Session One Discussion

Darcy Kelley: So we're going to have brief motivated discussion. I think I'm supposed to be the motivator. If you'd like to take your seats.

So the problem with a conference of this sort is not the people in this room, it's the people who aren't in this room, right? I mean to some extent a meeting like this preaches to the converted. You're here listening to science and policy and problems and economics because you are convinced that they can do something about it. And so the central question of this conference, is sustainable development feasible, actually boils down to the feasibility issue. So in some cases there's a knowledge we don't have, or we need more science education, but in many cases there's a knowledge base we do have, and what we'd need to do it to put it to work in some way.

Rather than bemoan what we're not doing I'd thought I might ask you all to tell you an example of something that works in this way. And I'd thought I'd start with BP because it's an unusual company in that it's actually doing something. And I wondered from your perspective, and this can be applied across the board to all of your areas, whether there is a lesson to be learned from this particular company that we could go out and use to snare additional efforts of that sort.

Steven E. Koonin: That's a good question. Let me start with what we are doing apart from the two decarbonized fuel projects which I mentioned. We are very serious about biofuels, we are very serious about advanced photovoltaics, and we're very serious about improved methods of converting one form of carbon to another in a clean way to help with the security of supply issue and environmental matters simultaneously.

Why is BP doing that? In part because it truly does have an ingrained concern about environmental matters, but in part we believe that it is and will be increasingly good business sense as the world comes to care about these issues.

How do we go about it having a larger impact than just the company? I think it is in discussion of forums like this, but more importantly, as you suggested, in government forums, and also by demonstrating that one can just go out and start to take action that can make a difference.

Darcy Kelly: So, pocketbook issues. If BP is successfully economically and other companies are not, they may be forced to follow the model. But one of the things that strikes me about the way that we function both planet-wide and as a country is we're so reactive, we're so seldom proactive, right? Katrina comes along, all of a sudden we realize that rising temperatures in the Gulf are important, right? But I'm wondering, maybe we could talk about weather for a moment, whether there's some way to bring home the impact, short of a disaster of some sort, people dying in a heat wave, whether there's some way of affecting policy changes based on the models that we now have, so that we could head off disaster, which is always not very big news, right, that's the problem, rather that react after it's occurred.

Tim Palmer: Yes, I think one topic of concern actually about this overwhelming publicity about climate change that I have is that people are sort of beginning to take the view now that it's sort of so inevitable that we may as well just drive around in our SUVs and Ferraris and whatever, because we're all going to hell in a hard cart. And there's a lot of sort of talk about tipping points, and the fact that we're beyond point of no return. I think one of the points I would like to make about the work I presented was that basically the climatic effects on droughts and floods and extreme variability is very proportional to the climate dioxide forcing. So if we want to make an impact we can do so by reducing emissions. It's not the case that the basic meteorology is not somehow gone past the point of no return. And I think this is the one message that perhaps people in my community need to stress a bit ore, that we can see a proportionate effect on the climate by a proportionate reduction in climate forcing, in emissions. So in a sense it's all to play for [?], and I think, you know, people in my community have a role to show the impacts of climate change, but also to show the proportionality of the response. And I think to some extent some of the so-called tipping point arguments have perhaps been slightly overdone in a few cases.

Darcy Kelley: But I think this just illustrates one of the problems that we have as an entity, as an Earth entity, which is that often the knowledge is there, right? I mean you look at the CO2 levels, you look at, I mean you can argue all you want, but the correlation is extremely strong. And then when it comes to policy issues somehow the science is out the window. And the question is is there a way to make scientific analysis more credible and more compelling because we often sit there and gnash our teeth over the fact that people knew that these things were going to happen way in advance, and we seem unable to bring into being policies that are based on the kind of sound science that we know about. I mean for example in Malaysia, how does the government react to scientific information? And is the fact that it's not homegrown, is the fact that the dominant cultural force in Malaysia, Muslim science, is not as strong as it should be? Would that have an effect on the credibility of advice?

Dato Lee Yee-Cheong: I think in the case of Malaysia, because we had a former Prime Minister, Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, who is a medical doctor, so he is still a very strong believer in science and technology for development. And in his office, the Prime Minister's office, he had a science advisor, and the science advisor is actually using the Academy of Sciences to get the science and engineering technology base to address issues of science and technology for development. And we have been very, very strong in natural rubber and in palm oil as an industry, not just what we call agriculture, but as an industry, and then value addition is very, very strong. For example, in the case of palm oil, for it to be valued as oleochemicals, for cosmetics, for vitamins, Malaysian companies have bought oleo scientific research centers in the Netherlands, so that we bypass all the problems about patent rights and intellectual property rights, we just bought the company and the research is now being done in the Netherlands. So I think we are very smart, we do some research, we make some, but we also buy some.

Darcy Kelley: So you think we should get more scientists to run for office?

