Politics and the Planet
Political Quarterly Commentary
Vol 83 No 4, October-December 2012
In the midst of the Eurocrisis, double-dip recession, coalition divisions and a US presidential election (not to mention the Olympics and Paralympics), readers might be forgiven if they failed to notice that this summer also saw a slew of shocking new warnings about the state of the global environment.
The melting of Arctic sea ice to its lowest ever levels – continuing a consistent trend over the last decade – has shown beyond reasonable doubt that climate change is not a possible future phenomenon but an actual present one. The worst drought in the United States for 60 years, which has destroyed nearly half the corn crop and a third of the soya bean crop, has helped pushed food prices up 50 per cent since June: the UN is now preparing for another global food crisis just five years after the last price shock led to hunger on a mass scale in 2008. The increasing scarcity of water due to rising demand and long-term changes to rainfall patterns led scientists this summer to predict that current patterns of meat-intensive food production would no longer be possible within a couple of decades. Meanwhile global oil and commodity prices, notwithstanding occasional fluctuations, continue their extraordinary secular rise which has wiped out in a mere decade the 100-year declining price trend on which the 20th century’s economic growth was founded. (Rising commodity prices are a major if barely remarked-upon contributor to the current economic downturn.) In a sober, and sobering, assessment of the overall condition of the planet, leading earth scientists convened by Johan Rockström of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, publishing in Nature, conclude that of nine ‘planetary boundaries’ which provide a ‘safe operating space for humanity’, half have now been breached, threatening dangerous tipping points in ecological and biochemical systems.
Now it might be said that, like the poor, the environmental crisis is always with us. Reports of looming catastrophe have been published at regular intervals for at least four decades. It is hardly surprising that getting politicians to take notice of them is difficult in the face of so many more immediate anxieties. But this is precisely what makes this summer’s developments so particularly depressing. The leaders of the world’s governments were compelled to acknowledge the environmental crisis: over a hundred of them gathered at a three-day UN conference for that very purpose in Rio de Janeiro in June. The ‘Rio + 20’ Summit, two decades after the original Earth Summit of 1992, was presented with a report by the UN Secretary General which adopted the ‘planetary boundaries’ framework and proposed a series of urgent practical actions to constrain further environmental damage. But the leaders did absolutely nothing. Not even going through the pretence of engaging in direct talks with one another, they turned up, made set-piece speeches, and signed a declaration of platitudes from which all practical commitments had been removed in deeply cynical pre-conference negotiations. The attitude of developed country leaders could not have been clearer: President Obama, Chancellor Merkel and David Cameron didn’t even bother to attend.
If you missed this extraordinary failure of global leadership, it may have been because it was matched only by the failure of most of the media to report it. Compared with the huge publicity generated by the 1987 Brundtland Report (which introduced the concept of ‘sustainable development’) and the groundbreaking new treaties (on climate change, forests and biodiversity) established at the subsequent 1992 Summit, this once-in-a-generation opportunity for global leaders to agree collaborative solutions to global environmental problems passed by with barely a glance.
It is difficult to escape the conclusion that our societies are in a state of denial. Some of this is active: in the US and UK climate change ‘sceptics’ are now engaged in a systematic campaign of scientific obfuscation designed to confuse the public and to promote the interests of the fossil fuel industries who fund them. But mostly it is a sin of omission: given no intellectual framework by dominant economic theory to understand our dependence on the biophysical functions of the natural environment, and in a political climate focused relentlessly on the short term, our media and governments seem unable to attend to worsening environmental trends with the seriousness they demand.
This is not somehow to think that politicians should stop being preoccupied with more immediate political and economic issues. The environment is not the highest priority of voters, particularly in times of economic crisis. But governments have to multi-task, and their purpose, at least in democracies, is to advance the wellbeing of their societies through collective action. If securing the very basis of a habitable planet is beyond their ability even to address, it suggests a troubling inadequacy in our political institutions and culture.
