The Age of Sustainable Development

welcome very nice to see such a full halt I'm Jonathan Lee I'm the executive director of the international growth centre and I'm very pleased to welcome professor Jeffrey Sachs for today's lecture many academic researchers aspire to inform public debates and to change public policy but few succeed because the challenges are immense there are conflicting cultures conflicting timeframes incentives constraints Jeffrey Sachs was one of the first and arguably the most prominent in a new generation of leading economists who became not only policy intellectuals but also public intellectuals who have challenged policymakers and all of us to see pressing national and global issues in a new light to consider new approaches to seemingly entrenched problems he's not never shied away from being provocative and from taking risks in the affect again and again has to been to take issues out of the closed domain of internal policy processes and negotiations very often with vested interests and into the public debate challenging participants to make their case on the grounds of public interest for this reason it's a special pleasure to welcome Jeff back to the LSE as many of you may know the LSE was founded in the late 19th century by the Fabian's with the express aim of applying the emerging social sciences to the pressing social and economic problems of the day very much in the spirit of what Jeff has devoted his career to doing but it's also a great pleasure for me personally to welcome him here on behalf of the international growth center the international growth center is was set up to promote sustainable growth in developing countries by bringing in new thinking and ideas and doing this by creating a new model a model that brings together a global network of leading researchers from around the world and a set of 15 establishing country teams that make it possible for us to work collaboratively with policymakers that is to recognize that policymakers are not only decision-makers and implementers but there are also knowledge creators and we as researchers need to engage with policymakers directly if we're going to be able to generate frontier research that can critically inform policy although he needs no introduction let me just tell you a little bit about about Geoff's background he's currently the director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University where he's been since 2002 he's the quarterly professor of sustainable development at Columbia's School of International Public Affairs and also professor of Health Policy and management at Columbia's School of Public Health and among many many other affiliations he directs the UN sustainable development Solutions Network in the public sphere he's perhaps best known for his contributions to the Millennium Development Goals following a summit at the UN in the early 2000s he was asked to launch and head something called the Millennium Project which over three years at the request of the secretary-general developed a plan of implementation for the Millennium Development Goals which as you know were then adopted and have had an enormous impact he's also known for his work as economic adviser to governments in Latin America Eastern Europe in the formula so for Soviet Union but also in Africa where he was worked with the Clinton administration to set up the Africa growth and opportunity Act it's hard to imagine anyone who is better placed to talk to us today about the challenges of sustainable development two quick announcements the hashtag for today's lecture as you can see there is LSE sacks we will have time for questions at the end of the lecture and they'll be roving mics so please wait for those and finally jeff has agreed to sign copies of his book after the lecture outside there on the lower ground floor 4ei immediately following the lecture so it's my great pleasure to introduce Jeffrey Sachs thank you very much I love the hashtag can I keep that can I keep the hashtag afterwards I I think many people here know that LSE is just one of my favorite places in the whole world we're very proud to Jonathan of what you're accomplishing with the IGC and its great efforts and also one of my dearest friends and gurus Richard Laird here world great economist and thinker and friend and wonderful compatriot in many adventures and also who kindly brought me here 24 years ago for the Lionel Robbins lectures which was one of the most enjoyable exciting moments of my life those three days to recount the drama of Poland's transition at at that time so I love being here thank you for being here thank you for the invitation in the chance to talk about what's really pressing us now and that is a both a really an existential challenge for the world and you've already heard I have a title complete bias in this issue of sustainable development because I believe it is the defining concept of our time and I'm going to try to make the case but also this year we have an absolutely packed diplomatic agenda that's either going to make this concept real or relegated to footnotes of Brundtland Commission 1987 because this is the year when sustainable development can really become something deeply meaningful as a guide for changing the global direction or we might miss the opportunity because this is a very complicated world and a mess of the time in which case I don't think this opportunity is going to come back again 2015 happens to be a pivotal moment for negotiations on adopting sustainable develop goals and I'm going to try to explain why I think that they're really so important so we're in not only a