The other thing, of course, that motivates people always, you know, when I give a science talk is health, right? If it's going to impact on their health all of a sudden it's incredibly important. The Science Times today is all about avian flu, right? And of course everybody's worried about avian flu because it might come here, right? So all of a sudden birds dropping from the sky might in fact impact our health. And I wonder if there was some way that we could harness this very powerful human emotion in the service of heading off things before bad things happen. For example, with the water supply, I mean what's worked with water supply? In a poor country there may not even be the resources to do what you'd want, but there can be steps that can be taken in the right direction.

Frank Rijsberman: Well I know you want a positive example, but sadly the diarrhea is such a creeping killer, but it's not appealing very much. It's one of the biggest health risks there is, but people aren't excited by it. When you have a tsunami or so in the country where I lived there's an outpouring of people for help. Now of course the number of people affected by something simple like diarrhea is a lot less glamorous, a lot less emergency-like, and therefore doesn't catch the same attentions. So the trick, well I wish I knew the trick, but the challenge is to try and get people to focus on these less glamorous issues.

Darcy Kelley: Right. So it's not charismatic, is what you're saying. What we need is for conservation to be charismatic.

Frank Rijsberman: But we do have some people here who are supposed to be the people who only talk and don't get into action. That at least was said this morning. Of course we are scientists, so we don't act, right? But at least we work with people. And I like this article by Paul Polak in here, you know, we do work with NGOs for instance, with IDE, and he there says in his article, and he's right, that they have a ten million dollar budget and they help a million people out of poverty every year. And we are quite proud as scientists to help people like Paul Polak to estimate and monitor the impact of their work, and help them get better knowledge to go out there. In fact even people like the Earth Institute, to have a plug for your own institute, you don't only have the Millennium Project that assesses the seriousness of the situation, but then there's the Millennium Villages Project where you try to actually do something and at a very simple scale for less than $100 per person show that the Millennium Development Goals can be reached. So that is scientists getting out of their armchair and taking some action, I think.

Darcy Kelley: Ismail, I think you had something to say.

Ismail Serageldin: Yes, I think I'd like to just follow up on the question of health. Part of the problem is that with diarrhea and so on is that it's not likely to come and hit you in New York. If somebody is dying, a child is dying, from diarrhea in Africa it's not likely. On the other hand, the avian flu or so on could presumably, or SARS or whatever, could be incubated by an airline traveler and bringing it to New York and then it could mutate and all sorts of things of that nature would happen. This may sound like an awfully selfish point of view, but I think it's also a prevalent point of view. The danger is far away, it's unlikely to come to me, and therefore I'm a little bit less concerned with it than I would be otherwise. And of course the media has a capacity for making us see problems by putting a spotlight on particular problems at particular times. I think that there are three problems that came from all the presentations today, starting with Jeff Sachs. The first of these is that there are many success stories. what Frank called in his last presentation bright spots and things of that nature, but the big question mark has been scaling up, the ability to scale up, pile up operations to a replication level where they start having a real impact on the problem. The second part is the part that I tried to bring up in my talk which is I think we should be very concerned that the best science and the best minds are not going towards the right kind of problems, that there's a lot of funding for particular things, cancer research, etcetera, etcetera, and yes, the Gates Foundation has done something and we're all grateful to them for that, but fundamentally, for example, Peter Singer's suggestion, the Canadian Prime Minister, that 5% of the research of the industrial countries should be devoted to problems of the poorer 80% of the world. I think that alone would have a big impact, because not only would it force the resources of Columbia University and Harvard and MIT and Stanford and so on, but it would create opportunities for linking up with the scientists in the developing countries which today for them to do first class science they have to emigrate and work on problems that are not related to their home countries. So it's a double whammy. The third part is this issue of recognizing the different between public goods and private goods. And I have a lot of difficulty with this when I discuss with people and explain to them, for example, that clean air is a public good, but clean water is not. And that's why you find private sector willing to make bottles of clean water because it's excludable, if you don't pay for it you don't get it, if you drink it I can't drink it, but on the other hand I can't exclude you from having clean air. So by their nature there are some problems that the private sector is not going to address. And we have to somehow classify our problems in this way and fight that terrible attitude that really starts with ??? and ??? coming into the stream governs best that governs least, leave it all to the private sector. No, there are some things that the private sector is not going to do. They have to make money, so I'm not blaming them. But it's the nature of the particular problem, and I think that's what we need to build more on.

Darcy Kelley: Do any of you want to comment on that?

Dato Lee Yee-Cheong: I think I would like to just add that it's very important to build indigenous capacity in the developing countries. Without that it's very difficult to sustain any sort of development. You can pour money into the country, but if there's no capacity to sustain whatever the money will achieve, I think it will be in vain. I think that has been the development failure of the past, that a lot of projects are basically donor-driven, the design implemented by the donors and actually leaving nothing behind in the country where the projects are implemented. So I think we need to focus on capacity building in developing countries, which was the Inter-Academy Council's report about building science and technology capacity focused on developing countries, which I was one of the co-chairs of the study panel.

