[Comment] The imperative of sustainability
PETER SAIN LEY BERRY
26.01.2007 @ 09:02 CET
EUOBSERVER / COMMENT - We have arrived at that point in the year when the great and good, from government, academia and the richer public corporations, gather in the Swiss town of Davos under the aegis of the World Economic Forum.
Their task is to analyse the murky economic present and peer into the even murkier economic future with the object of edging towards a consensus on the issues of coming importance to the matter of markets and moneymaking. As this is a private gathering the leaders can go about their business relatively untroubled by the more overt politics that usually attend international summits.
Some people see this as anti-democratic, often holding the view that governments and business - especially in their supranational manifestations like the European Union and multinational corporations - are the proximate cause of the changes that sweep through our everyday lives. These can be both good and bad, bringing us welcome things like cheap manufactured goods and modern healthcare as well as what we regret - loss of community, harmonisation, environmental pollution.
This train of thought is erroneous, isn't it? It is 'The Market' - that anonymous force - that dictates progress and provides the horsepower to pull the economic carriage. All governments can do is to run along afterwards with bucket and shovel doing their best to minimise the mess that unrestrained corporatism (and consumerism) might bring.
Market forces and economic progress
It has always seemed to me that democratic government is the people's response to what market forces throw at them. An attempt to exert some control over their lives. But governments can't steer the major forces. It wasn't governments that triggered globalisation, for instance, and nor can they do much about it now that it is here.
Business can't steer economic progress either. Business can only exploit opportunities that happen to arise. Corporations assess trends and work out the best way to jump. And that is surely one of the functions of Davos. If 'The Market' is moving, as if by some unseen hand, then we all need to pay attention to the business antennae.
Already out of this year's meeting has come the rather startling conclusion that the most important of these trends, surpassing even in importance the emergence of new markets in Asia and in Russia is climate change and with it the need for business to move towards long term sustainability.
The conclusion is startling because it suggests realignment between the coalitions represented by business, consumers and government. The old paradigm of government taming the dragon of unfettered enterprise is giving way to a new paradigm in which the three forces co-operate in a single aim - sustainability.
Of course governments do not act solely as the regulator of enterprise; provided the enterprise is benign, governments spend a lot of money on its promotion and development. Globalisation, which has provided half the goods in my home at prices that seem to me to make no economic sense, is encouraged for the wealth and jobs that it brings.
Climate change
It enlarges the economic cake, as Trade Commissioner, Peter Mandelson emphasised this week. There may be occasional individual losses but collectively everybody is better off. But is the current business model, involving as it does the opening of a new Chinese coal-fired power station every week, sustainable?
The popular focus of sustainability - climate change - is obvious and apparent. But beyond climate change lie other matters of huge environmental concern - ranging from biodiversity loss to endemic pollution. From vast dead areas of sea to the destruction of the cancer protecting ozone layer; from burning rainforest to dying corals.
There are the concomitants of climate change, too, spelt out in an article in The (London) Times this week by Professor Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum: growing shortages of water, expanding deserts, shrinking forests. 'This environmental damage,' he wrote, 'plagues countries around the world, industrialised and developing alike
.Sometimes,' he concluded, 'it seems that we as a society have lost our genetic drive to take care of the next generation.'
So it is against this background that we should view the current spat in the European Commission between Commissioner Verheugen, responsible for industry and Commissioner Dimas, responsible for the environment. The two are in dispute over whether or not to compel Europe's carmakers to reduce vehicle emissions by law.
Commissioner Dimas points to the carmakers failure to achieve sufficient reductions on a voluntary basis. Commissioner Verheugen believes that such a move would cost jobs and damage growth in the industry.
The matter has been 'called in' by Mr Barroso, the Commission President. As the Commission, only two weeks ago, issued a target for cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 20 per cent and an aspiration of cutting them by 30 per cent, this should be a simple matter to resolve. The Commission's credibility is at stake; for unless it acts robustly the targets will be discounted heavily and viewed as no more than drunken hope.
Taking care of the next generation
In fact Mr Verheugen may again find himself out on something of a limb, a position which these days he seems increasingly wont to take up. For there is evidence that the carmakers are relatively relaxed about prospective legislation. It may even provide a spur for them to steal a technological march on their competitors. Sustainability is now as much their maxim as anyone else's.
If the revolution in knowledge and communications triggered the globalisation of economic progress then its development may be modified by the imperative of sustainability - 'the genetic drive to take care of the next generation' in Klaus Schwab's words. Government must see that it is not left behind and refusing to push at a door that is already unlocked.
We are not perhaps quite at the stage where the World Economic Forum will rename itself the World Environmental Forum, but the message for Europe's politicians is clear: sustainability must become the overarching consideration.
The author is editor of EuropaWorld