SUMMATION: IS SUSTAINABLE
DEVELOPMENT FEASIBLE?
Moderator: John Rennie Editor in Chief, Scientific American
Panelists: Joel E. Cohen; Abby Joseph Cohen; Sir Partha Dasgupta; Nicholas D. Kristof, Columnist, The New York Times; Rajendra K. Pachauri; Jeffrey D. Sachs

John Mutter: And thank you, Roberta, for that wonderful job.

This is the point where we make the seamless transition to the final panel. That was seamless.

It's my great pleasure to bring to the stage the moderator for the final panel, the concluding panel of our day. He is John Rennie, and he has been Editor in Chief of Scientific American since 1994, and he joined the staff of Scientific American as a member of the board of editors in 1989. If you don't know John Rennie you'll think I've made a mistake in this date. You'll see why in a moment. He's previously worked as a science writer covering biology, technology, and medicine for a variety of publications. During his tenure the magazine has won two National Magazine Awards for editorial excellence, with the single topic issue “What You Need To Know About Cancer” in 1996, and “A Matter of Time,” September 2002. In the year 2000 John Rennie was honored with the Sagan Award for Public Understanding of Science bestowed by the Council of Scientific Societies Presidents. In September 2003 the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies honored him with its Navigator Award for distinguished service in support of national science and technology policy. His work has appeared in numerous publications including The Economist, The New York Times, Longevity and others. He has also appeared on ABC, World News Weekend, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Entertainment Tonight, ABC News Overnight, CBS Early Show, and he's even appeared on Fox News Channel but redeemed himself by appearing on National Public Radio's Science Friday. It's my very great pleasure to introduce John Rennie.

John Rennie: Thank you very much. Thank you, John, for a very kind introduction. This is, as noted, really a summation portion for the program, which is a little bit daunting, given everything that's happened in these past couple of days. I think, though, to start off, there would really be a no more appropriate time for me to thank Jeffrey Sachs and John Mutter, and everyone else here involved with the Earth Institute for putting together stupendously stimulating, rewarding days. So thank you very much for that.

Having said that, really let's bring out our panelists, brave as they are. Staying here with us on the dais are Joel Cohen and Partha Dasgupta who are brave and certainly they're energetic enough to be able to hold in for one last session this time. And also coming back out with us at this time are a number of other familiar faces, of course Rajendra Pachauri and of course Jeffrey Sachs, and we're also very glad to have Abby Joseph Cohen join us here again. We also have a little bit of fresh blood with Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times whom we're very glad to welcome. Your applause suggests that everything I am to say is superfluous. Nevertheless in case you don't know, Nick Kristof is a columnist for The New York Times and he was previously the associate managing editor responsible for the paper's Sunday edition. He joined The New York Times in 1984 to cover economics, but he later served as a business correspondent based in Los Angeles and is the bureau chief for Hong Kong, Beijing and Tokyo. In 2000 he covered the US presidential campaign focusing on then Governor George W. Bush, and in 1990 he and his wife Sheryl Wu Dunn, also a Times journalist won a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of China's Tiananmen Square democracy movement. Nick Kristof has also won the George Polk Award, and Overseas Press Club Award, a Michael Kelly Award, and an Online News Association Award, and he and his wife are the authors of “China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power” and also “Thunder from the East: Portrait of a Rising Asia.” So thank you very much for being with us, Nick.

Now my job in this session is to try and engage one last round of discussion with these panelists who represent all of the other sessions that we've had over these past couple of days, and assisting me in this are the questions that many, many of you have been good enough to submit, and which I am going to now try to thread into the conversation as best I can. Last night as I was collecting, and I had a big stack of the questions that had come in, I was saying to myself you have all made my job extremely easy because there were so many good questions in there. And then this morning at the break more of them came in, and I began to feel a little bit overwhelmed, and then at lunch more questions came in, and at that point I started to just feel afraid. And in the last break still more good questions arrived, and at that point my fear has turned to a dull grudging hatred of you all. So curse your curious minds, but please accept my apologies for the fact that there's absolutely no way we're going to get through all of the sorts of very good questions that you raised. I'm going to try to deal with some of these, but I understand that the good people at the Earth Institute have hung onto all of your questions and they're going to try to get answers that can perhaps be made available perhaps through the Earth Institute web site, or otherwise, because they really do care about trying to get the information back to all of you. So it's a wonderful sign that way.

