A DAY AT THE CLINTON GLOBAL INITIATIVE

Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran of The Economist chaired a climate-change panel at the Clinton Global Initiative conference in New York on Thursday. His reward, he writes here, was an overflowing gift bag—and a restored faith in going green ...

LET me come clean right up front: I like Bill Clinton. Since he has left office, he has devoted his considerable talent and energy to worthy causes like tackling climate change and preventing HIV/ AIDS. I also like the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), his glitzy annual conference on global issues and charitable causes. So much so that I agreed once again to chair a panel on energy and climate change at this week’s conference.

And yet, as I picked up my registration materials earlier this week at the Sheraton in midtown Manhattan, I felt uneasy, wondering if the noble aims that the CGI had started off with a few years ago were now being compromised. This was not because stars now regularly speak at an event once the province of experts and political leaders (Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were among the policy experts this year.) Nor is it because the carefully staged event is designed to recapture Bill Clinton’s glory years—though Bubba-Palooza it is rapidly becoming.

No, the red flags went up for me when I dug into that overflowing shwag bag. It includes, of course, Mr Clinton’s new book, “Giving”. But among the freebies was a Flip digital video camera, a solid silver key chain with the CGI logo and other things that seemed at first rather ostentatious. The biggest, most self-indulgent waste seemed to be the offer of a pair of custom-sized Timberland boots. Who suddenly needs boots?. And how on earth is that compatible with the conference’s green and giving goals, I wondered.

I set my doubts aside, along with the heavy bag, and headed to the panel on climate change that I was chairing. My panelists included Christine Loh, an environmental activist from Hong Kong, Lorraine Bolsinger, the top green official at GE, Harish Hande, an Indian solar energy pioneer, and Olafur Grimson, the president of Iceland. How on earth, I wondered, was I going to make a panel that diverse seem coherent to the very demanding CGI audience?

In the event, the speakers were succinct and sharp, and even said some striking things that made attending the event worthwhile. On one hand, Mr Grimson, the politico, argued that climate change will be solved not by slow-moving intergovernmental treaties but by fleet-footed grass roots action. He pointed to his own country’s bottom-up success in going from a fossil fuel economy a few decades ago to one that gets almost all its electricity from geothermal and hydro energy.

On the other hand, the representative of one of the biggest and most successful private sector firms, Ms Bolsinger, argued passionately for government involvement. Unless the rules of the road for clean energy were made clear, and the “externalities” of burning fossil fuels incorporated into market signals via some sort of carbon policy or price, she felt that companies will not move fast.

A similar surprise came from the Chinese and Indian panelists. One might think that an activist working on the margins of a repressive government regime to foment green unrest would denounce the authorities, while the businessman from the robust democracy would praise government policies in hopes of winning subsidies. In fact, precisely the opposite happened. Ms Loh praised the federal government’s commitment to tackle climate change, while Mr Hande encouraged seditious new business models (like micro-finance and micro-franchising) that bypass government altogether.

That refreshing candour and unexpected twist reminded me why the best conferences are so stimulating. However, as we all know, even that small handful of gabfests that really make us think anew about a subject rarely involve any follow through—so the momentum for change generated by the gathering dissipates. Ultimately, conferences end up merely as giant expense-account fiestas.

Just as my heart was sinking again, Bill Reilly, a former head of America’s Environmental Protection Agency, stood up. He took the stage before my panel could leave, and announced that he had several important awards to give. In rapid succession, he handed out certificates to inventive charities and businesspeople who have promised to do specific, measurable things by next year’s CGI—on penalty of not being invited back if they break their promise.

One non-governmental group in China is giving away enough super-green light bulbs to avoid the building of ten new coal plants. An innovative American charity is creating a new fund to invest in small, market-based clean energy start-up firms in the developing world. And so on and so on. Others at CGI committed hundreds of millions of dollars to such causes, big and small.

At the end of my panel, a shy man came up to me and waited till all the well-wishers and gasbags had left the area. He introduced himself as the head of the company that makes the digital video camera with the built-in USB connection that I guiltily salivated over in my gift bag. He said that he had been so moved by the generosity of those on stage with Mr Reilly that he wanted to get a million of his cameras into the hands of charities in the poor world so they could get onto You Tube very easily. He wanted to help, but as a newcomer to CGI did not know whom to talk to.

Rather churlishly, I demanded to know what on earth a person living on a dollar a day would want with a frivolous video-sharing website—especially as 1.6 billion of the poorest do not even have access to electricity. He responded that the cameras would be not for the indigent but for the many charities working to help them. By giving these brave souls the means of capturing in real time the fruits of their labors, and posting them effortlessly on the internet, he reckoned they could more easily secure donor financing. I walked him over to one of the organizers, who is now working with him to iron out details of his charitable proposal.

That example captures in a nutshell why the glitz and self-absorption is worth putting up with. Mr Clinton set out to motivate not just creative ideas but action. And it is pretty plain to me from first hand experience that the approach CGI takes—ranging from the cheesy certificates to the public acknowledgements to the big hug from big Bill himself—works so well that any evangelical preacher would be proud of it. This is one of the only conferences I know of where gabbing leads directly to giving.

But still, is it really necessary to ply the attendees with all that wasteful shwag? I look more closely at the kit and realize I have been too quick to judge. Philips has given out free super-efficient light bulbs (for those of us not lucky enough to live in China, I guess). The camera I was outraged about turns out to have that useful charitable purpose, as well as energy-saving AA batteries that can be recharged from any computer’s USB port. I overhear attendees saying they plan to melt down the silver bauble and give the proceeds to the poor. Even those hip Timberlands turn out to be made of recycled materials, and the firm promises to plant a tree in your name in China’s Horqin desert as part of a million-tree replanting scheme.

The best gift, though, was a membership to GreenDimes. This clever internet outfit aggregates the names (and misspellings) of those wishing to stop the torrential flow of junk mail clogging up our mail boxes and it claims to put a stop to that flow at the source. To sweeten the pot, the firm even plants trees on behalf of those who sign up for its service, which by definition prevents trees from being chopped. Far more than the chance to rub shoulders with Branjelina, this little company has restored my faith in going green. Bring on Bubba Palooza 2008!

(Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran is co-author of ZOOM: The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future", published this week, and shortlisted for the FT-Goldman Sachs business book of the year. Extracts from "ZOOM" appeared last week on More Intelligent Life—click here for the first, the second, and the third.)