Clock running out on irreversible climate change - Part II

The world has extremely complex systems problems but we have no matching forms of governance to correct them. We need to move from soft to hard global governance, from “Global Compact” to “Global Contract”. The Copenhagen process could provide such an opportunity.

It must therefore be redefined, redesigned and rescheduled. Above all its targets must be stated with clarity and leaders of nations must morally and operationally rise to this occasion. The declarations on climate change spoken in the General Assembly on September 24, 2007, by hundreds of heads of states were badly matched by the discouraging performance at Bali.

The expected compromise of Copenhagen we call Plan A. Each nation’s fallback plan prioritising its own interests is a Plan B. If there’s no credible Plan A, the world will descend into eco-protectionism, where struggles over food, water, fuels, and biomass overshadow any principle of solidarity.

The Tällberg Foundation has taken the initiative to develop a Plan C, a shadow plan for Kyoto 2. We will suggest an idealised design of the Perfect Agreement, with mechanisms for Perfect Implementation. It will be based on the definition of those natural boundary conditions we must not transgress, and will guide the moral imperatives of a leadership acting in the interests of the whole.

Nature is neither a political nor an economic system. Nature is neither ideological nor religious. Nature is simply nature and Homo sapiens is a product of Nature. Brian Arthur, the brilliant Irish economist, observes in his forthcoming book on the theory of technology that technology brings hope but that trust can only be achieved through our conscious relationship with nature. Trust and hope must be fundamental ingredients in our vision of the future and the redesign of the Kyoto agreement.

The easy way out for many is the elusive promise of new technology, with the wisdom of market forces like cap-and-trade systems. We may remember that it was earlier generations of technologies and market mechanisms that created the current problems. Modern society put its hope in technology rather than trust in nature, fixated by the idea that if only new technologies yield a competitive financial Return on Investment (ROI) the market will fix the environmental mess.

The reality is that the financial markets never fix recurrent failures. The market did not fix apartheid, fascism or World War II. Politics did. Governance did. The yield of good politics is another kind of ROI, the Return on Insight. We own the necessary insight into the acute and massive ecosystems crises but not yet the responsible politics needed. Let’s invent them.

We need a new global deal that combines trust with hope. The patrolling and defence of nature’s boundary conditions is a political assignment. Its implementation will demand law-enforcement regimes that, by design, infringe on the sovereignty of nations and their monopolies of military and police force, and of natural resources. Political insight will not, however, be applied without a thundering tsunami of global, enlightened public opinion demanding solutions to the question “How on earth can we live together - we the humans, we with nature?”