Governments are not being asked to embrace a radical overthrow of capitalism or industrialised society. Over the last two decades the environmental movement has largely abandoned the ‘deep green’ philosophy with which it was associated in the 1960s and 70s. As understanding of environmental issues has become mainstream, and green technologies more advanced, environmentalists have mostly become advocates of pragmatic policy solutions implementable by governments of both left and right. Even the old canard of opposition to economic growth has been widely eschewed: the concept of ‘green growth’, in which investment in resource efficiency and low carbon technologies can help stimulate new industries and generate increasing wealth while reducing environmental damage, is now promoted by bodies as mainstream as the World Bank and OECD. Indeed, economists in this field, as well as the large and growing sector of environmental and low carbon businesses, now argue that environmental policy and spending could provide a major stimulus to help the UK and European economies out of recession.
Yet while China is (notably) using environmental policy in precisely this way, the British Government, and the Eurozone, continue to resist; and the mild stimulatory efforts of the Obama government are relentlessly attacked by orthodox economic voices such as the Wall Street Journal. The reasons are not difficult to find. Environmental policy improves future prosperity and security, but frequently raises costs and prices in the short term, and the short-term has much greater political salience than the long. It challenges hugely powerful vested interests, particularly in the fossil fuel industries and other pollution-intensive sectors. And it requires international collaboration to overcome the intrinsically trans-boundary nature of many environmental problems.
The difficulty of prioritising long-term collective benefit over short-term private cost poses a particular challenge to politics which is not confined to the environmental field. It can be seen in other policy areas such as pensions, higher education, science funding and long-term care of the elderly. Part of the solution may lie in institutional reform: in recent years a number of proposals have been made for commissioners, committees of parliament or standing bodies which might better articulate the needs of future generations and ensure that their proxy voice is heard in present decision-making. These deserve proper debate. But this must also be a question of political culture: a willingness of both politicians and public to forgo the temptations of instant gratification and give considered political priority to the long view. It is not impossible: it is the normal register in which debates over defence spending are held.
In this process cross-party consensus on long-term policy is hugely desirable. It makes it harder for opportunistic politicians to offer voters the easy short-term option, and easier to take on powerful vested interests. Interestingly, there was effective cross-party consensus on climate change in Britain from around 2006-11. Responding both to the scientific and economic evidence and to public anxiety about it, all the major political parties adopted pro-climate policies. All supported the pioneering 2008 Climate Change Act, which put stringent emission reduction targets for 2020 and 2050 into law, and all committed to an overhaul of the UK’s energy system to give much greater priority to energy efficiency and renewables (and to a lesser extent nuclear). It is therefore particularly alarming that this consensus has now broken down, with the right wing of the Conservative Party openly in revolt against low carbon energy policy, and George Osborne actively undermining it in the Treasury. David Cameron’s September reshuffle, promoting two avowed opponents of low carbon energy to the energy and environment ministries, appears to sound the death-knell for his early ambition to lead ‘the greenest government ever.’ It will exacerbate the policy uncertainty of recent months which has already blighted much-needed energy investment.
Meanwhile at global level the growing evidence of a ‘perfect storm’ of climate change, food and water insecurity, resource scarcity and population growth makes concerted international collaboration more imperative than ever. It can be done: the 1987 Montreal Protocol on protection of the ozone layer, and the three treaties arising from the 1992 Earth Summit, show that with sufficient political leadership, international law and co-operation can be instruments of environmental progress. But the critical ingredient is leadership: in international affairs there is no self-sustaining progressive momentum. If the richest and most powerful nations do not take the initiative, the world is condemned to sleepwalk into disaster in the manner we are witnessing today. And it is always the poorest and most vulnerable who suffer the consequences.
This issue of The Political Quarterly includes a special symposium ‘In Defence of Politics’, edited by Matthew Flinders and Cathy Gormley-Heenan. The title, in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the best-selling book by our former editor Bernard Crick, reflects a stance this journal will always take: politics is the only means by which democratic societies can tackle the collective issues which confront them. But that stance sets us a challenge too. There cannot be issues which our political system effectively treats as ‘too difficult to deal with’, simply because of their scale and complexity and greatest impact on future generations. A number of scientists and political philosophers have questioned whether democratic political systems can ever properly address environmental problems precisely because of this. It is vital that they are not proved right.
