The Age of Global Warming: A History (16 page)

So what does ‘sustainable development’ actually mean?

In essence, sustainable development is a process of change in which the exploitation of resources, the direction of investments, the orientation of technological development, and institutional change are all in harmony and enhance both current and future potential to meet human needs and aspirations.
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In relation to the concept of needs, the Brundtland Report stated that the needs of the world’s poor should have over-riding priority.
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Poverty was a major cause and effect of global environmental problems, the report asserted.
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Brundtland herself went further, telling the UNEP governing council that international economic inequalities were the root cause of poverty and environmental degradation.
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The need for more resources for developing countries could not be evaded. ‘The idea that developing countries would do better to live within their limited means is a cruel illusion.’
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Thus sustainable development provided green packaging for egalitarianism and global income redistribution policies. ‘Perceived needs are socially and culturally determined, and sustainable development requires the promotion of values that encourage consumption standards that are within the bounds of the ecologically possible and to which all can reasonably aspire.’
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Sustainable development is not an economic concept, but a political doctrine with far-reaching economic implications. In her speech to the UNEP at Nairobi in 1987, Brundtland herself described sustainable development as the report’s ‘overriding political concept.’ It would help provide ‘the key to open new doors of perception and entail inspiration for humankind in its quest for progress and survival … It requires fair access to knowledge and resources and a more equitable distribution within and among nations’.
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Sustainable development, she claimed, turned on its head what she called the zero growth dogma of the early seventies. If done right, growth could be good and developing countries had no option but to seek to grow.

Yet the shedding of the limits-to-growth hair shirt was more in the nature of a re-branding statement than a substantive shift. There might not be absolute limits, but there were ‘ultimate limits’, the report said. The affluent would have to adopt lifestyles and live within ‘the planet’s ecological means’. ‘Painful choices have to be made,’ the report warned. ‘In the final analysis, sustainable development must rest on political will.’
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A commission chaired by a Norwegian social democrat, financed by wealthy, high latitude, northern hemisphere countries was always going to advocate a form of globalised Scandinavian social democracy. Nearly nine hundred organisations and individuals gave their views to the commission or assisted it in some way. Seventy-seven came from Scandinavia and Finland, compared to thirty-five from the US and fifty-one from the Soviet Union, the last signifying an important step in the greening of international relations.

The Chernobyl nuclear accident in April 1986 and Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of
glasnost
had made discussion about Soviet attitudes to the environment permissible. ‘No one even imagined the extent of our ecological disaster, how far we were behind the developed nations as a result of our barbaric attitude towards nature,’ according to Gorbachev.
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At one of the commission’s public hearings in Moscow seven months after the Chernobyl accident, a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences asked whether the development of civil nuclear power had not been premature, a position that before Gorbachev would have aroused the interest of the KGB (Gorbachev concluded that the Soviet Union could not dispense with nuclear power).
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While the commission achieved balance between the industrial and developing nations, there was a marked imbalance within the latter, with Indonesia (ninety-six) and Brazil (eighty-eight) to the fore. Despite the 1984 Bhopal industrial disaster, there were only six from India and two from China. 

One nation stood above all the rest: seemingly every organ of the Canadian government, its provinces and territories and a multitude of societies, students and individuals – two hundred and seven in all – were mobilised and made it their business to be involved. Maurice Strong was a commissioner and fellow Canadian Jim MacNeill, a 1971 Founex participant, was in charge of drafting its report. It is reasonable to say that the Brundtland Report and its aftermath represent Canada’s most singular impression on world affairs.
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Political success required sustainable development to have something it lacked.  The Brundtland Report and its antecedents made big claims about adverse trends harming the poor and the planet, which some day, would end in catastrophe, in some form. Yet these assertions were remarkably free of hard data. While sustainable development implied limits, it couldn’t say where they were or what exactly would happen if those thresholds were crossed. It was a doctrine in search of scientific authentication. As a political ideology, Marxism always claimed to be derived from scientific analysis. By contrast, sustainable development was an ideology, developed from a political formula, in search of science. 

What transformed the impact of the Brundtland Commission was a joint conference of UNEP, the World Meteorological Organisation and the International Council of Scientific Unions in the Austrian town of Villach in October 1985. Called to assess the impact of increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases on the climate, the conference concluded

it is now believed that in the first half of the next century a rise of global mean temperature could occur which is greater than any in man’s history.
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The estimated increase of between 0.3 and 0.7°C in global mean temperature during the previous one hundred years was, the conference said, consistent with the projected temperature increase attributable to the observed increase in CO
2
and other greenhouse gases, although the rise could not be ascribed in a scientifically rigorous manner to these factors alone.

An advisory group on greenhouse gases was formed, which liaised with MacNeill. Bert Bolin, a leading climate scientist and future chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, deemed the MacNeill channel to the Brundtland Commission essential in enabling the scientific community to get global warming onto the political agenda.
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Global warming was one of four environmental threats identified by the Brundtland Commission (the others being urban pollution, acid rain and the risk of nuclear reactor accidents). If the meeting at Villach had not taken place, the thrust of the Brundtland Report and the need for the world to adopt sustainable development would have been the same. Brundtland herself did not mention global warming in her June 1987 prepared remarks to UNEP on the report.

Without global warming, sustainable development would not have shifted the world’s political axis.  With global warming, environmentalism had found its killer app. In turn, global warming became embedded in a pre-existing ideology, built on the belief of imminent planetary catastrophe – which many scientists subscribed to – with a UN infrastructure to support it and a cadre of influential political personages to propagate it. 

A butterfly was ready to spread its wings.

*  The impression of mankind as a form of malignant tumour was reinforced by a passage quoted at the beginning of the book’s first chapter: ‘The world has cancer and the cancer is man.’ To add a Doctor Strangelove twist, in the second half of the 1970s Mesarovic and Pestel’s ‘World Integrated Model’ was used by the Pentagon for planning purposes. Julian L. Simon & Herman Kahn (ed.),
The Resourceful Earth: A Response to Global 2000
(1984), pp. 37–8.

*  There were no participants from Australia and New Zealand.