Mike Bloomberg and Frans Timmermans on a green recovery in cities | Paris Peace Forum

To talk about cities and some of the great work done at city level, I'm delighted to be joined by the Global Covenant Mayor's Co-Chair, Michael Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg LP and Bloomberg Philanthropies, and Franz Timmermans, Executive Vice President of the European Commission. Thank you both for joining us, and Mike, over to you. Well, thank you, Francine, and thank you all for joining us. I'm glad to be here today with the Executive Vice President, Franz Timmermans, to talk about leading a strong and sustainable recovery for the COVID-19 crisis. Here at Bloomberg Philanthropies, we have stepped up to help take on the pandemic around the world, and we've put partnerships and collaborations at the center of our work. We brought together more than 200 mayors for regular briefings from public health and management experts at Johns Hopkins and Harvard University, and from people with experience leading through a crisis, and that includes three former U.S. presidents who have addressed the group. We've worked closely with New York State and Governor Andrew Cuomo to launch a contact tracing program that is helping to control the spread of the virus. The effort's online curriculum and training program, developed with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, has now enrolled people across the U.S. and around the world, including 30,000 trainees in Europe. And as governments address the economic impacts of the pandemic, we're working with cities to call for investments that support a green recovery and help fight the climate crisis. Executive Vice President Timmermans and I are co-chairs of the Global Covenant of Mayors, and I want to thank him for his extraordinary leadership on this issue and for being a great partner on city climate action. We've seen how important cities are in the fight against climate change, and I look forward to continuing our close working relationship and collaborating to make even more progress. These are tough challenges, but we're in this together, and with collaboration between public and private sector leaders at the local and national levels, we can emerge stronger, healthier, and more sustainable than ever before. Thank you. Thank you so much, Mike. And with that, let's hear now from the Executive Vice President. Thank you very much, Francine, and it's really a pleasure to be here. Also, to thank Mike again for his incredible leadership in bringing cities together across the world, because we face a similar challenge. First of all, we need to get out of this horrible pandemic. Led by science, led by leadership also on a local level, we will make sure that we come out of this stronger. Cities will be leading this, also because some of the efforts we will be undertaking in the next couple of years will start in cities. We're going to do a renovation wave across the European Union to bring emission-free transport to cities, to make sure that housing and official buildings are refitted so that they become climate neutral. These are things we will be doing in the next couple of years, but we need to do it at a global scale. And you will see in the next couple of years, leading up also to the COP in Glasgow, that cities will play a leading role in getting the member states, the states that will have to do this work on a global scale, to do the right thing. And mayors across the world have been speaking out on this, have been showing such clear leadership, which compels also national leaders to do the right thing. And I think we've seen last week also in the United States the role of local authorities, of mayors, of people living in cities, taking us into a more sustainable future with clear examples of what can be done and what should be done in the years to come. And I have to say once again, thanks to leaders like Mike Bloomberg, bringing together mayors from across the world, we can learn from each other, we can have the best possible experiences pooled together, and we can avoid the mistakes that also will be made in such a transformational process. And we can make sure that we scale up to a level that will make sustainability a success, and that will take us into a sustainable future that will make livable cities the core of a society where we leave no one behind. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Mike, as a former mayor, as a businessman, and now through all of your philanthropic efforts, how do we build back better? Well, we have two things to do, Francine. One is to get the virus under control, whether it's with a vaccine or with social distancing and masks, common sense things that we can do. We've got to stop the carnage of people getting sick. The second thing we have to do simultaneously is get our economy back on stream, because without an economy, we're not going to educate our kids, and we're not going to give people the wherewithal to feed their families. And those things are just as important as the virus. We have to go down both tracks at the same time. We also have to think about the long term and start preparing for what happens when the next virus comes along. We can't assume that this is the last crisis that we're going to have to face. And we could do so much better by preparing for it, rather than just waiting until it happens and then winging it. Vice President, are we on track to build better? How