[ Inaudible Discussions ]
>> Hello everybody.
Hello and welcome, I'm
Susan Collins, the Joan
and Sanford Weill Dean of
the Gerald R. Ford School
of Public Policy and I'm
delighted to see so many
of you here with
us this afternoon.
It's a great pleasure to
welcome you here on behalf
of both the Ford School
and our co-sponsor,
the International Policy Center,
and it is a great honor for us
to have the internationally
renowned development economist
with us Jeffrey Sachs
who is here
to deliver our 2010
Citigroup Foundation Lecture.
The Citigroup Foundation
Lecture Series is made possible
from a gift from the foundation
several years ago in honor
of President Gerald R. Ford,
our school's namesake and one
of the universities most
distinguished alumni.
We're very grateful to the
foundation for its generous gift
which has enabled us to bring
so many distinguished policy
leaders and thinkers to campus
and it is especially a great
personal pleasure for me
to welcome our speaker Jeff
Sachs here with us today.
I was a junior faculty member
in Harvard's Department
of Economics from 1984
to 1992 and throughout
that time Jeff was
my senior colleague
and in many ways he was a real
inspiration for me and indeed
for anyone launching a
career in international
or development economics.
His classes were overflowing.
Literally dozens of
doctoral students were lined
up to work with him.
He was a prolific
author and increasingly,
world leaders were calling
to solicit his policy advice.
He was an economist who truly
infused theoretical insights
with practical engagement
and with a passion
to help people most in need and
he didn't just write and talk
about economic development
and public policy he went out
and he made a real
difference for real people,
as I've said a true inspiration.
So Jeff is now the Director
of the Earth Institute,
the Quetelet Professor of
Sustainable Development
and Professor of Health
Policy and Management
at Colombia University.
He's special advisor
to the United Nations
Secretary General Ban Ki-moon
and president and cofounder of
the Millennium Promise Alliance,
a non-profit organization aimed
at ending extreme
global poverty.
Please join me in welcoming
Jeff Sachs to the podium.
Jeff.
[ Applause ]
>> Susan, thank you so
much for inviting me
and for the nice words and
one more thing I would add
to your introduction is
that I'm a Michigander
through and through and--
[ Applause ]
>> Oak Park, 10 Mile Road and
of course it stays with you
and this university is always
with me and in my heart
and it's our kind of family
school so it's wonderful
to be here and also very
exciting to see many friends,
classmates, colleagues
and I thank you
for the chance to be with you.
It's interesting today
that we're starting what should
be a crucial global meeting
but is relegated to the
back pages of the newspaper.
I'm referring to Cancun
which is the meeting
of the international signatories
of the UN Framework
Convention on Climate Change.
It's the sixteenth such meetings
since the framework convention
went into application,
went into force in 1994.
This is the world governing
law for what will become one
of the most pressing day-to-day
realities on our planet
in the years ahead
and is already creating a
tremendous amount of turmoil,
of course I'm referring to the
effects of climate change and
yet how puzzling it
is that as important
as this issue is the only time
it really has gotten noticed
in the United States in recent
months is to defeat some
of the congressmen who voted
for doing something about it
and almost all who were in
democrats, in marginal districts
who voted for the legislation
that passed the house a couple
of years ago to cap carbon
emissions were defeated
in the November elections
and the politics was already
merely impossible on this issue
in the United States but without
question November has made it
even that much harder and I'll
show you in a few minutes some
of the most recent survey data
about the rather shocking
American attitudes
to this issue, which can best be
described as a lot of confusion.
So, we are starting a global
meeting with almost no prospects
of anything important
coming out of it
and that has generally been an
accurate way to describe events
since the 18 years ago when the
treaty was first signed in Rio
in 1992 and the 16 years since
it was ratified by enough
of the signatories in 1994.
Situation simply
continues to get worse
because the climate doesn't
really care about our politics.
It's not noticing.
What it does care about is
the rise and concentration
of greenhouse gases in the
atmosphere and those continue
to rise fairly relentlessly.
Even during our downturns,
the world's increase
of carbon emissions is stark
and the dangers are growing.
Now, there was an
international meeting
of the same ilk two weeks ago
that didn't even make the
back pages of our newspaper.
You had to be a real specialist
to notice how neglected it was.
And that was a meeting in Japan,
in Nagoya on the convention
on biological diversity.
That was another of the major
environmental treaties signed 18
years ago in Rio.
And that treaty as its
name suggest is committed
to first slowing and then
ultimately halting ideally.
It can't be reversed,
the extinction
of species on the planet.
We're in what the biologists
call the sixth great extinction
period of all earth's history,
the first one during
the human period,
and of course the first one
in which a great extinction is
caused by one of the species
out of the hundred million
or so that are on the planet.
We're having devastating
effects at profound threat
to our well being
in countless ways
and certainly profound
threats to the planet
and to the ecosystems which
direct life on the planet.
That meeting didn't even
make it to a brief mention
of public consciousness.
One of the problems is that the
United States never even signed
that treaty.
In 1994, when we had an election
not unlike the one we just
experienced in November
and there was the
contract with America.
One of the points of the
contract was a contract
on the world species
and that was to insist
that the US not ratify
the convention
on biological diversity.
It was viewed as a violation
of private property rights
and we never became
signatory to it.
And the convention like
much else that's agreed
internationally has had, I would
say, essentially zero impact
on slowing this mass extinction
though it has produced lots
of scientific and documentary
evidence of what's happening.
But we've not been able to tilt
the needle in the slightest.
And for this one, it's
absolutely shocking to me
since I watched close
up at the UN.
There actually was a goal, not
just the general treaty goals
but a time-specific goal for the
year 2010 that was set in 2002
for slowing the rate
of biodiversity loss.
Being at the UN on a
very frequent basis,
I heard a lot of-- a
lot about that goal
since it was a UN objective of
the signatories to this treaty.
But I never heard one word
about it in casual conversation
in the world in the 8 years that
it was supposedly in operation.
>> Literally not one person
in the entire world ever
asked me a question about it
or made a statement about
it unless I was talking
to an ecologist who
happened to know.
But it's another sign of
what I wanna talk about today
which is how blithely
we are proceeding
in the most extraordinarily
dangerous manner on the planet.
And it's not as if we're
taking calculated risks.
We're taking measures
without the slightest interest
in finding out what
those risks might be
and in almost complete
neglect of the--
not only the consequences of
our actions but the implications
of our actions for the planet
and for ourselves and especially
for our children and
generations that are gonna come.
So, today is not a happy story
even though it's well timed
to the opening of
yet another meeting.
It's a somber tale of--
that asks the question,
is there a way to do better?
Can we find a way
to thread the needle
through a very complicated
politics so that we begin
to take some real actions?
Fortunately, the answer is
probably yes, but the evidence
for that is negligible
other than some assertions
that I'm gonna make
later in my talk.
In other words, I'm gonna try
to suggest some ways forward,
not that I think we're all
that far along on this.
So what is sustainable
development?
Global sustainable development
is really the right phrase.
It is a basic challenge.
And that challenge becomes
more and more pressing.
It is how to combine
the economic aspirations
of the planet.
And for most of the world,
that means still achieving
economic development
in the first place for the
already developed countries
like the United States.
It means not falling
off the perch
and hopefully still continuing
to find a way forward.
How to combine that
basic powerful dynamic
because economic growth
is happening in the world
and it's happening robustly
and relentlessly even right
through our current
economic malaise,
I'll indicate in a moment.
How can this be combined with
planetary sanity with respect
to the earth's ecosystems,
the natural environment,
and the shared biodiversity
on the planet?
It's two goals.
We have a hard enough time
in our country achieving
any one goal at this moment.
We're certainly not very good
at achieving multiple goals.
Sustainable development
is really
about achieving two
very broad objectives.
I usually define it as
achieving three broad objectives
which is maintaining growth,
helping to rescue the poor
and helping to save the
planet from destruction.
