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Global Citizenship- Opportunities for Change

by Peadar Kirby, Professor of International Politics and Public Policy, University of Limerick.

This is the introduction to  week 9  of the Powerdown Toolkit 10-week community learning course created by the Cultivate Center in Dublin. It has an accompanying TV show with a 30-minute episode accompanying each week of the course, soon to be aired on Dublin Community TV.

On sale Now! The Powerdown TV show featuring the 10 TV shows to accompany the introductions serialized here on zone5 over the past few weeks, with interviews with Rob Hopkins, Richard Douthwaite, Megan Quinn, Peader Kirby and many others.

The twin challenges of climate change and peak oil also pose a fundamental question mark over the sorts of societies we have created, firstly in Europe and now worldwide. Since the Industrial Revolution over 200 years ago, our economic system and our ways of living have come to depend on the ever more intensive use of fossil fuels to drive the machines on which our societies depended.

Firstly it was the combination of coal with the steam engine and for over 100 years it has been the application of oil to the internal combustion engine. This combination of energy and technology has powered our production of goods, our mobility and much of our lifestyle.

It was based on two assumptions:

1)    There was a limitless availability of the fossil fuels;

2)    The ever more intense use of these fuels caused no damage to our environment.

Our societies have lived in denial of these two issues despite the fact that since the 1950s warning bells have been sounded by scientists that oil was going to peak within decades and, more recently, growing concern at the damage greenhouse gases, released by the fossil fuels we use, were having on our environment.

For example, in 1972 a group of eminent scientists, educators, economists, humanists, industrialists and civil servants published the ground-breaking report Limits to Growth warning that the post-war rate of economic expansion and population growth could not be sustained without widespread poverty and famine, the exhaustion of global natural resources and irreparable environmental damage. More energy was devoted to rubbishing the report than to hearing its warning message.

Indeed, over recent decades, instead of facing these challenges we have intensified our unsustainable practices and, more and more, they are being copied by countries around the world which aspire to the living standards of the rich West. Integrated into this system in colonial times, what we have seen over recent decades is that various ‘developing’ countries, some like China, India and Brazil with large populations, have successfully copied the Western model of ‘free markets’ to stimulate ever more intense growth through the use of fossil fuels. The digital revolution of the 1980s allowed the integration of a global market, marking a further stage in unsustainable practices as more and more people came to depend on the transport of their everyday foods and clothing from distant parts of the world.

Thus the final globalisation of this model coincides with its end point. Belatedly, we are having to wake up to the fact that this model of industrial society will either destroy us all or must be fundamentally changed. We are on the cusp of a social revolution more fundamental than anything we have seen in the 19th or 20th centuries.

Response

By and large, the response of our political and economic systems has been to deny the huge problems staring us in the face. Despite the activities of environmental NGOs such a Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and others, the environmental issue was marginalised for decades. Business leaders resisted any curbs on their activities that might affect their profits and most political leaders lacked the courage and vision to take the issue seriously.

Indeed, some CEOs of major corporations have been more farseeing than most political leaders in recognising the crisis as an economic opportunity and developing ‘green’ technologies and ‘green’ goods and services. On the political front, the United Nations took the lead in convening the first global summits on the environment, in Stockholm in 1972 and in Rio in 1992, the so-called Earth Summit. In between, the World Commission on Environment and Development, published its report, the Brundtland Report, in 1987.

These events marked the emergence of sustainability as an issue of international politics and led to the establishment of an infrastructure for negotiating these issues. In 1988, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established not just as a group of the world’s most eminent scientists on the subject but also with government representatives who debated the findings before they were published.

It was the four IPCC reports published in 2007 that finally established beyond any reasonable doubt the overwhelming scientific consensus that global warming is largely caused by human activities (recognised by the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the IPCC that year). The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, agreed at Rio, came into force in 1994 and established a regular series of global summits, called the Conference of the Parties (COPs).

A Climate Secretariat with its headquarters in Bonn, Germany, was also established to supervise adherence to the norms and rules established at these global gatherings; it collects annual reports from states and its Compliance Committee scrutinises them and can impose sanctions. It is this process that led to the negotiation of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, establishing for the first time the specific target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 5.2%-7% below 1990 levels by 2012.

It may have been well below the 60% cut called for by the IPCC but its importance is that it has established a global political regime to begin addressing the environmental crisis. Despite the decision of the Bush administration in the US not to ratify Kyoto, it finally came into force in 2005 when Russia ratified it. Kyoto also established a regime for trading carbon emissions so that countries that exceeded their targets could ‘buy’ credits from countries whose emissions came to less than their targets (mostly poor underdeveloped countries). This has had the effect of giving countries like Ireland a way to avoid making much effort to meet its targets.

