SUAREZ:  But we in the wealthy parts of the world can afford to guess wrong.  We can afford to drill ten wells hoping that one actually has something down there.  In these places where people are living closer to the margins, can they afford to guess wrong?   For instance, when they shift crops, what they grow, in order to respond to changes in the climate.  Or might they end up exposed to the downside risks of some of the decisions they make?

ROSENZWEIG:  Absolutely.  Our studies with our colleagues in the IPPC have shown that the farmers in developing countries are more vulnerable in many ways, not just from the climate but from lack of adaptive capacity and resilience as well.  And this vulnerability is very real and there are studies which also show that climate change increases the risk of hunger in developing countries so working on these issues with our colleagues is extremely important –  getting started right now because the climate change, as Steve was reporting from the IPPC, is happening already.  Climate change is not something in the future.  Climate change is happening now. 

SCHNEIDER:  I just wanted to follow up by saying to your point is this.  Here you have people if you don’t try it, they may not be able to produce the kinds of products that they need for their own improved standard of living without unacceptable climatic consequences.  They’ve got to try it.  But then there’s the risk that you pointed out.  Here’s where globalization, whether you love it or hate it, gives you a bit of a safety net because if you miss there are other places that can bring the food in, but in order for that too happen you have to have market purchasing power.  So the poor are disadvantaged right away because although there may be these services of food or other things available in the market if they don’t have the money, they can’t buy it so therefore taking the risk that you pointed out a minute ago is worse. 

What we need again are planetary bargains.  We need to have agreement that there will be a planetary scale, social safety net if you will.  Remember the rights of man  -- Eleanor Roosevelt – and before I think right to food is a basic human need and we in the rich countries as well as the very rapidly developing countries can easily afford to preserve that right so we don’t want to stifle experimentation and improve techniques in the developing world but we have to help out by saying if it doesn’t work, we’ll be the insurance company of last resort to help you which we do internally.  And I think that’s where viewing this as a system problem is important.  But to have a cooperative solution, you first have to have trust and trust occurs from communicating with people, not making it “them versus us” and that’s where food has had a very important role in the past – almost everybody agrees it’s a basic human right and finding ways to provide it and setting up those transfer safety nets is critical.  When people get to know each other they are much less likely to dislike each other.

SUAREZ:  Trust.  Is there also obligation?  Aren’t the countries that are driving this problem least likely to be the worst affected by it while the countries that have the smallest carbon footprint find themselves the most vulnerable?

SCHNEIDER:  That’s exactly right.  If you take a look over the last 100 years, and you ask who did it. 

This is something that’s not lost, by the way, on Brazil and Indonesia and China and India.  They remind us of this all the time.  The 20% countries, us, the rich countries, are responsible for 80% of the accumulated carbon dioxide and other such atmospheric pollutants in the last century.  So you’ve got 80% of the world that was responsible for only 20%.  So they say we won’t do anything until we catch up to you.  The trouble is if they do that and you multiply it times the fact that they have five times more people than we do, we end up quintupling CO2 and having a planetary sustainability train wreck. So you’ve got them saying they’re going to hold the sustainability agenda of the planet hostage to their notion of equity, and you’ve got us saying well we’re going to hold the planetary sustainability agenda hostage to our notion of consumption.  That is not a healthy world.  We need to make a deal where we help them develop but not the way we did it, and we also have to demonstrate something by taking some first steps, given how much we’ve contributed to the initial problem, and we have to put our cars on a diet – start being much more efficient in our energy systems and help them to literally leap frog over the industrial revolution and its early pollution and inappropriate technology.  It all is doable on a small fraction of the growth rate of the economy, but it takes political will and up until now it’s been hard to find that commodity.

SUAREZ:  Suzanne, you’ve traveled a lot.  Is there a sense in the places that are going to be heavily affected by what’s going on in the climate that, as Professor Schneider suggests, we can develop but not the way they did it.  That there are new paths to getting to the same place.  To being wealthy.  To being more secure. 

