Bypassing the blockage of nations
Richard Black, BBC News 15 an 08;
Would we not do better with a meaningful, informed and binding mechanism whereby the global citizenry could decide how to parcel out the cake of allowable greenhouse gas emissions in a fair and equitable way, without governments getting in the way?
Solving the world's environmental ills may mean re-thinking the role of nations and national governments, says our environment correspondent Richard Black in this week's Green Room. The current system, he argues, is a recipe for stasis.
Many years ago, I used to spend the odd weekend, and sometimes longer, looking after a pair of sibling dogs.
Neurotic Henry and crazy Max generally got on well, sharing a bed, a walk and a tickle without demur.
Every so often, each would be given a bone as a top, juicy, marrow-rich treat.
On these occasions, another side of their nature would emerge. Rather than enjoying his own bone, each would guard it, standing alert, tail erect, staring fixedly at the other's.
The doggy thoughts almost took on corporeal form. "Has he got a bigger bone than me?" "I'm not starting until he does." "Will he look away so I can get my paws on his?"
The stand-off would sometimes continue for minutes.
This image, framed in the springtime colours of a south London garden, has somewhat surreally surfaced in my mind on several occasions in the last few years, as I have watched politicians attempting to make deals on fishing, endangered species, whaling, and - above all - climate change.
"Are his emissions bigger than mine?" "I'm not signing for 11% unless he signs for 12%." "If I keep him awake for 56 hours straight maybe I can lure him into something stupid." "No way he's getting more cod than I am." And so on, summit after summit, with tails standing defiant.
As they check each other out, carbon emissions soar, species loss runs at an unprecedented rate, freshwater systems dry up and fish stocks disappear; check the recent UN Geo-4 report for the full sorry tale of global decline.
Now imagine environmental protection as a computer game. The novice player, faced with continuing failure, would continue to press the familiar buttons marked "lobby" and "persuade" and "cajole" in an attempt to wring action from the on-screen players.
The smart player would change the rules, and get rid of the dogs.
Structural flaws
In all the organisations designed to solve aspects of global environmental decline, politicians argue our future according to national mandates.
Each government decides what its priorities are, and then goes to a forum like the UN climate change convention, the International Whaling Commission (IWC), or the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species and argues for that national mandate.
I think it is time to ask whether this system is really in the best interests of planet Earth or its people.
I think the problem may not be, as it is often painted, that the politicians we have are failing; but that the very system of trying to solve global environmental problems through national governments is flawed, and likely to continue failing.
The issues begin with the positions that government representatives adopt in these negotiations; because, perhaps bizarrely, there is nothing to force them to reflect the will of their peoples.
Polls show, for example, that the US public wants its government to be more proactive on global warming than the current administration has been willing to be; but the administration has no obligation to act on those expressions of opinion.
In other cases, we do not know, and have no way of knowing, the will of various national publics; what, then, determines how the country casts its vote?
In some environmental treaty organisations - the IWC is a prime example - a nation with no real interest in the subject will vote according to a national interest defined by political favours, or political pressure, from other countries.
Even if delegations reflected absolutely the wills of their peoples, you would still have a situation in which global citizens varied hugely in their power to determine the outcome, simply because different countries vary hugely in their sizes of population.
China's population tops 1.5 billion, that of St Kitts and Nevis numbers less than 50,000; yet each country casts a single vote.
That means that a citizen of St Kitts and Nevis would have 27,000 times the influence of a Chinese person - even on issues such as climate change that are likely to affect every global citizen to a greater or lesser degree.
As a white-collar London wage-earner, my life has more in common with a Sydney teacher or a Rome accountant than a Shetlands crofter; yet the crofter and I must have one government speaking for both of us on global issues like climate change - and for the Manchester dancer, the Penzance policeman and the Aberystwyth plasterer.
Would we not do better with a meaningful, informed and binding mechanism whereby the global citizenry could decide how to parcel out the cake of allowable greenhouse gas emissions in a fair and equitable way, without governments getting in the way?
Should there not be some way for European consumers of African crops to resolve issues of income, aircraft emissions, and water and pesticide use directly with producing communities?
Should people not be able to rein in polluters wherever they are, without companies being able to shelter behind different legal systems or threaten to take their jobs to a different country?
What logic now?
When the primary threats to human health and livelihoods came through wars and invasions, basing the global power system around nation states had a logic to it.
But you have to ask if it still has any logic when, as Tony Blair among others has argued, environmental concerns may be the biggest long-term threats to our civilisation.
Rising seas will not stop at borders, nor crops magically continue to grow within countries that have cast their votes a certain way in the UN climate convention.
The atmosphere does not care whether a carbon dioxide molecule comes from Warsaw or Wellington or Ouagadougou; tuna stocks are affected no differently if ravaged by Libyan or French or Chinese ships.
You can argue that the power of the nation state should be sacrosanct. But then you have to explain why countries from Switzerland to Brazil, from Russia to India, from the US to Germany find it necessary to break themselves down into still smaller units of states, cantons and republics, with legal rights and responsibilities devolved.
You also have to explain why most of modern Europe has chosen to pass power up to a larger unit, the EU; and why national governments have ceded substantial decision-making rights on business and trade to the World Trade Organization (WTO).
In reality, we treat the nations we have like old monuments in a busy city; we tend them, nurture them, issue protection orders - until they get in the way of progress, when we clear the obstruction and get on with our lives.
Question time
What a new system of global environmental decision-making not based on nation states would look like, I don't know.
And before anyone hits the comments form at the bottom of the page to say this is just the sort of leftist, neo-socialist, anti-libertarian, collectivist rubbish they would expect from a BBC environment correspondent, I want to emphasise that I am certainly not advocating some kind of global government; if anything, recent history tells us that people want to live in smaller self-determining units rather than see power agglomerate at some remote and amorphous centre.
But just in case this humble journalist's argument finds any favour at all in a corridor possessing a tiny amount of power and influence - a major NGO, for example, or a government frustrated at glacial progress on environmental issues - here is an idea of where to start.
Stage a global referendum on climate change. It doesn't matter who organises it; maybe Unep could do it, or the World Bank, or perhaps one of the major business groups with an interest in climate change could get together with one of the giant NGOs. It doesn't really matter, so long as it is above board and seen to be so.
Ask what kind of action people want; what global temperature rise they are prepared to contemplate, what kind of global emissions cuts they would back, how the carbon dioxide quotas should be shared out.
Even before that, ask them whether they believe man-made climate change is real, and if they want to do anything about it at all.
The answers would form the basis of a real, genuine global political mandate, direct from the people. The job of governments would become to reflect the global will, and they would have a very hard time if they did not.
This exercise could be followed up by similar referenda on global fisheries, on pollution, on genetically-modified foods. They could be supplemented by international citizens' juries, using the internet to connect jurors with each other, and with expert witnesses, across the world.
It might achieve nothing; we might find that self-interest and business-as-usual triumph. We might find that people are not convinced there are multiple global environmental crises, in which case, fine - at least inaction will be the citizens' choice.
My suspicion, though, is that once people engage with the issues as citizens of the only planet we have, global interests rather than national interests will surface.
I also suspect that exercises like this would begin to show us how to construct a better system of solving global environmental problems than relying on governments constrained by stultifying sets of national priorities.
As Geo-4 bears witness, one bone for each national dog is simply not working. It is surely time to ask whether a different way of ordering our affairs can bring sense to the global menagerie.
Richard Black is an environment correspondent for BBC News
The Green Room is a series of opinion articles on environmental topics running weekly on the BBC News website
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