Governments around the world are now having to take the issue more seriously as cutting carbon emissions is forcing itself to the top of the international political agenda whether politicians like it or not. The EU has taken a lead in arguing for between 20-30% cuts by 2020 and negotiations for a successor to Kyoto were begun at the Bali COP in December 2007; these are due to be completed at Copenhagen in December 2009.

The scientific consensus now established beyond doubt is that global warming must not be allowed to get beyond 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels since anything more would threaten catastrophic climate change, environmental destruction and rises in sea levels inundating major world cities and putting whole countries below the sea. Remaining within these limits will require the most swinging cuts to carbon emissions – 80% globally by 2050 at the very least. Never before in the history of the world has so much hung on the outcome to these negotiations.

Barriers

Undoubtedly the greatest barrier to the social revolution now being demanded of us is the attachment of our societies to a model of limitless growth. Our political and business leaders can see no other way of organising our societies than on the basis of economic growth, namely producing ever more goods and services year after year, whether consumers really want them or not (not that we are given any choice in the matter as one of the most lucrative global industries is the advertising industry, designed to persuade us that we need all that is produced). Thus a fundamental contradiction is set up between economic growth on the one hand and sustainable living on the other.

This is reinforced by the assumptions underlying our mainstream economics, which the vast majority of economists share as they are taught these as fundamental tenets of their so-called ‘science’. This is a quasi-religious belief in the ‘free market’ to organise our economic life, a belief that government actions interfere with the efficient workings of the market, and labeling as ‘externalities’ elements such as environmental destruction so that they are not factored into the costs of production and consumption. Fundamentally, the ‘science’ of neo-classical economics equates progress with economic growth and allows no other way of conceiving of social change.

Furthermore, extremely powerful lobbies exist to try to persuade us that global warming is not really the problem it is being made out to be. George Monbiot calls it the ‘denial industry’ made up of a large number of NGOs, with names like the Centre for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, the National Environmental Policy Institute, the American Council on Science and Health, Science and Environmental Policy Project, and Global Climate Coalition to make them appear authoritative and independent. Funded by the oil and car industries, they have been responsible for casting doubt on the scientific consensus on climate change and for influencing negotiations through lobbying delegations and providing them with ‘disinformation’.

Opportunities

Yet, despite all the powerful forces ranged against the sort of fundamental change that is now unavoidable if we are to survive, this challenge also offers us many positive opportunities to fashion a better world for everyone. In particular, it offers the best opportunity for us in the rich West to pay back the environmental and social debts we owe the peoples of the global South many times over.

Not only is our rich lifestyle lived at their expense but, in living it, we are causing climate changes the effects of which are much more catastrophic for their countries that for ours. In being forced to reduce our carbon emissions, we again need to learn the ability to live in balance with the earth. This will help us value those indigenous peoples and cultures which have kept alive the skills and consciousness to live with a great reverence for the natural world. Having sought to exterminate them for hundreds of years, the new situation we are in forces us to realise belatedly the essential importance of the values they have, with great difficulty, tried to keep alive.

And the challenge of sustainable living is even influencing approaches to economics. For decades, economists like Herman Daly, were seen as eccentrics. Daly has promoted a ‘steady-state economics’ in which we will bring economic growth to an end for those countries that have reached a standard of living that can meet their citizens’ basic needs, and allow growth for only a limited period for those countries which have yet to reach that situation. He argues that an obsession with growth has distracted attention from the more pressing issue of distributing more fairly the fruits of that growth.

So one great opportunity of the crisis now upon us is to begin addressing seriously the challenge of distributing far more fairly the benefits of technological progress.

Readings

United Nations Development Programme (UNDP): Human Development Report 2007/2008: Fighting Climate Change: Human solidarity in a divided world, Palgrave Macmillan for the UNDP, 2007

Naomi Klein: The Shock Doctrine, Penguin, 2007

Seán McDonagh: Climate Change: The challenge to all of us, Columba Press, 2006.

Clive Ponting: A New Green History of the World, Vintage Books, 2007.

Jared Diamond: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive, Penguin, 2006

Peadar Kirby: Vulnerability and Violence: The Impact of Globalisation, Pluto Press, 2006

David Cromwell and Mark Levine, eds: Surviving Climate Change: The Struggle to Avert Global Catastrophe, Pluto Press, 2007

Timothy Doyle and Doug McEachern: Environment and Politics, Routledge, 2007

Jacob Park, Ken Conca and Matthias Finger, eds: The Crisis of Global Environmental Governance, Routledge, 2008