Success Quote by Maurice Strong

A businessman’s skepticism lands harder when it’s aimed at the very machinery he helped build. Maurice Strong isn’t dismissing international conferences as useless; he’s demoting them from savior to tool. “They do have a use” concedes the diplomatic necessity: convening, signaling priorities, producing frameworks, giving bureaucracies something to operationalize. Then comes the gut-punch: “never believe” is a warning against a particular modern addiction - the fantasy that a summit, a photo line, and a communiqué can substitute for power, enforcement, and sacrifice.

The subtext is about incentives. Conferences are designed to create agreement at the speed of the slowest participant. Environmental collapse moves faster than that. Strong, who was central to shaping global environmental governance (from Stockholm to Rio), knew how easily “process” becomes a kind of moral laundering: leaders look responsible without making decisions that anger voters, donors, or industries. The phrase “suddenly solve” targets the media-cycle craving for breakthrough moments, as if planetary systems respond to press conferences.

Context matters: the late-20th-century rise of environmental diplomacy produced real milestones, but also a pattern of lofty commitments followed by domestic backsliding. Strong is effectively saying: judge conferences by what they enable afterward - laws, budgets, standards, enforcement, technology shifts - not by the drama of consensus in a room. It’s a realist’s plea for impatience: treat summits as scaffolding, not the building.