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Transcript: Clinton Climate Initiative Announcement
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Thank you very much, thank you. Thank you to the city of Los Angeles
and UCLA for hosting our announcement today and thank you Mr. Mayor for
your important efforts to combat climate change.
I also want to say a special word of thanks to Mayor Newsom for being
here and London’s Mayor Ken Livingstone, and Deputy Mayor Nicky
Gavron, thank you for being here and for the leadership that London has
taken in creating this Large City’s Climate Leadership Group and
for the efforts you’re making for London to become a model for energy
conservation in greenhouse gas reductions.
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Credit: Dan Avila, Clinton Foundation
Announcing the Clinton Climate Initiative |
Finally I want to thank Prime Minister Blair for taking time from a very busy
schedule to show up to support us today. I want to say how much his leadership
on this issue means to me personally because the UK had disproved the canard
that lead the United States Senate to vote against the Kyoto Climate Change
Treaty even before I could present it to them.
And then, of course, after Al Gore and I left, the Bush Administration announced
that they would renounce the Treaty because of the idea that is rampant in the
old energy economy that it was impossible for our country to get rich, stay
rich, and get richer, without putting more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Great Britain’s target under Kyoto was more rigorous than ours. It was
a 12% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels. Already we know
that the United Kingdom will beat their target by at least 50%.
And so let’s look at the argument of those who have attacked those of
us who want to do something about this. How terrible it would be for the economy.
The British economy of all the European ones is the most like America, the most
open, the most flexible. Their unemployment rate is about the same as ours.
We have just finished the first five years in our history where we’ve
had increasing productivity in the work force and average wages have remained
flat and poverty has increased.
Average wages have gone up in Great Britain, poverty has declined and inequality
has decreased. Now, I’d like to tell you it’s because of the impact
of social policies that are more like mine than the current American administration,
but the truth is that while that may have something to do with it, the main
reason is that unlike the United States, the United Kingdom has found a source
of new jobs in an open global economy in the first decade in the 21st century
and a commitment to a clean independent energy future. So, thank you Prime Minister
for setting an example that all Americans should be willing to follow. I’m
very grateful.
We all know now that climate change is occurring more rapidly than we had previously
thought. We see it in the meltings occurring everywhere, in our own snowcap
mountains, in the Tibetan glacier, and in the Greenland ice caps that contain
8 or 10% of all the fresh water on earth. And if it continues to melt at the
present rate, sometime in the next 40 years or so, we’ll lose 50 feet
of Manhattan Island, America’s most expensive real estate currently.
I’m in Harlem, in the middle of the Island; I’ll be all right,
but it’s not a hopeful sign. More importantly and very troubling for the
United Kingdom and all of northern Europe, if we lose that much fresh water
into the ocean, it will almost certainly interrupt the flow of the Gulf Stream
which moderates temperatures in northern Europe in the winter.
So we could have this perverse development of making northern Europe so cold
it is uninhabitable in the winter, while the rest of the world continues to
burn to a crisp, we continue to lose top soil, we continue to lose water supplies,
we continue to lose biodiversity at a breathtaking rate.
Hillary and her odd couple colleague Senator John McCain have gone, taking
recalcitrant members of the Senate, to Pt. Barrow, Alaska, near the Artic Circle,
to see the manifestations of climate change in the northernmost part of America.
They have also gone to the Norwegian Islands, 600 miles north of the European
continent, to the northernmost village on earth to see first hand how rapidly
these changes are occurring.
We have to reduce about 80% of our greenhouse gas emissions over the next 10
to 15 years. It sounds like a daunting task, but I don’t believe it is.
I don’t believe it is for two reasons.
First of all, we now have a majority of the people in every major greenhouse
gas emitting country on earth who believe this is a problem. And secondly, at
least in the more mature economy, we have overcome the most crippling problem,
which is the false idea that we couldn’t deal with this without hurting
the economy.
And thirdly, we have the technology available. But the main thing we have to
do is to organize ourselves to move as quickly as possible and in the process
to demonstrate to the developing countries, where there is still more doubt
about whether they can become rich without continuing to put more greenhouse
gas emissions in the air.
We have to organize ourselves quickly enough to demonstrate that this is good
for the economy and if you’re an American or European, indeed if you’re
a peace-loving person anywhere on earth, this is also probably good for national
security, because too many of the sources of greenhouse gases come from countries
that are politically unstable and the wealth that is transferred is staggering.
