The Munk Debates Read online

  DAMBISA MOYO: I think I have already said most of what I wanted to say, but I do want to add a couple of things. It has been sixty years and a trillion dollars of aid. Let’s not forget that. Peter Bauer, to whom my book is dedicated, was a Hungarian-born economist who was very critical of the aid system in the 1950s and 1960s. He was ostracized and pilloried and, honestly, if I had lived at that time as a policy-maker, I might have been one of the people throwing tomatoes at him. He came up with a brilliant quote, which I’ll paraphrase here, that aid money is money taken from the poor in rich countries and sent to the rich in poor countries. I’m sad to say today that amongst a whole list of problems that Peter Bauer had anticipated, he was right. He died in 2002, and there was some semblance of him coming back into the fold, but he was essentially ignored.

  There are two choices. You can side with Paul Collier and Stephen Lewis, who advocate the continuation of state models of aid, a continuation of taking money from developed nations and passing it along to the developing world. It is, by the way, no surprise that Hernando and I come from the emerging countries — the very places that you are trying to help — and we are telling you we don’t want the money. On the other hand, you can vote for innovation, for a new approach — though it isn’t really a new approach in the sense it is untried and untested. It is an approach that we know works. We know how to create jobs, we know how to put a man on the moon, we know how to get Africa out of the quagmire that it is currently in.

  PAUL COLLIER: What would actually happen if the international community was not involved with Africa? We would be discussing China’s involvement during this debate. I don’t want to be too negative; China is doing some good things. But the idea that China would discipline African governments to provide property rights and good governance is hard to digest. Do you remember three or four years ago, the vice-president of China toured Africa and his calling card message was, “We don’t ask any questions.” What did he mean by that? In other words, an unrestrained China, without any international competition, would be a pretty dangerous thing. It would leave Africa in the cul-de-sac. Africa would go back to the model of resource extraction without benefit. Now, how do we get out of the cul-de-sac? And let’s recognize that a cul-de-sac is what a lot of these countries are in. Dambisa says that we’ve had sixty years of aid and that it has been a failure, but actually, over those sixty years, aid has had periods of amazing success.

  If we go back sixty years, which is when aid was invented, we see that it was invented in North America in order to restore my own region, Europe. Europe in the late 1940s was a fragile mess, both politically and economically. It was a ruin. And North America knew that it had to get serious, which is the difference between then and now. North America got serious by combining aid with intelligent trade policies, security policies, and efforts at governance. That worked. And then there was a period when aid, instead of being used to reconstruct societies, was used to buy Europe onto our side instead of the Soviet Union’s side. Right through until the early 1990s, aid was diverted into a different agenda. Of course, it didn’t develop Africa. It wasn’t meant to. It was meant to buy the support of dictators. It doesn’t have to be like that.

  In a democracy, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD] countries that provide aid are all democracies, the quality of the policies depends on the citizens. In the past, most citizens from countries in the OECD have not been sufficiently engaged or sufficiently up to speed, so the aid policies have been put in place by politicians and have been gesture politics. It doesn’t have to be like that. Citizens must get up to speed. That’s the virtue of debates like this. Once you are informed, once there’s a critical mass of informed citizens in Canada, in America, and in Europe, aid and the other array of development policies can become serious. We can repeat the success of sixty years ago when North America recovered Europe.

  HERNANDO DE SOTO: We all care about development, each in our different way. I’m also glad that we have focused on Africa, having Dambisa Moyo, a brilliant author, as my debating mate. Africa is the continent that needs us the most. And it is good that we focused on it. That is why I’ll point out again that the idea of the rule of law starts with property. You can’t establish rule of law if you don’t know who is where. It’s as simple as that.

  Because of the recession, we’ve lost focus on the fact that there is a food shortage in the world. And the food shortage is due to the fact that there are 1.7 billion hectares in the world that are being cultivated and that feed the whole globe. And it is obviously not enough. We have done the green revolution. We have done that, and we need more land. And there’s 2.7 billion hectares left in the world, most of which are in Africa.

  Unless you start giving indigenous Africans titles to their property, it will be taken over by the Chinese and by large corporations. Then you’ll understand why it is so important to give property rights. The potential property owners may not have capital, but if they are given ownership, whoever is coming in to invest will say, “Well, you’ve got the land, but you can’t do much with it unless I build a road. You can’t do much unless I move the stones away. You can’t do much unless I arrange the irrigation systems. I’ll tell you what. I’ll give you 50 percent.” That’s how capital begins. If you don’t do that, Africa is up for grabs.