I'm gonna talk a little bit less
about the poverty issues today.
Just say a word but we can
certainly discuss the issues
of those who despite the
economic growth they are left
behind in a discussion
after my opening remarks.
Suffice it to say
we're not even close
to achieving this objective
of sustainable development.
If you're a student,
I urge you to study it
because you will have decades
ahead of useful things to do.
And it is one of the least
solved problems on the planet.
And it therefore,
combines urgency,
intellectual fascination and
almost open virgin territory
for intellectual pursuits
because we still lack any deep
understanding of how we're going
to actually accomplish these
goals and in almost no part
of the world save a few
countries, perhaps exemplified
by the Scandinavian countries
which are more on track
than any other part
of the planet.
Is this agenda properly
engaged right now?
In the United States at best,
we care about economic growth
and have put the
environment into a very,
very distant second place.
This picture is the template
from an important article
that appeared in 2009 in
Nature magazine where a group
of about 25 of the world's
leading ecologists got together
in an expert review
of the evidence
to consider the environmental
boundaries or threshold
that pose the greatest dangers
for humanity and to try to begin
to assess because it was their
very frank acknowledgment
that this was only
an initial foray
into defining what
boundaries might be
for these various
ecosystem threats.
And if you go around the circle
though, it's probably hard
to see in the room,
certainly in the back.
These are issues like climate
change which is the one
that I'll focus on today.
Ocean acidification,
which is another crucial
and independent result
of the carbon emissions
from fossil fuel
burning, it is the fact
that with the rising carbon
dioxide concentrations
to the atmosphere, the carbon
dioxide dissolves in the ocean
and is already acidifying the
ocean with tremendous risk
to the marine ecosystems
and especially to all
of the marine species with
exoskeletons and the diatoms
that are part of the food chain.
Going around the circle
clockwise from 12 noon
which is climate change
then ocean acidification,
there is ozone depletion
which you are aware of.
It is one of the few areas
where real progress was made
because that was a case where
one specific human technology,
chlorofluorocarbons
were the predominant
or maybe the exclusive
cause of the human made
or anthropogenic
ozone depletion,
and where it was possible
to find a safe substitute.
And so, it was a rather
straightforward technical
substitution of one set
of chemicals for another
which over the long term will
actually reverse the ozone
depletion that was very
far under way by the 1970s
when this result was
first discovered.
Incidentally, and I'll
allude to it later on,
when the ozone depletion effect
was first known, the companies
that were producing
the chlorofluorocarbons
of course went to town calling
it a hoax, a fraud, a myth,
and every conceivable thing
that they could call it,
exactly what they do
with human-induced
climate change today.
And then one of their scientists
tugged on the CEO's sleeve
and said, "By the way,
we have a substitute."
At which point, they
came out and said, "Now,
everybody has to
adopt solutions.
This is very important.
Yes and so forth."
So, so much is driven by
the corporate propaganda
and that was definitely one
of the clearest examples
of that going from
delay and obfuscation
to a quick solution once a
technical means was found
and then those who
have the technology
in hand could argue
for the solution.
Still moving clockwise, the
next category that you see
in bright red because it
really is a drama already is
nitrogen flux.
We have 7 billion
people on the planet.
This is 10 times more than
when Thomas Malthus wrote
pessimistically about the
principles of population
in 1798, two centuries ago,
at which point there were
about 750 million
people on the planet.
Malthus said we wouldn't be able
to support a rise of population
or an increase of living
standards because any increase
of living standards would
quickly get dissipated
by higher population.
But that would be limited
by food productivity.
We broke through the food
constraint certainly far
from perfectly even nutrition
for feeding 7 million
people-- 7 billion people.
But we actually did not break
through the environmental
constraint though we think
we have.
Because in order to
produce enough food
for 7 billion people, we have
to put on about 150 million tons
of chemical fertilizer
every year,
roughly 100 million metric
tons of nitrogen every year.
And that massive
deposition of nitrogen is one
of the most destructive
human-induced changes
on the planet.
As I'm sure, most of you are
aware we have a 200-mile long
dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico
as the Mississippi
River cumulates,
the runoff of that nitrogen,
the leaching from all
of the farmlands of 25 to 30
states in the Midwest carries it
down to the gulf and creates
the eutrophication phenomenon,
the hypoxia, the dead zone.
It's now been realized
that about 130 estuaries
around the world are
similarly turning hypoxic,
short of oxygen, because
of eutrophication.
And we're seeing therefore one
of the most important ecosystems
in the world, the
estuarine ecosystem
which mixes the freshwater and
the seawater at the outlets
of freshwater rivers around
the world being destroyed.
Nobody has an answer
to this right now,
incidentally, just
to cheer you up.
Organic farming doesn't change
any of the nitrogen budget.
It just changes where you
get the nitrogen from.
There are certainly ways to
use nitrogen more efficiently
but the basic fact of feeding 7
billion people is a very tough
nut to crack.
And in this sense, while
we are feeding adequately,
maybe not adequately but
feeding systematically roughly 6
of the 7 billion people and the
other billion are struggling
everyday to have
enough to survive.
We're not doing it
in an environmentally
sustainable manner.
And so far, there are no
adequate solutions to that.
Right next to it is
the phosphorous cycle
which were similarly deranging
because it's nitrogen,
phosphorous and potassium which
are the three macronutrients
that have to be added
to chemical
and organic fertilizers.
Moving right along and I won't
belabor all the point is the
freshwater crisis, the
changes of land use.
The next bright red cone that
you see is the biodiversity loss
where there is a fulminant
and almost entirely
neglected disaster underway.
It makes sense if there are
7 billion of us on the planet
and we're eating and
we're clearing farmland
and pasture land to do it.
We are commandeering literally
the land and the food supply
that would feed the other
species on the planet.
And the best estimates
which I still find shocking
to contemplate is that our one
species commandeers about 40
to 50 percent of the total
net primary productivity
of photosynthesis on the planet.
That's a lot.
We're taking almost half
of the total photosynthetic
potential of the planet for us.
We're doing it through
pasture lands that we cleared
for our meat production.
We're doing it by the crop
lands obviously to grow.
We're doing it by--
through the asphalt surfaces
that build our cities.
And in total, we're literally
pushing the other species not
only out of their habitats
but right out of existence.
And that one is,
according to the ecologists,
the most dramatic and
imminent of all of the threats.
The next one, now we're roughly
at 9 o'clock, between 9 and 10,
is the atmospheric
aerosol loading.
That's the soot and the dark
carbon cloud over much of Asia.
For those who have been in
China recently, there is as far
as I know, not a
major city in China
where you can actually
see sunshine for more
than perhaps a few
days out of the year.
So polluted are the
cities through the carbon,
through the coal burning.
And that's creating this
massive aerosol loading.
Of course sulfur oxides
and other aerosols
are also part of it.
And then the last one is
the chemical pollutants also
which says not yet quantified.
They're pervasive and
they're polluting major rivers
and major cities all over the
world including again most
of China's huge cities.
The conclusion of the
ecologists was dramatic.
Of course, they were writing
mainly for other scientists
and other ecologists
but they were saying
that thresholds can be
identified and were very close
to them, those points at
which you arrive at huge
and perhaps amplifying
instability and irreversibility.
For climate change, if you
look at the bull's eye there,
only 3 of the 5 parts
of that cone are shown.
This is right at the top.
So they were suggesting
that there is still is some
room before we pass the ultimate
climate change threshold.
My colleague at the Earth
Institute, our lead,
actually our-- we have two
lead climate scientists,
Jim Hansen and Wally Broecker.
Jim Hansen being
NASA's lead scientist
on the earth's climate
system and NASA has
at Columbia University a unit
called the Goddard Institute
of Space Studies which
Dr. Hansen heads.
