Jeffrey Sachs is used to thinking big: His area of expertise is nothing less than our entire planet. As director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, he worries about climatic changes that could have dire consequences for us all. As director of the United Nations' Millennium Project, he works to save billions of people from disease, hunger, and the other ravages of extreme poverty. And as a leading economist and a special adviser to the Secretary General of the United Nations, he has a unique appreciation of the monetary and political obstacles to tackling these global challenges. In February, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in St. Louis, he captivated the crowd with early results from a project in Africa that uses low-cost fertilizers and improved farming techniques to increase crop yields several times over. Sachs travels constantly, not just from country to country but from continent to continent. Discover managed to catch him between flights at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
On the spectrum from microeconomics to macroeconomics, you've gone as macro as possible. What led you in this direction?
I've been interested in one question for—my God!—about 35 years: What makes a society work well? I was lucky to be taken by my parents to the Soviet Union when I was in high school. Communism was a puzzlement. Why would there be a different kind of political system on the same planet? Which one works? Which doesn't? That was a major prod toward looking at what leads to well-being.
After the fall of Communism, you advised governments in Eastern Europe and Russia on their transition to market economies. Did things turn out the way you expected?
I don't think anybody anticipated what the health implications would be. In some parts of central and Eastern Europe, not only did life expectancy rise but heart disease went down a lot: Changes away from high cholesterol and fatty diets helped that. In Russia, on the other hand, life expectancy plummeted, and deaths of middle-aged and older men rose significantly. There is still a big debate about why. Was it alcoholism and stress from the collapse of an empire? Or were more subtle factors involved? Some nutritionists believe that there were small changes in the men's diet that were very adverse, like a low level of some micronutrients, but this is still not proved.
What about the environmental impact?
The whole Soviet system—including Eastern Europe—was incredibly energy intensive, and to a large extent, that meant coal intensive. There was a huge rise in the price of energy after the fall of Communism. So there was a very sharp decrease in fossil-fuel use, and the air improved enormously.
Are the market economies doing much better in terms of environmental sustainability?
The Soviet system was particularly miserable, but it's not as if the market system has really gotten this under control yet. We still have a major conundrum, which is that gross national product, which we take to be an indicator of material well-being in some sense, is highly correlated with energy use. Although energy efficiency is improving, so that the economy can grow maybe 1 to 1.5 percent faster than energy consumption, rising economic output and rising energy use are very powerfully connected. Economic development comes from being able to harness energy sources. Getting by without energy doesn't make sense on a basic physics level because energy is what does our work for us.
So we're not going to conserve our way out of the problem.
That's right. We can and should conserve a lot more, but it won't solve the problem. When you consider that world population will grow by another 50 percent between now and its ostensible peak around midcentury and that you have massive economic growth in today's poor countries, energy use is going to rise significantly.
Won't increasing energy use make global warming worse?
The challenge is to deploy energy sources that are safe, reliable, plentiful, and environmentally sound. Anthropogenic climate change is an extraordinarily important issue, which we have done a remarkable job of neglecting up to this point. But climate change is not caused by energy use. Climate change is caused by greenhouse gases. The question is: Are there ways to deploy energy resources without creating greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide?
You recently coauthored a paper on some possible answers. What do you see as our most promising options?
Renewable or noncarbon forms of energy generation—solar power, wind, hydroelectric, nuclear—have to play a role. In addition, there is what we call carbon management, which is the big hope we have at the Earth Institute. It's proved at a very small scale and plausible, although unproved, at a much larger scale. Basically, you use fossil fuels in an environmentally sound way by making sure that carbon dioxide is not emitted into the atmosphere but instead collected and put safely underground. What's unknown is whether that can be done on a global basis. Roughly 25 billion tons of carbon dioxide are produced each year, and that's a lot of storage.
How can we find out if carbon management will scale up?
We should sit down with our counterparts in India, China, Brazil, Russia, and the European Union and build a number of thermal power plants with carbon management, so we learn how this technology works. What are the costs? What are the risks? What are the regulatory problems? What is the geologic storage capacity? Where should power plants be located if we're going to go this way?
