>>Pres.
Bill Clinton: First of all, let me just briefly
explain the way my operation is organized.
We have -- under the Clinton Foundation or
its independent affiliates, we actually are
another foundation.
We go out and do things.
We do projects in areas that I think will
increase the positive and reduce the negative
forces of our interdependence.
Then I have a school of public service which
is the only graduate school in -- that actually
gives -- in the world, as near as I can tell,
that gives you a degree in public service,
as opposed to public policy.
I just spent a long conversation with Ngaire
Woods who runs the new Blavatnik School of
Public Policy at Oxford talking about, you
know, how they're organizing this amazing
new school.
And the Clinton Global Initiative and its
affiliates do not involve direct projects
by me unless someone like you comes and asks
me to help.
That is, that's my attempt to create global
networks of cooperation.
We bring in, you know, governments, businesses,
philanthropists, NGOs from all over the world
that we have to fly in because they couldn't
afford to come otherwise.
At the opening of the U.N., we talk for two
or three days and everybody has to make a
commitment to do something and keep the commitment.
And we can identify some 400 million people
in 190 countries who have been helped by things
that have been done in the last eight years.
So we -- but we work on it -- it's a week
-- three-day meeting.
It's a year-round effort.
The idea of making and keeping commitments
and getting funding, if you need it, and doing
all this, I'm just trying to help people build
these networks.
So 98% of the time, I'm not involved.
The Haiti commitment, I'm involved in, because
it's what I do with a lot of my life.
So I think over the long run, the Clinton
Global Initiative and its affiliates -- we've
done one in Asia, we do one for college students
every year, we're about to do the second one
for the American economy, because when you
have a real estate collapse and a financial
collapse, it takes about 10 years, on average,
to get back to full employment and I'm trying
to help us beat the odds.
And so I do that.
That will probably have the biggest long-term
effect.
So far, I think the biggest impact has been
in the healthcare work we've done.
I mean, when I started out, the price of AIDS
drugs was $500 a person a year for generics.
We got it down to 90.
The price of children's drugs was $600.
We got it down to 60.
We had big reductions for testing and equipment.
We revolutionized the supply chain and the
ability to build out health systems.
And what may be the best thing of all -- now
I spend most of my time on that -- we just
got 19 American medical schools to agree to
give personnel to Rwanda for two years at
7% overhead, foreign and domestic.
Less than -- way less than -- a fourth of
the international average among most developed
countries.
Put all the rest of the money in Rwanda and
train them out a health system that they can
afford to run for themselves.
So the healthcare -- domestically, we work
on childhood obesity, and again, I just try
to put networks together.
We got an agreement with no soda pop tax between
Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Cadbury Schweppes, a lot
of the juice providers, that reduced by 88%
the total calories in drinks served to children
in schools, both from vending machines and
cafeterias.
88%.
Total voluntary.
No tax, no nothing.
It's a huge deal since a lot of overweight
kids get 56% of their daily calories from
drinks.
So that's a big deal.
What do I want to do next?
I want to keep doing what I'm doing in energy.
I have always been convinced that we will
never have an appropriate response to climate
change until we could prove it was good economics.
So that means whenever somebody asks me a
skeptical question, I need a question to answer
-- ask back.
And now when people say, "How can you seriously
say that sustainable economy is the best economy,"
I ask, "Why is Costa Rica's per capita income
2 1/2 times higher than its nearest neighbors?"
I mean, in other words, so I spend an enormous
amount of time doing things like streetlights
in L.A., helping them green the port in Los
Angeles, putting an all-electric cab fleet
in Bogota, you know, closing a landfill in
Mexico City and New Delhi.
I want to do more of that.
I want us to build the systems of a green
sustainable economy so that it becomes second
nature.
Because now, one of the fundamental problems
is all the financing of the world still, with
minor and not-yet-significant exceptions,
except for carbon credits for poor countries,
which has worked well, in my experience -- all
the other financing systems essentially favor
yesterday's energy economy.
And since we all deplore complexity when simplicity
is an alternative, it becomes a killer.
You need more energy in your country?
If you live in America, you go to one place
and get approval to build a new coal-fired
power plant.
You go to one contractor and get the agreement
to build the plant.
You go to one supplier of coal and get the
agreement on a 20-year supply of coal with
appropriate escalators and conditionalities
in the contract.
You have gone to three places and you're in
business.
And by the way, you get to bill the people
for this coal-fired power plant for 20 years
and you have all of these lobbyists who will
deride solar, wind, geothermal ways to energy
as being not as economical and how horrible
it is that they're getting these terrible
tax subsidies while we are operating in a
free market providing an economical source.
It's the biggest load of bull I've ever heard.
Plus, which, you only get 870 jobs for a billion
dollars invested in coal and you get 7,000
jobs for a billion dollars invested in efficiency
in the U.S.
So I want to spend the rest of my life doing
this, and I want to do the same thing in agriculture.
There's 700 billion people on earth.
People are going to start getting really hungry
again.
We're taking up too many resources.
And the worst we have done working with farmers
in Africa and Latin America is to double incomes.
The best we have done is to increase their
income on the same piece of land five-fold.
The work that is out there to be done, it
is easy.
Anybody like me that grew up in a farming
environment and knew what was done in the
U.S. in the Depression, this is so easy to
bring back the gifted small holder farmers
in the developing countries of the world.
Nobody builds any systems to do it.
Every time there's a famine in the horn of
Africa, I want to get literally sick because
the horn includes eastern Ethiopia, Djibouti,
Somalia, and northern Kenya, right?
So there's not very good farming in eastern
Ethiopia, but if you go to Addis and you draw
a line straight down to the southern border
of Ethiopia, everything west, it's an unbelievable
farming area.
But they have no storage, no transportation,
no distribution system, no way of hooking
that into the aid area.
God, I was there one day -- and we just build
health clinics there, but I took a helicopter
ride a hundred feet over the land for miles
and miles and I was stunned.
We can do this.
So I'd like to take what I've been able to
do and apply it to energy and agriculture.