Hansen through reliance not
only on the formal modeling
and the satellite
evidence that he
and his colleagues
have developed,
but also extraordinary work
in reading the paleo
climate record,
looking at how carbon
dioxide has been associated
with temperatures millions
of years ago by looking
at various isotopic
signatures of temperature
and carbon concentrations, has
made a very strong assertion
that we're past the threshold,
so just to cheer you even less.
We are as we measure the
greenhouse gas concentrations
at 387 parts per million
of carbon dioxide
in the atmosphere.
It means for every million
molecules of carbon dioxide,
387 of those molecules
are carbon dioxide.
It doesn't sound like very much.
It's a tiny, tiny
fraction of the atmosphere
but it is enough first
of all to keep us alive
because without the
effect of carbon dioxide
and the other greenhouse gases,
the planet would be
a frozen wasteland.
So there is a good side
to the greenhouse gases.
But the change, even
that modest change
from 280 parts per million
the pre-industrial level
to today's 300 or last year's
recently documented 387 parts
per million, is enough to have
raised the earth's temperature
on the direct land measurement
record as of now by about 0.8
of 1 degree centigrade, but once
the full feedbacks work through,
perhaps 2 or 3 times that.
And what Hansen has
shown dreadfully is
that whenever the earth has
been above this 350, I'm sorry,
there's been above a threshold
which he has characterized
as 350 parts per million.
The oceans have been 10
to 30 meters higher
than they are today.
In other words, we've
passed the threshold
that in the geological
record is sufficient
to melt the great ice sheets.
And Hansen's claim is that
we're already seeing the
disintegration of the Greenland
and the Antarctic ice sheets
and we don't know whether
this is a matter of decades
or thank God this
isn't gonna happen
for 200 years 'til we wreck
the planet, or maybe 400 years
but that the paleo
climate record is actually
quite powerful.
And Hansen's basic point is
that there is a powerful
positive feedback system
of the climate on the planet so
that even small perturbations,
modest changes are
tremendously amplified.
And one of the main
amplifiers is the disappearance
of the ice cover itself on
the sea ice and the glaciers
and the ice sheets of
Antarctica and Greenland
because as the ice melts, the
earth loses its reflectants.
It's so called albedo.
And therefore, more of the solar
radiation is absorbed rather
than simply reflected
back into space.
And this is one of the
powerful feedbacks.
There are probably many others
including the ocean's degassing
of carbon dioxide as they warm,
kind of as you warm your
Coca-Cola the bubbles come out.
And the permafrost under the
Siberian tundra, for example,
releasing methane as it warms
from the peak that
is then exposed.
>> So there are-- Hansen says,
"Unless we find ways not just
to stabilize as we're
trying to do at 450
or some scientists say maybe
550, but actually stabilize
and bring it down over the
next decades or century.
The consequences for sea
level and consequently
for the entire population
dynamics
of the world given the high
concentration of societies
around the world near the
coast could be devastating.
What it actually means
is everyone is moving
to Ann Arbor from the coastline.
So, save a place
for your neighbors.
Millions are gonna
have to move in soon.
So, this is one of
Hansen's map sites,
somewhat familiar I'm sure
to most or all of you.
The basic point is
that there isn't a part
of the world that
isn't affected.
And the main thing I would
just wanna leave at this moment
as I go on is the fact that
to the climate scientists,
this debate about whether
climate science is real
or not is so far from the
reality of the science
as to be unintelligible
and unimaginable to them.
There are so many
profoundly consistent reasons
for knowing this relationship
that the issues are not
discussed at all in the way
that the public seems to think
and the Wall Street Journal
insists they are discussed.
And that is that it's been
known for about 140 years
that carbon dioxide
absorbs infrared radiation
and warms the planet.
This is actually not 140, 180
years since Fourier worked this
out in the 1830s and 1840s.
The basic carbon dioxide
effect has been understood
for 115 years since Arrhenius,
the Nobel Laureate
Swedish chemist
of the late 19th
century actually made
by hand remarkably
accurate calculations
of what the carbon dioxide
doubling would actually mean
for the planet.
And he got it right in the zone
that the most sophisticated
models understand today.
The science at the basic
level is not in doubt
and the paleo climate
and current ecological
and satellite readings and a
profound range of other kinds
of data and evidence all point
unequivocally in the direction
of anthropogenic change.
What's in doubt is the
magnitude, the pacing,
the timing but not the
basic science itself.
And the areas of agreement
are powerfully strong
and the evidence overwhelming
and the public continuing
to doubt it.
And finally, this
graph is emphasizing
as the World Wildlife
Foundation does each year
as it publishes this index
that the species abundance
of every major class
of species is
in significant decline
right now.
And of course, you've all
read about the catastrophes
of the pollinators, the
catastrophes of the amphibians,
the catastrophes of the corals
and so on, major classes
of species under threat
because of the human forcings.
Now, it all is tending
to get a lot worse fast,
and that's because of something
that generally we
consider very good news
and that I have spent a lot
of my career trying
to help promote.
And that is economic growth
in the poorer countries.
We're living in a quite
remarkable period,
not remarkable in the way we're
feeling it in the United States
but remarkable as it's being
felt in the rest of the world.
The rest of the world
outside of Europe
and the United States has no
idea there is an economic crisis
right now except by hearing the
speeches of the US president
or the prime minister
of Greece or of Ireland
because in the rest of the
world, economic growth is robust
and at historic highs.
And that is actually true
now even in more and more
of the poorest places
in the world.
We're experiencing a phenomenon
that economists call
economic convergence.
And that is a tendency for
poorer countries to be able
to narrow the proportionate
income gap with richer countries
by being able to
absorb technologies
that are the difference of
living standards in essence.
And so, by being able
to adapt and adapt
to some extent technologies
already in use
in the high income countries,
today's poorer countries
are able to jump ahead
and enjoy economic growth
rates, that is the change
of real gross national
product at faster rates
than ever before
in human history.
And of course China is the
headline exemplar of that.
It is the most extraordinary
period of economic growth
in the history of the world.
Since Deng Xiaoping opened
China to international trade
and to markets in 1978,
that country has averaged
10 percent per year
economic growth.
That's extraordinary because
compound growth is extraordinary
and compound growth
to 10 percent per year
for what is now 32 years
is absolutely remarkable.
So if you make the
calculation, you get from 1978,
every 7 years is a doubling
of the Chinese economy.
And so if you do this for now,
this period from 1978 to 2010,
32 years, you double 32 years is
5 doublings and so we're at the,
roughly, a 30-fold increase
of China's aggregate
economy during this period.
And of course, we're feeling
it and we're feeling it
in some heavy ways as well.
It's in my view having
profound implications
for our income distribution
in the United States
and especially making
it impossible
to make a living
anymore in this country
in the middle class unless one
has at least a bachelor's degree
because the competition through
trade and through the flows
of capital with the lower wages
in developing countries of Asia
and now spreading part of
the world are simply so large
and powerful that they're
having massive effects
within the United
States economy.
Not all of my colleagues agree
on this but my perception is
that this is very, very big.
But whatever it's doing for us,
what it's doing for the rest
of the world is a massive
surge of the economic growth,
unprecedented in history.
And this is I found
a quite telling map
of the International
Monetary Fund for 2010.
The dark blue countries
are the ones
that are experiencing
economic growth
of above 5 percent per year.
Now mind you, 5 percent
per year is a doubling time
of only 14 years and many of
these countries are growing at 8
or 10 percent per year.
Then are the light blue areas
which includes the
United States, Canada,
parts of Central
Europe, Australia and so
on which are growing between
2 and 5 percent per year.
We are barely in that
category, maybe at about 2
and a half percent
growth right now in 2010
of an extraordinarily weak
recovery that we're experiencing
from a very deep downturn.
Then are the countries in pink
which are the Western
European countries
which are actually positive
growth between 0 and 2 percent.
