Speech: Sustainable Development Forum 2008

President Clinton focuses on the potential for clean and sustainable energy in Latin America, arguing that such a transition would in fact spur economic growth. He urges the people to translate their good intentions into serious efforts through social entrepreneurship and cooperation.

Full Text:

Thank you very much. Thank you, Mario.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am delighted to be given the opportunity to address this group again, and to say that I have here several members of my Foundation in the event something occurs to you during the speech that you think we should be doing together.

But my main claim to fame in this group is that one of our most important staff members, who was with me in the White House and now works with our Global Initiative, Mary Morrison, is from Salvador Pina. And I'm half Brazilian, at least in my musical taste.

I want to first thank the United Nations Association of Brazil, not only for giving me the opportunity to come here, but for continuing to focus on the remarkable potential Brazil has to play a major role in the 21st century world in dealing with its signal challenges.

I would like to begin with an overview. As you probably have noted, there is an election going on in America. It is being conducted against the background of an enormous amount of economic anxiety. Latin America has, in the past, worried about income inequality. But in the United States for the last seven years has had the biggest increase in income inequality in 70 years, because 90 percent of the economic growth of the last decade has gone to only 10 percent of our earners, the ones at the top, and an astonishing 43 percent to the top one percent, and a significant percentage of that to the top one-tenth of one percent.

I'm saying this to explain the rise of protectionist sentiment in America. Because the average person, after joint family income rose about $7,500 a year when I was President, has a median family income today that is $1,000 lower after inflation than it was when I left office. So even though, technically, America has not been in a recession, Americans are in a recession. Their health care costs have doubled. The cost of university education has gone up 75 percent. Energy costs are up about $2,000, and of course, that's all exploding this year.

I say that to explain to you that the people of the United States are still very much positive in their attitude toward all of Latin America. They want partnership for the future. The rising protectionism is a direct consequence of their declining economic fortunes. What we have to do in Latin America and the United States is restore a sense of shared prosperity, because the persistent inequalities of the world are being seen now, not only in the difference between wealthy nations and poor ones, but also within all countries.

In Latin America, this is causing a definite shift to the left in domestic political elections. Now, anyone who wins an election in Latin America on a populist nationalist platform has to think about how to promote social justice or environmental advances and still sustain economic growth. That is very much at the forefront of this debate in America today.

I have argued and did argue that when I was here before in the presence of many. I'm very grateful for so many governors from Brazil being here. I had that job once, and it was the best job I ever had in some ways. But what we have to do is to prove that the only way to promote economic prosperity and make it more broadly shared over the long run is to make it consistent with our obligation to save the planet and our natural resources.

And on that score, I would like to make just two observations. First of all, it is personally rewarding to me to see so much economic growth in Latin America, powered by Brazil and by Mexico, and to see Argentina make a comeback. I worked very hard when I was President to establish a good economic partnership and to promote the economic empowerment of all the peoples of Latin America. So I'm very happy about that.

Secondly, I almost wish I were here listening instead of speaking. There is no country in the world that is making more effort to find a path to sustainable development, to save the planet from global warming, and to permit its people to become more prosperous than Brazil. Sometimes I wonder if I have anything to offer to you. I am grateful to Brazil.

So let me begin by saying this: perhaps the best thing I can do today is to make the offer that I made to Mario in a different context the last time I was here. If you are involved in these projects and you think the work we are doing will help and you are interested in any sort of partnerships, I would be glad to discuss them.

But let's talk about the role of sustainable development, not only in saving the world from climate change, but in promoting more democratic economic growth; how I have seen that taking shape just in my own experience in what is going on in Brazil; and what it seems the biggest problems are, because these issues are not going to be easy to resolve.

The world has three enormous problems: inequality in incomes, in health care, and in education; insecurity caused by our interdependent vulnerability to terror, to narco-trafficking, to organized crime, to the spread of epidemics, and to the spread of nuclear, chemical, and biological materials, which could be used by criminal or terrorist groups to wreak havoc anywhere; and the instability that is our certain fate unless we can find a way to head off the worst impacts of global warming.

I will leave the insecurities out and talk about the relationship between economic and social inequality and the threat of global warming. This climate change problem has been presented by most experts, including many of my friends at the United Nations, as a problem so dire that it requires the wealthy countries of the world to give up a lot of our economic growth, or at least some of it, in order to meet the world's target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by the year 2050.

