Transcript: President Clinton’s Keynote Adress

President Clinton addressed the nearly 1,500 participants of the 2009 Campus Progress National Conference on July 8, 2009. Here is the official transcript of the speech. The video of the speech can be found here.

Introduction by Zimuzor Ugochukwu, Student, University of North Carolina, Greensboro

5:45 pm – 6:20 pm
Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Transcript provided by DC Transcription

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ZIMUZOR UGOCHUKWU: Good evening. My name is Zim Ugochukwu and I am a student at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. And as you heard earlier, I’ve been fortunate enough to work with Campus Progress this year, as I’ve sought to build support for the International Civil Rights Museum in Greensboro, as well as support for the involvement of students in local affairs.

Now, I have the honor of introducing to you our final speaker of the evening, a young man by the name of William Jefferson Clinton. (Applause.) During his two-term presidency, William Jefferson Clinton’s policies helped bring about the greatest period of peace and economic expansion in U.S. history. Unemployment set at record low levels and from 1993 to 1999, seven million people were lifted out of poverty. He used surpluses to balance the government budget, while also giving tax relief to some 15 million low income families. A strong economy wasn’t his only contribution. President Clinton signed a landmark bill that allows people to keep their jobs if they get sick or have to take care of a family member. He signed legislation that curved the spread of handguns in America’s cities, helping to bring down crime rate. Internationally, he brokered peace between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland and intervened to stop ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo. He strengthened U.S. leadership around the world and addressed the growing dangers of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.

Since leaving office in 2000, he hasn’t simply basked in his remarkable White House achievements. Instead, President Clinton continues to be a leading voice for humanitarian causes around the globe. In 2005, he founded the Clinton Global Initiative, which has more than 1,400 commitments in 150 different countries. That is a $46 billion investment. His dynamic CGI University program, a program which engages college students and global citizenship, works to involve young people in all of this work and advance their own projects.

David Halperin wanted me to add that he’s proud that CGI University is directed by Keisha Senter, the former deputy director of Campus Progress. (Applause.)

In addition to his philanthropic work, President Clinton also continues to play an important role as a world diplomatic leader. From 2005 to 2007, he served as a UN special envoy for tsunami recovery, helping to rebuild from the catastrophic Asian tsunami. In June, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon appointed him UN special envoy to Haiti, where he continues the important work he began during his presidency; that of building a future for the impoverished island nation. William Jefferson Clinton played an integral role in laying the foundation for the success that the progressive movement enjoys today. He is a man who has never stopped moving forward. He is a man that never stops striving for change.

It is my pleasure and most humble honor to present to you President Bill Clinton. (Applause.)

PRES. BILL CLINTON: Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause.) Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. First, Zim gave me such a good introduction I thought I should not say anything. (Laughter.) It’s all downhill from here.

I want to also say that I was honored to be the closing act for Nancy Pelosi. (Laughter.) I’m really proud of the work that she’s doing as speaker and I appreciate the comments she made and the places where you applauded. I agree. (Laughter.) I have to say that – it’s the only political thing I’m going to say – I find it hilarious that the members of the other party say they’re not for the stimulus or health care reform or fighting climate change because it costs money and they really hate to put that on our grandchildren. Now, I can say this because I never made any money till I left the White House. I had the lowest net worth adjusted for inflation of any president elected in the last 100 years, including President Obama. I was one poor rascal when I took office. (Laughter.) And when I left, I was in debt thanks to my fights with the Republicans, but after I got out, I made a lot of money. (Laughter.) And in the last eight years, I saw the surplus I left you, which would have taken this country out of debt, even with the 2001 recession by 2013 – no debt, so you wouldn’t have to worry about the retirement of the baby boomers bankrupting you with social security and Medicare – I saw it blown away and the debt doubled. And in the 12 years before I became president, they quadrupled the debt from $1 to $4 trillion. And then, we paid $600 billion down my last four years. And we were going down. It would really have gotten steep after that.

Now, these same people, it didn’t bother them a bit to put a burden on our grandchildren to pay for a millionaire’s tax cut, but if we’re putting some for a working stiff to work or helping a young person go to college, somehow that’s unacceptable. I disagree. The president’s doing the right thing. (Applause.)

So it’s not to say I don’t worry about the debt. I do. It’s a problem. But it’s a problem that will have to be addressed after the economy starts to grow again and we start generating revenues. Right now, the president is still confronting this wholesale deflation in asset values beginning with housing and going into other things, and the stimulus program was designed to put a floor onto that to give the financial reforms time to take hold. And that’s what’s going on here. If you look at the total borrowing in America, government and private, it’s still below the levels necessary to sustain a growing economy. So you should worry about the deficit and when we come back from this and we start having growth again, if the president and Mr. Summers and Secretary Geithner and the others come to us and tell us you’re going to have to take a lot of money out of the economy, even if it means we can’t all have what we want and when we want it, we should support that too, but not yet. And don’t you believe for a moment all these fastidious claims that somehow we should put off education and put off health care and put off dealing with climate change. It will only make it worse.

