New York – As world leaders filled New York for the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday, other famous faces and unknowns, conservatives and liberals, business leaders and nonprofit activists turned out for the first day of the Clinton Global Initiative to talk about climate change, poverty, health care and education.
The conference even brought about a brief reunion as former President Clinton and his vice president, Al Gore, shared a stage for a discussion of the need for global action.
Although there has been a chill in their relationship, the two Democrats spoke warmly of each other. Clinton praised Gore for his environmental activism, and Gore plugged Clinton’s new book.
Gore, who won an Academy Award for his documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” had appeared Monday at the United Nations, where he cited a lengthening list of global warming’s impacts and urged world leaders to act now.
“This climate crisis is not going to be solved only by personal actions and business actions,” Gore said Wednesday at the Clinton conference. “We need changes in laws, changes in policies. We need leadership, and we need a new treaty.”
The initiative draws world leaders, celebrities and scholars for three days of panel discussions and smaller working sessions on global issues and asks them to take concrete steps on those causes.
More than $10 billion was pledged toward world causes in the first two conferences, and commitments were already coming in for this year.
At a luncheon session, actor Brad Pitt announced that his Make It Right project was prepared to break ground by the end of the year on 150 affordable green homes in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward.
Pitt’s partner, actress Angelina Jolie, announced a commitment from the members of the Education Partnership for Children of Conflict, which she co-chairs, that would help educate more than 1 million children around the world.
Other commitments included plans by Florida Power & Light to build a solar power plant as part of a $2.4 billion clean energy program; a $150 million promise from CARE dedicated to fighting global poverty, to provide health services to 30 million women and children; and a $271 million pledge from BRAC, a Bangladesh nonprofit, to provide education to 7.5 million young people in Asia and Africa.
More than 50 current and former world leaders were on the list of attendees.
