with transcript
thank you very much we will start with the questions if I may uh right away um you have experienced a lot you are one of the most uh famous scholars in the world and you have witnessed many many serious events being the war in Vietnam the collapse of the Soviet Union invasion of the United States and its allies in Iraq Afghanistan however uh today often we hear uh that the situation at the moment is actually the most serious as it was the most threatening as it was after the second world war do you share this opinion we certainly have uh really grave dangers we also have uh good solutions to these if we keep our head on and if we're honest about the situation of course there have been moments of absolutely immediate Peril I think back 61 years and I remember it actually the Cuban Missile Crisis uh when we were just within uh a moment of the nuclear war uh and it was only extraordinarily wise leadership by President Kennedy and by Nikita kushev that pulled the two countries back from the in of complete disaster for the world we're not standing at the edge exactly that way but boy are we uh creating risks like the war in Ukraine which is really a war between the United States and Russia uh though it's being fought in Ukraine by ukrainians it's a proxy war and now this war in Gaza which is a War fought by Israel but made possible by the United States and is extremely dangerous and the high tensions between the United States and China which again I blame the United States for uh as the main reason add those up it's a bad situation but then add on top of that the fact that we have the man-made dangers of environmental destruction uh climate change pollution destruction of our fisheries and our forests that is very serious very far along and even denied by many political leaders we still have political leaders who are scientifically ignorant who aggressively deny uh what is uh absolutely fa ing us which is a terrible uh destabilization of the physical systems for our food supplies our forests uh our fisheries and so forth so you add this all up it's a terribly uh difficult and bad time and maybe what makes everyone so nervous on top of it is that the quality of political leadership is extremely low uh our president is 81 years old and should be in retirement this is absolutely obvious uh our Congress is quite corrupt in the United States because we have a a system of campaign financing that depends on billions and billions of dollars going from big companies to the uh congressmen and Senators uh and the US isn't alone in this uh there's a great deal of instability and our political leaders don't know how to get along with each other uh so you add this all up it's definitely bad whether it's absolutely the worst it's a little hard to judge but it's bad enough that we ought to do something about it you actually mentioned many questions that I was going to ask uh but um if I understand correctly um how did we get there actually so definitely there is some kind of crisis of leadership because I believe that the problem is not only a senior American president uh well and uh well these these problems can be also in in other countries uh then of course there's a concentration of unprecedented crisis uh and of course there is a part I would say that's considering the decisions that the superpowers make would would you agree with this with this combination I think if I could put one word on the reason we're in this crisis it is arrogance arrogance of the rich and the powerful and um the United States was the richest and the most powerful uh of all during this period so the arrogance of the United States has been extremely notable you know when the Cold War ended in uh 1989 uh in uh Central Europe and in 1991 in uh the former Soviet Union we might have said now we have a glorious opportunity for peace for cooperation and for Prosperity uh this didn't happen it could have happened I was there I saw what could have been done uh instead the United States said we won we're the best we're the most powerful we don't have to deal with anybody except on our own terms and the United States absolutely uh went from arrogant to hyper arrogant and said we can do what we want where we want and strangely enough though the United States basically faced no security threats after that time it went to war more often than than ever uh of course it completely uh misjudge two things one it continued to think of Russia as a natural enemy and so it it actually created a new enemy because I was advisor to gorov I was advisor to yelson they wanted absolute peace and normal relations there's no doubt in my mind this wasn't a trick it wasn't a plot it was in an attempt to create normal relations the United States instead said oh no no we won we won now we'll move NATO uh okay Hungary Czech Republic uh Poland OH we'll keep moving we'll go to the baltics we'll go to Romania Bulgaria we'll go to the Balkans oh no no no we'll go to Ukraine we'll go to Georgia will surround Russia will decolonize Russia that's a term used in American political circles uh even saying oh Russia should be dismembered now well what on Earth are these people thinking Russia has 6,000 nuclear warheads a powerful Army a uh self-respect and a desire for its own security uh and so the United States provoked what absolutely it should not have provoked so this was a a part of the issue a second part of the issue is that in general the uh Rich became arrogant in a different way saying oh we're so good we used to be millionaires now we're billionaires we don't have to share anything so they became libertarian in philosophy libertarian in American philosophy means we don't have to pay taxes because what we have is ours and nobody's going to take it away and so we developed a super rich class uh that became very self-righteous that's my money it's nobody else's money how dare the government think to take it and at the same time a growing uh amount of people struggling in poverty or losing jobs to technology being replaced by robots being replaced by automation so the Gap in our society between the rich and the poor widened considerably and this was the second factor and you would think that in a political democracy the poor people would vote out uh the uh ones that are uh leaning on them or would vote for tax increases on the small group of very powerful but that theory is wrong because the small group of very powerful buy the politicians they they really do uh and so they pay the campaign contributions and the first rule of the US Congress is vote tax cuts for companies and and Rich individuals so that is the second thing that happened the third thing that happened is that the environmental crisis especially the climate change crisis came and would require changes in our behavior and would also cause limitations to the big energy industry the oil the gas the coal industry and um the industry resisted those changes said no and the politicians said oh it's not even real like uh VAV klus and others you know they just denied the climate change and uh this denial has gone on for decades actually we just saw a new uh president of Argentina elected just now who said that climate change is a socialist plot you can't even make this up I don't know whether this is uh just playing games to get elected whether it's complete sheer ignorance whether it's corruption uh I don't know what it is but it's shocking people in any kind of responsibility should know better they should at least understand what this issue is about and this has been a very big challenge it's Again part of the arrogance uh I happen to lead a scientific Institute at Columbia University with hundreds of climate scientists so I had an earful all the time about the climate science many people don't have that chance to hear directly so they hear from politicians or actors or actors who want to be politicians uh who say whatever they feel like and the result is that we go decade after decade without solving these problems despite all the meetings the treaties the conferences and so forth so when you add all of this up uh as I said I think the underlying problem is arrogance of the rich and the powerful who somehow think the rules don't apply to them and we end up in a world that is in conflict we end up in a world that is divided between rich and poor we end up in a world that is uh facing massive environmental crisis and it's all so weird because the world's richer than ever before better Technologies than ever before and we could if we chose right move to peace immediately I just testified in the UN Security Council about four Wars the war in Ukraine uh the war in Israel and Palestine the war in Syria and the war in the Sahel of Africa which is Bina Mali Chad and I pointed out all four of these huge Wars could be stopped tomorrow with politics with basic sound politics but our leaders are just incapable of basic sound politics unfortunately when you mentioned arrogance and the beginning of the 90s well I I am from the CH Republic as you know myself so course yes I I we have vast experience with no policies and their application however I I wanted to ask about liberal democracy of course we have to mention Francis fukuyama and his end of History and now we see how how completely wrong that was but uh do you see also the the liberal democracy as something that maybe hides more the true State of Affairs uh than actually helps to resolve uh the conflicts uh because you know when Scholars like Martin