 Well, I want to thank you all for coming and also express thanks on the part of the speakers to all the individuals and Institutions that have helped put this event together. We're addressing what I think and what I'm sure most of you in the room would agree is Probably the biggest issue to face humanity, you know at a very deep level. It's true these issues range from the most profound and intimate and personal decisions all the way to the triviality of trying to find a parking space which Roz and I went through this evening, but but This issue is so important and we'll have such a huge impact on the future well-being of of our species and Many other species on the planet that a few years ago The majority of the living Nobel laureates in the sciences got together and issued a statement that got very little press attention But was unprecedented as a move by the scientific community at that time And I'm just gonna read you a little bit of it because it really helps set the stage here this statement that they issued again It was about 1500 scientists representing the majority of Nobel laureates It's called the world scientists warning to humanity and what they stated was Firstly that human beings in the natural world are on a collision course Human activities inflict harsh and often irreversible damage on the environment and on critical resources if not checked Many of our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society and May so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know The earth is finite its ability to absorb waste and destructive effluent is finite Its ability to provide food and energy is finite It's ability to provide for growing numbers of people is finite and we are fast approaching many of earth's limits Then they go on to say that a great change in our stewardship of the earth and the life on it is required if vast human misery is to be avoided and I'm skipping around in the statement but going to the end they then state what we must do and they offer five key suggestions the first is we must bring Environmentally damaging activities under control to restore and protect the integrity of earth systems that we depend on The second is that we must manage resources crucial to human welfare more effectively The third we must stabilize population a fourth We must reduce and eventually eliminate poverty a fit their fifth suggestion is that we must ensure Sexual equality and guarantee women Control over their own reproductive decisions They conclude by saying that we require the help of scientists business and industrial leaders Religious leaders and all people now the reason I read from this statement is I think it's remarkable and in two ways firstly It indicates the extent of the scientific consensus on these issues You never get that in the media You're always reading about Controversy over this or that environmental problem when in fact in the scientific community if you go to any meeting and You know, I'll be going to one next week Ross just came from one this past weekend and and Adam working in industry meets People all the time who really share a perspective on where we stand and the big question is what to do About the issues that we're facing, but there's not a debate. There's not really any argument over The jeopardy in which we're putting ourselves in the future of the planet the second thing I think that comes out of this statement that I find really interesting is that basically the action is on the social side But these people these are these are Nobel laureates in the sciences Okay, they've been at the cutting edge just defining the cutting edge of technology and they're saying that science with a capital S Is not going to save us. I mean science is part of the solution. There's no question We can become a lot more efficient in what we're doing and that will require Technological innovation we need to come up with you know new ways of doing things and that requires science there are a lot of questions we need to answer about What's going on how much? Different types of activities or patterns of activities can be sustained on the planet But but the basic message is that science is not going to save us all their suggestions have to do You know stabilizing population reducing and eliminating poverty that kind of thing The action is really on a social side so that gets to the whole issue of you know Why are the three of us here together might seem like a strange combination, but one of the most I? find inspiring things that's going on in the scientific arena and then in the private sector and in government as well is that people from totally different backgrounds have Started to really converge on views as to where we stand today and are starting to come up with much more innovative Solutions to some of these problems, so what we hope to lay out for you tonight is firstly, I have sort of the grim task of laying out where we stand here, but Then I'm going to turn it over to Roz and economists and to Adam a leader in the business community working in one of the You know big time businesses here dealing with all the trash we produce To discuss Where we stand from their perspectives and what we can do about the situation So first of all what's the big question the big question is how many people could the earth support you know and Says how many people could we support? Sustainably what would an optimum population size be when you take into consideration all the Lifestyle choices we'd like to make and that we'd like other people to be able to make How can you even begin to address these questions from a scientific or just a rational standpoint? What kinds of conceptual frameworks are there for us to hold on to and try and guide our way through an analysis? And if we're not on a sustainable course, which we're all going to argue or not How can we change course and actually begin a transition to a sustainable world? What do we need to visualize and what steps do we need to take in order to get there? So just starting out. I'm going to give you some population numbers Okay, that's one of the big underlying things here and the numbers are all in terms of billions of people I always find it really difficult to grasp these huge numbers and So I'm just going to tell you what a billion people might look like if you imagine in your mind a billion people Aligned up sort of standing Front to back for and about 15 inches apart. Okay, so you're all in a queue And if people did that a billion people and they formed a straight line and now we're going to ignore gravity And we're going to ignore other things like the hazards of outer space That line of people would extend from the surface of earth all the way to the moon Okay, so that's about one measure of a billion people What we've got on the world now As you stated earlier is about nearly six billion people. We're going to hit that in just a couple years here We're at about 5.8 billion now Where the average completed family size is about three children per family Which leads to a rate of natural increase or a rate of population growth of about 1.5 percent per year What that all boils down to is that the world population if we continue on these The current path will double in about 45 years Okay, so we're looking just within the next couple of decades at at least 8.5 billion people and probably surging on past that up to 10 maybe 12 billion people Nobody really knows and most of the projections are based on assumptions of No increase in mortality and nobody knows whether that's going to hold up either I mean doesn't look like AIDS is going to make a huge dent in where we're going but But that's an open issue and there are plenty of other things that could intervene as well We're not going to go on to infinity But just looking at population numbers in the aggregate Misses a lot of the issue if you look at and just contrast now we don't have much time So I'm just going to contrast the rich countries from the poor countries in the rich countries We've got about 1.2 billion people the average completed family size is actually below replacement below about 2.1 Just to replace the parents children for family. It's about 1.6 That means we're growing at a relatively slow rate 0.1 percent per year and our doubling time would only be a it was about 500 years In the less developed countries the poor countries. We've got about 4.6 billion people They're growing much more rapidly nearly 2% per year and they're going to double in less than 40 years So most of the future population growth is going to occur in developing countries over 90% of it as things stand now so There's basically and then there's huge variation among nations in these population statistics Another thing that we've got to keep in mind here is that slowing population growth is like trying to slow or stop A super tanker it it takes a long time for the thing to actually stop after one starts applying the breaking mechanism and then the case of you know Demographic momentum the amount the population will grow after you've reached replacement fertility Let me just give you one example if India Right now India has a lot of people under the age of 15 years Okay, so they're going to come surging up into the reproductive years soon about 36 percent of the population is under 15 even if they had a drop in their Total or average family size from the current level of about 3.6 children per family to 2.2 replacement By 2025 and that would be a really rapid drop relative to what happened in other countries in the European countries in the U.S And so on That would still involve a growth of today's population of about 970 million to 2 billion people around 2100 so that means even with the very best most Concerted efforts to reduce fertility rates in India starting now, and they are really going for it We're still gonna see tremendous growth in that country and in many other parts of the world So that's where we stand roughly on population then you can say well how are we going to deal with this problem? Obviously we have to come to some understanding as to why people have quote too many children too many from Maybe a socially optimal standpoint There are a bunch of reasons here. I'm just gonna run through them quickly and Ross will elaborate on them somewhat in her talk Some have to do with just plain old lack of access to family planning information and methods That's pretty common. I've done a lot of work in developing countries and People have even asked me to bring the pill from the United States because even in countries like in Costa Rica where you can pretty much get access to To family planning information and methods there, you know government supplied things that often don't suit people's own needs very well Another big reason is that children in many areas are actually net economic assets. Certainly. That's true when they're grown They provide old age security and that's extremely important where there's no social security system and where avenues for saving are actually very limited But another big