So having said that – (applause) – I want to talk a little bit about those of us aren’t elected to anything because I love this meeting that the Center for American Progress convenes. This is John Podesta’s version of what Zim talked about in the Clinton Global Initiative for university students.

I’m glad to be here because I think the Center for American Progress is basically the intellectual engine of progressive politics not just for the national government, but for all of us in our citizen capacities. And because I owe John Podesta a lot, not only was he my chief of staff in the White House, my deputy chief of staff, my cabinet secretary, which maybe the most important, powerful position of all because they control everything that goes from all the departments into the White House and back, but this year, this summer, I will have known John Podesta for 39 years. We were six when we met. (Laughter.) I – or something we were.

David Halperin was a great speech writer on my foreign policy team and I’m very grateful to him and – (applause) – and I’m a huge fan of John Oliver’s. I hated to speak after him. You know – I thought the great thing about not being president was that I could just say whatever I want to. (Laughter.) And the bad thing was nobody would care what I had to say anymore, but I thought it was great. Then, Hillary becomes secretary of state and I – (applause) – yes, I want you to cheer for her, but thinking for me here for a minute. (Laughter.) I get the worst of both worlds. I’m about to give you a serious talk. Nobody has to care what I say. But they do care if I mess up. (Laughter.) So I get the worst of all worlds. If I say something really helpful, it’s not particularly newsworthy, but if I mess up because Hillary is secretary of state, oho, that’s a headline. (Laughter.)

So – now Oliver can say whatever he wants. I’m from Arkansas. We have all these country jokes. And when I hear Oliver talking, he reminds me of the two dogs watching two kids break-dance. And one dog says to the other, “If we did that, they’d worm us.” (Laughter.) That’s the way I feel, when Oliver talks. They would worm me if I said half of what he says. But he is so funny and so wonderful and all that dig about the British health care system – remember what he said about that? Just imagine what he’d look like if we hadn’t had the British health care system. (Laughter.) (Applause.)

I’ll have to wear a hair shirt on that because he also attends my CGI University and I hope he’ll come next year – (laughter) – if I promise never to say that.

I also think Van Jones was here earlier. (Applause.) And he’s an active participant in the Clinton Global Initiative and a living embodiment of my strong conviction that changing the way we produce and consume energy is the best way to fight global warming, advance national security, and mobilize this country’s economic resources for just and decent economic growth, in a way that we have not done since we mobilized for World War II. And this time, we don’t have to shoot anybody. We can just go out and do the right things.

So this has been a great meeting and I think it’s great that you’re here. And you must feel it’s a good time to be young in America because things seem possible again. And we’ve seen this explosion of energy from young people participating in all the presidential campaigns and voting in record numbers and doing any number of other things. But what I want to say is that this is a very different world. The reason I think we’re going to get health care reform, the reason I think we’re going to make progress on climate change, the reason I think the world, in fits and starts, will stumble back to a decent economic policy and we will get out of this mess is because of you and because you look different than any previous generation of young people, and because the way people think now is different. When I was the age of most of you, it was before things went haywire in America in 1968, when the conflicts imposed on the American psyche by the Vietnam War, the riots in the street, the increasing inequality of people, in the cities particularly, and the fact that there was no economic activity in rural areas, and the rise of the women’s movement, all these things were happening and the society that we had basically couldn’t contain all of the conflicting pressures.

And in 1968 President Nixon was elected basically appealing to what he called “the silent majority,” which is everybody in our crowd and nobody in theirs. It was an us and them election. And it began the sort of the politics of social division in America. The instruments of that division have changed. They’ve gone from race to violence, race riots to fighting over the nature of religion, to fighting over whether you should be prolife or prochoice, to fighting over the role of gays in societies. But it was just basically the politics of social division putting on a different suit of clothes. And for 40 years, except for President Carter’s election in 1976 and for my elections in 1992 and ’96, it worked. And I knew what caused it. And I think the only way we could have avoided it, frankly, is if Robert Kennedy had not been assassinated in 1968 because he was the last candidate we had – (applause) – who had the capacity to bridge the divides, the racial and income and the cultural divides. President Carter was able to do it once because he was a Southern governor in a reaction to Watergate. And I was able to do it in part because the first President Bush didn’t have his heart in the politics of divisions, one of the reasons I love him, and because the country was in terrible economic shape. And by then, they had added the second arrow to their quiver, which was essentially a virulent antigovernment campaign which was used to redistribute wealth upward. There was no such thing as a bad tax cut, no such thing as a good government program, unless it laid concrete or increased the budget of the Defense Department. So it worked for a long time.