A lot of the work we do in Africa, for example, is threatened by the impact
of the rising oil prices on the African continent, which basically in some countries
totally wipes out the impact of increased aide being given.
So this is a very, very serious problem, but also a phenomenal opportunity
and we should see it as such. Today we are here to announce a partnership between
the alliance of large global cities and my foundation to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions.
Cities are responsible for over 75% of carbon emissions; large ones obviously
are not only the largest source of greenhouse gases, but also today the most
visible in their leadership, which can set a model for others to follow.
We know what needs to be done. We have to use less energy and find cleaner
sources for it, but, as I said, the good news is we don’t have to have
major breakthroughs; they would help, but existing technologies are enough to
make dramatic reductions possible.
Cities waste a lot of energy. Most of our buildings waste more energy than
they use because their heating, cooling, and ventilation systems are inefficient,
because of poor construction of walls, roofs, and windows, and because light
bulbs use only 5% of the energy needed to run them to produce the light.
Cars idle in traffic jams, city vehicle fleets, like buses, garbage trucks,
police and fire vehicles, run inefficiently on fuel that generates too much
CO2. Street lighting and traffic lighting use technologies that waste energy,
water systems use huge amounts of energy, and waste disposal systems generate
large amounts of poisonous methane in the atmosphere which is even more potent
in the emission of greenhouse gas emissions than carbon dioxide.
Energy wasted in inefficient power distribution systems fed by distant coal
fired power plants is the biggest source of greenhouse gases in the world and
China is bringing on a new coal fired plant about once a week.
In the United States its important to point out that these coal fired plants
operate at only about 35% efficiency which means that 2/3 of all the greenhouse
gases emitted by our coal fired power plants do not provide any benefit or electricity
to us.
Existing technology would enable those plants to increase their efficiency
from 35% to about 57% and new plants can be built at 60% or better. Those changes
alone would have a dramatic impact on greenhouse gas emissions.
As I said this is important to me not only because of climate change but for
national security reasons, and because as the United Kingdom has shown, it’s
actually the only viable economic strategy for a wealthy country to maintain
an open economy, trade to develop poor countries around the world, and still
generate new jobs with rising income.
So here’s what we’re going to do with this partnership. First,
we will organize a purchasing consortium to pool the purchasing powers in large
cities to lower prices of energy saving products, and to accelerate the development
of new technology to be used in cities to reduce consumption and create cleaner
energy. And we will open the benefits of this purchasing consortium to other
smaller cities around the world. This is exactly what we did with AIDS drugs.
We convinced the generic producers of AIDS drugs to go from a high margin, low
volume, uncertain payment strategy, to a low margin, high volume, quick payment
strategy and we dramatically reduced their prices.
Now we work in 25 countries with our AIDS project, but we sell those medicines
to over 400,000 people, about 25% of the people in the whole world that are
getting medicine today in developing countries.
So we know this will work and it’s imperative that we take advantage
of it. The scale of buying we can do, because of the consortium to big cities
and because they’re well distributed on every continent of the world,
will be truly impressive.
Secondly, we will deploy the best experts in the world to assist in developing
and implementing plans that work best for them to reduce emissions. Thirdly,
we want to help to create systems to measure energy uses and greenhouse gas
emissions and to chart the progress of the initiatives undertaken and then to
share all the information. This is real important.
For those of you that are active in this, you know that one of the most controversial
parts of the effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions once you start is setting
a realistic base line and accurately measuring reductions. For example, for
people like me who have always believed that the carbon sinks are important,
there’s a lot of controversy because some people claim they have reduced
greenhouse gas emissions through no-till farming, but they are counting acres
that were under no-till before they began to do it, and so there’s a lot
of these kind of issues.
It’s really important that this effort maintain its integrity, so we
have to have a clearly understood base line and clearly understood standards
for measuring, and people have to buy it, because I personally believe that
we can’t do all that we need to do without some serious reforestation
efforts if for no other reason than to restore the quality of soil and biodiversity,
and maintain water supplies throughout the world.
But we can’t afford to have anybody think that any of us are trying to
game the system here. None of us have an interest in cheating. The only thing
we really need to do is to figure out how best to reduce these greenhouse gas
emissions to avoid calamity. So this is important.
