Clinton's New Campaign
From Environmental News Service

BERKELEY, California, January 30, 2002 (ENS) - Globalization has created a
"world without walls," an "explosion of democracy and diversity within
democracy," former President Bill Clinton told an enthusiastic audience at
the University of California-Berkeley on Tuesday.

Fresh from a trip to the Middle East, Clinton said globalization, the
explosion of information technologies, and advances in science and
biotechnology make it imperative to avert war and terrorism by investing
now in health care, education and the environment, especially in poor
countries. A global community, he said, cannot thrive unless "those of us
who believe that our common humanity is more important than our interesting
differences can defeat, in the battle of ideas and in the facts of life,
those who believe that their differences define the truth and give them the
right to wipe out the lives of others." "The Afghan war costs about a
billion dollars a month, and that's about as inexpensive as a war gets
these days in a country like ours," Clinton said.

Warning that the United States now spends the smallest amount of any
"advanced country" on foreign aid, Clinton then used that billion dollar
figure as a benchmark to advocate increased spending on the prevention of
environmental degradation, AIDS, poverty, and illiteracy. "Brazil proved
with medicine and prevention they could cut the death rate from AIDS in
half in three years. Uganda proved with prevention alone, they could cut
the death rate in half in five years. There are now 40 million people with
AIDS and there will be 100 million in 2005," Clinton said. "If you have 100
million taken, some countries are going to fail, and you'll have a lot more
young people willing to be terrorists or mercenaries in tribal wars,
because, what the heck, they're going to die anyway," Clinton warned.

We will spend a lot more money cleaning up these messes than we would spend
if we invested now in the $10 billion health fund UN Secretary General Kofi
Annan is advancing, Clinton said. "And you can make the same argument with
the environment. You know we've got terrible problems," he said. "The ocean
is deteriorating that generates most of our oxygen. One in four people
don't have access to clean water." "Climate change is real," Clinton
warned. "If for the next 50 years the Earth's climate warms at the rate of
the last 10, we'll lose 50 feet of Manhattan Island, we'll lost the Florida
Everglades, island nations in the Pacific will be flooded." "That's the
most dramatic set of examples, but the most important is that agricultural
production will be disrupted all over the world, and millions upon millions
of people will be turned into food refugees, breeding more terrorists, and
anger."

Clinton said he believes money can be made from the substitution of
renewable energy technologies for the burning of fossil fuels, such as oil
and gas, that contributes to climate change. "I just got back from the
Middle East and I told them they ought to forget about becoming the oil
center of the world," he said. "They ought to become the energy center and
double the capacity of solar technology and conservation technologies and
put them in every warm place in the world." While endorsing the need of
the United States to spend money on defense and homeland security, Clinton
said, "We could do America's fair share of economic empowerment of poor
people, putting all the poor kids in the world in school, funding the
Secretary General's health efforts, and accelerating the effort to turn
around climate change, we can do all that and pay our fair share for more
or less what we would spend in a year in Afghanistan in a conflict. And I
can only tell you it is a lot cheaper than going to war," he said to
lengthy applause.

Clinton was interviewed onstage immediately after his speech by Journalism
Dean Orville Schell who asked, "If globalization succeeds, is it possible
that the resources of the world, the environment, could actually sustain
the level of development it would really take to lift all boats, not just
yachts?" "I do, but only if we sever the link between greenhouse gas
emissions and economic growth," Clinton replied, repeating a frequent theme
of his second term in office. "The sustainable development is still a
phrase that means next to nothing to most people. Most people on a
university campus know what it means, and it sounds like a pleasant enough
concept, but it might as well be in Aramaic to most people." "This assault
on the Kyoto Protocol has not just been on the practical details of
whether, since the Republican Congress when I was President wouldn't adopt
any of the initiatives I had for meeting the Kyoto goals, [they] can be
met. There are really people who basically believe first, that you can't
really get rich, stay rich or get richer unless you put more greenhouse
gases in the atmosphere. And therefore they have to believe that global
warming is a fraud. Otherwise, they'd face the Hobson's choice of being
poor or being toast." "So, yes, I think we can lift the poor to a decent
standard of living without burning up the planet," Clinton said, "but only
if the people who are in the position to make the decisions honest to
goodness believe that we can do it." "I remember when the Chinese
environment minister came up to me after me after my environmental meeting
event in China on the way down to Guilin and thanked me for doing this
because he said the people in his own government just didn't believe him
when he kept telling them they could meet the challenge of global warming
and still sustain China's growth targets." "For a lot of you in this
room," Clinton said, "this debate was over a long time ago. For a lot of
the world, this debate is just beginning." "We need to spend more effort to
help countries solve their own problems and develop basic capacities,
freedom, openness, human rights, and actual capacity to govern. I spend a
fair amount of time on that now," Clinton said, "and I hope to be able to
do more in the years ahead."