wolf suggest that maybe instead of voting we should have some you know choice by chance randomly it would be better than elect the repres resentatives that we have that there's certainly something wrong so maybe if you could elaborate on on the liberal democracy and maybe really be an an but the question is what kind of anend it will be it would be great if we could make democracy work uh because democracy is very attractive in principle uh it's a way for free people to express themselves it's a way for people to participate it's a way for people to learn about social and political realities so it in principle is a very attractive system uh and in general it's a way for people to have protection from their own governments because non-democratic governments can be very very destructive of their own people because there's no control necessarily over government so in principle I'm a Democrat uh but in practice you can see all of the difficulties of making this work a democracy needs to have an informed public a democracy needs to have a respectful uh dialogue or deliberation in the public not shouting not even even worse violence not uh hidden influence uh a democracy needs to prevent being taken over by powerful interests that use the Democracy as a as a facade uh as a pretense rather than real democracy so some democracies work pretty well uh some in Europe work reasonably well I would say the quality of the American democracy has declined tremendously during my lifetime um maybe that's an illusion but I feel that and I can see even in the data that people had more confidence in government 60 years ago than they have today and I look at that and I've of course course spent my whole life trying to understand that declining confidence in our government and I find two factors uh that are at the core of this one is that after World War II the United States created a Security State uh with the CIA and other institutions that were supposedly ensuring National Security but in fact fact they really diminished democracy because the first principle of the CIA is that it's secret and its actions are secret and um it does lots of things around the world that are not good but they're secret so this really undermined American democracy and um we don't have a de we don't have much public effect on foreign policy for example in the United States because when it comes to foreign policy really the president and a few uh other people make decisions on behalf of everybody without public debate or without control by any really Democratic institutions other than a vote once every few years but that's not enough because we go to war all the time against the interests of the American people um so that's one part of the problem the other part of the problem that I mentioned earlier is the big money in politics some countries restrict private campaign financing in fact most in Europe don't have a lot of Corruption of the political system but the United States I regard as kind of legal corruption legal in the sense that our Supreme Court said that companies can spend whatever they want on politics no restriction and or few restrictions um and the result is our election cycle say the 2024 election will spend maybe $15 billion of campaign financing now you don't get honest government with so much money Changing Hands you get government that is purchased by the highest bidder and this is H why the confidence democracy has declined so much you mentioned of course the power of big money I I I wouldn't be so optimistic about the situation in Europe I just believe because the economies are weaker then uh there's not so much money as in the US but the tendency is practically uh practically the same uh you you mentioned Joe Biden and of course then president Trump uh probably they'll meet in in elections next year probably um do you see the crisis in in leadership because when we uh look in the past we see many strong leaders who were both from Europe from the United States who were able to offer some vision and lead a society some of them even towards a peaceful Society we mentioned will brand Olaf Palmer we can also mention well we can also mention Ronald dran as a special type of American Heritage as well uh I would say there is a certain decline in these leadership uh qualities do you view it as well because in Europe it's I think very visible yes I think the quality of the political leadership in the US and Europe is very weak right now in general speaking of the United States uh we have uh two leading candidates one of whom is 81 and can't find his way off the stage anymore he happens to be our president and the other one is a convicted uh is is is multiply convicted uh uh uh psychologically unstable person uh who now faces uh dozens of criminal uh counts right now in Trials coming up so maybe we'll have a a an octogenarian who is who should never be running and a convicted felon uh running for the presidency this is a terrible terrible thing obviously uh how can we get there there are some other candidates I'm hoping that Robert Kennedy Jr uh proves himself as a highly capable candidate and I like him we were schoolmates we're friends uh and uh he comes from a great political tradition in fact uh his uncle uh John F Kennedy was in my view the last great American president uh because after that well we had some very nice and smart people a few not very many Jimmy Carter was one uh but um we've had a lot of failed presidents and failed presidencies so the quality of leadership is uh is quite low and in Europe it's also really surprising to me how when the United States makes such bad judgments European leaders tend to follow along uh the US lead and of course I'm very unhappy about the Ukraine war I mean everyone's unhappy about it but I have a view that's somewhat different from the mainstream view which is in my interpretation the war in Ukraine was caused by the US wanting to expand NATO uh and uh of course uh many in Europe say no no no it's all Putin uh he he did this but I I know enough history and I was present at enough events to know how much the US provoked this war through absolutely stupid policies because if you're smart you don't push a military Alliance right up against Russia's border uh that's just not a wise thing to do Russia's extremely sensitive to uh the military of the West encroaching on it because of how many times Russia's been invaded by the west and especially when the United States politicians have so much hostility to Russia which they do they openly express the idea that Russia should be dismantled and many other things of course Russia's going to see NATO expansion as a direct threat to National Security and it's not going to let it happen so this is just an example of terrible policy predictable disaster but the US went along with it now my point was the Europeans knew better I know because many Europeans told me many times oh expansion to Ukraine is very dangerous but then they don't say it in public uh and they don't say it in public because the United States uh would get mad at them and uh you know they're afraid of the US they shouldn't be afraid of the US Europe should have its own independent foreign policy and it should understand its own interests uh and the interests are not just following along the United States so this is a a just an a very important example of the weakness of the political leadership right now in in Europe as well as in the United States yeah we we see that here very well so they're actually not able even to formulate the national interest and I don't know if if it's fear or simply they are not capable to understand what's going on maybe it's combination of both however the con the consequences are really disastrous for the EU both economically and politically of course you men one one European political leader said to me uh a couple of years ago oh they don't take us seriously in Washington and um he said it even more colorfully which I won't repeat exactly but uh this was a leader of a major country and my thought was yeah but you should not allow yourself to be treated that way that's your fault that's not America's fault yes America's arrogant but stand up for Europe and uh this should be the approach but it's not the approach because I think we've covered a lot of ground for aan and we've heard a lot of things that are very promising and that's good because we need some uh optimism and some direction for uh how to uh overcome some of some of the big challenges right now if we were to step back from our crisis and look at uh some of the very um fundamental Trends in the world we'd have a great deal of reason for for optimism in fact uh the world economy and world society as a whole has become much better off than it was a 100 years ago without question life expectancy has risen remarkably income in the world on average is now $20,000 per person if measured at International prices and about $112,000 per person if measured at market prices and this is a huge rise of incomes and well-being and uh quality of diets protection uh of Health Care coverage and many many other uh really fundamental parts of our material life and what Dr Xiao describe for China which is absolutely incredible for 1.4 billion people over a period of 40 years um has been achieved not quite at that pace but very broadly in many parts of the world and the underlying reason for those improvements is that science technology knowhow has advanced and continues to advance even at an accelerating