
Dear friends of the Takeda Foundation, dear friends in Japan, and distinguished ladies and gentlemen in this audience. It is now 42 years ago that I came for the first time to Japan, and I must say I have grown very fond of this country. I am very happy being here again. I'm very thankful for everything, in particular for having been bestowed this enormous honor of a technology-based award. I'm sure that my grandfather, who was the first engineer of Zeppelin, would have been very happy to hear that. I would like to make a small point first about the achievement of a good friend who is a Nobel Prize winner, Sherwood Rowland, with whom I worked for four years in the United States. As some of you may recall, his was the first Nobel Prize given in the area of environment. It was Sherry who deduced from an ingenious laboratory experiment that there could be a problem involved in emitting large quantities of CFC's because they could interfere with the natural ozone layer of the earth, even though they were known to be non-toxic and extremely non-reactive compounds. We now know that Rowland was right. I mention this because I think there is some significance in the fact that the Nobel Prize is often given for specific achievements, for increasing the basic knowledge on specific aspects of wider problem. In Sherry's case the focus was compound-specific and output-related as regards the economy and its impact on the environment. His important discovery was not transferable to the environmental behavior of the vast majority of ten thousands of other synthetic chemicals. It could hardly open new vistas for precautionary policies or economic behavior. In short, the scientifically splendid discovery of Sherry had rather limited systemic impact. In September 1989, when I was working in Laxenburg near Vienna at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis and responsible for the economic reform of the Soviet Union and its former allies, we had once as our guest Academician Shatalin, the chief economic advisor to President Gorbachev. Late that evening I suggested that perhaps we should jointly work out environmental legislation for his country, in addition to worrying about all these economic things such as markets, labor markets, pricing and what have you. After some reflection, he said: "Bio, I don't think we should do that. Russia is not rich. What we have to do first is to learn how to operate a market economy. And once we have become rich, we will worry about the environment just as you have done in the OECD countries." That answer worried me very much because I had been involved for quite a number of years in writing legislation and being responsible for legislation in the chemicals control area. It struck me that, indeed, if the Soviet Union with all its resources, with its very rich science base, was not capable, did not have the money to follow our - what I believed to be wonderful - OECD lead in environmental legislation, then what about another 150 or 160 countries? Remember, it was at that time only two years since the book Our Common Future had been published, the book of the Brundtland Commission. In the West we were busy discussing the new global concept of "sustainability" and nobody seemed to have any doubt that we were already moving in its direction what with the strength of our environmental legislation and dedication. And here I was, listening to one of the most eminent economists of the Soviet Union, a trained mathematician, as most economists in Russia are, who was saying "Forget it! We cannot follow your legislation as it is." So, then, how dare we talk about ecological sustainability when our kind of environmental protection was too expensive for most countries, was therefor not exportable, could not be globalized, if you wish? Let me just add here a rather recent event. Evidently this is the kind of policy that is even too expensive for the United States. Mr. Bush, the President of that country, let it be known in March 2001 that his country was not going to implement the Kyoto accord, he simply said: "We cannot afford it. There is going to be too much unemployment involved, and so it is economically not doable." Back in Laxenburg I asked myself: Well, why don't you give up? If, in fact, this is the way the world goes, we should stop talking about sustainability and go on with our daily business. But then I did what I guess every one of you would have done. I started thinking about the question whether there might be a different way of protecting the environment. I guess what happened then is quite common when the time is ripe for new insights and ideas. I simply asked myself: Well, if we cannot afford to control the output side of the economy, the emissions, the effluence, and the wastes, because that's too expensive, then why don't we manage the system at the input side?