Re: Is it fair to ask developing countries to go green?

Description: How can China and India develop cleanly?

Question:  Is it fair to ask developing countries to go green?

Transcript: Every country in the world has to be environmentally conscious, Africa, who really didn’t create any of this problem and arguably will suffer the most with the gross of the- growth of the Sahara and everything else. There should be a way to have tax credits and buy and trade on carbon and things like that so things are more equitable. Those people that are taking the most should at least be taking something with some kind of tax on it. It can be financial, it can be otherwise, so there’s trading systems so that it’s the same--  If you want to drive a Hummer, good on you. You’re going to spend $120 to fill up the tank. That’s $120. It’s not $10. What if there was no price on gas and you just bought any car you wanted, went down to the gas station and just filled it up?  Why would anyone drive a Prius?  People would just drive Pimp My Ride, anything, getting the worst gas mileage. You’d have Caracas is what you’d have but that’s not the reality. There is a tax on gasoline and it costs over $100 to fill up a Hummer so there is an incentive. Get a Prius, get a Mini, get something else. I drive a Mini.

Question: How can India and China develop cleanly?

Transcript: As I said, there is a coal plant coming online every three days, one coal plant every three days. Those coal plants will last for 60 years. The majority of those are probably going in to China for the next foreseeable future. There is excellent technology that exists today that should be offered to the Chinese without tariffs to clean that- those plants. Their plants should be cleaner than ours because they’re coming online. If we’re putting a new one up, it should absolutely be clean as well. It doesn’t matter who’s putting a coal plant up, anywhere in the world it should be clean as possible with the best technology possible, no tariffs, etc. We need to do that so we need to help developing countries leapfrog us just as they have with cell phones. Most places in Latin America had bad land lines. Carlos Slim sold them all cell phones and now over the majority of all the cultures in Latin America are on cell phones. It’s great. It’s relatively clean. There’s no visual pollution or anything else. We need to do similar things with other consumption-oriented, fuel-oriented infrastructures.

Recorded on: 9/27/07