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When I explained then in a private letter to you what I had meant, you conceded to me in your private response that you had not seen my point in the light I intended, and that my claim was not in fact the blunder you had said it was-but of course you never chose to recant your criticism in print, so your uncorrected accusation stands to this day. Such a gentleman and a scholar you are! But times have changed. We now have blogs, so this time you can readily respond in public to my open letter. OPEN
LETTER TO H. ALLEN ORR FROM: Daniel
C. Dennett Dear Allen, You claim Dawkins ignores the best thinking on the subject. The Selfish Gene, which you rightly admire, doesn't waste any time rebutting Teilhard de Chardin, or any of the perennial would-be defenders of Lamarckism, or even—I might add—many of the murkier claims made by Richard Lewontin over the years. Do you object that he thus "ignores the best thinking on evolution"? No, you say he "wrestled with the best thinkers." So you must have in mind some neglected gems on religion: what arguments and/or thinkers on the topic of religion ought Dawkins to have tackled in detail? What in your opinion is the best thinking on the subject? I hope that you don't mean the recent reviews. Some of them did indeed "shred" Dawkins' 747 argument, if by that you mean they scoffed and hooted and clawed at it. Did any of them, in your opinion, rebut it soundly? Tom Nagel made some dismissive remarks-not arguments-in passing. Do you count that? I'd really like to know which published critique of the 747 argument you endorse, so I can explain to you, a non-philosopher, what its shortcomings are. Maybe there are some good ones I haven't seen, but I'll lead with my chin. I myself think Dawkins has made some excellent improvements on the standard arguments, improvements any philosopher would be proud to have composed. As I said in my own review, in Free Inquiry:
I'd be interested to see the 'shreddings" that persuaded you otherwise. And you say that C.S. Lewis "had already dispensed with" one of Dawkins' claims. Am I to take it that you are now endorsing the quote from Lewis as an adequate rebuttal or pre-refutation of Dawkins? You misconstrued my NYRB letter in several ways. I didn't say you held Dawkins' book to too high a standard; I said you imposed a goal on the book that was not Dawkins' goal. I didn't say or imply that Dawkins' book was "merely a popular survey" and I didn't say or imply that you were "disturbed by Dawkins' atheism." I said you adopted a double standard-like many atheists, I might add-and were attempting to protect religion from serious criticism, for reasons I am curious to know. These misconstruals do not strike me as unintended, but perhaps you read with a broad brush. As I write this message, I am reminded of your earlier trashing, more than ten years ago, of my book Darwin's Dangerous Idea, first in Evolution, which does not permit rebuttals from authors, and then, slightly enlarged, in the Boston Review, which does. You leveled very serious charges of error and incomprehension in that review, and when I challenged them, you responded with a haughty dismissal of my objections (in an exchange in the Boston Review). Quoting an example, dealing with the speed of evolution: "Now I've been in the population genetics business for some time and, frankly, I have no idea what Dennett is talking about. And-I can find no polite way of putting this-it's hard to escape the conclusion that Dennett has no idea what he's talking about either." (1996, p37) Now that was rude-even ruder than your reply this time. When I explained then in a private letter to you what I had meant, you conceded to me in your private response that you had not seen my point in the light I intended, and that my claim was not in fact the blunder you had said it was-but of course you never chose to recant your criticism in print, so your uncorrected accusation stands to this day. Such a gentleman and a scholar you are! But times have changed. We now have blogs, so this time you can readily respond in public to my open letter. Note that I have not yet claimed that you have no idea what you're talking about; we philosophers try not to jump to conclusions. I have however asked you, twice now, to tell us what you're talking about. Please. I await your reply. Dan Dennett
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WAKE
UP MR. SLEEPY! YOUR UNCONSCIOUS MIND IS DEAD
RICHARD
FOREMAN RETURNS TO THE ONTOLOGICAL THEATRE
In 2005, Edge featured Richard Foreman's "The Pancake People, or, 'The Gods are Pounding My Head' " in which he noted that "I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the "instantly available". A new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance—as we all become "pancake people"—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button". He then announced his 40+ career as New York's leading avant garde theatrical director had come to an end, and he was going to begin exploring film. Now Foreman is back as a new hybrid vision Still young and artistically radical as he approaches 70, Richard Foreman's 45th Ontological-Hysteric production plunges into a new world in which human consciousness is turned inside out. Wake Up Mr. Sleepy! Your Unconscious Mind Is Dead! is his second project defining a new kind of theater in which film and live action trace parallel contrapuntal dream narratives. Wake Up Mr. Sleepy! postulates the invention of the airplane (controlled by a horde of baby-doll pilots) as the death knell of the unconscious mind. Foreman is responding to a world in which visionary sages and poets are being replaced by specialists who make platitudes out of the immediately observable and hand-feed them to the public. In Richard Foreman's universe, his muse and ally, the unconscious, fights back to life in a shape resembling "the stone that rolls up the hill backwards" (the evil one) and from such "evil", life renews itself. [See New York Times review).
