 The idea behind this panel is to really turn the tables on a standard framing or narrative around climate change. And if climate change is a crime novel, every crime novel has to have a victim. And the crime is humanity's assault on nature through industrialism. And the victim is poor people everywhere, especially developing world. But as we know from Katrina and other stories that are often seen as harbingers of climate change domestically in enriched countries as well. And there's a couple of ironies surrounding that narrative. One, we've already talked about in previous panels, which is that it turns out that if you look at sustainability and climate change discourse, often what counts as sustainability in poor countries amounts to a shadow of the kind of economic and standard of living aspirations of the world as, for example, the United Nations define sustainable energy access as a light bulb, a fan, and a radio. And this gets to this tension that the energy panel discussed so interestingly between climate change issues and energy access issues. But there's also this sense of the victim as powerlessly sitting back and waiting for bad things to happen to them. And that also seems, to me, not only to be false, empirically false, all one has to do is look at the dynamic things that are going on everywhere from China to Indonesia to Brazil that make a mockery of this notion of victimhood. But also it forecloses this idea that there is much to be learned from the pathways that develop in countries and that disenfranchised populations in affluent countries are going to be creating and building on as we deal with a world that, as Brad says, yes, has to confront climate change, but many, many other complex challenges and opportunities as well. So the idea of this panel is to say, we're not going to talk about victimhood and we're not going to talk about death and disaster. We're going to talk about opportunities that new patterns of development that can create, that challenges can stimulate in terms of innovation and creativity. And think about new pathways to a better world that actually the developed world may well be able to learn from as other countries and other populations show the way. So I think we'll start with each of the panelists just talking for a few minutes about the sorts of ways that they're thinking about the future in a more positive, less kind of victim-centric approach and then dig into some specifics and then open it up to conversation with you all as soon as you guys have had your say. So, Nikki, do you want to get started? Sure. I work mostly on domestic issues just as an FYI. So I will be gently taking us into international as we move this way. But I wanted to. Exactly. See, he was already thinking that way. So I wanted to draw us a picture, create some context. When we talk about domestic climate change issues and when we talk about international climate change issues, what are the similarities there? The similarities is that climate vulnerability and exposure for the people that are most impacted, the reasons why they are the most impacted tend to be the same domestically and internationally. It's because of things that are non-climate related. It's because of infrastructure. It's because of poverty. It's because of environmental issues that were in existence before the recent climate change. The recent climate change, the word is sticking in my head. Moving on. Phenomenal. No, because it's... Hysteria. I think it was looking at the last panels. The way that we talk about climate change right now is very different than the way that we talked about climate change 50 years ago, the way that we talked about climate change 100 years ago. We have been terraforming the earth for a while since the beginning of agriculture. And there have been cultures, ethnic tribes, different groups of people that have been very aware that there is no crisis point of the way that we manage the earth where everything will be perfect. We're changing things all of the time. And the way that we talk about it now is slightly different than that. So it's the recent phenomenon of climate change. But when we talk about hope, considering that the risks are the same, domestically and internationally, one of the things that's very hopeful for me is that those who are most impacted tend to also be the ones that are the most clear about what needs to be done. I was executive director of Green For All until late last year, which is a national organization that focuses mainly on green jobs. And one of the things that we did was commission a study. And we published a report about what people of color think about climate change in America. And the reason why this report was unique was because African-Americans had been polled, Latinos had been polled, and Asian-Americans had been polled separately. And that data was being held in separate camps, but there wasn't a study that aggregated all of that data to see how people of color in America really thought about climate change. And what we found was that 75% of likely voters who are mostly over the age of 50, so this is not just the inconvenient truth generation of youngsters that I'm talking about here, they all actively seek information on climate destabilization and have over the last two years, 70% of people of color in this country would actually change how they vote depending on what a candidate says about climate change. And 50% of those people felt like climate change and the reason to deal with it is immoral imperative. So when I get into these, I'm gonna get into some real specifics about how different communities across the country and across the world are dealing with climate change from the bottom up, but when I get into those specific examples, what I want you to remember is that part of not considering those who are most impacted victims is just in the beginning asking them, how do you think about this? How do you think about yourselves? What is the context that you create for yourself? And clearly the context is, if we mess it