Reuters - Katy Daigle Interviewing Jeffrey Sachs on Sustainable Development

It starts at 4:30. 

13:43 He has some advice about improving your international credit rating: get together with your neighbours and share your grid. See https://www.caf.com/ the web site of the Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean and this report: Third Annual CAF/ UNDP Conference on Governance for Development in Latin America and the Caribbean: Critical Natural Resources for Sustainable Development:

For the dialogue of the year 2025, the discussion of proposals to manage responsibly, transparently and efficiently the natural resources critical to sustainable development.

These resources, which include water, air, biodiversity, soil, energy, and minerals such as lithium, copper, and cobalt, play a fundamental role in the energy transition, electro-mobility, economic growth, and food security. Latin America and the Caribbean are rich in these resources, and therefore, they play an essential role in sustainable transitions. Demand for these critical resources is expected to triple by 2030. Previous experiences show that a successful transition requires governance models that center respect for human rights, community participation, and appropriate social and environmental safeguards. Only then will it be possible to turn this wealth into a decisive opportunity to transform and diversify economies, create green jobs, and foster sustainable trade and local development, avoiding past mistakes that amplify existing inequalities or negatively affect the choices, livelihoods, and local resources of future generations. 

At the beginning (7:07) he talks about a visit to a Chinese factory where they claim to be able to produce solar-electric power for 8 cents a watt. The cost per watt metric does not tell you much about scale or operating costs, however. A solar panel array that produces 10 KW may cost you 80,000 cents (US$800) to buy, but that tells you nothing about the costs of transporting the panels, or the costs of replacing them and disposing of the degraded panels once they become useless, neither does it tell you about the costs of batteries or power transmission.

The reason I am pointing this out is not to support Donald Trump, it's to bring people's attention to the lack of information we have about production, transport logistics and disposal that are fundamental to any notion of sustainable development. For some reason Sachs doesn't seem to think we have a problem with this basic lack of the necessary information to make rational sustainable development policies. By far the best place to start addressing energy policy is to look at the way we use the existing energy sources, which we need to produce the new sources, as well as the way we use the energy produced by those new sources: people may love cheap Chinese electric cars, but that doesn't mean that electric cars are useful for sustainable transport development. Of course the first place to reduce energy consumption is not to use it to wage war, so maybe that's what taking all his attention, but war is also a symptom of a lack of information. See Richard Wolff and Richard Murphy on Risk.

24:01 He does bring this up but he sounds a bit muddled to me. He says first that all you need is a spreadsheet (24:27), but then goes on (26:10) to talk about following a route on Google Maps! But then at 29:17 he talks in very vague terms about "something more holistic" which is a multi-disciplinary approach to designing development plans. The problem as I see it is that the data is constantly in flux: it depends on the state of manufacturing technology in different countries and transport costs and the knowledge people have of appropriate solutions, which depends on the local geography (and climate!) as well as technological know-how. There is another factor that needs to be taken into account, which is that simply by producing and publishing such a long-term plan you inevitably effect the investment of private capital, if anybody actually believes your projections have any likelihood of becoming realized. So the effect of producing long-term plans can itself become a cause of stalling technological and economic development. See Jenann Ismael on Monkeys, Bananas and the Laws of Physics. That discussion was what prompted me to make the decision to return to South America.

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