Frankly, there is a lot of evidence that would support this argument. Of the 170 nations that signed the Kyoto Protocol, the only ones that had to make no effort to meet the targets in reducing their greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels were the former communist countries. For them, there was a fortunate coincidence between the date the target was established and the couple of years later when all their economies collapsed, as the old communist system had collapsed. Most of them are just going to meet the targets because they couldn't catch up with their coal-fired plants in time to fail to meet the target. All the other countries in the world actually had a target to meet in the reduction of greenhouse gases.

How many do you suppose are going to meet that target? As best we can determine now, six. Only six. So while I certainly agree with the rest of the world in criticizing the United States for withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol after I left office, the second biggest tragedy is that only six of the 170 countries that signed it are going to meet or beat their targets. It is not because the people who signed it are incompetent, or dishonest, or unintelligent. It is not because they didn't have the best of intentions. It is because, at the time it was signed, we knew more about it being a big problem than about how to solve it. Perhaps the central political challenge of our day is figuring out how to turn good intentions into concrete advances in the lives of all of our people.

But if you look at the countries that are meeting the target, you see that the argument that this is bad for the economy is dead wrong. Let's just take two examples. Denmark is going to substantially beat its Kyoto Protocol target. What has happened? They have grown their economy 50 percent with zero increase in electricity use, all through energy efficiency. They have reduced their greenhouse gas emissions because 27 percent of their electricity is now generated from wind.

It may be objected that, well, Denmark is a tiny country, only five million people, hardly any landmass, not like Brazil or the U.S. All that is true. But they do prove that you can grow the economy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Unlike our experience in America, they have more jobs, median incomes are rising, and poverty is declining, because they are committed to averting the worst consequences of climate change.

Let's take a more representative country, the United Kingdom. It is the European country most like the U.S. It has the least regulation, the most open borders, a huge number of immigrants, both legal and undocumented, and a real commitment to free enterprise with all of its upsides and downsides. But unlike America, there has been no increase in income inequality, and huge numbers of jobs have been created. And it's because they will meet their Kyoto target in 2010, two years early, and substantially beat it. This is particularly an impressive feat for a country that depends for a lot of its income on the production of oil and natural gas from the North Sea. Sweden is doing the same thing.

Anyway, if you look around world, it's hard to make a case, at least in the first stage, that fighting climate change is bad for the economy. All the evidence, skimpy though it is, involving just six countries and the anecdotal evidence from Brazil and the U.S. and every place elsewhere we are making localized progress, is that in fact it is very good for the economy.

So I would argue that one of the most important things we can do, as we go to 2010 when there will have to be a successor to the Kyoto agreement, is to, all of us, spend more time illustrating what can be done to reduce emissions and grow the economy.

After the next American election, no matter who's in office, they will be much better than the current government on this question. The Democrats are better than Senator McCain, because they are willing to embrace much more stringent targets. But he's been a leader in the Republican Party on this. He and Hillary have taken skeptics all over the world to show them the changes in the climate. We now have in the United States Senate a majority made up of Democrats and Republicans to do something serious about this. So you won't have any problem finding a new partner in America, no matter what happens in our election, on this issue.

But there is still a problem in figuring out how to take our good intentions and turn them into concrete reality. Brazil can play a major role in this for several reasons. First, you have proved in other social problems that you have a great facility for this. You were one of the first Latin American countries to reach almost universal enrollment of primary schools because of the Bolsa Escola program. And it's an amazing piece of social entrepreneurship, basically paying for its women to keep their kids in school. You were the first country outside of the U.S., Europe, and Japan to have virtually universal treatment of people with HIV and AIDS, including your native populations, because of the brilliant distribution network you have. The Brazilians have proven that when it comes to social programs and challenges, you're great problem-solvers.

Now all of us who work in the climate change field know not just about the ethanol from sugarcane, we know about what's being done in your cities, like Porto Alegre, to try to improve transportation. We know that a lot of the states are really committed to forest preservation. We are watching all this with great interest.

And so the most important thing I can say today -- you could almost order another drink and ignore everything else I say, I hope you won't, but you could -- is that I intend to spend the rest of my life trying to help people turn their good intentions into positive changes in our children's future. That is the single most important problem that exists in politics, in society and social policy. The world is full of really smart people who know about all our problems and have the best of intentions. There are far too few people who can figure out how to organize ourselves to actually make the differences on these things.

So I don't think you could possibly underestimate the importance that Brazil can play, not only for your own country and your region, but for the world in proving that we can find an answer to climate change. Not only because you have done a lot of these things, but because you have the toughest problems. And I'll just give you a few examples.