Sometime in my second term, the politics of division stopped working as well; partly because of the performance of the government, partly because America was changing. We were growing more diverse. And if you think about it – just look around this room. This is a much more interesting crowd than would have been 30 years ago, right? Right? (Applause.) The division by gender, by race, by religion, even by the country in which you were born, this is an incredibly diverse crowd. And the more diversity you have and the more people get to know each other and get to like it and find it interesting, it’s not that people cease being proud of who they are, it’s that they can be proud of who they are without having to disapprove of someone else. And that builds what I would call – it doesn’t make us more liberal. It makes us more communitarian. And it’s a very important distinction. It means that there is a role in this debate for what is the best way to fight global warming. What is the best way to achieve universal quality, affordable health care? What is the best way to achieve all these objectives? But we do it, all of us, within an understanding what we’re all in this together. We’re going up or down together. And it’s really dumb to waste a minute’s worth of energy fighting about what divides us that has nothing to do with the decisions we have to make about where we’re going forward and how we’re going forward together. And that is one of the things that made President Obama’s election possible. We’re not just a black-white country anymore. We’re a very diverse country.

Hawaii is the only American state that never had a majority race. Now California doesn’t, and unless we just shut off all immigration, which is not going to happen, by some time in your lifetime, somewhere between 2040 and 2050, there will be no majority race in America. And we will be irrevocably a communitarian country. (Applause.) And that’s a good thing. (Applause.)

Now, it means the Republican Party needs to go through the process of searching reassessment that we did beginning in the mid ‘80s to modernize their party. You can still be more conservative on what you think the private sector, as opposed to the public sector should do. You can argue a lot of these issues in more than one way, and nobody’s got the whole truth. But it means that all of us have to think about what the implications are for our lives of living in an interdependent world in which we have to go up or down together. It’s not only more interesting – all of you are exhibit A for what’s good about it – it’s also more empowering. You’ve access to more information than ever before. It’s relatively low cost, compared to ancient times. You can travel around the world in ways that you never could before. Individuals have the power to connect with millions of others in the way they never did before, with internet and Facebook and MySpace, and now look at the impact of Twitter on the ability of the Iranians to communicate with each other when they were demonstrating on the street, all your counterparts there are the fact that when the state shut down the state controlled media and shut out all the foreign media, people simply filmed it on their cell phones and sent it to television networks beyond the borders of the country.

There’s a lot of good about this modern world. But there’s also a lot about it that is profoundly troubling. The modern world is – basically has three huge problems. It is inherently unstable because when you rip down all the borders and you don’t have anything to supplant it, you’re vulnerable to terror, to weapons of mass destruction, to swine flu, to the international financial crisis, right? Starts in American and before you know it, people start looking at bank books in the UK and Ireland and they’re in worst trouble than we are. And all of a sudden police pension funds start trailing in little English towns and it turns out because they believed the exorbitant promises of return in Icelandic financial institutions. And it collapsed all of the Icelandic financial structure and caused the whole government to be thrown out, which was very sad for a lot of us because Iceland was exhibit A in many ways of what was good about the global society. Iceland, before this, had the highest percentage of self-made millionaires of any European country. So they were harboring the positive and the negative. But the deal’s inherently unstable.

We shut off the sea lanes that the narco-traffickers in Columbia were using and shut down some of the big narco-trafficking gangs. The good news is the Inter-American Development Bank celebrated its 50th anniversary in Medellin, Colombia, which used to be the drug capital of the world that belongs to the people of Colombia again. It was safe. We all went there and it’s so beautiful. My first impulse on seeing Medellin was: I now understand why the drug lords wanted it so bad because it’s a beautiful city. But there’s a lot of money and power and organization behind it, and borders are porous, so they decided to go the land route over Mexico and on the way they would stop in Monterey, Mexico’s biggest city, and sell a bunch of drugs there. So now you have kids being shot in drive by shootings in Monterey the way they were in Los Angeles in the early ‘80s. And because under the previous administration, they allowed the assault weapons ban I put in to expire, these drug cartels come across the Rio Grande River to buy 50 caliber riffles, which will blow a whole in the wall of this hotel and assault weapons. And they outgun the Mexican police and military that are risking their lives to keep you from being exposed to coke.