Just reflecting on the bulk of what you all questioned, the most overwhelming theme that ran through your questions that I could see was that there was a tremendous enthusiasm to try to pick up on these suggestions that were made by Dr. Yee-Cheong, but by a number of others, for us just to do something, for us to try to first find some ways for all of us to individually, as well as the various organizations with which we're associated, to find ways to be able to act on all of these actions. And that was really wonderful and inspirational. I think some of the questions were how can we do more, how can we try to address the need for that? There were a few questions that pointed to quite naturally the inevitable holds of one sort or another that could show up in any sort of great program. It was interesting to see that there was a certain note of I think significant skepticism, at least among maybe a minority of people here in the audience, but I think it was important, sometimes about some of what so many of our panelists and what maybe so many of the rest of us in this room would take for granted about some of the projections about climate or some of the other kinds of suggestions about where things might go. And one other strong thread that did run through was that a number of people did point out that yes, they thought it would be appropriate if the Earth Institute leading by example perhaps in future State of the Earth messages perhaps the lunches could perhaps a more sustainable package. I'm in no position what the Earth Institute would be able to do about that, but I can guarantee you you have been heard on this point, so thank you, thank you very much for that.

Let's at this point try to jump into some of the real questions about this. The whole point where we started with this was the question is sustainable development feasible? And yesterday Darcy Kelley pointed out that maybe in a sense that's a rhetorical question, it's almost a foregone conclusion that of course at this meeting the answer is going to be yes, otherwise we wouldn't have much to talk about. But I guess I want to ask the members of our panel now, and it's picking up in some respects on the potentially menacing outlook of where the future may be going that could come out of Joe Romm's synthesis of things from this morning, is suppose we were having this meeting ten years from now, it's the twentieth anniversary for the Institute at that point, and at that point if we were having the same meeting and we were asking ourselves this question, is sustainable development feasible would the answer still be yes, or after ten more years if the status quo has preserved, if the trajectory of events has not budged from what we see, is it too late at that point? Anyone. Yes, please.

Rajendra Pachauri: Well, I'd say if we were still in the same situation ten years from now then the answer would be that sustainable development is imperative, because there wouldn't be a moment for us to delay taking the right kinds of actions. I hope in these ten years there would be enough lessons learned on the basis of which perhaps every element of human society would get involved. So Jeff Sachs in 2016 will certainly have his hands full in charting out a roadmap on how we might go ahead, because I believe if there is no progress in the next ten years then our choices will narrow, and I think we'll have to articulate the fact that we really don't have a choice.

Sir Partha Dasgupta: It's sort of looking ten years ahead, John, I was wondering whether some of us have done some calculations about the past, the recent economic history of not the world, I haven't done the summing up, but certainly over regions, and a number of us have published together, ecologists and economists, in trying to see whether in some sense the productive base of regions and countries, per capita of course, has expanded over the past twenty, thirty years, or shrunk. And the news is pretty much as you might expect in your worst moments of fear, which is that the poorest countries, that is the ones that are poor in terms of GDP per capita, are precisely the ones whose productive base, that's a different index by the way, that's the base on which things happen, and that includes natural capital, has gone down. So in some sense I would say we haven't, if you include in the “we” the regions that are suffering, the people in those regions which are suffering, they haven't experienced sustainable development over the past thirty years. So unless we when, say that in some sense those of us who are fortunate to be in this part of the world can persuade through our voting, fortunately these are also democracies, through collective action, to see how we could transfer not resources directly, but through curbing our demand on the natural resource base to enable others to pick up, I don't quite see how things will reverse themselves in the next ten, fifteen years.

