DAVOS REPORT
Day 1. Tuesday 1-23-07
The Set Up
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.
The participants range from corporate CEOs, heads of state, cabinet ministers, politicians, intellectuals, journalists, scientists, academics, celebrities and many hangers on. I have been coming to Davos off and on for a little over 20 years. The Monitor Group is represented here by Mark Fuller and me.
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
Began the morning with coffee with Geoffery Moore, Shai Agassi, Orville Schell and Baifang Liu, who brought along the former Chinese ambassador to China, and then John Holdren joined us.
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
Thursday Morning
The morning began at 7 with a breakfast conversation with David Cameron, the Tory leader. He joined me because of a comment I had made at the dinner the evening before. I must say I continued to be surprised by him. He intends to really lead on environmental issues in Britain. He said, "After all shouldn't a conservative be for conservation." That was followed by an interview with the Dutch Financial Times on my views of the issues here at Davos. Then ran into Jim Rodgers again along with Tom Stewart the editor of HBR and Jim and I agreed to do an article for HBR on how a CEO addresses anticipatory investments in light of long term issues like climate change. Then along came Paul Saffo to enrich the conversation. That was all before 8:30 AM
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 What China Wants.
Just finished three conversations: First was Richard Cooper of Harvard and former head of the NIC. The main subject was Niall Ferguson of whom Richard had a mixed opinion…loved some things, e.g. arguments around. But thought Ferguson was on weaker ground when he dealt with economics. While talking with Richard, a hand from behind reached out and it was Tom Friedman. We went off to discuss his next column which will be about George Bush cleaning out his desk now that he has been fired last November. And that the Democrats ought to put strong climate change bill and an Iraq bill on his desk, inviting a veto.
Then it was Baroness Susan Greenfield, a British biologist with whom I discussed the future of human biology for my upcoming Nature article. She believes the next great leap will be a deep understanding of how the brain generates consciousness.
Then it was off to China. Cheng Siwei Vice Chairman of the People's Congress emphasized the commonalities that China had with all other nations. Pei Minxin of the Carnegie Endowment asked whether China knows what it really wants. Kishore Mahbubani raised whether the competing global visions would shape China. He made the argument that others echoed that China has become a status quo power with a deep investment in the current order.
Bob Zoelleck enmphasized China's participation in international institutions. Wang Jianshou the head of China Mobile made a surprising point to emphasize the scale. When he started the company, there were less than three million phone subscribers in all of China. Today China mobile has over 300 million customers. William Donaldson former head of the SEC not surprisingly emphasized the rule of law in China and China's political role in the developing world. The moderator Robert Thomson of the Times of London tried to get Kishore to define China as an enemy and a problem.
Thomson observed that China will be defined by how the world sees it. Kishore said that was the wrong way to think about the issue. China defines itself through its history. Cheng also emphasized that China must take responsibility for the international system, but only a limited sense given its limited capabilities. He also pointed out that China's trading partners in places like Africa and Latin America are interesting but no where near as important as the US. Cheng was asked by SKY news… "What about human rights?" he replied that they are aiming to steadily increase the scope of human rights toward a much more free society. The next big step will be passing a new bill granting basic property rights to all people.
Also had a brief conversation with Dave Gergen who was sitting behind me about the Obama phenomenon. He thought that Obama was for real but has a big challenge to difine himself in substance…so far it is all about authenticity and not issues. And he has until this fall to do it. Interestingly he observed that Obama's biggest rival would be Edwards as the other non Hilary. But his number two at the Kennedy school has just left to join the Obama campaign as the deputy campaign manager.
Then went to a session on petropolitics moderated by Tom Friedman with Rex Tillerson the CEO of Exxon, Jeroen VanderVeer, CEO of Shell (and an old friend), Sam Bodman US Energy Secretary, and a few more. It was content free. They all avoided Tom's questions and the audiences…not a great performance.
This evening it was to be the IT governors cocktail party and dinner, but…I screwed up…sort of. The World Economic Forum as a series of industry groups that also meet and help guide the program of the forum. Tonight was a joint cocktail party of the Media governors and the IT governors and then I thought a shared dinner. In fact Paul Saffo and I had discussed what we would say at the dinner as intellectual fare for the evening along with the other guests.