new period of history multipolar and a cold war however you want to say it not only a new phase of geopolitics were actually in literally a new geologic epoch the concept of the Anthropocene meaning the epoch of humanity Anthropocene meaning specifically that we have left the Holocene that rather comfortable period from 10,000 years ago when agriculture got started - sometime recently that was the era in which we built civilization the geologists are telling us were in something new we've actually transited from the Holocene to the Anthropocene now when Paul Crutzen the Nobel laureate who was one of the three discoverers of the ozone depletion effect coined this term a dozen years ago my guess is and I have to ask Paul about it but my guess is that he meant it as a metaphor that humanity has become so large relative to the size of the planet that we can change the climate we can change the ocean chemistry and so forth but the International Geophysical Union the American Geophysical Union other geologic societies have taken it up maybe he didn't mean it as a metaphor have taken it up as a literal concept to ask a question if you apply the same criteria for dating the end of the Pleistocene in the beginning of the Holocene for example and you apply the same criteria of stratigraphy and of other changes of Earth processes would you say we're in a new era and the answer is yes that's not a happy moment by the way this is not yay humanity this is oh my god what are we doing and that's really the message we began kind of to know this 43 years ago when three great events happened in one year one was the UN conference on Environment and development in Stockholm which said environment and development need to be brought together the second great event was the publication of limits to growth which said it's possible to overshoot the Earth's ecosystems the third great event is I became a freshman at Harvard and I began to and I began to study economics that was only a personal grade event but it was a great event and actually the first book that I was assigned was limits to growth how many here know that book by the way this is Elysee you know it's unfair if I said this at most places all hands would stay down because it's really forgotten even though it is a great work not great in every modeling aspect and every technical issue but great in noting the basic premise which is stated right at the beginning of the book which is if you have exponential growth and a finite earth you're going to hit a problem now that was first noted by whom exactly that problem 1798 principles of population mouth who said geometric growth finite arable you got a problem and we were assigned the book in 1972 to say there was this crazy guy Malthus who got it all wrong because just when he was writing the world took off and everything went well and now they're writing it again this Malthusian doom and it's not like that if there's scarcity there'll be a rise of prices then there will be innovation and so forth and maybe that will be the end of the story a hundred years from now but the reason why we're here is that it's not automatic we really could ruin things and by the way if you have any doubt of it almost every time humanity entered a new place at room things before and the poor Native Americans who ended up on the disastrous side of history after 1492 ruin things unfortunately for them when they came to the Americas we don't know but maybe 12,000 BP or 14,000 BP and when it started to warm up a little bit one of the first things they did was drive to extinction all of the large land mammals including the horses this was a very bad idea because from then on for the next 12,000 years roughly they didn't have any animal traction except if you happen to live up in the Altiplano of the Andes but there were no horses and then damn it came the Spaniards and they had horses and they could kill everyone that they wanted to and then not just the Spaniards let's do all of Europe for that matter arrived and it was a very bad scene same thing happened in Australia same thing happened in other new entries humanity does not have a natural stopping point necessarily to say we've had enough and we're at that moment now in a very different way all previous extinction events all previous environmental crises were local for regional affairs now we're in the Anthropocene we're at the global scale there is no backup except if you love the idea of extraterrestrial migration which is not I think a great idea for the problems over the next 20 years I think we are going to have to do better than that the starting point of the Anthropocene is definitely this machine it all began in Britain as almost everything about the modern world did it began with James Watt it began with the absolutely wonderful ingenious recognition actually with Newcomb in but then with the Watts condenser that we could use solar power buried in the ground stirred over a hundred million years in the form of coal that is plant and plant an animal with the case of oil and gas plant and animal carbon that was deposited and transformed into fossil fuels and that this could be the basis for motive force for transport for mechanical operations for industrial transformation and everything in the world changed and if you're in class studying was there an industrial revolution or not the answer is yes not no and if you want to know was the central invention of the Industrial Revolution the spinning jenny or the mule or the textile revolution no it was this it was the ability of mega transformation of energy which changed everything because all work that we