It’s a very interdependent world that’s inherently unstable. The Second problem is it’s way too unequal. Half the world’s people are still living on less than $2 a day. That’s a lot of people. I just got off the plane from Haiti before I came here, where I’m working. In Haiti, more than 70 percent of the people live on less than $2 a day. They’re our neighbors. A billion people live on less than $1 a day. Almost a billion people go to bed hungry every night. Two and a half billion people have no access to sanitation. Within America, before the financial crisis on September the 15th, before that, two thirds of the American people that had incomes that adjusted for inflation were lower than they were the day I left office. And this is unbelievable. Ninety percent of the income benefits of the last decade in America went to the top 10 percent of us, 43 percent to the top 1 percent of us.

You cannot sustain a movement toward freedom and democracy and openness with that kind of inequality. And you know what the health care numbers are like.

One quarter of all the people who died this year on Earth, from everything – natural disasters, crime, cancer, heart attacks, all of it – in the world will be from AIDS, TB, malaria, and infections related to dirty water. Those are the diseases of the poor.

Only a handful of people in America will die this year from AIDS if they don’t take their medicine as they should, or they’ll have a unique bowel chemistry that can’t be adjusted to the available drugs. Otherwise, nobody dies of aids anymore, except the poor, who don’t get the medicine primarily even though we cut the costs because they have no health systems. Nobody’s there to test them. Nobody’s there to evaluate if they got the medicine it works or not, or change it.

So these are very serious problems of inequality in America and throughout the world.

And finally, the whole edifice of the modern world is completely unsustainable because of climate change. And it’s true there are a few respectable climate skeptics, including the 83 year old physicist Freeman Dyson, who supported, campaigned for, and voted for President Obama. He just thinks – he’s not sure it’s all that bad. But they’re less than 5 percent of the number of refutable scientists.

You really want to gamble your future and your children’s future on the fact that fewer than 5 percent of the people that understand this issue are right? When if you follow the 95 percent, it could spark an economic explosion that would enable us to be both more stable and more equal. That’s what we have to understand. (Applause.)

So what does all that mean for you? It means that it’s not enough for you to come here and be proud that you have a new president, that you have a – I hope – a filibuster proof majority now in the Senate for the kinds of reforms we want – (applause) – because there is too much to be done. Twenty first century citizenship requires more than 20th century citizenship. When I grew up, you were a good citizen if you went to school as long as you could, if you went to work when you needed to, if you honestly paid your taxes, and you were responsible in paying your bills and in being a good parent, and if you were an informed voter. That was a definition of good citizenship. Now, you also have to be a public servant as a private citizen. We all have to find some way to advance the public good as private citizens. That’s really what this meeting is about.

I was glad that the president invited me the other day to the signing of the bill which expanded AmeriCorps. That was one of the proudest moments in my life, was signing that AmeriCorps bill because I had campaigned all over America on it, written about it in the book Al Gore and I prepared for the ’92 campaign. And I advocated that we eventually serve 250,000 young people a year, give them a chance to serve and earn money to go college. But now, more than 700,000 young people have served in AmeriCorps. By 2017, under the bill the president signed, we’ll be up to 250,000 a year, 25 years after I first advocated it. And that’s really a good thing. (Applause.)

The biggest AmeriCorps partner is City Year. And since I left office, I’ve helped City Year to start chapters in Johannesburg, South Africa, Little Rock, Arkansas, which my library houses. I gave them there headquarters. And New Orleans after Katrina. The CGIU, you’ve heard about in the introduction, but we’ve now had one in Tulane in New Orleans and now in the Lower 9th Ward, Brad Pitt and his foundation – I’m sure you read about this – are building hurricane resistant low cost, energy efficient housing on lots that were cleared by the young college students who came from all over the world to come to CGIU. We cleared the lots that they now are building on.

And this year, we met in Austin, Texas, and it was great, we had kids from 50 countries and all 50 states. And we did a service project at the end, after people made their commitments, and the commitments were amazing. One student from the University of Texas committed to provide housing to homeless veterans that were recently discharged. Another from the University of Texas established a partnership between hearing impaired people in Texas and the school for the deaf in Mali and use technology to give the young people in Mali an empowerment to overcome their impairment that they never otherwise would have had.

A young graduate student in America from Zimbabwe noted that while people generously give medical supplies to poor countries in Africa and elsewhere that are used, when they give medical equipment, 80 percent of it is dysfunctional within a year because nobody is trained to maintain or repair it. So she organized an NGO to do nothing but find people in Zimbabwe and eventually throughout Africa to maintain and repair medical equipment. Sounds simple. The reason I give you these examples is none of these requires much money. This requires brain power and effort and work. And it shows the power of young people who were just using their minds.