Joel Cohen: The question is of questionable meaning because it's a counter-factual about the world staying the same for ten years. There are going to be another three-quarters of a billion people on the planet, and they're going to all have their needs. There are going to be a few other things. But I'd like to answer your question by posing a problem to which I don't know the solution, and that is three fundamental limitations of representative democracy based on nations. And the three limitations are that first the time scale of the problems that have been addressed today so far exceed the time scale of tenure in office of any elected official that it's difficult for elected officials to pay much attention to them. The second problem is that the time scale is so long that we are making decisions about people's lives and other species who don't vote. So we vote today on the things that affect us, but the outcomes are fifty years hence, and my children's children aren't born yet, and I don't know their preferences, although I can guess they might not be that different from mine, but we're making decisions about people who aren't involved in the voting and selection. And the third of national-based democracies is that a government like the United States makes a choice that affects people who do not vote in the elections of the officials of the United States, whether it's cotton subsidies, sugar subsidies, environmental policy, whether we go metric, a whole bunch of things where the people affected by our decisions don't have a hand on the oar. And I am deeply troubled by these three shortcomings of national-based representative democracy, and I think that if we don't get some way around those problems in the next ten years we shackle ourselves and prevent ourselves from addressing the problems of sustainable development.

John Rennie: Jeff.

Jeffrey Sachs: I don't have an answer, Joel, but I think that part of the problem is a little bit of disillusionment with our own electoral democracy right now, and less with electoral democracy in general. Because there are other parts of the democratic world that are doing a much better job at addressing these longer term challenges. I don't think we would agonize right now at least, I wouldn't, about Sweden or Denmark or Norway's look to the future or responsibility abroad. They're spending 1% of their GNP roughly on development assistance, they're not at war, and they are ample leading subscribers to the Kyoto Protocol and to faster action on a number of environmental fronts. It's not perfect, but it also gives a little bit more hope that it's perhaps not intrinsic in the institutions of electoral democracy, but maybe particularities of our own political or social or economic circumstances here. I agree with you, there's no good answer to that question, but I'm not sure that it's simply, I don't want to say simply, there's nothing simple about it, but I wouldn't say that it's necessarily a matter of the lack of institutions that could do this job. And what we have actually is - I'll stop there. I think Nick was going to say something much more intelligent.

Nicholas Kristof: Not at all. I was just going to say that I'm maybe a bit more optimistic, and I think that perhaps reflects the fact that I spent most of my career in east Asia. And in general if you get people who've been involved in development and have lived in east Asia, you get them together, they tend to kind of beam and be really optimistic about things, and you get a pool of people who spent most of their careers doing development issues in Africa and they sit around, they look kind of doleful, and I mean that reflects the reality that east Asia has been incredibly successful after an earlier epoch of being incredibly unsuccessful, but more recently has been very successful with remarkably little outside assistance, while Africa has recently, in recent decades, been remarkably unsuccessful with a lot of outside help. And indeed I think some reasons for optimism are that the lessons that we've seen in the more successful places have been, or increasingly are being, absorbed and one sees that in some African countries, but also I mean everywhere. I'm just back from Pakistan, and Pakistan now is growing at 8% a year. And it's a lot easier to be optimistic in that kind of environment in general. The other point I would make is that, you know, on those moments when I am feeling a little more pessimistic, it's not just because the issues that I think we've been talking about, but also because of some other things that just keep in the back of one's mind and I mean one is nationalism rising in a lot of places, and the other is security issues. And that can completely destroy otherwise promising scenarios.

John Rennie: Actually I'm glad you brought up the security issues, because that in fact was something that a few people had also asked questions about. We talked a lot about different forms of investment in trying to support sustainable development in various ways, obviously with the aims of trying to alleviate poverty, trying to protect the environment, but there's also a question of are there ways to sometimes try to target some of those actions also in a way that will reduce some kinds of conflicts, for example, between nations that are sharing a border and which conceivably they're going to get into a lot of disputes. Are there any thoughts about that, about ways that an additional set of criteria that might influence the kinds of investments we're making?