up, we gotta clean it up. So I'll begin with an example. I work on water and agricultural issues and I work with farmers in Arizona where I'm working and also in India. So it's always very striking to me how the two groups perceive climate change. So back in Arizona, we got funding to do, to look at impacts of climate change on agriculture. But a senior colleague told me, if you want to build relationships with the farmers, don't mention the word climate change. This will just break all the relation between you because the perception here is the moment you say climate change, the farmer is thinking ahead about all the regulations that will come his way and his or her way and they are thinking about how that would decrease their autonomy and more federal regulation and so on. And so they are very opposed to this. And then when I go to India I talk to farmers about climate change. This is a conversation starter in fact. Or somebody is asking me about stuff that I have been thinking for a very long time and I've been trying to communicate and nobody has been listening to me. So they would start talking about the fact that the rain is coming late. They have their own narratives about how the climate is changing. This insect comes out later now. The frogs are appearing later or whatever have you. And then they have their own way. Slowly the conversation will go on to what are they thinking about, how to deal with the situation. And the whole narrative there is about how climate change is impacting their everyday operation, how it is affecting their livelihoods and then how they are dealing with what they can do about it. So how are they thinking about, and there are several examples of how they are already putting in, without knowing this is adaptation or mitigation or whatever, just thinking about solutions, about simple technologies that can, so I'm planting late, I'm working with the output, the person I sell my output to, I have already talked to him about what would happen if I sell the product later this time and they work that whole thing out. So I think it has a lot to do with how you build the narrative as one being of opportunities or and so making, empowering people thinking about innovations and opportunities as opposed to this narrative of more and more regulations. There the government doesn't work anyways. So people are, so in that sense it helps, people are already thinking about what they can do themselves. And so I think this victimization narrative I completely agree has done more damage here. So I think about what's going on in developing countries and how decisions in places like Washington DC impact economic opportunities in those places. And the short answer is it's becoming less and less relevant what happens in Washington. Why is this? So one is that people are getting massively richer. In the next 15 years, a billion people around the world will come out of poverty. The World Bank does projections on when are we looking at the end of extreme poverty around the world? The margin is somewhere in the next 15 years. The worst case scenario is 93% of the global population will be out of extreme poverty but they're projecting it's gonna be closer to 97. So we're looking at very small margins. And not just extreme poverty but we're seeing hundreds of millions of people go from poverty into the lower rungs of the middle class. Which is fantastic news including for the planet even though it makes some people nervous. I'll come to the connection in a second. It's not just people are getting richer countries are getting richer. Right now the World Bank one way we think of it is do you qualify for cheap loans from the World Bank? If you're a poor country you get essentially 40 year interest free loans. If you're not a poor country you don't you get commercial loans. Right now the World Bank has 78 countries that qualify. Within 10 to 15 years that will be probably around two dozen. We're seeing almost total wipe out of the current the current system that thinks of poor and rich countries. They're all moving into the middle income. And this is also great news. It means that countries will have greater access to finance, greater capabilities, greater abilities to deliver their own needs. And it also means much less importance and relevance for the West. And essentially the developing world and this is almost every country is they're not waiting for us. This is not like it was in the 1980s or even early 1990s. It's also great news for both them and for us but it does force us to rethink what our role is. And I'll come back to the first panel which I think is a good window into this which is on the energy gaps. They're just massive. As people are rising out of poverty and become entering the middle class, right now there are more than a billion people, something between a billion and two billion people that don't have access to regular electricity. I was just looking at the data. Canada versus say Ethiopia, average Canadian will use about 16,000 kilowatt hours per person per year. Average Ethiopian around 50. So we're talking 300 times. Ethiopia happens to be one of the fastest growing economies in the world pulling people out of poverty very fast and as these poor countries grow the demand for energy is just absolutely going to expand rapidly. But the way that we think about it is seems completely outdated. So for example modern energy targets are just not modern. The way that we think, if I give you a statistic that 15% of the population in Tanzania has access to energy, what that means is that the IEA estimates that the average person has 100 kilowatt hours per person per year. That is what a Canadian will use in two days. So we're not anywhere near modern energy access and we need realistic targets if we're gonna think about what is the actual demand that we're likely to face so that we can have adequate responses. And this means fine, solar lamps are fine if you need a couple of light bulbs and a cell phone charger but that's not modern energy. I just don't think until