I’m going to give you another example in a minute. When I built my library, we established a school of public service at the University of Arkansas, which is the only institution of higher education on the entire country that gives a graduate degree, not in public policy, but in public service. And one half the curriculum is practicum. It’s doing. Because I think it is so important to engrain in everybody their power, their potential, and their obligation to do, to solve problems.

So I’m really thrilled to be here, but I also want to say this. Remember the debate on the stimulus. I agree with everything Nancy Pelosi said. I’ve already told you this. But that debate and how it was reported in the paper was a great deal like all the reporting on politics in the 30 plus years I was in politics. You just think about it. What did we talk about? Whether there was enough money in it, right, and what it was going to be spent on. And I strongly defended the president on both counts. So people – the Republicans said, “Well, look at all this money we’re spending for jobs.” That’s not true. A third of that money went to income supports, modest tax cuts, food stamp increases, unemployment extensions. And about a third of it went in grants to state and local governments to keep them from having to lay off teachers and health care workers and make the recession worst, or raise taxes which would have made the recession worse. And as you see from the problems of California and other states, it wasn’t enough. And then the rest of it went to create jobs, mostly in infrastructure and clean energy.

But there was almost no discussion in the whole debate about the third question, not what and how much, but how. How is the best way to turn your good intentions into positive changes? I’ll just give you one example because my foundation also has a climate change project. And I did a lot of work on the how in climate change. I go to these meetings all over the world. I went to one in Sweden the other day. We had a big European-wide meeting, and Sweden, by the way, is one of only four countries that for sure will actually meet its Kyoto Protocol targets. (Applause.) The others that for sure will do it are Denmark, which generates 25 percent of its electricity from wind and is very efficient, Germany, now the number one producer of solar power in the world and number two to us in the producer of wind, even though the sun only shines in Germany in the whole country on average as much as it does in London. They still made it work. And the fourth is the United Kingdom. They’re the four that will for sure surpass their Kyoto targets.

Anyway, Tony Blair and I were there with Wangari Maathai, who’s a great friend of ours from Kenya, won the Nobel Prize for her efforts to rebuild forests. (Applause.) So Wangari talked and she was magnificent. Blair talked and he was wonderful. And they drug me up to close the show and I said, “I agree with them.” And I came all the way from America to tell you this. If you don’t have a vote at the Copenhagen Conference in December, where they’re supposed to come up with a successor, or a vote in your local parliament, please do not go to any more of these meetings. Instead, go home and figure out some way to prove this is good economics. You want China. You want India to participate. China’s already spending a fortune on this. They’re going big into wind energy. General Electric, for all their financial problems, is making out like crazy, selling their energy efficient electric locomotives because the Chinese have such a big backlog orders for them. They’re going to build electric cars that will sell for $20,000 a piece. It’s not that they don’t think this is a problem and that they don’t think they have anything to do about it, they’re scared to commit to a target because they’re afraid we won’t do it or somebody else won’t do it, and they’re afraid that, in the end, you won’t be able to get rich and grow richer if you don’t put more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

We have to prove. We, all the rest of us, have to focus on being doers. We have to answer the how question. You should think of your generation as the “how” generation. You have enormous, don’t you, consensus about this. When you go back home in your campuses, most of the Republicans that live on your campuses or go to school with you believe global warming is real. Most people who think they’re conservative now don’t have a racist bone in their body. Now, there are a few cuckoos, I’m sure. But, basically, there’s a broad consensus now on the things that, when I was your age, people shed blood over, literally. You’ve got to be in the how business. You’ve got to be able to turn your good intentions in the concrete changes. And so let’s just take the issues you’ve talked about today. I want to talk about them a little bit.

On health care reform, I believe that the last plan that the Senate is talking about is basically quite good. It won’t get us – it will insure about 97 percent of the people, and it can be done under the president’s budget allocation for health care. But there still is a lot of debate and a lot of people don’t want the government to offer a so-called public alternative. Why? Because we’re spending 16 and a half percent of income on health care and none of our competitors are spending more than 11. That’s $800 billion a year. One of the reason General Motors got in trouble is they were spending $1,500 a car on health care and Toyota was spending $110. So before you condemn all those people for flying around their private planes, ask yourself a serious question. You think you could take over General Motors, spot Toyota $1,400 a car, and beat them in the marketplace? And if it made us healthier, we’d all happily pay it, but instead we have 50 million we can’t seem to figure out how to insure and there are no indicators that show that we have better health care than the Japanese spending an approximately nine and a half to 10 percent on health care, the Germans and the French spending 10-10 and a half percent, the Canadians spending 11, the British spending 9.