Vol 83 No 4, October-December 2012
In the midst of the Eurocrisis, double-dip recession, coalition divisions and a US presidential election (not to mention the Olympics and Paralympics), readers might be forgiven if they failed to notice that this summer also saw a slew of shocking new warnings about the state of the global environment.
The melting of Arctic sea ice to its lowest ever levels – continuing a consistent trend over the last decade – has shown beyond reasonable doubt that climate change is not a possible future phenomenon but an actual present one. The worst drought in the United States for 60 years, which has destroyed nearly half the corn crop and a third of the soya bean crop, has helped pushed food prices up 50 per cent since June: the UN is now preparing for another global food crisis just five years after the last price shock led to hunger on a mass scale in 2008. The increasing scarcity of water due to rising demand and long-term changes to rainfall patterns led scientists this summer to predict that current patterns of meat-intensive food production would no longer be possible within a couple of decades. Meanwhile global oil and commodity prices, notwithstanding occasional fluctuations, continue their extraordinary secular rise which has wiped out in a mere decade the 100-year declining price trend on which the 20th century’s economic growth was founded. (Rising commodity prices are a major if barely remarked-upon contributor to the current economic downturn.) In a sober, and sobering, assessment of the overall condition of the planet, leading earth scientists convened by Johan Rockström of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, publishing in Nature, conclude that of nine ‘planetary boundaries’ which provide a ‘safe operating space for humanity’, half have now been breached, threatening dangerous tipping points in ecological and biochemical systems.
Now it might be said that, like the poor, the environmental crisis is always with us. Reports of looming catastrophe have been published at regular intervals for at least four decades. It is hardly surprising that getting politicians to take notice of them is difficult in the face of so many more immediate anxieties. But this is precisely what makes this summer’s developments so particularly depressing. The leaders of the world’s governments were compelled to acknowledge the environmental crisis: over a hundred of them gathered at a three-day UN conference for that very purpose in Rio de Janeiro in June. The ‘Rio + 20’ Summit, two decades after the original Earth Summit of 1992, was presented with a report by the UN Secretary General which adopted the ‘planetary boundaries’ framework and proposed a series of urgent practical actions to constrain further environmental damage. But the leaders did absolutely nothing. Not even going through the pretence of engaging in direct talks with one another, they turned up, made set-piece speeches, and signed a declaration of platitudes from which all practical commitments had been removed in deeply cynical pre-conference negotiations. The attitude of developed country leaders could not have been clearer: President Obama, Chancellor Merkel and David Cameron didn’t even bother to attend.
If you missed this extraordinary failure of global leadership, it may have been because it was matched only by the failure of most of the media to report it. Compared with the huge publicity generated by the 1987 Brundtland Report (which introduced the concept of ‘sustainable development’) and the groundbreaking new treaties (on climate change, forests and biodiversity) established at the subsequent 1992 Summit, this once-in-a-generation opportunity for global leaders to agree collaborative solutions to global environmental problems passed by with barely a glance.
It is difficult to escape the conclusion that our societies are in a state of denial. Some of this is active: in the US and UK climate change ‘sceptics’ are now engaged in a systematic campaign of scientific obfuscation designed to confuse the public and to promote the interests of the fossil fuel industries who fund them. But mostly it is a sin of omission: given no intellectual framework by dominant economic theory to understand our dependence on the biophysical functions of the natural environment, and in a political climate focused relentlessly on the short term, our media and governments seem unable to attend to worsening environmental trends with the seriousness they demand.
This is not somehow to think that politicians should stop being preoccupied with more immediate political and economic issues. The environment is not the highest priority of voters, particularly in times of economic crisis. But governments have to multi-task, and their purpose, at least in democracies, is to advance the wellbeing of their societies through collective action. If securing the very basis of a habitable planet is beyond their ability even to address, it suggests a troubling inadequacy in our political institutions and culture.
