Columbia economist and anti-poverty activist Jeffrey Sachs returns to Harvard this afternoonfor a talk on the future of energy and climate change. Here’s how the event is being billed:
His thesis states that new transnational networks of key actors – scientists, engineers, businesses, and civic leaders – must take the lead from governments and diplomats. He will explain how this can be done, with reference to past cases of large-scale systems change.
Sachs is a big ideas guy so he has big admirers and big detractors. In 2001, as Sachs turned his attention to health care, a Globe profile noted that his big ideas didn’t work out too well for the Russian economy.
More to the point of today’s talk, here a link to a 2007 piece on climate change Sachs wrote for Nature.
Complex as this agenda will be, mitigating greenhouse gas emissions will be only part of the story. Climate change is already upon us and will intensify considerably even if we succeed in stabilizing and then reducing global emissions in the coming decades. Sensible policies must therefore not only mitigate climate change, but adapt to it as well, learning as best as possible how to live with the inevitable increases of water stress, crop failures, extreme storms, and other shocks that are on the way. The challenge of adaptation requires a separate and thorough strategy, and the global work on that has hardly begun.
A 2007 Vanity Fair profile looks at the AIDS work and barely mentions climate change. But, it does describe Sachs’ reputation as a love him/hate him, or both, kind of guy.
According to Sachs, his job is to be “a pest.” Bono, who wrote the foreword to Sachs’s best-selling book, The End of Poverty, makes the same point, more or less poetically: “He’s an irritant,” Bono told me, paying Sachs a compliment. “He’s the squeaky wheel that roars.”
Mark Malloch Brown, who was deputy secretary-general of the United Nations under Kofi Annan, described Sachs to me as “this magnificent battering ram.” In unadorned English he added, not without respect, “He’s a bully. For the record, he’s a bully.”
Never mind. To Sachs, the end of poverty justifies the means. By hook or by crook, relentlessly, he has done more than anyone else to move the issue of global poverty into the mainstream—to force the developed world to consider his utopian thesis: with enough focus, enough determination, and, especially, enough money, extreme poverty can finally be eradicated.
Once, when I asked what kept him going at this frenzied pace, he snapped back, “If you
haven’t noticed, people are dying. It’s an emergency.”
The talk begins at 5 pm at the Harvard Science Center at One Oxford St.