So I’m for the public option because I think there needs to be some competition here. Now, I think the president will get a health care reform bill because the filibuster won’t be an option. Small business community won’t be as against any plan we’ve got now. Frankly, economy’s in such a mess, they’ve got a little more budget flexibility than I had. And I think we’ll get it, but you should care a lot about the how because wouldn’t it be terrible if we went to universal coverage and we did nothing to try to bend the cost arc and then five years from now we lost it again because we couldn’t afford it? Or wouldn’t it be terrible if we did it and we didn’t bend the cost arc and it made the Medicare chickens come home to roost even sooner?

You should know all this handwringing about how when the baby boomers like me – and I’m the oldest of the baby boomers – when we retire, we’re going to bankrupt you over Medicare, you should know that only 20 percent of the cost predictions you read, only 20 percent are due to the size of the baby boom generation. Eighty percent is the multiple from the assumption that inflation in the medical care will continue to be three and four times what it is in the economy as a whole.

What does that mean? That means my generation has a responsibility to stay healthy, that all of us who can – if we want to keep breathing, we owe it to you to breath as healthfully as we can. And it means that your generation has a responsibility to reach down the people younger than you and fight this childhood obesity epidemic, which I spend a lot of time working on.

The children now in public schools have a legitimate chance of being the first generation of Americans to grow up to live shorter lives than their parents because we have literally, in the last two years, seen the American Medical Association change the term that it is acceptable to refer to type 2 diabetes as. All my life, type 2 diabetes has been called Adult Onset Diabetes because it’s a kind you get from living. How you eat or don’t, how you exercise or don’t. Type 1 is the kind you’re born with. And I spent enormous amount of time as president trying to improve the quality of diabetes care and prevention and all of that.

We had a nine year old child in Harlem, three years ago, diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. Nine years old. It’s running rampant among young people now. You should worry about this. It’s the biggest public health problem in America your generation will face.

So yes, I favor public health option. Yes, I favor the efforts the administration has made to get the drug companies, the hospitals, and everybody else to kick in and give us some of their predicted future increases based on rampant inflation. And yes, I favor organizing the society so that old people stay healthy and young people don’t get diabetes. Otherwise, we’ll pass this health care plan and five years from now, we’ll be back to drawing board. Just at the time a lot of you will be having your first children, you’ll be worried sick about the future of your children. So you need to focus on the how.

Same thing is true on the energy. And I – every college – my foundation has a lot of partners. We work with 40 big cities around the world. I just went to Seoul, Korea, and we announced 16 projects in 10 cities on five continents that are real estate projects – housing projects, commercial developments or mixed use, all of them are going to be carbon positive. They’ll produce more clean energy than they use. But the real low hanging fruit in fighting climate change today in America is building retrofits. About a third of our greenhouse gases are admitted from transportation, about 45 percent from buildings of all kinds, about 25 percent from various manufacturing processes and agriculture. And the reason that a lot of these building retrofits are not economical is that the financing is not parallel with the financing of power plants. So wherever you live, if somebody wants to build a coal fired power plant, they can finance it over 20 years. If they want to build a nuclear plant, they can probably get financing over 30 years, if the right payers pay for it.

We just announced that we worked on a retrofit on the Empire State Building, a symbol of America and probably, since the falling of the Twin Towers, the building outside of Washington DC that most symbolizes America. Built in the teeth of Depression in 1931, it’s an energy guzzler. It has to be fixed anyway. For $33 million, we’re going to cut their greenhouse gas emissions by 38 percent. It will lower the electric bill by four and a half million dollars and have the equivalent impact of taking 19,000 cars off the road and create a huge number of jobs.

Now, that will be financed – do the math – that will be financed in – (applause) – it’ll be financed in less than seven years. Now, luckily there, the owners of the Empire State Building have enough cash reserves and they’re going to do the – they’re going to upgrade the building anyway. They could self-finance it. But if they’d had to borrow the money? Well, why shouldn’t they be able to borrow the money for eight years or 10 years? It’s just like building many power plants. We wouldn’t think a second at all about financing the coal fired plant over 20 years.

If you invest a billion dollars in a coal fired power plant, it creates 870 jobs. If you invest it in solar power, depending on whether it’s solar thermal, a big centralized unit, or photovoltaics 1,800 to 1,900 jobs; more than twice as many. If you invest it in wind power, and you make and assemble of wind mills where you put them up, 3,300 jobs. Building retrofits – 6,000 jobs, seven and a half times the number of jobs for a billion dollars spent as a coal fired power plant. What’s keeping us from doing that? Why shouldn’t every college campus in the United States become a carbon neutral campus?

