Davos Diary, Day 3: A Warming Trend in the Zeitgeist

Panelist Scott Friedheim

A kind of popular uprising took place yesterday during the first set of sessions here in Davos around the Forum’s theme of global power shifts. Working groups were to meet to discuss different drivers in the global power structure (geopolitics, technology, etc.) and then they were to gather in a plenary to share results and formulate final conclusions. The plenary was to be augmented by wireless polling technology to add a democratic flair to this forum of the world’s elites. But as the tables in the plenary stood up to review the findings, several “insurgents” said that they rejected the conclusions being offered to them. Clearly, they said, the world’s greatest power-shifting force is global warming.

This left some of the people that I spoke to somewhat baffled, because while all acknowledged the importance of the issue, none felt it would reshape global power any time soon. No matter. Perhaps the insurgents own considerable waterfront property, but whatever the reason for their revolt, they succeeded in placing global warming high atop the list of drivers of change. (more after the jump)

At each Davos, a different cause seems to captivate the audience. Several years ago it was the “digital divide”, and then, impassioned celebrities like Bono and Angelina Jolie drove Africa to the top of the list. Now, global warming has seized center stage.

It’s not as if global warming had previously been ignored. Europeans and the NGOs they love have been active in promoting the issue in Davos for years. But after a considerable period in which U.S. business leaders and government—still disproportionately powerful at this meeting—pushed back with, “yes, global warming is important, but we have more immediate issues to deal with,” the American contingent has come around this year to lead the charge.

U.S. venture capitalists like Vinod Khosla and John Doerr, often in alliance with Internet giants like Steve Case, have arrived with ideas, with cash, and with a commitment to promoting massive change in the energy sector. The issue has come to dominate the meetings so far, with session after session dealing with global warming from the security perspective, from the economic perspective, from the technological perspective, and so on.

Which is not to say that global warming is now the most pressing global issue. Is it more important in terms of immediate threat than the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction? No. More important in political terms than Europe’s drift into what one keen Davos hand described as a kind of new provincialism where the cleavages—between the local middle class and predominantly Muslim immigrant groups, between globalized elites and emerging populist-nationalist reactionaries, and often between the states themselves—are growing? Well, that is also important, and also discussed here.  But not with the fervor that carries global warming forward here on this frozen mountaintop, where nothing could seem more remote at the moment.

Why not? Why the sudden fervor for global warming? Partially, it’s because the U.S. financial community is hot in the process of building something of a bubble in the area. But partially it’s because it’s easy to embrace: far off in the future in terms of consequences, worthy in terms of intentions.

Davos deals in themes, rather than actions, and so it cannot hold a candle in this respect to what has become the world’s pre-eminent philanthropy potlatch, The Clinton Global Initiative, in which companies and individuals announce great commitments to save the world. That much of the money would have been spent regardless of what happens in Davos is irrelevant. That some of it will never be spent is also of secondary importance. At least some good is being done. And besides, it feels just so darn good … warming the heart while wait for global warming to step up and do the trick permanently.