Speech: India Today Conclave Keynote Address

President Clinton addresses the most pressing issues of today, discussing the dangers they pose but listing as well the steps taken by foundations such as his in combating the problems. Noting India's enormous potential to devise solutions to meet those challenges, he paints an optimistic picture of the future where cooperation will create a more sustainable, equal, and secure environment.

Full Text:

Thank you very much, Aroon. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.

I must say that I was so taken by that introduction that I hardly know what to say. Thank you for giving me the chance to address you. I wish I was there with you. As you know, I can't leave the United States now because Hillary is in a critical phase of her campaign. Still, I am delighted to have this chance to speak to you and to the India Today Conclave participants. Thank you for having me back, and I congratulate you on having Vice President Gore to close the Conclave. He won a well-deserved Nobel Prize for his lifetime commitment to doing something about global warming, and it is very important to the considerations that India and all of Asia have to make about how to grow their economies in the future. So I think you are going to have a great closing session.

I understand that I am supposed to talk for a few minutes today and then we are going to have a few questions. So I'd just like to offer a few thoughts to build upon those ideas that you mentioned at the end of your introduction.

When I spoke to the India Today Conclave in 2003, I had the opportunity to say that we should build a world of positive interdependence, not negative interdependence. In order to do that, we had to deal with the challenges of building shared opportunities and giving the world and each nation a sense of shared community across all of our divisions based on a set of basic values, the most important of which is that our differences are quite significant and they make life more interesting, but our common humanity matters more.

As we look back on these past five years, we see an enormous amount of progress and significant and persistent peril, reminding us again that every nation and every region in this interdependent global environment is bedeviled by three problems. The first is persistent, enduring inequality -- inequality in employment and incomes, lack of access to education, and health care. The second is insecurity, which includes terror, the prospect of being exposed to dangerous nuclear and biological materials, and the danger of global epidemic, like avian influenza. And finally, the course that we are on is unsustainable, because of the undeniable reality of global warming, which we see manifested over and over again in currently and rapidly changing circumstances in the global environment.

So, as we look ahead, we can celebrate the last five years and what they have done for India. Look at the large amount of people in this Conclave. Look at the enormous burst of creativity, strength, and economic and political influence in India. Look at the generation of new wealth. Look at the fact that India now has the world's largest middle class. But even then, you see persistent inequality, continued sporadic violence, and you have to face the fact that global warming requires us to change the trajectory of growth in terms of our energy usage. Can we do these things? Can the positive elements of the interdependent world of the 21st century outweigh the negative ones? That is the great overarching question of our time.

A lot of the specific elements and questions have to be answered by our political leaders. That is why elections matter in the United States, India, and everywhere else. But I spend a lot of my time trying to answer the question of what civil society can do. What can we do, those of us who are private citizens, who are not in political power, who will never be in political power, but who have access to resources, human creativity, and a world where the non-governmental sector is more influential than ever before?

You surely see this in India where over half-a-million non-governmental organizations are operating in villages and funded by very wealthy individuals. You see it all over the country in the United States. We have an amazing number of non-governmental groups, and half of them have been established in this decade by people who believe that civil society can make a difference in tackling these big problems. Essentially what I tried to do with my Foundation's work around the world is to take people's good intentions and turn them into reality to affect other people's lives.

So I had to talk about that a little bit in terms of the challenges we face. When we come to the end, I know we are going to have a question and answer session. I like those because at least I know that I am talking about something that all of you are interested in rather than something that I am interested in. Hopefully it will be the same thing, but it isn't always.

Let us just begin with the world health crisis. A quarter of all the people on earth this year will die of AIDS, TB, malaria, and infections related to dirty water: diarrhea, dysentery, and cholera. Eighty percent of the people in that last category will be children under five. By and large, these are the diseases of the poor. To be sure, there are people living in wealthy countries who have AIDS, but if they take their medicine properly, and if they maintain their diet and exercise regime and do what they are supposed to do, most of them can live a reasonably normal life expectancy, creating high levels of health.

