2009 has been intense for us here at JANERA. We talked to established world leaders, provocative thinkers, and bold innovators, all of whom are tackling the biggest issues of our time. See below an overview of our 2009 events, and read what’s next on our agenda for 2010.
Global Religion in February with leading Buddhist thinker Sharon Salzburg and five other leading religious figures;
Modern-day Slavery in March with Peter Buffett and Dayton Literary Peace Prize winning author Benjamin Skinner;
Global Capitalism in March with ProfessorJeffrey Sachs and the New York Bureau Chief of The Economist Matthew Bishop;
Green Transportation in May with Robin Chase one of Time Magazine‘s most influential people in 2009 and Vijay Vaitheeswaran award-winning correspondent for The Economist;
Iranian Elections in June with journalist and author Hooman Madj and Nisid Hajari, Newsweek’s Foreign Editor;
Empowering Women & Girls in September with Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Sheryl WuDunn and Camfed’s Executive Director, Ann Cotton.
Climate Change Debate in November with NRDC’s Ralph Cavanagh, Duke University’s Eric Roston, AEI’s Steven Hawyard, Reason Magazine’s Ronald Bailey, moderated by CNBC’s Dennis Kneale;
We undertook a complete redesign of our Web site and switched from being “the voice of global nomads” to “curating global conversations.” We now integrate video into the site more and think this better reflects our mission of making international affairs accessible and attractive.
And we launched a brand-new membership program with exciting benefits! We not only serve individuals with discounts to our events at our Nomad level, but we can also help causes spread the word at the GameChanger level, or even co-host events with authors, advocates and concerned citizens at the Leaders level. And this is just the beginning. Click on our Membership page and find out which level fits you best, and sign up today!
2010 promises to be amazing. We are taking the conversation to the next level by partnering with fabulous companies and individuals, and are expanding beyond New York. If you’re interested in bringing our events to your city, email us to set it up.
THANK YOU for being with us along this roller-coaster ride and HAPPY NEW YEAR!
On November 23rd 2009 at Norwood Club in New York, JANERA and InterConnect Events present the great debate:
Will Green Put us in the Red?
Details:
6PM cocktails
7PM Debate and Q&A
Norwood Club, 241 W 14th St, New York
Tickets—only available in advance—are $45.
For Live Streaming, in case you cannot make it to the debate, please click here.
President Obama wants America to save the world from itself by capping carbon emissions and imposing “greener” demands on carmakers and utilities. As the richest country in the world—and the earth’s biggest producer of greenhouse gases—the U.S. must lead the way, supporters say.
But this green crusade has sparked a rising cry of outrage and opposition. Doubters warn of draconian measures that would slap a huge carbon tax on our own economy and hurt U.S. competitiveness. Furthermore, while Obama’s goal to reduce carbon emissions by 80% over the next 40 years is admirable, how are we going to wean ourselves off fossil fuels in just four decades?
China and India, meanwhile, balk at Obama’s big push and may simply keep growing and polluting, unrestrained by any restrictions. One looming dilemma: Is “climate change”—which activists had called “global warming” until that trend abated in recent years—a threat imminent enough to require drastic measures now, when the world’s still-ailing economies can least afford it?
We chose this topic leading up to December’s Copenhagen Climate Conference, intending to highlight some of the issues that will be addressed there, here in New York. We hope to raise awareness and ignite a lively conversation. This is an important issue and we bring both sides together to foster dialogue.
The debaters will be tackling questions like:
- How are we going to achieve these ambitious targets given that our entire economy has been built around the use of fossil fuels?
- Is climate change really a threat imminent enough to require drastic measures now, when the world’s still-ailing economies can least afford it?
- What timeframes should be used, and are realistic, to measure the impact of environmental policy changes?
And should you not be able to make it, watch the debate live online on FORA.tv. Remote viewers can also participate in the conversation and submit questions. Spread the word too! The more people who watch the debate and learn about the most pressing climate change issues, the better!
The dialogue will spark new ideas and—as in any debate—there will be a winner, chosen by the audience. Which team will prove most persuasive?
The passionate environmental defenders:
Ralph Cavanagh, Senior Attorney and Co-Director, Energy Program, NRDC
Eric Roston, Author and Senior Associate, The Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, Duke University
Or
The fearless climate change skeptics:
Steven Hayward, F.K. Weyerhaeuser Fellow, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research
Ronald Bailey, Author and Science Correspondent, Reason magazine and Reason.com
Dennis Kneale, Anchor of CNBC’s Power Lunch will moderate.
