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CNN Connects

Aired September 17, 2005 - 20:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You know that old saying, come hell or high water, they came together. It's not hell or high water. It's hell with high water.

ANNOUNCER: Hurricane Katrina pummels America's Gulf Coast. Is this global warming or simply nature taking its course?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I wouldn't say this is the end of (INAUDIBLE) but it is the beginning of the end.

ANNOUNCER: Summits and concerts call for an end to poverty. But what's it going to take beyond good intentions and promises? A faith divided, confronting radical Islam and its deadly effects. When is faith taken too far?

These are among the most pressing issues of our time, challenges on the minds of world leaders gathered in New York for President Clinton's Global Summit.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: Now your host, Christiane Amanpour.

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CNN ANCHOR: Thank you and welcome to this special edition of CNN CONNECTS. Here in New York at the time of the U.N. General Assembly Summit, the annual summit and also when President Clinton launches his global initiative to tackle the issues that you saw in that report.

How will we rescue our planet from the kind of crippling poverty that causes nearly a billion people a year to try to struggle to stay alive on less than a dollar a day?

How will we rescue our planet from the climate change that is causing potentially more intense weather storms such as Hurricane Katrina?

How will we save our planet from Islamic extremists and any other religious extremists who want to deny people their rights, based on what they think is right for the world.

And what will we do about good government? How will we hold leaders accountable to their people, even leaders who've been elected? We have an incredibly distinguished panel here to discuss these issues. Of course, President Clinton, whose global initiative this is, and it is being launched today.

We have Bono, the U2 lead singer, rock star, who has made consigning poverty to the dustbin of history, his mission.

We have Queen Rania of Jordan, who is incredibly interested and active in the issue of micro finance, poverty, the equality for women and also about trying to keep the Middle East as part of an active member of the world community.

Paul Wolfowitz used to be deputy defense secretary and now is the head of the World Bank.

Jeffrey Saks, the director of the U.N. Millennium Project, who is involved in trying to eradicate extreme poverty.

And of course, Wangari Maathai, Nobel Peace Prize winner for her work on the environment, and who believes that poverty is inextricably linked with what is happening to our environment.

But who would have thought, as we start this, that it is an issue in the United States that looms so large over today's summit. Hurricane Katrina that exposed the ugly side of poverty in the United States, the desperate side of trying to respond by the federal, local and state government to the needs of their citizens. So, very quickly, I'd like to start first with President Clinton.

You have a global initiative that is designed to try to help the world. But what about trying to eradicate 37 million people living in poverty in the United States, and that number going up?

BILL CLINTON, FMR. PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The unique thing about this conference is we are asking everybody who comes and participates to make a personal commitment to do something in the coming year, in one of these four areas. And we already know that some of them are going to do something about the poverty issue surrounding those who were dislocated by Katrina.

And it showed us that there are an awful lot of poor people living in America. And some of the things have to be addressed by a government policy, but there are a lot of things that can be done by private citizens working on it.

AMANPOUR: I must say, it did shock the world to see Katrina happen and to see the kind of response and to see the most victims were poor black people, dark skinned Americans, standing on their roofs, holding the American flag and saying, "Please help us. The waters are rising."

Mr. Wolfowitz, you are now president of the World Bank. You used to be in the Bush administration. At what point is too little government too little? And at what point does government, whether it be here or around the world, have to respond to the needs of their citizens? PAUL WOLFOWITZ, PRESIDENT, WORLD BANK: Well, I think one of the lessons the whole world should take from Katrina, in fact, not just Katrina, if you think about it in just the last 12 months, we've had two disasters on a scale that nobody really anticipated, Katrina and the tsunami, which happened December, a year ago and in both cases I think we saw that we need to be better prepared and it's not something that individuals can handle at a local level.

It's something, in fact, in the case of the tsunami that required an international response. But it makes a difference. We saw in the tsunami the fact that the U.S. military was able to be delivering water to people within days of that attack -- that catastrophe, meant that people weren't dying of thirst, weren't dying of disease. So speed of response is crucial. And if you don't plan in advance it's very hard to be fast.