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THE
DAWKINS DELUSION
"No, Richard Dawkins does not exist. I have never seen him. Science has given a full and satisfying explanation of the book alleged to be his handiwork. It is but a collection of fortuitously ordered a's, b's and c's, recombined from previous patterns. There is the alphabet, there is a book of nursery rhymes and there is "The God Delusion" - and one developed from the other, though some of the details of which is the most primitive remain to be sorted out. The links between them may still be missing, but Science will have that worked out at any moment. Anyone who doubts this fact is either lying, mad or stupid (or wicked, but I'd rather not think about that possibility)." |
CONSTELLATIONS
Eno,
primarily known for shattering musical conventions as a founding
member of Roxy Music and pioneer of ambient music has created
a computer programme that continually fuses his virtual paintings
to create 77 million permutations. Click here for Brian Eno's Edge Bio Page
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Steven Pinker Explains How The Brain Works in Five Words ... [STEPHEN COLBERT:] Your specialty is the brain and how it works. Right? [STEVEN PINKER:] Right. It's a complicated subject. How does the brain work? Five words or less. Brain cells fire in patterns. Brain cells fire in patterns. Not bad. And these patterns establish our behavior and stuff like that, A pattern corresponds to a thought. One patterns causes another pattern, that's what happen when we think. OK. Let me ask you something. You're also, you're also, uh, language is very important to you. Umm, uhh, wha wha, what, why is language important? It's the way we get our thoughts across. It's the way we cooperate, the way we share our knowledge… How important is volume? I find if I'm trying to get an idea across if I shout it at the person I'm saying it to, it makes it seem more important. Is that common? I think that's common, unfortunately, yes. Now, uh, your book here, you've got a book called The Blank Slate, The Human Denial of Nature. What are we denying about human nature, Sir? A lot of people are upset about the very idea that there is such a thing as human nature. Some people fear that … Well, that God gave us our nature. Some people fear that human nature is a product of evolution, rather than a … I don’t fear it I deny it. I'm not afraid of evolution because I know it's not really there. I'm not afraid of ghosts either. Some people are afraid of the idea that if were born with any kind of talent or temperaments, then different people can be born with different talents and temperaments, and that seems to open the door to discrimination and oppression. Some people are upset that if we have any kind of instincts we may have selfish and nasty instincts and that would seem to get in the way of hopes for social reform. Why try to make the world a better place if people are rotten to the core and we'll just foul it up no matter what you do. Well I say some people get it some people just don’t. Well, that would imply that there are differences among people. There are. And there are people that would want to deny that there could be differences among people and if we all start off with nothing then by definition we're all the same. No, we don't all start off with nothing in my opinion, if I may, and I may because it's my show, I don't think we start off with nothing. I think we can achieve nothing. I think we can become a blank slate. I've worked very hard over the years to stop thinking and now I'm empty inside. What do you think people have, uh, what do you think people have instinctually other than original sin. What do they have when they're born? ... |
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Pinker's