you can run an iron ore smelter on solar panels that we're going to be able to move to totally carbon free sources. And I know everyone throws around the cell phone example we can leapfrog. There's really important lesson from cell phones but it's not leapfrogging from hard wire to wireless. It's that when you start to provide a service that poor people want, even poor people that you think don't have any extra cash, they will pay if it's a good service. That is why in Nigeria there's only 12 million bank accounts but there are 60 million cell phones because there's absolutely people will pay these are some of the most profitable businesses and they're available everywhere and we will see that in energy as well. So what does that mean for outsiders? One, I think we need to accept that a high energy planet is inevitable. We're not gonna be able to stop that and we should move forward rather than trying to constrain growth and consumption. We should try where we can to work to create incentives for cleaner sources and ensure that the energy generation that's gonna happen as oil and gas and all of these other sources get developed actually leads to expanded access for people. This means investing in things like new business models for distribution. And then something I hope we'll talk about is that ethically I think it's very, very important for those of us sitting in San Francisco or Washington D.C. or London to avoid some of the gross hypocrisy that I hear about when I travel to Africa that is that we are pushing poor countries to adopt cleaner technologies. We're trying to deny certain access to finance for things like natural gas power plants. And this comes at a time when here in the United States we have 3,400 power plants that run on fossil fuels. Country like Ghana, which I visit every year has two, they would like to build number three and we're trying to stop them. Okay, thanks. So you've provided kind of a high level look at the reasons why we can expect different development pathways to emerge in both domestically and populations that are perhaps not part of the mainstream economy but especially in across the developing world. So I know each of you are also thinking more specifically about models, about opportunities, about the way the world might look and also what we might learn. So can we burrow down a little bit now and talk a little more specifically about the sorts of things you're either thinking about or seeing happening or trying to make happen? Yeah. When I was thinking about examples, a couple of themes that I noticed were that they both came out of non-climate related fields and they activated specifically in response to climate disasters, which brought up another theme, which is documenting post-disaster innovations is incredibly important and it's something that I can't emphasize enough because there are a number of anecdotal stories about well after Sandy, well after Katrina, well after the hurricane, well after the storm, well after the earthquake, but then when I look for data, how many people, what did it take to do this? How much money would it take to expand it? That kind of stuff isn't really there and so we need to invest in research to make sure that as innovations come up in real time, we're keeping pace with what's available. So one of these things in terms of a field that's non-climate related is the collaborative economy, which is Uber, Airbnb, the sharing economy, it has a lot of different names and Airbnb has a disaster relief program that started organically after Hurricane Sandy in New York because they noticed, the Airbnb staff noticed that after the hurricane, people tried to start listing their homes for $0 because they wanted to house refugees from the storm in the neighborhood that these people were familiar with because one thing about relocating, if your home gets destroyed by a storm or you can no longer go into your neighborhood, is that small things become very important, right? That store that you're used to going to, your dry cleaning is still at this place and so you lose a lot of clothes because you can't go pick it up. My dog only will walk in this one neighborhood. There's just, there's things that feel really small but they're actually really important, especially when your home is no longer available to you. So Airbnb scrambled and struggled and in 24 hours created a platform that would allow people to list their home for no money to specifically house and feed folks that were recovering from a storm. And at this point, well, after, during Sandy, 1,400 homes opened up and since then in Serbia, Bosnia and Croatia for people affected by the Balkan floods, this platform was used. In London, Sardinia and Colorado, this platform was used after the floods. The Greek island of Keflonia after the earthquake and they've been partnering with cities to try to make this more available on the front end because right now it only activate, it's user generated, right? So it's completely grassroots at this point and it activates when people activate it when there's an event but they're trying to partner, actually the city of San Francisco was one of the first cities that they tried to partner with to actually put this in place beforehand because government officials can also be housed there if and when housing that's sponsored by the government isn't available quickly enough. And the other example that I wanted to bring up was the two bridges neighborhood. So two bridges is a neighborhood that's in the lower east side of Manhattan and after the storm there, one of the things they realized was that food and water was one of the biggest issues for people. I mean, there's obviously energy and there were obviously other issues but one of the reasons why food and water came up so much was because the two bridges neighborhood is incredibly diverse and that's one thing about America, but I mean, America, yeah, but Manhattan is just, it's a on steroids version of this. People living next door to each other that really don't speak the same language. 