AMANPOUR: Let's move onto your initiative and what everybody here is interested in and that is trying to eradicate the worst kind of crippling poverty. The promises that have been made, the commitments that have been made, are they actually going to come to fruition and how do you implement that? What is the solution for stopping nearly a billion people around the world, having to struggle on less than $1 a day?

CLINTON: Well, first of all, let me say, we know a lot more about this than we used to. And we have a lot of examples of things that work. When Bono and I worked on the first big round of debt relief in 2000, it was conditional debt relief. We said to now about 27 countries have qualified, we'll forgive your debt, if but only if you put the money into education, healthcare, or economic development. The response has been extraordinary.

And the debt relief that the G8 just provided at the meeting in Glenn Eagles in Scotland, which was strongly supported by one of our biggest contributors to the conference, Sir Tom Hunter, back here, they know what works now. So, debt relief is a part of this, tied to development.

Wangari works on the environment in a way that ties to development, lifting people out of poverty. Queen Rania has worked in Jordan on a whole lot of things, including micro finance, you talked about and we have the father of it, Mohammad Yunus, behind us here. They know how to do this.

So, the difference in now, I would say, and 1970 when people were talking about this, or even in the '80s and '90s, is we really do know what works. And the question is, as Jeff Saks will tell you, because he's tried to put together a comprehensive village-by-village approach in poor countries is whether we can get enough money to cross the critical threshold, whether it comes from governments or from the private sector.

But I would like all of our listeners to know we actually know how to lift people out of poverty. Most poor people are working. Most poor people are smart. Most poor people have skills. They don't have equal access to capital, education and natural resources. Most of them live in highly depleted environments.

So I can't answer you when all this will happen. All I can tell you is that we're having this conference trying to get people to do very specific things that we know will work.

AMANPOUR: You, Bono, have essentially moved Africa to the top of the agenda, you and people like Bob Geldof and others. Is it working? Have you got the commitments you want? Are people delivering on the promises they make to you face to face?

BONO, U2 LEAD SINGER: I mean, first of all, just talking about the poverty, we're talking about extreme poverty. That's a phrase that we need to understand. Extreme poverty is what is in Louisiana and Mississippi, post-Katrina. Poverty is, you know, we have in America and we have it in Europe. Extreme poverty is what we think in a generation, we can really seriously make a dent on.

And as regards to the G8, you know, there was some significant steps made, very serious promises made, but so far not one African has benefited it has to be said. But promises are very important. I mean, I'm in the checks business. It is not all about cash, but I'm in the checks business. And of course, you know, there's a lifetime between signing the check and cashing the check. We have to make sure they cash the check. And that's part of our job, but you can't cash the check if you don't sign it.

So, I am pleased that President Bush, Blair, Chirac, Schroeder, et cetera, have signed on promised $50 billion. Now the financial mechanisms to allow them to pay for that have not been agreed yet and that's a worry for me.

AMANPOUR: Mr. Wolfowitz, for many, many years the issue of development has been linked to the issue of good government, of trying to get the governments that you're trying to help to be transparent, to be accountable, not to be corrupt. Is it time, do you think, to cut through that debate? Because we face an emergency now of people living in extreme poverty and actually get to those people who really need it without holding their lives and their fate hostage to what their governments will or will not do?

WOLFOWITZ: You know, I think it is very important to keep in mind, as we talk about particularly the situation of Africa, which is desperate that in the last 20 years have probably seen the greatest progress in a couple of centuries in reducing poverty. Hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty, particularly in China, increasingly in India and Latin America, by successful policies by the countries themselves that have produced spectacular economic growth, especially in East Asia.

And the danger, or the tragedy today is the 600 million people in sub-Saharan Africa have been left behind by that progress, and poverty's actually increased in the last ten years.

But I don't think you can cut the tie between development and governance. Absolutely, if you can deliver relief to people who need it, and President Clinton's absolutely right, you meet poor people, they are desperate not primarily for themselves, but to give a better life for their children but if they're trapped in a system where assistance is stolen by officials, it's not going to work.

AMANPOUR: Maathai, let me ask you, since we're talking about Africa, will it work for Africa the very poorest of the poor? Obviously, it's a legitimate aspiration to get good government, accountable government, democratic government hopefully. Will it work, though, linking the kind of eradication of extreme poverty to that, to good governance?