Darcy Kelley: I think it's somewhat ironic that the benefit of the development of India and China has in fact been stemming the brain drain. So there are Chinese scientists that were trained here in the United…

…this sort of thing is incredibly important. And the other thing, of course, is healthcare workers, right? We did not touch very much on immigration, but that clearly has a very powerful effect, it's part of the brain drain problem among other things.

What else do you guys want to talk about?

Ismail Serageldin: On the healthcare part, I mean I think you know it's disastrous when you think that a country like Zambia can offer their nurses only $30 a month, and therefore the only way to keep them is to train them to a level that is below what is acceptable in industrial countries. It says something about the problem right there. But I also think that the developing countries are going to have to face up to the issue of what is known as brain drain and try to transform it to brain gain. That is built into the demographic structures of the industrial countries today, leaving aside what I said, but certainly in Japan and Europe, do not have enough young people coming in to fill in all the opportunities. And what is going to happen is that the immigrants of the 21st Century are going to be very different from the immigrants of the 20th Century where the 20th Century immigrants were taking the low level jobs, now they will also be taking top trained individuals. We saw this when Chancellor Schröder proposed to the German Parliament that they offer 100,000 visas for computer specialists from India. And as a beginning, even though it was unaccepted at the time, that's a beginning of that issue. The trick will be, not that we can stop it, but how can you actually having these links transform them into a better way of communicating and collaborating. There's a whole series in the report that Dr. Yee-Cheong was mentioning, the Inter-Academy report, this whole series of recommendations on how to do that, and turn that brain drain into brain gain by building stronger bridges between the developing countries and the industrial world. But at the end you must have presence on the ground in the developing countries. And I can say this with pride now because I have actually gone back to my own country and I work there on the ground there.

Darcy Kelley: But you know, there's an irony here, right? So China and India send us people to educate, right, and Bill Gates was just up at Congress trying to get the number of visas increased for talented people. And then when these people come here and if they stay in this country, their kids don't go into science, right? So one has the concern that in terms of look, suppose we have to be deeply clever, right, we have to pull CO2 out of the air with a Klaus Lachner thing, I mean we're going to have, you know, it's up there for a hundred years, we decide we have to do something about it, we're going to need the cleverest people. To the extent that the cleverest people, you know, stay home and work on shagas and you know, getting water into areas, they're not over here figuring out how to pull carbon dioxide out of the air and this may not be a high priority in the country that they come from, so we should beware of unintended consequences.

Steven Koonin: I'm stimulated to make two remarks. One is pulling CO2 out of the air is a wonderful dream, it would get around the issue of whose carbon is it. The problem is, you know, CO2 is an end product of combustion for a good reason, it's a very low energy molecule, and so doing anything with it is going to cost more energy than you got by making it. That's science, not politics or anything else.

The second is as a global company I just might note that we are facing, as many other large companies are, a serious shortage of engineering talent, and we're looking to China, India, as a major source of talent for a worldwide enterprise.

Darcy Kelley: That's true. And as globalization increases and we have these multinational companies, we're not going to be able to say where they are anymore. Frank, I think you had a comment.

Frank Rijsberman: Yes. To me this is a glass that's half full. I mean when we talk about the brain drain and we're sitting here in Columbia, even though BP has a lot of wonderful opportunities to offer for scientists from the south, we do see that over the last few decades the situation has changed very much. I work for CGIAR Institute, Serageldin chaired it. Forty years ago those were institutes where people from the north would work in the south because there was no capacity there. Today, I mean okay, I am Dutch, but my institute is in the south, more than half of the scientists are from the south, with education from Columbia or Cornell or wherever, but they returned to their countries, they do good work, and we work with a lot of capacity. I mean twenty years ago there was not much maybe in Malaysia, at the moment Malaysia is a center of excellence, so is Thailand, and so on. And even in Africa we have excellent African scientists working with us who are motivated to work on the problems we talk about. So there is some hope.

Darcy Kelley: And I think part of this global knowledge accessibility issue that we raised here it feeds into that. I mean even if there's limited access to the internet, which of course there is limited access, you'd be surprised at the number of people in Gabon with cell phones. Once we get the internet onto cell phones in some sort of reasonable way and have transmission, I think that global knowledge available to the entire world will make a big difference.

Dato Lee Yee-Cheong: I think about the brain drain and the brain gain, I would like to see universities in developed countries like Columbia here, somehow you attract all the brightest from all around the world. Can not the university itself somehow give back to the developing world in kind, it may not be forcing the diaspora to go back home, but somehow in kind, you know, with Americans to go to be of some capacity in the science and technology in the developing world?

Darcy Kelley: The service component of the university. And of course the Earth Institute is an example of some aspect of that service.

Dato Lee Yee-Cheong: But I think it is not widespread enough to me.