issue here is that children are often net economic assets even when they're young They pay themselves off in a few years if you travel around in the developing world You'll see kids doing everything all kinds of work and in India where a lot of study has been done of this issue Children have been observed to work typically about one and a half times the number of hours that adult males work so they're a huge asset and large families are more economically viable in some communities than our small families so you have to Break that incentive and change the incentives around one way to do that is to change If possible the status of women their access to health care education employment Control over resources offer them other options for having income Then relying on their children to carry out this labor Another big issue is to change the distribution of benefits and costs of childbearing Which often are unequal among men and women men. This is generalizing. Okay, but in many regions Men and women get a lot of state social status from having larger families But women typically bear the a disproportionate share of the cost of of having large families And then finally there they're big cultural traditions here And there's a we have to expect that there would be a lag time involved in getting the kind of change We need in Costa Rica where I've said I've worked extensively in 1992 there was a survey done by the demographic Institute that Revealed that 73 percent of women surveyed and they surveyed a lot of women in urban areas and so on Agreed with the statement that quote a woman's place is in the home and the less time she spends outside the better So there are a lot of issues involved here. It's complicated, but Just to conclude on the population front and again Roz will go on it a bit more length We've basically found out a lot of ways to get at this problem And I'm quite optimistic about it. We're sort of locked into a lot of population momentum here but I'd say you know my own perspective on it is that many countries are serious about reducing population growth rates they do see the problem and Overall I'm much more optimistic on the population side of the story than on the next part of the story that I'll tell You about now is what we really care about is not population alone What we care about is our total impact on the planet and that's only partially revealed by how many people there are It's also a matter of what those people are doing and what their per capita impacts are so In fact what we care about when we're talking about you know sustaining life on the planet and the things that these world scientists were talking about is Total impact which could be expressed as a product of three factors Okay, so the first is population you double population all else equal you're gonna double your impact the second is Affluence or the level of consumption per person so again holding all else equal if you double consumption You're gonna double your impact even holding Population constant and then finally you've got to multiply by a factor that takes account of the damage that the technologies or the Practices through which consumption is delivered acts on The environment so they're these three factors is this called the iPad equation John Holdren and Paul early Proposed it a long time ago, and it's just a convenient way for thinking about some of these issues So it also means there are three opportunities for lowering impact. Well, you can work on population, but that's going to take a long time Maybe we can work more quickly or more effectively in some areas on some of these other factors like the a factor Affluence or the t factor which Summarizes the impact of technology or or resource extraction Practices and the economics and institutions involved in that so Anyway looking at this then if you take a look at what's happening around the world Well before we were saying most of the population growth is occurring in developing countries In fact most of the impact caused by consumption is occurring in the rich countries So just to give you a few general statistics, and we can go into detail more later if you're interested the Rich countries with just 20% of the world's population Actually account for nearly 70% of the impact as measured by taking per capita impacts into account If you look at the US with just 5% of the world's population And by the way the US is the most rapidly growing not even considering immigration the most rapidly growing of the major industrialized nations It's also the third largest nation in the world So we've got a major p-factor here, but we also have a huge a and t huge a and t factors So with less than 5% of the global population the US actually accounts for about 20% depending on how you count it 20 or 30% of total impact on the planet that really puts into perspective some of these Negotiations we hear are going on about how to manage global resources more effectively and fairly Another way to put it another statistic is another framework aside from the ipad one is to look at well How much land area would it take to support a given community to? Supply all the inputs into it and to absorb and recycle and somehow deal with all the waste and effluence coming from it Now somebody did that for for Canada and North America. They said okay What if? Everybody lived like Canadians or North Americans then how much more in the way of land area and resources would we need and effectively? We'd need two more earths to support the current population at North American levels So that again puts it into perspective and here. This is what we want to turn to you later I was saying I I feel like we've gotten population is a big issue. It's remains a big problem But interestingly at least there we have some sense of what can be done about it I have much less sense and confidence and maybe Adam will change my mind some Regarding what we can do about very high consumption rates You know, it's it's interesting Self-reported levels of personal happiness. However, you want to define that have declined in recent decades Even as consumption levels have increased so a lot of people do seem aware that these are not That directly related and ever-increasing consumption is not going to lead to ever-increasing happiness, but how you actually You know restrict consumption rates or I don't know induce people to consume less is still a very difficult issue and one I find even more daunting than the population issue now just to close I'm going to Just put out one other framework for looking at these issues another way to consider the problem is to say Well, what's the total carrying capacity of the planet? That's how we got into this in the beginning now How many people could we really support and is today's number you'll read all the time that? From you could call them optimists people saying that actually we don't face a problem today We can easily support the number we have now You know just given our current consumption patterns technologies socio-economic organization and so on is that true? I would argue and and certainly the weight of the scientific community would as well that that isn't remotely true by one simple Criterion and that is that today's population is being maintained Only through the exhaustion and dispersion of a one-time inheritance of natural capital They're basically three different kinds of capital you can think about physical capital the buildings the plants Industry all our infrastructure you can think about human capital in our skills our intelligence our training and So on and then you can think about natural capital which typically has not been accounted for and and often is completely ignored and We're running out of that. That's effect. That's what one of that first book. It's actually an edited book and Roz and some other people have contributed to it nature services Gets into but you know the biggest export by weight from the United States is topsoil We're over pumping trillions of gallons of fossil ground water where There's so much such a high rate of land conversion that we're losing about one species every hour from the planet They're dramatic changes going on now that obviously can't be sustained forever So basically these assertions that today's overshoot is temporary really don't carry much weight Some people will say well the rate of technological advance will lower those a and t factors or the t factor more than enough to Compensate for increases in the P and a factors But you know right now current levels of investment in this are very low and science doesn't have the situation under control as the Statement I read to you at the beginning indicated And then a second main argument you'll hear about is that well growth in the spirit of equity and social Responsibility will lower these a and t factors and there too. I would say We definitely need this we need growth in the spirit of equity and that's what the other book is on but Planning for a world of you know highly cooperative anti materialistic Ecosensitive vegetarians is not going to help us very much in dealing with this issue We have to consider the creature that we are in the aggregate and work from there And I'll just quote from a well-known demographer who said at one point in summarizing You know decades of work by social scientists He said if we have one point of empirically back knowledge, it's that bad policy is widespread and persistent We have to take account of it. So Again, that brings me to the main point here, which is that I think most of the action is on the social side And I'm gonna turn over after depressing you thoroughly To these people here who are Engaging in a lot of action on the social side and economics and industry and I just want to close saying that Well, these are very daunting issues. I am I keep my spirit up because partly just through the inspiration I have in working with people in these different arenas who really are trying to make a difference They're a lot of absolutely fantastic and smart people out there moving things forward and I think There are a lot of good prospects that I think they'll start bringing up and that we can discuss Later in the question and answer session. Thank you very much Okay, I'd like to present another perspective from the economic side of things and I was intrigued by Gretchen's beginning when she was talking about the consensus among scientists When Gretchen and I started working together six or seven years ago The biggest problem at least it on Stanford campus was that the biologists were doing everything and the economists were just messing everything up And from the economist perspective the biologists were just on a rampage and wouldn't listen to the reality And now we're we're actually meeting several times a quarter Meet socially drink wine together and really are working together on a whole set of these issues Which is which is really fun? I tended even as an economist to side more with the biologists in their assessment of things at the time And I was happy to