WANGARI MAATHAI, NOBEL PEACE LAUREATE: I'm quite sure it would, because I think that one of the most important statements that the Norwegian Nobel Committee made by giving the prize to an environmentalist and linking that to governance and peace, is to demonstrate how closely the reduction of poverty, or a good quality of life that comes out of good management of our resources is very dependent on leadership.

AMANPOUR: Well, let me ask you, Jeffrey Sachs, you've been actually implementing these Millennium Challenge goals around Africa and other places what have you found? I mean, is it enough to try to help the poorest of the poor by holding their leaders accountable? Of course, many people believe that individuals are responsible for their own economic woes, and if they would just pull up their bootstraps and work a little harder, maybe they could get somewhere. But is that always the case?

JEFFREY SACHS, U.N. MILLENNIUM CHALLENGE PROJECT DIRECTOR: Well, the problem is these people don't have boots, they don't have bootstraps. They can't tighten their belts; they have no belts. They need help. They're trapped in extreme poverty, where they don't have even enough to have enough food to eat in a day, safe drinking water, access to essential health services. So to give a lecture to them isn't going to do anything. And unfortunately we've been beating back, over many, many years now, this idea that it's enough just to tell people something, without helping them.

It's been 20 years of a fight for debt cancellation, because on top of everything else, we've been trying to force these countries to pay back their debts. That's been a long, long struggle. There are practical steps we've known about them for years, how to grow more food, how to fight malaria, AIDS, T.B., how to keep children in school with school meal programs, how to get safe drinking water, how to irrigate arid climates with treadle pumps and small scale irrigation.

These are practical means, measurable, monitorable. You can fight the corruption because you can measure these simple technologies, getting to the people that need them.

BONO: Trade, it's the most remarkable thing. You talk about the fishing rod and the fish; well here we are denying people the fishing rod. And the U.S. and Europe both have protectionist strategies, and so that the poorest of the poor cannot sell to us.

And so in Sunday service people are passing the plate for the poor black babies. Meanwhile, they're not allowed to sell their products and put them on our supermarket shelves, where we flood theirs with our cheap exports.

AMANPOUR: I must say, I was in Ethiopia around the G8, just before and the prime minister there said, look, debt relief is fantastic, aid is fantastic but what's really going to get us out of this hole is trade. So we'll follow up with that.

Queen Rania of Jordan, Jeffrey was talking about, you know, solutions. We can do it. We know what it takes to lift people out of poverty. What are some of the things that are happening in Jordan, amongst for instance the women and the other, you know, individual citizens that you work with?

QUEEN RANIA OF JORDAN: In Jordan, for example, micro credit has been an incredible tool that we've implemented to try to lift people out of poverty. And what's great about this is that people become, they are able to take control of their lives. It's the whole fishing rod thing. People are able to lift themselves out of poverty, to provide for their children, to provide education. And we've seen it being a very important empowering tool for women as well.

We've had repayment rates of about 98 percent, and we've seen women become more active in their societies, have more of a say in their households, even some of them are venturing into politics. So it's been an incredible success for us and a really effective tool.

AMANPOUR: President Clinton, one last question, before we go to a break, on this issue what is the solution? How do you implement promises? How do you spend the money properly? How do you get it where it's most needed? And how do you follow that chain through? For instance, you saw that all the money that was promised to the tsunami you had to go regularly to make sure that it was going to the right places.

CLINTON: Yes, you do have to do that. You have to set up an accountability provision. You know, we have a uniform reporting system now for tsunami aid, so that if you -- a watchdog from the press, you can get on our Web site, you can see every country, every project, the source of the money, the status of it. And it's something that's very important to people like Mr. Wolfowitz, who's putting a lot of money into this. You have to do all that.

But the main thing I want to say is Bono had it right. Once the big countries make a commitment -- keep in mind, the executives make the commitments, but the parliaments have to fund it. And they have to fund it and then you have to figure out how you're going to fund it over how many years and how you're going to implement it.

I don't think enough attention has been paid to implementation. It's one of the things that I was frustrated when I was president, is you're dealing with all these big issues at this level and you can issue all the executive orders you want. But the question is, will things be implemented?