There’s – (applause) – there’s a small college in Vermont that specializes in environmental studies, and I believe it was the first carbon neutral campus in America. And – but everybody ought to be. You just have to work out the financing. Before the financial collapse, I had gotten five banks to commit $5 billion to doing this work and letting all of it be paid off just with the utility savings. So there’d be no more out of pocket costs in any local, state, or national government building, or any public school building, or any college building, or any hospital. But I have to wait for the financing to come back to be able to do it. But everyone – you want to do something about this? It’s good if you sign petitions and go to meetings and clap for people who say what you agree with, it’s better if you make your campus carbon neutral. Then you don’t have to say anything, especially if your campus is located in a district with a Republican congressman. Think about it. They’ll be under all this pressure. Oh, this is not economical. It can’t be done. Then, instead of saying please do this because I don’t want the planet to burn up for my children, you say, “You know, on our campus, we created 150 new jobs and we reduced our power bills this much. And now we have avoided the following increases in tuition. Why are you against this?” Better argument, don’t you think, for people who don’t agree with us already. (Applause.)

Let me just deal with one other issue because I know that you wanted to – you talked a lot about this, and that’s the college access issue. College costs – while health care costs doubled in the last decade, college costs went up 75 percent after inflation. It’s the second biggest item in a family’s budget.

Now, in 1998, when John was my chief of staff, we passed through a Republican Congress the biggest increase in college aid since the GI Bill. We had tax credits for all four years of college and all graduate schools called HOPE Scholarships. We went up to a million work study positions. We had – we increased the Pell Grants. We had all kinds of college aid for people that – from basically from poor – people who came from poor families, to people who came from solid middle income families, even at the upper ranges of middle income. It was the biggest increase in 50 years. The impact of that was gone within five years because of inflation in college costs.

So what I want you all think about is this. 2006, the Democrats won a majority and then they proceeded to pass another big college aid bill, which, in dollar terms, was as big or bigger than the one I passed in ’98. But if we don’t do something to bend the cost curve, to figure our what’s the matter with the delivery system, we’ll be right back in the soup. Now, most of you will be out of college by then, but a lot of you will have big debts that will be a pain to pay. A lot of you may forgo going to medical school or some other graduate school because you think you won’t be able to repay your debt, and already the consequences to your country’s economic future are dramatic.

When I left office, we still enjoyed the distinction we had had since the passage of the GI Bill at the end of World War II. From that day, till 2001, we ranked first in the world and the percentage of our residents ages 25 to 34 with four-year college degrees. And we were a magnet for people from all over the world to come.

So after 2001, we, I think, mistakenly made it too hard for foreign students to come here and go to college and the cost base was still built in, which added to the inflation and the rest of the students’ costs. But we have dropped in this decade from first to 10th, all the way to 10th. So this is like health care. You have to ask yourself about the delivery system. It’s no accident that 17 states have now legitimized community colleges who can meet the academic standards offering four-year degrees. And it’s more user friendly, right? First of all, you don’t pay for a development staff, a football team, a basketball team. You don’t pay for all that. Secondly, older students can access it because they offer courses at all hours of the day and night and in the weekend. And thirdly, you pay by the credit hour only.

So 17 states have done that. Penn State became, I believe, the first university in America this year to offer a four-year degree that is basically taken by distance learning over the internet with no distinction on the degree between the people who earned their degree offsite and the ones that earned it onsite.

Now, all of this stuff – and look, all of these things present challenges. What kind of test do you give? All the tests have to be open book tests. How do you enforce it? What do you know? How do you this person did it instead of somebody else? There are – none of these options are free of challenges. And why shouldn’t people be able to have the traditional college experience and live on campus and be able to afford to do that and go to the occasional basketball game. I just think that all of you need to be thinking though. We assume that the answer to the how question in college cost was to increase the Pell Grant or provide bigger tax credits or whatever. But you have to look at the delivery system. This is not sustainable. It’s unbelievable that we gave the kind of increase that was given in the GI Bill and the benefits were gone in five years. And so I want you to be able to come back here when you’re my age. I want you to be able to go to meetings like this and see your children or grandchildren there, and see even more diversity, even more sense of community in the most peaceful, prosperous time in human history. And if you’re going to do that, you’re going to be able to answer these how questions. And the answer can’t just be more money. You have to really examine these delivery systems and see if they make sense anymore.

You don’t think a thing in the world about changing the delivery system when you do more work over the internet. A lot of you probably downloaded songs off the internet before it was quite legal to do so. Is Kindle a good or a bad thing? I’m probably too old to hurt the book industry with Kindle because I like holding a book in my hand and filling my book sales. But it still – it’s a good thing. It’ll help to spread knowledge and it adds to convenience and all that, but it changed the delivery system of information. You think about the really great, most profitable advances in information technology. What did they do? They changed the delivery system. Same product, different delivery system.