difficult actually is it to change some of these big cities we live in? Well, I think we're in a very difficult situation. We need, as Mike says, to get this pandemic under control first and foremost. But the fact that, for instance, in Europe, we now understand that we will need to invest massively to get our economy going again, and that we would make a huge mistake if we put this investment in the old economy. We need to put it in the new economy. We need to put it in a sustainable economy. And this is what's happening in cities. Cities understand this. So the move towards zero emission public transport, the move towards zero emission housing, the move towards a new economy that is based on digitization and sustainability is what's happening in the cities. And so if we can combine short term recovery on the basis of a long term plan, based on the Green Deal in Europe, then I think we can kill a couple of birds with the same stone. The thing we need to avoid now is to only be talking about the long term and not showing that we can create short term results. And the other risk we need to avoid is that we put money in the old economy, then you create incredible amounts of stranded assets that we can't afford to do that. But do you need the Vice President to give them time to transition? Well, I think they've started this transition. Not all of them. But if we can create a level of solidarity, and I'm really talking about Europe, not only about Europe, but about the world, a level of solidarity that those cities that are forerunners are willing to share their experience with cities that have a lot of catching up to do, we can show that we will leave no one behind. And that's the only way we can avoid some cleavages in our society. Because, you know, not just in the US, all over the world, there's a lot of healing to do. There's a lot of people who think that they've been left out of this, or that they've been handed the short end of the stick. And we need to prove to them that we will leave no one behind and that everybody can be part of this. And cities can be leaders in this. Cities can also help convince more rural areas that they can be part of this. Mike, what role do you see for cities and mayors in this green recovery? Well, in the end, cities are where the people are, cities where the action is, and cities where the leaders really make a difference, because they live among the population, and they talk to the population, and they set the local rules for where you can go and how far away you have to be from one another. I think the first thing is we've just got to stop this craziness of not believing in science. We've got to educate people that it's the scientists rather than the politicians who should be telling us what the risks are. And then the politicians have to implement the policies, but they should be based on the recommendations of the scientific community. So whether it is wearing a mask, or social distancing, or how you treat people if they've come down with the virus, all of those kinds of things we've got to start paying more attention to. And we haven't done that. And unfortunately, some of the political leaders we've had have walked away from science, used politics to say things that some people believe and then act on. And incidentally, we in the press also, we push too hard, we don't take the patience to really explain. We've got to do a better job of separating those things that people say for political reasons from what real scientists believe to be current at the moment. Vice President Timmermans, is there a difference between how politicians communicate and how mayors communicate? I don't know if you can explain the difference between a government and mayors, and why mayors maybe need to take a more active role going forward. Well, I think if I look at Europe, many of the leaders with the biggest credibility in Europe are mayors of bigger cities. And I'm sure this is not very different in the United States. And you know, if we accept the premise that all politics is local, and of course, those who are active locally have the biggest connection with the citizens. More so than we, certainly we at the European level, for many citizens are far, far away from their realities. And so listening to mayors and listening to their concerns, incorporating their voices in what we're doing is just helping us tremendously to get our message across and also to make sure that we connect with our citizens. The connection with our citizens goes through the mayors very often. And I believe this is something we should cherish, and we should give mayors a voice collectively also. That's what we're trying to do. That's what Mike's been doing for so many years, so successfully. And I believe this is creating a new dynamic. You know, government is no longer central government telling everyone what's what. Government is something of many, many levels, where mayors play an increasingly important role. Mike, first of all, do mayors actually share more information? So is that how they get smarter? And how difficult is it for a mayor to do his or her job properly if you don't have support at a federal level? We have organizations, there's two or three of them, that we've participated in and funded and led, where mayors listen to other mayors as to what happened when the virus struck, what happened when there was an automobile crash, what happened when the economy slowed down, that kind