As we were going down the stairs from the cocktail party to the dinner, Bob Wright the CEO of NBC/Universal grabbed me and invited me to join him for dinner which did. We had great discussions on many including the work we are doing with SCI FI Channel one of his networks. We were entertained by a fascinating interview in which Sir Martin Sorrel, another friend, interviewed Rupert Murdoch and founder of MySpace a recent acquisition of NewsCorp. Watching Murdoch make the poor young man dance was almost painful…but it was also clear that Murdoch has a very well focused and articulate vision of managing the digital transition.
As I looked around the room I could not find Paul Saffo or my other fellow panelists. And no one ever called on me to speak. Only as we were leaving the dinner when I ran into Bill Gross and Joe Schoendorf who had spoken at the IT dinner that I found out that there were two dinners and I went to the wrong one. I had missed the IT governors dinner altogether. What an idiot!
After dinner it was off to another climate change event. This time it was the Young Global Leaders of Tomorrow (YGLs) who were organizing the event. This is a group of young future leaders (mostly 20 -30 year olds) had decided to take on climate change as an issue last year and this year they were launching a campaign that they had worked on for the last year.
The project looks hopeful. It is an effort to tie highly valued brands to climate action. But it was an all star event. At one point a photographer captured Claudia Schiffer, Hakken the studly young Crown Prince of Norway and I all in conversation. Shimone Peres also spoke and he is always remarkable and inspiring. And it appears he will be named President of Israel in the next few days. By the way the Prince and I will be together most of next week at an energy meeting in Norway.
Day 4. Friday 1-26-07
Friday Morning
The morning began with a highly productive working breakfast with Larry Brilliant to discuss whether GBN would be willing to do for the AIDS initiative what we did for Pandemics last year. He and I will be meeting with Peter Piot the head of the initiative who is here, to help formulate the process.
My first session of the day was The Procreation Choice…about reproductive technologies and all the issues surrounding them. I was the moderator but the panel was terrific. A Columbia Professor Raymond Fisman who has studied how people choose at sperm banks (what is really desirable sperm) and how they choose dates, Prof. Robert Winston of Imperial College, London who argued that gender choice was about to become a real issue, but the rest of the issue was irrelevant.
But most profound was Ingrid Mattson, the first woman head of the Islamic Society of North America. She took the conversation in a surprising direction focusing on the immigration issue and how some countries are now trying to raise their birthrates through technology to avoid becoming immigrant societies. She also pointed out that, of course, limiting reproduction has been and continues to be the most critical reproductive decision that women are making today.
Now in a session on African Geopolitics.
Thabo Mbeki is speaking mainly on African security issues and the challenges of sovereignty. He argued that focusing on poverty as a source of conflict was the answer and that until we eliminate poverty we won't end the violence. I must say it seems backwards to me. He is also arguing for a relationship with the world from an African perspective for example seeking an equitable relationship with China…not perpetuating the old colonial model. Africans need to develop the strength to really negotiate with China.
Richard Haas said that Africa is now part of globalization …not just an internal matter for the continent. Now linked to the world in at least ten ways…energy, HIV/AIDs, terror, developmental, trade (as negotiators), conflicts, genocide, governance, role of AU, role of external powers. He argued that there is a need for the US and China to come together on how to deal with Africa. CEO of Total, said Africa is now 11% of world oil production but soon 15% with a growing competition with the Chinese for access.
He was emphasizing traditional approaches for joint ventures. The Nigerian finance minister, Nenadi Usman, who was really impressive, emphasized the need for new leadership. Africa has to pull itself up. We need to determine what we want to be. Need to reinforce good behavior. Need for good governance…then can do everything else. Can shed the weight of the past. We are now seeing even best practices in Nigeria. US General James Jones the former head of NATO argued for NATO to be engaged in Africa, training, etc. and be involved in the variety issues in Africa, especially terrorism…need for steady presence. I asked a question of Mbeki on Zimbabwe.
How could they deal with the misery that Mugabe is producing there? Mbeki replied that they were working on the internal parties none of whom want foreign military intervention. It was a self serving and vacuous answer that annoyed many of the panel.
My lunch event was on extending human lifespan. In the end there was a lot of agreement on the technology potential but the real issue they focused on was cost and associated inequities. If we can't all live longer should anyone?
On the way back to the hall I ran into Moises Naim the editor of Foreign Policy who raved about his work with GBN. And he and I agreed that he would publish the debate that Niall Ferguson and I will do in September on applied history: the optimist vs the pessimist. Also ran into Steve Case, who much to my surprise was a big fan of GBN. Also ran into Mike Porter today…this is where we end up seeing each other most often.
