Recession could give birth to EU sustainability treaty

I suppose there could be a sense in which the current recession may come in later years to be seen as a blessing in disguise.

That is not in any way to understate the pain of those who have lost or will lose their jobs and savings now. There is always pain in any transition. But if Europe comes out of the present recession facing in a different direction, then perhaps we shall be better able to avoid even greater pain in the years to come.

What do I mean? Well, it's been pretty clear that our way of life in Europe has become unsustainable in terms of the resources it demands and the load that it puts on the planet.

We have learned to recycle but our appetite for energy, of course, and for steel, aluminium, tin, copper, coltan and so on seems practically inexhaustible. Moreover, we export our lifestyle and our consumption to the developing and the emerging worlds. They soon will overtake us, where they haven't done so already, in their demands on the planet.

The rain forests are shrinking, our seas are polluted with fish stocks decimated; biodiversity is everywhere only a fraction of what it was a century ago. All this we know and now we see the visible effects of climate change in the melting of the permafrost, rising sea levels and drastic perturbations in the weather.

Stable and sustainable

We know this cannot go on. We know that mankind needs to arrive at a point at which the burden that it lays on the planet is both stable and sustainable.

Technology may take us so far. With plant breeding techniques or genetic modification we may learn in the future to double the yield from an ear of wheat, but we know that we shall not be able to treble it.

Though technology may take us a long way from where we are now, we know that its capacity to assist us is not unlimited. We know there will come a point when we shall have to stop the headlong expansion of demand. The world and its resources are finite: we cannot place an infinite load upon it.

Climate change is pushing us towards a more sustainable future, towards using less energy, for instance, and towards recycling of consumables. Here the response from the European Commission and from national governments is clear. We are marching away from profligacy and towards sustainability. Industry must adapt.

Go out and spend

Now comes the recession in whose icy grip most of western Europe's economies are firmly held. Unlike climate change economic decline poses an immediate threat to our way of life. So the authorities have acted.

On Wednesday the Commission announced a programme - or rather it exhorted that a programme should be brought into being seeing as it is the Member States who will pay for most of it - of €200 billion of financial stimulus, approximately 1.5 percent of Europe's GDP.

These measures are directed simply at returning Europe's consumers to Europe's High Streets again and to kick-starting the same old cycle of unsustainable consumption.

"Go out and spend," the Commission says in a crude reversal of its usual financial prudence. "We shall lock the Stability and Growth Pact (the agreement that sets limits on Member State debt and fiscal deficits) in a cupboard until 2011. Do whatever you like. We shall bless your expenditure, save only that it should be "targeted" and "temporary" whatever those words may mean.

It all seems madness to me, I have to confess. Not that the situation is not serious. I know of three people already in my small circle of friends and acquaintances who have lost their jobs. And each firm that folds places a greater strain on all the others until the next weakest folds too. It is a vicious circle. Everyone in business is in survival mode, hoping they will struggle through and trying to safeguard reserves.

No, it seems madness to me to imagine that an undirected and barely co-ordinated financial stimulus of this sort will be sufficient to arrest this recessionary juggernaut.

The stimulus amounts to a few helicopter loads of water against a forest fire. There may be a temporary discernible effect, but the fire will take its own course and burn itself out according to natural factors.

A Treaty of Sustainability

It seems madness to me to think of such sums of money which, though they may pale in comparison to the magnitude of the recession are nevertheless stupendous sums in their own right, being thrown away like this with so little expected benefit.

It seems madness because that money will have to be paid for. Whether I borrow €20,000 for a new car, or whether my government does so on my behalf, I shall still have to pay for it later - either by direct debits to my bank or by large cheques to the Inland Revenue.

And while I am paying such large cheques - and governments are repaying their financial stimulus debts - I am not in a position, and neither are they, to pay for the investment that should be leading us all towards a more sustainable and a more socially just world.

Instead of these €200 billion being spent on clothes, cars and cosmetics, how much better might it have been to have seen a massive increase in the funding available for research - into energy storage for instance, or hydrogen cars or energy efficiency and renewables, or - given the rise in food prices - into increased yields from sustainable agriculture.

Instead of cutting VAT across the board (as we have done in the UK) could the cut not have been selective to reward those industries that would lead us down more sustainable paths - recycling, repair and re-use, energy saving and so on?

Still in times of difficulty, the EU has the knack of conceiving a vision for the future. In the seventies, after the oil price shock, it conceived the idea Monetary Union; in the nineties - a grand expansion of the Union towards the east, re-uniting our Continent. What now?

Could we be looking in 20 years at a new treaty setting out a new vision? A treaty that dealt not with regulations or constitutional provisions or accessions but one which dealt with a way of living in the world of tomorrow. A Treaty of Sustainability in fact.

Peter Sain ley Berry is an independent commentator on European affairs