need to do in the world whether it's making steel and construction or whether it's any other kind of industrial transformation or running all of those a wonderful spinning it jenny's requires energy and the trees of England were not enough and England was deforesting and coal became the key to the modern world and everything changed and this is the truth of the world all curves look like this in economics in about economic development and of course if you're studying economic history this part is fascinating I don't want to say that there isn't a lot of micro wealth to what brought James Watt to Glasgow with the know-how to do that because maybe it was Newton and maybe it was 1492 and maybe it was antecedents maybe it was the Glorious Revolution but the steam engine was the moment of transformation that was absolutely fundamental and this is why we have the Anthropocene and this is what you get if you take Angus Madison's data and / Angus ins Madison's population estimates in terms of per capita income and roughly speaking we have two orders of magnitude growth of the world economy one order of magnitude growth of the world population since Malthus wrote and one order of magnitude increase of output per person since the start of the industrial era so it's the big driving change and it's really quite wonderful except all curves look like this and another curve that looks like this is co2 concentrations everything changed with coal and who knew who knew of the side effect and it's interesting actually I already back in 1824 we started to know with Fourier and then by the 1840s to 1860s we knew a lot better about the greenhouse effect the thermal balance and even the spectral absorption of co2 and in 1896 spontaneous who was a very very clever chemist Nobel laureate who worked out with paper and pencil what a doubling of co2 would do it took in 18 months and he nailed it that a doubling of co2 concentrations would raise temperatures by say 3 degrees C but even a rainiest got wrong the compound rate of growth because he said the world is producing and using coal enough to double co2 but it's going to take about 750 years and he didn't anticipate dumb shall pink he didn't anticipate the diffusion of economic growth widely and it turns out that it's going to happen in about one-fifth of the time that Aranea s-- estimated so we're now on a trajectory of doubling the co2 concentration from the pre-industrial level of 280 ppm parts per million to maybe 500 550 560 ppm by the middle of this century last year we've reached 400 parts per million and we know that everybody knows except for Rupert Murdoch land that this is real and if you happen to live in Rupert Murdoch land you may know that it's a hoax but the rest of the world all of us human beings are experiencing we're experiencing warming were experiencing droughts were experiencing floods were experiencing draught dramatic events now by the way the problem of addressing climate change is not about public opinion even in America which is definitely one of the world's weirdest places there was just a poll last week released by pew interesting and online showing that about 65 percent of Americans think that climate change is serious and government should do something about it I said to myself what a breakthrough this is wonderful went to look at the poll and it showed the numbers are basically flat for the last 15 years that Americans have always believed this and yet we haven't acted on it almost at all why because politics not because of opinion because our democracies are not aggregators of public opinion especially in the United States we do not have the median voter model we have the median billionaire model it's true everything is skewed to the right several degrees see because they are cold-blooded by the way and they are breaking our politics and breaking our government and the two Koch brothers who just promised to put in a billion dollars into the next election owned the world's largest privately owned oil company and so this is the reality not the public opinion so all curves look like this and that's why we are in the Anthropocene now the steam engine was followed by waves of technological change another thing I learned in 1972 was don't take notice of the contrat II of ideas and it took me about thirty years onward to learn that that was yet another thing wrong that I was taught back in in 1972 Kendra D of long technology cycles are real they're important they're crucial for understanding economic development we've been through several long cycles and we're in another cycle right now of information technology and the digital revolution and it's a very deep and exciting and promising and disruptive technology cycle as well but it's that cumulation of cycles that leads to this remarkable rise of output and the remarkable threats to the planet our immediate curve looks like this this is the transistor count on intel chips this is Moore's law graphically the curve looks just the same this is the doubling time of 18 to 24 months for Intel's doubling of chips back in 1961 noise brilliantly etch to transistors into a silicon chip and last year Intel put five billion of those transistors on the chip and that has led to the revolution that we have right now it has led to what I think many consider to be the absolute highest flowering of civilization imagine and that is that you can stream movies on your phone I mean it's hard to imagine anything beyond that and actually but I'll try to suggest a couple of things but this is the revolution that we are in today and it's leading to a development revolution as well in my