And I guess what -- to go back to what Jeffrey said, to what Queen Rania said, to the work Wangari does, we know how to do this. So the trick is to take all these financial commitments of the government and implement them right and then integrate all the things that the private sector is willing to do.

One of the things I like about my life now is that I can go in and figure out where the systems are broken and fix them. For example, we give AIDS medicine in my foundation now. We sell it to 175,000 people at the lowest prices in the world at a tiny fraction of the cost that it would have cost me when I was president to do it through the American government.

So we need to have this sort of entrepreneurial spirit. One of the reasons I wanted to have this conference is to figure out what we can do, regardless of what governments are doing but the governments need an implementation strategy. And then, since the G8 made the commitment, there ought to be somebody designated from the G8 to drive the thing, to figure out how to implement it.

But to say that we don't know how to do this is crazy. I do agree that trade's a big part of it and you may want to talk about that later. But Jordan, when we did the Jordan trade agreement, they were selling us something like $80 million worth of stuff a year. Now it's a billion. How many jobs is that?

In Africa, when we did the Africa trade bill in 2000, and then President Bush extended it, tiny Lesotho went from 2.2 million people, went from 2,000 to 50,000 jobs in textiles. That's a stunning thing. It's very hard to make up 48,000 jobs in aid. So that is a very important part of this.

WOLFOWITZ: Christiane, just if I could say one thing, too, on what Queen Rania said, I don't think it's a choice between improving governance and increasing assistance. I think you have to have both. But when you talk about improving governance, it's not just governments. It's civil society. It's the things that Gramin Bank has done on their own in Bangladesh or the things that Wangari Maathai -- governance comes at all levels of society.

AMANPOUR: And we're going to talk about that in our next segment. We're going to take a short break but to come back and talk about good governance, what exactly does it mean for the people?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

AMANPOUR: We've been talking about how to eradicate extreme poverty and how to hold governments responsible and accountable to their people. We talked a little bit about corruption, not just the corruption that exists in some governments around the world, but Western corruption, those who actually pay bribes and do similar things in order to get contracts.

Here is a report by CNN's Richard Quest on what goes on in Nigeria, one of the countries that is, in fact, working with the West to try to make things better.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) RICHARD QUEST, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): In (INAUDIBLE), it was the local way of doing business where getting a deal often involved paying off officials, offering bribes, practices which shamed the country.

For businessmen like Morton Huld (ph), a Danish telecoms executive with offices in Nigeria, it was part of the country's business culture.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You can call it a bribe or you can call it a tip or you can call it a commission. Of course it exists but it's a way, it's a culture, it's a culture that needs to change and I think that it is changing.

QUEST: That change began six years ago when President Obisanzo (ph) was elected when his priority was to put a stop to business as usual. The country introduced an anti-corruption commission. Investigations were launched. Prosecutions were brought. Even the chief of police has been charged.

The newspapers here bristle with anti-corruption stories. Everyone is obsessed by the subject. That attention has also been targeted now at the companies doing business who were seen as part of the problem. After all, it takes two to make a bribe, which is why the finance minister in Abuzia (ph) believes business is also to blame.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Fighting this takes time. It's not that overnight, you know, you are going to have everybody behaving properly but you have to send a strong signal. Secondly, those people who are paying those bribes are part and parcel of the problem and, you know, that is what we are saying. Business people should not engage in that because there's a supply and a demand side of corruption.

QUEST: The critics say this is all just noise but only political opponents have actually been targeted and that in reality nothing has changed. You just have to be cleverer about how you offer the cash.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

AMANPOUR: So that's pretty shocking. Wangari, what can the West do, the people of African countries do, since we're talking about Africa now, to stop that kind of corruption?

MAATHAI: It has to be a conscious decision by all of us, especially those of us who are in leadership that we have to deliberately and consciously cite corruption. And it is not fair, as we have seen, to just blame the African leadership.

It is on both sides and I remember when it was introduced in the '60s. It was introduced partly to encourage governments to take up deals and accept arrangements to allow business to take place.

So for me, I have seen it from the top an also at the bottom. It has to be a conscious effort. Just like we are fighting AIDS, we have to fight the cancer that is corruption.

WOLFOWITZ: Christiane, it's absolutely right that there are at least two parties in every corrupt transaction and very often one of them is a company or an entity in a rich country.