of stuff. So they do share experiences. And in fact, Bloomberg Philanthropies has a training program joint with Harvard Business School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government to train mayors where they role play, and they have speakers come in to say what happened elsewhere. So yes, it's at the city level. The federal governments provide money, but fundamentally most of these problems are done much further down the food chain, if you will. For example, getting rid of coal-fired power plants in the United States, but it was done without the federal government. In fact, we've closed coal-fired power plants at the same rate under Donald Trump that we did under Barack Obama. Why? Because it's the economics of running a coal-fired power plant and the people living in the neighborhood who don't want to breathe the stuff from the air, those two things and the customers of the power plants and the employees and their stockholders, they all get together. They're the ones that want to do what's right. And the federal government could be helpful. In fact, it could be a little bit hurtful, but fundamentally we're getting rid of coal-fired power plants because it's a lot cheaper to use renewables today than it is to use coal. And because that's what the public wants. And so when you come to climate change, the local people are the ones that really are where the problems are and where the solutions are. Mike, what does a Biden administration actually mean for climate change? I assume the first thing that the president-elect will do is to rejoin the Paris Accord, which we dropped out of for no rational reason whatsoever. But working with other countries, we can all do a lot more. And I think it also sends a message that America really is in favor of fighting climate change. Joe Biden, I assume very quickly will put the government back in and that sends the right message to everybody else around the world. If we stop polluting in America, everybody around the world benefits. If we don't stop polluting around the world, everybody around the world suffers. So we're all in this together. And that's something that I think our past president forgot about. Vice President, what do you think a president-elect Biden means for Europe and climate change? Well, if Joe Biden does what he says he's going to do, the United States will be part of the Paris Agreement again by the end of February. And then we can really start preparing for the global meeting we will be having in November in Glasgow to see where we need to take the world to get to climate neutrality. This is a movement that is gaining momentum. Xi Jinping has announced that China wants to be carbon neutral by 2060, which is a big announcement. Japan has said it wants to be climate neutral by 2050. South Korea has now said the same thing or is preparing to say it. South Africa has said the same thing. So we want to lead on this as Europeans, but there's not much point in leadership if nobody follows. But if the United States is moving in that direction again, I think this is going to be a global movement. We're going to get there. We're going to make a success of the Paris Agreement. That's how much of a difference it makes when an administration says we stick to our international agreements. We know we have a climate crisis and we certainly want to do something about it. American leadership here is going to make a hell of a difference. Mike, given the juncture we're in, are there any important actions that actually mayors and cities can take now to respond to some of these challenges? Can they take them swiftly? Absolutely. Using less electricity, not polluting with all of the other things that we've done. All cities are the same. They could be as big as London or Paris or as small as a 100 person town. But everybody wants something. Nobody wants to pay for it. And the mayors of all of these cities don't get any credit. People only complain when they don't like something done. And so all these mayors are in it together. They've got to stand up and do what's right. If we don't sacrifice now, we are not going to have a future. And yes, it's very nice, as Fran said, that the Chinese want to stop polluting by 2060. At the rate we're going, the numbers that used to be used for 2050 were then used for 2040. Today they may not even be good enough for 2030. Storms are getting bigger, carrying more moisture. They're moving slower so they can do more damage. And we have forest fires in Colorado and California that we haven't had ever before, some of them. You can go right around the country and find concrete things that are hurting our planet and destroying our economies and our lives coming from climate change. We don't have any time to waste here. We've just got to do something now. We can't go and dig coal just to keep jobs going. We've got to switch to renewables and we've got to find ways to help the coal miners and find employees for the renewable companies. But we just can't sit here and say, well, it's not politically popular. I'm not going to do anything. I'll leave it for somebody else. Mike, when you look at the vacuum left on climate change over the last four years in the US, were cities and companies and business able to fill that vacuum? Certainly the companies did. What has happened in America, and it's really starting to take place around the world as well, the stockholders of companies, the employees of companies and the