rate so our ability to to address practical challenges is really unprecedented right now our wealth is unprecedented and our knowhow is unprecedented this is really the fundamental reason for being uh very optimistic about what we can do and what we should do in the coming years what we've learned though is that there are at least three fundamental problems with the way the world functions and that's what brings us to this workshop and what brings us to the sustainable development goals the first is that with all that progress there are billions of people that have been effectively left behind this progress that are really struggling for a variety of reasons people live in more remote areas or in very unfavorable geographies or are part of minority groups that have been maltreated within Societies or half the population women and girls that traditionally were not part of the market economy were part of the household economy and have definitely seen uh progress but facing a lot of social obstacles still today which is why one of the sustainable development goals is directed specifically at the issues of gender sg5 so one of the three huge challenges is that we have a rich world and a lot of very poor and suffering people within that world and that's just uh I think for most of our us humanly unacceptable and indeed when the UN was established in 1948 all of the member states agreed that there should be basic standards of life for every person on the planet because there people on the planet because they're human beings and the world is productive enough to ensure the Dignity of everybody and that's why the universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted and I regard us still trying to honor that declaration which seems to me to be the basic point so problem number one is the very uneven development the fact that there is still today uh a significant part of the world that lives in really abject deprivation and that's a a first Challenge and I think it's ethically probably the number one challenge because extreme deprivation in a world of plenty is absolutely uh destructive of all of our Humanity if we don't solve that problem so that's why sdg1 is and extreme poverty straightforward and sdg2 the second highest priority is and hunger For Heaven's Sake of course there are big challenges of how to do it but I will say in a world of wealth and knowledge this is definitely within reach it's crazy to my mind that if the average income is $112,000 per capita there are people living at a few hundred dollars per capita and the world just goes on as they suffer and die young and face terrible hardships the second Big Challenge the huge challenge the puzzle that is even harder than the first one conceptually is that we discovered about 5050 years ago that the nature of our Economic Development all that wealth that I just talked about is environmentally destructive because the much vaunted economic processes don't take care of their physical byproducts and some of them were not understood till 50 or 100 years ago like greenhouse gases and their effects on climate that was that required a scientific breakthrough of a quite deep order to understand that it came by the end of the 19th century and then it took at least uh 75 years to create measurement systems to verify the science and we've more or less known from around 1980 that humanity is really changed in the climate in ways that could be dangerous and we're still struggling with that fact because what brought us that wealth in the first place starting in the 1800s was fossil fuels and then we discovered about halfway through oh those are dangerous that's not good so this is the second big problem is that we have a economic system and a set of laws rules regulations a Global Commons the Open Seas and many other factors of our economic system that mean that uh the scale of production is now self-destructive and as I say we've understood this intellectually at least for 70 at least for about 50 years uh it was 50 years ago that the first conference on this fact took hold was 51 years ago that the first good book about this limits to growth was written and made clear that there was a real problem and we've not finished solving that problem but let me stipulate the following just like I did for the first one there's nothing fundamental about these environmental challenges that is beyond our solution even with our current knowledge base in other words we already in 2023 have the range of Technical Solutions to 90% of the greenhouse gases not 100% we definitely don't face a choice between food and nature we a face a choice between uh un between destructive and non-destructive forms of food production that's a very different choice I haven't found in 40 Years of my work on this a fundamental barrier to economic well-being and environmental sustainability so I'm not in the de growth school of thought which says that what we really need is to reverse Economic Development not all economic development is good for human well-being that's a different matter but I'm not of the school of thought that says we've created a kind of society that is completely inconsistent with our environmental Necessities or our environmental well-being or health what we have is a very flawed economic system legal system regulatory system incentive structure so that we adopt or continue with technologies that are very ill advised and do lots of stupid things because it's possible to make money off of those stupid things rather than do the things that we should be doing and I've not seen in all of my experience any calculations that show me that this that doing the right things is beyond our reach beyond our budget beyond our uh economic means for example all of the estimates about the energy transformation to a zeroc carbon Energy System suggests that it's one or 2% of world output that is needed to make that change that's really strange it's not that it's 50% of world output that's needed it's not that this is cataclysmically expensive and we're just doomed as if an asteroid were coming to hit the planet and we have nothing to do no we have clear very very clear things to do sometimes we have too many possible things to do so we don't know which one to take so we're paralyzed should we do wind or solar or nuclear or this I don't know we won't do anything right now we're making money with what we're doing so we're paralyzed or we know what to do but there are strong vested interests saying don't do it because I'm making too much money in the short term doing the destructive things or it just is complicated and hasn't been thought out properly because this is something absolutely new it was rather straightforward to build a coal plant but it's not so straightforward perhaps to build offshore wind or solar fields or something else because of storage or other issues so they're just complexities but that's the second big category of challenge that we face which is this economic environmental Collision Course which again needs analysis and then needs to ask how deep is the problem and for me and how solvable is the problem so the climate crisis is very deep but it's also rather solvable and there are some......
and how solvable is the problem so the climate crisis is very deep but it's also rather solvable and there are some puzzles definitely what should big ocean tankers run on should it be hydrogen fuel cells should it be ammonia should it be hydrogen combustion I'm not an engineer I've heard the arguments from the engineers I want them to fight it out I want them to try different approaches but clearly we should be trying these technology the third Big Challenge which is a challenge of time immemorial is that we seem to have a very hard time to stop killing each other so War becomes all ever more dangerous because the weapons become ever more destructive and now we're were technologically so smart that we figured out how to destroy the whole Humanity damn it if we weren't so smart we wouldn't have this trouble but a few Geniuses figured out you could make nuclear fishing work to make a bomb by the way there were probably 50 people in the world that understood that and they figured it out and then they gave it to a world of idiots so we have a lot of dumb people who are in charge of nuclear weapons and they were made by a few Geniuses that's our problem so this is our third issue which is how to stay peaceful and Cooperative to my mind these are the three big issues that we face which is how to be fair and decent to people who are suffering how to make sure that we're not self-destructive because our economic system is actually a complicated set of incentives that doesn't get things right and there's no magic in how we have organized our economic life to handle issues like greenhouse gases which weren't in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations are not part of the uh things that a free market can solve and so forth and the third is this interminable problem that if you read human history we've been fighting with each other most of the time but there are also glimmers of hope that there are long periods of peace and we also have institutions for peace just like we have institutions for war one of the things that makes me quite optimistic about China's rise is that China has been much more peaceful in its history than just about any other region of the world and the amount of Interstate war of China over the last 2,000 years is actually quite low it's