 back to Global Connections. I'm Jay Fiedel here in Honolulu, Think Tech, and we are talking with an old friend of Think Tech, Gary Kandekar, and she is in Brussels, and it's 12 hours difference, but she stayed up late for us. Hi, Gary. So nice to see you. Hi, Jay. Lovely to see you again and lovely to be back on Think Tech. Just in the way of background, Gary was a fellow at Pacific Forum here in eight years ago, and she was on our show at the time, and it was on the very day she was leaving back for Europe, where she has been since, well, with various trips to various places. She's a global relations expert person, and into climate change these days. She has been with a number of think tanks, and now she's with the University of, did I say right, Brussels? Brussels, yeah, Brussels Tree University. Okay, and although she does not speak Flemish, we're going to conduct this entire conversation in Dutch. So Gary, in a word, how have you been, you know, catch up with our viewers and try to bring them current over the last few years? Oh, there's been so much happening. I've been shifting from a lot from foreign policy to climate change, and I think I made the big shift at the right time. There's been these state protests. Everybody's heard of Greta Thunberg, but there've been so many manifestations in Brussels all the time, the youth climate for movements, etc. So I've been working a lot on climate change. I work on how the Paris Agreement can be better implemented. And I also work on how we can decarbonize industry. So like the steel industry, the chemical refining industry, so a lot of the geeky stuff. So this is wonderful, especially these days. You know, so the US was part of the COP 21, as I remember, but now under Trump, we turn our back on climate change. We turn our back on, you know, environment in general. And every day, although he sets an agenda in front of the White House, it's very distracting. The fact is, his administration has been running 180 from, you know, anybody into climate change or environment. So I'm just wondering how the community in Europe, because I'm sure you touch base with them all around Europe, how the community in Europe feels about what's happened to the United States position on climate change and the environment. Yeah, it's quite sad, because the US should be one of the biggest players, because they're also one of the biggest emitters, and the world needs the US to be on board. So it's been quite sad that Donald Trump has pulled the US out of the Paris Agreement, and what we have been doing since, so the shock factor has since left. What the Europeans thought at the time was that maybe it would lead to other countries leaving the Paris Agreement, but that didn't happen. There was, there were many countries, for example, India and China in particular, who reinforce their commitments to the Paris Agreement. So that was good on the one hand. And on the other hand, what we did was started to analyze what's happening in the US. So there are various states, there are even cities which are leading in climate action. So we look a lot at California, and they've been doing great action there. But also the number of corporations that are leading in their own pledges for climate action. Just today, we were looking at some decarbonization technology from Hawaii. So we look at it at also more at a people scale, and hope the US will be back again. Well, the US needs to have a change in leadership. I think it's clear. I was telling you before the show that there was an article in the Irish Times by an Irish political writer yesterday, or day before. And he said, well, there were times when Europe and the world in general held the United States in awe, that they admired the United States, all these positive kinds of impressions of the United States as a world leader. But now it's not that at all. Now, he said they hold pity for the United States. And I read this article and said, my God, you know, that he's absolutely right. If you look in the looking glass, what else can you feel about it? Which takes me to coronavirus, because we have it, you have it, it's a pandemic. And I wonder what the sense of the people in Europe is about how well this administration and the United States has responded to coronavirus as it exists here in the United States. So for us here in Europe, it's quite shocking the way the US has been handling the crisis. The first thing was that we thought that it would be a moment for Donald Trump to actually take, it was clearly his make or break moment for the election at least. And unfortunately, he didn't take the bull by the horns. Let's say it was his opportunity to reinforce to people that he could be there for them. But since then, Donald Trump has called it a hoax. It has been largely mismanaged. And the amount of infections that are there in the US at the moment, I think it's already a million. It's huge. It's quite sad, actually, when the US has traditionally had a sort of foresight. And we did read a bit in the newspapers that every administration does these exercises before of imagining pandemics and how to handle them. And this was not conducted in a similar way. But also in how aid is being delivered by the center to the various states. And only Republican friendly states have been getting more aid and the others have to really grovel for it. It's quite shocking, to be honest. And also the fact that they have to pay for the treatment because in Europe, the people who get coronavirus have to pay any medical fees, even for the test. So it's been quite shocking. Yeah, I can imagine. Well, maybe when things cool off, I'll come to Europe. I'll feel safer there. How are things