In fact, per capita growth
in Europe is the same
as in the United States
because population growth
in Europe is almost a percentage
point lower than in the U.S.
So once you take into
account population growth,
we're both basically growing
at something like 1 percent,
1 and a half percent
per year, very,
very slow given the
preceding downturn.
And there are only a couple
of countries in the world
that are experiencing
negative growth right now.
What's striking about this is
essentially the two speed map
of the world.
>> The developing worlds said
goodbye to us in our recession.
When the downturn hit
in the United States,
everybody assumed there would be
no decoupling to use the phrase
at the time that the developing
countries would experience an
even more severe downturn.
I actually doubted
that at the time.
I was wrong in a
way because right
after the financial collapse of
Lehman Brothers, everybody went
into a steep downturn
because that was a panic.
But once the panic subsided, the
poor countries came surging back
in a way that the
richer countries did not.
And I think that this is
actually par for the course.
If you look at the
annual growth rates,
the green at the top here
is the so called emerging
and developing economies
and they are growing now
at 6 percent, 7 percent per year
since the beginning
of the past decade.
The developed countries which
means the United States,
Western Europe, Japan
and a handful of others,
not only had the very deep
downturn, minus 3 in 2009,
but the recovery is very modest
and the spread is about 4
or 5 percentage points
per year right now.
In my view, that is a structural
gap, not a temporary gap.
The structural gap
is essentially the
convergence process.
It might not remain so large but
I think that it is fairly safe
to say that unless the
world falls apart in one way
or another, the poorer countries
have a fairly wide running room
of rapid growth because
they're much poorer
than the rich countries.
Their average income is
perhaps a tenth of the income
of the rich world and that
means there is a lot to grow
into by absorbing the higher
productivity technologies
of the rich economies and
that's what's giving this fuel
of growth.
Without question, the
most dramatic example
of that convergence these
days is mobile telephony
and wireless broadband which
has reached every impoverished
village in the world
just about by now.
There are around 6
billion mobile subscribers.
Five years ago in Africa where
we were working on projects
in about a dozen villages in
a dozen countries in Africa,
nobody had a phone and none
of these villages had fixed
lines or wireless coverage.
As of today, every one of
them has wireless coverage
and it's typical in an
extremely impoverished place
that maybe 20 percent
of the households would
actually have a phone
and there are many aspects
to that, the ingenuity
of being able to sell phone by
the seconds so that you prepay
and are able to buy tiny bits
have brought this technology
in a very ingenious way to the
poorest people of the world.
But the productivity
advances that come from this,
from having a village that was
completely isolated had no news,
had no idea about markets,
couldn't make any business
arrangements where literally
if you were a pastoralist
community, you might track
for two weeks to take
your camels or your goats
or your sheep to a market,
guessing should I go
up to the Red Sea,
should I go to Nairobi,
should I go to some other port
and you get there and not know,
and now you flip out the phone
as the pastoralists are
doing all over East Africa
and they're calling their
markets and finding out what
to do when they're doing
their banking online as well.
Well, this is a great thing.
It is a fuel obviously
for economic development.
But it's also a problem
when you come back
to sustainable development.
Roughly put, think
about it this way.
There are 7 billion people
on the planet right now,
6.9 but who's counting.
And the average income is
about 10,000 dollars per person
using what economists call a
purchasing power
adjusted standard
where you adjust each
country's income level according
to their specific
average price level.
You add up the incomes across
the world that comes out to
around 70 trillion
dollars, 10,000 dollars
on average per person
and 7 billion people.
Suppose that the whole
world just caught
up to the rich world
income, so the rich worlds
at 40,000 dollars per
capita on average.
The world average is 10,000.
If there were complete
convergence,
that would mean a
fourfold increase
of economic activity
on the planet.
That's what convergence
has potentially to close.
Add in the fact that
the population
of the world is continuing
to grow
and actually grow rather
significantly even though the
proportion of growth
rate is slowing.
We're still adding 75
to 80 million people net
population increase each year
though now all in
the poorer countries.
You combine this
force of convergence
with the extra roughly
40 percent increase
of the world's population
that demographers are
guessing could be the level
at which the world
population stabilizes
as fertility rates come
down to replacement.
In other words, stabilization
at around 9 billion
as opposed to today's 7 billion.
Combine those two forces and
you see that we have built-in
to the global dynamics
right now an increase
of total economic activity over
the course of a century, say,
that could amount to
5 or 6 fold increase.
And the point to keep in mind is
that not only are those forces
underway and much to be priced
and praised in a lot of ways,
but even today we're
unsustainable
in what we're doing.
So there's a collision
at least if we continue
to do things the way
we're doing them now
and this collision
is an enormous one.
It's the biggest thing
humanity has ever faced
because we've never before
faced a truly global challenge
like this.
Throughout human history
until now our challenges
have essentially been local
or regional.
Many, many civilizations
have collapsed as we know
from Jared Diamond and others
because of ecological shocks
or natural climate change
or unsustainable practices.
But never before has
the planet as a whole
in an interconnected manner then
unsustainable at the baseline
and then having built within
it this massive increase
of further anthropogenic
forcings as we would say
of human-induced
changes on the planet.
I took for this picture just
to show you a simple standard
economic model of convergence.
So economists estimate lots
of statistical equations
of how fast economies grow
as they're catching up
and essentially, an
economy that is half the way
to the frontier tends
to grow at about 1
and a half percentage
points faster
than the frontier economy.
An economy that is a quarter
of the way to the leadership,
one-fourth say of the
U.S. level would tend
to grow 3 percentage
points faster.
An economy that is
one-eighth the level
of the United States would grow
about 4.5 percentage
points faster according
to the standard statistical
models.
If you plug that in to
the world as it is today
and just churn this
difference equation forward
for another 40 years to
mid-century, you find something
like this graph that the
world economy has built
into it something on the
order of a tripling of output
by the middle of the century.
That's not crazy,
that's pretty plausible
because it's implying a growth
rate of the developing countries
of today, of something
close to 5 percent per year,
they're actually achieving
even higher than that.
So this is not a wild forecast,
it's even a little bit
cautious one would say,
except that it can't happen
on our current technological
trajectory.
Something would have to give
because what's not built
in to the economist standard
model are the environmental
implications of all
of this growth.
>> When I studied macroeconomics
in 1972 for the first time
and learned the canonical growth
model that we're all weaned
on written by Robert
Solow in 1956
and which brought him his
well-deserved Nobel Prize,
that model says that economic
output depends on human labor
and on capital stock and on any
technology that we come up with
and the technology
is just assumed
to somehow descend upon our
fertile minds and the capital
and the labor are more
under our control.
But what Professor
Solow didn't deem to put
in the model though he
was one of the leaders
of amending his model
later was anything
about the natural environment
or the resource limits.
And the reason is that
as he always emphasize,
you make strategic
assumptions as an economist
to simplify your models to get
to points that are important.
And as of 1956, these
boundary conditions
of the environment weren't
important and Solow chose right.
He got a one, a first order
differential equation,
thank goodness, so all of his
students for four generations
to follow could solve it.
And we all felt excited and good
about that and it inspired us
to become economists but
the fact to the matter is
that if you were writing
a growth model today,
you could never or should
never dream of putting
on paper such a model.
Because now the boundary
constraints are not second order
concerns, they're not
footnotes for a completeness,
they are going to be
the essential question
for humanity even if Fox News
and Wall Street Journal and all
of the rest of our media
haven't figured it out yet.
That's deeply embedded in
the realities of population,
convergent economic growth
and ego system realities
and the only question
is how and when we catch
up to this basic reality.
One of the things that
will mean of course is
that the United States which
is had a very unusual run
of things, of course,
especially becoming, by far,
the predominant economy
of the 20th century
after two world wars not
fought on our soil and with--
by virtue of mass immigration
of genius partly as a result
of those wars and our
own cleverness and bounty
of natural resources,
we became for our--
we don't know whether it's
our Andy Warholian 15 minutes
of historic fame or not,
we became the world's
leading economy.
