President Obama was the Keynote speaker on the first day of Greenbuild, the sustainable building and environmental education expo and conference from the U.S. Green Building Council, in Atlanta thru Friday. Here are some video snippets and the transcriptions.
Unintended Consequences – President Obama’s Reflections at Greenbuild 2019
President Obama remembers his childhood and how it shaped his Sustainable Journey, “Java is probably one of the most dense places on earth. And when I spoke earlier about negotiating for Modi in India and getting the Paris Accords, in Indonesia, you saw very quickly how huge population, great density, if you did not design things properly, then very rapidly you could have all kinds of dysfunction, and pollution, and severe consequences to it. And so it got me thinking fairly early on about these issues.
My mother also was in development, and she worked primarily with women in villages to create industries and an economy for women with their trades and their crafts. But she’d hear stories of people who thought they were developing and improving the area by, for example, introducing new strains of seed or agricultural products. But then it would turn out that it needed massive amounts of fertilizer, and it was usually expensive. And when the farmer suddenly couldn’t afford fertilizer anymore, the crops would all just get destroyed and people would be worse off. And so it also taught me early on, I think, to think about unintended consequences.”
Green Buildings for All – President Obama at Greenbuild 2019, November 20, 2019, 1:12
President Obama’s comments at Greenbuild 2019, “How are we going make sure that this building is as energy efficient as possible, which is in Chicago, not that easy to do because it’s cold. And when you look at how to do that, there are some short term added costs. We can amortize those costs and eventually recover them. But obviously I’m in a position to think about that big project differently than somebody in their thirties, a young family that’s looking for a starter home and how do they deal with those costs? That’s something that I think we all have to think about if we are going to get a problem of climate change solved, we are going to have to also pay attention to the economics of this so that we can build a broad based coalition to deal with the issue.”
Learn more about Greenbuild at their website https://www.greenbuildexpo.com