Clinate change keeps on coming

The next couple of hours were spent in the large buffet lunch in which one talks buts eats little in a multilevel hall packed with a couple thousand people all with the same objectives, talk to the people you want to, avoid the people you want to and maybe get a bite to eat. A number of interesting conversations in which energy and climate change figured large. More with Jim Rodgers (one of the ten US CEOs who came out for carbon caps last week) on how to bring the country around on nuclear power. Coincidentally followed by a conversation with an old friend whom I had not seen in years, Prof Robert Socolow of Princeton. He is the recent author of a seminal paper on how to deal with climate change, in which he thoughtfully considered nuclear and how Al Gore had used his ideas but avoided the nuclear dimension. Just as I finally made it to the buffet table Richard Quest of CNN the moderator of the next panel of which I am a member to join him and the others in the preparations. Our topic was the technological and societal dimensions of the major power shifts now going on, with the focus on things like virtual communities, the rise of the download generation and the increasing youthful elderly. The others on the panel included Shai Agassi of SAP, Bill Mitchell the CEO of Arrow electronics, (visual note: if anyone wants a visual model of what a fantasy CEO and his wife look like, Bill Mitchell and his wife are it.) and David Rothkopf of the Harvard negotiation project. There was some whining about people losing authentic contact with each other because of new media and e-mail, etc…but I was the strongest advocate that far more had been gained in extending the breadth and depth of our communications and knowledge access. Not surprisingly I also argued for the growing power of the youthful elderly. Looking out at the audience at Davos can also be a daunting experience because you know almost everyone out there could just as well be on the stage as you. I saw Joe Nye and Larry Summers of Harvard, the head of Bus Dev of Cisco, Richard Levin the President of Yale, Ernesto Zedillo the former President of Mexico, the Indian Ambassador to the UN…..and it goes on.

In parallel to our session were several others structured similarly on economics, geopolitics and business. At the end the rapporteurs came to the big hall to report to all the delegates on the panels and their audiences’ views. We were to vote on the most important issues and the ones we were least prepared for. After much discussion…some of it quite good…a member of the audience said “but what about climate change?” And then we voted and climate change wiped out everything else, fundamentally undermining the process the Davos organizers had so carefully put together to create a neat web of interconnected issues. But Ged Davis manfully came up at the end and gracefully recovered the conclusions from the panels that such phenomena as the emergence of China and India and the return of Russia to the world stage might also be very important, and the huge generational transformations that are underway also might be consequential. But climate change remains the topic everyone keeps coming back to.

More conversations followed among them with Alan Gershenfeld, the brother of Neil and the CEO of a new kind of web start up designed to enable creative types, eg musicians to find their audiences. But as always talking with Martin Wolf the economics columnist of the FT was a highlight. We had a great debate with Joe Nye …who drew in others on whether the US would invade Iran before Bush left office, with Martin convinced that he would. Ran into our chairman Mark Fuller at the end of the debate and he and I headed over to the Yale reception at the Steigenberger hotel. It is the one ancient grand hotel of Davos and where most of the pseudo VIPS stay. (The real VIPS stay in rented chalets). At the Yale reception spoke with Zedillo about the impact of the biofuels industry in the US on Mexico…pricing corn out of the tortilla market for the poor of Mexico. They may have to break NAFTA to survive the US move in ethanol.

On to dinner on climate change and national security chaired by John Holdren. The highlights happened to be two Brits, Sir Nicholas Stern and James Cameron, the young new head of the Conservative Party. Sir Nicholas basically summarized his now very influential report arguing strongly that the cost of doing little was far more costly in the long run than taking strong action today. But it was Cameron who really surprised me. He wholeheartedly supported Sterns conclusions, (Stern is Labour) and then went on to argue that we need an international emissions authority… a kind of global EPA….not at all Tory like. A Pakastani general described the horror of his work in relief in a 1971 Tsunami that killed nearly 2 million people in Bangladesh as the waves washed over them. It was the future he feared from climate change. And Nick Kristoff, the NYT columnist, chimed in with the idea that maybe the WEB 2.0 phenomenon of bottoms up action might become a novel means of environmental enforcement…creating a kind of global ecological transparency. At my table were two amazing young woman, a member of the Brazilian Congress and one of a small group fighting hard on environmental issues in Brazil and a Lebanese educator and mother who is trying to preserve some hope for the future for her kids and students while trying to teach them something about the interconnected world of ecosystems in the midst of a dreadful conflict.

Well its midnight here and I have one more night cap to go… so more tomorrow.