30 different languages spoken in a two block radius. Immigrants, just mistrust because the people that run the bodegas are not the same people that shop there. There's just cascading and multiple layers of issues that meant that even if there was infrastructure to be used in this neighborhood, getting past some of the cultural barriers to make sure that everyone had access to it would have been a big problem. So urbane development is a firm that went into the two bridges neighborhood and decided to start a climate resilience plan using food because the bodegas in that neighborhood were a hub where everyone would go for everything. And are people familiar with like who's a New Yorker in here, people that know how important bodegas are? Because I mean, bodegas two in the morning, I need anything. I need batteries and I need cat food and I need toilet paper and I need food for me. You know, it's an organic cereal and you can get all of that in a bodega depending on what bodega you're at. So these bodegas are incredible hubs in the community that people go to for everything. And so they surveyed 200 plus bodegas in the neighborhood to figure out what type of people owned it, what type of shoppers were there, what kind of food they offered and starting with cooking classes and neighborhood tours, they started to weave the community together. They got community translators so that people who knew how to speak a few different languages because to make sure everybody knew how to talk to each other. And they started, the thing that I wanna lift up here is they started by building trust because when you're dealing with working class folks trust is incredibly important. It's the very first thing. And then on top of that, phase two is gonna be making sure that there is a hub, that there are hubs at a few different bodegas so that they can have community generated power and broadband access. So it's a lot like the mesh networks that are coming up, only these mesh networks are gonna be bi people of color, low income people, for low income people. And so it's a pretty brilliant project and I haven't seen anyone approach it that deliberately before because usually when mesh networks like that come up in those kind of neighborhoods maybe they fall apart because of that trust factor. Someone's downloading something so I'm gonna cut them off and then it just falls apart. So the last thing I just wanna say is that the population of the two bridges neighborhood is 25,000 to 30,000 people. So this is a solution that could happen on that scale and could be replicated on that scale for different local populations. So I just wanna tie together two points and maybe this is obvious but Todd's point about DCs becoming increasingly irrelevant actually ties into a bigger point. I mean we're talking about very kind of grassroots bottom up creative context specific solutions which is the opposite of the way climate change has been framed from the beginning which is we've gotta have an international global governance scheme that imposes the same regime on all countries and what you're talking about is in some sense just completely saying that hasn't worked, it's not gonna work, screw that. What we really need to do is unleash creativity at the local level and see what happens. So Rindram, I know you've got some fabulous examples of that sort. Right, along the same lines, my background is as a development economist. I was trained here and we were taught exactly, I mean some what 20 years back about the same model of the centralized kind of planning top down and then how you can deliver goods from the top onto the bottom and just getting more and more better about doing that same model becoming more and more efficient but keeping the top down model in mind. But now I think both climate change and the spread of information and information technology is what it has done has just completely put that model on its face sort of turned the whole thing around because the whole way the narrative about inequality also came in was you look, you're planning for a country you look at areas which are best endowed you give those areas first all the resources and then you go streaming down and it's all that way. Now with information, with ITC technologies this whole thing has completely turned. For example, so now I'll come to my specific example. So for decades people, very brilliant people in my own country, I come from India have been working on great mathematical models of planning and some has worked, some of it has worked but we haven't seen much progress and now over the past two decades the field has opened up. It was completely dominated by economists and probably some engineers. So we have this huge country we are going to divide it into zones like you were talking about these clusters. So we're not going all the way to say every person is going to have all the services. That's of course very expensive. How do we think about community clusters all through the country and create hubs where we provide infrastructure and services. So instead of providing, making sure that every person has access to broadband we're going to create clusters and these clusters will come up in areas which let's say they were major tourist centers major historical sites, major marketing sites create clusters all around the country and then link those clusters with the villages through what they called a bicycle commute economy. So you pick up major clusters all through the country you provide them all the infrastructure and build on that infrastructure a set of services and then connect those hubs so there are these spokes going from the hubs that connect you to all the villagers in it. So it's not all the way this idealism of providing every person every service but making sure that the hubs are provided with the essential infrastructure and services. And then what you do is make use of what is special about that particular locality in which the hub is located. So it's not a uniform model of development we apply and it goes around the same