This event is held in partnership with:
-Global Nomads Group, an international non-profit organization that fosters dialogue and understanding among the world’s youth, discusses these issues each year, with more than 15,000 young women and men from around the world.
-Tablet Hotels, Hotels for Global Nomads, represents exclusive, hand-picked luxury and boutique hotels worldwide.
Zipcar co-founder Robin Chase has made renting wheels as easy as getting cash out of an ATM. More recently, she launched GoLoco, a national rideshare Web site with social networking elements. In advance of her talk at our Green Transportation salon next Monday, the forward-thinking Boston resident and mother of three spoke to Darrell Hartman about why our aversion to strangers and our dependence on cars might soon be things of the past.
How did Zipcar, which you founded in 1999, come about?
My cofounder Antje Danielson is German, and she was sitting in a café in Berlin when she looked across the street and saw a shared car—not uncommon in Europe. And she came back to the U.S. and said, ‘What a cool idea!’ And the light bulb went on over my head. I thought, ‘Wow, this is exactly what the internet was made for—sharing a scarce resource among a lot of people.’ And as a person living in a city, with three kids and one car that my husband would take and leave in a parking lot far away from me for eight hours a day, I really want this kind of service.
Would Zipcar have been possible without the Internet?
No! And I think that’s critical. It’s been done on a very small scale using paper and telephone calls, but the Internet makes the transaction effortless. There was no other way for it to scale and be worth everyone’s effort.
And now you have a ridesharing site, GoLoco, which is kind of like Zipcar meets social networking.
I would say it’s Facebook meets the ride board, with some Paypal thrown in. The idea was to use social networking, really nice mapping, email and alerts, and let people make the financial transaction quickly and easily.
I would think getting people to ride with strangers might be an obstacle.
Marketing is everything—how you spin it. All of us give rides to people all the time. If, for example, at this upcoming JANERA.com salon, I were sitting there at the end and said, ‘Hey, is anyone driving to Brooklyn? And if anyone in the room said, ‘Sure, I’ll drive you,’ we would go together in a car happily, because we had shared this one interaction. It’s similar with these social networks: if we went to the same university, or both liked hard rock—it’s just the very smallest of things that makes you feel fine about traveling with someone.
Have you ever hitchhiked before?
I did, once, with my dad when we had locked ourselves out of the car. And I know it was my presence—I was twelve at the time—that made people more willing to pick us up. I’ve got some interesting ideas that I’d like to try one day—a better cross between that hitchhiking phenomenon and ridesharing.
Do you mean something like those collectivo buses in Latin America?
Yes! These are just visions, and I have many visions. But you could imagine that on the top of your car—like the school bus sign on the top of the minivan, or the pizza delivery guy—you could type in, LEXINGTON $3 if you’re going to Lexington. And every single person on the side of the road would understand what that meant. So while you may or may not pick anyone up the first time, or the tenth time, you haven’t lost anything because you were going there anyway.
Wouldn’t safety be an issue, here, too?
Yeah, you might have to require pre-registration to participate—but it also depends what environment you’re in. In small towns or rural areas, it’s likely you’d know the person. But people give rides all the time. In New York City, when you have a transit strike, within hours people are happily sharing cabs and giving people rides.
Let’s assume that we do start traveling this way in the future. How will we look back on our current habits?
I think we’re going to be so, so shocked. “What in heck were we thinking?” It was so incredibly expensive, so wasteful, such high CO2 emissions, so costly from a fuel perspective. And this is really fun. I joke that if there were more ridesharing, we’d never be at a loss for dinner-table conversation.
Would it spell the end of morning radio?
I don’t know, because there’s this thing called slugging in Washington, D.C.—when you put a person into a car so you can travel in the HOV (high-occupancy vehicle) lane. But the rules are that you never, ever talk in the car. I think around carpooling and ridesharing, that’s one of the anxieties we have: Am I going to be too chatty? Am I going to be morose?
I’ve been at many meetings where we’ve gone around the table and said, what are the things you’re willing to accommodate to address climate change? And I have to say, I’m pretty much willing to give up everything except that blasted long-distance travel. I can’t figure out how to do it in a low-carbon-footprint way.
You’re not alone, obviously.
I have friends who are doing almost no traveling, and more video conferencing. I gave one talk in Paris via Skype, and it’s hard. I can’t see the audience, so I can’t quite read them. You don’t get sound feedback. Maybe it’s a talent I can get better at.
