 Hello everybody. Hello and welcome. I'm Susan Collins, the Joan and Sanford Wildein 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 of the International Policy Center. And it is a great honor for us to have the internationally renowned development economist with us, Mary Sacks, who is here to deliver our 2010 City Group Foundation lecture. The City Group 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 university's 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 Sacks, 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 Cadillac Professor of Sustainable Development and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University. He's special advisor to the United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and president and co-founder of the Millennium Promise Alliance, a non-profit organization aimed at ending extreme global poverty. Please join me in welcoming Jeff Sacks to the podium. Jeff? 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 at Oak Park Ten 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 16th such meeting 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 notice in the United States in recent months is to defeat the congressman 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 nearly 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 in 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 suggests 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 U.S. 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 that there was a large close up at the U.N. 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 U.N. without that goal since it was a U.N. objective of the signatories to this treaty but I never heard one word about it in casual conversation in the world in the eight years that it was supposedly an 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 want to 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 these 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 going to come so today is not a happy story even though it's a well time to the opening of yet another meeting in the chamber tail of that ask 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 going to make later in my talk but in other words I'm going to try to suggest some ways forward not that I think we're all that far along on this so what is sustainable development and 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 going to talk a little bit less about the poverty issues today just say a word we can certainly discuss the issues of those who despite the economic growth are left behind in the discussion after my opening remarks suffice it to say we're not even close to achieving this objective of sustainable development if you're a student I urge you to study it because you will have decades ahead of useful things to do and it is one of the least solved problems on the planet and it therefore combines urgency intellectual fascination and almost open virgin territory for intellectual pursuits because we still lack any deep understanding of how we're going to actually accomplish these goals and in almost no part of the world save a few countries perhaps exemplified by the Scandinavian countries which are more on track than any other part of the planet is this agenda properly engaged right now in the United States at best we care about economic growth and have put the environment into a very very distant second place this picture is the template from an important article that appeared in 2009 in Nature magazine where a group of about 25 of the world's leading ecologists got together in a expert review of the evidence to consider the environmental boundaries or thresholds that pose the greatest dangers for humanity they tried to begin to assess because it was their very frank acknowledgement 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 in 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, the notion of acidification, there's ozone depletion which you're aware of and 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 straight forward technical substitution of one set of chemicals for another which over the long term will actually reverse the ozone depletion that was very far underway 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 the technical means was found and then those who had 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 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 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 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 200 mile long dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico as the Mississippi River accumulates the runoff of that nitrogen, the leaching from all of the farm lands of 25 to 30 states in the Midwest carries it down to the Gulf and creates the eutrophication phenomenon, the hypoxia and 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 feeding systematically roughly 6 of the 7 billion people and the other billion are struggling every day 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 phosphorus cycle which we're similarly deranging because it's nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium which are the three macronutrients that have to be added through 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 farm land 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 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 loadings 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 it 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 we're very close to them. Those points at which you arrive at huge and perhaps amplifying instability and irreversibility. For climate change you look at the bull's eye there only three of the five parts of that cone are shown. This is right at the top. So they were suggesting that there still is some room before we pass the ultimate climate change threshold. My colleague at the Earth Institute are lead actually we have two lead climate scientists Jim Hansen and Wally Broker. 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. 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's 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 years 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 two or three times that and what Hanson has shown dreadfully is that whenever the Earth has been above this 350, I'm sorry this 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 Hanson'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 going to happen for 200 years until we wreck the planet or maybe 400 years but that the paleo climate record is actually quite powerful and Hanson's basic point is that there's 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 reflectance 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 oceans 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 peat that is then exposed so Hanson says if 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 concentrations of societies around the world near the coast could be devastating what it actually means is everyone's moving to Ann Arbor from the coastline so save a place for your neighbors millions are going to have to move in soon so this is one of Hanson's maps somewhat familiar I'm sure to most or all of you that there isn't a part of the world that isn't affected and the main thing I would just want to 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're discussed and that is that it's been known for about 40 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 Arranius 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 from 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 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 in the United States has no idea there's an economic crisis right now except by hearing the speeches of the U.S. president or a Prime Minister of Greece Ireland because in the rest of the world economic