basically been Wars of uh pastoralists coming from the north uh and uh sedentary Farmers trying to fight them off uh and that's been most of China's Wars for 2,000 years if you look at Europe's Wars it was just kill each other across the Divide for a thousand years nonstop um so China at least has a peaceful tradition and I think it fits actually with this idea of harmonious Society with the idea of uh Global civilizations and so forth I'm quite an optimist I have to say about that because I think it actually there's a a deep rootedness so that's all we have to do end poverty protect the environment stop killing with each other all right so thank you no okay so so what do we do to my mind the basic thing is we should think hard about each of those things and then come up with plans that's the most basic idea that sounds so dumb why am I saying that after 40 years don't have anything more intelligent to say and the thing is that the way that our social systems work is not to think and then solve these things and that's very interesting our economic system is designed around a different principle which is let people do what they want get rich go find your job go uh buy what you want but not solve problems so in economic land it's not oriented towards solving problems it's oriented towards doing your thing businesses are supposed to go make profits and we're supposed to be good consumers and we're supposed to be smart in the job that we pursue but at least in market economics which is became the dominant uh ideology of the Anglo-Saxon world and then the world it isn't to solve problems it's go do your thing so don't expect the answers to these problems s to come from the economic sphere or from the business Community it's not their job their job is to run a business it's to make money so that's problem number one that we don't think in the economic sphere about end goals we're supposed to just do our thing and then politicians in most politics it's not about solving problems it's about maintaining power and that's even the goal and you have experts on maintaining power all the politicians have little machellies around them handing them this is what you need to do to stay in power and that's your goal and so politics at least in my country has very little to do with any goals I don't know what any American goals are we have no goals we have some Heroes our founding fathers we love the Constitution we like the July 4th independence day but we have no goals and even when I hear Dr Xiao talk about China's goals you could not have that in the United States stating those goals because that's that's that's socialism uh you're not allowed to have goals so politics is not oriented towards solving problems really it's management management of power competition for power holding on to power benefiting from Power and so we don't see from our governments most of the time these big goals and how to solve them I really think China's been different in this period the last 40 years from most other governments and I think the success is a result of that actually that it's really and why well I think this very interesting question but um a few countries at a few times have very clear goals maybe because of survival maybe because of their past history maybe because they have a successful uh neighbor uh so they want to imitate the success maybe like in Singapore because a genius came leuan Yu and he had a very very clear idea and really Singapore it is a case of a very clear brilliant thinker who just guided things for quite a while like Plato's philosopher king but most of the time this is not how politics is so we don't see a lot of this problem solving coming from governments and the third thing is in my country which became the most powerful country in the world for uh the last 75 years militarily they really think that fighting Wars is a big part of what governance is about they're crazy and dangerous and could get us all killed so that third category of just peaceful cooperation does not come easily every day we read something hateful about China in the American newspapers now every single day I just read uh today China has the global civilizations initiative wonderful you talked about it today I just read this is terrible this is you know out to China's out to take over the world through this now honestly this is a mindset that is very very deep probably ingrained evolutionarily in us also because there probably was a time when whoever could control the next water hole survived and whoever didn't didn't survive and it was us or them and that's not how the world is right now it's not us or them we don't need to take over any other place to have well-being period there's no crisis of living room there is only the crisis of understanding don't kill the other side okay so what do we do again just to conclude we need to think clearly excuse me that's a technical term about American politics so we need really to put serious ideas forward in detail and that's the purpose of what uh we're after and two specific Pathways that we're really focusing on right now is one is the energy transition because there's only a quarter century and an energy systems really complicated you have to have a power grid we have to convert all the vehicles to Electric or to hydrogen or to some other non-emitting source the building sector has to be far more efficient industry emits a lot of greenhouse gases deforestation in other words all of the getting to Net Zero is quite a complicated challenge with lots of moving parts and it's a lot of money not more than not more than an energy system cost but an energy system is trillions of dollarss a year and so it's worth getting right so that's the first of the pathways and the second is the land use and ocean use because we're really so close to destroying everything irreversibly when the species is lost it's never coming back and when the ecosystems are degraded many of them never return and if we pass climate thresholds we're just going to spend the next Century in disaster of calamitous sea level rises storms heat waves and so on so we're very close to that so those are the two main Pathways that we are really focusing on the biological and its Associated its association with food production and with other agricultural production and for this region that's Central because this is a biodiversity uh Garden of Eden and also a biodiversity threatened region intensively all this beauty and it's being torn down and it can happen so fast because economies are very uh very very large right now and demands China could DeForest this country just by its demands for tropical Hardwoods without a problem unless you take care so those are the two areas that we really want to focus on and the final point that I want to say is again about this third category of cooperation it happens that when you look technically at an energy program or at a ecosystem program no country can do this by itself nothing can be done other than at the local level but plans need to be transnational without question so there's a lot of local action but they have to be part of a broader fr framework and that's why this is an Assan Workshop because Assan countries are not only together on the map and not only physical neighbors but have work to do together because Assan countries cannot achieve their goals without working together and so we need to do this at a transnational planning level that's hard CU there are no elected transnational officials anywhere all transnational organizations are weak because none of them has an army none of them has political leaders were organized at the national level in the world that's where the physical Force lies and yet and that's that's where the politics generally lies and yet we have Global and Regional problems that need addressing urgently the makong is not going to be saved one country at a time it's going to be saved by China Lao PDR Cambodia Vietnam working together without question there's no way to do that one country at a time it's got to be done in the Watershed the energy system from Malaysia absolutely needs to be integrated with the rest of the region and those Regional institutions are weak politically and organizationally and they need to be strengthened considerably and then uh the question of what region is the right region for this we're dealing with a because it's a crucial established Regional entity but I said yesterday and I'll say it again I think for the energy sector ARP is even more appropriate that's adding in Assan plus China Japan Korea Australia and New Zealand the United States would have a fit by the way I I'll be done in one minute the us would have a fit you're cooperating with China well my strong advice to you is cooperate with China closely and my strong advice to Australia is don't build a submarine base cooperate with China and let's not waste money on nuclear submarines right now and raise the tension more so my own advice is that broader group and I hope India joins that group and then we've got a a lot of the world together in a way that could actually solve the problems so sorry for the long rambling except I believe that all of these problems are solvable I believe that universities have a unique and extremely important role to play in this because this is what we should be doing training teaching educating researching policy analysis and really trying to make politics work the way that it should which is for the common good thank you a political