The afternoon session was "The Next Limits of Growth".
Martin Wolf the moderator and said that Malthus was wrong for 200 years because of innovation and the availability of fossil fuels leading to rising agricultural productivity. Brabeck-Letmathe CEO of Nestle argued that innovation will continue unabated and that there really no are limits, if markets work (right price matters.) His big issue was water because markets don't work in water. Sam DiPiazza, CEO of PWC also said no limits and reported on their current survey of 1000 CEOS. They are optimistic about growth (90%) but energy is a concern, along with climate change and resource scarcity. Isdell, CEO of Coke also said no limits.
The biggest threat is that we lose confidence in the growth oriented system as a result of income gaps, and job insecurity, Kindle of ABB also said no limits but the necessary energy substitution would lead to much higher costs. Chukwuma Soludo the head of the Nigerian Central Bank and also quite impressive said most of Africa's limits were internal limits. Water kept coming up as perhaps the greatest constraint. Soludo, when the population issue came up, suggested open the borders and let population poor countries absorb some of the excess from the population rich countries.
You can imagine how the Europeans reacted to the suggestion of vast numbers of Nigerians arriving on their shores seeking work.. The politics of water and immigration, not technology are the real constraints to solutions, they all seemed to agree. Van Jones of Oakland expressed a great deal of skepticism at the panels relative optimism and spoke for many others in the room.
Jimmy Wales, of Wikipedia has just arrived and rang in desperation. I am off to help him solve the problem that no one at registration knows anything about him…a big oops. It turns out the invitation was for next year and someone in Bono's entourage screwed up in inviting him now but we managed to get Jimmy in any way.
So Jimmy and I headed over to an event organized by Marc Benioff the CEO of Salesforce.com to launch his book on social entrepreneurship and to honor some of people featured in the book such as Peter Gabriel, Michael Dell and Alan Hassenfeld, CEO of Hasbro. It was a delight to see Peter and Alan getting well deserved respect. As I was leaving for dinner, for the first time, ran into Gavin Newsom who promised to come by our new office to officially "bless" it. The mayor, as always, was in great form.
On the way to dinner I stopped at the Accel Partners party…they always have the best wine, champagne and food…in a very beautiful modern art museum. But this year unlike the last few years they did not do it with Google who was having their own party later on that evening. Accel was a much smaller event as a result.
Then it was on to a Davos dinner which for me was a real treat. The main guest, who was at my table, was Mike Griffin, the Director of NASA. The other guests were the Chief Scientifc Advisor to the Prime Minister of Japan and an old friend the cosmologist Lord (Martin) Rees, Master of Trinity College and President of the Royal Society. Griffin was astonishing, candid, insightful, imaginative, open minded, (a bit arrogant), though willing to listen, and willing to admit that he got something wrong. And not at all like a typical bureaucrat. His vision is one of a space faring civilization and he doesn't mean the US, he means humankind. He loves the idea of space based solar power, Stewart Brand will be pleased to hear. He has funded some of the best innovative rocket technology like Elon Musk's Space X. So for me this was a really exciting evening.
As it happens sitting next to me was another space buff, Abdullatif Al-Othman, the CFO of Saudi Aramco, someone I have worked with before. He was an excited fan too, but he also had very kind words about the impact we have had on Aramco and invited us back.
Then things got weird…
So after dinner I decided to go the Google party which was beginning at 10:30. After putting on my warm clothes to march back up the frozen hill to the Steignberger, I had not gotten twenty feet from the front door of the hotel when I was hijacked by an Arabian oil mogul whom I've know for some time and mainly see here at Davos. He leaned in close and whispered urgently to me…"Shimone Peres is about to speak here at your hotel and I need to listen to him, but I can't walk in there alone. If any of the Arab press see me I am in deep trouble, but I have to be there. Please take me in there so I can be anonymous." So what could I do but turn around and take him in.
The event was a night cap with several Nobel laureates including Joe Stiglitz, Ron Engle and Berkeley' Steve Chu and soon to arrive Shimone Peres. But Peres got trapped at the Accel party and never showed. The speakers were great though. When Larry Summers who was interviewing them asked Joe Stiglitz "what is the one fallacy in the air around Davos that would undermine some common beliefs?" Joe, replied, "Only one?"And then he went on to attack the discussion on the need for a new round of trade agreements. He argued that no deal is better than a bad deal. And the last round was a bad deal." That would indeed be a very controversial position around Davos.
