Bill Clinton: “If I might just interject. I don't know the answer to this, but I've spent a lot of time thinking about it. This woman…”

“If I might just interject. I don't know the answer to this, but I've spent a lot of time thinking about it. This woman, Ms. Bryce, she works, and she's talked about she works in sustainable development. A big problem in poor countries, they totally destroy the environment to try to develop, and then they don't have anything upon which to develop. The biggest problem in our hemisphere is Haiti. If you fly over the island of Hispaniola, you know when you're going from the Dominican Republic to Haiti, because in all the years when it was governed by dictatorships, they just tore down all the trees and--if any of you know anything about it, know this. The real question is--we used to have certain assumptions about development in a poor country: that if you wanted ever to build a middle class life for a substantial number of the people, yet have X amount of electric generating capacity, you had to have Y number of roads, and you had to have Z number of manufacturing companies, no matter what they did to greenhouse gases, and that eventually you get around to building schools and universal education, and then 30 or 40 years later you start letting the girls go to school with the boys and there is this sort of thing that would happen. I do believe that the question, the real question is if you're running a country like this, should you put this sort of infrastructure development first? That is assuming you've got a base level of electricity necessary to run a system. Should you do this first because this gives you the possibility to skip a whole generation of development that would otherwise take 30 years in the economy and in education? And I think the answer to that, at least, is, maybe--at least, is, maybe. That I think is really the question that this woman is asking. [The discussion continued.]”