outcome right now not the one we wanted but we were so dumb not to take a better deal a year ago two years ago five years years ago 10 years ago that now we're in a situation where we're not going to get exactly what we quote want but to continue the fighting would absolutely destroy even more what worries me most is actually that really the lives of ukrainians are just taken as a as a casualty as something not even rough speaking about they don't even talk about it the leadership is absolutely gross you know I look I I'm sure that zalinski is in a very hard place but all he talks about right now is throwing more lives to the graves frankly no strategy no self-awareness no situational awareness okay it's very sad because the United States talked him out of a peace agreement in March 2022 that was Zin 's chance and he lost it he was inexperienced you know when you the United States comes and tells you we have your back you you know you tend to believe it if you're inexperienced I tried to tell them by the way I you know I I really tried to tell the ukrainians look I'm I'm an old guy I've been through lots of us Wars Vietnam War Nicaragua uh the gulf Wars Syria they never win are you kidding you really want to end up like Afghanistan and they didn't believe me they just thought oh you're a Putin apologist so they didn't want to hear any of this but I was telling them the hard facts about American wars and they didn't want to hear it uh besides Russia I'm not sure that Ukraine actually is such a big topic or in in American uh policy I'm not sure about that definitely you know it's a big focus of the political class still the military industrial complex and the White House maybe for just political reasons that Biden doesn't want to admit what a lousy poker player he is but the the point is uh for the American people they've had enough there's no ground swell of support people don't want that they want to stop this thing and so in that sense you're absolutely right typically the public doesn't have much say in this we have almost no public debate but Biden's popularity is really collapsing and if the uh unhappiness with Biden's foreign policy is very very clear so maybe even public opinion is going to start playing a role because we're now in an election year um I would like to ask you to clear the position on China because when I look both at the Republicans or at the Democrats I would say that their views on China are very similar so they actually have very hostile views uh towards China uh now there was a summit uh apek where uh both presidents Biden and Shining met um do you see any any decline in tension any hopes that actually the relations they are probably not going to be friendly but let's say at least stab I and and would be less less threatening for the world I'll tell you an interesting thing when President shei came to this Apex Summit in San Francisco he met 200 US Business Leaders and they gave him a standing ovation I don't think they would give an American president a standing ovation but they gave president shei a standing ovation why China is their biggest Market they both produce in China they sell in China they make a lot of money in China and they want normal relations what what is happening is two things one we have a kind of security class in America who uh are all about uh American dominance American hegemony America being number one it's a very strange group of people uh but this is our foreign policy establishment then we have politicians who basically uh think that and it's very particular Trump in 2016 won the election by winning swing states in the middle of America in the American Midwest which is our industrial Zone and he won it by saying China took your jobs away and when he made narrow victories in those States the Democrats said oh we have to to attack China in order to compete politically with Trump so there are two reasons for the anti- China sentiment in the United States one and in the political class one is this idea of America being the only dominant country well you know you know unless you're playing a board game like the game of Risk you don't get to be the dominant country in the world when other big countries around so this is arrogance again very misguided then there is this protectionist politics uh which uh tries to appeal to a few swing states in the US elections the upshot of this is that the political class both Democrats and Republicans are pretty United against China pretty ignorant from my experience they don't know China they don't know Chinese history they don't have any perspective they play a dangerous game like when uh our Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi flew to Taiwan so stupid sorry just why do you want to provoke another super thank you for saying that because we have same Representatives who are also provoking China in this in this country okay don't provoke China be respectful just have normal relations don't provoke a superpower why what is in it to poke a superpower it's stupid people should think you know if there's some even if you think there's a bully which China's not but if you think there's a bully in the schoolyard and you're a you know a little kid and you think they're the bully is it really smart to go poking them and say you're a bully I hate you no you're going to get hurt in the end so you need some common sense and China's not even bullying China is just big successful Dynamic actually a good trade partner for Europe so we should treat it normally respectfully and uh the US anxieties should not be Europe's anxieties this is another area where European politicians are just repeating the words of American politicians and you know I know behind the scenes it's although it's obvious you know why does vanderlan repeat words almost like Biden because she feels that her job is to be with the United States maybe she hopes the United States appoints her as the secretary general of NATO or something I don't know what it is no but that's what what she hopes maybe so this is where Europe makes a big mistake just like it did make a big mistake in Ukraine it would make a big mistake of trying to make an enemy out of China that's a completely ridiculous losing proposition uh my last question because our time is coming up I have to reflect one very current event you already mentioned and that's uh the elections in Argentina yes because let's say that the elected president is a unusual personality um how how do you view this situation um is there a danger for for bricks or or maybe for other Latin American countries with his very strange suggestions as for foreign policy as for economics yeah of course time will tell one thing is he won the the presidency but has no uh control over the Congress uh his small parties and at least for the moment doesn't have any kind of governing Coalition in the Congress so maybe his uh ability to do things will require a much broader Coalition of forces and that could be a a constraint but let me just say first are Argentina is a country that has been unstable for its whole history going back to the 1820s ever since Independence Argentina has messed up more currencies had more inflation and more instability than any other place on the entire planet this guy won not because of what he says but because of disgust with the outgoing government which was delivering inflation of triple digits uh more than 100% you can't really win an election when inflation is a triple digit and I know Argentina quite well uh and actually worked with the Finance Minister just before this one and he ended up he was doing a good job and he ended up being not forced out he resigned unfortunately uh but he resigned because his own I would say corrupt politicians in his own party were uh rejecting the normal policies that he was trying to promote so Argentina is now in yet another cycle of instability all my professional career as an economist I've been watching Argentina in amazement because it's it it's not an impoverished country by any means and it's you know got huge natural wealth and uh and very smart people um well educated class of people but it has made such a political mess repeatedly and this could be yet another one I don't want to say on the first day after the election of uh this guy that he'll really govern the way he campaigned because sometimes they become a lot more responsible but it could be that he's that he is what he says he is in which case uh Argentina is gonna face some real troubles I don't it it's regrettable because I'm I'm a a fan of the bricks I would like to see them work Argentina is a new member of the bricks group uh whether this guy stays in or out of the bricks or gets kicked out of the bricks everything remains to be seen uh but I uh I only hope that this guy was making this as a Persona not as a real politics because uh his real politics uh if delivered this way would be very very detrimental to Argentina office in 2021 rather than trying to deescalate he called for NATO enlargement and reinforced the US push to expand Eastward Putin strongly pushed back Biden pushed back the US signed several statements in 2021 confirming that NATO would enlarge I think this was all absolutely irresponsible Russia masked troops on its border and put on the table a draft draft us Russia security agreement on December 17th 2021 based on no NATO enlargement the Biden Administration formally replied that it was not willing to negotiate over that issue in a response in January then