But what we can say
pretty clearly is
that that lead is
shrinking already right now
in relative terms
because leadership is a
relative phenomenon.
It doesn't mean we
have to suffer.
It does mean that our star
in the sky won't shine quite
as bright in the presence
of other stars in the sky
and as everybody has
come to appreciate,
China will become a larger
economy than the United States
within the next 20 years,
not higher per capita income
but given a four time
larger population,
a larger overall economy
and that is affecting
every bit of geopolitics.
Every single country I'd been--
well I don't know if that's true
but almost every and
that's dozens by the way--
but in the last dozen
countries that I visited
in the last 5 days, it feels
like, but in the last 3
or 4 months, I've
heard the same line.
Oh by the way, China just became
our largest trading partner.
This is amazing when you hear it
in Santiago in Chile
for example.
When you hear it all through
Africa, in Asia you'd expect it
but it's a worldwide phenomenon.
And this of course is
part of geopolitics
but it also should
be informing us
in a little bit more clever
way about how we engage
in the world right now.
What this graph shows
is just using
that same simple
numerical model that I use
to make the previous
slide that the U.S. share
of the world economy won't
disappear, will still be a big
and outsize economy but
will go from being something
like 20 percent of the
world's population--
of world's gross product per
year to being something closer
to about 13 percent by
the middle of the century.
Not precipitous unless
we collapse
but definitely a decline.
The red line on the top,
the red curve is the share
of the developing
countries in the world.
Right now, they're about
half of the world economy.
The U.S., Europe, Japan, that's
about half and then the rest
of the world is the other
half in terms of total output.
Now, that means that the rich
world on average is still 6,
8 times richer than the
poor by these metrics
because the income level
of the developing countries
in this categorization
which is the IMF's,
the developing countries have
a population of 6 billion
and the rich world 1 billion.
So we're sharing the worlds
economy but with one-sixth
of the population of the
other half of the planet.
Now what does this mean
for climate change?
It definitely means a
mess and it means set
of basic calculations
of what we need to do.
So let's look to the middle
of the century and think
about what the climate
scientists are telling us.
Now, according to Jim Hansen,
he is telling us, it's finished.
We're already in disaster.
Most climate scientist are
telling us, please, please,
please try to stabilize at
450 parts per million or less.
Hansen says, not anywhere
close to good enough.
Our current trajectory is to
reach 550 parts per million
by mid-century and then shoot
right through that limit,
and that almost surely
would be catastrophic
and I wanna underscore
the word catastrophic,
devastating for hundreds
of millions or billions
of people around the planet.
So what the central view of
this is is that at a minimum,
we have to cut by half
the world's emissions
of greenhouse gases by the
middle of the century compared
to where we are today.
That's tough.
We're emitting 30 billion tons
of carbon dioxide each year
through energy use and
another few billion tons
through deforestation each year.
That energy-led carbon
emission should come
down to perhaps 15
billion tons at the most.
But that has to be
done in the context
of a burgeoning world economy.
That's the challenge.
It's an unprecedented challenge.
If we need or if the developing
countries are counting
on three times the
world's output
through their rapid growth,
emissions should be half
of today than emissions per unit
of GNP which is pretty constant
around the world by the way
because we all used basically
the same technologies.
So the emission per unit of
GNP is pretty much shared.
That would have to come
down to around a sixth
of what it is right now.
We'd have to be able to get
our carbon-dioxide emissions
down to one-sixth per dollar
of our income if the world is
to have a chance of
getting on a trajectory
that isn't gonna blow the
whole world out of the water
or into the water I should say.
And that means reducing
something like 83 percent
of our emissions
intensity by 2050.
Now how could this
conceivably be done?
Obviously there are lots
of mixes and matches
and Larry Burns, your professor
here and a colleague of mine
in the program at the
Earth Institute as well,
we're discussing some of those
options and playing with some
of the numbers to try to see
how this can possibly match.
But one way, for example,
would be a combination
of energy efficiency
combined with decarbonization
of the energy system and in some
sense both of these are vital.
We have to get more output
per unit of energy input
and we know there
are lots of wastes.
>> As Larry has emphasized
so often, only 1 percent,
if I have it right, of
the energy that's used
in an automobile actually
is literally doing the work
to carry the individual
from one place to the next.
Much of it is purely lost in
heat dissipation and a lot
of it is carrying the
other 3,000 pounds
around that are accompanying
us on our personal mobility.
And so there's lots of
room for saving energy
through smarter vehicles
for example and of course
through better design of homes
and through smarter
grids and so on.
So one possibility is reducing
the energy input per unit
of output but it's not so easy
because the physicists are
absolutely right dead on,
you need energy to do work and
you need work to make income
and you need income to have
the kind of living standards
that the world aspires to.
So the other part of
this is to find ways
to decarbonize the
energy supply.
Now what might be done
in the U.S. context?
How could this actually
be accomplished?
I'll use round numbers.
We have 6 billion tons of
carbon emissions in the world.
Note that that is one-fifth
of the world's total emissions
of 30 billion tons so
GT, for any of those
who can see the graph is giga
tons, 30 billion tons of CO2
that are emitted by the burning
of coal, oil and natural gas.
The U.S. is 6 of
30, we're a fifth.
Now mind you, we are 5 percent
of the world's population
emitting 20 percent
of the world's emissions
so we're four times the
average per capita emissions
on the planet.
Of those emissions from
fossil fuel use, oil,
gas and coal all play
their important role -
coals about 2.1 billion
tons, oil 2.5 billion tons,
natural gas 1.4 billion
tons of emissions.
Now what we could
expect economically is
that the U.S. economy
will roughly double
in size between now and 2050.
That's taking as
given some slowing
down of our underlying growth
rate to a pure per capita growth
of about 1 percent per year
which I think is a realistic
assumption plus a population
growth that will take us
to by mid-century to--
I don't remember the number
exactly so don't hold me to it.
But somewhere probably close
to about 350 million Americans
compared to 310 million today.
So if our GNP or gross domestic
product doubles and we are able
to double our energy efficiency
as a rough measure, we could say
that perhaps we can get
by with the current amount
of energy use, that's
probably the case
if we make a huge effort
at energy efficiency.
We can't save energy net
most likely compared to today
in a growing economy
at this rate
but we could probably
hold the line.
That's not good enough though
if we're gonna reduce emissions.
That would just stabilize
emissions.
For that we have to change
the way we use energy
and roughly get to one-third of
the carbon emissions per unit
of energy that we have now.
That is not an easy thing
to do but that's the scale
of the challenge and
this kind of scale
of challenge is what every
country in the world faces.
You can see why it's
so easy to throw
up your hands and say forget it.
Let someone else worry about
it because it is not easy
at all to accomplish this.
Can it be done?
Well, if you look
at the proportions
of our energy use right
now, about 40 percent
of our total primary
energy comes from petroleum,
that's our oil import
dependence.
Another quarter roughly comes
from coal, almost all domestic,
another quarter from gas
and then roughly one-seventh
from renewables or nuclear.
So it's a hydro,
nuclear, a little bit
of biomass and so forth.
We'd have to change the mix and
change how we use the energy
in order to be able to get
to a reduction to one-third
of our current emissions.
Now part of the mix can be
changed if possible by moving
from coal to natural gas.
Natural gas as you
know burns cleaner.
Coal is essentially all
carbon with a little
of hydrogen attached whereas
natural gas is a carbon
with four atoms of
hydrogen attached.
When methane or natural gases
combusted, you get water
and carbon dioxide is
part of your energy mix.
When coal is combusted, you
just get the carbon dioxide.
So you get roughly not quite
twice the carbon dioxide per
unit of energy from coal
as you do from natural gas.
Converting to gas would be
one way to reduce the amount
of U.S. emissions but it would
only take us a very small way.