find that there has been progress sort of on a on a more aggregate sense About a year ago There was a statement actually signed by over 2,500 economists in the American Association of that economists as well as Eight or ten Nobel laureates among them that actually looked at the issue of global climate change and Affirmed the scientific conclusions of the intergovernmental panel on climate change saying that the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on the global climate and Declare that preventative steps are justified and this is a huge way over over even just the 1990s of the economy Economists realizing that there's huge costs to human action even when you can't measure them directly in terms of commercial products So I just wanted to start with that note that I think we're all coming a long way Most of my work is actually in the developing world I spend most of my time doing research in third-world countries and so today I want to talk about the link between economic development and the environment as Gretchen said the population issue really the guts of it is going to be in developing countries now and What I want to focus on more than why is the population growing or what to do about it? I'd like to save that for some of the question and answers what I want to focus on is the dynamics of what happens when these Countries actually go through a growth process or a growth decline process as it is What is the link between income growth or decline and the environment? Let me put the bottom line up front and tell you what my three points are going to be The first point is that for the very poorest countries of the world where the fertility rates are still up at about six or higher The average the average woman is having six or more kids for these countries economic growth is absolutely essential You need the right kind of growth, of course one that's going to actually reach some of these poor people But the but you can't reach a conclusion when you're dealing with an area where families can't put food on the table Have no sanitation have no potable water have no job opportunities You really can't start in on an argument saying let's just stop growth all together in regions like this My second point is that measuring economic growth is an enormous challenge among economists and for economists and And yet measuring it properly in a way that does account for some of these ecosystem services like Gretchen said Measuring it properly is really critical if we're going to make the sound and write policy decisions to have a growth process that can Actually support so many people on this planet and the third point also concerns human values We've noticed in high-income countries you know a pattern where there is more environmental protection of a number of resources and a lot of people like to jump to the Conclusion saying all as we need is economic growth and then we'll have all the problems solved everything will become cleaner You know the environment is really a luxury good that will that will deal with once we get a high enough level of income And my third point is really there is no absolute guarantee whatsoever that income growth will lead to more environmental protection Okay, so let me start with the first point and that's on the necessity of economic growth This is a huge area of debate and one that we debate at Stanford and at other institutions all the time It's very complex especially with respect to the environment and I think it's important up front to take into account the broad perspective What are the objectives of growth? What are the right strategies and then what are the outcomes of the growth process? Just to give you some context Gretchen mentioned the the number one billion and put that in some perspective But currently there's roughly about one billion people on the planet living in chronic hunger Not knowing where their next meal is necessarily going to come from living on less than a dollar a day that grinding day in day out Hunger and that's what you're up against when you actually go to these countries and you're grappling with the environment on one hand And yet the huge pressure of trying to alleviate poverty that most of these governments face So in these countries in the developing countries whereas Gretchen said over 90% of the incremental population will be What are the objectives of growth? I mean these countries are gonna face huge challenges in the next several decades as this population is added There's the challenge of how to feed all these people There's a challenge of how to house them where all these people actually going to live The challenge of how to employ these people and then the challenge of just governance and I think the governance one is something that's drawing a lot of attention because particularly in areas We don't have income growth governing people of diverse religions cultures and so forth With minimal resources is going to be extremely difficult and that's something that really is going to be in our face as US citizens On the employment issue alone I think this is something that strikes me all the time in my work as a development economist of You know how are these jobs really going to be provided if we look in Mexico just on the other side of our border the labor force is growing by about four percent annually and That equates to adding about one million people to the labor force each year one million additional people who need to have a job The San Francisco's population is about 750,000 So we're employing the whole of San Francisco and more so need to employ more so each year in Mexico And that's at the current growth rates The Circumstance as population continues to grow and that momentum continues to grow is not going to get any rosier And so how is a country like Mexico really going to get out of out of the situation? What are they going to do to create those jobs and what will be the environmental impact of creating that kind of economic growth? If economic growth isn't created in a number of these countries the situation is equally as bad As I said the issue of governance of a population that doesn't have employment opportunities is enormously challenging But also just how to keep people from moving into more marginal lands to eke out a living becomes a huge challenge in itself as well Families who really don't know where that next meal is going to come from really don't have a long run A long run perspective on what it means to cut down the forest what it means to clear the mangroves or what it means to Overfish a local fishery with dynamite You simply don't have a long run dimension when you're dealing with extreme famines Chronic hunger or third-degree malnutrition just doesn't exist And so there's really more pressures on the system than we're just presenting with the population itself I Guess from my perspective What type of growth process is most useful here is one that really is rural based Most of the populations in third-world countries still do live in rural areas despite a lot of the attention towards mega cities Over 50% of the labor force is employed in agriculture agriculture still accounts for 25% or more of gross domestic product in many developing countries and so a focus on Agriculture is absolutely a first step in dealing with some of these growth issues And what's surprising when you actually look at the international lending community the United States foreign policy on aid Is that it's really had an attention being drawn away from agriculture towards other issues and other regions of the world and Without a respect to where the main employment engine is coming from I think we're really in some trouble here And agriculture is not just to supply food, you know, it's not the The pounds of grain on the table. It's really the income that then goes to people to be able to buy food as well Now when we think about promoting growth and in a way that is maybe rural based and that does Get to the heart of the employment issue in very poor areas how that will coincide with an environmental strategy is Is extremely difficult, you know most developing countries don't have a legal system in place They don't have a regulatory structure as jobs are created to start regulating the effluent that's coming out of factories or To regulate all the emissions that are coming out of the smokestacks and so forth the regulations aren't there There's no legal system of enforcement. There's no resources to monitor I mean actually Mexico itself does have quite a few regulations in place, but there's absolutely no monitoring To speak of in most of the regions And then there's a bigger problem and this happens in the United States as well Where you know the Ministry of Agriculture was interested in in increasing pure production isn't talking to the Ministry of Forestry Even though agriculture is encroaching on forest lands the Ministry of Forestry is not talking to the Ministry of Fisheries If there is a Ministry of Environment usually that ministry is totally Without control over anything and none of these groups are talking to the ministries of trade the ministries of finance or the central bank Which in their own decisions really overwrite everything else their exchange rate policy or interest rate policy prices that permeate all aspects of the economy and Until those groups start talking together. There's also some enormous challenges on the development side of things So I think you know it's important for us At least as Americans be thinking about our foreign aid programs That we need to go more beyond the structural adjustment We've invested a lot in our foreign aid on trying to get macroeconomic policies right in third-world countries We need really to go beyond that, you know to get programs and policies will actually affect real people In real villages who need to be employed and need to have some income Like agricultural policies and actually on the upside there USAID has recently rewritten its agenda to have a major focus once again on agriculture after about a decade of decline That just happened this fall But we also need to think I think pretty carefully about trade policies I mean trade liberalization is occurring right now in a very very major way with the GATT and With NAFTA and so forth and what this implies for both the environment and poverty alleviation I think deserves a lot of attention As citizens voted voting citizens as well as us as academics and really figuring out what the implications will be So let me go on to my to my second point which is related to this and that's in measuring growth In most developing countries, they're very dependent on primary resources In fact in a lot of developing countries 80 to 90 percent of foreign exchange is derived from primary products and when governments or lending agencies like the World Bank or the Asian Development Bank or AID thinks about utilization of these resources. They're thinking in terms of the forest What is the timber worth commercially in the foreign exchange market or in the domestic