The Politics of Climate Change (33 page)

In geopolitical terms, it is essential to recognize, as Paul Collier has put it, that ‘the third world has shrunk'.
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For much of the past half-century the question of ‘development' was one of a gulf between one billion affluent and four billion impoverished people in the world. The millennium goals were established with such figures in mind. Yet about 80 per cent of the five billion now live in countries that are developing, some of them at extraordinary speed. These countries have experienced rapid growth in income per capita. They have recorded an average GDP growth rate of over 4 per cent during the 1980s and 1990s. Over the early period of the current century, that rate has risen to over 4.5 per cent, although of course the fast pace of China's development alone over the period accounts for a substantial proportion of this.

These statistics drive home the importance of what I have earlier called the development imperative. Economic growth on the large scale is the only way out of poverty for the mass of the world's poor, and for many people in the world it has worked. Yet at least a billion people – located in about 60 different countries – have been left out. Most of these societies are small and their combined population does not approach that of either China or India. As Collier says, they ‘are falling behind, and often falling apart'.
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Their economies have not grown; on the contrary, their level of income has declined. It was, on average, lower in absolute terms by the year 2000 than it had been in 1970. Since then it has increased by just over
1 per cent, not enough to make any significant difference to their fortunes – they are marked not only by poverty, but by epidemics, ignorance and despair.

These societies lag behind the rest of the world because they are caught in what Collier calls four ‘traps'. One is that of civil war. Over 70 per cent of the societies that contain the bottom billion have either recently experienced civil war or are still caught up in one. Susceptibility to civil war both causes economic stagnation and is caused by it. These countries face a 14 per cent possibility of experiencing a civil war over any given five-year period. Every percentage point increase in growth knocks 1 per cent off this risk. Conflict almost always affects neighbouring countries – and, as mentioned earlier, can spread to whole regions, to some extent dragging them down too.

One of the four traps is actually the possession of natural resources, especially oil and gas. Some 30 per cent of the world's poor live in countries where the economy is dominated by resource wealth. The reasons for this situation are well known. There are a few rentier states which, to some degree, have been able to escape the ‘resource curse' – such as Kuwait or Saudi Arabia – mainly because their oil and gas revenues are enormous. For others, however, revenue from such sources only provides a livelihood for a tiny elite. At the same time, that revenue discourages investment in other industries, and renders the country's exports uncompetitive. Moreover, as in the past, the prices of oil and gas have been unstable, and that instability is imported into the economy.

The other two traps are, first, being a land-locked country with dysfunctional neighbours and, second, bad governance. Almost 40 per cent of the people in the bottom billion live in countries that are land-locked. The case of Switzerland shows that it is possible to be both land-locked and wealthy; but Switzerland has friendly neighbours, whose countries have excellent communications. In countries such as Uganda, Sudan and Somalia it is a different story. The economies of the land-locked societies in Africa are not integrated with those of their neighbours, but are either turned inwards or open to the vagaries of the world market.

Bangladesh ranks 134 out of 178 countries in the world
covered in Transparency International's ratings of corruption.
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Yet it has managed to put in place fairly effective economic policies and has achieved a significant measure of economic growth. It has done well because it has few natural resources of its own and because it has an extensive coastline – (although, as discussed in
chapter 7
, one which puts it at high risk as sea levels rise as a result of global warming). No doubt the country would have fared even better if it had been less corrupt.

Bad governance, a matter that extends well beyond corruption as such, compounds each of the other sets of problems – producing societies in which governments are either paralysed by divisions or where there is, in effect, no government at all. One study equated failed states with countries comparable in other respects. The results showed the average cost of being a failed state, over the period during which it could be classified as such, to be £100 billion.
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Political reform is always, in principle, possible, and achieving it is normally the key to progress in other areas. Some of the world's poorest countries have managed such reform in the past, most importantly China. In the 1960s the country faced ruin as a result of the policies of Chairman Mao. The subsequent leadership took the decision to change direction, resulting in the economic success that is such a feature of world society today.

On the face of things, the nations that make up the ‘bottom billion' are threatening to drop off the edge of world history, since they are locked into a deteriorating cycle from which most other nations have, in large measure, escaped. Ethical reasons alone demand that the rest of the world community cannot sit by while local tragedies unfold. But in the context of climate change, there are important material reasons why the more affluent nations cannot remain uninvolved. The pressures created by climate change and increasing energy scarcity, sketched out at the beginning of the chapter and throughout this book, could cause the problems of the bottom billion to be dispersed around the world as a whole. What has happened in Sudan is an awful reminder of how global struggles may play out if ways are not found to contain and reshape them.

The fate of the bottom billion is likely to have a major influence on how far international terrorism will continue to be a prominent feature on the world scene. The states where the poorest live frequently display a lethal combination of terrorism, international crime, drugs and money-laundering.

Where these states are also oil-producers, their history tends to be even more blighted. It would be difficult to overemphasize how important oil and gas have been in shaping world politics in the decades since the end of the Second World War. As Thomas Friedman says, when historians look back at our era, they might well conclude that one of the most important geopolitical trends was the influence of oil wealth over the changing centre of gravity of Islam.
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In the early post-war years, that centre of gravity was located in Cairo, Istanbul, Beirut, Casablanca and Damascus, all in their way cosmopolitan cities offering the hope of progressive modernization. At that time, many Muslim nations were relatively liberal and there was widespread talk of the need to separate church and state on the Turkish model.

