Making Green pay

Day 2 First Sessions
Began the morning with coffee with Geoffery Moore, Shai Agassi, Orville Schell and Baifang Liu, who brought along the former Chinese ambassador to China, and then John Holdren joined us.

I am currently in a fairly large session on Making Green Pay. It is a televised debate on CNN on several environmental and energy issues. (It will be broadcast at 6 EST on Jan 28.) The first proposition was in favor of nuclear and clean coal. The affirmative was presented by Jim Rodgers, CEO of Duke and old friend (we chatted before the session.) and the negative by Vinod Khosla, a VC. At this session we get to vote electronically on the propositions. The audience was asked to vote and the nukes and coal lost by 3-1, much to my surprise. Of course my friends Orville Schell and Baifang Liu, sitting next to me voted the wrong way. Dan Yergin is speaking now in favor of the second proposition on markets vs regulation, The Chinese ambassador has just weighed in on the government side. (one of the speakers just cited The Long Tail as an argument in favor of markets.) The audience voted 3-1 against markets, but Jim Rodgers just weighed in against the either or nature of the propositions. And the third proposition is on a global carbon tax now being argued against by Jose Goldemberg because setting the tax rate is very hard and would produce serious inequities around the world. He is in favor carbon caps and trading and efficiency regulation. He is not surprisingly, as a Brazilian for a strategy similar to what they did with respect to biofuels. Nicholas Stern is now arguing in favor of the carbon tax because of the scale and urgency of the risk. There appears to be some degree of consensus on the need to set a price for carbon, John Holdren and Lester Brown ended up on opposite sides. The carbon tax won 2-1. It was a surprisingly good debate…though made a bit artificial by the extreme nature of the propositions.