market? In terms of agriculture, what are the agricultural products worth? Not so much like Gretchen was talking about the soil on the land But what are the products worth if mangrove forests are cleared for shrimp ponds? What is the commercial value of that shrimp or of the charcoal that will come about from clearing the mangrove trees? And I've never been so struck by this issue as my recent visit last month to Indonesia I was in Sumatra where the fires are taking place right now and a very large part of that is due to illegal burning of the fires to clear land for oil palm development and It is illegal, but the government has just turned a blind eye to that one because of the very high foreign exchange earnings of oil palm and Second because it's a politically popular crop there are some few individuals that are very politically powerful that are in control of that industry and These are the kind of political and economic realities that are out there and meanwhile we're watching the whole Sumatran Desert I'm exaggerating a little bit, but not too much go up in smoke and it's really affecting the whole region as well as having some global atmospheric impacts I was in Sumatra not for this purpose but to look at the whole issue of shrimp ponds and the conversion of wetlands mangroves to shrimp ponds and I was really struck by the fact that the government is literally giving away the land to Industries that will development shrimp ponds for the foreign exchange value that can be derived for those lands So there's no value whatsoever Applied to the mangroves themselves just to the commercial value that might be derived from those lands And so it's a terribly important point in respect to The economics because the ecosystem services the land heart of what Gretchen was trying to get at in in that collaborative book The ecosystem service of the land may be much much greater over the long run than the commercial value in the short run Because in fact most of the shrimp ponds I looked at in Indonesia are completely inoperable because after a few years Viruses affect them and people can't farm them anymore And only in these very large farms where they can manage risks and have the capital to monitor water quality Where they even economically viable even with all the policies that go along with it But mangroves is a good example because Just to give you a notion of some of the ecosystem services that we're trying to measure as as a subgroup of economists now The mangroves supply nutrients to the onshore fisheries so the fisheries are much more productive In fact if the mangroves are their supply and nutrients the mangroves offer a habitat for the larvae say of wild shrimp brood stock and other Crustaceans and birds and so forth they provide erosion control storm control to the local communities And they act as water purification between the the terrestrial systems and the marine systems a good example is in Ecuador We have the banana plantations just dumping on pesticides on their banana plantations The mangroves act as a sev for those chemicals before they actually hit the ocean, but now as the mangroves are being Completely obliterated those pesticides are going directly into the ocean so how economists can really Restructure their re their evaluation efforts to include these ecosystem services Implies two things one a really close affiliation with scientists so they understand the scientific processes and can somehow Put these into a real measure and it and it also requires a bit of creativity To say how can we get away from the old economic paradigms into something a new way of looking at things? And I was really struck in thinking about this point by how a statement made 30 years ago Was so relevant then as it is today and this statement was by Robert Kennedy on the first day of his 1968 campaign for the US presidency and at that time 30 years ago. He said the following Gross national product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage It counts special locks for our doors and jails for the people who break them It counts the destruction of the redwoods and loss of our natural wonders It counts napalm and it counts nuclear warheads and armed cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities And yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children the quality of their education or the joy of their play It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages the intelligence of our public debates or the integrity of our Public officials it measures neither our wit nor our courage neither our wisdom nor our learning Neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country It measures everything in short Accept that which makes life worthwhile and I don't think anyone could say that more eloquently So my third point also has to do with human values and that's the question of does economic growth Necessarily imply an improvement in the environmental condition we certainly in some high-income countries the United States and Not to mention anything of the Scandinavian countries, which are much greener than we are There has been some patterns of improved environmental conditions with the Clean Air Act We've strengthened that a lot recently the Clean Water Act even San Francisco cleaning up the bay and so forth there have been a lot more Efforts to clean up the environment in terms of certain chemical pollutants such as sulfur dioxide or Knox the kind of smog that hangs over our cities and so the question is is Growth necessarily better should we be encouraged if we can just get economic growth going There's three caveats to the analysis that I think are worth discussing here tonight The first is that when we look at that pattern what we're looking at is a cross-section of countries going from the very poorest countries to the most affluent countries and When you look at that spectrum of countries you can see that countries as they start to gain more income The pollution actually gets worse at the onset and then after a given level of income Actually the environmental ethic and and the legal system regulatory system and so forth does kick in and you start to get an improvement over time In looking at this cross-section of countries. It really says nothing about time series events for a given country It doesn't say what will happen a good example again is China One because they have a fifth of the world's population, but also they're just growing Incredibly quickly as measured by the traditional GDP measures double digit annual growth in that country now And the question is will they hit a point? At which point they're really going to take on the environment seriously and try to clean up the environment or By the time that they get those institutions in place will it in fact be too late You can bet that countries like Japan that are sitting downwind of the sulfur dioxide the acid rain That's coming right in their direction are extremely worried about whether the time series will match up with the cross-section on this particular issue But the second point is that That this relationship really holds for for pollutants that are more short-running nature that are more localized like sulfur dioxide Or knocks that really can be dealt with In a political term, you know with the political agenda of the current government and it doesn't say anything about the really difficult persistent long-run pollutants such as the toxics which I think Adam's going to mention a bit and the greenhouse gas emissions and The third caveat says similar is that it really doesn't hold for pollutants that are either international or intergenerational in character. There certainly isn't a Voting block or or a government that is thinking about it in those terms right now But this is some very important as we lead to the climate convention in Kyoto in December where the targets and timetables of reducing greenhouse gas emissions particularly carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide are Going to be discussed and there's a lot in the paper today the Chronicle for example really I think Said in very simple terms that Clinton had laid out a plan that was very Inadequate for environmentalists and yet the industry was going to raise Raise a lot of stink over it because it was way too stringent We're very far from coming down on this issue even domestically at this point, but if we really can't take the lead we in the United States can't take the lead in Kyoto and It get a good agenda that sets timetables and adheres to the targets and respects the original agreement That was made in Brazil in 1992 or thereafter if we can't take some lead on this Then we have absolutely no credibility in telling developing countries to clean up their environment in the face of the population and income Dynamics that they are going to be facing and I want to emphasize this point and close on it It's terribly important because I think it's clear now both in a biophysical context and in a social context in which You know values are really preeminent that we're all on the same boat You know if you think about the industrialized countries being on the front end of the boat It's simply not okay if the back end sinks We're all going to go down together and it's not clear to me at this point that the front end isn't going to sink first So I'm going to turn that over to Adam But again the three points are the need for economic growth the need to measure growth much better than we have been doing and The need to put a set set of values in place. I think are some of the main issues that we as economists are worried about well Would anyone else like to follow them? Trying to follow Dr. Daly and Dr. Naylor with what is supposed to be this evening a business perspective on world population Reminds me of course of the old one about the two scientists that were being interviewed by a reporter They were being interviewed about the world situation one scientist described themselves as an optimist and the other as a pessimist and the reporter goes to the pessimist and says Why is it that you describe yourself as a pessimist and the scientist says well, isn't obvious? Are you kidding? Things couldn't get any worse So the reporter goes to the other scientist and says well Why is it that you describe yourself as an optimist and? The scientist says well, I disagree completely on the contrary things could get much worse And the picture science paints for us, especially when it comes to Questions like world population is not a pretty one as you've just heard As I've been thinking about What I would say this evening. I've been pondering. Why is it? That the population question is so intractable. It seems so unsolvable And I think the core of the matter is that the things that have enabled world population to increase are The exact same things which in many ways clearly benefit us in terms of how long and how well we live The things which have reduced mortality rates worldwide Nutrition sanitation and medicine have resulted themselves from an enormous system of