Brain Picked On 'Colbert Report' Last night, Colbert—who plays a right-wing pundit on his show "The Colbert Report"—welcomed Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology Steven Pinker as a guest on his program. The appearance came just two months after Colbert journeyed to Cambridge himself to record segments for his show at the Institute of Politics. In last night's segment, entitled "Pinker and the Brain," Colbert and Pinker discussed basic brain function and human nature. Colbert introduced Pinker by saying that because Pinker is a Harvard professor, he "probably thinks I think he's a pompous know-it-all." Colbert asked Pinker to summarize the brain in five words or less, to which he responded "Brain cells fire in patterns." Pinker said he was surprised by his own ability to describe the brain in so few words under pressure. "I never thought I could sum up how the brain works in exactly five words!" he wrote in an e-mail after he taped the show, adding that he was "pretty nervous beforehand." Most of the discussion focused on Pinker's 2002 book "The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature"—a book on evolutionary psychology—as Pinker struggled to explain his beliefs about brain function while Colbert joked and interrupted him. Colbert also poked fun at Pinker's 2003 move from MIT to Harvard. "You were at MIT first then went to Harvard? That's like going from the nerds' table to the rich nerds' table," Colbert said. At the "rich nerds' table," Pinker continues to be a professor of some of the College's most popular classes. Pinker, who has in the past led the popular core Science B-62, "The Human Mind," is co-teaching Psychology 1002, "Morality and Taboo," with Frankfurter Professor of Law Alan M. Dershowitz this spring. There was no specific occasion for Pinker's appearance on the show, as he has not published any major works in the past year. A Comedy Central representative said she could not comment on why Pinker was chosen as a guest. |
DAVOS
REPORT
What is Davos and how does it work? Officially the meeting is called the World Economic Forum. This is their annual meeting, but there are many other meetings during the year held around the world, but this is their big event they are known for. It was founded and run by Klaus Schwab in the early eighties as mostly a European event, but has grown huge and global with about 2000 participants from all over the world. |
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Canberra Times, Seed, New York Times, Boston Globe, Toronto Star, Les Affaires, Tonight, Genome Technology Online, Le Monde |
AN
IDEA may be dangerous either to its conceiver or to others,
including its proponents. Four hundred years ago, heliocentricity
was acutely dangerous to Galileo, whom it led before the Holy
Inquisition. Two and a half centuries later, Darwin's notions
on natural selection and the evolution of species jeopardised
the certainties and imperilled the livelihoods of many professional
Christians. To this day, the idea that God does not exist is
dangerous enough to get atheists murdered in America. ...There
is much in many of these brief essays to astonish, to be appalled
at, to mull over or to wish for. Some of them suffer from galloping
emailographism, that mannerism of the hasty respondent whose
elliptical prose can make even the most pregnant idea indigestible.
But most of them, from the three-sentence reminder by Nicholas
Humphrey of Bertrand Russell's dangerous idea ("That it
is undesirable to believe in a proposition when there is no ground
whatever for supposing it true") to the five pages of V.S.
Ramachandran on Francis Crick's "Astonishing Hypothesis" (that
what we think of as our self is merely the activity of 100 billion
bits of jelly, the neurons which constitute the brain), are vitally
engaging to anyone with an ounce of interest in matters such
as being or whatever meaning we might deem being to have.
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Cosmology and Particle Physics On the theoretical side, particle phenomenologists will continue to develop physics beyond the Standard Model; string theorists are connecting more strongly to cosmology and astrophysics; and cosmologists are investigating models of dark matter, dark energy, and modified gravity. ... —Sean Carroll, Caltech Synthetic Genomics The goal of synthetic biology is to make possible the engineering of living organisms that behave as expected. Progress in the field is based on three new foundational technologies that go beyond classical genetic engineering: automated DNA synthesis, standardization, and abstraction. Synthesis enables direct construction of genetic material from raw chemicals and information. Standards and abstraction together provide the languages and grammars needed to define the information used by DNA synthesizers. 2007 should witness two important milestones for automated DNA synthesis (which enables direct construction of genetic material from raw chemicals and information). ... —Drew Endy, MIT Neuroscience In
the last five years the scientific study of morality has exploded.
