The Politics of Climate Change (10 page)

Precautions against some risks almost always create others. This observation is important to my arguments about climate change, since there is always a balance of risks (and, crucially, opportunities) whenever a given course of action is considered. We cannot therefore justify a ‘bias for nature' – leaving nature intact – as an argument relevant to dealing with global warming. We will need to push the boundaries of the end of nature further, rather than (as green thinkers want) pull back from them.

How can it be that the PP is self-contradictory, yet is so widely accepted as a framework for policy? The reasons, Sunstein says, lie in the social perception of risk. We tend to focus on some risks to the exclusion of others, and use rules of thumb that are quite often very misleading in judging risks. Sunstein lists a number of such rules of thumb or ‘heuristics', including:

If one adds to these points the exploitation of risks by special interest groups, it is easy to see how biased risk assessments arise. Since people usually concentrate only on some risks, filtering out others, and since they tend to concentrate on worst-case scenarios, strong versions of the PP result. They offer no proper policy guidelines, however, because of their self-contradictory starting-point.

I draw several conclusions from Sunstein's analysis. The first is that we have to operate in terms not of the precautionary principle, but of another PP – the ‘percentage principle'. In assessing risks, no matter how catastrophic, some form of cost-benefit analysis of possible forms of action is nearly always involved. That is, we have to assess risks and opportunities in terms of costs incurred in relation to benefits obtained. Risks which shade over significantly into uncertainties, like those involved in global warming, however, inevitably mean that there will be an element of guesswork, perhaps a large element, in whatever we do (or do not do).

Second, cost-benefit analysis in democratic settings presumes public debate, since choice among risks is involved. For instance, nuclear power can help reduce emissions, but it creates other risks, such as those involved in the disposal of radioactive waste. Debate, however, will not necessarily lead
to agreement, and policy-makers will in the end have to make the leap one way or the other.

Third, all risk assessment is contextual. It depends upon values, which inevitably shape the threats considered most salient at any point, given that no course of action is ever risk-free. Consider the introduction of a new medical drug. From a regulatory point of view, it is certainly sensible to test it thoroughly before it is used on a wide scale. However, those suffering from a condition that the drug could help may well decide to take it before full testing has taken place. In such a case, ‘he who hesitates is lost' trumps ‘better safe than sorry', because sufferers have little to lose by not taking the drug.

The issues just discussed are relevant to all areas of risk and public policy. They are important to the arguments of this book, since how people assess and respond to risk in general is a key part of the politics of global warming. However, they are also relevant in an immediate way to strategies for mitigating climate change and also to problems of adaptation.

The year 1972 was important in the history of environmental thinking, since it was the date at which a landmark study appeared: the Club of Rome's
Limits to Growth
. The work argued that our civilization is exhausting the resources upon which its continued existence depends.
¹²
It sold in its millions and, although it was subjected to numerous criticisms, its overall emphasis is now widely accepted. In the same year, a major UN conference on the ‘Human Environment' highlighted the importance of reconciling economic development with the more efficient use of resources. The term ‘sustainable development' was introduced in the 1987 report of the World Commission on Environment and Development – now usually referred to as the Brundtland Report, since it was chaired by the Norwegian ex-Prime Minister, Gro Harlem Brundtland.
¹³
Like
Limits to Growth
, it focused on the possibility that modern industry is using up its source materials at an
alarming rate, which cannot be maintained for much longer without major change.

The Brundtland Report recognized that economic growth is necessary in order to bring greater prosperity to the developing world. However, development overall has to become sustainable. The Commission defined sustainable development as ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs'.
¹⁴
The 1992 UN Rio Earth Summit endorsed a declaration setting out 27 principles of sustainable development and recommended that every country produce a national strategy to achieve these ends. A few years later the Treaty of Amsterdam embraced sustainable development as integral to the aims of the EU, and a comprehensive Sustainable Development Strategy was established in 2001.

The introduction of the notion has had a valuable effect. At least to some degree it has helped bring together two previously discrepant communities – on the one hand, greens and others who were ‘anti-growth' and, on the other, pro-market authors. As Richard North has observed, it ‘has exposed green extremists as being indifferent to human realities [the plight of the poorer countries] and hard-nosed industrialists as obsessing about the short-term. And it has provided some solid middle ground from which former hotheads, dreamers and radicals can hone workable policy.'
¹⁵
The meeting-point came through world poverty. Greens and conservationists could argue that a no-growth policy made sense in the industrial states. However, they also support global social justice, whose realization means that poorer countries must be given the opportunity to become richer – that is, to develop economically.