view so this is mobile phone coverage which went from basically zero because the technology wasn't there to a few tens of thousands around 1980 to seven billion mobile subscribers now including in all the villages where we work in the most remote areas of the world and my wife and I experienced just absolute proof that the whole world is connected we were up at about 4000 meters in a little mountain pass in Bhutan a couple of years ago and we were at a monastery and the monks from the youngest child up to the elder monk were praying with the scriptures the the scrolls and the senior monk sauce and came out in saffron robes and we the stars were all there in the milky way and suddenly grew and he reached into his robes to take a call on his galaxy and you realize this world's absolutely connected there's no doubt there's no place that isn't I believe this makes possible everything we want to do when development ending poverty providing health and all the rest and all this talk by the way about secular stagnation bla bla bla is complete nonsense or Robert Gordon who I like a lot that somehow we've lost the technology development and we've got to slow down the digital age of touring and von Neumann and Kilby and noise is as fundamental a technology transfer Asian as we've ever had with the possible exception of watt and the inventors of agriculture because everything that we do is based on information and whether it's going to be AI or robotics and all the rest we have a very profound revolution at hand that's extremely positive if we use it right by the way every technology can be used wrong we can end up with the totalitarian all surveillance state we can end up with complete disaster we can end up with cyber warfare we can end up with everything or we could actually use this technology to solve the problems that we have so there's no technology determinism but there is a technology opportunity that's really profound the rate of development therefore has accelerated enormous Lee this is Shenzhen just outside of Hong Kong looking over the fields in 1980 same view fast-forward literally that is one generation you can't make this stuff up by the way this was 23,000 people farmers in 1980 and it's now about 23 million people in a metropolitan area today so the rate of transformation that is possible is absolutely unbelievable the world is fundamentally changing global scale production systems ICT enabled technology rapid population dynamics both aging in the open the high income countries and continued rapid growth in Africa there's massive churning of the labor market I believe I do believe that technology is driving the rapid decline of demand for labor for certain large categories of work and that this is quite fundamental and very complex by the way to analyze whether it's good or bad and it would be good to work on economic models what robots can do everything what kind of world is that is that the great world is that the miserable world where no one has a job or is that the great world where everyone has endless leisure and it's actually interesting the transition paths because both are possible in such a changing world but that is the kind of change that I think is underway but because of that growth that is based on fossil fuels land use water claims and so forth we are in an unprecedented environmental crisis and because of the diffusion of technological capacity were in a highly multipolar world that is good on the one hand because we want a diffusion of capacity and responsibility it makes it hard to agree on anything and we've got so many Wars going on because we're bloody-minded and so we're not very good at managing multipolarity also but we know from history for instance the the history of the long 19th century of Europe it's actually possible to tamp down the violence for a very long time and we should be working much harder to do that and get agreements right now poverty is coming down sharply I wrote a book in 2005 that said we could end extreme poverty by 2025 I think it would have been possible then the world is actually adopting the formal date of 2030 because SDG number one will be end extreme poverty by 2030 good idea absolutely achievable we're down to about 17 16 percent poverty rate in the low in the developing world from what was about 43 percent according to World Bank estimates in 1990 but we are not achieving sustainable development so I have to define the term what is sustainable development sustainable development is development that is socially inclusive and environmentally sustainable and we are not achieving that kind of development now and there are basically several reasons for that first there is growing income inequality and social exclusion including the hard very difficult regions of poverty like the Sahel or the Horn of Africa that are not getting out of this mess they're falling into violence into crisis and into a geopolitical proxy wars second we will not achieve sustainable development as long as the world population continues to rise rapidly and it's still increasing at a rate of 75 to 80 million people per year that means that by 2024 we'll probably reach 8 billion by 2040 9 billion and beyond this has been very difficult to talk about because talking about high fertility rates has not been politically correct until two weeks ago when Pope Francis mentioned that being a good Catholic doesn't mean breeding like rabbits , pardon the expression said Pope Francis well this was a good opening because I think the Pope would be good place to start this discussion and he did and we need what he called responsible parenthood which is