We're now probing the moral brain like never before, using
functional neuroimaging, studies of neurological patients,
and sophisticated cognitive testing techniques. As a result
of this work, it's now clear (to some of us, at any rate) that
moral decision-making is neither a pristine rational enterprise,
nor simply a matter of emotional expression. ... High Energy Physics The coming year will see a number of interesting developments as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) goes online. The enormous amount of data generated by the LHC will force us to refine our methods—and explore new ones—for extracting and interpreting information from high energy collisions. This work should lead to new insights into the masses of elementary particles and the consequences of various models for particle physics and cosmology. ... —Lisa Randall, Harvard University [...] |
How
Do We See Red? Count the Ways Such visual semiotics are not limited to the human race. Red is the premier signaling color in the natural world, variously showcasing a fruitful bounty, warning of a fatal poison or boasting of a sturdy constitution and the genes to match. Red, in other words, is the poster child for the poster, for colors that have something important to say. "Our visual system was shaped by colors already in use among many plants and animals, and red in particular stands out against the green backdrop of nature," said Dr. Nicholas Humphrey, a philosopher at the London School of Economics and the author of "Seeing Red: A Study in Consciousness." "If you want to make a point, you make it in red. |
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Morality
play By Carey Goldberg, Globe Staff Last
week, Harvard professor Marc
Hauser dropped in to his daughter Sofia's kindergarten
class and presented the children with a moral dilemma. You
must all keep your eyes closed for 30 seconds, he told them.
If none of you raises your hand during that time, you will
each get a sheet of stickers when it's over. But if one of
you raises your hand, only that child will get all the stickers. |
...When Sulloway and I noticed the difference between why people believe in God and why they think other people believe in God, we decided to undertake an extensive analysis of all the written answers people provided in our survey. In addition, we inquired about family demographics, religious background, personality characteristics, and other factors that contribute to religious belief and skepticism. We discovered that the seven strongest predictors of belief in God are: 1. being raised in a religious manner 2. parents' religiosity 3. lower levels of education 4. being female 5. a large family 6. lack of conflict with parents 7. being younger ... [...] |
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L'optimisme
boursier actuel est inquiétant Le marché boursier se distingue à bien des égards. Ainsi, dans la vie de tous les jours, l'enthousiasme, l'optimisme et la confiance sont des valeurs importantes. Mais à la Bourse, ces belles qualités peuvent devenir des pièges coûteux. Le paradoxe, c'est que notre monde en général est en manque d'optimisme, alors même qu'il y en a probablement trop dans les marchés financiers. Le site Web Edge.org offre un lieu d'échange à un grand nombre de scientifiques, philosophes, penseurs et intellectuels de tous genres. Le consulter est fascinant. La quantité et la qualité des interventions qu'on y trouve sont vraiment exceptionnelles. Au début de chaque année, John Brockman, éditeur d'Edge.org, pose une question fondamentale à ses participants. En 2006, la question était "Quelle est votre idée dangereuse?" Cette année, sa question est "À propos de quoi êtes-vous optimiste?" Et des personnalités comme le psychologue Steven Pinker, le philosophe Daniel Dennett, le biologiste Richard Dawkins, le psychologue Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, le biologiste et géographe Jared Diamond, le physicien Freeman Dyson, le psychologue Daniel Goleman et des dizaines d'autres y ont répondu. [...] |
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What
Is Your Dangerous Idea? Dare to question. Most don't. Indeed, many people get alarmed, agitated, when difficult questions are posed. Questioning settled assumptions forces people to think, which can be a frightening, radical exercise. Consider the "dangerous ideas" listed here: "Do women, on average, have a different profile of aptitudes and emotions than men? Were the events in the Bible fictitious — not just the miracles, but those involving kings and empires? Do most victims of sexual abuse suffer lifelong damage? Did Native Americans engage in genocide and despoil the landscape? Do men have an innate tendency to rape? Are suicide terrorists well-educated, mentally healthy, and morally driven? Are Ashkenazi Jews, on average, smarter than Gentiles because their ancestors were selected for the shrewdness needed in money lending? ... Steven Pinker, in his introduction, calls these "dangerous ideas - ideas that are denounced not because they are self-evidently false, not because they advocate harmful action, but because they are thought to corrode the prevailing moral order".... ...psychologist Daniel Gilbert employs just 131 words to shoot down the thought "that ideas can be dangerous". Paradoxically, he states "the most dangerous idea is the only dangerous idea: The idea that ideas can be dangerous." Whew! I was worried for a moment. Like the meaning of life, there's no simple answer. Which is why so many, desperate for certainty, shy away books like this. Personally, I relish such questions, and if you have any sort of an open, enquiring mind, then so will you. [...] |
