerging economies. All of the noise that we make in the advanced economies, United States, the G7, Europe, Australia, the United Kingdom, South Korea, none of it matters very much because those emissions are 13% of the future cumulative total. The trajectory of climate change will be steered by the emerging economy and Chinese emissions. Therefore, if we want to solve the problem, we've got to solve the problem there.
And third, there is this magical thinking that the clean energy transition kind of is a win for everybody. It's not true. There are clear winners and clear losers. United States, by the way, could be a clear loser. The way we are headed, we are the world's largest oil and gas producer, larger than Saudi Arabia. We stand to lose a lot of prosperity and geopolitical leverage if the clean energy transition progresses and the United States does not have globally competitive industry and China which currently has domination over solar, wind and batteries continues on that track.
Taking into account all of these hard realities, I created climate realism to say let's start from the starting point that every country wants the best for its citizens. What is a reasonable set of policies that we can use going forward in order to address this problem realistically instead of with magical thinking and they're kind of three pillars.
Pillar number one is recognizing that we're going to blow through our climate targets. Let's prepare. A three-degree world is a very scary world. We prepare for that world by investing in adaptation and resilience right now. Some countries have more means to do so than other countries, but every country is going to find it economically optimal to invest in adaptation and resilience. I believe we should have what we call an adaptation moonshot, a call for next generation innovations that help us to survive on a hotter, more inhospitable planet.
A world in which we have AI powered advanced weather forecasting to see when disasters are going to hit us days in advance. A world where we have planned at the city level, at the state level, the national level, disaster response capabilities that are 10 or 100 times greater than what we have today. Much of our fiscal space in the emerging world and in the advanced world should be going to adapting to an inhospitable future. And we should be eliminating incentives to do economically sub-optimal things such as develop economically on the coasts or in areas that are likely to be ravaged by wildfires. We need to prepare now for a darker and grim world. I promise there is positive stuff coming.
Pillar number two is technology. Here's where I'm most optimistic. I believe technology has the possibility of speeding the global energy transition. Let's be clear. There is no global energy transition today. If anybody tells you that, they're lying because global energy use and production is increasing from every source, not just clean energy. Clean energy may be rising faster, but around the world it is dirty energy that continues to increase its absolute production even if its percentage continues to fall.
Given that technology is maybe our only hope of turning the tide and actually having clean energy displace dirty energy. I think for example about the next generation of batteries that will enable electric vehicles that are fundamentally superior to current vehicles. I think about next generation solar technologies, nuclear technologies, geothermal technologies. There is a range of technologies where both in advanced and emerging economies there's a chance to kickstart the energy transition.
And if we do it right, for example, here in the United States, if we actually invest in industries where we can win, we have also a chance of aligning our political incentives with climate action. Because remember, American emissions don't really matter that much. We are on the order of 5 to 7% of the future cumulative total. It doesn't matter that much if America goes to zero. What matters is that America develops technologies that India and South Africa and Indonesia and Brazil and China can all use. And if we succeed in doing that, America prospers by exporting technologies. Our politics align with climate action because we make money off of it and therefore it becomes a durable political topic. Not every four years we change our minds.
The third pillar is what I call global cooperation and leadership in order to avert the worst consequences of climate change. Now I told you we're headed for a pretty bad future, a three degrees future, but let's avoid that four degrees 5 degrees future. That would be cataclysmic. And even three degrees, there is a risk that we hit planetary tipping points and aren't able to stop this cascade of impacts. So what do I mean by the limited realm of global cooperation to avert the worst impacts? I think of three subcategories. So I'm going to talk about 3A, 3B, and 3C.
3A is actually stuff that has nothing to do directly with climate. A more free global trading system and a world economy in which we can keep interest rates low is one in which clean energy flourishes. What I'm saying here is upholding the international rules-based world order with largely free trade avoiding protectionist barriers makes it possible to have global supply chains where clean energy technologies are cheapest and low interest rates because the economy is doing well around the world enables us to build clean energy which is capital intensive much more so than dirty energy. These are just broadly good economic concepts and leaders in the United States and around the world that support such an economic system. I know I'll be called a neoliberal for this are actually going to help on the climate transition.
What's 3B? 3B is what I call targeted cooperation. I envision a world for example where we encourage India to develop next generation clean industrial products. It is economically optimal for India to make zero-carbon steel, zero-carbon aluminum, produce the zero-carbon fuels for long-distance transportation, shipping, aviation, and export them to rich countries. It is economically far superior than rich countries trying to do this themselves because they'll fail. It'll be horribly expensive and it will be a net economic drain. I think there's a win-win here and our trade policy should recognize this.
Europe and the United States are trending toward what's called a foreign pollutions fee or a carbon border adjustment mechanism. And these policies can be horribly punitive. But if we include carveouts for next generation technologies like zero-carbon industrial products, we have an opportunity to harmoniously coexist with emerging economies that want to produce industrial products for us.
And the last thing I'll mention is a taboo topic. I'm sorry for being provocative here. Geoengineering may end up being one of our best bets to avert the worst consequences of climate change. It's a horribly fraught topic. For example, I'm talking about solar radiation management techniques to reflect sunlight into the atmosphere by pumping sulfur dioxide sulfates aerosolized into the atmosphere. That is intentionally pumping an air pollutant into the atmosphere that will kill thousands of people. It's a scary philosophically fraught way to approach this problem, but it may end up being cheaper. It could cost 10 billion dollars a year, not the 10 trillion dollars a year we need for a net zero transition. And it may enable us to very rapidly cool the world by about half a degree.
If we have access to a tool like this and we do it in an intelligent way with global cooperation and a lot of research, we might avoid the dangerous scenario. We're a rogue state. That state, by the way, in the academic literature may very well be India, where a rogue state goes and just unilaterally deploys it in a way that may be dangerous for the global climate or dangerous for human health.
So, I'll pause there, but I'll say it's time for some fresh thinking on climate. Climate realism tells us to discard all of the things that make no sense and focus on the things that could conceivably make some sense going forward. I'd love to have a discussion about this. Thank you so much for having me. Hope that wasn't too provocative.