to have the number of children you can raise in a healthy well-educated way so that there's a chance for prosperity and that means two or three children it doesn't mean five or six or seven or eight children so this remains a major challenge Africa had how many people sub-saharan Africa in nineteen fifty according to the UN data for all of sub-saharan Africa you'd be surprised to know who I feel a surprise each time I mention it a hundred eighty million people only for all of sub-saharan Africa it's now 1 billion today and the UN medium fertility forecast is to reach four billion by the end of the century I have no clue how you would achieve sustainable development with four billion people in sub-saharan Africa so at that point sorry I don't know how to do it but at two billion you can do it but that means a rapid reduction of fertility rates and that's not happening yet and then finally the environmental crises I don't have time to go through the evidence of this but I do mention the social exclusion I used to just add pictures to this chart till I ran out of room youth unemployment high income inequality lots of unrest lots of confrontation on the streets including in many of the world's major cities including Occupy Wall Street in 2011 now I love this picture and I really recommend it from 2009 who knows this picture okay who doesn't know this picture before now you all know it okay go read this article by Johann ruck strim 2009 Nature magazine this is the concept of planetary boundaries it says we can identify dangerous thresholds across many ecological domains and were at the risk or already have surpassed these thresholds and at high noon is climate change definitely the most dangerous of them all and rapidly approaching the world has agreed to a 2 degrees C upper limit on warming but we're on a business-as-usual trajectory of 4 degrees C 4 to 6 degrees Celsius compared to the pre-industrial level so we're ripping right past safety right now nobody knows what the food supply would look like in a 4 to 6 degree C world except everybody has reason to believe it would be a help because water in the soils with the vapo transpiration rates much warmer than they are right now with changes of the hydrologic cycle with thermal stress with rising sea levels with the loss of biodiversity could devastate the global food supply and with that rising population not to mention it so we have a huge huge crisis and if you go around the circle what the ecologist did was to identify all of the threat points ocean acidification carbon dioxide melting and even dissolving in the ocean the hydrogen proton concentration is already up 30 percent against the pre-industrial base 30 percent acidity that's just a drop a point one in the pH level but that's enough already to be threatening the corals the shellfish the phytoplankton with their Cal Souris shells in other words the marine ecology at a quite fundamental level we're on a path for a drop of pH of maybe 0.3 or 0.4 could be devastating for marine ecologies the circles here are the nitrogen and phosphorus loadings which come from heavy fertilizer use to feed the planet because we haven't figured out how to feed the planet much less how to feed the planet nutritiously and not destroy ecology at the same time and we know that agriculture is the number one anthropogenic sector of society and we don't know what to do with groundwater we don't know what to do with the biodiversity loss with the habitat loss with the massive loadings of phosphorus and potassium and nitrogen and with the pesticides and the other pollutants that we're putting on the soils also this is a scale problem that is massive so energy systems agriculture systems fundamental and we haven't figured that out yet well it's a circle of massive looks like a bull's-eye with us in the middle which is really the point which is that we have not figured out how to grow and to be sustainable at the same time and until we do Malthus is there he has not been proved wrong yet he said we would raise population enough to lower our living standards again well we've raised the population we did have this massive gain of productivity we had rising living standards we've had huge progress and now we have to ask can we sustainably live with the planet and keep the gains to production because Malta said we wouldn't be able to do so he's not been proved wrong yet now we can prove him wrong in the same way as the past by being clever smart and attentive to the problems but that we haven't also proved that we're ready to do and wherever I went this past couple of years as part of the UN process of trying to negotiate sustainable development goals it has been an unbelievable mess and usually wasn't there for the floods I was there the next week saying the Balkans once in 500 years scale massive storms unprecedented heat waves we're seeing already all of this play out this is California's water supply by the way I was in Brazil early this year or early in 2014 sorry of the year ago and I said what's going on oh we have a massive drought in San Paulo I said what's the public response Shh can't do anything we have the World Cup coming can't say a word and then the World Cup came and went and still nothing why we have elections coming up can't say anything the elections came and went now there's water rationing and you have the region of San Paulo in an absolute extreme water crisis so the politicians also play their games even in this completely imminent known circumstance they won't tell the truth and that's a big problem and that's by the way why universities are so important because it's our