customers of companies are demanding that those companies are more environmentally friendly. ESG has taken off. Every investor worries about this. You have to pay attention to what your employees, customers and stockholders want. And they want companies that are more responsible and that are working today so that we'll all have a world down the road. When Bloomberg recruits at schools, one of the things when we explain to potential employees that all the profits of Bloomberg is going to the foundation that works on climate change and all of these other things that we all believe in public health issues, it is a very big deal in helping and convincing them to come to work for us. And there are customers who feel exactly the same way. They feel better about dealing with us because they know that what they're paying, the profits of that go to things that they care about. Vice Presidents, in the last couple of weeks, you had a major increase in your climate ambition for Europe, a 55% emission reduction, a faster path towards a net zero economy. How do you make sure that you maintain momentum for climate change? We analyze this very thoroughly. So we're based on science. We're based on very thorough analyses. And this shows that industry can do this. It's going to be hard, very difficult, but we can do this. The three areas where we're really going to struggle is in housing, in transport and in agriculture. So we need an extra effort in these three areas. But it can be done. That's the big message of our analysis. It can be done. And if we achieve minus 55%, we might even achieve more, you know, because technologies are also advancing at quite a high pace. If we achieve that, then we can actually achieve climate neutrality by 2050. It's just 30 years down the road and a lot of work to do, but it can be done. Two both. And Mike, let's start with you. How do we maintain the confidence and trust of citizens in cities at a time when a lot of people are working from home? A lot of people may be thinking of leaving cities because of COVID. There's a reason why people live in cities, because working together, you create an excitement and you share ideas and cultures and the economic opportunities for people are much better. So people aren't going to leave cities. I'm a believer that you can't do the same thing from home that you can do working with your co-workers and visiting your customers. We're going through a phase right now, but most people should assume they're going to have to go back to work and sooner rather than later. We don't have an economy in the city. If people don't go to work, if we don't have an economy in the city, we can't educate our kids. We can't do research at schools. We've got to pull people together. We depend on so many things of working collaboratively and collectively. And then the basic answer to your question is we need leadership. We need somebody that stands up. I'm the mayor of the city and this is what we're going to do and pushing the companies and then the companies and leadership in the companies. We have to be able to get together, share ideas, help one another and see how we can build something for our children for the future. For me, it's clear that the answers, the problems, the biggest problems are in the cities and the biggest answers are in the cities. We need two things in our societies to get us moving in the right direction. First, we need to re-establish the beauty of critical thinking. So to avoid falling into the trap of believing in myths and being stuck in our bubbles, because that's paralyzing. It's paralyzing our capability to actually find solutions to difficult problems. Secondly, we need to embrace the concept of diversity as a strength and not see it as a threat. I'm sure this is also a challenge in the US. It's certainly a challenge in Europe. And it's in cities where this is handled in the best possible way, because that's where you see the friction between difference. But you also see that this friction brings creative solutions. Things that are invented to face climate change, to solve the problem are invented in cities. In cities where minds meet, where minds collide, and where in this confrontation, they find the best possible solution. And this is how we show that living together well, developing our capacity to critical thinking, these are the things happening in the cities that will bring humanity forward. And this is happening in cities all across the world. Even in cities where there are regimes and countries that are trying to stifle freedoms, the cities will not stand for it. They will show that they can be free, even in those circumstances. And that, I believe, is giving us so much hope for our collective future. You know, I've recently become a grandfather for the first time. And I want for my grandson to live in a free country, where diversity is not seen as a threat, and where climate change is seen as an opportunity for our economy and our societies to be sustainable. It can be done. You know, this is the one message we need to bring across. It can be done. And what you see happening in cities across the world proves the point. It's being done. They're not waiting. They're moving. And we should follow that movement. We should support them. We should, you know, bring together the best experiences, share those, and make sure humanity has a bright future. Thank you. Franz Timmermans, Michael Bloomberg, thank you so much.