It wouldn't take us to a
reduction of two-thirds.
It would take us to a
reduction of maybe 15
to 20 percent in total.
It's no solution overall though
possibly it can add to the mix.
The other part surely
is moving to renewable
or low-carbon energy sources.
Nuclear, solar, wind
or using fossil fuel
and capturing the carbon and
safely storing it geologically,
what's called carbon
capture and sequestration.
Another popular idea though
not very popular with me,
remains to be proved,
is biofuels.
The problem with biofuels
which we've embarked
on in a big way is that they are
competing directly with land.
Land that should be
used for food and land
that should be used for nature,
and photosynthesis is probably
just not a good enough way
to fuel our economy and the
idea that we're gonna get a lot
out of biomass in my view is
still an unproven proposition
perhaps not wrong but I
remain to be convinced.
Well, if we moved from
14 percent to 50 percent
of the energy mix to non-carbon,
we'd start to get there.
But how could this be done?
It would mean drastically
curtailing our use of oil
of course and it would
mean using the fossil fuels
in different ways.
Larry who was here
and had to leave was,
as many of you may know,
the lead of the project
which is today's headlines
in the Detroit news,
the Chevy Volt, he was
GM's Vice-President
for Product Development and
Research and Development
and made one of the most
consequential contributions
which is a pathway from an
oil-based fleet of automobiles
to electric or fuel cell,
also electric, but the grid
or fuel-cell based fleet
of vehicles in the future.
If you can do that
and power the grid
with clean primary energy
sources, then one can begin
to make a huge dent
in this energy mix.
So there are lots of choices
that are at least potential.
Nuclear wind, solar, carbon
capture and sequestration,
possibly biomass, conversion
to electric vehicles,
conversion from home
and building furnaces
to electric heating
driven by heat pumps,
industrial fuel cells at large
industrial scale and so forth.
Lots of possible technologies
but there's a huge problem
which is why we've done
essentially none of it yet.
We have to decide
we wanna do it.
Because all of this
is more expensive
than what we're doing right
now, which is just burning coal
and using the electricity
the cheap way.
It is the case that the highest
carbon emitting energy source is
also the world's most plentiful
and also the cheapest to use.
And so the world
is actually more
and more moving towards coal
even though that's moving away
from a solution to the
climate change crisis.
>> And the world's leading
economy that depends on coal
of course is China
where about 80 percent
of the electricity is coal
fired and where 50 percent
of the overall primary
energy is coal.
Unbelievable, the
implications of that
in such a rapidly
growing economy.
It is meant that
in the short period
of time China has
overtaken the United States.
Even though it's only half
the size of our economy,
it's overtaken the United
States in total emissions.
China is the number 1 leading
emitting country in the world.
And not per capita of
course, it's one-fourth
of the US per capita 'cause
it's 4 times the population
and roughly the same emissions.
But it is the leading
emitter because it has
such a coal-dependent economy.
And the amount of coal that
it's adding every year even
as it looks to other fuels
as well is staggering
and threatening to
the entire planet.
So the same set of
calculations that I'm
about to mention
briefly here definitely
and even more importantly
are necessary in China,
and within a decade or two will
be vital for India and for Asia
in general, which is more than
half the world's population,
and soon will be more
than half or half at least
of the world's total GNP
or total world product.
The problem is that we're gonna
have to pay an extra price.
Now why would we do this?
To avoid the even greater
ecological devastation.
And the cost benefit
analysis is pretty clear,
at least if you have a
time horizon of 40 years.
If you have a time
horizon of 100 years
and you actually think we
have some responsibility
to generations in the next
century it's unequivocal
because the current trajectory
is so devastating that any sense
of risk would cost us to
have a massive change.
The problem is that we have
not come to accept that
and our political
cycle is obviously
with the time horizon inevitably
of 2 years to the maximum,
that's on election
day and the day
after election day the time
horizon is 2 years minus 1 day
and the countdown is
relentless, and we're already
in presidential election season.
And though we've barely
blinked and I don't think
that President Obama has even
finished filling his team
yet for the first administration
before he's got a full fledged
effort of running
for reelection.
So how much is this
likely to cost?
Here some basic calculations
suggest the following,
and I think this is
really the main point.
To make the kind
of transformation
that we would need
to get to one-sixth
of emissions can be done
with known technologies
or with technologies that are
at a near commercial scale.
Those technologies will
improve overtime as we learn
from actually implementing.
There's probably nothing that
needs to be done that isn't
at least on the drawing
board, the mockup
or the demonstration
scale by now.
The electric vehicles, the heat
pumps, the greener buildings,
the fuel cells, the solar, the
wind, the nuclear are all there.
And the one that is
consequential that's not
yet tested but all its pieces
are tested is the carbon capture
and sequestration.
The big question there is both
cost and geologic availability
of reliable storage sites.
But the evidence is the more
one looks at it that the costs
of making this transformation
are
within actually rather
low bounds.
But that the transformation
is decades long to make
because the power
plants, the vehicle fleet,
the buildings last for decades.
What would be expensive is to
knock everything down and try
to start over, impossible.
What is not prohibitively
expensive is to roll
out the old stuff and
roll in the better stuff.
And the difference in cost looks
to be something on the order
of 50 to 100 dollars
per ton of CO2 avoided.
Now if it's 50 dollars
per ton and we have
to avoid 4 billion tons
of it we're talking
about an annual cost
on the order
of about 200 billion
dollars a year.
Small stuff with what they
play within Washington.
That currently is
about 1 point--
what is it, 1.35 percent of GNP.
So it's between 1
and 2 percent of GNP.
If instead you allow for the
energy efficiency as well
and still assume that
high price, not abate--
not declining overtime you'd
get something by the middle
of the century that would be
well under 1 percent of GNP.
And indeed if you phase in this
transition you could stay less
than 1 percent of GNP
through the entire
transformation process.
And this I think really is the
bottom line of the reality.
We can lose the planet because
we don't want to do this
or we can decide to invest
something a little bit less
than 1 percent of
our income each year.
Given that where America these
days I don't know what we're
gonna decide.
But as rational human being
who care for ourselves
and for our children I think
the choice is pretty obvious
when it's laid out clearly.
Now-- I can't go
through all of that.
But let me say the following.
There are probably
fairly clever,
low intrusive ways to do this.
Much better than the ways that
had been proposed in Washington
and had so far been rejected
by Washington 'til now.
And the way that I'm roughly
proposing this without going
into all of the gory details
is to give an incentive
for new low-carbon producers
by subsidizing the gap
between essentially their
current higher cost and the cost
of coal and guaranteeing
that subsidy out for a period
of 25 years each year
on a rolling basis
as new produces bring
clean technology online.
Now how would you pay for that?
Since we started out
with essentially a coal,
gas and oil economy if you
put a tiny tax-- sorry.
If you put a tiny tax
on coal, oil and gas
and then you give a
pretty robust subsidy,
5 cents a kilowatt hour, 6 cents
a kilowatt hour differential
to the low-carbon
sources you bring them
on with very low disruption.
Over time as more and more
of those new low-carbon
sources come online you have
to give a wider subsidy.
You raise that lower tax up
but that pushes up the price
that consumers are anyway
paying for their energy.
And it means that
you can also pull
down slightly the
cents per kilowatt hour
that you're subsidizing the
new producers coming online
and you create essentially
a rolling system.
And I've illustrated it here.
I won't go into detail.
But you phase in over a
40-year period, mind you,
4 cents per kilowatt
hour on the energy bill.
You can't make it
softer than that.
And over time that ends up
raising the energy bill by total
in the year 2050 by
about 0.7 of 1 percent
of GNP according to
this calculation.
Now it may be that the
technologies get even better
on these renewables and
they compete on their own.
It could be that
as a recent article
in Nature magazine
had it two weeks ago,
maybe we've over estimated.