job to tell the truth that's how we get scored not by the votes we get not by the money we make alas but by telling the truth and that's the problem that we have right now massive droughts all over the world check out the Middle East please appreciate that the disaster in Syria while it is a geopolitical disaster and another American intervention folly is also an ecological disaster because there were ten years of drought before the violence broke out food prices were soaring populations were displaced there was unrest then crackdown Dan America had the bright idea we'll throw this guy out because that's what is called foreign policy in America is throw out someone you don't like or drop bombs on their head very clever and now 200,000 Syrians are dead but the ecological crisis that underpins this is extremely powerful and we just had the warmest year in history except damn you see the blue up there we had the coldest winter last year but by the way not by coincidence we had this polar vortex which according to my friends at the earth Institute is part of the Roz B waves becoming more lopsided moving less rapidly trapping some regions in arctic air for a long period we had that but the rest of the world was so so sustainable development is the framework that aims to holistically address the economic social and environmental crises and the world's governments for some wonderful reasons have adopted this idea because they don't adopt so much together and yet this idea they've adopted that sustainable development should be the organizing principle for global development and they've set 2015 as the year to do it and by coincidence two mega negotiations came together one to adopt sustainable development goals and the second to finally adopt a climate agreement that has proved to be elusive since 1992 we signed the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Kyoto was stillborn Copenhagen was a debacle and Paris is the last stop and Paris is the last stop because no one's going to believe this process anymore unless an agreement is reached in Paris and it's been six years to regroup since Copenhagen and it's now I've been saying 2015 2015 as if we're the distant future and now we have a few months to go to reach a serious climate agreement and then a third summit was added on financing sustainable development in Addis Ababa in July so three big summits this year that third one was added because the developing country said so how are we going to pay for all of these wonderful goals and the idea in Odyssey is to look at how private finance and public finance together blended and in its discreet ways can be oriented away from the dangerous things like financing Arctic oil development which is useless and unneeded and financing renewable energy which is absolutely what we need so we'll adopt SDGs the big struggle which shouldn't be a struggle at all is to get a list of seventeen agreed goals down to a workable number from the point of view of public understanding and advocacy I'm trying to urge that the number come down to 10 to 12 headline goals through just good word smithing and I guess in German it could all be just one long word actually so I but I think that the point is just advocacy to to make this to make this work now what do we need to actually accomplish this we need pretty fundamental systems changes we need energy systems that go from a high-carbon world which by the way you heard me very clearly nothing is wrong with coal oil and gas except for the damn side effects they made the world without fossil fuels no modern world not even a chance so this is the point it's not that there's something intrinsically awful about fossil fuels except for the fact that when you oxidize see you a greenhouse gas that's all so that's our problem we have to move to a low-carbon energy world in the next 40 years we have to live within a carbon budget of about 1000 billion tons of carbon dioxide emission that means a drastic decline of co2 because we're emitting 36 billion tons per year right now we need a drastic decline of emissions down to essentially Net Zero by 2070 that's what we call deep decarbonisation going to zero net carbon by around 2070 fundamental transformation everything about energy everything about divestment everything about what the energy companies are doing should be calibrated against a time line to get to Net Zero by 2070 we have more than enough fossil fuel reserves to last us till then there's a wonderful article by Ekans and malade of university college london in nature magazine a couple of weeks ago that I highly recommend which measures all the assets that need to be stranded of the coal oil and gas basically 80% of the coal should never be produced and about half the oil and should be stranded and about 30% of the natural gas roughly speaking we need resilient and sustainable agriculture very complicated topic because we have to feed people more nutritiously we have to feed more people but we have to stop the anthropogenic adverse effects of agriculture and to make agriculture resilient to the climate changes that are underway it's a massive mess of a problem it's not even mentioned most of the time in our daily day-to-day policy discussions we need smart urban systems ICT based because we living in cities and it's fifty-four fifty-five percent urban today in the world and it will be seventy percent urban say by 2030 and the numbers will make an urban world by mid-century that's overwhelming and we need health education and governance systems and ICT should fundamentally change governance as well not just that they spy on us but actually we get