Yet because of the growing importance of oil, and the dominant position which the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia hold in its production, conservative interpretations of Islam have become much more prominent than they used to be. Saudi Arabia is the guardian of two of the holiest mosques of Islam, in Mecca and Medina. ‘Desert Islam', aggressive and reactionary, was originally shaped by poverty; now it is in possession of untold wealth. The half-century-old pact with the US kept the ruling family in place and, in turn, helped conservatism to flourish.

‘Oil is the enemy of freedom' – is it possible to make such an apparently absurd theorem stick? Without too much over simplification, the blunt answer is ‘yes', and the reasons why are well known. What Friedman calls the First Law of Petropolitics brings an impressive range of cases together.
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The tiny kingdom of Bahrain, he observes, led the way among states in the Gulf in holding free parliamentary elections, ones in which women could vote and stand as candidates. Bahrain
was the first such state in which oil was discovered, about three-quarters of a century ago – but much more recently, it was also the first in which it started to run out. The leaders of the country began to think in terms of diversifying the economy, which in turn led to the beginnings of political reform.

Following Tunisia and Egypt, Bahrain was the third country in the Middle East to experience an attempt at democratic revolution in early 2011. In spite of partial reforms, up to that point little of a concrete nature had changed. When these uprisings first started, the initial response of the oil-rich states was bribery. Several rulers announced cash payments to be made to citizens to try to keep them quiescent.

Friedman has undertaken a systematic study of the relationship between the fluctuating price of oil and political change. His ‘Law' states that the higher the price of oil, the more likely an oil-producing country is to turn autocratic. Political leaders get popular support from the rentier income flowing into the country and feel free to ignore what opposition groups may say, and indeed, to some large degree, what the rest of the world thinks too. Oil-rich governments use their revenues to bypass the need for taxation, thereby avoiding the pressures that come from tax-payers, who normally demand accountability.

Oil money promotes the use of patronage, creating an inner group of rulers; that self-same revenue makes possible the creation of an elaborate system of police, security services and surveillance. Michael Ross argues that it is not only conservative Islam which produces the subordination of women; it is the dominance of oil money as such. Since there is little economic diversification, there is no chance for women to join the non-agricultural workforce, which in turn has the effect of keeping the birth rate high.
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There are 23 countries in the world which get a large part of their income from oil and gas; not one of them is a democracy in anything but name. Of course, all this might change as a result of the events that have convulsed the Middle East. At a minimum, they are likely to have a far-reaching impact on the relationship between oil and politics.

Russia is now in the grip of a small elite drawing its power
almost wholly from revenue provided by oil, gas and mineral reserves. The symbiotic, yet tense, relationship between the EU and Russia has attracted a great deal of commentary. Some 40 per cent of the EU's gas supplies, 30 per cent of its oil and about a quarter of its coal come from Russia. EU–Russia relationships need to be normalized, a task that is routinely spoken about but, so far, not realized. From a climate change point of view, a major concern of a continuing EU–Russia dialogue should be a reopening of Russia's oil and gas industry to European, and then to other foreign, investment.

Large-scale new investment is needed to reduce the profligate way in which energy is produced (and used) in Russia. It has been estimated that the volume of gas flared off in the country each year is equivalent to a quarter of total Russian gas exports to Europe.
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Leaky pipelines add substantially to this total. In the meantime, Russia won such a liberal deal at Kyoto that there is no motivation to control emissions. Russian commitments to reduce leakage should receive international support and encouragement, as should moves to raise energy prices for consumers, although neither is motivated by climate change considerations. On the back of high oil prices, Russia adopted a forceful stance in international relations.

Vladimir Putin's notion of sovereign democracy has nothing to do with democracy as ordinarily understood and everything to do with sovereignty – with the assertion of Russia's right and capability to act as a great power. The EU is rightly encouraging its former East European member–states to diversify their sources of energy supply and move towards full-cost pricing for consumers (although EU leaders objected when Russia tried to force the Ukraine to make such a move overnight), but with little impact so far. The sole exception is the Czech Republic, which has built an oil pipeline to Germany and has concluded a long-term gas deal with Norway.

These considerations show just how much there is to play for, should the industrial countries be able simultaneously to reduce their dependence on oil and lower their carbon emissions. The famous ‘curse of oil' does not only apply within nations, but to the world system as a whole, since the need to sustain a steady flow of oil plays such a large part in contemporary geopolitics. If the industrial countries could break
away from their wholesale dependency on oil and natural gas, it would be a major benefit not only for them but, perversely, also for the producer nations. It would help bring about one of the most far-reaching realignments of international relations in history.

One does not have to envisage a future in which the developed countries will become autonomous in respect of their energy supplies, which for most is neither practicable nor desirable. Interdependence – for example, in the shape of large-scale smart energy grids powered by renewable technologies – will continue to be a fact of life and has a clear positive side, in terms of the pooling of resources. But it will become far more possible than it is now for them to be protected from system breakdown by the capacity for significant energy self-provision. To repeat a constant theme of this book, what is important is that it should not be provided by a return to coal.

The large bulk of greenhouse gas emissions is produced by only a limited number of countries – as far as containing global warming is concerned, what the majority of states do pales in significance compared to the activities of the large polluters. Moreover, only a limited number of states have the capability seriously to pioneer technological innovation relevant to climate change – rules governing knowledge transfer and investment from these countries to others will be more important than universal accords.