There is no question that in terms of ethanol the most sensible way to produce it is with sugarcane, because you get eight gallons of ethanol for every one gallon of oil. So it's the finest conversion ratio in the world as opposed to corn, which is 2.3 to 1. This is a real problem because ethanol, in general, is 30 percent less efficient, in terms of energy output, than traditional gasoline. It is probably slightly more harmful to the environment than if you produce cellulosic ethanol, because you can just take that from the residue of agriculture, the residue of temporal agriculture, or even closing landfills and using organic materials in the garbage.

But as a lot of you know about ethanol, the inside process for converting cellulosic material to ethanol is still quite expensive, which means, if we are going to do this for environmental reasons, we'll need very, very large tax incentives to make the economics work out.

Meanwhile, as Mario was telling me, the last time I was here I suggested that somebody from Brazil ought to contact the Prime Minister of Ethiopia, because he said that he had done soil studies, and they can grow sugarcane in Ethiopia and do the same thing you're doing. And he thinks Africa, as the poorest continent on the earth, should become the first continent that is completely oil-free when it comes to transportation. He believes that would be very good for their economy, that they'd have lots more jobs and lower costs and environmental problems, which are attendant on the greenhouse gas emission.

This is an enormous potential issue for you. On the other hand, 18 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions are generated by deforestation. The major forests of the world, as all of you know, are in Amazonia, mostly in Brazil, the Atlantic rainforest in the Congo basin in Africa, which is the second biggest rainforest, and in Indonesia. With the demand for alternative fuels from palm oil in Southeast Asia, they're just cutting down trees to have something to keep warm and cook food in Africa, to the exploding demand for ethanol among your neighbors and trading partners. This complicates the efforts that President Lula's government is making now to protect the rainforest, and that many of you are supporting.

I must tell you that I thought about this for years. I read an article literally 29 years ago, maybe more, maybe 30 years ago, pointing out that the Amazon rainforest was generating 20 percent of the world's oxygen that did not come from the ocean, and that an extraordinary amount of it was being cut down. So I have been interested in this and invested in it for a long time.

In the run-up to the 1992 Biodiversity Conference in Rio when I was just a Governor, not running for President, I organized an effort among the nation's governors to try to determine what every state's pro rata share would be of the acreage being destroyed in the Amazon rainforest every year so that we could replace it. Of course, it's silly to think it can be replaced in any American state because of the unique biodiversity in the rainforest and the fact that you may still have in that rainforest the cure for the world's cancers, for Alzheimer's, for what in our country is an almost epidemic increase in the number of children being born with autistic conditions.

I've watched you try to do this. This is really hard. You have a vast landmass. I admire and honor the fact that you are making efforts. I'm also exceedingly sympathetic with the poor people who live on the margins of existence and on the margins of the rainforest. How are we going to find a way to make money that goes down to ordinary people by preserving them? The two most important things for Brazil to do, besides continuing to modernize your own cities and to prove that you can be as maximally efficient as possible, is show us how to preserve our natural resources in a way that actually works and figure out how we can move to a post oil transportation future in a way that doesn't explode the cost of food, diminish the quality of farmland, lead to more deforestation, and compromise more water resources. These things are really important.

I spend my life now solving problems. I see what you are doing and I don't know if I can do a bit better on this. This is really hard. But the whole world has got so much riding on you. That's why I was so glad to see the young women who are here as green models. Anything you can do to raise the consciousness of people and get the best ideas out, involving 100 percent of the people, is important.

Now, let me back up and tell you what we're doing with our Foundation. We have a climate change partnership with cities all over the world on six continents, including some in Brazil. We are doing everything from organizing the retrofitting of buildings to make them more energy efficient, to developing new building standards to make sure that we move eventually to having all of our new buildings being carbon neutral. That should be the goal of every major urban area so that every building over a certain size should be a carbon-neutral building. And you don't have to live in a hot climate to do it. One of my partners in Netherlands has built a carbon-neutral office building in Rotterdam. And I don't mean he's buying offset credits in Brazil. His building is carbon neutral. When I was in Athens last fall for a speech, there were mile-long lines of cars waiting to drive by the first Greek office building that was completely carbon neutral, going well beyond what is the most prized designation in America, which is to be a platinum building in the Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.

In the meantime, there are huge numbers of jobs and savings and greenhouse gas reductions in a massive effort to systematically make as energy efficient as possible every existing structure in the world, normally starting with public buildings, schools, university buildings, and government buildings. We do this. We're retrofitting 660 elementary schools in Paris and all public housing in New York City, which is 11 percent of America's total. We just helped to green the Chicago Merchandise Mart. That's the largest single building in America. Houston, Texas, the oil capital of America, is now the wind energy capital of America. Texas generates more electricity from wind. And shortly, the Mayor of Houston, who served in the Energy Department of my Administration, will issue new building standards, and Houston, Texas, will have the greenest building standards of any city in the United States, second only to Vancouver, Canada, in North America.