At the end of the session my Arabian friend salvaged his evening when I introduced him to Joe Stiglitz and he got to ask Joe about the future of oil and he replied…"biofuels!" And as it happened I had just introduced him to Jay Kiesling, one of the leaders in synthetic biology whose new start up company will soon be focusing on bacteria to produce biofuels. He immediately asked Kiesling if he could invest as this is obviously the future. We ended the evening by a discussion of whether or not we cold help him deal with the security issues facing his country. By then it was too late to head up the hill. So for me, even if I missed the Google party, perhaps something of value will flow from this, the Noble event was really interesting anyway and I was able to help an old friend.
Day 5. Saturday 1-27-07
Saturday, The Final Day
The morning was dominated by a set of meetings and interviews. The most interesting was a meeting at the suggestion of Larry Brilliant with Peter Piot, the head of the UN AIDS program. GBN, working with Larry about eighteen months ago organized an enormously consequential meeting on dealing with Pandemics. The AIDS program is looking ahead to the next phase of the pandemic and wants to develop scenarios and strategy and have asked us to help them in the way we worked on the possible influenza epidemic. Their project called AIDS 2031 is likely to be an extended process over the next eighteen months involving a great variety of actors. I think it is an honor to be asked and I hope we can make some difference in what is obviously one of the grave issues the world is facing.
After the meeting, Peter Piot and I were headed down the hill and about to get in his car, when Peter Gabriel came out of the same hotel overstuffed into a snowsuit. He needed a ride too, so all three Peter's piled into the back seat of this not very large Audi. Try to imagine the scene with a UN Deputy Secretary General, a rock star looking a bit like the Michellin Man and me all smunched in together.
This morning Tom Friedman quoted me in his column on what Bush should be doing on energy and the environment. As a result as the day went on many of the participants came up to comment, agree or disagree and it became one of the background notes of the day.
The afternoon for me was dominated by the panel I moderated in the main hall on WEB 2.0, with Bill Gates, Mark Parker, CEO of Nike , the founders of YouTube and Flickr, Chad Hurley and Caterina Fake, and Viviane Reding the Information commissioner of the EU, with a challenge from Dennis Kneale of Forbes. The panel went well, everyone played by the rules and it really became a conversation about the empowerment of the individual by the new technology. I began with the "Benjamin effect." The reason I got onto this early was not brilliance on my part. It was watching my son Ben uploading light saber fighting movies he had made for a competition with dozens of other kids and downloading original Lego designs from other Lego maniacs. Gates really was quite good with a detailed and imaginative vision of how people were going to use technology, a picture of rich and dense ubiquitous mobile access.
The next major event was Tony Blair's valedictory address. It was insightful, articulate, witty, bold and even controversial. He had a wonderful self deprecating sense of humor. He had, for example, recently been at a signing of a bilateral climate agreement with the state of California where he had been standing next to our Gov. Schwarzenegger and said "it was the first time I had ever experienced body envy of another politician." He addressed three major challenges, climate change, trade and security.
Blair argued that China, India and the United States needed to accept binding CO2 agreements. He went on to say that there was an opportunity for business to find an alignment between their sense of moral purpose and their business strategy in dealing with climate change and poverty. His really bold strokes came in arguing for a new framework of international institutions and instruments of shared action in several areas. Blair argued for the reinvention of the Security Council, new peacekeeping tools, new international means of nation building and a G8+5. The head of the WEF asked me to throw out the first question which I did…on how blair was going to convince the Greens of Britain about his new positive position on nuclear power? And he gave a highly informed and nuanced answer…but it was basically that we can't reduce green house gases enough withoutnukes.
John McCain was on the closing panel and made one very important point…that Congress would pass a strong climate change bill and that Bush would sign it. You can imagine that was well received especially coming from him. I must say he did not look well and wondered if he was up to the rigors of a Presidential campaign.
Davos for me ended with an event that I always look forward to, The Nerds Dinner.
On Saturday evening the World Economic Forum holds a blacktie gala in the Kongress Hotel and it is a real drag. Imagine over 4000 people jammed in face to face in penguin suits and gowns, with men smoking cigars, drinking bad wine, fighting to get access to tables filled with bad food, irrelevant music blaring in the background with everyone shouting at the person next to them so that they can be heard…a nightmare to be avoided.