And I think there are at least three things the rich countries have to do. One is to set a higher standard. And I think at the World Bank, where I'm now president, we started doing that five or six years ago. And we've got to keep pushing it. You can't just say this is the way it's always been done. We've got to get to a gold standard.

Secondly, I think the laws against bribe giving have got to be strengthened. The United States has a pretty good law but it could be better. A lot of other countries should step up to the plate.

And third, something that is a little bit hopeful, just last week I think, the Swiss government agreed to return almost half a billion dollars that the former dictator Abacha had stolen from Nigeria. This money ends up in banks in developed countries and there's got to be a more vigorous effort to chase it down and return it. That would deter corrupters right there.

AMANPOUR: And yet, in a Nigeria that is now democratic, with a president working with the West, there is still this issue of immunity for many high-level officials. And even though the president has said that must end, it hasn't ended. How do you -- how do you help that along?

WOLFOWITZ: Well, I think that's their responsibility. But I would say one other thing, punishing corrupters is important but I think what we've found even more important is telling people where their money is going.

In Uganda there was an experiment -- not an experiment, a project that showed local school districts how much money they were supposed to be getting. It turned out they were getting 10 percent of what they were supposed to get and as soon they began to publish those numbers the numbers turned around.

BONO: It's called the Poverty Action Fund and it was where they ring-fenced monies, particularly in debt cancellation that we did with President Clinton's administration and you can see where the money is going. And as a result of that improvement there are nearly three times as many children going to school in Uganda now than were five or six years ago.

This just is very real. It's just an important thing because you think all this stuff goes on and on. There's a real, concrete example of what smart strategy and money provide.

CLINTON: But at first, we didn't know what to do, because that was part of the debt relief. They had to do it to get the debt relief. And they overnight doubled enrollment, and now it's tripled, because they could follow the money. And that's what we've tried to do with all this tsunami money. But Wangari's right but I sort of side with Mr. Wolfowitz on this. I think for us to be pointing our fingers at people that have been used to getting this kind of money we look hypocritical unless we have really tough laws. America's got better laws than most rich countries, and ours could be tougher.

BONO: This is actually so critical to what us on the panel are working on because there's an issue of credibility, here. And the United States, you know, it's -- in the list of the 22 wealthiest countries in the world it's at the bottom of the list in terms of per capita giving.

The real reason, in my opinion, is that people in the U.S. don't fundamentally believe that the money is getting to the people. And if we can convince them that it is, that there is transparency, that corruption is being tackled on both sides, I believe the American people and -- will increase aid. I think they're generous in spirit and they want to do this and this is critical.

AMANPOUR: It is actually shocking, Jeff, the low percentage of foreign aid that the American government gives. And I think, talking about the American people, and from what I've talked to the American people, I've learned, they actually think they give more. They think their government gives somewhere in the 15 percent.

CLINTON: They think much more.

AMANPOUR: So a proper education campaign could...

BONO: It's .15 percent.

AMANPOUR: Well right which is tiny.

SACHS: On the corruption can money that we give as help actually reach people that need it? And there I think there's a very simple point that needs to be made. If you give it for specific, monitorable, measurable things, you can track it all the way down,

That's why immunizations work. If you give money for immunizations, you know you're giving money for a drop of polio vaccine, or an injection. If you give money specifically to help to farmers grow more food with improved seeds, or you do malaria bed nets, the specifics are measurable, monitorable, deliverable

AMANPOUR: We talked a little bit about trade and how important it is to open markets to people in the Third World.

BONO: Our markets, rather than theirs.

AMANPOUR: Our markets, yes.

BONO: At the moment, they have to open their markets in order to get -- they used to in order to get loans from the World Bank and the IMF and that was the cruelty of that.

AMANPOUR: And we've also talked -- President Clinton, Queen Rania has talked about individual efforts to step in where governments have failed. And we have, in our audience, in our side panel, here, people such as Muhammad Yunus, who started the whole issue of micro finance; Ted Turner, who was one of the first big civilian philanthropists; and of course Bill Gates, who is not here, but who is now just about a one-man vaccination agency that's really working.

