According to Google Maps, its a 7-8 hour drive from Davos to Paris and depending on the route its about 500 Miles or 800 Kilometers. There also some tolls to pay along the way.
Davos and Climate Change
Randall Krantz, a former student and friend was in Davos for the World Economic Forum a couple of weeks ago and while I was watching videos of the sessions on the Middle East at home, he was talking to people about climate change in Switzerland. Randall used to manage the climate issue at the Forum and said that “being on the other side added an element of adventure”.
Randall’s view is that Davos was quite upbeat on environment and sustainability issues and that the “vibe” as he calls it, started in New York last September, was re-enforced in Lima where some progress was made on breaking the deadlock between developed and developing countries and continued in Davos where the issue was “the biggest non-business issue on the agenda”.
Al Gore‘s made a presentation in which he linked rising temperatures to horrific storms, such as Typhoon Haiyan and Hurricane Sandy, flooding events around the world and desertification.
While Vice President Gore did not go too deeply into the science, the potential cause and effect between the warmer temperatures we are experiencing and extreme weather does have some scientific support as discussed in a NOAA report published by the American Meteorological Society which found that man made climate change was a contributing factor to approximately half of the 2012 extreme weather events that they studied.
The Road to Paris
As discussed in a post a few weeks ago, the Climate conference in Paris in December will have an enormous impact on the world we live and the business environment regardless of the outcome.
At the end of the speech, Gore brought Pharrelll Williams, a singer and Kevin Wall, a producer on stage to explain Live Earth 2015. Since 2007 these guys have been organizing concerts to raise awareness of climate change and have a very ambitious plan to hold concerts all over the world on June 18th in order to mobilize citizens around the world to push their governments to make a meaningful agreement in Paris.
Christine Lagarde, the Director of the International Monetary Fund compared the upcoming talks in Paris to the historic meeting in 1944 in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire when John Meynard Keynes and 730 other representatives of 44 countries met to design the current international financial system. Ms. Lagarde credits the framework for giving the world 70 years of international prosperity and growth in a speech to the BBC back in February last year.
Keynes was also present in Paris in 1914 abut left in frustration as he was largely ignored and went on to write The Economic Consequences of The Peace in 1919 which correctly predicted Germany’s subsequent collapse.
Diplomacy in the Public Eye
While there are many differences between the Paris Peace talks in 1919 and the Bretton Woods accords in 1944, one that stands out is the role of the press and the general public. In Paris, discussions between the leaders of France, England, The U.S., Japan, and Italy (when it participated) were held behind closed doors but there were a constant stream of news reports coming form official and non official sources. In fact, according to Margaret Macmillan, the political situation in the different leaders countries largely limited their room for action in Paris and the press played an enormous role in shaping those situations for good and ill.
The press also followed the delegates to New Hampshire and Keynes was reportedly touted by them but my guess is that a meeting of bankers and Finance Ministers did not strike the public’s imagination during the last months of the war.
Paris 2015 will be very much in the public eye and you can count on Live Earth and virtually every conservationist and activist organization to do its best to bring public opinion to bear on the political and diplomatic debate. The issue is how will delegates manage to get at the real issues at hand with so much pressure, attention and media coverage?
The road from the positive “vibe” in Davos to an agreement in Paris will be long and hard and I suspect the developed countries will be expected to pay some tolls along the way. Will public opinion be strong enough to get them to do it?
i like how al gore is bringing in prominent people in his fight for environmental sustainability.