  The next thing that I think is important to remember in all of this is that Canada is a great country because your two heads of Janus, facing opposite directions inside the country, have come to terms with each other. There are Canadians who believe in property rights and individual rights and growth, and in conquering the world, and in creating treasure and enterprise. And there are Canadians on the other side who like community, who want social harmony, who want to take care of the poor, who want to take care of women’s rights, who want to take care of minorities. And the advantage in Canada is that your political system brings the two heads of Janus together. We have to find a way of structuring aid and communicating with developing countries in a coherent manner, instead of asking them to be victims of your right, through capitalist exploitation, or victims of your left, through fantasy projects.

  And the important thing to understand with respect to indigenous people is that we will one day look left and right in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. That’s the twenty-first century way to look at politics. But we’re not there yet. Canada’s indigenous people are not there. They are frozen in the 1876 Indian Act. The issue, when you’re living in the nineteenth century, isn’t left or right. It’s up or down. Once you look at it that way, you can start talking.

  STEPHEN LEWIS: I have three points to make, if I may. Let’s provide a moment’s perspective. I don’t know where the trillion dollars comes from. I’ve never seen any precise sourcing —

  DAMBISA MOYO: From the World Bank.

  STEPHEN LEWIS: But this year, 35 billion dollars is going to Africa by way of foreign aid. You saw what we’re paying for the General Motors bailout. It will be over 60 billion dollars. You saw what the Pentagon spends in a year. It’s over 600 billion dollars. We now have 11.5 trillion dollars internationally devoted to bailouts and subsidies. What we’re doing with Africa by way of aid, in response to requests, is so picayune and marginal that it shouldn’t be overly inflated. It is an effort being made as genuinely as possible to provide the transition to fully vibrant and mixed economies. Number two, it’s important and good to invite private capital in, but private capital tends to move to the one place where there is a predictable return, and that’s in the natural resource sector. As a result China is developing oil in Sudan, and a number of private companies are in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is having a war of the most insensate atrocity, which is rooted in the resource base. And it’s important to recognize that private capital doesn’t always go where you want it to go.

  Yes, I’m preoccupied with sexual violence. It drives me crazy that a quarter of a million women have been raped in the Congo over the last several
years, and it’s running at a level of over a thousand a month in the Kivu alone — and it is all because of resources, and the resources are being developed by the private sector. It is terribly important to recognize that when one has these investments they don’t always work quite as you would wish them to work. Witness Angola, as my colleague gave evidence for.

  And the final point I want to make, which hasn’t been introduced into this debate at all, is triggered by Hernando’s reference to food. Two thousand of the world’s most eminent scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] have come to the conclusion that the consequences of global warming — by the year 2030 —will be felt most forcefully in southern Africa. In other words, the consequences of global warming will impact all of the countries which are now consumed with the struggle against poverty and disease. Sometimes I think it’s like some kind of conspiratorial network. But the fact of the matter is, if the panel is right — and so far we have underestimated the impact of climate change in the world — there will be more drought. There will be more famine. There will be more hunger. There will be an absence of household food and security. It is terribly important that the world need not be so self-centred.

  And aid is just a vehicle to make humane and economically vibrant societies possible. It is not a mystery. It just works. It has been abused, but that’s because of the way it was given. It need not be, and that’s what we’re arguing for.

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  SUMMARY: By evening’s end, both sides had made such impassioned pleas that the audience vote barely changed. The pre-debate vote was 39 percent in favour of the resolution and 61 percent against. Post-debate the vote was 41 percent in favour and 59 percent against.

  CLIMATE CHANGE

  Be it resolved climate change is mankind’s defining crisis and demands a commensurate response.

  * * *

  Pro: Elizabeth May and George Monbiot

  Con: Lord Nigel Lawson and Bjørn Lomborg

  December 1, 2009

  CLIMATE CHANGE

  INTRODUCTION: The Munk Debates tackled the highly charged matter of climate change shortly before the United Nations’ historic Copenhagen Summit, which was held December 7–18, 2009. The debate also followed hard on the scandal involving the release of over 300 leaked emails and documents at the Climatic Research Unit and the University of East Anglia, which urged climate scientists to present a united front on global warming.

  A holiday gift to attendees was the warmth provided by all the sparks flying as Canada’s Elizabeth May, Leader of the Green Party, environmental lawyer, and activist; Sweden’s Bjørn Lomborg, an environmentalist, adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School, and organizer of the Copenhagen Consensus Center; the U.K.’s Lord Nigel Lawson, a past Chancellor of the Exchequer and President of the British Institute of Energy Economics; and George Monbiot, an author and journalist, tackled the following resolution: Be it resolved climate change is mankind’s defining crisis and commands a commensurate response.

  Arguing the pro side were May and Monbiot, versus Lawson and Lomborg on the con side. While all the debaters agreed that CO2 levels in the atmosphere were climbing steadily higher, bringing with them some challenges, differences arose when it came to how great a problem this was and whether or not some of the proposed cures were likely to cause more difficulties than they solved.

