And I have a long list of questions, but I think I'll try to just boil it down to one main question because you've both um told us what is needed and we know what is needed and we know that we are going in the right direction both in Europe not that much in US but it is limited how much damage Trump can do but we need to speed up. So what should we do to speed up? Madame Laglet, first

allow me to look at it from my my limited angle which is that of a of a central banker and one concerned about the movement of capital in the in the in the European Union which was one of the four freedom of circulation that was agreed between all the European partners. We have to make sure that private sector money I mean Al was very eloquent in saying what is it 90% of 85% of the necessary investment was financed by the private sector.

Private sector has to feel confident and encouraged in investing in those elements of the transition and they're not just you know narrowmindedly defined. There's a whole range of sectors that have to benefit from the transition. So policy makers have to facilitate that accelerate it as much as possible. I think that as sort of cherry on the cakes which would not be uh irrelevant is making sure that there is the right taxation in the place where you want to encourage or discourage.

So I referred in my speech to you know taxing alternative sources rather than electricity sources. I would say that encouraging equity investment rather than debt would also be necessary in order to you know have stable and longerterm investment which is needed in in the green uh sector.

So on in from my corner I think accelerating speeding up simplifying access to from private capital to a market where green investment are encouraged by uh the fiscal side would be would be first priority together with you know in terms of where the money is invested. I would repeat grids, grids, grids in order to address the cost that can be reduced.

Let me uh endorse uh uh President Lagard's comment about the priority that should be assigned to improving the grids. Um this is true in almost every country. When the millennium turned uh a few years ago, the National Academy of Engineering in the United States conducted a survey to identify the number one engineering achievement of the 20th century. And the answer was America's electricity grid. But only a few years later, it became apparent that the key part of that phrase was in the 20th century

because it's no longer a one-way transmission. It is a a two-way and multi-way transition with grid storage uh widely distributed throughout the grid requires a lot of software. It requires a lot of innovation. I think this is going on in in the United States in spite of Trump. There's a boom in renewable energy investment right now in the United States. Some of it is driven by the uh prospective uh retirement of certain incentives at the end of the year, but it's mainly driven by the economic superiority of these sources.

And may I remind you that when Donald Trump was president for four years, the first time around, what happened during those four years? Um, solar energy doubled, electric car sales doubled, clean energy investment tripled, coal use declined by more than 20%. Why? Because the economic realities are favoring this energy transition.

If I could give you a visual metaphor that to me describes what's going on in the world and in the US, there's a big wheel turning in the right direction and little wheels within it turning in the opposite direction. But even those little wheels are being moved inexraably toward where we're going. We're not moving fast enough. We have to accelerate. How do we do it?

In order to solve the climate crisis, we have to pay attention to the democracy crisis. Christine mentioned that nine out of 10 Europeans are in favor of ramping up investments in renewable energy. I don't think the percentage is quite that high in the US, but it's close to that in the US. uh and yet the political power and the legacy political and economic networks of the fossil fuel industry have been used very skillfully to slow this transition down.

Uh and at the I mentioned the big changes with the pandemic and and and with the China WTO the invasion of Ukraine and all of that. There's another transition that's we've been wrestling with and that is a radical transition in the information ecosystem within which we make collective decisions. Norway and the United States formed our institutions during the era of the printing press and we cycled through broadcasting which is totalitarianfriendly to the internet and now social media with an overlay of AI coming rapidly

and as a result the the norms and practices of representative democracy have been turned upside down and they're not working as well as they should. I do believe that change is coming and I believe in the elections one year from next month we will see almost certainly we will see a dramatic change in the direction of the Congress in the United States.

Yes, let's hope so. I dare to say. Uh Madame Lagards, uh

did you allow me to make a suggestion here?

Absolutely.

Because I I don't know how many of you in this room have seen a film called The Inconvenient Truth. raise hands.

Yeah.

Okay.

Point made. At times when films were actually very powerful, one person sitting next to me was the agent for change. And I don't know what it was for you. For me, it was a dramatic understanding of what was going to happen.

And I would suggest that with that same person sitting next to me, we should encourage him and maybe fund him. There's a bit of money around here to produce on the media of the future. something that could be called, I don't know, the inconvenient comfort zone that we are in and or something like that in order to encourage as many young people because we're all a little bit over the edge of the 20s uh in this room, but encourage them to appreciate what is needed, how much money will be required, and how they should prepare for that.

