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 [...]
Keynote address given at the China Development Forum 2005
Dear Professor Lu Mai, dear Professor Liu Shinjin, ladies and gentlemen,
It is an unusual honour for me to be invited to this keynote address, which I have put it under the title of Resource Productivity.
This title contrasts with the preoccupation with labour productivity during the last 200 years of technological progress. Labour productivity has been the melody of the first Industrial Revolution. It increased twentyfold or more during those 200 years. This has been the basis of prosperity and it is the main theme of China’s stunning economic progress.
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 [...]
Unedited Draft
Keynote Address to the Transatlantic Policy Consortium Plenary Meeting, Speyer, 16 –18 June, 2003
Transatlantic Perspectives on Liberalization and Democratic Governance
Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker, MP, Chairman of the Environment Committee
When I began preparing this address on the Old and New Europe in their transatlantic relations, I saw with a degree of relief that hundreds of [...]
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 [...]
Speech at the Königswinter Conference, Oxford, UK
Whereas the Select Committee on Globalisation has two and a half years to discuss this wide subject, I have a limit of 10 minutes. That is a bit like the difference between the subjects of globalisation and of housekeeping at Keble College!
1. Would economists please remember what some of their pioneers said?
Over 200 years ago, when Adam Smith set about forming his moral ideas of the free market, he made it clear that the wealth of nations requires a strong state, not a weak one!