The diseases of the poor ram home the inequality of the world. Working with indispensable partners in India, the great generic drug producers like Ranbaxy, Cipla, and several other Indian companies, we have arranged to provide the world's least expensive high-quality AIDS medicine to adolescent children all over the world. We are now serving 1.4 million people around the world. And that is an astonishing thing when you consider that just a couple of years ago, when we began this project in 2003, only 200,000 people in poor countries around the world who needed AIDS medicine to stay alive were getting it. Most of them were in Brazil and Thailand, where the government was providing the medicine. So the United States government is serving about four million people. The Global Fund on AIDS, TB, and Malaria is serving about that number. So we have come a long way. There is some overlap on those numbers, but we are coming closer to the goal of making sure that no poor person has to die of AIDS simply because they live in a poor country. And none of this would have been possible without a remarkable change in business strategy by the Indian pharmaceutical companies.

It is the sort of thing that we all ought to be thinking about in terms of how we can both do well in the world and do good, because what these companies decided to do with our help was to change their business strategy with regard to AIDS medicine. Instead of selling a relatively low volume of drugs with a relatively higher profit margin per dose, we got them to disburse exceptionally high volumes at lower profit margins. That enabled a whole world to open up with the limited amount of funds that we had available to save people's lives. I want to make it clear that no one who I worked with has ever had to lose money. People made profit, but did it in a different way. This is the sort of thing that a non-governmental movement can do.

And we have seen it dramatically with regard to children. A couple of years ago, we started to provide pediatric AIDS medicine. Only 10,000 children in the world who needed different dose pediatric AIDS medicine were getting it. In fact, 100,000 kids a year were dying of AIDS. The work has made a real difference not only in India, but in many countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. We sell this medicine all over the world. So that is just one example of what we can do.

Another big problem in the developing world with regard to health care is the absence of systems. We find this with health, with education, and with economic development. So our Foundation also tries to build function, in a sense. Think about how you all came to be there today. I can see you through the monitor. All of you are there having a nice gathering. You are going to drink that bottle of water, and you have absolutely no doubt that it is good water. You are going to have a good meal, and you have no doubt that the food is well prepared. You expect the sound equipment to work. You take for granted that you are comfortable in that room.

Most of those conditions are absolutely unavailable to a vast number of people in the world, where half of its people live on less than two dollars a day, and a billion on less than a dollar a day. And largely, it is not because they are not intelligent, not because they are incapable of learning things, and certainly not because they don't work hard. It is because they do not have access to the kinds of systems we take for granted that make the generation of wealth possible, make comfortable lives possible, and make the very building blocks of a good life possible, in terms of health, education, and shelter.

So my Foundation does a lot of work to create those systems. We work in 25 countries in Africa, where we are actually trying to build the health systems from the ground up. We are working in two countries trying to build health, education, and economic systems simultaneously, using some of the lessons we learned in our HIV/AIDS Initiative in Rwanda. In Malawi, we have doubled, and sometimes tripled, farmers' income by doing what we did with AIDS drugs. We lowered the cost of seeds, we lowered the cost of fertilizer, we improved the distribution from farm to market, and we have had remarkable success. Simultaneously, we have built health care systems from the ground up.

This can be done all over the world. In the end, I am convinced it is one of the most important things a non-governmental system can do to empower people at the local level to create their own systems so that there is a real connection between the effort they exert and the results they achieve. We are now attempting to do that on a much larger scale beginning in Latin America, and then ultimately going to Asia, Africa, and countries where mining occurs. The mining industry is one of the few industries that you can be absolutely sure will increase its profitability in every year between now and the year 2050, because the world's population is projected to grow from its current level of 6.5 billion to nine billion. We can slow that a little bit if we could get all the girls in the world in school, and that is another thing I am trying to do, but even so - and we could only take maybe a billion off that number -- there would be more people in the world in 2050 than there are now. And we have to do something to try to deal with that.

Meanwhile, miners will make more money, because they will have to take more things out of the ground for all the people who will be living in the world. More and more of these big mining companies are concerned that when they close up shop and move away the people they leave behind will have nothing to live on and the land may not be well cared for, depending on what the local government regulations are. So we have put together a consortium of 24 mining companies, seeded with $300 million, that will try to build sustainable economies for the long run. The goal is to build environmentally responsible economies with good jobs, good health care systems, and good education systems in mining communities across the world, beginning in Colombia, Peru, and Mexico, and eventually spreading out to mining communities in Asia and Africa.