Governments are not being asked to embrace a radical overthrow of capitalism or industrialised society. Over the last two decades the environmental movement has largely abandoned the ‘deep green’ philosophy with which it was associated in the 1960s and 70s. As understanding of environmental issues has become mainstream, and green technologies more advanced, environmentalists have mostly become advocates of pragmatic policy solutions implementable by governments of both left and right. Even the old canard of opposition to economic growth has been widely eschewed: the concept of ‘green growth’, in which investment in resource efficiency and low carbon technologies can help stimulate new industries and generate increasing wealth while reducing environmental damage, is now promoted by bodies as mainstream as the World Bank and OECD. Indeed, economists in this field, as well as the large and growing sector of environmental and low carbon businesses, now argue that environmental policy and spending could provide a major stimulus to help the UK and European economies out of recession.
Yet while China is (notably) using environmental policy in precisely this way, the British Government, and the Eurozone, continue to resist; and the mild stimulatory efforts of the Obama government are relentlessly attacked by orthodox economic voices such as the Wall Street Journal. The reasons are not difficult to find. Environmental policy improves future prosperity and security, but frequently raises costs and prices in the short term, and the short-term has much greater political salience than the long. It challenges hugely powerful vested interests, particularly in the fossil fuel industries and other pollution-intensive sectors. And it requires international collaboration to overcome the intrinsically trans-boundary nature of many environmental problems.
The difficulty of prioritising long-term collective benefit over short-term private cost poses a particular challenge to politics which is not confined to the environmental field. It can be seen in other policy areas such as pensions, higher education, science funding and long-term care of the elderly. Part of the solution may lie in institutional reform: in recent years a number of proposals have been made for commissioners, committees of parliament or standing bodies which might better articulate the needs of future generations and ensure that their proxy voice is heard in present decision-making. These deserve proper debate. But this must also be a question of political culture: a willingness of both politicians and public to forgo the temptations of instant gratification and give considered political priority to the long view. It is not impossible: it is the normal register in which debates over defence spending are held.
In this process cross-party consensus on long-term policy is hugely desirable. It makes it harder for opportunistic politicians to offer voters the easy short-term option, and easier to take on powerful vested interests. Interestingly, there was effective cross-party consensus on climate change in Britain from around 2006-11. Responding both to the scientific and economic evidence and to public anxiety about it, all the major political parties adopted pro-climate policies. All supported the pioneering 2008 Climate Change Act, which put stringent emission reduction targets for 2020 and 2050 into law, and all committed to an overhaul of the UK’s energy system to give much greater priority to energy efficiency and renewables (and to a lesser extent nuclear). It is therefore particularly alarming that this consensus has now broken down, with the right wing of the Conservative Party openly in revolt against low carbon energy policy, and George Osborne actively undermining it in the Treasury. David Cameron’s September reshuffle, promoting two avowed opponents of low carbon energy to the energy and environment ministries, appears to sound the death-knell for his early ambition to lead ‘the greenest government ever.’ It will exacerbate the policy uncertainty of recent months which has already blighted much-needed energy investment.
Meanwhile at global level the growing evidence of a ‘perfect storm’ of climate change, food and water insecurity, resource scarcity and population growth makes concerted international collaboration more imperative than ever. It can be done: the 1987 Montreal Protocol on protection of the ozone layer, and the three treaties arising from the 1992 Earth Summit, show that with sufficient political leadership, international law and co-operation can be instruments of environmental progress. But the critical ingredient is leadership: in international affairs there is no self-sustaining progressive momentum. If the richest and most powerful nations do not take the initiative, the world is condemned to sleepwalk into disaster in the manner we are witnessing today. And it is always the poorest and most vulnerable who suffer the consequences.
This issue of The Political Quarterly includes a special symposium ‘In Defence of Politics’, edited by Matthew Flinders and Cathy Gormley-Heenan. The title, in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the best-selling book by our former editor Bernard Crick, reflects a stance this journal will always take: politics is the only means by which democratic societies can tackle the collective issues which confront them. But that stance sets us a challenge too. There cannot be issues which our political system effectively treats as ‘too difficult to deal with’, simply because of their scale and complexity and greatest impact on future generations. A number of scientists and political philosophers have questioned whether democratic political systems can ever properly address environmental problems precisely because of this. It is vital that they are not proved right.
