Mike Bloomberg Opening Remarks at 2019 Global Business Forum

Well, good morning everyone. Another round of applause for our dancers from the Streb Extreme Action, conceived by the award-winning choreographer and recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Genius grant, Elizabeth Streb. Weren't they great? Now, I was actually invited to join that dance performance, but we do have a full morning ahead of us and I figured I should save my energy. Seriously, the theme that drives today's forum is instability in the economy and in the environment. The dance performance we saw was inspired by just that theme, and I think it really was a powerful way to start the morning. So let me welcome everyone to the Global Business Forum. We have an outstanding group here at our New York conference, with heads of state from over 50 countries and CEOs from a broad range of industries. And I want to give a special thanks to the international partners who helped bring us all together. They are listed on the screens around the room. And I want to thank all of you for making time to be here during this busy week. The United Nations General Assembly is in session, and we all know how busy traffic and everything else is during UNGA week. In a sense, this forum has become the economic complement to UNGA week, which is focused on geopolitics. But more and more, geopolitical issues require geo-economic thinking and solutions. And let me just mention one example, and it is an issue that frames much of what we're going to talk about today, and that is climate change. Now, I know many of the heads of state here attended the UN Climate Summit on Monday. I addressed the summit in my role as the Secretary-General's Special Envoy for Climate Action. And one of the messages that I delivered was this: if we're going to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, we have to move entirely off fossil fuels and to an economy powered by 100% clean energy. A decade ago, that seemed like a far-off fantasy, but smart government policies combined with private sector innovation have driven down the costs of clean energy faster than almost anyone thought was possible. Today, electricity from solar and wind is cheaper than coal power in a growing majority of the world, even without subsidies or other government support. And that's why this April, the U.S. generated more electricity from renewable sources than from coal for the very first time. And last year, global investments in renewable energy were triple what they were in gas and coal. That wouldn't have been possible without cooperation between the public and private sectors. Now, we still have a long way to go, and we don't have any time to waste, but we've only scratched the surface of what we can achieve when government and business leaders work together on climate change. And that's the big focus of today. This morning, there will be two panel discussions featuring public officials and private sector members of the Climate Finance Leadership Initiative. It was an effort we created at the request of the UN Secretary-General to help reach the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement. And last week, our group released a report outlining how to speed and scale up investment to transition away from fossil fuels. This morning, we announced a new public-private partnership to bring more climate finance to emerging markets. And I want to thank the partners in this coalition, all of whom are represented here today: Allianz Global Investors, AXA, NL, Goldman Sachs, Japan's Government Pension Investment Fund, HSBC, and Macquarie. All of us can help fight climate change. And we took a number of steps to make this New York conference sustainable. Everything from the signage to the carpets that you're standing on will be recycled, and we'll do as much composting as possible, including coffee cups, of course. Climate change isn't the only challenge we face. Population and protectionism are injecting uncertainty into the global economy. Trade wars are harming businesses and consumers, and geopolitical risks represent a real and growing threat to people's livelihoods. So today is a chance for influential leaders to share ideas and have conversations that might not happen otherwise. We won't agree on every subject, but in a world that's increasingly polarized, it's critical that leaders in the public and private sectors talk to one another and listen, even when we disagree. That's the only way we're going to be able to solve problems, increase prosperity, and spread the benefits of growth more broadly. So I want to thank all of you again for being here.