It is very exciting. We already have about 26 companies signed on. But again, we are trying to build systems. Will we be successful? I can't be sure. But I am absolutely sure that we are working on the right things. We work only in partnership with governments. We don't try to be at cross purposes with them. We know that in many of these developing countries the government simply does not have the capacity on its own to build the kind of systems that have made the success that all you in the room enjoy possible. I think it is very important that we try to do that whenever we can. So I am working on that.

Finally, let me just say a word about the sustainability issue. I believe that global warming is a real and persistent problem. I do not believe it will be addressed unless we can prove that we can change our energy patterns and essentially move into a post-carbon future in a way that is good for the economy -- not just of the wealthy countries, not just for the United States, Europe, and Japan, but especially of the emerging countries, particularly China and India, but also Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico and all the other emerging economies. If we cannot prove that you can change the pattern of energy usage in a way that is good economics, then I don't think anything we do in America, Europe, and Japan will make any difference. I think the planet will be irrevocably damaged by mid-century, and our children and grandchildren will live a much reduced life.

So the question is: can we do this? And the answer is: nobody knows for sure, but I think so. I devote a lot of my time now to working with cities around the world proving that there are things that you can do on energy and on water management that will make real difference and actually boost economic growth.

Our Climate Change Initiative works with 40 cities on six continents to prove that it is good economics over the long run to save the planet for our children and grandchildren. We work in Paris, for example, where we are retrofitting 660 elementary schools, and we are going to save energy, cut the cost to the school budget, train lots of people for new jobs, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We are doing the same thing in New York City with the Public Housing Authority, where we are going to cut the annual electric bill from $500 million per year to $350 million per year, train hundreds of low-skill workers who are presently unemployed or underemployed in green-collar jobs to do the work at these buildings, give the City Housing Authority more money to take care of poor people, and cut our greenhouse gas emissions substantially. This kind of thing could be done all across the world. We are working with the city of Houston, our third biggest city, where the mayor has retrofitted the homes of the poorest 20 percent of his city's citizens and cut their utility bills 20 percent.

We are saving the planet and making the poor people richer by having more disposable income, and we trained a lot of new workers. We are working in Delhi and Mumbai, primarily on building efficiency, trying to cut energy usage and clean the environment in that way. But over the long run there are lots of other things that have to be done. We are working on water management systems. It is a huge issue in Delhi, and we are hoping we can help improve the waste management systems in a way that it both improves the energy situation and improves public health and the quality of life. I believe these kinds of investments are very important and the Indian government has committed quite an amount of money to these kinds of investments in the future.

I believe that India has enormous potential in solar energy, in wind energy, and in tidal energy in order to build an efficient, clean energy future, and to find jobs for a lot of people in smaller areas, in rural areas who don't have jobs. A lot of people are coming to the big cities without sufficient employment, and if you think about it, changing India's energy future will actually compliment the high-tech sources of economic growth you have had in the last few years. It will also broaden economic opportunity. The current government in India, after all, was elected after the country had enjoyed nine percent growth for several years. But it had been largely confined to 35 percent of the population. The government's commitment was to spread that growth to the other 65 percent. The easiest way to do that is by changing the way you generate energy, by localizing it, by making the country more energy independent, and by using the sun, the wind, and the tidal energy along the coast, particularly in the Indian Ocean where the tides are quite strong, and by maximizing energy efficiency in lighting, in heating, and in building material.

There are all kinds of things that can be done and there are millions and millions of jobs to be created in doing it. The same thing is true in China. If you look at China, they are bringing on a new coal-fired power plant every ten days. If they continue to do that, their growth and yours alone are almost sufficient to tip the scales in the global warming battle. Now you can't tell people not to use coal. So, therefore, we will have to find a way to take the carbon dioxide out of the coal, and in the process either burn it up or put it underground. The only place this is being done on a large scale is in Norway, where carbon emissions have been taken out of oil burning and put under a rock shelf in the North Sea. It is very thick rock. It is not porous. The emissions will not escape, and of course, the North Sea is very heavy. That cave, which is now vacuum-packed against leaking, has enough capacity to store Europe's carbon dioxide for the rest of this century. And so you see people in the Netherlands and other countries, for example, trying to think of how they can build piping to send their carbon emissions to store them under the sea. We have to find places like that all over the world or change the process by which coal is turned into energy usable for electricity for people. These are the kind of things we are working on.

