GLOBAL SOLUTIONS T20 Summit Speech Jeffrey Sachs Colleagues, and first to Dennis Snower and Dirk Messner, thank you for bringing us together. We are members of think tanks: our job is to think, to complain and to make our voices heard. I hope that most of us in the room are not politicians, but are really here as thinkers, because we actually need the thinking right now. As I sat through the discussion, I just became more and more nervous. I think there is very little to be complacent about right now. We are living in a quite dangerous world right now, and there is no reason for complacency. Our institutions are not working, and our governments are not working, mine, first and foremost. We are in a massive political crisis the likes of which we have not seen, perhaps since the Civil War and I do not think I am speaking hyperbolically. We are in a very historic place right now and it is really worthwhile to think about that just for a moment, because the rate at which our world can spin out of control is absolutely astounding. We are at the hundredth anniversary of World War I right now, a war that a hundred years ago was raging right here; it took twenty million lives. This is the year of the Bolshevik Revolution s hundredth anniversary; this is the year when France and England perfidiously divided up the Middle East in the death throes of the Ottoman Empire and created a hundred years of chaos, by creating states that they wanted to govern, so that Britain could steal the oil from Mosul, France could have its colonies, Britain could control the route to India. Okay: that is a hundredth anniversary. Take the 90th anniversary, here in Berlin, just after hyperinflation, just after the Beer Hall Putsch, an unstable country in the wake of a terrible agreement of the politicians at Versailles, a disaster, the peace to end all peace. Go ahead ten years from that, we are in Hitler s Germany, right here, one of the greatest disasters of all of human history. Take it ten years from that, 1947, we are within six days of the 70th anniversary of the Marshall Plan, a glimmer of global cooperation after the most disastrous war in human history. Take it ten years after that, we are in the 60th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, the start of the European Community. Ten years after that, we are in the Vietnam War crisis, the beginning of a long-term collapse of American governance; the German economic miracle on the positive side. Ten years after that we are in the throes of stagflation, 1977, the absolute change of global dynamics that that brought about. In 1987, a miracle named Mikhail Gorbachev appeared on the scene, making possible a peaceful resolution of a conflict that nearly brought us to extinction on several occasions. Ten years after that, the Asian economic crisis and I penned a little article after that, saying that should not we have a G16 rather than a G7, or G8; why don t we have developing countries talk with developed
countries? I published that in 1998, because I thought that it was time for there to be an expanded discussion, not just a discussion of a few rich countries. Ten years after that we had Bear Stearns nearly dying, near death and the death throes of the bubble that led to near financial meltdown, a decade ago. And here we are today, every ten years has brought unbelievable change. And so the idea that it is going to look the same in a few years from what as it looks like now is just a frailty of our psychology. We are in an extremely unstable period right now, and we are facing tremendous geotectonic changes. Most importantly is the decline of the United States as a leading power; sadly, while Trump is unstable and incapable of this job, behind him is a broken political system. It is not just him. The Republican Party is a bought political party in the hands of the oil and gas industry, and that is what is driving the climate change right now. This is just corruption of a democratic system by Big Money. This is not about public opinion, this is not about our voices: this is about the Koch brothers, ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Continental Resources, who put Scott Pruitt in the Environmental Protection Agency. I do not believe that we are in a safe period, and I do not believe that we should pretend that this is safe. Of course, it is not just the United States, I just know my own country s situation. There are many prima donnas that are not representing the values or the interests of their people, and we are living in a nuclear age. And more than that, we are living in an age where more insidious, less understood, deeper and yet potentially catastrophic forces are at work. And of course the environmental destruction that is underway is profound; so profound, so unprecedented that we are running to catch up with the realities. We are running to understand as my biology guru, E.O. Wilson, says we are destroying species far faster than we will ever have met them, because we have not even classified the thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of species we are driving to extinction, because we do not even know of their existence in the ecosystems yet. And this is proceeding rapidly, and nearly irreversibly, and we are at the brink, on both the climate and on the biodiversity, and not to mention the social and other profound challenges we face. So, I confess I am a nervous wreck, because I do not believe that we are doing the most basic things we should be doing to take care of ourselves, and I do not believe our political processes work, and least of all do I believe that democracies are organized for the sake of the political longevity of the officeholders. That is the least interesting thing in the world, is how well they are doing, though it is the number-one interest for them. TSo there is a basic misalignment of interests here, and that is what we need to grapple with.