Church predicts that 2007 will be the year of the personal genome, with the mainstream public finally getting involved (and interested) in the field and its consequences. "I am optimistic that while society is not now ready, it will be this year," Church writes. Check out his full response here. And for the record—it's people like George Church who keep us optimistic. Thanks, George! [...] |
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"Dans
quel domaine êtes-vous optimiste? Et pourquoi?" Quelques exemples: Brian Eno estime que la réalité du réchauffement global est de plus en plus acceptée et que cela pourrait donner lieu à un premier cas de gouvernance globale. D'où sa principale source d'optimisme: "le pouvoir croissant des gens. Le monde bouge, communique, se connecte et fusionne en des blocs d'influence qui transfèreront une partie du pouvoir des gouvernements nationaux prisonniers de leurs horizons à court terme dans des groupes plus vaques, plus globaux et plus consensuels. Quelque chose comme une vraie démocratie (et une bonne dose de chaos dans l'intérim) pourrait être à l'horizon". Xeni Jardin de BoingBoing, est optimiste après avoir suivi les travaux de la Forensic Anthropology Foundation du Guatemala, un groupe qui se consacre à identifier les morts assassinés par la dictature en s'appuyant sur des logiciels open source, des ordinateurs recyclés et l'aide de laboratoires américains pour l'analyse de l'ADN. "Quant au moins une personne croit que la vérité ça compte, il y a de l'espoir," conclue-t-elle. [...] |
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What is Davos and how does it work? Officially the meeting is called the World Economic Forum. This is their annual meeting, but there are many other meetings during the year held around the world, but this is their big event they are known for. It was founded and run by Klaus Schwab in the early eighties as mostly a European event, but has grown huge and global with about 2000 participants from all over the world. DAVOS
REPORT
Introduction Every year dozens of Edgies are invited to the World Economic Forum event and the dancing bears to perform for the corporate and govermental elite. Attending this years conference were Peter Schwartz, Larry Brilliant, John Markoff, Paul Saffo, Lord Martin Rees, Adam Bly, Dan Dubno, and Yossi Vardi. Peter Schwartz, founder of Global Business Network (GBN), is equally at home and astute in the worlds of science, technology and the corporate boardroom. This year, he wrote a blog which is is distilled into this report. —JB PETER SCHWARTZ is cofounder and chairman of Global Business Network (GBN), now part of the Monitor Group. From 1982 to 1986, Schwartz headed scenario planning for the Royal Dutch/Shell Group of Companies in London. Before joining Royal Dutch/Shell, he directed the Strategic Environment Center at SRI International. He is the author of Inevitable Surprises, and The Art of the Long View, and co-author of The Long Boom, When Good Companies Do Bad Things, and China's Futures. |
DAVOS REPORT Day 1. Tuesday 1-23-07 The Set Up The meeting is organized around three kinds of sessions. In the main Kongress Hall are major speeches (e.g. Tony Blair on Saturday) and high level panels (I will be moderating the one on WEB 2.0 on Saturday with Bill Gates, the head of Nike and the founder of YouTube….which directly proceeds Blair's talk, meaning we will have a very large audience trying to make sure they have seats.). The second kinds of session are panels on a large variety of topics in the smaller meeting rooms. Finally there are the breakfasts, lunches and dinners at the local hotels on a great many subjects. I will be going to one Wed evening on climate change and national security hosted by Global Business Network (GBN) network member John Holdren and another on future IT hosted by another network member Paul Saffo. Around all the sessions is non stop talking in the many lounges and sitting areas of the Kongress Centre. Not surprisingly these are among the most interesting parts of being here. The day begins with early meetings and goes very late. Before and after the dinners are many receptions, cocktail parties sponsored by companies and governments. The India one always has the best food, but the Accel/Google party has among the most interesting people. And there is, of course, the NERDS dinners on Saturday