>> This is not exactly
easy news.
It's not great news but it
changes the calculation.
Maybe we've overestimated
the amount
of coal that's under the ground.
And rather than actually having
fairly unlimited supplies
of coal just enough to wreck
the planet at a low price.
Maybe the coal was
actually gonna rise in price
and rise right pass the price
of solar and wind and so
on so you wouldn't need
any subsidies at all.
We'll just be led to these
alternatives by the market
without even needing to take
into account the externality
of climate change destruction.
Whichever it is my
point is that we
at a quite low price can
make this transition.
It is essentially a
technology transition.
It's essentially based on the
idea of mass electrification
of autos and of buildings
and then converting
the electricity itself
to a clean grid.
Those are two essential
steps of this.
Electricity is the fuel carrier.
And the primary energy converts
either to carbon capture
and sequestration or to a zero
or low-carbon energy source.
And some of the best
technologies combine natural gas
with wind or combine
natural gas with solar.
You wanna make that combination
because of the intermittency
of the renewables themselves.
The costs are completely
manageable
but we've never seen a plan.
And this I really do fault
the administration for it.
Instead of a plan they went
to congressional negotiations.
They went to the back room,
they went to the lobbyists.
They said if we give you these
many permits, if we do this
and that will you come on board?
And it was a pretty
awful process.
Most of you were not watching
it as closely as the process
of healthcare which was
another awful process in terms
of how the lobbyists
swarmed around the system.
Rather than having a plan with
the logic we had, unfortunately,
the way we do is scrammed and
ended up partly with a mess.
And on energy we didn't
even end up with a mess.
We ended up with the mess
that was passed in one house
and was defeated in the other
house but we never saw a plan
and this I think is
absolutely missing.
Not that you can plan
from here to 2050
but you can certainly
bound a strategy
and you can certainly use a plan
to say what should we
do from here to 2020?
And then we'll recalibrate
along the way what's called the
adaptive programing but we
haven't even started to do that.
We went for cumbersome cap and
trade system which is a bit
of a mess on many
accounts rather
than a simpler gradually
rising transparent carbon tax
because supposedly the
lesson was learned in 1993
when President Clinton
tried to put in the BTU tax,
he never mentioned the
word tax, that maybe true.
We do have part of
the electorate
which is completely obsessively
and I use the word advisedly
against us paying for
our most minimal needs
and our most urgent
needs I should say.
But the fact of the
matter is the cap
and trade was immediately
branded a tax
which implicitly was and
it was the end of it anyway
and it was a much
less direct way to get
where we needed to go.
Obviously, we would need a
gradual phase in of subsidies
as new producers come online.
And that's why the actual
budget outlays can be pushed
to the future but paid for by an
identified gradually rising tax.
We need a lot of
research and development.
I don't have time to
elaborate on this today
because we don't actually know
a lot of what needs to be known.
How will carbon capture
and sequestration work?
How will the Chevy Volt operate?
How will batteries
improve in the future?
How can a national grid be
properly and robustly managed
when it relies on not
the base load of coal
but a much higher
proportion of wind and solar
and other interment sources?
I'm told by all of my
engineering colleagues
that we just don't know the
answers to these things.
They are knowable
but they are known.
And we're certainly going
to need a broad mix
of technologies.
Anyone that rules out a
major category probably has
to think again.
Sad to say we're gonna need
nuclear and it's sad to say
because it's a big
problem in this world.
And the risk of, example,
proliferation politics are real
but it is also a low-carbon
energy source that dozens
of countries will use
for their electricity
and that the United
States is going
to need and continue to use.
And we're probably gonna
need carbon capture
and sequestration.
Clean coal, another
of those tagged words.
Now there's another
fight brewing which is
about the natural gas deposits
and the hydrofracking so called,
of blasting out of the
shale rock of the Marcellus
so shale underneath New
York and Pennsylvania,
massive deposits whether this
can be done ecologically soundly
or not.
Nothing is assured
in any of this.
Everything has to
be done adaptively.
The only thing that
unfortunately is assured is
that the current course
is a course of disaster
and a disaster that's
already underway.
We start today in Cancun.
There will be no
agreement, maybe next year.
But it's a very odd process.
It's basically the wrong people
at the negotiating table.
It's very nice diplomats.
I love diplomats.
When they're good they
keep us out of war.
But they are not good engineers.
They don't design systems.
They certainly don't
design physical
and technological systems.
They don't understand
the economics,
and they don't know
how to get us started.
And unfortunately,
these negotiations have kept
the business sector away
and kept the analytical and
the academic sector away
and so we don't have
negotiations over the things
that we need to be
negotiating on.
I think the kind of framework
that I very loosely sketched
of how to converge in 2050
to a one-sixth emission
standard is actually a basis
for discussion, a kind of
convergence of technologies.
And I think that China and India
and other low-income countries
right now accept the fact
that they want to
converge on incomes
and that they would
also have to converge
on technological standards.
And how to do that and
who to pay for some
of the extra costs are
valid issues of negotiation.
But focusing on how to make
that convergence process work
I believe is the right way
to negotiate but we're
not there yet at all.
And we've simply not
cast these negotiations
in the context of technology.
Now, finally, let me
turn back to us here.
These are the numbers from the
most recent few center survey
on American attitudes
towards climate change.
They are horrifying.
What's happening to us?
We're a weird place.
We're in a complete
anti-science rant right now
and it's getting worse.
Since climate has been big news
in recent years the numbers
of people who believe
that there's evidence
for it has fallen sharply, down
from 50 percent who believe
that there is human-induced
climate change in the 19--
2000-- sorry-- 2006 poll to
just 34 percent last month.
So well over half
of the American people either
believe this is a natural
process for which the scientists
have looked up and down
at changes of solar radiation
and every other kind of process
that could conceivably be part
of this can't find
those fingerprints
or that it's not
happening at all.
In the lower left hand part
of the chart you see the
answers by political party.
Only 16 percent of
republican respondents said
that there's human-induced
climate change.
>> We're in an extraordinary
moment when a really life
and death issue for the planet
has become a completely partisan
issue as well and were
beliefs on the basic facts are
so profoundly different
across the divide.
So 53 percent of democrats,
16 percent of republicans
and the independents right in
the middle with 32 percent.
And among our newly ascended
tea party it's 8 percent.
Eight percent of those who
among the republicans who said
that they agree with
the tea party also said
that there's human-induced
climate change.
What's happening here?
It's really hard to know.
Of course it is true you can get
25 percent of Americans to agree
on any proposition you can name
and so there is something
to that.
But the aggressive
anti-science that we're living
in right now is not
entirely an accident.
I have seen over the
recent years and many of us
in academia feel it, the most
relentless assault on science
that I certainly recall in
my professional lifetime
and it's led by identifiable
and powerful interests
that are doing a profound
disservice to the planet.
Number 1, Rupert Morduch.
Definitely the most destructive
individual on this issue
and many others in the world
because he commands the media
in a way that almost no other
person on the planet does.
I don't know whether he's simply
the most cynical or ignorant
but somehow he is
the most destructive.
Sometimes I believe the Wall
Street Journal editorial page is
just designed to get my
blood going in the morning
because my wife knows that I'm
absolutely bouncing off the
walls every morning by
about 6 a.m. out of control.
So it's morning exercise
but it actually has a
very powerful effect.
David Koch who some
of your may have read
about in the New Yorker
earlier this year.
The owner of America's
largest privately owned oil
and gas company,
Koch Industries,
big philanthropist in New York.
You go to Lincoln Center,
you go to Koch Theater.
You go to the American
Natural History Museum you go
to the Koch Exhibition.
More destruction of financing
anti-scientific propaganda
than perhaps any
other person other
than Rupert Murdoch himself, and
this stuff works in today's age.
And we're facing something more
than problems of communication.
