The Age of Global Warming: A History (15 page)

10

Pupation

Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?

Edward Lorenz, 1979

Before reaching their adult form, holometabolous insects such as butterflies undergo a complete metamorphosis. When they hatch, they are very different from the adult. Inside are the rudiments of the adult together with small blobs of tissue called imaginal disks. When the larva has grown enough, it stops moving to form a protective cocoon. The larva pupates and the imaginal disks grow into adult structures. What was a caterpillar becomes a butterfly.

In the decade and a half after the Stockholm conference, environmentalism underwent a form of pupation. It lost some features and gained others. Over time, the crusade against economic growth was replaced by talk of sustainable development and green growth. Environmentalists thought the sudden disappearance of growth was desirable. It took time for environmentalists to adapt to the new environment.

In 1974, the Club of Rome produced a sequel to
The Limits of Growth
. In some ways
Mankind at the Turning Point
was even more extreme. It too claimed to be a scientifically conducted assessment based on computer models. Mankind’s ‘crisis’ was defined as two widening gaps, between man and nature and between North and South. ‘Both gaps must be narrowed if world-shattering catastrophes are to be avoided,’ although the book did not explain how a computer could measure the gap between man and nature.
[1]
Nonetheless, the authors argued that scientists had every right to make recommendations based on their subjective judgements, otherwise scientists would be barred from discussion of mankind’s future, leaving the arena to those more ignorant about the world’s future course.
[2]

Nearly four decades later, the hypothesis that scientists can see the future better than non-scientists can be tested. Comparing economic growth to cancer, the authors, Mihaljo Mesarovic, a professor of systems engineering, and Eduard Pestel, a professor of mechanics, predicted a series of regional catastrophes.
*
In the early 1980s, South Asia would be hit by a catastrophe which would peak around 2010. ‘There is no historical precedent for this kind of slow destruction – the massive, agonising reduction of the population of an entire world region once inhabited by several billion people.’
[3]
  Indeed.

Climate change was an additional threat. The continuous increase in carbon dioxide would lead to a rise in global temperatures, but the increase in particulate matter would cause falling temperatures. Either one would be disastrous, but cooling was more of a threat. ‘Since 1945 the second trend has appeared to be prevailing.  If it continues it will have grave consequences for [the] food production capacity of the globe.’
[4]

The
Guardian
thought
Mankind at the Turning Point
might be the most important document of the year.
[5]
Otherwise it caused hardly a ripple. The world had moved on. At a conference in Philadelphia in 1976 to celebrate the bicentenary of America’s independence the Club of Rome’s founder, Aurelio Peccei, distanced the Club from its anti-growth crusade.
The Limits to Growth
had ‘punctured the myth of exponential growth,’ but further growth was needed to solve world poverty and threats to world peace.
[6]
Even so, the book had served its purpose of ‘getting the world’s attention’.  Finding solutions to the problems it had identified required puncturing a second myth – ‘the myth of national competence’.
[7]
Peccei’s view that individual nations were powerless to shape their economic future would take some hard knocks in the 1980s.

As little noticed was a conference Barbara Ward chaired between representatives of UNCTAD and Maurice Strong’s UN Environment Programme in the Mexican town of Cocoyoc in October 1974. The Cocoyoc Declaration codified the basis of an alliance of convenience between the G77 and environmentalism in terms of their mutual enemy rather than what divided them.Thus it was a synthesis of Raúl Prebsich’s Havana Manifesto and Barbara Ward’s environmentalism.

Large parts of the world today consist of a centre exploiting a vast periphery and also our common heritage, the biosphere. The ideal we need is a harmonised cooperative world in which each part is a centre, living at the expense of nobody else in partnership with nature and solidarity with future generations.
[8]

A North American or a European child, on average, consumes outrageously more than his Indian or African counterpart, the Declaration said.
[9]
The problem was not one of absolute physical shortage, but of the economic and social structures within and between countries, reflecting the legacy of colonialism.
[10]
The market enabled powerful nations to exploit poor countries’ natural resources at low prices and then sell manufactures back to them ‘often at monopoly prices’.
[11]
It demanded taxation of the ‘global commons’ as a first step towards a system of international taxation to generate automatic transfers from rich to poor countries.
[12]