primary resource extraction and transformation primary manufacturing transportation Distribution and consumption and finally waste production Which system itself now threatens the ecosystem services, which directly keep us alive Yet in trying to address the problem of overpopulation There is tremendous resistance to acknowledging The benefits of our ecologically destructive behaviors We seem embarrassed to talk about the successes because we know at some level how destructive we are being But it is still true that since the turn of the 20th century Antibiotics and inoculation have prevented and cured much infectious disease Fossil fuels and transportation systems have all but eliminated the impact of local crop failures in the industrial world and greatly improved sanitation systems, especially in cities through the development of sewer and water systems have all contributed to mortality rates dropping sharply and Of course while there are significant Differences in countries as we've heard some about this evening life span has increased everywhere in 1900 the average life span in the United States was between 40 and 50 years Today it is 78 for women and 71 for men the single fastest growing demographic group in our country is those over 85 in The developing countries now it is 64 for women and 61 for men Which is still better than the most well-off people in the world less than a hundred years ago So as we go about the task of imagining a solution to the population problem I think it's incumbent on us to remember just how painful and short life has been for much of humanity Over much of history how common the state of bereavement was and how the very experience of being alive is Impacted by living in a high abundance low mortality Society like the one we all live in It all reminds me of that wonderful scene from the Monty Python movie when the rebel leader is trying to stir up support against the Roman Empire He's talking to his group and he's he's saying they take from us and they've taken from our fathers But name one thing the Romans have ever given to us The guy stands up in the back of the room and he goes the aqueducts And it says well besides the aqueducts the roads Besides the aqueducts in the roads well education and literacy a dependable food supply someone else goes the wine and Of course benefits have accrued to us through the development of our technological Industrial society now. I want to be clear. I'm not arguing that everything is just fine or that we should do nothing It's hard to disagree with Scientists like the one you've the ones you've just heard from That the the path we are on is not sustainable. It is clearly not sustainable I'm just arguing that we must be cognizant of the benefits of what we are trying to change if we're going to try and change things for the better But in any case it brings us back to the original question, which is how do we achieve? increased lifespan and quality Which then can reduce fertility rates as Gretchen referred to while avoiding the trap that we now seem inevitably headed into of damaging the ecosystems which sustain us I'm going to suggest that if there is anything to do It will require a clear vision of where we want to go. What is the desired outcome? We could on the one hand reduce our environmental impact by reducing abundance go back to a way of living that existed before we knew how to extract primary resources and transform them and use them and so on On the other hand we could do as some people advocate of extracting and consuming like mad in the hopes that some technological revolution will come along later which will somehow Take the co2 out of the atmosphere replenish the forests and fish stocks and so on. What is the vision? Where are we trying to go? I Was listening to the radio in my car Not too long ago. I'm not really paying attention When all of a sudden I heard Bill Clinton say something which really caught my attention. He was talking about fast-track authority to negotiate these international trade deals and why it was important that he have this authority and I think this is an exact quote. He said we need to continue a situation in which 4% of World population continues to control 22% of world resources Now with all respect To our beleaguered president. I don't think this is a vision for managing world resources that's going to work for us On the other side of that famous bridge to the 21st century I would like to suggest instead that in order to achieve relative population stability relative abundance and long lifespan for all with some measure of equity that what is needed isn't it a major advance in resource productivity Which is really a fancy way of saying that we need to get the results using much less stuff Now advanced resource productivity is a term originally coined by Amory Lovens and Has been expanded on greatly recently by people like Paul Hawkin and Bill Shireman What it really means is the infusion of information Into the into the economy in order to directly displace the use of physical resources The name of the game over the past 125 years And the industrial economy has been to convert natural resources into GDP as rapidly as possible My friend Bill Shireman describes the industrial economy as a kind of a chute where you draw natural resources in one end and Accelerate them through the measured economy as products fuels services and ultimately as wastes and The imperative of our economic system is to put more and more raw materials more and more Rapidly down the chute. Thus President Clinton's recent appeal to hang on to 22 percent of world resources On the other side of that bridge to the 21st century though lies a world in which growth can no longer be a function of how quickly We can consume our natural capital We must understand and encourage instead What is already an emerging trend in the industrial world away from the hunting and gathering of primary resources by extractive industry and Towards a substitution of knowledge and information for mass and energy in the creation of value-added goods and services In other words, we must meet human needs using less material and energy inputs Now what do I mean by knowledge as a source of Energy and materials I mean improving every step of the process by which we derive material well-being from the planet Starting with the way we design things from product and package design to architecture and land use planning From resource extraction and harvesting techniques to transportation systems to efficiency in primary Manufacturing to incorporation of reuse and recycling into waste handling The name of the game in the 21st century is not going to be how much can we consume? But how smart can we be about not having to consume so much? Now I can just hear you asking That's all very nice. Mr. Davis, but aren't you a capitalist? Don't you benefit directly from all the consumption and wastefulness and the honest answer is of course the way things are set up now But if there's one predictable thing about capitalism, it's that it will always seek profits So if bad environmental outcomes are profitable or if good environmental outcomes are profitable The enormous channeling of energy of human energy, which capitalism represents can be utilized In order to accomplish advanced resource productivity We need to understand the structure of economic incentives and use them to promote environmentally sustainable outcomes I'm going to I'm going to cite three very quick examples to make this more concrete and then I'll close my remarks About 20 years ago Pacific Gas and Electric Company the world's largest investor owned utility had on the drawing boards six new nuclear power plants and a huge new coal-fired power plant that were being planned in order to meet California's growing energy demand PG&E at the time was paid by the kilowatt So the more energy they produced the more money they made it was in their interest at that time for you all to leave your windows open At about that time the utility commission decoupled the amount of profit from the number of kilowatts and At the same time gave an incentive for investment in energy efficiency Now not surprisingly the result was tremendous investment in energy efficiency That's the programs that you've seen for rebates on energy efficient refrigerators and light bulbs And the home insulation programs It's essentially an inclusion in an economic system of what had been externalities the non-point source Wastage of energy which had not been included was somehow included in the system through an economic incentive I think it's an example of the substitution of intelligence for energy generation And another example comes from airports airports not long ago Would put out a bid for replacing their entire carpet every few years they take the whole carpet out toss it in the landfill Put in a whole new one Not surprisingly airport or airport floors receive a lot of foot traffic One day a guy named Ray Anderson had a small carpet named a small company called interface carpets small carpet too probably and He actually went and sat in the airport and watched what happens and he noticed something interesting, which is that? 80% of the footwear is on 20% of the surface because we all walk in the same places And he went to the airports and he said I'll make you a deal I'll provide you with a new surface at all times for less cost He came up with the idea of carpet tile leasing That may not sound revolutionary, but what he was able to do was to Provide the same exact result using five times less energy and materials It's an example of substituting information for mass The final example has to do with the New York City watershed in the early 1990s New York City was facing a capital cost of about four billion dollars to construct a water treatment plant To for water from the Hudson River watershed Because the quality of the water had degraded to the point where it no longer was meeting drinking water standards in 1996 just last year the pivotal decision was made to not build the water purification plant, but instead to invest six hundred and sixty million dollars upstream and actually purchasing the watershed and Implementing programs to arrest sewage fertilizer and pesticide runoff By investing directly in the conservation of an ecosystem service the ability of the watershed to provide clean water New York avoided some three billion dollars of additional investment in a physical plant I think this last example is in some ways the most exciting because it demonstrates the potential for directly placing economic value on the conservation of an ecosystem service Now in conclusion these two principles the principles of substituting information and knowledge for mass and energy and The principle of using economic incentives for environmental outcomes will not solve the population problem By themselves, but if we were to implement them fully we'd be creating a model for development That the rest of the world could follow To create abundance and reduce mortality Which could