The next point I want to make is that we in the cities are not doing this alone.
When my foundation was asked to work with the cities, we partnered with several
other people the way we do with our AIDS work, and because we knew we needed
all the help we could get and there’s more work to be done than all of
us can do together.
So I want to acknowledge the groups that have already agreed to partner with
us. The International Council for Local and Environmental Initiatives, the U.S.
and the Global Greenbuilding Council, the Climate Group, the Institute for Transportation
and Development Policy; the Earth Day Network, the Alliance to Save Energy,
the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration, and Air Conditioning Engineers.
We will also have other partners as we get to work. Working with the large
city Mayors and large businesses based in those cities to mobilize resources
and to make these things happen and we’ll have to mobilize some more financial
resources as we go along.
I am encouraged at the broad base of Americans and people around the world
who get this now. I think that the political base for acting here and the financial
base will only broaden in the years ahead, if for no other reason than an increasing
number of petroleum geologists that tell us that we’ve reached peak production
on oil, which means people who never before were concerned about climate change
realize we have to use less oil anyway because if we keep using it at present
rates and the conservative geologists are right and we run out in 35 years or
50 years, that’s not enough time to convert the earth off of oil to some
other fuel base.
I think that this is going to happen, but when I agreed to work with the cities,
we said that we wanted to raise our own money to pay our own costs because we
wanted the cities to spend their money helping their own citizens – and
guess who our first big contributors were. Our first contributors were Barbra
Streisand and Rupert Murdoch. And I bet you, to be perfectly honest; this may
be the first time I’ve ever said that because I didn’t want to risk
either one of them having second thoughts. I’d also like to thank Anson
Beard from New York, those three people got us started on this.
But Barbra has been funding climate change solutions since the late 1980s and
Rupert Murdoch has committed News Corp to reducing its own emissions of greenhouse
gases and to become a carbon neutral company.
We’re having a good laugh about this, but this is serious business. You
just think about it – there should be no political, there should be no
philosophical, there should be no difference here, there should be no national
difference here.
I remember when I went to China late in my second term and we did an environmental
event dealing with climate change and species preservation, the Environmental
Minister of China came up practically with tears in his eyes to thank me because
he said he was the only person in his government who believed then that you
could reduce greenhouse gas emissions without hurting China’s long for
economic expansion. I’ll never forget that.
And now the Chinese have tougher auto emission standards than we do. They get
this, so I say that not only because I am grateful to Barbra Streisand and Rupert
Murdoch, and Anson Beard, but because we all need those kinds of alliances.
We cannot afford any enemies on this: time is our enemy, our past habits are
our enemy. The entrenched thought patterns and economic interests of yesterday
are our common adversaries, so we all need to join hands and we need to say
that they have set a good example for us and I’m very grateful to them.
So, that’s what we’re going to do. I believe whether I’m
working on childhood obesity, or AIDS, or any of the other problems we work
on, I think what the world lacks so often are systems that work that prove that
there is reward for effort.
This is for those of us in wealthy countries a birds nest on the ground, and
for the developing countries we have to show them that they can get rich quicker
and have more control over their future if they follow this path.
One final story, I was with the Prime Minister of Ethiopia the other day and
they’re one of our AIDS partners. He’s a highly intelligent man
and he said, “I think Africa should become the first oil free continent
in transportation.” He said, “We can grow sugar cane as well as
Brazil.” He then went through all the conversion ratios of the different
based fuels for biofuels and he said, “Just think, if we ran all of our
cars in the whole continent on biofuels, we would double farm income, create
a great constituency for stopping soil erosion, promote people in reforestation
efforts, because we were going to have sustainable farming, and we’d sell
all of our oil on the international market diluting the influence of all those
unstable countries.”
Here’s a guy sitting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia a country with a per capita
income of $2.00 a day, after his decades of all kinds of trouble thinking in
that way. That’s very hopeful for the future, because we all have to do
this together.
And we have seen the results not only in what the United Kingdom has done,
but we know that Portland, Oregon has reduced their emissions below America’s
greenhouse gas Kyoto target and their economy is booming.
We know that DuPont Chemical has reduced their greenhouse gas emissions and
saved hundreds of millions, they may be up to a billion dollars a year now,
they’re saving because of this. We know that this is a good thing to do
and we all have to join hands.
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