HUNT:   I think that in general the average person on the street is probably not thinking about technology leapfrogging.  They are thinking about getting an iPod and following the American model. So on the one hand that’s the kind of the picture on the street.  On the other hand, I think that the folks that are in the technology and energy and agricultural fields very much see the opportunity to skip a lot of the errors we’ve made with our kind of dirty development path and leapfrog to these cleaner production systems.

I think you are absolutely right, Steve.   We have to get the policy framework straight.  We have to get the incentives right so that these industries develop in a low-carbon way.  I think a piece of that is getting our research and development oriented so that instead of focusing on crops that produce just bigger tomatoes and sweeter tomatoes and a greater yield  we need to be looking at how we intercrop different varieties so that we have more resilient systems and developing crops like sweet sorghums is an example of a crop where you can use the grain to feed people; you can use the sugar in the stalk to make ethanol and then depending on how much residue you can take away from the land, you can burn some of the residue for electricity.  So focusing on research and development on developing much more resilient agricultural systems and crops. 
 
ROSENZWEIG:  Some of those systems are well developed in the tropical and developing countries, so I think it’s also very important to emphasize that this is a two-way street.  It’s not that developed countries have all the answers and we’re going to be imposing our answers and way of life, etc.  There is so much to learn.   For example, as you mentioned, the intercropping as a tropical agricultural system.  I think also in some of the social responses to climate extremes, some of our colleagues have taught us about social networks – when there’s a flood in a coastal area that the families on the higher ground take the families from the lower areas in and I think we can be developing those kinds of responses.

I’d also like to talk about another solution, talking about solutions, on the energy side.  Thinking about energy solutions on the food side, individual food choices.  When we think about starting to consider how much energy has gone into the food that we eat or put on our table.  Has the lettuce come from across the sea.  Has it been flown in?  Has it been shipped in by boat?  Is it coming from afar so we can eat strawberries, for example, in January?  Thinking about the energy cost of our food is one way that we can begin as individuals and families to track down our energy regarding our food.  Another challenge is to begin to think about has the food that we eat been how much of it is vegetarian based, which has lower energy than livestock based in terms of meat production.  So while there’s of course a whole range of systems that combine crops and livestock and they’ve always gone together but the livestock diet – an American diet with regular amounts of meat – produces much more – over 50% more carbon dioxide emissions than a vegetarian diet.  So, again, it’s not that we have to change right away but just becoming more thoughtful in our choices of all types of consumption, not only our cars but our food consumption as well.

SUAREZ:  Thoughtful is one thing but pricing mechanisms are something that you understand right away and, Professor Schneider, when you bit into a Chilean plum in February, I’m stunned that they are as cheap as they are, and I’m wondering why is a Chilean plum so cheap.  Shouldn’t it be so expensive that only a few people would make the choice and say well, I’ll just wait until there is a Michigan plum to eat. 

SCHNEIDER:   It’s the same story, Ray, as when you plug your appliance into the wall and the electricity is very cheap and that’s because you didn’t charge the power company for dumping all that pollution in the atmosphere.  Then in other words it’s as if somebody came to collect your garbage and you didn’t pay $4 a can, they collected it for free. So part of the reason it’s so cheap is that the amount of emissions associated not only with the production of that food but with the diesel ships that took them there, nobody charged them a tailpipe emission fee, so our prices are, in fact, too low relative to all the costs.  And this is, I’m afraid, a role for government.  Private sector has no incentive whatever to pay more and lose profit by imposing a fee on themselves for what they do to degrade to the climate, for example, or send kids to the hospital with asthma from smoke that comes out of uncontrolled smoke stacks.

That’s the right role for government and until we start charging in our prices all the costs including what the economists call externalities, those things external to the calculations to the companies, it’s very hard to have the incentives to get the prices right, so the low cost of your plum and the low cost of your gasoline or your electricity is in part related because we’ve rigged the free market to the status quo instead of charging the full rate.  The problem is that everybody has gotten used to that low price so transitioning takes a generation.  What we’ve done is delayed and delayed and delayed and now it’s starting to build up in significant climate change and it’s time to reverse that trend.

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