The global commons that mattered most was the ocean. In 1973, Ward had written that the Conference on the Law of the Sea was
the
critical conference of the world’s ‘commons’ of the twentieth century. There should be a special maritime authority to administer the ocean’s mineral reserves.
[13]
The Cocoyoc Declaration also said that a globally administered oceans regime had to be established ‘with jurisdiction over a maximum area of the oceans’.
[14]
  

The Law of the Sea Treaty, negotiated through the 1970s, embodied the redistributionist principles of the New International Economic Order. It was one of the reasons that led President Reagan in 1982 to reject it. When Al Haig, Reagan’s secretary of state asked him why, Reagan replied: ‘Al, that’s what the last election was all about … It was about not doing things just because that’s the way they’ve been done before.’
[15]

After Cocoyoc, the New International Economic Order gained momentum. Responding to a suggestion made by Robert McNamara in September 1977 the former German Chancellor Willy Brandt announced his readiness to launch an independent commission. The Brandt Commission on International Development marked a decisive move away from the militant anti-growth rhetoric of First Wave environmentalism. ‘Many people in the North have questioned whether it is feasible, and even desirable, to maintain high rates of growth,’ the commission acknowledged. Growth, the Brandt Report argued, helped fund environmental protection. It wasn’t growth as such that was environmentally damaging, but particular technologies, lifestyles and industries which should be controlled by selective intervention.
[16]

The thrust of the report was that the gap between rich and poor was wide and getting wider, that it threatened the global economy and world peace, and could only be narrowed by a new architecture of global governance. ‘Current trends point to a sombre future for the world economy and international relations,’ the commission feared. Mankind was using up non-renewable resources. Pollution and exploitation of the atmosphere, sea and soil were all-embracing. ‘Are we to leave our successors a scorched planet of advancing deserts, impoverished landscapes and ailing environments?’ the commission asked.
[17]
‘The 1980s could witness even greater catastrophes than the 1930s,’ it said.
[18]
For an anti-Nazi who had adopted the pseudonym Willy Brandt to hide from the Gestapo, this was as bad a prognosis as it could possibly be, one that turned out to be totally ill-judged.

Among the twenty-five ‘eminent persons’ the commission invited to testify were Barbara Ward and Maurice Strong – and Raúl Prebisch. It was a close knit circle. One of the commissioners, former British Prime Minister Edward Heath, was a fervent admirer of Ward. Another commissioner,
Washington Post
owner Katharine Graham, was one of only three people McNamara would take a telephone call from before ten in the morning, the other two being his wife and Barbara Ward. 

North-South: A Programme for Survival
concluded that the world community must shape a new international economic order to transfer more resources from the North to the South. The welfare state had delivered social harmony within nations by protecting the weak and promoting the principles of justice. It had to be elevated to the global level. ‘The world too can become stronger by becoming a just and humane society. If it fails in this, it will move towards its own destruction.’
[19]
Rich countries should transfer 0.7 per cent of national income in aid to poorer countries, rising to one percent by 2000. There should be global system of taxation, based on a sliding scale of national income, and taxes on exploiting the seabed.
[20]

The Brandt Report was one of the items of the 1980 G7 in Venice. President Carter also briefed fellow leaders on the
Global 2000
report. The summit communiqué agreed that the G7 needed a better understanding of the long-term effects of global population growth and economic development generally. Formally welcoming the Brandt Report, the summit pointedly said that providing aid must be equitably shared by the oil-exporting countries and the Soviet bloc, which was tantamount to saying it wasn’t going to happen.
[21]
As Prebisch had privately remarked about OPEC, ‘the worst type of rich are the poor that have been enriched’.
[22]
  

At the 1981 G7 in Ottawa, host Pierre Trudeau prevailed on Ronald Reagan to attend the first North-South summit in Cancún later that year. Margaret Thatcher wanted Reagan there for the opposite reason – to argue against the New International Economic Order. At Cancún, Thatcher dismissed the Brandt Report as fashionable talk and attacked its underlying idea of tackling poverty through redistribution rather than wealth creation as wrongheaded. She and Reagan saw off proposals to change the voting weights of the IMF and the World Bank. She wasn’t going to have British money in a bank run by those on overdrafts.
[23]

Cancún and Reagan’s rejection of the Law of the Sea Treaty the following year marked the end of North-South dialogue in response to the South’s attempts to create the New International Economic Order. When world leaders met in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, it was at the West’s behest in the context of its fears about global warming. The South’s demands hadn’t gone away.