to decide things again and we could use ICT for deliberative decision-making group decision-making voting and many other things in ways that were not possible before so we should rethink governance for participation in a quite fundamental way that ICT can enable now the last concept I want to mention is directed technical change we need to move the world systems in a deliberative way in other words not just as a self-organizing expanding and dodging is growth system but as a system that is controlled by moral ethical ideas and purpose that's unusual for economics it's unusual for thinking about the free market and all the rest we need to move in a direction of safety we need to avoid the planetary boundaries so we need directed technological change and if one believes that technology doesn't work that way technology does work that way because most of the great breakthroughs especially in the last century have been under the early patronage at least of the state but typically the Defense Ministry or the Defense Department and that's where great breakthroughs have come not only in the United States we fund two basic things war and health and there the Health in NIH and so forth has been fundamentally transformative unraveling the human genome absolutely phenomenal my guess is that every congressman knows that their family members get sick and so they fund NIH and then they like to bomb other people also and those are the two things they do for a living other than collecting David Koch and Charles Charles cokes money other than that I don't see the job exactly but the point is the great breakthroughs have come with a strong role of directed ideas and you look at the great science vaccines medicines Diagnostics radar of course was World War two cryptography started right here with the with the touring of course the whole nuclear age computing was giving funding to both touring and then to John von Neumann so that he could simulate thermonuclear explosions with computers semiconductors was really Bell Labs but then all the semiconductors virtually that were made for in the 1960s were bought by NASA to go to the moon and so public procurement was a massive part of that satellite space science the internet of course was a project to keep networked computers in the event of nuclear attack and so forth and then it became an NSF project and so forth and a human genome project finding the Higgs boson the new brain initiatives and so forth it's not to say that there isn't an important role for a Steve Jobs or Bill Gates there is of course but the fundamental transformations have come with fundamental investments by the state and we have to choose our the only thing we're going to do is better drones better fighter pipette better fighter planes cyber warfare cyber security and so forth are we actually going to invest in low-carbon energy systems better agriculture and so on you'd be shocked at how little we actually invest in all of this u.s. spending right now for health in the budget is about 30 billion dollars per year u.s. spending for renewable energy technology under 3 billion dollars per year for what nick stern lord stirrin has told us is a fundamental trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars issue we haven't invested properly in this up until now when we do invest we get really great results this is one of my favorite illustrations of this NIH made the Human Genome Project at the end by the way as you know Craig Ventnor came in and competed with the US government but building on the Human Genome Project fundamentally and they closed the deal in 2000 deciphered the genome at a cost of several billion dollars then in 2001 NIH brought everyone together said what do we do next and there was a general consensus to use this we should reduce the cost from what was then estimated to be a hundred million dollars per human genome down to a thousand dollars that's a lot that's a hundred thousand X improvement and they set the date for 2015 now Moore's law since this is a semi-log graph is a straight line downward like that and the genome cost reduction absolutely wiped out Moore's law because it was 13 years to get a hundred thousand x improvement in cost if you put your money in it you can get somewhere we're at the cusp of revolutionary breakthroughs in health in education in renewable energy in smart systems smart transport robotics artificial intelligence maybe someday just robots from 193 countries will talk to each other at the end and they'll actually have intelligence artificial intelligence but intelligence that can get the job done we can all go to the beach or go back to our quest for leisure but this is the revolution that we have available I have run out of time because I wanted to spend a few minutes at least to take some Q&A except to say we need to make 2015 a fundamental success it means adopting smart strong guideposts for the world in the form of sustainable development goals this September this will be the largest gathering of world leaders in history they will actually spend three days at a summit on sustainable development the summit will be opened by Pope Francis it will be a very wonderful occasion before that we need to make the financial markets which are vast and could easily fund everything that needs to be funded direct financed towards the areas that are needed and away from the areas that are dangerous and in December we need to reach a climate agreement that respects the two degrees Celsius upper limit and that takes seriously our planet and our future thank you very much let's get five minutes into 5mr we could push anything five