Now let me smile for a minute and say a little bit of good news, kind of the crazy other side of this. And I will quote, as I like to do, President Kennedy, who said in his inaugural address, The world is very different now, for man holds in his mortal hands the ability to end all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. So our existential reality is that all of those dangers in which we are so prone to engage in have on their other side the most wondrous opportunities for positive change if we can just learn to think, to deal with values, and to cooperate. It is not too much to ask, even of these 20 individuals that will meet in Hamburg in a couple of months. We are not interested in their fate; they need to be interested in our fate. So we have, as President Kennedy said, the ability to end all forms of human poverty, and he said that in 1961. Here we are 56 years later with technologies that he could not even have dreamt of, with more power in any of our phones than NASA had in the entire system as we went on the moonshot, with a 127 trillion-dollar world economy, 17,000 dollars per person on this planet, and still there are poor people dying of their poverty. That is cruelty. That is absolutely recklessness. So I believe, as think tanks, that it is our particular job to think; and I was delighted that the Secretary of State of Argentina said we need a plan, then she said we will turn to the World Bank, and I said Oh my God, that is about the last place we are going to get it. We have not had a health plan from the World Bank I have tried for 15 years to get some thinking but no. By the way there is a deep issue there: they are a bank. They are not a development agency, they are a bank. Okay, there is room for banks, but they are not going to be the one to make the plan, nor are the G20 governments. There is not even a Secretariat of this thing, there is no continuity, there is not an office to call. We are here today because we have two gifted people, Dennis Snower and Dirk Messner, that brought us here together, and I thank you and I have loved these people for decades, as leaders. But that is why we are here, not because this is institutionalized, because we have been told to think through things, not because the governments are waiting for this, not at all. So, I believe that we are really in a dangerous period. Again, Trump, by himself, makes the world dangerous, but he also represents larger U.S. forces, and by no means is this the U.S. alone, by no means. The number of terrible ideas around the world is staggering. The idea that Saudi Arabia, in a crisis of budget, in an era of de-carbonization, needs most of all to buy a 110 billion dollars of arms from the United States? Are you kidding! But by the way, it
won t happen. They cannot afford it and we are too disorganized, so it is actually not even going to happen. It is just a kind of announcement. I was at the One Belt One Road conference last week in Beijing. Now that is something for us to think hard about. President Xi Jinping gave a brilliant talk, and within the space of about 500 words he had invoked Marco Polo, ibn Batutah, and Leibniz. Not bad. He gave a panorama of Eurasian history and the links of the Silk Road and the exchanges of technology and know-how over the course of two millennia that was truly inspirational. A job for us, because even China with its magnificent capacity for this, Eurasia is awfully big and to get right the idea of One Belt One Road and to make it compatible with climate, with renewable energy, with the advances of information technology, requires us, as think tanks, to be working hard on this. So I am thrilled to be together with you. I believe our job is to think, and think clearly, and to think honestly, and to think about the future, and to show how the Goals that our governments agreed upon in a moment of lucidity in 2015 the Sustainable Development Goals, and the Paris Climate Agreement can actually be achieved. I am not talking about how they can win the next election and do it, frankly I do not care, though I do not think it is impossible, I do not care which politician wins election or not; I would advise you not to care also. Because that is such an uninteresting question among the many fascinating questions we have; it is much more interesting to ask how can we save 5.9 million children who will die this year under the age of 5 because we have not solved that problem yet adequately with finance and with the delivery of services; or it is very interesting for us to ask the question how can we achieve SDG 4 to ensure that every child in Africa and every child elsewhere gets at least a secondary education by the year 2030. That is a great question. That is so much more interesting than the next election. That is really to make the world safe. And how can we achieve what the scientists have told us cogently we need to achieve, and which we even promised to achieve in Paris on December 12 2015 the de-carbonization of our energy system worldwide. Our job is to show the path to de-carbonization and call out these crooks. Just to be clear, it is not our job to be quiet or pleasant when we have an irreversible cliff that we are facing, and that cliff could be the West Antarctic Ice Sheet or large parts of the Greenland Ice Sheet. I live on a small-island economy called Manhattan, and I just bought an apartment, and it is going to get flooded out, unless we get this right. So colleagues, because all of us are colleagues, we are members of think tanks, we are privileged to be here. I think we had a wonderful mandate from Germany this year, I am incredibly grateful for it and I am incredibly grateful for the leadership of Dennis Snower and Dirk Messner. We have the organizational capacity to look ahead, to make plans, especially I like to call them pathways, as defining how we get from where we are to where we have promised ourselves in
human decency we will be. And we are going to work together on this to make the pathways, and if these politicians won t listen, we will bring in the next ones, honestly, because this is too important to be left to 20 people, this is for 7.5 billion people and their children and their grandchildren. Thank you very much.