then reduce fertility while using resources in a more sustainable manner And if anything is going to be good for business in the 21st century It would be developing a stable and affluent world population that can consume indefinitely into the future. Thank you I see the capitalist took my pen That's how it works Thank you all for for your incredibly articulate and thought-provoking Presentations I'm I think that tonight perhaps more than any of the The programs that we've had here so far the interrelationship of issues that come together when we talk about environmental issues has been very aptly demonstrated that that we are talking about environmental issues social justice issues economic issues cultural issues human rights issues and that Environmental issues really affect every single aspect of our lives and one of the purposes of the Stegner Center is to show that so that we Seize atomizing these issues and understand them in a context of interrelationship And that they must be approached myriad from myriad perspectives, and I think that that's What we've heard tonight really well put But I've got some questions for you, and I'm sure that there are people in the audience that do too Capitalism is the panacea is a little Troubling to me Because capitalism has so far been of great benefit to the capitalists But not necessarily to the citizenry who are the consumers of those things that capitalism creates So I'm also interested in trying to bring these issues Down to a level that we can personally relate to and so and we've been talking about the relationship between population and consumption So I think that you particularly have addressed some of these consumption issues and around energy So let's look at energy per se and the fact that we now with rate we rate wheeling are going to have a Deregulated energy situation in San Francisco, and I'm going to get to choose. I'm going to get to choose I'm going to have to choose my energy supplier. How is the consumer? going to make sense out of all the different options that are there and are and with this Deregulation our alternative energy sources going to Survive or will they be utterly decimated not that they've been strongly supported before that at least because of the the structure of energy regulation in California? There was a requirement that that energy providers the big guys had to had to buy from alternative sources How's the consumer going to sort this out and what's going to happen to these more environmentally sound energy sources under this new system? Well for the first time you'll have a choice and there will be green energy providers Which you can choose to purchase energy from that that would they will be? Advertising and marketing based on their ability to provide you with power from windmills or photovoltaic cells and so on you can choose To purchase that power The Sacramento Mutile Municipal Utility District has recently Invested a considerable sum in providing photovoltaic cells to any citizen who wants it and There is a minor surcharge it costs somewhat more to have that done than to buy power off the grid But during times of high solar energy you can actually run your meter backwards And the utility then has to pay you the electricity you're putting in the grid So it's a fascinating setup. I want to use that question though to Talk briefly about what I think is one of the major impediments to Sort of remark it at an environmental solutions, which is the tremendous subsidies to primary extractive industry Which clearly is true of energy? as much as Raw materials for from mining and forestry and so on we have laws on the books that date from the 1800s which have never made their way off the books and These laws were designed to do a couple of things one of them was to settle the West and that has now been done So we can we can stop that part the other the other reason was to Under the theory that providing cheap primary inputs for manufacturing and for energy production and so on Would lead to cheaper goods and services for everyone and in some sense it has worked to do that We pay very cheap prices very highly subsidized prices for a lot of things, but the net result is that we have Incorrect price signals in the economy so things which should be cheap if the into externalities were Sorry things that should be expensive if the externalities were included are not expensive and energy is one of those So we're gonna have to exercise our judgment as consumers to advocate to you know vote with our dollars This is one of my questions Oh, maybe it's really not fair to ask you this but as a consumer of communication services, for example I no longer have any idea whether MCI Pacific Bell AT&T Sprint this proliferate now world calm What's the new one though the biggest one that I'd never heard of except I always knew when I wanted their pay phones because I could never check my Voice mail because they didn't communicate with each other. So, you know, I'm trying to figure out how Consumer I mean it's funny, but it's serious because it becomes you'll forgive the expression a bathroom with bullshit so so the fact that That's gonna get bleeped on the radio So so so the fact that in a perfect economic system The consumer is well-served because the cheapest product will out the cheapest most effective product will out Really is not it may be true But we don't know if it's true because it's almost impossible to be discerning as a consumer Do you have any suggestions about how to be an intelligent consumer of energy services of telecommunication services of? Of the of what's certainly going to be sort of an increase in the whole internet Way of offering services or in now as the ecologist I have to stand up for our poor capitalist here and say I think this is Unfair to expect that we come in here and try and solve both the population problem and the consumption problem And then on top of that you lay problems of Telecommunications We're already having a difficult night here What what we need to keep in mind Obviously, I think the points you raise are troubling and they're also relevant But we need to consider what the opportunities are here. Obviously, there's a crisis, but there's also an opportunity and You know, it would take quite something to overthrow capitalism at this point and considering that our hands are already full Trying to clean up the environmental situation. I think what we've got to do is Confront capitalism on its own terms confront the market and the forces of the market on their own terms and try and turn them to our benefit and That's sort of what the examples that Adam gave Proposed to do and serve as models for other communities what you know what I think is Most promising about using market forces is that there's a lot of efficiency involved. That's one thing another Benefit is that it's basically value neutral rather than going around and we also haven't proven to be good religious leaders so we've resigned ourselves to You know looking at these things from more of an academic or a practical standpoint as opposed to the Certainly we consider all the ethical standpoints But rather than going around and sort of trying to beat people on the head about the ethical dimensions of these problems if instead We could present people with an array of choices Where the good choices were also the cheaper ones the ones that could be sustained over the long run Then I think we'd be headed more on the right path. Of course, that was specifically my question How do we how do we have an array of choices that allow us to make sense? This isn't a particular attack on capitalism right capitalism is here But it's but it will be modified as it spreads around the world and and so the question is how to Enable people to make intelligent choices and I don't know if you want to respond to that I would like to try it from a different approach the subject I'm most familiar with of course is garbage and I think it's instructive To answer your question about phone choices. I have no idea how to choose phones But I can tell you that when given a choice people recycle People have busy lives and when they had to go to the local recycling center as an extra chore and an extra trip They didn't do it very much very small number of people Recycled actively but when curbside recycling came along and all of a sudden it was as easy as throwing out the trash Almost everyone chooses to do it. So when given the choice I think most of us want to make the right environmental decisions So I think choice is good there, but Again back to the economic signals right now. There's a law in California called a B9 39 It's the integrated waste management act Governs all solid waste and recycling In the state and basically there's a hierarchy in the law that says that waste prevention We're not making the waste in the first place is the highest priority The second priority is recycling and composting everything and the third priority is throwing stuff in a landfill But the way people get paid the way we as a garbage company get paid We get paid the most and the most dependably to landfill things We get paid less and less predictably certainly to recycle and compost and we get paid nothing at all To provide waste reduction services. So it's the inverse of the hierarchy in law Now we've made some progress in that at least now we can get paid to do composting and recycling Which was not true just a few years ago. So that's an advance, but we need to think about Being willing to pay for what we say we want we have to have the integrity to do that both as individual consumers and As local government making purchasing choices for contracts to provide services and at a broader level We have to pay for what we say we want Well, I'd like to actually ask you a different question. I mean that's sort of there's so many different Issues and questions to that could be raised. So I'm kind of interested in varying the the conversation a little bit I was wondering if in nature there is an example of another species that Was threatened with overpopulation that responded to it in a more Conscientious way than than we are because one of the things that strikes me is that humans Theoretically have a higher level of consciousness than other creatures on the planet some would argue with me about that, but it's it's It's also interesting to me that our consciousness seems to increase and our instinct for survival seems to decrease And I wonder if you thought about those issues or or have examples in the world Well, it's interesting in the in the book co-authored with the air leaks Paul air leaks starts out with the chapter saying it's entitled something like the only species that practices birth control So we are the only species Known in the universe that practices birth control and that that's certainly a remarkable distinction What's the second part of your question? Well in terms of other species that setting aside birth control, let's say that have Overgrazing or Okay, I would say, you know, we don't think any less