Globalization is still going strong, and yet there also seem to be efforts—like your ridesharing site—to build local communities. It seems contradictory.
I think there’s going to be so much more diversity in local-ness, and more celebration in local-ness. Those giant new Asian cities—I want to say they’re pasteurized, they all seem the same. I think we’ll be doing with less of that. I don’t think we’re going to see more travel, because ultimately we’ll get to a place where fossil fuel is more expensive and carbon is being charged appropriately and it’s going to make airplane travel incredibly expensive.
That will be painful, but it could be a good thing.
Maybe we’ll have those lovely six-week vacations that we don’t get now, and we’ll go by some other method than airplanes.
You mean a return to the European grand tours people did in the 19th century?
I read John Adams’s biography and it took him six months to go from Massachusetts across the ocean to Paris. So when I think about transportation, there is this bifurcation: the long-distance transportation and the routine transportation. In the U.S., about 92 percent of our trips are in cars. In Europe, it’s about 60-40. And I think if we predict what’s going to happen in the U.S., it’ll be much closer to what’s happening in Europe. We’ll still have car travel, but a much greater number of trips will be taken by foot, bike, or public transit.
President Obama seems serious about building a system of high-speed rail lines. Will that have a big effect on the way we travel?
Not anytime soon, since it takes so darn long to build out. But if we had great inner-city to inner-city rail connections, we would use them.
You live in Cambridge, Mass. How do you get around?
I live in one of those ideal urban areas. I can walk to just about anything. There’s also a subway. And my husband gave me this really cool and ridiculous bike—it has three speeds and it changes gears automatically. I also love to walk, and I adore the subway. It can’t be beat.
They’re talking about making big subway cuts here in New York.
It breaks my heart. It’s happening across the country. The sickening part is when we cut mass transit budgets it makes people think, ‘I have my own car. You can’t screw around with me—I decide my own destiny.’
But cars aren’t always that liberating. Just as often, I feel trapped in them.
In America, we think that cars equal independence. I believe deeply that cars equal dependence. Right now, we’re spending 18 percent of our incomes on our car. The lowest 20 percent of people are paying 35 percent of their incomes on their car. You can’t get a job, you can’t get a glass of milk, you can’t get your kid to school, you can’t go have fun—without your car? That is such incredible dependence. Whereas if we had a good multi-modal system, you’re not having to take this blasted three tons of metal around with you and find a place to put it. And as transit of all kinds becomes more wireless, not being able to work will be another huge cost to driving alone.
Cars are definitely status symbols, though, which makes them hard for some people to give up.
One of the pushbacks I got when we founded Zipcar was: ‘Americans love their cars. It’s their identity.’ But I think we’re getting farther and farther away from that.
Do your kids drive?
I have three kids. Two of them—they’re 18 and 21—don’t know how to drive, and a car is not on their list of status symbols.
I bet you helped persuade them!
The only convincing I did was that I wasn’t an enabler. If they wanted to do it, they had to get themselves down to the DMV and get the permit and whatever else. But they’re city dwellers, and they feel this extreme freedom in the city without a car. As a parent of teenagers, I like that I can pretty much count on the fact that my kids are going to make it through adolescence without dying in a car accident, because they’re never in a car.
What, in your mind, is a global nomad?
You are happy to lay your head just about any place. You maintain your friends across the world in real time, through all the communication channels that we have. Your identity can’t be bound up in your house and your things, because you wouldn’t have those in all the different places that you go. It’s more bound up in your social networks and your online presence.
So nomadism will become increasingly virtual?
The Internet and our increasing use of technology will transform us in a positive way. When a good piece of your day is spent in the physical world, those attributes—what Robin’s wearing at this minute, what kind of car I own, where my house is—matter significantly. But today, a larger percent of our identity is created through virtual space. My identity has to do with things that I write and read and view, and things I think are funny and share with friends. I’m able to create an identity, a sense of self and status, without relying on the consumption of physical goods. And that’s a really great reality—the virtual world as an important outlet for making a sustainable world.
Darrell Hartman, a former assistant editor at Travel + Leisure, has written for Budget Travel, Departures, Style.com, and the travel section of the Chicago Sun-Times. A collection of his writings is at darrellhartman.com.
Okay, I’ll give you a hint. I weigh 160,000 tons (as much as 840 blue whales). I am worth 580 million US dollars (one-sixth of the annual GDP of St. Maarten, one of the islands I visit). Oh, and I’m responsible for beach closings and the dirtying of pristine ecosystems all over the world. What am I? A commercial cruise ship. And I’m polluting the oceans.