I wanted to ask Muhammad Yunus, hi sir, nice to see you, I wanted to ask, you know, you pioneered this micro finance decades ago and nothing has really sort of come since. What is it that you see that should come since or has it?

MUHAMMAD YUNUS: Oh, a lot of changes have taken place. Lots of development has taken place in the micro finance area, like (INAUDIBLE) bank we lend over $5 million, 96 percent women, lend out over half a billion dollar a year on loans averaging $120.

You talk about corruption when you say corruption almost you give the impression the whole country is corrupt. It is not. Some people in that country might be corrupt. Some officials in that country may be corrupt. People are very honest.

And look at Gramin Bank in Bangladesh, all these half a billion dollar lending that we do there is no legal papers. There is no collateral. It gets paid back 99 percent of the payment. It's based on trust and it works beautifully, not only in Gramin Bank, anybody who has imitated Gramin Bank practices within Bangladesh, outside Bangladesh it works very well.

So, honesty of the people should be highlighted. The fact that society still exists, we have floods, disasters, nobody steals each other's property or each other's things, it works out very well.

So, you have to focus on the things that work and where is the money coming from in Gramin Bank, that half a billion dollars? It comes from the deposits of the borrowers and on borrowers. So, it's not somebody giving the money to them to lend money. So, it's always not the money is the issue. The issue is how do you structure your things.

AMANPOUR: What will it taken then to make what Mr. Yunus says work?

CLINTON: The United States, when I was president, funded about two million micro credit loans a year. I don't know what it is now but we should do more of it. You have to -- in order to have the impact that Muhammad Yunus has had in Bangladesh, if you want to list the per capital income of a country you have to figure out how many you have to do.

The second thing we have to do, I think, is to create the conditions within which banking can occur and lending can occur in every country by having some fairly substantial reforms of the property law.

For example, one of the things that Mr. Wolfowitz and the World Bank are doing and we're doing on the tsunami relief they gave $30 million for us to do a land titling project in Ache in Indonesia because we had land records that had to be restored in the capital.

But out in these little rural villages nobody had any property and, if they don't have a land certificate and title, they couldn't go to the bank and get any credit. So, we can in effect create literally a million mini Gramin Banks if people have any basis on which to start one.

QUEEN RANIA: The challenge now is how much -- how can we give civil society internationally more of a role to play where the government just monitors and regulates but they actually do the work?

And, they have to be held to high standards as well. They have to -- they have to stick to issues of transparency, of self regulation, of fighting corruption as well. But I think more and more as a global world we have to think of how we can give these organizations more of a role to play, a more substantial role.

AMANPOUR: We'll come back with Queen Rania and with you, Wangari Maathai, right after a break where we're going to talk about climate chaos, climate change, whatever you like to call it. How important is it?

And we're also going to talk about religious extremism and how we can combat that right after a break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

AMANPOUR: Welcome back.

To continue our discussion, who knows whether it is global warming that caused Katrina? But many imminent scientists believe that the inevitability of the climate change that's going on means there could be more of these kinds of hurricanes and this kind of devastating damage. This happened in the United States of America. What about the rest of the world?

Wangari Maathai, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for her work on the environment, believes that poverty and governance and all the issues we're talking about are directly related to the environment. How to make that much more of a public debate than it is right now?

MAATHAI: Well, I do believe very strongly that all these issues are interlinked and that the environment is almost like the core and that we have to think very seriously whatever we do the environment must be the central piece.

Because we still are debating and we are still not in agreement, despite what the scientists are telling us, and it would be very unfortunate for us as a human species if we are going to learn through the experience of the devastation that the changes in the weather are bringing to us.

We have seen forests disappearing. We have seen a lot of vegetation disappearing. We have seen rivers drying up and we have been warned that the seas are going to rise. The polar ice is going to melt or it's melting. But somehow, especially our leaders, continue to say we do not have enough evidence.

AMANPOUR: What about it, Jeff Sachs, how to gain, if you like, a critical public mass to demand even more than they are demanding now some kind of action on the environment?

SACHS: I think the key first is to listen to what the science is saying and the science on hurricanes is quite clear. We've already experienced a tremendous increase in the energy of hurricanes in the last 30 years. It's related to the warming of the oceans and that's related to the manmade climate change and there's really no ambiguity about that.