And so I want you to think about that when it comes to energy, when it comes to health care, and when it comes to higher education because your life is going to be shaped by America’s success or failure in doing this.

So that’s my pitch. I think this is a wonderful time to be young. America has its mojo back. We have our sense of possibility back. We have our sense of hope back. And I think the president is doing a good job. I think the cabinet is doing a good job. I think the Congress is doing a good job. And I think if they don’t get it all right the first time, we need to cut them some slack because these are mind-numbingly complex problems and nobody’s right all the time. It’s not part of human nature. What you – America works when we’re all sort of stumbling forward in the right direction.

Winston Churchill once said when the British press was ragging him about America’s slow entry in the World War II, he said, “Oh, the United States always does the right thing after exhausting every other alternative.” (Laughter.) And so we got to the point where we had exhausted our alternatives and we made a change. And this is a great moment. But it isn’t enough to cheer from the sidelines. You’ve got to answer the how questions. And there’s a whole world out there waiting for you. And I’m going to close by showing you one of the best answers I’ve ever seen.

I just got back from Haiti. I told you. And I’m working there. And Haiti had four storms last year that took away 15 percent of its income and left all the cities littered in garbage and waste. And it’s a poor country. They don’t have any public garbage collection system anyway. So they have a dramatic example of a problem you find in every poor city in the world. My climate change initiative works on trying to figure out what to do with garbage dumps, which emit methane gas 23 times more powerful than CO2 in South America and Asia and Africa, from Lagos, Nigeria to Lima, Peru, to Rio and Sao Paolo in Brazil, to Delhi and Mumbai. Did you see Slumdog Millionaire? Opening scene, the kids are running from the cops. They run over the Mumbai landfill that goes on forever. That’s what a garbage dump looks like in a city of more than 20 million. We’ve got to figure out something to do with this.

I see those things and I see economic assets, okay? So here’s one thing you can do. Handsome, articulate, compelling young man, not much older than you is in Port-au-Prince in his neighborhood, which was racked with violence, making these. Here’s what they do. They send out people everyday to pick up garbage off the street and putting so many people to work and cleaning the streets, making the neighborhoods proud, has caused a precipitous decline in violence. So they got their neighborhoods back.

Then, the people there first separate all the garbage. The organic stuff is going into a compost thing and they’ll send it out to discount prices for organic fertilizer to the farmers. Then they have glass, plastic, metal, and paper. The paper is then wet and they make it really, really soggy, and then into the soggy paper they pour saw dust, which they get for free because it’s waste from a local furniture manufacture and the guy’s glad to have somebody take it off their hands. They mix it up, then they put it in presses that the Haitians designed and build themselves onsite. And they press – once they put it into ovals like this, they press all the water out. And then they cut them into these sections and dry them out, leaving this. This is nothing by waste paper and saw dust. And they sell this to combat climate change and deforestation. Why? Because in poor countries from Haiti to Kenya, they only have a forest cover of 1 to 3 percent because poor people cut down the trees to make charcoal so they can stay warm and cook food. And once they do that, they lose the top soil and all the environmental problems get worse.

So every storm in Haiti is like Katrina was for America. Remember what happened in Katrina? The gate broke. Remember that metal gate? So most of the Katrina damage was done by water. Most hurricane damage is done by the air and you can build against that. But if you can’t protect from the water, it’s awful. That’s what happens in Haiti. Everything floods all the time because there are no trees. There’s no prevention.

So this is what this guy does. They sell these for one fifth, one fifth the equivalent cost of charcoal that produces as much heat. They sell one of these for about a penny. They create jobs. They create community pride. They lower crime in the neighborhood and they fight deforestation and climate change. Why? Because a guy with his neighbors – they’re eight people that I met on this local council – answered the how question.

Now, this may not be as sexy as a pretty speech. It may not be as interesting as a new movie. But this little thing here could save the nine million people who live in that poor country a world of misery.

So when you go home, I want you to think about that. Every one of you has got an answer like this inside you. And if we come up with enough of them, you’re going to live in the most interesting time in human history. Thank you and God bless you. (Applause.)

MR. DAVID HALPERIN ?: Thank you all for coming and thank you, President Clinton. One more time, let’s give him a hand. (Applause.) Thank all our speakers. Thank everybody who organized this. Please keep pushing for change and we’ll see you outside. We’re going to have a party and we’d love to see all of you there.

(Applause.)

(END)

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