evening. Today is mostly registration an early dinner and meeting up with a few friends. My first panel as a participant will be Wed afternoon on the main theme of the conference, "The Shifting Power Equation: Technology and Society". Day 2. Wednesday 1-24-07 First Sessions I am currently in a fairly large session on Making Green Pay. It is a televised debate on CNN on several environmental and energy issues. (It will be broadcast at 6 EST on Jan 28.) The first proposition was in favor of nuclear and clean coal. The affirmative was presented by Jim Rodgers, CEO of Duke and old friend (we chatted before the session.) and the negative by Vinod Khosla, a VC. At this session we get to vote electronically on the propositions. The audience was asked to vote and the nukes and coal lost by 3-1, much to my surprise. Of course my friends Orville Schell and Baifang Liu, sitting next to me voted the wrong way. Dan Yergin is speaking now in favor of the second proposition on markets vs regulation, The Chinese ambassador has just weighed in on the government side. (one of the speakers just cited The Long Tail as an argument in favor of markets.) The audience voted 3-1 against markets, but Jim Rodgers just weighed in against the either or nature of the propositions. And the third proposition is on a global carbon tax now being argued against by Jose Goldemberg because setting the tax rate is very hard and would produce serious inequities around the world. He is in favor carbon caps and trading and efficiency regulation. He is not surprisingly, as a Brazilian for a strategy similar to what they did with respect to biofuels. Nicholas Stern is now arguing in favor of the carbon tax because of the scale and urgency of the risk. There appears to be some degree of consensus on the need to set a price for carbon, John Holdren and Lester Brown ended up on opposite sides. The carbon tax won 2-1. It was a surprisingly good debate…though made a bit artificial by the extreme nature of the propositions. The next couple of hours were spent in the large buffet lunch in which one talks buts eats little in a multilevel hall packed with a couple thousand people all with the same objectives, talk to the people you want to, avoid the people you want to and maybe get a bite to eat. A number of interesting conversations in which energy and climate change figured large. More with Jim Rodgers (one of the ten US CEOs who came out for carbon caps last week) on how to bring the country around on nuclear power.Coincidentally followed by a conversation with an old friend whom I had not seen in years, Prof Robert Socolow of Princeton. He is the recent author of a seminal paper on how to deal with climate change, in which he thoughtfully considered nuclear and how Al Gore had used his ideas but avoided the nuclear dimension. Just as I finally made it to the buffet table Richard Quest of CNN the moderator of the next panel of which I am a member to join him and the others in the preparations. Our topic was the technological and societal dimensions of the major power shifts now going on, with the focus on things like virtual communities, the rise of the download generation and the increasing youthful elderly. The others on the panel included Shai Agassi of SAP, Bill Mitchell the CEO of Arrow electronics, (visual note: if anyone wants a visual model of what a fantasy CEO and his wife look like, Bill Mitchell and his wife are it.) and David Rothkopf of the Harvard negotiation project. There was some whining about people losing authentic contact with each other because of new media and e-mail, etc…but I was the strongest advocate that far more had been gained in extending the breadth and depth of our communications and knowledge access. Not surprisingly I also argued for the growing power of the youthful elderly. Looking out at the audience at Davos can also be a daunting experience because you know almost everyone out there could just as well be on the stage as you. I saw Joe Nye and Larry Summers of Harvard, the head of Bus Dev of Cisco, Richard Levin the President of Yale, Ernesto Zedillo the former President of Mexico, the Indian Ambassador to the UN…..and it goes on. In parallel to our session were several others structured similarly on economics, geopolitics and business. At the end the rapporteurs came to the big hall to report to all the delegates on the panels and their audiences' views. We were to vote on the most important issues and the ones we were least prepared for. After much discussion…some of it quite good…a member of the audience said "but what about climate change?" And then we voted and climate change wiped out everything else, fundamentally undermining the process the Davos organizers had so carefully put together to create a neat web of interconnected issues. But Ged Davis manfully came up at the end and gracefully recovered the conclusions from the panels that such phenomena as the emergence of China and India and the return of Russia to the world stage might also be very important, and the huge