growth is robust and at historic highs and that's 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 adopt 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% per year economic growth that's extraordinary because compound growth is extraordinary and compound growth at 10% per year for what is now 32 years is absolutely remarkable so if you make the calculation you get from 1978 that 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 in trade and through the flows of capital with lower wages developing countries of Asia and now a 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 the rest of the world is a massive surge of 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% per year now mind you 5% per year is a doubling time of only 14 years and many of these countries are growing at 8 or 10% 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% per year we're barely in that category maybe at about half percent growth right now in 2010 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% 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 US so once you take into account population growth we're both basically growing at something like 1% 1.5% 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 world said goodbye to us and 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 poorer 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're growing now at 06% 7% 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's 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 5 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% 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 genius 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 were literally if you were a pastoralist community you might trek 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 and 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's seven billion people on the planet right now six point nine but who's counting and the average income is about ten thousand 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 it comes out to around seventy billion trillion dollars ten thousand dollars on average per person and seven billion people suppose that the whole world just caught up to the rich world income so the rich world's at forty thousand dollars per capita on average the world average is ten thousand if there were complete convergence that would mean a four fold 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 proportionate growth rate is slowing we're still adding seventy five to eighty million people net population increase each year though now all in the poorer countries you combine this force of convergence with the extra roughly forty 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 another word stabilization at around nine billion as opposed to today seven billion combine those two forces and you see that we have built into the global dynamics right now an increase of total economic activity over the course of a century say that could amount to five or six fold increase and the point to keep in mind is that not only are those forces underway and much to be prized 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's 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 been unsustainable at the baseline and then having built within it this massive increase of further anthropogenic 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 one 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 US level would tend to grow three 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 into 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% 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 into 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 in 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 emphasized 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 first order differential equation thank goodness so all 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 of 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 completeness they are going to be the essential question for humanity even if Fox News and Wall Street Journal and all the rest of our media haven't figured it out yet that's deeply embedded in the realities of population, convergent economic growth and ecosystem realities and the only question is how and when we catch up to this basic reality. One of the things it will mean of course is that the United States which has 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 Warholi in 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've been in well I don't know if that's true but almost every and I would that's dozens by the way but in the last dozen countries that I visited in the last five days it feels like but in the last four 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 used to make the previous slide that the U.S. share of the world economy won't disappear we'll still be a big and outsize economy but we'll go from being something like 20% of the world's population gross product per year to being something closer to about 13% 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 world's 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 a set of basic calculations of what we need to do so let's look to the middle of the century and think about the what the climate scientists are telling us now according to Jim Hansen he's telling us it's finished we're already in disaster most climate scientists 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 want to 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 lead 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 then emissions per unit of GNP which is pretty constant around the world by the way because we all use basically the same technologies so the emissions 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 going to blow the whole world out of the water or into the water I should say and that means reducing something like 83% 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 a program at the Earth Institute as well were 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's lots of waste as Larry has emphasized so often only 1% 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 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 that 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 US 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 if for any of those who see the graph is gigatons 30 billion tons of CO2 that are emitted by the burning of coal oil and natural gas the US is 6 of 30 we're a fifth now mind you we are 5% of the world's population emitting 20% of the world's emissions so we're 4 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 US economy will roughly double in size between now and 2050 that's being as given some slowing down of our underlying growth rate to a pure per capita growth of about 1% 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 1.5 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 going to reduce emissions that would just stabilize emissions for that we have to change the way we use energy and roughly get to 1.3 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 30% 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 bit 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 as 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% 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 needs 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 going to 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% to 50% 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 an electric or fuel cell also electric but a 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 hit 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 want to 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 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% of the electricity is coal