About our long-term future than other species do you know most likely it's hard to know what's going on in the minds of a bird or a butterfly but the the you know one Implication of what you're getting out here is is basically that most populations are controlled naturally of most species by Changes in weather or over-the-long run evolutionary changes and the abundance of resources available to them or how they utilize those resources In the case of human societies, if we want to maintain a certain population level, we have to exercise social control There's no magical formula or Like stabilizing mechanism by which our population will somehow have an exactly, you know balanced birth and death rate And even going back through history. It's pretty interesting if you read early stuff It turns out that people have been practicing birth control for a long time. It's not always that I don't know appealing sounding the ancient Egyptians, for example, apparently used crocodile dung suppositories as a way of driving people away They'll probably work. I don't know how effective they were or how they acted exactly But but you know are in Victorian England you read about People dumping their babies out on the street to die if they couldn't take care of them I mean for a long period of time people have Used various drastic methods to try and regulate their fertility and today we're lucky that we have much more convenient and ethically acceptable methods of birth control available, but if society Wants a certain fertility level. It's got to do something about it. It's not going to happen on its own and that's Justification I would argue for government intervention at some levels and changing the incentives that people face By providing, you know social and economic Circumstances that favor smaller family sizes right now in too many parts of the world There's still a lot of economic and other social incentives to have unsustainably large or high fertility rates I think that Most of the signals that we get suggest that growth is a good thing When we listen to the radio and our economic well-being becomes predicated in part on new housing starts for example That suggests that the more new houses that get built the healthier our Economy is but that also suggests to me that there are a lot more people living in these new houses that are being built So I wonder if Raj you could speak a little bit more about The Conventional economic indicators and some attempts to come up with new economic indicators that would measure things in a way that takes into account Well, very issues that that Robert Kennedy was talking. Yeah, that was a beautiful quote. I've never heard that. It is nice Well, yeah Well, there's a lot of examples of that usually I actually worked at a commercial bank at one point in my life and had to do This was before graduate school had to do the statistics of housing starts an automobile sales And it was the most boring job of my life But that is how it's measured because it's measured through through jobs primarily and I did mention the connection between You know, how many people are you really employing? Where's the income getting distributed through the economy and and housing and construction is one area that uses so many products and so many industries in the housing that it actually has a very wide effect on Employment and income growth as measured by paychecks, you know, essentially and What's not measured is these is these other quality of life the real welfare that we're gaining, you know And Adam was talking about You know, are we better off? Are we a happier population? Gretchen mentioned the same thing some of the alternatives in In in the development economics literature right now some of the measurements of welfare We've always based it on GDP per capita gross domestic product per capita and said this country is better off than that Country and so forth Now there's new measurements that are starting to get used through the aid agencies and and Bi economists and and governments working there that includes things like freedom education levels literacy rates infant mortality things that really aren't measured in an economic sense and that sense that whole package actually gets put together say is this country better off than that and For the perspective and of an aid agency for example, where's the attention really deserve to be Placed in Sweden. Actually, there's they are actually Redoing their measures of GDP to include ecosystem service values trying to get what is the real economic value of that soil resource? that is being washed away very quickly, what is the real economic value of Preserving the oceans or of having clean air and some of the mechanisms to get after that are obviously avoided health costs in the case of a lot of the pollution indices or longer-run Longer-run benefits from soil or water resources that are capitalized over a very long periods of time Instead of just looking at this year's returns So there's they're working on the methodology for that and and a lot of you know pilot Projects are going through it's going to take a long time to institutionalize it sort of on a global scale But the UN and and a number of agencies are actually paying attention to this now We have time for a few questions from the audience Sir Could you expand on that with regard to global Globalization and sustainable economies and the relationship to population growth? Yeah, I think If that's a very large question I should say this starting off, so I'm going to answer it and I might not answer all of it I'm happy to push Yeah, it is a major one and I would think I was struck Most of all from a recent visit that I had to the Asian Development Bank Which we got talking about this issue because we were talking about Mangrove some trim ponds and all these trim ponds that they had invested in the 70s are now laying completely idle and having no productive power at All and they're saying how do we regenerate these you know, how should we invest for regeneration? Should we breed a tilapia which is a freshwater fish to be saltwater tolerant and then you can imagine some species you know exotic species introduction of the whole ecosystem And I said no let's take a longer run and we take a longer run look We had an hour discussion with all these lending officers. I'm trying to measure ecosystem services Now the problem was still in the institutions that count I think the lending agencies are hugely important in terms of the economic development growth link that you're talking about There's still a mentality if you can't see it and you can't measure it don't count it You know, let's just do what we can count and measure and I think it's going to take a long Time institutionally to get at that but as they started thinking about it and they started saying okay Well, let's add up The real value of coastal fisheries if they weren't being decimated You know if we actually had nutrient flows if we had larvae being developed here You know could that sustain all these coastal populations that are the poorest in most of the countries along the coast and they started thinking The sense of it, you know started really clicking in terms of adding that up Um Gretchen you may know better on the Swedish measurements because you were over at the Bear Institute how those Actually calculate in terms of being more more wealth or less wealth But I think what what it ends out is a you know as as Adam was saying a much longer Run potential in terms of the opportunities that are out there when you count these You know these other other factors the the basic resources that are involved David Morris will be addressing these issues quite directly on November 19th at the last of these four debates if you care to learn more Do any of you care to respond on the economic value of the space program and putting scientists to work on the environment instead of having fun Well, I Yeah, that's that gets into the knowledge category and building knowledge. That's obviously a Confrontational one and I'll avoid it slightly by saying the first step I would do is take the military budget and and convert the military Which is which is a real negative the measuring of napalm and arms and so forth. I mean that is Is a real negative in terms of social welfare for the life quality of most people I think Converting that I think you could make a huge huge Estimation of a big economic gain that could be reinvested in something worthwhile I'll let you guys know. I'll just follow up quickly on that there's a well-known physicist who originally worked in the area of space physics and Who now goes around saying how appalling it is that we have named more planets and stars and we have Species on our own planet and we know so much more about these distant galaxies And we like I don't know it captures our fascination But it's incredible what there's left to be learned here in the United, you know here in the US or just on planet earth So I share your Convictions there. Yeah, I'll tell you about my my sympathies are along those same lines I have trouble with those sort of expenditures, but in the spirit of my role for this evening. I I Was reading something very impressive in the paper just yesterday about the development of a new fuel cell car and These are very exciting technological developments which I'm just going to quote a couple quick things from the New York Times here is yesterday's paper this car will Yield twice as much useful energy per gallon as a car engine does with a pollution 90 percent lower That's very exciting thing. And where did the technology come from for this fabulous thing? Well the new method Developed by Arthur D. Little Inc with 15 million dollars from the energy department a technical aid from a nuclear bomb laboratory Los Alamos National Laboratory and Then it's giving a little bit and there's a membrane which separates some of the atoms and so on as fabulous High-tech stuff as is so often the case in science the Times says The membrane was initially developed for an unrelated purpose to punt first manufactured it for making insecticides So you just never know Yeah, that's there's been any work on the Swedish measurement system. Yeah, that's That's specifically the idea actually is to be able to calculate what the capital is in in countries when you do the bank lending you're looking at You know capital stocks, which are the you know the basic savings of a country And then you're borrowing off that and the idea would be actually to calculate the natural resource Capital stocks, you know the those capital stocks that we just count as free our air and our water and so forth and actually to have those as stocks to grow off of and you know as as part of our Route savings and so the conception in the conceptualization. It's exactly the idea that you're talking about actually and so that's Part of the program is to interface with the central bank Behind you and then you so the question is entering this Kyoto conference, which will deal with Global reductions of