Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
[ 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 *** 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 ]