fired and where 50% of the overall primary energy is coal unbelievable the implications of that in such a rapidly growing economy it has meant that in a 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 one leading emitting country in the world and not per capita of course it's one fourth of the US per capita because it's four times the population and roughly the same emissions but it is the leading emitter because it is 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 going to 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 cause us to have a massive change the problem is we've not come to accept that and our political cycle is obviously with the time horizon inevitably of two years to the maximum that's on election day and the day after election day the time horizon is two years minus one day and the countdown is relentless and we're already in presidential election season and 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 over time as we learn from actually implementing there's probably nothing that needs to be done that isn't at least going board the mock up 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 cost 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 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 with in Washington that currently is about one point 1.35% of GNP so it's between 1 and 2% of GNP if instead you allow for the energy efficiency as well and still assume that high price not declining over time you get to something by the middle of the century that would be well under 1% of GNP and indeed if you phase in this transition you could stay less than 1% 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% of our income each year given that we're America these days I don't know what we're going to decide but as rational human beings 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 have been proposed in Washington and have so far been rejected by Washington till 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 producers bring clean technology online now how would you pay for that since we start 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 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 GNP according to this calculation now it may be that the technologies get even better of these renewables and they compete on their own, it could be that the article in Nature magazine had it two weeks ago maybe we've overestimated 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 is actually going to rise in price and pass the price of solar and wind and so on so you wouldn't need any subsidies at all we'd 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 the 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 want to 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 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 this 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 formed around the system rather than having a plan with a logic we had unfortunately the way we do it a scrum and ended up partly with a mess and on energy we didn't even end up with a mess, we ended up with a 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 adaptive programming but we haven't even started to do that. We went for a cumbersome cap and trade system which is a bit of a mess on many counts rather than a simpler, gradually rising and then we went for a carbon tax because supposedly the lesson was learned in 1993 when President Clinton tried to put in a BTU tax, never mentioned the word tax, that may be 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 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 a 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 baseload of coal but a much higher proportion of wind and solar and other intermittent 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're not 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 going to need nuclear and it's sad to say because it's a big problem in this world and the risks 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 going to need carbon capture and sequestration, clean coal and other of those tag 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 shale underneath the 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 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 Pew Center survey on American attitudes towards climate change. They're 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 change has been big news in the recent years the numbers of people who believe that there's evidence for it has fallen sharply. Down from 50% who believe that there is human induced climate change in the 19, sorry 2006 poll to just 34% 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 of the chart you see the answers by political party. Only 16% 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 right now. And where beliefs on the basic facts are so profoundly different across the divides. So 53% of Democrats, 16% of Republicans and the independents right in the middle at 32%. And among our newly ascendant tea party it's 8%. 8% of those who among the Republicans who said that they agreed to 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% 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 the same. 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 of us to the planet. Number one, Rupert Murdoch. 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 6am out of control. So it's morning exercise. But it actually has a very powerful impact. David Koch, who some of you 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 Climate Gate last year of time. 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 every day wrote the most vicious nonsense 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 on their 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. 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. Please. Yes, hi, Jeff. I'm Mary Albertson. I'm from Results Global Group in the area and I want to 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. Yeah, let's take one more. Thank you also for a great 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 of kilowatt hours or 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 going to have to increase our effort but also change our lifestyles to solve problems that lower temperature energy sources can 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 want to first thank Results International which is a 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 poverty 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 drylands and what's happening 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 drylands 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 the problems are poverty and we spend in Afghanistan a hundred 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 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 that girls can stay in secondary school which is one of the things that such a global fund would do or help for smallholder 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 going to make all of this 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 this I think there are a couple of things to say first let me make a technical point that solar power is very diffuse but there's 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 Tar 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 Desert Tech 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 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 statistics 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's a lot of that kind of learning and introspection to do we are absolutely on what the psychologist 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 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 conversation in the lobby and I invite you to stay and continue your discussion thanks again for joining us