Closing Remarks: President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson of Iceland
Summary by Josh Sanburn, World Policy Journal
After three days in which global leaders, academics and entrepreneurs addressed the world’s most pressing problems, the closing keynote speaker identified the financial crisis, the need for a green energy revolution and climate change as the three most important issues, all of which are irreversibly linked. “None of these three crises can be solved without solving the other,” he said.
The financial crisis has shown that people around the world fell victim to the notion that the market is paramount, he said. Icelanders have learned how fragile that idea really is. “It threatened the complete breakdown of of the social fabric of our society,” he said, citing riots and social unrest that occurred soon after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in the United States last year.
President Grimsson called on leaders around the world to create a new philosophical and moral framework to avoid repeating the same mistakes. He tied the rise of a green energy revolution to stabilizing the economic sector, saying that Iceland now has a 100 percent clean energy economy. And greening the energy sector will naturally lead to a reduction in emissions.
To solve these problems, President Grimsson said countries around the world should place more regulations on financial institutions in order to rein in the excesses of a market economy, and he also challenged the United States and other countries to harnass geothermal energy to limit the use of fossil fuels.
“The political system was tested to its limit,” he said. “Even in the most stable and secure democracies, it almost resembled the revolutionary situations we read about in history books. But we have the capability and the mandate to solve these problems.”