More than problems of what was
called climategate last year
of injudicious statements
by a few climate scientists
that I can assure you
had absolutely zero to do
with the climate science
and with its reliability,
its depth, its knowledge.
But it was taken on
as a massive campaign
by the Wall Street Journal
who everyday wrote the most
vicious nonsense saying
that not only was
climate science wrong
but it was a deliberate global
scientific hoax and fraud
and conspiracy by all of those
climate scientists looking
to get rich under
government grants.
And I kid you not.
And as one who tries to
help keep these people able
to do their marvelous
research, they're not in it
for the bucks I can tell you.
They are in it because they know
that not only is the
science fascinating and deep
but the stakes could
not be higher.
And for us ladies and gentlemen,
the stakes that we have
as citizens now to get
our country reoriented
in the right direction
could also not be higher.
Thank you very much.
[ Applause ]
[ Inaudible Remarks ]
>> Okay, maybe a couple.
Yeah. Okay.
>> Thank you very
much for both a sober
and passionate assessment
and a concrete policy
analysis and proposal.
We are very short of
time but we are going
to take just two questions.
And I'm going to ask
for one from each side.
And if you could
say the questions
and then we'll turn back to Jeff
for a quick response,
that would be great.
So, perhaps one on
each side first.
Here.
>> Please.
>> Yes. Hi Jeff,
I'm Mary Albertson.
I'm from Results Global
Group in the area.
I wanna thank you
for your friendship
and your support to Results.
What I wanted to ask you about
was if you would please comment
on the importance of investments
like a global fund for education
and why this is doable and
needed even in this economy
for educating the people.
>> Great. Thank you.
Thank you.
Yeah, let's take one more, yeah.
>> Thank you also for a
lucid and enlightening talk.
You've talked much about
the quantitative needs
for more energy to
meet economic growth
and human aspirations
primarily using the first law
of thermodynamics
that is talking
about X number kilowatt hours
of BTUs to do that work.
Yet as we give up oil,
natural gas, coal we're going
to energy that's
much less intensive,
much less power packed
than those fuels.
We're going to the very general
harvesting of solar and wind
and so on which means that we're
probably not only gonna have
to increase our effort but
also change our lifestyles
to solve problems that lower
temperature energy sources could
do like living closer together.
Giving up the American dream
of sprawl and living in cities
where we can walk, use
transit and bicycle.
Could you comment on that?
>> Sure. So first on the
question about global fund
for education and I wanna first
thank Results International
which is a marvelous,
marvelous organization
which mobilizes public
awareness for purposes
of global sustainable
development.
And I love everything
that Results does.
I didn't talk about
problems of puberty per se.
But what this chart shows
is I think perhaps useful
very briefly.
The red triangles are
conflict areas and the yellow
on the map are dry lands.
And what's happening, the
point that I'm making.
This is taken from a book
that I wrote a couple
of years ago called
"Commonwealth,"
is that the ecological
stresses of the poorest places,
the dry lands, are spilling
over into massive conflict.
And we're fighting in places
like Afghanistan or Yemen
or Somalia or Sudan,
not by accident
but because people
are hungry, desperate,
poor and therefore those places
become vulnerable to terror
or to internal conflict
or to demagoguery
and extremism and the like.
We are spending an
unbelievable waste
of our resources fighting this
condition through military means
which is useless because--
[ Applause ]
>> The problems are poverty.
And we spend in Afghanistan 100
billion dollars a year right now
and one-hundredth of that on the
poverty problems in Afghanistan
and we go out of our way.
We don't care about Afghanistan.
This is just about Al Qaeda.
It's mind boggling how
ignorant this process is.
We're just really in the hands
of the military,
I'm sorry to say.
And if you read Bob
Woodward's book
on Obama's war you can't find
one sentence in the whole book
of anybody that says one word
about Afghanistan's
real life conditions.
Even though what's
mentioned a hundred times
by these generals is
winning the hearts and minds,
they don't have a clue as
to the hearts and minds.
Not a clue because the poverty,
the hunger, the water stress,
the ecological stress isn't
mentioned one sentence
in the entire book.
And this is our disaster.
So why do we need a global fund
for education or a global fund
to fight AIDS, TB and malaria,
or help to make sure the girls
can stay in secondary school
which is one of the things that
such a global fund would do,
or help for small-holder
farmers to grow more crops.
>> First, it would save lives;
second, it might save our souls;
and third, it would be by
far the most reliable way
to peace on the planet.
And climate change is gonna make
all of these dreadfully worse
because it's the poorest
people who almost inherently,
not inherently, but by dint
of history are poor in part
because they're living
in marginalized places
that are already very difficult
and therefore more vulnerable
to the kinds of dislocations
that are likely to come.
Second question was about
the lifestyle changes
and how we can manage on this.
I think there are a
couple of things to say.
First, let me make
a technical point
that solar power
is very diffused
but there is potentially
a lot of land available.
This is one way that the deserts
really can fulfill a tremendous
direct human need at very,
very low ecological price.
And many of you have seen the
little square in the Sahara
which collects enough
solar radiation
to fuel the entire world.
This is not fanciful that our
Mojave Desert or the Sahara
or the Atacama Desert in
Chile and Peru and so forth
or the Gobi or the
Taklamakan or the Thar Desert
in India could actually
become places
for major collection
of solar radiation.
Yes, very, very large
arrays brought
to people living in cities.
I think it's a pretty
interesting way to go
when there's something called
DESERTEC and DESERTEC Foundation
which is looking to mobilize
the deserts for solar energy
on a very large scale.
And I find it a very
exciting thing.
Now lifestyle changes absolutely
are part of I think any kind
of improvement in our
quality of life aside
from our environmental
sustainability.
We're finding that the
way we've designed sprawl,
the way we've designed our
cities without walking,
the way that our landscape
has led to more flooding
and less percolation
of rainfall, less--
more surface runoff and so forth
provokes major hazards for us,
major health risks and
I think major problems
of our own psyches right now.
One of the interesting
things about economic growth
that economists have understood
since Richard Easterlin
at the University of
Pennsylvania brought the fact
to our attention more
than 30 years ago is
that after a certain point,
this chase for higher
incomes is not leading
to higher self reported
happiness or satisfaction.
And what economists now
technically call SWB,
subjective well being
in the opinion surveys.
And it's actually quite stark.
You get big gains
when you're poor.
They are real gains.
I can tell you living with
electricity rather than living
without it, it's huge.
It's huge.
It keeps you alive.
It allows you to have
a quality of life
that we forget what
happens without it, perhaps.
But after a point and we've
certainly reached the point
that the statistic
show, it's very hard
to find much benefit directly
from per capita income per se
as opposed to better
health, more longevity.
But that's not necessarily
coming
from a higher GNP per capita.
That's coming from a smarter
lifestyle, a better way to live,
walking rather than driving
every place and so on.
And so I could only
say amen in general
that there are many
things that cities
and dense settlements
actually do very, very well.
New York City's CO2 footprint
per capita is one-fourth
of the national average.
You can see why people walk.
Buildings, your building
heats the next building
because you're all
interconnected
down the long blocks of the
row houses or the brownstones.
And it shows up very
much in the results.
So these kinds of
changes no doubt are part
of what I call the energy
efficiency, getting more
for less and getting
and being happier
as a result of it as well.
And I think that there is a
lot of that kind of learning
and introspection to do.
We are absolutely on what the
psychologists called the hedonic
treadmill right now.
We are running so fast,
we're completely frenzied.
And why we're doing it and
what we think we're getting
out of it really
is a huge question
but a question for
another lecture.
Thanks.
[ Applause ]
>> Thank you Jeff.
We certainly got a lot more.
And we appreciate all of
your insights and comments.
Thank you, all of you, for
joining us this afternoon.
There are I think
some refreshments
and hopefully a conversation
in the lobby.
And I invite you to stay and
continue your discussion.
Thanks again for joining us.
[ Applause ]
