Dinner Speech, May 11, 2006
Bren School Corporate Partners Summit
Tomorrow, we shall discuss the science, management and economics of catastrophes. After Katrina, this is one of the hot debates in this country and the world. I seem to observe some kind of a new mindset setting in and do hope that the Bren School and the [...]
Speech held at the RadTech Conference 2003 in Berlin, 3 November 2003
Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker, MdB/MP
Chairman, Bundestag Environment Committee, Germany
Why Sustainable Development?
We live in a finite world. Ultimately, there is no way around production and consumption patterns that are sustainable. Ultimately, customers, engineers, managers and politicians will show a strict priority for the respect of [...]
Draft (linguistic editing will be necessary)
The answer to this question should be yes and no.
Yes, we are closer than ten years ago. During all of he 1990s, an irritatingly optimistic mindset was dominating the world. The very expression of ‘saving the planet’ would not have been politically correct in these days, because it sounds ‘pessimistic’.
We all agree that a lot more economic wealth is needed for six billion people let alone nine billion people that we expect to live on earth by the mid of the century. Doubling wealth is the least, I suggest, what we should aim at.
On the other hand, we are already now overexploiting the earth. [...]
The global environment is endangered. We are losing some fifty plant and animal species every day. The global climate is beginning to become hotter. Unpredictable changes may hit countries both in the temperate and tropical zones. Theoretically even the sea water table is unstable.
If major parts of the Greenland or Antarctic ice covers were breaking [...]
Speech at the 10th Japanese Business Leaders Conference on Environment and Development, Tokyo, 12. Nov. 2002
Introduction
I feel greatly honoured being invited as your tenth speaker in the Business Leaders Conference on Environment and Development. Nihon Keizai Shimbun started the series in the year of the Earth Summit of Rio de Janeiro, the UN Conference on [...]
Speech by Ernst von Weizsäcker, M. P., Athens, 9 November 2002
Let me at the outset distinguish two different tasks of environmental policy.
One is pollution control which is predominantly a local and a national activity. The first twenty years of environmental policy in advanced industrial countries were almost exclusively devoted to pollution control and to set [...]
Annual Conference of the European Environmental Bureau, Brussels, 10 October 2002
Keynote Speech by Ernst von Weizsäcker, M. P.
Let me at the outset distinguish two different tasks of environmental policy.
One is pollution control which is predominantly a local and a national activity. The first twenty years of environmental policy in European countries were almost exclusively devoted [...]