doing in Europe on coronavirus? How are things doing in Belgium? In the countries around Belgium, do you feel that the response there is acceptable? Do you feel that we're going to be out of the woods on this? So of course, for us, the US has been the extreme on the bad side of dealing with coronavirus. But here in Europe, we also have different examples. And we do complain about our own countries as well and how they respond to it and how even the minuter section. So let me just explain a bit what's been happening in Belgium. So we have a nationwide lockdown. Schools were closed already in mid-March. And since then, we were all encouraged to work, not encouraged, we were mandated to stay at home, work online. And there were only some essential workers, for example, supermarkets or hospitals, pharmacists who could go to work. And now they've been trying to relax the measures. So until then, we also had, for example, the ability to go out and exercise, like a walk in the park, for example, or a jog. Some people did try to abuse a bit, but then there've been police all around. And there've been thousands of fines, each around $300 per incident. So it's been quite strict. But it's not even been as strict as in other countries. So for example, Italy or Spain, where they have to have permits to go out of their home, to go shop for food or medicines. So they literally have to fill out, print out a form. And many Italians living in Belgium were complaining that it's like seeing the future, because we know what Italy has been through. And this is what we need to go through. We are going to go through, but the measures are not yet in place. They're not strict enough. So it's been that. And Belgium's response has been, let's say 75% strict. Germany has been similar in the UK. The response has been a bit similar to the US. So Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister of the UK, shocked everyone when he said, we would like to create herd immunities, let as many people as possible get the coronavirus, and then people will survive eventually. It was really shocking until he himself got it. And then he was in hospital, he was in intensive care. And now he's really put the UK under lockdown. But this has led to around 40,000 deaths in the UK. It's not far behind the US, actually. The population per capita, it would be ahead of the US, I think, at 40,000, no. Yes. And Belgium with around 7,000 dead is still ahead of the UK by population size. In other countries also like Sweden, for instance, they've had no measures, no lockdowns. But now they're trying to ease the lockdown, yeah. So how about you? How has it affected you? I guess you're working at home. Are you washing your hands? Are you taking short walks in the park? You haven't been fined, I guess. No, I've not been fined. So I normally, to be honest, it is quite hard psychologically, because there's this huge pandemic, the whole world's changed overnight. And psychologically, it does impact you. And many people are not understanding or acknowledging that. So I think that's important to do. So what do I do is basically try to keep this similar schedule with at least the dog walks. I have a dog and I go walk him in the park a few times a day. But then yes, I've been working from home mainly. The good thing is our university. So I work at the university, right? And we had been making the shift to online teaching, etc. So we did have, we were quite advanced anyways, at eLearning. So making this shift to working from home has not been a big issue for at least me. That's good. Are you using Zoom or something else? Yes, Zoom, Skype for Business, Microsoft Teams. But yes, by the way, I do go out and wash my hands a lot. And I do wear a mask as well. I put a few masks around. And yeah, I did relax. No finds yet, thankfully. I hope no more. Yeah. Well, it's very interesting. It sounds so similar to, you know, my life here and the lives of the people that I deal with in ThinkTech. But let me go to a question that we've been working on, and that maybe you thought about too. So you have two big things happening, two existential threats these days. One, of course, is climate change. Lest we forget, you know, Donald Trump sucks up all the oxygen. But in fact, you know, we have far as fires, we have floods. We have all these indicia of dreadful climate change and including storms that will probably come in a few months that will affect everybody, you know, and worry about affecting Hawaii. So that's one existential threat. And the other is the pandemic for which there is no therapeutic drug, no matter what he says. And there is no vaccine, and there may not be one for a long time. And we may develop, you know, herd immunity whether we like it or not, because so many people ultimately are low-hanging fruit, and the virus will get to them. Okay, so what I'd like to explore with you if you've had any thoughts about this is the relationship between the two. We know, for example, that coronavirus has effectively stopped a lot of economic activity. And when you look at the world map to see how much energy is being used, you see a lot less energy has been used, a lot less oil, the oil market collapsed. And so, you know, there's a relationship there. The other relationship I find even more interesting in the sense that climate change by perhaps raising temperature, climate change by changing, we don't even know all the flora and fauna that it has changed in the world, that it is changing may have contributed to the development of the virus. And so there's a two-way street on that. Each one somehow affects the other. What do you think about that? That's my proposition for you. What do you