The ideas championed by Carter and Brandt also began to attract the criticism of academics.  In the US, economist Julian Simon led a critique of
Global 2000
by a group of academics which included one of Al Gore’s favourite scientists, Roger Revelle.  Simon’s studies of population growth and economic history had led him to conclude that population growth, far from being a threat to prosperity, was associated with rising prosperity. People were the ultimate resource, he argued.  Simon turned upside down
Global 2000
’s pessimistic end-of-century forecast: ‘If present trends continue, the world in 2000 will be less crowded (though more populated),
less polluted
,
more stable ecologically
, and
less vulnerable to resource-supply disruption
than the world we live in now.’
[24]

On the other side of the Atlantic, David Henderson, a former World Bank economist, wrote a searching analysis of the Brandt Report. Henderson argued that the commission’s view that inequalities between nations caused war had no historical basis. War had been an endemic state of affairs throughout history, whereas the condition of extreme inequality between nations had arisen only in the recent past. The commission’s understanding of why economies grew was naively political. Evidence of progress made by many poor countries had, in George Orwell’s term, become an ‘unfact’. Henderson’s criticism centred on the commission’s handling of uncertainty.

It is a profound mistake to suppose that the issues of social and economic life are such that it makes sense to think in terms of ‘solutions’ to them, as though they were like the entries in a crossword puzzle, for which there can be found a recognised, uniquely correct and permanently valid set of responses.
[25]

The belief that economic problems had determinate solutions, Henderson argued, embodied a definite magical element, ‘so that the complexities and uncertainties of the world are wished away, and events are treated as though they could be made predictable and manipulable by formulae or spells’.
[26]

In December 1983, the UN General Assembly adopted resolution 38/161 – without a vote – to establish a special commission to propose ‘long term environmental strategies for achieving sustainable development by the year 2000 and beyond’.
[27]
To those who might have opposed it, the resolution appeared pretty innocuous. Member governments weren’t bound by the commission’s conclusions. Its costs were to be met by voluntary contributions from its sponsors, Canada, Japan, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the four Nordic nations.
[28]

The issues hardly appeared momentous. The previous year, the governing council of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) had selected three topics of concern – hazardous waste, acid rain and the possible adverse environmental impact of large-scale renewable energy farms.
[29]
The chairmanship was offered to the leader of the Norwegian Labour party and former prime minister, Gro Harlem Brundtland. 

Like its forebears, the Brundtland Commission’s report,
Our Common Future
, was predicated on impending doom. There was a trinity of crises: an environmental crisis, a development crisis and an energy crisis. ‘They are one,’ the report proclaimed.
[30]
According to Brundtland herself, a painful list of disasters had alerted ‘all thinking people to the grave crisis facing our planet’.
[31]

Hope was at hand. ‘What we need is new concepts, new values and to mobilise will. We need a new global ethic.’
[32]
The planet could be redeemed and the poor saved from sliding down a spiral of economic and ecological decline by embracing the doctrine of sustainable development. 

What was the magic formula possessing such power? ‘Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.’
[33]

It had the merit of superficial plausibility. But as the Paley Commission put it, the needs of future generations are unknowable – the syndrome of conserving bayberries for the electric age. In his review of the Brandt Report, Henderson argued that the distinction between essential and non-essential needs was alien to the conception of economic choice which underlies the case for using market modes of allocation in which ‘there are no needs to be met regardless of cost, and to think in terms of a sharp distinction from essential to non-essential is meaningless’.
[34]
 

At times, the search for the meaning of sustainable development gets caught in a loop of tautology. Living standards higher than ‘the basic minimum’ are only sustainable if consumption standards everywhere have regard for long-term sustainability.
[35]
Should the use of non-renewable resources be forbidden? No. ‘The rate of depletion and the emphasis on recycling and the economy of use should be calibrated to ensure that the resource does not run out before acceptable substitutes are available’
[36]
– a formulation that is meaningless because the world has never run out of a particular mineral. Species become extinct, not minerals. 

In principle, the Brundtland formulation of sustainable development is consistent with having no policy at all other than to promote the efficient functioning of markets. This would, of course, clash with the report’s presumption that markets were propelling the world towards some kind of planetary catastrophe.