hybrid okay well yeah the pressures on we only have time for three questions please make them very concise and I'll just choose people here and then Jeff will wrap up with all of them just do you think the sustainable development is compatible with our current economic system we've got do we need a economic revolution or can we adapt the current CAFTA system we've got two suits ten your moment yep thank you another question okay right there the back the yes the that's right you just hold your hand up there when the gray shirt on the left they are thank you hi there what would you say the price of carbon is going to be in five years time thank you okay and then finally over here down in the front professor Sachs quake lecture you made a good case that corporate capture of politics is the key problem what can academics and the finance system do about that right okay good yes 60 and social activism thank you very very very quick very quickly I am a social democrat by political persuasion social democracy is an idea that capitalism can exist in a absolutely humane decent and productive manner I take Sweden Norway and Denmark to be the greatest exemplars of social democracy in the world they are not blemish-free societies by any means they have the same struggle of all of humanity that they're finding right now with their immigrant populations with diversity and all the rest which they have not had to face because they are ethnically homogeneous populations which gave them a base which is a different kind of social base for their politics but they are examples of capitalism that absolutely in my view works for society for inclusion and for attention to environment there are wonderful places a lot of places are wonderful I happen to love Scandinavia for what it has proven for how to have a decent life we write with the professor Laird we edit Co edit together the world happiness report third edition coming out shortly and Denmark's always at the top there not only clean green productive prosperous but they're happy too so that's great so the answer is yes capitalism can coexist with sustainable development and we even have examples of it now on the price of carbon I would be quite surprised if in the end we need more than $100 a ton long term in order to get this transformation because we're seeing such dramatic improvements of technology but we do need a corrective price Pegula's right there's every reason for or it could be a little bit higher a little bit lower all the calculations that I've made and that I've seen say to get to climate safety is 1% of world income annual to 2050 or less if it's more than that it's not much more than that in other words this is a tiny amount for planetary safety like many things this is not driven by the damned exigencies of meeting heroism it's because of neglect and powerful interests and this is driven overwhelmingly by powerful interests the oil companies are the most powerful lobby in the world this month less powerful than they were a few months ago because of falling oil prices we need to raise our voice period stop it stop wrecking the planet let's get serious we need a transition path we made a project this year called the deep decarbonization pathways project d DPP you can find it online it shows how technologically this transformation can be made with a lot of interesting numbers and a lot of interesting options how do we beat corporate capture how do we beat corporate hock recei the United States has it the worst because we have a Supreme Court that failed to understand the difference of free speech and corporate bribes basically and absolutely the most mind-bogglingly inept Supreme Court that we have had in our history probably since the Dred Scott decision or maybe there were a few zingers in our history but this this citizens united was one of the stupidest most pernicious decisions we've ever had but America everything is for sale starting with the Senate the interesting thing is it doesn't cost much to buy the Senate by the way but if you start a bidding war the cokes will keep going up so it will cost more they just bought it for cheap because there was no one on the other side so they bought this Senate you just look at it just everyone needs their oil decal on their labels or Mitch McConnell needs his coal across the forehead because that's who owns this Senate so this one is miserable they voted against they they really voted against nature against science against everything but they're just bought they're not as dumb as they look they're just lazy lying bought but but they're not so stupid actually which is a good sign I suppose the America actually it's odd but probably true if they were really so stupid I'd be even more worried than I am we need candidates that can win without campaign contributions that's the bottom line of it not you take your billionaire and I'll take my billionaire or not I am a billionaire I'll be your president sometimes like Berlusconi taking the shortcut which is absolutely the worst disasters but rather saying I will take no money my opponent is on the take vote for me and you get somebody who's really looking after your interests vote for them and them is everyone in our political scene right now and all you're getting is corporate votes not the public vote is this possible that's what social activism is the answer is yes thank you very much

Channel: LSE

Views: 75,523

Keywords: LSE, London School of Economics and Political Science, London School of Economics, University, College

Id: EadvEChBNUA

Length: 60min 46sec (3646 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 05 2015