think about that? Yeah, there's a clear link. In Europe at least, everybody has been trying to, the research community has been making the link between coronavirus and climate change quite strongly, but in particular in terms of recovery. So you know this will lead to another financial crisis maybe and it's going to be quite devastating for most parts of the world, but especially the West. Like the last crisis, Asia escaped, but this time again it might be the case that Asia comes out a bit less impacted than the West. So what we've been doing in Europe is the research community has tried to see how do we get out of this, but also maintain our response to climate change. So right before the coronavirus pandemic struck, there were really interesting developments here in Brussels and I think you must have spoken about it too, is the Green New Deal. And the Green New Deal is a mega financial program to transform the economy into a green economy basically, so that Europe will become carbon neutral by 2050. And the amount in research for this would be between one trillion and four trillion or something like that. And so now what the thinking here has been that the Green Deal needs to be reinforced as a way to get out of the coronavirus impact on the economy. And also the companies that will get bailout should have to use that money to make sustainable changes to their production, their processes, their machines, etc. So that they come out less polluting and more in line with the climate ambitions. So this is quite interesting, no? Yeah. Oh, so is that actually happening or is that aspirational? That is what the thinking is going at the moment. I think the policy makers will just need to announce it, but it makes sense. Anyway, let's say industry for instance, because we now see the chemical industry, the textile industry, then they've been useful in making the medicines, the mass, the cleaning products, etc., not to drink or inject, but they've been really at the center of it and they've been strategic, right? These industries have for many years in Europe been making a lot of progress in order to reduce their emissions. So now they will suffer eventually because of the financial crisis that will come, but then this money from the Green Deal could help them to become greener, but also more resilient. So this is the thinking that's going on. Yeah, well, that's very good. One of the things that necessarily we all have to cover going forward is how is coronavirus, and for that matter, the threat of climate change, how are these existential threats changing our world? In some countries, some places, they're going to change our world more and some less. The smart guys change. Survival is change. The other guys, maybe in this country, they don't change so well. They want to go back to another time. But what I wanted to ask you, if you've been thinking in your think tank kind of way, Gary, at least Europe is going to change by reason of the combination of things. You've mentioned that people are going to try to, policy makers are going to try to do things about the Green Revolution, do things about climate change and sustainability, and try to get the economy going and also deal with the response. But my question to you is, how do you see it evolving? What is it going to be like in the next few years? Say a five-year horizon. It's going to be different. For example, civil liberties may be affected if you go out on the street and you're caught in the street and they give you $300 fine, then it somehow impinges on the civil liberty notion that you may have had before. And there's all kinds of other things in other countries, not in Western Europe so much, where the government is leaning on this as Trump is trying to do, as Xi Jinping is certainly doing. And so you have a question of the change in the relationship of the citizen and the government, the change in the way the government works, the change in our personal freedoms. Do you have a sense of how it's evolving and what it's going to be like, say in Europe in the next five years? Yeah, I mean, there's been so many changes already just because of one pandemic, right? I mean, flying, for instance, will be forever changed traveling in the short and the long term. Now we've been thinking about not having the middle row in the airplanes. So how would that affect traveling? Will a lot of people travel or not? And just going out, interacting, even as much as having lunch or dinner with friends. So it's going to a restaurant and that's the essence of life in Europe, all the bistros, the restaurants. And that's really going to be impacted at the very basic level. Going forward, we don't know the big impacts of climate change that may or may not come. Something drastic could happen just as we didn't foresee the coronavirus crisis. So for instance, with the melting of the poles, there could be other viruses. And this is quite a, there are scientists have written about this that have been chosen for ages that could come about again, and we don't have any antibiotics for them. So we are at a large risk when large swathes of land will go under water in Bangladesh, for instance, in India, but also in a lot of European countries. When we start losing land and the migration crisis becomes worse, especially in Africa, when there will be less and less water. And that anyways has a link to different crisis. So it's going to be exacerbated. But life as we know it has been changed from now on, I think, and it's going to change quite more in the coming years. And whatever Europe does or doesn't do, it can impact the whole world alone. So a global question for you, can the planet, with all these things