thing to every place. We find out what is so special about a particular region. Maybe this region is very good has been known for its handicrafts. So this is what we focus on. There is another region which is known for its beautiful beaches. So this is a different kind of model that we are going to promote. And from those hubs then you build on the services and you connect people and you focus on local diversity and people's talents, local talents and link that up into a national vision of development instead of sort of this top down. And I think with climate change what has happened is that there is greater recognition of local knowledge. So like this example of the farmer that I was talking about, previously people would be know the model was that the expert will come and tell the farmer what has to be done. Now we recognize that this farmer has local knowledge that climate change is so much about the local impacts and the local impacts are very different in different places and we need to leverage that local knowledge and that is how you empower that poor person because what he has now is being valued which is his local knowledge. And so with that empowerment you build a model from the bottom up to and this has been tried in India. It's being talked about and being implemented. Very interesting example similar to what you were talking about. So just going back to that point I don't think it's the cell phone per se which is going to change the world or the solar pumps itself but I think this whole new paradigm that if we sort of engage with it there are components of it. I think that the total picture is what is transformative not so much these particular elements of... So how does the technology lead to social empowerment? How does it let local diversity flower? I think just connecting those dots are important rather than specific pieces of the technology. Todd, are you seeing examples of a different paradigm that the world can learn from? So I mean I'm seeing the US to kind of pile on our growing irrelevance and kind of our penchant to be quickly distracted by a shiny thing rather than what people are actually asking for. The president last summer, summer 2013 went to Tanzania in East Africa. This country even by the lowest standard only one out of eight people has any electricity at all. They also have a massive offshore natural gas discovery. They're trying to figure out how are they gonna work with the Norwegians to develop that? How are they gonna turn that massive natural gas discovery not only into cash for exports but also into domestic energy? The president happened to be there announcing a major US effort to try to promote electrification in Africa. Tanzania was gonna be one of the focus countries. They were gonna work with the Tanzanians on converting policy issues to convert natural gas into power. How do you get it into the villages? How do you get it? Deal with some very difficult policy issues. President Kame talked about that. But still this whole idea of technology, many people still think of technology as a gadget. It's an app on your phone. It's a little box that you're gonna create. It's not about ideas. So the president is there. The biggest issue in Tanzania. He announces the energy. What does he choose to do to highlight at the photo op? He pulls out something we heard earlier. The socket. The soccer ball created by American college students to recharge cell phones. I think I'll leave it there. Okay, well, we've got a few minutes left and I'd love to have a conversation amongst all of us, so please. So thank you very much. I think being newly in Africa here would be really sad if he said anything about the idea that I had here. The question I have is this. Are any of these bottom up approaches existing outside a policy framework? Now, having asked that question, let me just update you on something real. There are more cell phones in Nigeria than there are people. At the last count, there are 90 million cell phones in Nigeria. We are, as an environmentalist, I wonder what's gonna be the problem after those phones are discarded? What do we have in mind for those? But for me, the issue has really been policy, no matter what we think. And I think the problem has been transparency and accountability. Where Nigerians cannot even vote someone they think should come into power. Now, until we deal with those issues, I think when we discuss energy, when we discuss climate, when we discuss development, the issues of policy and politics must not be left to background or even what's the word now, left alone. The question is, does any of these ideas exist outside the policy framework? The governmental policy framework. So just to contextualize what you're really asking is, if you don't deal with these bigger governance problems, is it possible for this kind of creativity to flourish? So what do you think? So again, one example from India. I mean, there are lots of initiatives on what is called e-governance where people are using the cell phone technology to talk about, you know, the road, the monsoons came, the road is completely destroyed. So you go, there is a mobile net, there is a mobile, it's called, mobile cell of the water department, of the roads department where you can report these complaints. And I think the way it has worked is that there are certain stages. So there was a law passed on the right to information. There are regulations being talked about on facilitating greater transparencies. And so I think these new technologies provide the medium to think in new ways about how you can promote transparency and accountability. So there is a lot of, you know, these small computer kiosks where you can give feedback on the government services, which is having a tremendous impact. I'm not saying that that's the complete solution. There are still problems, but I don't think it has so much either or we can use technology to further some of these governance challenges. And I, yeah, I have a response to that one too. Both of these examples that I cited are having