And, oh by the way, the really cool people…CEOs, heads of state and major celebrities are not in the hall. They are having elegant private dinners.
Well,about fifteen years ago Paul Saffo organized a dinner for the Silicon Valley types who weren't cool enough yet and definitely did not want to be in the hall, which came to be known as the Nerds dinner. Joe Schoendorf of Accel Partners has really become the sponsor, organizer and provider of the really great wines. Orville Schell always does a brilliant and hilarious poem about the participants and there are truly hysterical moments.
So first of all who was there…a partial guest list: The head of NIMH, Rob Socolow of Princeton, the founders of Facebook, Steve Chu of Berkeley (Noble in physics), Yossi Vardi, Israel's top VC and funniest, the founders of Flickr and Skype, Senator Maria Cantwell, John Markoff of the NYT, Orville Schell, Shai Agassi of SAP, Peter Gabriel, Larry Brilliant and wife, the women's world champion Kenyan marathoner, Lord Martin Rees, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Mitch Kapor and probably some others I've missed.
The evening began with a toast to Rich Newton, the Dean of Engineering of UC who died on New Years Day and had been a regular part of the dinner. The best moment came during the introductions. Each of us had to introduce ourselves using only seven words. Many were witty. Mine was, "Taking the Long View, but rarely right." But the best by far was Sergay Brin, "Mother says, Google, Schmoogle, finish your PHD." And with that I will end for the evening.
Sunday 1-28-07
Mid day, Another Davos Moment, The Airport Lounge
Many people are headed home through Zurich airport on Sunday at mid day. And we always run into friends there. It began with a conversation with Lord Rees, the new head of the Royal Society (the British equivalent of the AAAS) who been looking to have a conversation with our friend John Holdren the new head of the AAAS, when along came John and they went off together.
Prof. Victor Halberstadt, one of Europe's leading business intellectuals walked over and joined me for a particularly interesting. He wanted to challenge something I had said a year or so before; that political Europe would be internally absorbed in integrating all the new members of the EU for decades to come. He too said they would be internally absorbed for a different reason. He sees Europe fragmenting, but no along nation state lines. Rather it is tearing itself apart along many seams, immigrant vs. native, religion, class, age, sexual orientation and culture.
The European vision of the post WWII generation has been lost at the very time that the internal tensions are becoming ever greater and the bases for agreement ever weaker. He believes that most of the energy of these societies will be burned up in just holding their countries together. It will mean slower growth in Europe as interest groups buy each other off out of the state coffers.
Based on a further conversation at his home in Amsterdam, he also believes that at least one of the major fault-lines is likely to be the increasing role of religion in politics in Europe. This will not be about issues of religious values, e.g. abortion, gay rights, etc. as in the US. These are settled issues in Europe. It is more about the politics of identity and Victor sees parties like the German Christian Democrats becoming more Christian. It is another way of creating a unique sense of identity now that the European dream may be dying and the nation state has been semi-absorbed into the EU. It gives people something strong with which to identify. As before in European history, this is unlikely to have a happy outcome.
As always among the best things about Davos were the many meetings and conversations most of which could happen only there. Some of the meetings will lead, like the AIDS conversation, to more later and others are merely interesting and informative. There were new people like the President of the Islamic Society of the US, the Brazilian legislator and her husband the CEO of Head the sports equipment company and many old friends like, Jim Rodgers and martin Wolf. There was the opportunity to meet many of the new and consequential start-ups, like YouTube, Facebook, Skype, etc. So the networking function of Davos worked well.
Looking back over the week it feels like there was little sense of urgency in the world. There was a lot of discussion of the big problems: climate change, water, trade, economic imbalances, the dollar, religious and ethnic conflicts, rising China and India, extreme poverty and many more. But in the background was a global economy that felt fairly robust and from a business perspective times are good and no big threats appear imminent. You might call the mood complacent. There were no obvious big surprises or unanticipated crises.
The upside of that complacency was a sense that first of all the problems are well recognized and that we can even imagine how most, if not all can be addressed. There was, for example, a broad consensus that climate change was an urgent issue but the only real question was what was the mix of solutions.
I can't help wonder, as a result, if we are not missing something. Will we return to Davos next year only to find a very different mood following unanticipated events? Could it be a dollar crisis? Even more surprising weather? A scientific development? A breakdown in a key country?