There are lots of things that can be done in transportation. Every country could become virtually energy independent in transportation. The only thing we know we need oil for today is to produce jet diesel fuel. No one has yet figured out how to take a heavy airplane, lift it off the ground and fly it a long way at a fast speed without using an oil derivative product. But, every other time we use oil, it is optional. So, if I were, for example, in charge of this in India, I would be trying to modernize the rail system. I would be trying to accelerate the production of the natural gas powered vehicles that are now regularly used around the Taj Mahal to reduce local air pollution there. I would be looking for all kinds of other things that can be done. We are very close to developing a car which gets 100 miles to a gallon in America with a lithium battery that will run on electricity to 55 miles an hour and then kick over into fuel. Today, there is insufficient material to produce these batteries in a large volume, and because they can't be produced in large volume, we can't drive the price down. Many of you in the audience know far better than I that the cost of all electrical products will drop dramatically in prices if their volume goes up. But we are getting there. And our Foundation is working in all these areas, and especially in the building areas, where a non-governmental organization can have a great impact. You simply organize people to finance these improvements out of lower electric bills and we can create millions of jobs on every continent.

So I am working in India. If you have any ideas, if you want us to help, if you think you can help us, I would welcome that. But I do believe we can take the future we were building away from our children and grandchildren unless we do something serious about climate change.

Finally let me say, I have tried to find ways to involve other people far beyond our Foundation in this non-governmental work. The most important thing we do is the Clinton Global Initiative that meets every year at the opening of the United Nations, where we bring in business, political, and non-governmental leaders from all over the world. We discuss, at most, three or four problems every year, and we tell everyone who comes if they want to come back, they have to make a commitment to actually do something.

And the results have been quite encouraging. We have had about $30 billion in commitments from over 1,000 people and groups affecting 100 million people in over 100 countries in the last three years just trying to build this great non-governmental movement, not only in the areas that I have mentioned today, but in other areas that people are interested in.

I think that India, with its rich and deep heritage of non-governmental organizations, may be in the best position to devise localized solutions to a lot of these problems with an even bigger and even better funded non-governmental movement. That is the other thing that I would ask all of you to look at. This December in Hong Kong, we are going to have a Global Initiative meeting in Asia for the first time focusing just on the major challenges facing Asia and what the private sector and all this new generation of wealth in Asia can do to address these problems. Our goal is to work not in opposition to government, but hopefully in partnership with government in places where the government clearly is not and perhaps cannot address these problems adequately. So we are going to be meeting there in December. Perhaps some of you in the audience will be there. Perhaps you are interested in coming. If you are, you could let me know and I will try to work that out.

But this is a very exciting world that we are living in. There are more people generating more wealth and more opportunity than ever before. But those of us who have it have a huge responsibility to plow some of it back into the future so that our children and all our grandchildren can enjoy these benefits.

We are still a long way from a world of shared benefits, shared opportunities, and shared responsibilities. We are still a long way from a world where we reach across all the divisions and build a global community and genuine communities with all our nations. The progress is immensely and obviously encouraging. I am far more optimistic than pessimistic. But I don't think we could deny the searing impact of inequality and what it does to diminish the potential of a country like India. I don't think we can deny the troubling insecurity that still exists in the world today because of the conflicts that you see most pronounced in the Middle East that is everywhere else in the world, in every continent. And I know you can't deny the fact that we could be depriving our grandchildren of building on all the work that we have done if we don't do something about global warming.

So this is an exciting time to be alive and a heady time to be filled with lots of interesting things to work on, whether you are in politics or business, or if you are in the non-governmental sector. There is plenty to do every morning to keep us busy, to keep us worried, but also to keep us hopeful. On balance, I am quite optimistic about the future, but we have to deal with these big challenges and we can't expect the government to do it all as there is simply not the capacity to do it or the political support to do it. But ironically, it has been my experience in all these countries where I am working that the more the non-governmental sector does, the more we prove that these problems can be solved, the better governmental policies we get. These two things work hand-in-hand. And that is one of the reasons that I am quite hopeful about the future, and quite grateful for the chance to address such a distinguished group in India today.

Thank you so much.