Filling it in

So it is Saturday afternoon between sessions so I thought I would add and fill in from last night. Though a few quick things from today already. Had a major session on water this morning, but while it was interesting...no big surprises. More interesting were two conversations. The first was with Bob Shiller the Yale economist who was right on the sub prime crisis and housing markets which I underestimated. He supported the view that this recession could be long. He drew the analogy to japan in the nineties. If we manage it wrong it could last a long time indeed. he also agreed with the comment that this would lead to a power shift away from the US toward the capital rich countries. He also had noticed how irrelevant the US had become.

I also had a great conversation with Lisa Randall the Harvard physicist and author of Warpped Passages... a marvelous book on the frontiers of physics. She agreed with the hypothesis that we need a scientific revolution to understand such phenomena as dark energy or the breakdown of quantum gravity, but that she was unsure of if and when it would actually happen. The Large Hadron Collider could be the trigger.


So back to yesterday....
The Young leaders yesterday really focused on the enabling power of the new communications technology to transform governance in many ways from the conduct of politics, to the structure of governance to the delivery of public service. They were fairly sure that as these new technologies has already transformed many aspects of life the next arena would be governance.

At the lunch on the digital transformation of media Chad Hurley of You Tube and most of the others argued that the transformation would continue to accelerated. The big push back came from the head of Liberty Media and the publisher of the New York Review of Books...nut surprisingly.

The discussion of Bill Gates compassionate capitalism speech went on today...after a press cocnfernece he held with Bono and Michael Dell while extolling the RED campaign. No one I heard had a kind word for Bill. he apparently will have to do a lot of penance for tough business practices before anyone takes his conversion and epiphany seriously.

The Clean Energy session was really great because we had very knowledgeable people and little ideology as well a real diversity of arenas. Perhaps the best moment was Craig Venter's move from physics to biology. he was quite lucid, precise and convincing of the potential of the biologically driven models. In the end the opinions were quite positive about being able to implement a variety of new technologies fairly quickly...a very upbeat session.

The nuclear power and climate change dinner was fascinating. Gerd leipold from Greenpeace set the stage with why nukes weren't the answer, responded to by Lady Barbara Judge the head of the UK Atomic Energy Authority and her Minister John Hutton on how and hwy Birtain had moved toward nukes as a response to climate change. Jim Rogers of Duke laid out the decarbonization vision, which was aggressively challenged by Ed Markey in a truly impassioned speech. Shirley Jackson, President Of RPI and Clinton's head of the Nuclear Regualtory Commission took a rational and analytic view of why Markey was wrong. In this she was supported by her counterpart from India and Japan. At the end of the evening Gerd made a final set of comments that very effectively challenged whether nukes could actually make any meaning full contribution to dealing with climate change. A great conversation but I am not sure we changed any minds.

At the Google party, the conversation with Peter Gabriel focused on his family and the work of the elders, as well as the new album he hopes to release soon and the new music he is writing for a new PIXAR film. The Elders continues to develop well and it is the main project he is focusing on. Carl Bildt agreed to help coordinate with the the right political and military forces to enable them to safely intervene in Somalia...which has become even worse than Darfur so it was a productive discussion even if we had to cope with very loud music in the background. As we left we had a brief hello with Bono who was on his way in.