Date: 11/01/07

Summary: Newt explains the benefits of “incentivizing” development of new energy and environmental technologies, showing that there are potential positives for biodiversity and for the economy.

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“And so part of what we’re suggesting is: if you look around at every single major environmental challenge and try to organize it so it’s a management problem first; what are the values we’re trying to achieve, what’s a vision of success in achieving them, how could we incentivize people to achieve them, that we think you can make dramatically faster breakthroughs, and you can actually produce a planet which is much, much more diverse in terms of biological diversity, is much cleaner, has much lower carbon loading, and does so in a way that is economically rational, and therefore is much easier to get India and China to adopt, because it actually makes economic sense as well as environmental sense. And that, I think, is close to the core of what we’re trying to say in A Contract With the Earth.”