Economics
Times Record "Sustain Maine" op-ed series
SLOUCHING TOWARD JOHANNESBURG
23 August 2002
David Vail
This week world leaders converge on Johannesburg, South Africa, for the United Nations' World Summit on Sustainable Development. Given minimal US media coverage and the Bush administration's conspicuous lack of enthusiasm for this 190-nation gathering, most Mainers are likely unaware of it. What a contrast to 1992, when the UN's Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro captured the world's imagination! Bush the elder even flew to Brazil to offer his blessing. In retrospect, Rio marked a high point in international commitment to protect the environmental foundations of our economic prosperity -- and human life itself.
The Rio summit culminated in landmark conventions to protect biodiversity in the face of human-caused mass extinctions and to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the face of human-caused global warming. It also produced Agenda 21, a wide ranging set of environmental goals and a call for national 'green plans' to reach them.
The past decade brought great advances in scientific understanding of environmental processes and many discrete environmental improvements, but backsliding on major Rio goals like cutting carbon emissions (reality: a 9% global rise; 18% in the US), halting the loss of biologically rich tropical forests (reality: 400 million more acres lost), and reducing the number of people without safe drinking water (reality: an increase of 100 million).
This dismal record is certainly one reason the American media have little to say about the "Joburg Summit" But there are other reasons as well. US policies and official pronouncements have cast a cloud over Johannesburg. President Bush's unilateral repudiation of the Kyoto Protocol and his petroleum-centered energy strategy are disheartening and exasperating news on the global climate front. While every other industrial nation has committed to reduce GHGs, America -- the 900 pound gorilla with nearly a quarter of global carbon emissions -- refuses. A main source of international doubt at Johannesburg is the sense that America can't be counted on to cooperate, much less to lead.
Bush insiders consider sustainable development a bogus issue invented by radical environmentalists. With an administration whose attitude is "if Clinton did it, it must be wrong," it doesn't help that President Clinton espoused sustainable development (even if he did not carry through). Beyond that, Bush's handler -- and the headline writers -- are obviously pre-occupied by a bogged-down war on terrorism, sluggish economy, financial market meltdown, and corporate corruption crisis. Even the threat of a baseball strike captures more headlines than the Sustainable Development Summit.
Another reason for doubts about Joburg is that the dominant international trend over the past decade was economic globalization, not sustainable development initiatives. The growing sovereignty of trans-national corporations, combined with the operating rules of the North American Free Trade Area and the World Trade Organization, have trumped many efforts to restrain shortsighted economic interests for the sake of farsighted environmental stewardship. Congress recently met Bush's demand for "fast track" trade negotiation authority, signaling that it will be "business as usual" in the future as well.
Nonetheless, the Johannesburg focus on sustainable Third World development is critically important, even for us in "the richest society in history." In the UN's terms, sustainable development boils down to "meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." Two recent stories from India highlight the complexity and enormity of the challenges facing four-fifths of humanity -- and us.
On one side of India's poverty divide, hundreds of millions eke out subsistence, cooking with wood and dung and burning forest for cropland. According to the Associated Press, the resulting "grimy cocktail of ash, soot, acids and other damaging airborne particles" causes half a million premature deaths yearly. This vicious circle of grinding poverty and environmental degradation is unjust and manifestly unsustainable.
On the other side of the divide, India's burgeoning middle class has enthusiastically embraced western consumerism, symbolized by cars and air conditioners. Perversely, when soaring electricity demand in Delhi caused repeated nighttime blackouts in recent weeks, thousands took to their cars for air-conditioned sleep.
A western reporter once asked Mahatma Gandhi if independent India would aspire to British living standards. He replied sagely, "If it takes half the earth to sustain Britain's way of life, how many earths will it take to sustain India's?" Today, that is a vexing sustainability question, as populous nations like India, China, Brazil and Korea all pursue the western model of rapid, fossil fuel-driven growth.
Three core priorities in the transition to sustainable Third World development are poverty eradication, lower human fertility, and adoption of renewable energy systems and energy conserving technologies. The United States, with its unmatched economic strength, technological virtuosity, and geopolitical influence, is in a unique position to foster this transition. But our national leadership clearly feels no such commitment.
That is sadly ironic. Experts tell us economic hopelessness is an incubator for terrorist movements. I am convinced that over the long run, sustainable development with shared prosperity will contribute much more to America's security than spy satellites, smart bombs, and special forces. 9/11 was a horrifying reminder that we all share "one world." The success or failure of sustainable development will profoundly affect our future.
David Vail teaches ecological economics at Bowdoin College and is a founding member of the Maine Sustainable Development Working Group.