Russia invaded on February 24th 2022 making clear that it was the failure to reach an understanding on the NATO question that was Central to Russia's action 4 Weeks Later zalinski declared that Ukraine was accepting of neutrality in other words the initial Russian invasion brought Ukraine to the negotiating table and during the second half of March with the Turkish government being the mediators Russia and Ukraine hammered out a peace agreement incredibly the United States blocked it because the United States told the Ukrainian government you fight on because American policy makers had two ideas one was that Ukraine should not be neutral it should be a NATO country and second that the war would be won by some combination of Western armaments and financial sanctions and so the us ratcheted up the war Putin said no we don't stand down we fight and mobilized hundreds of thousands of Russians in the summer of 2022 and since then we've been on a path of military escalation I resent the fact as a citizen threatened by this that Biden has not negotiated over NATO and that Biden and Putin have not talked once as far as we know since February 24th 2022 you know when two sides are fighting they need to talk and negotiate but that's rejected the hardliners in the United States Nan blinkin Sullivan Biden say why negotiate we just escalate we'll defeat Russia this is in my view utterly Reckless and irresponsible first it leads to the destruction of Ukraine and second it risks the escalation to nuclear war so I'm very unhappy about this and I very much resent that the mainstream media like the New York Times repeats the falsehood all the time that this was an unprovoked action on February 24th 2022 seemingly wanting us to be without any context or history to understand where this conflict came from and how it can end and a newspaper like the New York Times has a responsibility to tell the truth and they're not doing it indeed as Citizens we have the right you know a country is not looking after in the US the prosperity of its own citizens going out conducting these irresponsible words when we don't have time with other things with the environment ironically what seems to be behind it all is this insistence on a unipolar world insistence on dominance and while the US wants to hold on to its status as a reserve currency it seems under those economic sanctions that us has also suffered it might even be hastening strengthening the currencies of other countries well the basic point is the US has 4.1% of the world population so how could it presumed to be the world leader you know the US is a powerful country it's a rich country but it doesn't run the world and it should not aspire to run the world that's a kind of Madness and the US ideology for a long time has been that the US should run the world it's to my mind unbelievable but then again I've spent most of my career outside the US seeing the other 95.9% of the world and I know that the other 95% of the world doesn't want the United States to run the world it's not against the United States just says let us have our own part of the world we don't want you running the world we don't want you deciding what our government is who we are how we rule ourselves you know you're just one place and this the United States leaders don't understand they're very arrogant they're very ignorant because of the two big oceans they're very unaware the history of other parts of the world and we end up with this arrogant and naive and dangerous foreign policy because there's no doubt the United States is Rich and powerful and it makes lots of weapon systems and I'm 68 years old and the United States has been at War almost every year of my life from Vietnam and la and Cambodia and Nicaragua and Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria and Libya and now Ukraine come on give it a break and the US is also experiencing the reality that other places in the world are catching up on technology indeed leading on Technologies as well and China is a very successful very industrious very hardworking society which in the last 40 years has gone from poverty to a very significant World important economy and the us has a very hard time accepting that the US attitude if you listen to congressmen who don't seem to know anything is oh if China's successful it must be because they're cheating what about because they're saving more than 40% of GDP that the Chinese people have been engaging in a remarkable upgrading of Education hundreds of thousands of phds minted each year massive scientific research programs come on this is the truth and so this arrogance is not allowing the truth to come through but you mentioned one specific point which is the role of the US dollar part of the US strength after World War II is well the US was basically the only economy standing and it was a technologically advanced Rich large economy the world's largest and the dollar was really the only internationally usable currency for quite a long time so the dollar system became the center of how you do International Trade when you trade in Goods they're denominated in dollars when you buy the Imports you pay in dollars meaning you use accounts in US Dollars typically in the US banking system when the transaction is closed it's closed through the so-called Swift interbank system and so the US has had a what France long ago called an exorbitant privilege that it could print a lot of money because the rest of the world was holding dollars using dollars the dollar was the basis of the world economy that's changing now and it's changing for three basic reasons one is the share of the US in the world economy is diminishing so this means that the predominance of the US is bound to diminish the second is technologically settlements are going to occur in all sorts of ways other than through US Banks and so-called digital Curren currencies especially Central Bank digital currencies will mean other ways to make settlements we'll settle in renman B when we buy in China or settle in Rubles or settle in rupes when trade is with India and so forth so there will be multiple currencies and then the third part which is really a matter of a bad set of decisionmaking the US has militarized the dollar meaning that usually you think about money well you have it you can use it you can spend it but the United States has has come to say if we don't like you you don't necessarily have access to your money anymore if it's in our banks so the US froze the dollar Holdings of Russia the US has frozen the dollar Holdings of Venezuela the US froze the dollar Holdings of Afghanistan my advice to any government that's not getting along with the US government is be careful about your money because the US might come in and freeze your money and so countries are looking to hold their reserves in other ways now perfectly understandable and I think that this is another part of the move to a multi-currency International System from a dollar-based International System and you mentioned the possibility of a reserve currency being the REM andb and so there's other things that are not often reported about China One and I know that you've written about this as well is that they're stepping in where America policy of destabilizing and it's destructive China in some cas in the Middle East is stepping in as a peacemaker and it's less expensive if we can achieve peace well probably the most remarkable diplomatic achievement of recent years I would say is China brokering a peace agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran in the American idea those two countries were implacable foes they could never agree and for the United States Iran was the enemy and Saudi Arabia was the Ally but the whole idea of US foreign policy is you bring countries under your Authority as an ally of the United States like Saudi Arabia and you fight your enemies on the other side but China has a different idea which is that Saudi Arabia and Iran had no fundamental reasons for this dissension but they have plenty of reasons for cooperation for one thing they're both being hard hit by climate change they need to cooperate because the Water Crisis is is quite severe they're both hydrocarbon economies they need an energy transformation which is very profound and so the Chinese facilitated a Reconciliation between the two I'm very happy about that reconciliation by the way the fighting between the bitterness between Iran and Saudi Arabia divided Western Asia it contributed to a absolutely devastating war in Yemen in which the United States gave its military support that killed a lot of people and it destabilized a region that needs a lot of economic transformation and technological upgrading and change and so this agreement is really a big help for the whole region not only for the two countries involved and China gets a lot of credit in my view for having the wisdom to see that that was a conflict that could be solved not just exacerbated but the US approach was always to push out added even when the US made an agreement with Iran the the nuclear agreement called the jcpoa the US government walked away from it and then it maintained sanctions on Iran because the US is not really serious at making peace most of the time it's got an US versus them mentality and I find that very destructive and not in the US interest yes and I hope that China maintains this sense iple approach because it's dangerous what's happening now in Taiwan and just help us understand the situation