You can't point to a particular storm and say Katrina or some other storm that's a climate change. But what's known from the record all over the world is we're already in the midst of more powerful hurricanes.

Katrina is the third most powerful ever to make landfall in the United States. We're going to see a lot more Katrinas if we don't head off what we are doing and what the scientists are warning.

AMANPOUR: Can I go to one of the true global citizens and founder of CNN, Ted Turner, who you have made the environment and trying to protect it one of the pillars of your foundation and your life's work. What is the solution to making us be serious about it?

TED TURNER, CNN FOUNDER: Well, it's very complex but Jeffrey hit it on the head. We have to -- for a number of reasons we have to move out of the fossil fuel era and into an era of clean renewable, locally produced alternate energy sources, wind, solar, possibly more nuclear.

But we have to stop these CO2 emissions and other emissions going into the atmosphere that are building a blanket -- a blanket over the earth that is reflecting the heat back in -- back into the atmosphere and causing these weather changes.

We're going to have massive crop failures, trees dying, forests dying. It will be the greatest catastrophe the world has ever seen to date and it will affect virtually everybody in the world. We need to get serious about -- about clean, renewable energy.

AMANPOUR: Senator John Glenn, who has also devoted quite a lot of our energies to the environment, Ted Turner mentioned nuclear. That's a buzz word that a lot of people don't like. But many people say that that is the way to the future. It's clean and once you build an extremely expensive nuclear plant it will eventually be cheap as well. Can that pass in the United States?

JOHN GLENN, FORMER U.S. SENATOR: Sure it can. What we have, we have a demand that occurs at 6:00 to 10:00 in the evening, so we have to build new electrical generating plants to take care of that.

I think we can do better if we had better electrical energy storage. We have been negligent in not pushing that so that we can take all the forces of energy that we know, all the forces of nature we know how to convert to electricity and store them so we can bring them back on and maybe not need to build new power plants because our electrical generating capacity in the country right now only operates at about 50 percent on a 24-hour basis.

AMANPOUR: We do have to take another break. When we come back we will continue and also talk about how to combat religious extremism when we come back.

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AMANPOUR: Often one of the biggest obstacles to solutions to environmental pollution are business, as you just heard from Senator Glenn. Many businesses believe that trying to combat this kind of pollution is bad for business and will cost a lot of money.

What can leadership do, Mr. President, to I mean disavow them of that -- of that fact, if in fact it's not bad for business?

CLINTON: Well, that's actually the whole point of what we're doing on climate change here. There's no question it's a disaster waiting to happen that people are in denial. But a lot of business people and political leaders think that no country can get rich, stay rich, get richer without putting more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere because you got to burn more oil and coal to be rich.

It's not true anymore, so what we're trying to do is to show how through clean energy and conservation you can generate more growth and protect the environment.

The most important things that have been done on that recently in America is the statement by Jeffrey Immelt, the chairman of General Electric that that's going to be a profit center for G.E. in America and all across the world clean energy in the future.

AMANPOUR: Can we move on to an extremely troubling development that's been really plaguing our world for the last several years and that is the notion of religious extremism? Sadly, it is right now Islamic extremism that is causing so much difficulty around the world.

So, I want to talk first to Queen Rania about this. What is the solution to this? Where are the moderates? Where are the people who, you know need to stand up within their own countries and in their own environments and basically denounce those who are committed to killing others who don't agree with them?

QUEEN RANIA: Well, first of all, we have to bridge what I like to refer to as the hope gap and that's the difference between people who have a chance of improving their lives and those who have absolutely no chance and we have to work at this at many levels.

First of all, children, children are born without any old scores to settle, without any prejudice or preconceived notions and so it's very important for us to really focus on the kind of education that they receive, to expand their horizons so that they're no longer vulnerable to people who want to preach hatred and anger towards them.

Mothers are very important because mothers influence their children, so a well-educated mother can make sure that she shields her children from those kinds of ideas.

At the second level, I think leaders have a very important role to play, whether it's leaders of countries, government, religious leaders, leaders in civil society. They all have to speak out and be proactive and say that this is wrong.

In Jordan we've done that. A year ago my husband had issued what has become known as (INAUDIBLE) message and that was a message in which he directly wanted to remind people of the basic values and tenants of Islam, a religion of moderation, equality, respect for human life.