challenges with the policy infrastructure. And so for me, the question of how these types of solutions exist inside of a policy and governance framework is what are the barriers to scale, right? The collaborative economy is in a huge conversation right now about whether it's even legal to exist because it's challenging the hotel industry, it's challenging the taxi industry, it's challenging former ways of regulation. And one of the reasons why something like this could happen is because it exists outside of current regulation and it can move much more quickly because of it. But that's a double-edged sword. So that's a very insightful question. And with the two bridges example, the president's resiliency task force last year of 25 mayors was specifically because the federal government had this sneaking suspicion that there may be laws on the books that are preventing mayors from being able to create resiliency efforts in their cities that were just outdated and perhaps stupid. Things like we're not allowed to move sand from this part of the city to the other. So when there's a flood, we can't use sandbags, right? And this law, that particular example was great because it wasn't created because of any environmental issue. It was literally created because these two mayors were at war with each other 50 years ago. And so I wanted to just draw a line because my beach is better than yours. And now that feud is actually no longer legitimate. And so when you have to create an entire task force just to update municipal policies that says something. So I think that there's something to be said for just do it. And then once you see what policies and regulations you bump up against, that opens a real time in context and not theoretical conversation about what policies and regulations you need in place to allow innovation to flourish. Todd, do you have thoughts on this tension between governance and bottom up? Yeah, I mean, in a lot of countries, in most developing countries, the basis for accountability is the relationship between population and government is the tax system and just doesn't exist. I mean, less than 5% of Nigerians pay direct tax. It's all indirect. So, and that's a good reason that a lot of countries that have been reliant on external finance to support themselves rather than domestic taxpayers, they're much more accountable to London or Oslo or Paris than they are to their own citizens. And so, you know, Ringe's point that the reach of mobile phones, and I made fun of gadgets, now I'm gonna be in favor of gadgets, is that you can do all kinds of polling and feedback from cell phones that you could never do before. And you don't need a smartphone, you can do this with the old style phone. So you've got a lot of corruption reporting of local officials, you've got reporting in Kenya, of corrupt police officers, you've got places where parents can report if the teacher isn't showing up to school for the first time that can all be done through cell phones. So you are seeing technology, try to build accountable systems, but it's all sort of second best because you don't have a social contract through the, at least through the European model of governance. Let's move to our lightning round. So, we have multiple, we only have one, we can have a slow lightning round. Wow, we cleaned Africa. You know, it's funny, we hear this argument made here often about how micro solutions are the wave of the future and everything's consumer facing and we're moving away from sort of the mainstream structure of society. I'm not sure that that necessarily works in emerging and frontier countries because we have the luxury of doing that, knowing that we've got our infrastructure to fall back on. And I don't think in those places, I mean, it's nice to have a cell phone, you know, but does that make a country investment grade because half the population now has cell phones? Is that gonna drive commercial capital into that country? No, if it's an investment grade and they have the infrastructure in place that reduces risk, so you don't have to just go through multinational banks to get anything done, well, that's a different story. And it's still, that's what it boils down to at the end of the day. And I mean, I think it's terrific to see technology being introduced that shows traction that the people want these technologies and these solutions, but it doesn't solve the basic problem of how you, you know, convince investors to make that huge, take on that huge risk and go into these very shaky economies. Quick final comments. Well, I mean, I think that's right. Cell phone doesn't replace a port in an airport and a modern power system. So, again, I don't think anybody would argue that that's an alternative, but that gets back to, you know, some of this big old dirty, unsexy construction is really, you know, in a place like Lagos, there are tens of billions of dollars of old school construction that's gonna happen. You know, and it's not all gonna be shiny cell phone towers. And I thought what something, Lisa Marganelli said earlier about how we should, we should think about electricity for everybody as a measure of good governance. And so if you think about it in those terms, then it kind of brings these two scales together in a very tangible way. Quick final comments. Nikki Rimjim. No, I think it's just pretty much, I don't have to think. The only thing I'll say is that that's true everywhere. And it feels important to note, right? There are places in Alabama where people are still frying eggs on rocks because that's what they have access to. And so 300 million people, it's a lot of people. We have a lot of geographical space in this country. And so to ensure that everyone in your country has access to basic services and basic infrastructure, we may need to look to hubs and distributed networks for the poorest places in our country too. So let's not be too good as a developing country to use what works to take care of our citizens. Thanks, Todd, Rimjim and Nikki. Thank you all. Thanks, Corey. Thank you.