[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Free the Unborn!

[Bill Totten]

A proposal for slowing down politics.

by George Monbiot

Published in the Guardian (October 21 2008)


The problem is simply stated. As Gordon Brown - discussing what he
perceives to be an improvement in his political fortunes - says, "an
hour is a long time in politics" {1}. (It used to be a week, but
everything is speeding up). To remain in office or to remain in
business, decision-makers must privilege the present over the future.
Discount rates ensure that investments made today are worth nothing in
ten years' time; the political cycle demands that no one looks beyond
the next election.

The financial crisis is just one consequence of a system which demands
that governments sacrifice long-term survival for short-term gains. In
this case political leaders on both sides of the Atlantic - from Reagan
to Brown - decided to appease business lobbyists and boost short-term
growth by allowing the banks to use new financial instruments, many of
which were as dodgy as a three-pound coin. It made perfect political
sense, as long as the inevitable crash took place after they left office.

For similar reasons we are likely to be ambushed by other nasty
surprises: runaway climate change, resource depletion, foreign policy
blowback, new surveillance and genetic technologies, skills shortages,
demographic change, a declining tax base, private and public debt.
Politics is the art of shifting trouble from the living to the unborn.

At first sight, the government's strengthening last week of the UK's
climate change target looks like an exception to this political
short-termism. In fact something rather interesting is taking place in
this country. While prime ministers in Italy and eastern Europe demand a
bonfire of environmental measures in order to save the economy {2}, in
the UK politicians from all the major parties have made the connection
between environmental destruction and economic meltdown. One of the
fastest-spreading memes is the proposal for a green new deal: a
Keynesian package of environmental works designed to boost employment
and channel public investment {3}. If this idea is adopted it won't be
the first time that it has helped to rescue a major economy. The biggest
and most successful component of Roosevelt's New Deal was the Civilian
Conservation Corps, which employed three million people to plant trees
and stop soil erosion {4}.

But all such proposals soon collide with the realities of the political
cycle. As Ed Miliband, the climate change secretary, admitted, "signing
up to an eighty per cent cut in 2050, when most of us will not be
around, is the easy part; the hard part is meeting it, and meeting the
milestones that will show we are on track" {5}. A recent paper in the
journal Energy Policy shows that the government is pursuing the wrong
policies to meet the wrong targets, produced by using the wrong methods
to assess the wrong data. (Otherwise it's more or less on track).

The paper shows that to help deliver even a small chance of preventing
two degrees of global warming, the UK can generate a maximum of
seventeen to 23 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide between 2000 and 2050
{6}. In the first five years of this decade we produced 3.6 billion
tonnes: at this rate our carbon budget would run out by 2028. To hit the
government's temperature targets, the UK's carbon emissions need to fall
by between six and nine percent a year from 2012 onwards. At the moment
they're still rising.

Current policy, in other words, bears no relationship to the long-term
target. On this trajectory, the only way in which the government could
meet its obligations under the climate change bill would be to buy the
cut from other countries, which means that it will make no contribution
to a global reduction.

But at least in this case there's a recognition that current policies
have long-term implications. Elsewhere, the government simply refuses to
look beyond the present, for fear of seeing something it doesn't like.
For example, it has failed to conduct any assessment of global oil
supply. When I asked the business department what contingency plans it
possesses to meet the eventuality that oil production might peak, it
told me "the Government does not feel the need to hold contingency
plans" {7}. The survival of our transport networks - and therefore of
the economy - is secured by touching wood and crossing fingers.

In other cases, the question isn't even raised. Food policy everywhere
is governed by the expectation that crop yields can keep growing to meet
rising demand. A possible limiting factor is the supply of the
phosphorus rock required to make fertiliser. I asked the researcher Tom
Bailey to produce an assessment of global phosphate deposits which can
be exploited at reasonable prices {8}.

He found that there is a wide range of estimates and a good deal of
confusion between reserves (known deposits which can be readily
exploited) and resources (the total geological stock). The most
extensive survey published so far suggests that the global demand for
phosphate is likely roughly to double by 2050 {9}. Can this demand be
met without pricing food out of the mouths of the poor? Perhaps. Some
reports suggest that phosphate constraints will provoke a global food
crisis by the middle of the century.

This, in other words, is a critical, even existential, question.
Yesterday I searched the past five years of parliamentary records in the
UK. It hasn't been discussed once. But the possibility that aircraft
passengers and crew might be exposed to trace amounts of another
phosphorus compound - tricresyl phosphate - has been mentioned 1670
times over the same period. This is a miniscule issue by comparison to
the question of whether or not the world might be fed. But it has the
great political virtue of affecting people today.

In 1791 Thomas Paine complained that "the vanity and presumption of
governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all
tyrannies" {10}. He was answering Edmund Burke's contention that a
declaration made by parliament in 1688 bound the people of England "for
ever". A parliament which considers only the immediate consequences of
its decisions imposes the same insolent tyranny on succeeding
generations. They have no means of contesting the legacy of economic
crises, depleted resources and limited choices we bequeath to them.

What can be done about political short-termism? With the environmental
thinker Matthew Prescott, I've hatched what might be a partial solution.
We propose a new parliamentary body - the 100 Year Committee - whose
purpose to assess the likely impacts of current policy in ten, twenty,
fifty and 100 years' time. Like any other select committee, it gathers
evidence, publishes reports and makes recommendations to the government.
It differs only in that it has no interest in the current political
cycle. Its maximum timeframe is roughly the residence time of carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere.

The members of this committee would not be equipped with crystal balls;
they would simply be released from the need to balance the interests of
the present against a heavily-discounted future. Their purpose would be
to provide a voice for those who have not yet been enfranchised. A 100
Year Committee can't insure us against political stupidity, but it
deprives governments of one of their excuses: that they couldn't see
trouble coming.

www.monbiot.com

References:

{1} Andrew Rawnsley, 12th October 2008. Why the crisis puts a spring in
the Prime Minister's step. The Observer.

{2} David Gow, 16th October 2008. EU pledges to lead climate change
fight despite financial crisis. The Guardian.

{3} Andrew Simms et al, July 2008. A Green New Deal. New Economics
Foundation.
http://www.neweconomics.org/gen/z_sys_publicationdetail.aspx?pid=258

{4} Neil M Maher, 2008. Nature's New Deal. Oxford University Press.

{5} Edward Miliband, 16th October 2008. Statement to the House of
Commons.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200708/cmhansrd/cm081016/debtext/81016-0006.htm#08101662000006

{6} Kevin Anderson, Alice Bows and Sarah Mander, 8th August 2008. From
long-term targets to cumulative emission pathways: Reframing UK climate
policy. Energy Policy 36, 3714?3722.

{7} DBERR, 8th April 2008. Response to FoI request Ref 08/0091.

{8} Please contact me if you would like a copy of his assessment.

{9} Ingrid Steen, September-October 1998. Phosphate Recovery. Phosphorus
and Potassium, no. 217.
http://www.nhm.ac.uk/research-curation/projects/phosphate-recovery/p&k217/steen.htm

{10} Thomas Paine, 1791. The Rights of Man, pages 41-42. Penguin
edition, 1984.

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/10/21/free-the-unborn/


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