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If an hour is a long time in politics, we must start thinking in centuries
George Monbiot, The Guardian
From banking to the climate, the wreckage of short-termism is stark, and the need for a 100-year committee is plain
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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”. 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 10 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.
(21 October 2008)
Crunch may put price tag on environment
Alister Doyle, Reuters
The worst financial crisis since the 1930s may be a chance to put price tags on nature in a radical economic rethink to protect everything from coral reefs to rainforests, environmental experts say.
Farmers know the value of land from the amount of crops they can produce but large parts of the natural world — such as wetlands that purify water, oceans that produce fish or trees that soak up greenhouse gases — are usually viewed as “free.”
“Most of our valuable assets are not on the books,” said Robert Costanza, professor of ecological economics at the University of Vermont. “We need to reinvent economics. The financial crisis is an opportunity.”
Advocates of “eco-nomics” say that valuing “natural capital” could help protect nature from rising human populations, pollution and climate change that do not figure in conventional measures of wealth such as gross domestic product (GDP) or gross national product (GNP).
“I believe the 21st century will be dominated by the concept of natural capital, just as the 20th was dominated by financial capital,” Achim Steiner, head of the U.N. Environment Program, told Reuters at the International Union for Conservation of Nature congress in Barcelona earlier this month.
(21 October 2008)
Reuters summit-Economic woes may give planet a breather
Michele Kambas, Reuters
A slowdown in the world economy may give the planet a breather from the excessively high carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions responsible for climate change, a Nobel Prize winning scientist said on Tuesday.
Atmospheric scientist Paul J Crutzen, who has in the past floated the possibility of blitzing the stratosphere with sulphur particles to cool the earth, said clouds gathering over the world economy could ease the earth’s environmental burden.
Slower economic growth worldwide could help slow growth of carbon dioxide emissions and trigger more careful use of energy resources, though the global economic turmoil may also divert focus from efforts to counter climate change, said Crutzen, winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on the depletion of the ozone layer.
(7 October 2008)
