But I digress…

Panelists: Larry Brilliant, Chris Fields (IPCC), Meena Palaniappan (Pacific Institute), Bill Collins (LBNL), Dan Kammen (Goldman School of Public Policy).

Running the panel: Vijay Vaitheeswaran (The Economist):

[These are my unedited rough notes which I took during the panel.
I have lots to thoughts coming from what I've heard, but for now I'll just post the notes.]

VJ: Mahhatma Ghandi said: "How many planets" (would it take to "feed" India if it follows the road the British Empire took – eating up half of the world's resources). Relevant today re. China and the uplifting of the bottom billion.

Larry Brilliant: Swine flu: Death rate 0.6 / 10K . Currently called "mild pandemic", Will infect 3.5B people, killing 210K people. But death rate may be significantly higher, esp. in 3^rd world. This is the world's first "mild pandemic", as all diseases will probably be global now, i.e. pandemic, but death currently not in the tens of millions.

Chris Field: We are at a threshold. Within a generation problems will become critical. Climate has huge momentum, consequences of past action not fully expressed, consequences of current actions will last a generation. If we wait until we have 100% scientific clarity, it'll be 100% too late. People most responsible for actions (what has happened and what will happen) are those lease affected by the warming. People lease responsible for the past & future are those who will be most affected by it.

VJ: IPCC report give more and more verifications with each edition

VJ: Inaction is also a choice.

Palaniappan: Great rivers (collorado, nile, yellow) no longer reach the sea. Huge inefficiency in 3^rd world water (50% lost from utility "main" to tap).  Many opportunities there. Developed country example: gray water was illegal in CA until a week ago. In CO rain-water catchment is illegal.

Bill Collins: Scientists should communicate more with the public, and not haul up in the ivory tower. Human-made climate change is a scientific fact. Example: Habitability zones are shifting faster than man & animal can move. Our brains are wired to deal with immediate threats of the African savanna. But now we need to deal with a long-term problem. Current models do not agree whether rainfall will increase or decrease in the tropics, and that's 2.5B people. Current model & policy assume a continuous gentle rate of change. If Greenland melts or a huge piece of Antarctica breaks of, we're in a dire crisis. And models don't cover this. We need to stop treating this as a science problem. We need to communicate and say "this is what science predicts will happen".

Dan Kammen: Climate change is about the weakest among us. Climate change is relatively a small problem, since we have solutions. But we have bigger problems: energy. It's a big problem since our society is build around the high energy density of oil (and coal). And greed is preventing us from re-engineering society. Scientists don't like econ 101. Money the US spends every year on importing oil is equivalent to the whole TARP (financial incentive package). This is money which can uplift the entire society. $800B a year. That's more money than is needed to solve climate and water and …  . We need to find every possible way to incentivize an alternative to fossil fuel. Including, but not limited to cost on carbon. In the new US climate bill: homeowners can green-up their homes and get incentives to do so. Need to find ways to make people, companies, etc invest in themselves instead of throwing money down the oil hole.

All: decentralized solutions.  We usually go with supply-side solutions and large-scale projects. Rarely thinking of bottom-up local small-scale approaches.

Water: rain catchment, leaky pipes.

Larry Brilliant: The value to society of vaccination is 10x the cost of it in the individual. How do we make this explicit?

VJ: Markets are great when it comes to efficiency, but they are useless when it comes to morality.  Government should level playing field when it comes to energy (full cost of pollution, remove subsidies to oil/coal industries). Indonesia did not share Bird Flu (H5N1) info since then Western companies would create vaccines and IP around them and will not sell back to Indonesia at a price they can afford. Withholding the info is the only leverage they have.

Larry B: N1H1 (Pig Flu) is a closely related to the flu of 1918. Re N5H1: as a result of Indonesia's pressure, the world is changing it's behavior, setting up a consortium of buying vaccines for the third world.

Bill C: Re VJ's "hot spot approach" – put a lot of money in relatively few places". E.g. Amazon rainforest. The place were we have trouble watching and tracking climate change in not the frozen places, but the warm parts.

Larry B: Mosquitoes can now live up at 6000ft due to climate change. We will have malaria in Hollywood within 5 years.

Chris Field: We need much lower discount rates to deal with strategic long-term solutions (i.e. so it makes more economic sense to make very long-term goals).

VJ: Copenhagen Consensus limitation is the question: $50B as charity to 3^rd world. But this is the wrong question, since $50B will not touch the $7T energy/climate issue.

Dan Kammen : "Politicians are only really good at one thing: getting elected"

Dan K: We don't assign value to public health, biodiversity, climate change, etc.  The capitalist system does not assign value to this.

Meena: Use cell phone to report who has water, who's sewage is overflowing. Use technology for local activism.

Key to solve problems: Releasing the human capital + change in incentive system

Larry B: We need a movement to deal with the global challenges. Thomas Friedman: this is a party, not a movement. A movement requires sacrifice.

VJ: The crux of the problem is the United States – it is responsible for most of the world's consumption (e.g. 1/2 of the world's oil usage), and the leader in world innovation. VJ claims there is a great awakening in the American public, in contrast to the relative inaction of the Federal Government.

Larry B: Which technology is most important? The WWW, to foster conversation and motivate politicians.

Chris Field: Getting a price on carbon will create a whole new industry, provide jobs in improving the world, funnel creativity and will provide a model that the public is domain is not a dumping ground. Tech: we need to remove CO_2 from the atmosphere in a consistent muti-century method, and it will in some way involve plants for the capture phase.

Meena: Water in the decentralized model. We need companies selling systems door-to-door water solutions. Problem is not solutions (they are out there), but scaling and deployment. Educating the world must be a two-way conversation, not information download. We need to co-design solutions so they fit and scale. Tech: Web and info tech to spread the data and enable more civic action and accountability.

Bill C: Human-caused climate change: Unfortunately we do not have a control-earth to comapre our models. But we have history (ice-cores, etc. etc). The past is our control. And what we have today is unprecedented in speed and a-correlation with other factors we have seen to be relevant in the past. Tech: Life technologies – the ability to mimic nature, is within our grasp.

Dean K: Solar is the winner, but there is no silver bullet. We need the diversity, we need the competition of solutions. The energy field invests only 1/20 in research as compared to biotech, in relative terms.

VJ: We have only one planet, and we MUST find a way to reconcile the aspirations of 7B and the limited capacity of the one planet we have, and we must do it with human ingenuity.

I think what Google is doing with it's OS is the same thing it has done with Chome.

With Chrome, it created a browser with x30 Javascript performance and better standard compliance. Within a year, both FF 3.5 and IE 8 showed up with huge Javascript improvements and better compliance.

With the Chrome OS, the goal is to change the game in the following sense:

• Change the default for software design (OS + apps) of the computer from disconnected to connected.
• Show how good at browsing a dedicated design can be.

Don't forget – Google will not make money directly from this (all code is either GPL (OS) or BSD (browser)). Just as with Android and Chrome – Google's only real interest is driving more usage of the web and of their web applications.

They are taking the next big step – designing a complete software stack under the assumption that most of the time the computer is connected to the internet, and also assuming that the data and application are in the cloud, delivered via a browser.

There is a good chance that the Chrome OS is a little ahead of its time – connectivity is not where we would like it to be, and the cloud apps are still not up to par with native apps (and most don't provide decent offline modes).

Overall – this is a great technological step forward and is not designed as a commercial step. Would it succeed? Almost definitely, since it will push the web/cloud-based, almost-always-connected OS concept forward. Even if the most common implementation is Microsoft's, Google will get its way.