Nicholas Kristof: I think we desperately need security, I mean if you look at Africa right now maybe the two worst places to choose to be born right now would be Darfur and Congo. And the reason that those are such awful places to choose to be born don't have to do with environment or with education or health problems, it has to do with the fact that in one case you've got a genocidal government busy trying to kill people, and in the other case you've had security fall apart and a civil war result. And those do result in part from issues of environmental degradation and lack of education and all kinds of other issues, they're all interrelated, but you would get tremendous bang for the buck in terms of intervention by working out security mechanisms in Africa in particular so that one could stop this slide early on. I mean in west Africa you had problems in Liberia that then infected Sierra Leone, infected Ivory Coast and may next cause a collapse in Guinea. You had something similar in central Africa with the Great Lake countries and then Congo, and now we may be having the same with Sudan and Chad. So some kind of international security force to try to address these early I think would just make tremendous difference.

Jeffrey Sachs: I think, Nick, security's important, but there's no way that security can conceivably work without development in those places. And the biggest mistake - I wanted to take issue with one thing that you said, because a lot of people believe it and I think it's absolutely not the case, and if you do believe it I want to go over the numbers with you, we haven't given a lot of aid to Africa. What we've done is watched, we've manipulated, we've watched as a spectator sport, we have done all the things that you have so boldly and rightly said we've neglected, but the myth that we've done so much and so little has happened is one of the pernicious myths. We reviewed that yesterday, Nick, you know, the perception of the public about aid levels is that it's something like thirty times larger than it is, they'd like to cut it in half and then it could go up tenfold to be what they'd like it to be roughly, and with Africa I've been in this argument for years, if you actually look at what we do, we do almost nothing, we let people die. And I think helping Americans to understand that - they're skeptical about the military invention because they say that's, you know, every time we try that it's a disaster, if it's Somalia, or if it's Lebanon, or if it's Iraq, and they're right about that in a lot of ways. And I know what you're getting at which is let's stop the slaughter first, which is absolutely correct. But the problem in my view therefore is that I believe it did start basically as an ecological and a population crisis of extreme poverty, and I believe it continues that way, and I have yet to see even one development plan put forward for the region by anybody. I've said it inside the UN on innumerable occasions, I've said it to individual donors on innumerable occasions, I've never seen a development concept put forward for the region, and it seems to me a tragic mistake because the first thing I think you would do is get some interest of the combatants that maybe there's an alternative for them, if they were actually thinking about a future rather than killing each other. And so this I think is the way to link the security, the development, and the sustainability. It's a water stressed area with impoverished competing groups, well before Khartoum got involved they were desperately killing each other over their camels and their farms a generation ago. You know the story much better than I do, of course, but the point is we tend to view these problems too late, then we ignore them, as you've been pointing out, but we don't view them first as development and sustainable development challenges. And I think that's one of the huge lacks of any real solution for these problems. It's one of the reasons probably Americans are skeptical about doing anything, because they just see aren't we just going to end up trapped in yet another place where they're all shooting at us with no solutions, because no one's tabled a real solution that would capture the imagination of the existing combatants a future for them. And I think that that's one of the most important things that we need to do.

Rajendra Pachauri: I would agree with Jeff because there is so much evidence all around, wherever you've had security problems that are sort of homegrown they have arisen to a large extent out of ecological damage and disaster, and of course a lack of development. And I also agree with Jeff that really speaking we have not focused enough on Africa in the manner that we should have. Even where we have provided development assistance it's typically been in a form where you paradrop equipment, technology, and totally unsuitable know-how. There's really been no genuine effort to create capacity at the grassroots level. And I think unless we do that you're not really creating the conditions for any kind of sustainable development.

Now just going back to what was discussed earlier, I'm not all that pessimistic about our ability to achieve sustainable development, because let's say in the next ten years we must also remember that quite apart from the inherent strengths that democracy per se has, we also will see a major improvement not only in the development of knowledge but its dissemination. And my own experience, I mean I can say with some degree of pride, the IPCC, the organization that I'm associated with, has by and large had profound impact on thinking and understanding of the issue of climate change. Now if in other areas also we could bring about large scale understanding of some of the problems that face us, maybe action will follow. Lester Brown I think said that communism collapsed because they told lies about the economy, capitalism would collapse if we tell lies about the ecology. We need to understand.