in mind, can the planet support the existing population? I don't know if you remember, there's a movie called Human Flow a few years ago done by Ai Weiwei, the Chinese dissident. And in it he showed us that there were 65 million people behind Bob Weier in various camps around the world, and they would never leave those camps. There was no political solution for them. The children would live and die in these camps. And that sort of suggests that maybe it's not working for an awful lot of people, and that may increase. And so I ask you, in terms of agriculture, in terms of water, in terms of clean air and in terms of the resources you need to live, going forward, do you think the planet can survive with this many people? And if you do think the planet can survive, can you tip us off on what it must do to survive? So yesterday, actually, I saw a video from a speech of Nicolas Sarkozy, former president of France, and he was mentioning that he's around 65 years old, and when he was born, basically the global population was 2 billion, and in his lifetime, it increased threefold. And he said in the next 30 years, it's going to become 11 billion. And that's quite something to think about, and our planet can definitely not sustain so much population. But there's a need to look at it in a really global community way, kind of, how looking at it as one planet and not country by country, on what impact population we'll have in your life. I honestly don't think we can survive comfortably with 11 billion people and the economic disparity, because anyways, as the coronavirus makes it clear, those who can afford it will survive, those who can't don't. And it's quite sad. I mean, because of the social security systems here in Europe, it's less exacerbated, the economic divide. But globally, it's quite true. Those who really can afford to live will live. So with the rising population, it's going to be just that, unfortunately. Unless we control population rise, it will be quite grim along with the climate change. One other question I wanted to get your advice on is, so the issue exists perhaps in a more clarified way in Europe than in the US, but you have to take steps to protect the public health, and you also have to take steps ultimately to revive the economy as you want to take off the lockdown. And I wonder if you have any thoughts about how you solve that problem. It's complex, multi-parts. And how is your approaching that? I mean, my own view is, first, you have to do testing. First, you have to flatten the curve. That's first. You don't undo the lockdown until you're very sure you've got that worked out for your entire jurisdiction, not just part of it, but all of it. And only then do you make a systematic approach to recovering the economy. But what would you add to that? I completely agree with you, Jay. I'm so 100% behind you on this. And I sometimes feel that really starting to recover the economy too quickly, lifting the lockdowns is too soon. And it's not only because of young people or whatever, they're going to be significant losses. And it's not that also it's not that if you get the coronavirus once you have immunity, that's not the case. People are getting it multiple times even. And even though Trump might be a fool enough to say it, but every other country is also thinking in terms of acceptable losses in terms of population. And that's quite sad, I feel, what they're doing here. So they're different approaches that different countries are using. So in France, rightfully, and Macron is quite a good leader. So he's doing just as you said, he's gonna back testing, testing of the population a lot, really. In Belgium, what we're doing is we're going to relax the measure. So from next week, schools will start, shops will open. And I think that's really too soon to do that. But then the Prime Minister here said that these measures are not passed in stone, you know, so they could be reversed. In other countries as well, they're trying to open up the economy. But honestly, I think it's going to be quite a threat to a large amount of the population, especially schools open because children can carry there have been some deaths among children as well. But they certainly are carriers is going to spread to very quickly amongst the population. And we don't have measures like other countries in China, for instance, there's a shortage of mass, we can't it's really hard to find masks around here even in Europe. So even though in Belgium, it is, it's not testing of the global population not done in Belgium yet. But they did mandate that afterwards everybody will have to wear masks and go to work. But like I said, there's no easily available. I know how somebody's going to make a lot of money making masks. Well, Gary, you know, there's so much, there's so much happening, you know, at the same time, I feel that although the last time I saw you in person in on the streets of Honolulu eight years ago, you reminded me. It's like, it's like you never left. And what I really want to do is follow this global adventure we're having now. It's probably more of an adventure than we ever could have imagined eight years ago. And I hope I can catch you again in Brussels. You don't have to stay up too late right now. It must be oh gee was 10 o'clock at night already. Can we do this again? Can we do this again? There's much more to discuss. Yes, I'd love to. Okay, the same here, Gary. Gary Kondekar, our friend at ThinkTech for many years. And we look forward to catching up with her on a regular basis. We look forward to making the comparison, the global comparison, if you will, which is so important these days. Thank you, Gary. Thanks to you. Thanks.