At Davos: Citizenship, Apostasy and $100 Laptops

I was sitting in a session at Davos idly doing e-mail when I suddenly slapped my laptop closed and listened, amazed. Nestle CEO Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, on stage, was asserting that global warming doesn't much matter, that Al Gore deliberately omitted contradictory information from his movie "An Inconvenient Truth," and that the world would be better off using money it is spending to comply with the Kyoto Protocol to improve water supplies.

That evening at a party I ran into venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, now investing in clean-energy start-ups. What did he think of Brabeck-Letmathe's comments, I asked? "He should see his proctologist to find his head," said Khosla, "and you can quote me."

So it goes at the World Economic Forum, where the world's leading expert on any subject may end up sitting next to you at lunch, and everyone's got an opinion on everything. This year's Davos swarmed with energy and climate gurus. Brabeck-Letmathe's ill-considered remarks were especially noteworthy because the 2500 attendees - including corporate chieftains -seemed to have reached near-universal consensus that global warming is real and businesses and governments must thus change their behavior.

The company in Davos is dazzling, even to one of the most worldly and influential environmentalists. I was sitting on a sofa interviewing Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, when Environmental Defense President Fred Krupp stopped by to say hello. Krupp was instrumental in orchestrating the big announcement a couple weeks ago when GE, BP and a number of other corporate giants announced a plan to help combat climate change.

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