John Rennie: Again I have to thank you. You've segued exactly into the next point which I wanted to raise. Again, maybe one of the most important concerns the people in our audience ultimately is one of getting the message out, informing the people and the right people in the right ways. And I think there were a lot of questions about, for example, ways of getting this information out to the public in general, ways of being able to develop some sort of grassroots actions, and letting people about that. And I'd definitely like to hear anything we could say about all that. But I think also Nick, you're media, I'm media, we've got sort of a special responsibility, and that's because I think one of the other concerns that came up a lot is how do we deal with these issues in a way that cuts through what's seen as sheer partisanship, how do we manage to make problems of sustainable development which is seen as so much of a concern of a certain kind of granola, Birkenstock-wearing faction of the United States, how do we make that something that registers with the rock hard red staters? Any thoughts? Nick, you want to start off with that?

Nicholas Kristof: I think that's actually easier now, I think it's a great question and I think it's much easier now than it was fifteen years ago. You know, fifteen years ago you had Tom DeLay talking about choosing between Ghana or Grandma, you had Jesse Helms talking about foreign aid is money down the rat hole. And there really has been a change in kind of middle America, and that has been increasing interest in the Religious Right in some of these issues, and I mean it's extraordinary to me that Sam Brownback who's, you know, one of the most conservative Republicans in the Senate has become a real advocate on some of these issues, particularly involving Africa. And so I think that on some aspects of development you are beginning to get a constituency within the Right, and that efforts to address these issues will be far, far more effective if that can be built upon.

Abby Joseph Cohen: I think it's also important to note that sometimes things happen perhaps for the best, the silver lining in the dark cloud. Think, for example, of the huge impact that a few months of elevated gasoline prices has had in terms of dramatically reducing the demand for gas guzzling automobiles and leading to significant increase in the demand for hybrid vehicles, just one example of something happening that just turned out to be reasonably favorable. But that's just an anecdote. In terms of something that I think is much more trend, I think it's fair to say that there really is now significant momentum in the business community in the United States to do the right thing. Many are expressing the point of view that they're not waiting for the federal government to adopt the right policies, but rather to begin to move forward right now. And is it possible that we have now passed an important tipping point? Some of the data that I presented earlier today that about 15% of the assets invested in the US equity market are controlled by investors who say that these issues are important to them, they want their portfolio managers to focus on them, and very importantly, they want the managers of the companies in which they invest to focus on them as well. And it seems to me that we now have so many companies saying the right thing, fewer are doing the right thing, but everyone is moving in the same direction. And that makes me feel much more optimistic than I was as few as three years ago.

John Rennie: Abby, if I could just pick up on one particular question. Earlier of course you were talking about the very fact that the fund managers handling the ESG funds, they have a fiduciary responsibility obviously to be bringing good returns to their clients. Do we need any new sorts of metrics or better sorts of metrics to try to encourage them in some directions beyond what the simple reflection of dividends paid would result in?

Abby Joseph Cohen: That is a terrific question and one that I wish were easier to answer. Let me explain that there are many problems in the simple metrics of this area, but I'll go through just two of them if I may. First of all the company analysis itself, the sort of disclosures that we get from some companies are very hard to parse. There are no publicly available databases that do a particularly good job of it. There is no place where a shareholder can go, or a manager can go, and get reliable and consistent data comparing how Company A and Company B are performing in this regard, even in the same industry. So point number one is not only do we need more disclosures from the companies, but we need people out there to analyze these disclosures and tell us whether they are meaningful. Number two, in terms of the performance data of the companies in the stock market or in the portfolios, we can measure that, but we need to adjust, if you will, for other risks that are taken on. And one of the things that we have seen significant improvement on in our community is trying to identify long term liabilities. Generate a return between now and next Tuesday, but what are the long liabilities? Think along the lines of asbestos. Forty, fifty years ago companies who were generating very good profits and very good shareholder returns legitimately did not know that they were also creating long term environmental and medical liabilities. And what we see today is that many companies are raising their hands and saying there is a degree of uncertainty out there, and the shareholders are now trying to build that potential and currently unmeasured risk into their analyses.