The term gained such popularity that it is now deployed almost everywhere and has figured in thousands of books, articles and speeches. Yet it has had its detractors from the beginning and their voices have become ever more strident. What accounts for its popularity, they argue, is precisely its anodyne quality – an intrinsic vagueness, coupled with a have-your-cake-and-eat-it quality. The two prime terms, ‘sustainability' and ‘development' – as many have observed
– have somewhat contradictory meanings.
¹⁶
‘Sustainability' implies continuity and balance, while ‘development' implies dynamism and change. Thus environmentalists are drawn to the ‘sustainability' angle, while governments and businesses (in practice, anyway) place the focus on ‘development', usually meaning by this term GDP (Gross Domestic Product) growth.

One response to the elusive nature of the concept has simply been to avoid defining it and instead to substitute a cluster of goals in its place. In
Implementing Sustainable Development
, for example, William Lafferty and James Meadowcroft argue: ‘Sustainable development indicates an interdependent concern with: promoting human welfare; satisfying basic needs; protecting the environment; considering the fate of future generations; achieving equity between rich and poor; and participating on a broad basis in decision-making.'
¹⁷
Such an all-encompassing list, however, surely empties the notion of any core meaning. It is an example of ‘the way that sustainable development has become an all-embracing concept to the extent that it has no clear analytical bite at all'.
¹⁸

‘Sustainable development' is more of a slogan than an analytical concept, and I shall avoid using it in this book. Rather, I will consider its two components separately. ‘Sustainability' is a useful notion, although itself a little slippery to define, since it concerns an indefinite future. We don't know what technological innovations will occur down the line, and hence assessments of the limits of the earth's resources usually operate under a question-mark. Sustainability in its simplest meaning implies that, in tackling environmental problems, we are looking for lasting solutions, not short-term fixes. We have to think over the medium and the long term and develop strategies that stretch over those timescales. There is an obligation to consider how present-day policies are likely to affect the lives of those as yet unborn.

It can be given substance in various ways. For example, the World Economic Forum has elaborated an Environmental Sustainability Index, which has been applied to more than 100 countries.
¹⁹
Environmental sustainability is defined in terms of five elements:

We should also look again at the idea of ‘development'. ‘Development', on its own, has two somewhat different meanings. It can simply mean economic growth, as measured by GDP, in which case it applies in principle to all countries. However, it can also refer more narrowly to the economic processes that take people out of poverty. This is the sense in which we contrast the ‘developing' countries with the ‘developed' ones. In the first sense of the term, of course, ‘development' never stops.

In both senses, ‘development' means the accumulation of wealth, normally measured in terms of GDP, such that a society becomes progressively richer. It implies that this wealth is generated in some large part by the economic transformation of the society in question, as a self-perpetuating process. We wouldn't say that a society is developing economically if, for example, it were simply getting income from selling off its mineral resources. We speak of ‘developed' as opposed to ‘developing' countries for a reason – namely, that growth is much less important to the former than to the latter. ‘Developed' countries may continue to expand their economies, but the need for growth is much less pressing – they have reached some sort of equilibrium, albeit a dynamic one.

For the poorer countries there is a
development imperative
. It is not only that they have the right to become richer, but that such a process has direct implications for sustainability. Poverty is closely associated with population expansion, one of the root causes of the pressure that is now threatening resources. There will continue to be two separate trajectories
of ‘development' in the world, at least until the poorer countries reach a certain standard of wealth. Just what this ‘certain level of wealth' should be is a massively important question, which has to be negotiated politically. Wherever possible, such as through technology transfer, reductions in emissions at least relative to past practices in the developed countries should be sought. The state of play in terms of the dangers involved in climate change, together with a peak in the production of oil and gas, will determine in large part how far ‘development' today can mimic the trajectories followed by the existing industrial countries. We have already reached a point where the outcome of those trajectories is under immense pressure. Nevertheless, a certain ‘licence to pollute' has to be acknowledged.

‘Contraction and convergence' – whereby developed countries reduce their emissions first, and radically, with poorer countries following suit as they become richer – is a necessary point of connection between the two types of development. There are different versions of this idea around, but the underlying principle is simple.
²⁰
The developed countries must aim to make large cuts in their greenhouse gas emissions, starting now. Developing nations can increase their emissions for a period in order to permit growth, after which they must begin to reduce them. The two groups of countries will then progressively converge.

We can legitimately talk of
over-development
as a possibility in the affluent societies. The continued expansion of the economy may well bring benefits, but at the same time the problems of affluence tend to pile up.
²¹
The implication is not that economic growth has to stop, but that it should not be pursued irrespective of its wider consequences. For these countries it is essential to create more effective measures of welfare than GDP. GDP is normally defined as the total market value of all final goods and services produced in an economy in a given year. The formula includes personal consumption
expenditures, gross private domestic investment, government purchases and net exports. It was not invented as an indicator of welfare, but has almost everywhere come to be used that way.