So these are the kinds of things we're trying to do. We're doing our very best to rebuild the city of New Orleans, destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, at very, very green standards and to use that as a magnet to get even more tourists there and to attract more people to go back home because many of the people who work in the tourism industry don't make a lot of money, and if we can green all the houses in the rebuilding, their cost of living will go way down.

So I'm very interested in this. There are four or five countries that will determine what happens in the world on this whole climate change issue: obviously, China and India, because they will be the biggest and they are growing like crazy; United States, because if we don't take the lead, others won't follow. But Brazil is poised to have a major influence on what happens to the world on climate change because of the rainforest, because of your reputation for social entrepreneurship and because of your growing economy.

One final point on this: I do not believe that we can possibly solve this problem, that is, to prevent the worst impacts of climate change, unless people in the developing world believe it's an intelligent thing to do economically. We cannot sell it as: "Would you like to be just a little bit poorer so your grandchildren will still have an earth to walk around on?" We should do it, but we can't. We can't sell it that way. The Chinese are too overwhelmed by their current challenges and intoxicated by their current success, and so are the Indians. So we have to find really smart ways to do this.

I would urge all of you to think about this whole issue, not just in sort of mega huge solutions, but also from an entrepreneurial point of view. What is the Bolsa Escola analogy in getting more people to use green energy or use less? What about this astonishing network you can use to do something?

I do a lot of work in the AIDS area. We have 1.4 million people alive today on the AIDS medicine that we procure for more than 60 countries. It's the least expensive, high-quality medicine. I've worked with Brazil to try to protect your right to provide affordable AIDS medicine for all your people. But it's amazing what you did in getting that medicine into the native tribes of Brazil, many of whom did not speak Portuguese and many of whom were totally illiterate. How you did this, and totally reversed what could have been a calamitous epidemic, is one of the great and relatively unknown stories of public health in our lifetime. The skills that you brought to that are the skills we have to bring to every single building block of this climate change problem. And I see it in a lot of your cities now. I see it in the states that are making the serious effort. But you have to know the whole world is watching.

As the failure to comply with Kyoto proves, the biggest problem in the world is no longer ignorance. The biggest problem in the world is no longer unwillingness. The biggest problem in the world is incapacity, the inability to turn your good intentions into concrete changes. That is what you have to help in order to keep this phenomenal resurgence of Latin America going, in order to have your country rise to its rightful position in the world, and in order to save the planet for our children and grandchildren. Can it be done? Of course it can. But this is the great untapped problem of the 21st century.

You can say the same thing, by the way, about poverty, about the lack of universal education, and about sustainable economic development by the Department of Energy. There are all these wonderful people in the world willing to spend their money, spend their time, spend their efforts, and all these well-meaning people in government, but there is still a breathtaking limit on the capacity to turn our good intentions into positive changes on these really big problems.

Because you have them and because you have proved you can solve them, Brazil will, for the next 20 years at least, have the riveted attention of the world and have the potential to have profound influence on what other people do to deal with this climate change issue, if you can show the way.

For example, I'm really worried that, as we in America retrofit every building in this country, if we keep adding 18 percent of our greenhouse growth every year for deforestation, then everything we do for energy efficiency will be blown away. We can put everyone in an electric car in America and use no oil to get around, and if we still keep all the deforestation, if we keep all these landfills, which generate methane gas, instead of closing them and using them to generate ethanol and electricity, and if we don't do this in a hurry -- you have the melting of the Himalayan glaciers continuing, flooding out Nepal, the thawing of the Siberian tundra, which is releasing methane at a breathtaking rate, which, as all of you know, is 20 times more powerful per unit than carbon dioxide -- then all of our efforts still could be for naught in trying to preserve the future for our children.

I am an optimist by nature, not a pessimist, but I have been frustrated in how limited people's capacity to make the changes they intend to make is. Brazil gives me hope. I'm sorry you have such a big problem, but your problem is a promise. You are lucky to have the rainforest. It's an honor and privilege to be given the responsibility to preserve it. You are lucky to have all this prosperity. It's an honor and a privilege to figure out how to keep moving people out of poverty without destroying the land that they love.

And so I say to you, the whole world is looking to you. I'm just over here trying to figure out how to help people solve their problems. If I could ever do anything to work with any of you on that, I would be honored. I love your country. I admire the current government. Your former President, Fernando Cardoso, is a very close friend of mine, as many of you know. And I think you have the best music in the world.

We've got a lot to do and a limited time in which to do it. We can do it, but you have to help lead the rest of us in the right direction.

Thank you very much.