John Rennie: A lot of these forward looking economic arguments are obviously going to be playing themselves out against global population looks extremely unlike the one we have now, as Joe was describing, over these next forty, fifty, sixty years we're going to see a huge transformation in the shape of the human race. And I guess a question I'm uncertain about is how much do we really know about how to make a transition from the kind of growth based economy we've got today to one where stability of population size, at least, is a much bigger fixture? Is that a terra incognita [?], or are we confident about going forward with that?

Abby Joseph Cohen: If I can answer it just from my narrow slice of this panel, and that is to say that as there is global economic development we create other issues that need to be dealt with. For example, in the United States and in all of the major developed economies the use of energy per unit of GDP has declined notably. In the United States we today use only half as much energy per unit of GDP as we did twenty or twenty-five years ago. That sounds pretty good. I wish all of that was due to more efficient processes and conservation. The fact of the matter is that some of that improvement is due to the fact that we not outsource some of our energy intensive activities to other developing economies. And so if we take a look at younger economies what we see is that they are in fact using more energy per unit of GDP than we have been using, and to the extent that there may not be the same degree of sensitivity to this issue, the regulatory environment may be even more lax in those nations, we may be exporting the problem. So by looking at on a nation-by-nation basis we don't come up, if you will, with the optimal solution for the planet. But one quick footnote, if I may, and that is to recognize that multinational companies who tend to be based in the developed economies tend to be reasonably good citizens from an environmental and an energy use standpoint when they go to other countries. They are not usually the bad players in those communities.

Sir Partha Dasgupta: I think we fall into the temptation on occasions like this to think about these global problems conventionally spoken top-down, but I mean something like what should we plan, how do we tilt the economy in that direction as opposed to the earlier one? Of course the action, the activities, that are leading to the macroeconomic phenomena that we observe and criticize and worry about are happening at the level of the household, at the level of the individual throughout the world. They're receiving signals from the rest of the world which enables them to do one thing rather than another, and they choose reasonably intelligently. This is sort of invariant across cultures, as far as I can tell, and invariant across regions. And Abby was referring to disclosures from the level of firms, but it is really quite remarkable that as late as 2006 national income accounts, which are not firms, it's delivery, it's the level of the state, and international accounts, carry very little information about what we are doing to nature. There's a huge swath of natural capital there which is unaccounted for. And if they're unaccounted for they are not going to be taken into account when decisions are made. The reason we are in the kind of soup we are in and why the Earth Institute does so much interesting work, is able to do, is we're not paying for so many of the resources that are being used. They are goods, but they are not accounted, they're free, or even if they're not free the price is very, very low. So it seems to me that we need very soon, it's a matter of real urgency, that we do our economic calculation at the level of the household, not only at the level of the nation, but taking into account the capital assets which we are making use of.

John Rennie:

I am very sorry to truncate the conversation at this point, but we are completely out of time, and there are so many other points we could go to. Thank you. You've been a wonderful group of panelists all together, and I want to thank you very much for all that. And if I could just pull out one quick point of commentary just myself, I have to also thank you and all the other speakers here today for being extremely unreasonable people. And here's what I mean by that. Unreasonable people are responsible for almost all of the progress in the world, because they stare reality in the eye and insist the world is going to change more the way they want it to be. A reasonable person does not look at almost a billion others who are in the most abject poverty and say we're going to be able to eliminate that in our lifetime. A reasonable person does not look at an eternal kind of scourge on mankind, something like malaria, and say we can stop that. And a reasonable person does not look at ongoing changes in the Earth's climate and say we can fix that kind of problem. That's not the way reasonable people behave, so I'm very glad that this is a group of very unreasonable people. Now a lot of the unreasonable people who have been speaking, and a lot of you who are in this audience, you're the kinds of people that some others out there would look at and they would consider you do-gooders, or bleeding hearts, or they might consider you hysterics, and they will do that as a way of being able to ignore you, because that's why they will call you do-gooders, but what they mean is you are troublemakers because they are complacent the world the way that it is. And I think that all of you owe those people a few sleepless nights. So it's very much my hope that after Jeff concludes this meeting with a few words I really hope that we will all go from this place and cause a world of trouble.

Thank you very much.