We held a conference in July where we brought the leaders from all eight Muslim schools of thought and they unanimously condemned religiously motivated violence.

AMANPOUR: You mentioned education. Let me ask you, Mr. Wolfowitz, in terms of helping countries with the whole issue of education I wish President Musharraf was here. He's not at this panel but he has promised many times to close down the Madrassas in Pakistan, which basically many of them are breeding, you know, tons of little terrorists.

Even if he wanted to close them down where is the money for alternative education for those people who want to put their kids in some kind of education? Do we in the west bear some responsibility to really addressing that issue? Can the World Bank make any difference there?

WOLFOWITZ: I think we can. I think we are actually and I think it's true. The implication of your question is closing down Madrassas is not nearly as important as opening schools that will draw kids away.

And, in the state of Punjab in Pakistan, where I just visited, the government there, the state government, did an incredible job of increasing their own education budget by 20 percent and President Clinton knows how hard it is -- I mean you've got to take it from other parts of your budget.

It was impressive and then the World Bank topped that up by about another 15 percent on top and the result has been a huge increase in girls' enrollment, huge reduction in dropout rates, really measurable. And, Jeffrey's right, you need to measure measurable results in education.

QUEEN RANIA: And education is only the half of it. Once we give our children the tools to succeed we have to also give them the hope to find a good job and to improve their lives.

For example, in our region, the Middle East and North Africa region, we have to create about 100 million jobs in the next ten years and this can be viewed as either a demographic challenge or an opportunity.

If they have the right skills and they have the ability to find good jobs, then you can unleash great potential and harness that energy and productivity to really improve our -- our part of the world.

AMANPOUR: Can I just bring in a member of our audience, Imam Feisal of New York? What about free speech? We in the west, the democratic nations, hold free speech to be very, very dear.

But what about when it comes to inciting violence, inciting murder, inciting the kind of hatred that we've heard sadly right now the bulk of it coming from the Islamic world, although it happens in the Hindu extremism, in Jewish extremism, American Christian extremism with Pat Robertson, you know, calling for the assassination of a world leader.

How do you close down that kind of terrible public rhetoric and can we do it and will the Muslim world accept sort of like a name and shame program? Let's say a U.N. report that puts those people who say that kind of thing at the top of a list?

IMAM FEISAL ABDUL RAUF: Oh, absolutely. In fact, Queen Rania just pointed out to the (INAUDIBLE) conference which I attended in July in which over 180 of the greatest and most notable Muslim scholars from around the world attended to agree on a set of principles and unfortunately which was not very much advertised in the media. I mean it was not much known in the western world.

And, as I mentioned to Paul Wolfowitz last year, it is one of the challenges that is facing the nature of the discourse between the western world and Islamic world is that we in the west do not acknowledge the role of religion in a public square as much.

Religion is a very powerful motivating factor and for Muslims it is a dominant motivating factor. It is, in fact, a fundamental constitution of life, if you will. And, therefore what we need to do is to deploy -- deploy religion for positive improvement.

AMANPOUR: We are coming sadly to the end of our hour. We thank you all for your incredible contributions. We could go on and on and on about these subjects which are so important.

You have invited people here, Mr. President, not just to talk but to, as they say, here walk the walk, to deliver and if they're not going to deliver, then they're not welcome guests. What do you want to come away with?

CLINTON: The whole purpose of this conference is so they can hear people, like our wonderful panelists here, and then when they leave they actually have to say in the next year I will do this and we're going to check. We're going to get a report. We're going to tell the world what they did. And, I figure if we do this for ten years, as the U.N. opens every year, maybe we can play a small role in making things better. I think we can.

BONO: Can I just say one thing just on that? That's activism, being active, being involved and what's great about this kind of thing is it's not just a talk and shop. We've all been to them and some of us talk a little too much but I think -- I think it's the actions that will make it memorable.

AMANPOUR: Well, certainly none of you have talked too much. We could go on talking. We thank our wonderful panel, our side panel of experts and leaders in their fields who have contributed, our audience and, of course, our viewers.

They say that our generation can do it. We can make a difference. The question is will we?

Goodnight and good luck. Thank you.

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