like and that through line between you these proxy wars and what could happen in China well the situation in Taiwan is like the situation in Ukraine very explosive very dangerous and requires cool heads to avoid a conflict the fact of the matter is that actually all three governments let me say in the United States Taiwan and China have a policy that there's one China and whether it is the government in Taiwan or the government in Beijing they both say there's one China they disagree on what happened in 1949 and how China should be governed but they don't say there are two countries and the United States when it established diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China very clearly said that there is one China and has one China policy and that is how to keep peace and to make sure that this tension between Beijing and Taipei does not boil over to open conflict but the United States started to play games with this it started to form a military alliance with Taiwan in effect which is really coming into a military Alliance in the middle of one country and this is an extremely dangerous and imprudent thing to do and Biden starts talking about how we're going to defend Taiwan and the American politic politicians talk about how a war is coming it's all utterly Reckless irresponsible and what we should have is trying to reduce tensions diffuse tensions through negotiation through talk through peace building ideas rather than stoking the idea that some conflict is inevitable a conflict would be devastating of course first and foremost for Taiwan but actually for the whole world and so this needs to be aoid voided and we need cool heads and we shouldn't have American politicians saber rattling we should not have speaker naty Pelosi fly to Taiwan after the Chinese government has repeatedly said don't do that don't provoke don't stir up things don't make conflicts where there don't have to be conflicts but the United States leadership doesn't listen very well it's the same thing that when Putin said many many many times do not expand NATO to Ukraine the United States uh sorry we don't hear you that's you have nothing to say about that that's none of your business and then War comes this is very typical of American foreign policy because American foreign policy leaders are too arrogant and they don't listen yes and now 61 years since the Cuban Missile Crisis you do think we've learned our lesson and of course America would never accept uh military Alliance on its doorstep you know say coming down from Canada or something like that well of course when Cuba aligned with the Soviet Union in 1960 the US idea was invade that's it it didn't say Oh Mr Castro you could do what you want it's an open door if you want to be with Soviet Union that's fine with us no it said well we invade so that was 1961 in 1962 in the repercussions of that and in a really Reckless Gamble and Reckless action by the Soviet Union putting missiles into Cuba this whole conflict escalated to just the brink of nuclear war the Cuban Missile Crisis and then in 1963 both President Kennedy and Soviet chairman Nikita kushev said you know we have to pull back from the brink we have to live together we should not be coming to the edge of global nuclear war and they signed the partial nuclear testband treaty in the summer of 1963 proving that even at the height of the Cold War if the mindset is right you can make peace and that that's the mindset that we need now yes it seems like the neocon mindset never really went away you know just help us to understand because to my mind you know Ukraine is not indispensable for the US right it's just this idea of NATO enlargement but there's other forces behind the scenes that are you know profiting or pushing and I understand that zalinski you know secured $110 billion doar and US Aid and of course humanitarian Financial Military Support also like key Partnerships with you know the Black Rock Venture Capital firm Goldman Sachs to privatize Ukrainian assets so that would then deepen the country's debt so help us understand that a little the path forward how do we get out of this well when the debate raged initially in the 1990s about the wisdom or lack of wisdom of NATO enlargement which was contrary to what we had promised and was not wise a lobbying campaign took place in the United States led by the military industrial complex very crude that's how American politics Works bring out the big bucks so it was Ron and locky Barton and other big companies became the lobbyists and then you know American congressmen they salute money they salute campaign contributions they salute the lobbyists and so this is how American politics works there are always Financial interests that are also playing a role here so we have a mix of ideology confusion lack of historical sense arrogance and money all stirring the pot it has very little to do with the American people though the American people are not asked about anything the votes on money for Ukraine are generally almost secret because they're not really debated they're just measures stuck into some other piece of legislation so that you never have to debate the fact that we've spent more than 10010 billion dollar so far on Ukraine and nobody's really been asked about it nothing of the American people haven't really been asked so this is how American politics works now what should be done this war should end by the United States saying that NATO will not enlarge and Russia saying we take our troops home that's the core of this that was available in December 2021 it was available in March 2022 and it's still available now it doesn't solve many many other issues what happens to to the territories what happens to Crimea these are for negotiations but the basic idea is that the two superpowers back off and that the war stops and that we go to political Solutions not military Solutions and that should be our priorities and so finally as you think about the future uh the prospect of nuclear war the kind of world that we're leaving the Next Generation what would you like young people to know preserve and remember young people should lead the way to a safer Cooperative peaceful and environmentally sustainable and fair world this is the point we need to build the future we want not to feel trapped in this mindless cycle of violence and environmental destruction the problems that we Face are solvable and they are not driven by the needs of the people they're driven by greed or power seeking of Elites and we need to have a new generation say this is not working we want a world that is at peace that is shared in prosperity and that solves the environmental crisis which have become so deep and are neglected in part because we are wasting our time our lives our resources on these useless Wars no let me say it's the first book of Western political science is the better way to say it because Plato had written the Republic a generation earlier but it's the first book of political science it is paired with his ethics nicomaki and ethics as two joined volumes because for Aristotle ethics and politics were the same of course in 15 14 I think it is Mak II wrote a very different political science he wrote a handbook for the prince which was about how to maintain power and political science in the west began to be the science of maintaining or managing power not the science of producing the good and in fact makavelli was teaching the prince he was actually making a job application back to the medich because he had been dismissed from the medes wanting a job back that he was advising the medicis how to hold power in Florence later in The Next Century one of the most influential texts in Western cultural history was written by Thomas Hobbs the Leviathan and this was written in 1640 as Western science was taking shape and Hobs wanted a scientific theory of human beings but modeled as individual atoms that collide with each other because for Hobbs there was no longer a cultivation of virtue but rather each individual with insatiable desires so hobbs' model of human nature is that it is simply unbounded desire it can't be taught to moderate desire it can't be cultivated for virtue it is individualistic and it is insatiable and so hob said unless there is an overarching power people will kill each other and so we need a leviathan he said to stop human nature from committing nonstop violence it was a very pessimistic view of human nature but notice the main point is no longer was there any idea of developing virtue that was deemed to be impossible instead one needed institutions to reflect harsh reality this is the flip of philosophy it's no longer about cultivating the good it is about controlling the bad then interestingly and importantly this was Amplified at the beginning of the 18th century first by a very uh influential public intellectual Bernard mandaville who wrote an essay in London called the Fable of the bees and in the Fable of the bees the most aggressive bees win but they make the hive powerful and great and if you try to control the avarice or the vice or the aggression of the bees the hive actually dies so this was now a philosophy of Empire that power seeking was good because it would make the society powerful and wealthy and able to dominate over the other bees so it was taking Hobs and adding another element one beehive taking dominance over others and clearly this was a philosophy that appealed to the emerging British Empire then came Adam Smith six decades