greenhouse emissions. Is it reasonable to ask developing countries to basically make the same sacrifice? That the developed countries should be making the current agreement actually is that there there is it There is a schedule for developing countries too It's with it's with at least a 10-year lag depending on the country and then with a lower target And so it's a different target and timetables, but that they're supposed to be on board The real problems are coming into play with those countries like China, which a lot of the spotlight is on because they're growing so fast And they're doing it with soft coal which is contributing a lot to the the greenhouse gas emissions globally and You know the point of view from the developing countries is that These industrialized countries have already been able to grow and we have the kind of lifestyle that Adam has been talking about And we're all set and that these countries on the other hand are facing poverty And they need to provide the jobs and get out of that You know, why are they being blocked and there's no promise? I mean some of the issues that come up is will you transfer that technology from the industrialized country to the developing countries the Technologies like I don't just read about can you transfer that without all the patents at lower cost and so forth So we can just get on board. We can leapfrog the process On the population side there actually was a population conference a few years ago And it was a separate conference that was in Cairo and the issue became very touchy around religion and who's rights And what is a family worth and it's not worth anything to you But it's the only thing that we have in our countries and that whole issue and I think that the United States tried to take a Take a good role and one of the steps that we did that I would emphasize has been Critically important is to invest in international family planning We have taken all our resources out of that because of this abortion related issue And there's a lot of family planning that does not relate to abortion that involves contraceptives and knowledge and education and so forth and That investment five dollars in the family planning investment Will go so much further than having to invest in foreign aid programs once this population is there and trying to solve it And yet somehow that mentality that's hung up on the abortion issue is really stifled I think what is a fairly easy route to getting at you know A big part of the problem I could I just add a quickly to that just to put it into perspective a little more with some numbers right now the Average per capita energy consumption in China is just six percent of the average per capita energy consumption in the United States and China has the ambition which how could we you know argue with it to double that to just 12 percent of What we consume here and yet if China fuels that doubling of per capita energy consumption Using its soft coal it will add more co2 to the atmosphere than the United States could Remove by stopping all coal consumption in this country and right now coal Comprises about 24 percent of our energy economy about 85 percent of our energy economy is based on fossil fuels So my feeling here is that and then on the population issue I mean we're doing nothing like I was saying we're the fastest growing not even considering immigration which is a whole Related but somewhat separate issue major industrialized nation so on on these issues unless the United States takes a leadership stand How can we expect other countries to take these risky measures that we're not even with all our affluence willing to take ourselves? I think the first step is to develop a population policy for this country and Secondly to develop an energy policy and on the positive side here There Clinton put together something called the president's counsel of advisors on science and technology p-cast and these people are charged with reviewing important scientific issues for human welfare in the United States and just last week a Proposal for an energy policy was submitted by the best minds in this nation led by a physicist at Harvard now named John Holdren and that policy in his Their report they recommend the types of investment. We need an alternative Energy technologies and fuel sources and so on the sorts of things that are being described in this New York Times article that Adam was quoting from So if we take anything like that seriously, we could really Lead the world show that these other Alternatives are feasible and then hope that they would adopt them But if we don't do that China's gonna go ahead and develop using technologies in hand that we've used here And it'll be decades, you know after they've made those billions of dollars of investment in fossil fuel technologies before Anybody would consider switching to something else So it's crucial that the United States take a leadership role in in these issues now or we're gonna be paying the consequences for Many decades to come Just I'm not any kind of expert on global warming But I think both the bond agreement and the Kyoto agreement are both really interesting examples of what I was trying to talk about of Economic incentives for environmental outcomes You can see kind of how the incentives line up by which industry is in favor of the current agreement and which industry is against it Basically clean energy. We've it's divide and conquer clean energy gets them incentives So people who are in positive environmental technologies now have an incentive to be behind this deal and then you get people like the Western fuels association this is from the Wall Street Journal and the wonderful quote I couldn't resist but read this evening is Since 1988 our association has occupied the front lines in the battle for Americans right to cheap electricity So those are the people who are against the The agreement as it's currently formulated I just I just want to point out towing the other line that when we rely completely on economic incentives They don't necessarily take into consideration the tolerance of the system and that's That's one of the Negretion was talking about China going from 6% to 12% of our energy use the environmental impact was in the iPad equation The technology choice there was high sulfur coal. That's bad news That's bad news here And it's bad news there if they could have energy using clean sustainable renewable energy sources Obviously the tea part of the equation is a lot less and therefore the impact is less last last question sir I Repeat the question Well, the question really is how do you deal within an economic framework With the rape of Pacific lumber by Charles Hurwitz and Max Sam. Yeah, there's I think Economic incentives are going to go so far and then you're going to need regulation on some things There are some things to which the answer is just no and Cutting down ancient redwoods the last few of them is just one of those You know, I heard a story about Hurwitz When he took over the redwood forest Which is that you know, he was analyzing his asset his trees in terms of their net growth and if you actually look at the rate at which Ancient redwood trees put on new board feet of lumber through their natural growing process It's one and a half two percent a year just wasn't fast enough for him So you need at some point you need to just step into the equation and say there are certain things Which are just not permissible and that would be one of those Well, as I said with the curbside recycling example And I know Paul Hawkin talks about this a lot and when he starts his lectures He asks the question of the audience. How many of you got up this morning and decided you wanted to help destroy the world? I mean no one gets up in the morning and it says they want to be part of a system Which wrecks the world but yet we all do we are participating by getting up in the morning and turning on the electric Appliances and starting the car and driving to work and being part of the economy and no one is immune from it so We we need to We need to Acknowledge where we are and the impacts of our behavior and then make good choices. I I think the principles of Using economic incentive for environmental outcomes and substituting information for materials are kind of core principles which can Guide our individual decisions and our societal decisions to make better decisions I also think that this will be something that David Morris and others will talk about in November And I I think that that one of the issues is the fact that the that an economic scale does not necessarily respect or relate to The scale on which an ecosystem Operates and and so when somebody like Hurwitz is operating at a global scale and yet the survival of a particular ecosystem is happening On a different scale these two things are not synchronized in in any way and And what happens is what's happening and the destruction will not only be a terrible loss for northern, California But that ecosystem participates in a global ecosystem at the same time so it will have potentially devastating consequences Can I just add just one statement because I I'm also really troubled by it and I can see in your face How how concerned you are? I just spent actually yesterday I was in a small plane flying over Victoria Island in BC to clay o'quat sound which was one of the last pristine old growth forests in that area and I have never seen so much destruction in my Life as you see you flying over Victoria where literally every hillside is completely stripped down to nothing And I do think there are some important economic Principles here one is what are the leases on those lands or what was the land so far in the first place? In a lot of the federal lands and so forth It's way underpriced and it doesn't account at all for the true value of that land And and I think if the the price that had to be paid for using the land at all Increased a lot than the new technologies that would be more Conducive to selective harvesting and so forth would come into play right now a lot of selective harvesting You'll see it in the Sierras were actually helicopters and going to take out tree by tree. That's incredibly sustainable, but amazingly expensive I mean those lands are very very high-valued and they should be because we've got a lot of population pressure and And a lot of pressure to save some of those lands Reassessing those and really putting as as Adam said some some some Absolute knows in terms of the regulation. I think would would really force the owners of the land that does exist to think really rethink what is the technology and what is the strategy here for a 50-year plan of Capitalizing on that land. It would be very different than just completely ripping down the health side Thank you very much Adam Ross and Gretchen. This was terrific and and thank all of you very much for coming Please fill out the evaluation forms and there's a box in the back with a pink piece of paper on it Where you can leave them and we hope to see you on the 19th