  Lomborg and Lawson proposed that decarbonizing economies would make already low standards of living sink lower in the developing world. May and Monbiot saw a connection between virtually every problem faced in the developing world — famine, tribal wars, AIDS — and climate change. Monbiot, for example, suggested that AIDS was spread in Africa when drought brought about by climate change forced men to move from village to village. Lomborg noted that perhaps the use of condoms could help curb the spread of disease more efficiently and with fewer economic side effects than decarbonizing entire markets. This caused some laughter from the crowd but angered Elizabeth May.

  * * *

  LORD NIGEL LAWSON: Let me start by saying that I congratulate Peter and Melanie Munk and their foundation on holding this debate. Not least because this important issue — and I think we’re all agreed on that — is seldom properly debated.

  Believers in what to all intents and purposes has become a new secular religion — starting with former U.S. vice-president Al Gore, who refuses to debate — constantly insist that dissent should be neither tolerated nor heard. And I hope that most of you here find that as disquieting as I do.

  This debate is not about whether we care about the environment or not. We all care about the environment, and so we certainly should. No, this debate is about one very specific issue, which is whether to require policy decisions which I believe, if implemented, would be highly damaging. I interpret the motion as contending that prospective global warming is the most pressing issue facing humanity today, and that to avert it the world must decarbonize its economies in short order.

  Now, the vast majority of climate scientists themselves don’t believe the first part of this proposition. The most thorough survey of hundreds of accredited mainstream climate scientists was conducted a couple of years ago by Professor Hans von Storch of the Meteorological Institute of the University of Hamburg. And it asked a considerable number of questions, one of which is highly relevant to our debate. And it was, “What is the most pressing issue facing humanity today?” How many of the climate scientists do you think answered either “climate change” or “global warming”? Just 8 percent gave that answer. Only 8 percent thought that climate change or global warming was the biggest issue facing humanity today. And when you look into the issue, that derisory figure becomes thoroughly understandable.

  As most of you know, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] is the body that the world’s governments principally rely upon for their analyses. And in its most recent report, the IPCC calculated the likely cost of climate change based on elaborate computer models. Incidentally, those models projected a marked acceleration of global warming during this century following the very modest recorded warming in the last quarter of the twentieth century, and in fact, so far this century, there has been no further recorded global warming.

  Moreover, the single most important source for the IPCC’s global temperature series is the small group of scientists at the Climatic Research Unit [CRU] in the U.K.2 Recent leaked emails have revealed serious incompetence and apparent skullduggery there, and I have called for a full and thorough inquiry.

  I would like to take this moment to salute George Monbiot, whose views I don’t share, but whom I recognize as a man of integrity, who has gone even further and publicly demanded the resignation of the head of the CRU.

  To return to the IPCC report, let us, to be on the safe side, take the upper end of the IPCC’s projected temperature range for the year 2100 — the upper end of its estimate of the cost of that warming, and the gloomiest of its six economic scenarios. And let us further assume that the relative cost of this warming for the developing world will be twice that for the world as a whole.

  It’s not difficult to calculate, as I do in my book [An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming] — and that calculation has never been questioned — what this would mean for living standards in the developing world. The answer is this: in a hundred years’ time, average living standards in the developing world, instead of being nine and a half times as high as they are today, would be only eight and a half times as high as they are today. So is this man’s defining crisis, the most pressing issue facing humanity today? If only.

  As for the second part of the motion, the so-called commensurate response of drastically decarbonizing the global economy, it can readily be shown that the cost of doing this would far exceed any benefits it could conceivably bring. Moreover — and this matters a great deal — there is an even more important moral dimension. The reason we use carbon-based energy is simply that it is far and away the cheapest large-scale source
of energy, and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.

  Switching to much more expensive energy may be acceptable to us in the developed world, but in the developing world there are still tens if not hundreds of millions of people suffering from desperate poverty, and from the consequences of that poverty in the shape of malnutrition, preventable disease, and premature death.

  So for the developing world, the overriding priority has to be the fastest feasible rate of economic growth, which, among other things, means relying on the cheapest available source of energy, which is carbon-based energy. To deny them this would be positively obscene. Which is why, of course, there will be no Kyoto-style agreement at the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.

  But there still remains the ugly spectre of protectionism. The cap and trade bill, the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 [ACES] that is currently stalled in the U.S. Congress, contains a provision to impose punitive tariffs on imports from countries like India and China, which are not prepared to forswear cheap energy. And France has urged the European Union to follow suit. At a time then when we are trying to emerge from the worst world recession since the 1930s, that really is all we need. This policy is madness.

  So, in conclusion, what then? Throughout the millennia that we’ve been around, mankind has successfully adapted to the changing climate that nature has provided, just as we adapt today to the very different climates that exist in different parts of the world. And, aided by more and more advanced technology than we’ve ever had at our disposal, that is what we should continue to do. The motion before us is scientifically unfounded, economically damaging, and profoundly immoral. And that is why I invite you to reject it.