The cruise industry is no small affair. Despite the global economic crisis, cruise lines are projected to attract 13.5 million passengers this year—up 2 percent from 2008. There is no shortage of vacationers willing to forsake environmental awareness for a week of fun out on the Caribbean blue. And the cruise line industry deserves marketing props for roping evermore people into this category—I’ll admit that I’m one of them.
This March, I boarded the Royal Caribbean’s ‘Liberty of the Seas’ with a few girlfriends for a carefree spring break extravaganza. It wasn’t until I returned to land, and my wireless internet, that I realized how un-“carefree” my week had been for the environment. In one week, I alone left a carbon footprint (or rather a carbon stomp) of 1.2 tons of carbon dioxide. (The average yearly carbon footprint for an individual is 4 tons). That is, a medium size cruise liner such as the one I was on emits .43kg of carbon dioxide per passenger per mile. Multiply that by the some 5,000 passengers and crewmembers on my ship and it amounts to a grand total of 6000 tons.
That may be a relatively small drop in the overall pot of carbon emissions, but multiply that figure by several ships for multiple cruise lines for 52 weeks per year and it’s no insignificant number. I could’ve taken the same route by airplane, flying from Miami to San Juan to St. Maarten to Haiti to Miami, and, according to Climate Care’s carbon calculator, left a carbon footprint less than one half the size, at .49 tons of carbon dioxide.
However, when you’re floating luxuriously amidst infinite sapphire blue waves under a smog-free sky, it’s hard to imagine that the seemingly passive bulk below you is a waste-proliferating beast. Seven types of waste, in fact. There’s black water (human sewage), garbage waste, gray water (i.e. sink/bath/laundry runoff), ballast water, oily bilge (crude oil-derived bunker fuel), diesel exhaust, and hazardous waste.
And we aren’t talking superfluous amounts here. Let’s take black water, for example. The average passenger takes care of 8.4 gallons of business a day, which means that one week on the “Liberty of the Seas” racks up about 290,000 gallons of sewage. And there’s no handy pipeline from the ship’s hull to a sanitation center—it all either has to be lugged on shore and disposed of or dumped into the ocean blue. Although the United Nations International Maritime Organization outlawed the disposal of anything but food waste into the water in 1993, the ban has yet to be upheld in the Caribbean. Small, island countries simply don’t have the infrastructure to handle such huge influxes of external waste. Sadly, this can come back to bite them, since some of the improperly-disposed of waste eventually washes up on shore, dirtying those pristine, white sand beaches.
This isn’t to say that all cruise lines take advantage of the circumstances to dump their waste wherever they please. The twenty-one member companies of the Cruise Lines International Association are pledged to uphold fairly detailed disposal standards, including in the Caribbean. These include regulations like not discharging gray water within at least 4 nautical miles (7.4 km) from shore, processing all black water through a Marine Sanitation Device, and not discharging spent batteries in the ocean. Yet if, according to Cruisejunkie.com there are 12 wastewater violation fines still pending from 2008 against some of CLIA’s most prominent cruise lines, including Holland America and Princess Cruises, in the strictly regulated Alaskan waters, one can only imagine the amount of unreported violations that have taken place in the Caribbean.
Furthermore, as cruise lines make waves towards eco friendliness, they also continue to build more and more extravagant ships to push this goal farther out of reach. In December 2009, Royal Caribbean will launch its newest conception, Oasis of the Seas, into Caribbean waters. With a record occupancy of 5,400 passengers and a gross tonnage of 220,000, the ship will boast a fully functional, open air “Central Park” and a full-sized carousel in the Entertainment Place. Also factor in that to accommodate the gargantuan size of such ships requires the dredging of some local ports, disrupting the local ecosystems and habitats. There’s already controversy over the dredging of the St. Thomas port in the Virgin Islands, where Oasis of the Seas plans to make a main stop.
On the other hand, the ship is expected to be 25 percent more fuel-efficient than any of Royal Caribbean’s other ships and will be outfitted with green amenities such as something called the Hydroxl Advanced Water Purification System, which has a multi-step waste removal process. Yet—as much as cruise lines seem willing to make an environmental effort on paper, their actions in the water tell a different story.
On November 23rd 2009 at Norwood Club in New York, JANERA and InterConnect Events present the great debate: 