generational transformations that are underway also might be consequential. But climate change remains the topic everyone keeps coming back to. More conversations followed among them with Alan Gershenfeld, the brother of Neil and the CEO of a new kind of web start up designed to enable creative types, eg musicians to find their audiences. But as always talking with Martin Wolf the economics columnist of the FT was a highlight. We had a great debate with Joe Nye …who drew in others on whether the US would invade Iran before Bush left office, with Martin convinced that he would. Ran into our chairman Mark Fuller at the end of the debate and he and I headed over to the Yale reception at the Steigenberger hotel. It is the one ancient grand hotel of Davos and where most of the pseudo VIPS stay. (The real VIPS stay in rented chalets). At the Yale reception spoke with Zedillo about the impact of the biofuels industry in the US on Mexico…pricing corn out of the tortilla market for the poor of Mexico. They may have to break NAFTA to survive the US move in ethanol. On to dinner on climate change and national security chaired by John Holdren. The highlights happened to be two Brits, Sir Nicholas Stern and James Cameron, the young new head of the Conservative Party. Sir Nicholas basically summarized his now very influential report arguing strongly that the cost of doing little was far more costly in the long run than taking strong action today. But it was Cameron who really surprised me. He wholeheartedly supported Sterns conclusions, (Stern is Labour) and then went on to argue that we need an international emissions authority… a kind of global EPA….not at all Tory like. A Pakastani general described the horror of his work in relief in a 1971 Tsunami that killed nearly 2 million people in Bangladesh as the waves washed over them. It was the future he feared from climate change. And Nick Kristoff, the NYT columnist, chimed in with the idea that maybe the WEB 2.0 phenomenon of bottoms up action might become a novel means of environmental enforcement…creating a kind of global ecological transparency. At my table were two amazing young woman, a member of the Brazilian Congress and one of a small group fighting hard on environmental issues in Brazil and a Lebanese educator and mother who is trying to preserve some hope for the future for her kids and students while trying to teach them something about the interconnected world of ecosystems in the midst of a dreadful conflict. Day 3. Thursday 1-25-07 Now I am in the great hall in panel on Iraq, chaired by Richard Haas, the President of the Council on foreign Relations with a Sunni and Shiite VP of Iraq. Much to our surprise the panel was modestly positive. They focused on how to get beyond the politics of exclusion. On the other hand they argued they would need peace keepers for a long time, even possibly under a UN mandate, as a last resort. They even agreed that they were not far from reaching agreement on oil revenue sharing. Graham Allison of Harvard rose to ask whether the Iraquis would really come with their own security forces. And the Sunni VP gave a fairly detailed response on how the forces would develop and intervene. And even the Shiite VP agreed strongly that Iraq would remain one country. On the way to the next session ran into Peter Gabriel who had arrived late last night. He was on his way to a Reuters interview that they were doing in Second Life. Now in a session on local energy solutions with people like Amory Lovins, Tim Wirth, David Victor, Angela Belcher from MIT, Bunker Roy from India and Bill McDonough. At the session with me are Bill Gross and Marcia Goodstein from Idea Labs, and sitting next to me is Orville Schell. Amory is now speaking and reminding everyone on how much is actually already underway all over the world. Angela Belcher spoke on the major leaps now underway in advanced materials that will enable new solar technologies. A Chinese delegate, CS Kiang argued that China can do a great deal because they are so inefficient… a lot of low hanging ‘grapes" as he said. He'll be in Berkeley in a few weeks and we will meet. An Ecuadorian Rose grower just spoke about how they are becoming carbon neutral. The Chief Investment Officer of Citibank and interested in how energy investing can represent a major new opportunity…..well a bit more later. Early afternoon…just had lunch with Laura Tyson, discussing the upcoming Presidential election. She is hoping for another Clinton White House with her in the cabinet. In any event she has returned to Berkeley from London and I am hoping she will do a bit with us. Toward the end we were joined by Sergay Brin and Larry Page and the conversation went Google. Also spent a bit of time with Kishore Mahbubani the Dean of the Lee Kwan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore talking Asian Geopolitics. And with Bob Friedman from Fortune, who is doing a special Green Issue of Fortune and would like me to do an article on our EPA work. …more after the upcoming China session…on |