Wouldn't you agree? Yes. Yeah.

Well, as I often say, if it hadn't been for me, we might have a big problem right now.

Yes.

But I'm not done yet.

You're not done yet. But should we move back to to the European country? No. No. Please. Uh and uh because um climate initiatives are competing with many other uh important tasks. For instance, we have to increase our defense budget. we have a lot of other challenges. Uh how should we how should we try to to combine climate initiatives with all the other tasks that we have to address?

I hope it was clear in my in my remarks that we have to act together and the togetherness for me is Europe and the European friends around us. And I think that when there is a threat as obvious, as imminent, and as longasting as climate change, it really warrants a joint approach.

So fiscal space is limited for some countries as we know. Other countries have a larger balance sheets and are are putting the balance sheet uh in the equation. But it's really one of those areas, the two or three that I think my perspective are unquestionable. Defense is one, climate change is the other one that warrant joint commitment, joint initiative, joint funding in order to respond to the urgency of the matter.

And as Al Gore was saying earlier on, 85% is private sector, 15% was the incentive or the environment within which policy makers could make a difference. So we're not talking about the entire financing needs being supported by governments because number one, they cannot do it. Number two, private sector must play its part as well and will bring a level of discipline and scrutiny to the projects which is which are which are needed.

So that would be my response to you. It's a joint effort massively from the private sector in a smaller proportion by the public sector but one where joint effort is completely warranted and necessary.

But we will be dependent on a lot of import from China and we try to be more independent of Russia. So are we just swapping the the dependence of Russia with dependence on China?

Look, if there is one lesson that we learned in the last few years is to be more s more security, sustainability, affordability. All of that applies as well to the uh the supply chain and the sourcing of the components. It's obvious at the moment that about 95% of the solar uh generation u various components including rare earth by the way that are needed for for some of that are in the hands of China. But we have to respond to that and there is a strategy that has been developed by the European Commission which addresses precisely the issue of rare earth in order to reach certain targets of independence. It's going to take a while uh just as it will in relation to defense. But we we have to to take that path and to and to travel that journey.

Let me offer two pathways to consider. Uh you ran the IMF brilliantly Christine uh and you study started then and Cristina Georgva has recently released a new version of the study. What would happen if governments eliminated the subsidies for fossil fuels? Many people are surprised to dig down into the realities and realize that taxpayers around the world are forced to subsidize the destruction of humanity's future. It's literally insane.

The IMF study shows that if we eliminated subsidies for fossil fuel, governments around the world would have an extra $4.4 trillion dollar to spend. that happens to be just about exactly the amount that the IEA says is needed to finance the energy transition. So when people say where's the money going to come from? Well, if we stopped spending it subsidizing the destruction of our future and used it for good results instead, we'd be done where the money I is concerned.

a second pathway forward if I could. President Lula, who is hosting, of course, COP 30 next month, uh has recently ventured this proposal for a an alliance of countries that support the carbon border adjustment mechanisms, the C-bams, if

China and the European Union, including Norway, Singapore, Australia, all combined with a border adjustment to reflect the carbon content, then that might even match uh President Trump's fondness for tariffs uh such as it is uh and we could finally in in that indirect way put a price on carbon.

Thank you so much. They tell me we have to stop. I can see that the audience is more optimistic now than when we met this morning and that is because of you. You are very experienced people. you have been working on this for decades and uh we knew it wouldn't be easy to uh you know form that such a big transformation but we just have to carry on carry on.

Can I make one more comment? I I know that you're in Norway you're much more punctual than we are in the United States. I know you're getting the signal. Yeah,

I had a I had a teacher when I was young who said frequently that we all face the same choice in life over and over again. And it's a choice between the hard right and the easy wrong. We have now reached a point in the evolution of human society where we face that choice between the hard right and the easy wrong. People say we face a poly crisis. We have a poly solution.

We need to make the hard right decision to vastly accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels and build confidence that we can control our own destiny. I want young people to have the same hopefulness in looking at the future that I had when I was young. How dare we not give that to them when we know that we can. We have the ability to do it. Norway has been leading the way in the right making the right decisions. We can choose the hard right and save our future and thank you so much.