later in 1776 and he said said in agreement with Hobs and in agreement with mandaville that human nature is individualistic tastes are unbounded desire is a great motivator but Market forces will tame all of that because Market forces will force a kind of competition that will lead to a socially beneficent outcome the point is the Anglo-Saxon philosophy Broke Free of more than 1,800 years of Western tradition the Western tradition from Aristotle and Christianity was an tradition of the common good virtue and care for the poor by the with the rise of the British British Empire the philosophy came became the benefits of power as a philosophy and then even the idea that this would lead to quote the common good but there are two more steps that are important to State the poor became an enemy because now they were a drag on society so John Lock one of our our most esteemed philosophers wanted very harsh treatment for the poor so that they would not be burdens on society and then came malus Thomas malus wrote after Adam Smith one generation later in 1798 and he proposed something even darker which is that those hives those different societies are actually in competition for survival with each other because there are more people produced then can be supported and so life is a battle for survival and trying to help the poor is inevitably to fail because there will just be more poor people that was his iron law of population and it's that led in The Next Step Darwin took that idea brilliantly from a scientific point of view to understand natural selection but the later 19th century philosophers took that idea as a struggle across Nations and that now Nations or peoples or races were in the struggle for survival and this became known as social Darwinism and the idea was not only should there be no beneficence if you help your own poor you will weaken your Society compared to others and indeed you're in a struggle for survival and this gave rise to the worst crimes of History because Nazism actually is a philosophy which it was was based based on social darwinist pseudo science and this idea the German people will survive or the Slavic people will survive and so this is a war even to extermination now this kind of idea led to the worst cruelties but we are still in a mindset in the western world where it is competition and struggle that is the absolute underpinning of society when I studied economics I was taught about perfect competition I was never taught even one minute about perfect cooperation the idea doesn't even exist in economics it's not even developed in one paper that I know of because the idea of cooperation as a norm doesn't exist it happened this notion of letting greed motivate action perhaps did generate the spirit of innovation to some extent but the way that it was champ ioned and taught of course led to the worst excesses so the world became rich and those who were Rich became devoid of benevolence and compassion and a terrible writer in the United States who became quite popular a and Rand a kind of uh popular philosopher among young people and among many politicians wrote a famous essay about the virtues of selfishness so selfishness became the virtue actually that's the literal title of an essay it's unbelievable and she is championed by many still these novels are unbearable to read but they are part of our philosophy so I went on too long I know because the sign told me to stop five minutes ago but so that's not very benevolent of me but let me say the following I believe we've had a deviation from the right path in western civilization there are roots of Western culture that we can really use to find a path of virtue and politics that is ethical but the anglosaxon version deeply lost this tradition and there are many fascinating reasons for this but it was mainly the rise of power of the British Empire which was in many ways an extremely nasty Empire and the United States learned everything it knows from the British Empire because it aims to be the continuation of the British Empire after World War II and this is what needs to end a world that can return to the common ethical principles of virtue now let me just conclude by saying I am hopeful that this can actually happen and I think you at the table need to help lead that and we need to help explain these things and when President Xi Jinping launched last year the global civilizations initiative I think that this is actually an important opening that is very positive because China has said we should should go back to our roots of culture to find a way forward which I very much subscribe to and the GCI or Global civilizations initiative is an invitation across civilizational wisdom and I hosted a meeting in Athens last month co-hosted with the Academy of Athens a Aristotle confucious symposium on Ancient wisdom for modern challenges that brought together Chinese and Western philosophers we didn't have Buddha properly at the table except one very distinguished Buddhist thinker from Cambodia but we need more of that at the end of this meeting we agreed that we would have a second Symposium this time I hope it is the Aristotle Buddha confucious symposium mum in shuu uh in Shandong province in July I hope we could participate together in that uh we will be back for that many philosophers are interested in that I will be in shuu in next month uh for the Nishan uh Forum which is uh also a philosophical for but the Shan onong government has asked to host the follow-up meeting of the Aristotle Buddha confucious uh Symposium and I believe that this idea of east and west deep philosophical traditions finding the Deep Humanity that is common across them is extremely important and powerful and can really contribute to an understanding which right now doesn't exist and I think the failings of this understanding are overwhelmingly on the western side if I may say so because we are steeped in a philosophy of competition and even war and this mindset is taken as given but it is actually a recent phenomenon it is an imperial phenom phenon and it needs to be put aside so I I believe that this actually can be done can I have two more minutes because I want to talk about Net Zero by 2050 and first to say how much I admire what Dr Shaw proposed and I I is the book in English also or in Chinese in Chinese English okay we're going to have to get me an English translation somehow uh if we can but I'm very eager also to read your forthcoming paper let me add a couple of things that I think are Central but I think they're already exactly in your uh climate Club idea it is not possible to reach net zero one country at a time least of all for an island we need an interconnected Energy System region by region because if you are tapping renewable energy it's intermittent so it's sunny here or windy here this needs interconnection and East East Asia should be interconnected in a common grid there is a mainland China program called guide code cooperation organization that is the China State grid Engineers who are doing analytical work on interconnecting Regional grids for Africa for South America for North America for Europe and for Asia this is very important work Taiwan should be connected to the mainland in a power grid and the mainland should be connected with Mongolia and it should be connected with the Assan countries and with sub system it would [Music] be region the economic Powerhouse of the world rather than a Battleground because this region has everything if it works together and it could lose everything if it views the region as a Battleground I think everyone in this region can understand this the only one that does not is my country actually but the US needs to be told let us solve our problems we know how to discuss don't medal because you will make a mess this is actually the truth this is true about Japan it's of zero carbon energy and all the cooperation that go would the regional Cooper operation the regional structure andos and probably road maps that show the physical interconnectedness what technologies where as I've been saying opposite of a plan it's 80% fossil fuel what plan is that nothing please don't encourage them so show fastic or work I was Sony and I were just in Beijing with them a couple of days ago we'll come back for a meeting that they're hosting on September 26th uh for a worldwide meeting on energy interconnections I think that this is really uh uh absolutely at the core so I agree with everything that you said and I think that it's absolutely the way forward and in that polycentric world there's a concept which I find very useful it's a concept adopted by the European Union but a concept that actually started with the Roman Catholic church and that is the concept of subsidiarity which is that we need governance at all levels so we need need Global governance Regional governance National governance local governance you put each problem at the lowest level possible closest to the people where it can be solved but not below the level at which it can be solved so the power grid cannot be solved at the national level it must be solved at the regional level the targets for decar carbonization must be solved at the global level and so forth and the idea of subsidiarity is that we have this multiple levels we have Global governance we have a global government that can do certain things and not other things we have Regional government we have national government we have
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