Moving in the right direction

2011 draws to a close with financial instability and climate change topping the agenda of global issues to confront in 2012. The signs are, however, clear that a co-ordinated, multi-governmental approach to problem solving is an emerging trend, if a hotly debated one, with developments of the past week underlining the increasing relevance of intergovernmental approaches to problem solving.

Yesterday, new capital disclosure templates were published for comment by the members of Basel III, the latest in international regulatory standards for banking, requiring banks in more than 30 countries to use a common format for disclosing the size and quality of their capital safety margins to investors.

Last week, the COP17 summit gave birth to a new agreement that commits all signatories to developing a future framework for legally binding carbon emission reductions, bringing hope of an eventual remedy to one of the key deficiencies of the Kyoto protocol.

However, in the same week, Britain elected to abstain from participation in a treaty intended to protect to the European market, leading to wholesale domestic re-evaluation of Britain’s role in an evolving European Union.

The debates will continue in 2012 with the evolution towards intergovernmental co-operation being resisted by nationalists sounding somewhat outdated calls for increasing independence in an increasingly inter-dependent world. Because rationalism tends to favour harmonisation, trends towards integration are seldom opposed on rational grounds but rather through messages of sound and fury, fear and loathing.

When Southern States began advocating for secession from the United States to preserve their "economic interests", Abraham Lincoln famously pointed out, three short years prior to the commencement of the US Civil War, that “a house divided against itself cannot stand”.

Provided that the slow evolution of international co-operation and regulation never comes at the expense of freedom of culture or expression, or the principal of subsidiarity (a principle that affirms that a more centralized level of government should exercise only those responsibilities that cannot be more effectively handled at a local level) then latter day nationalists should hopefully, ultimately, and without necessity of war, come to understand that they have little to fear from a more co-ordinated approach to solving the big problems that affect everybody equally.

For all the contemporary criticism leveled against the European Union, none of these critics lived through the continents’ great wars and nothing in their criticism can trump the truth: from the time European supra-nationalism was first introduced, major warfare amongst member states became unthinkable.

Let’s hope 2012 sees our global body politic keep moving in the right direction.

Kent Cops Out

Peter Kent, Canadian Environment Minister, says India and China are amongst the world’s biggest pollution emitters. He uses their “developing nation” exemption from the emission reduction standards of the Kyoto protocol as a possible basis for Canada’s withdrawal from the treaty. 

But here’s the irony: while Canada might have previously committed itself to carbon emission reduction targets of the Kyoto Protocol, in the last decade Canada’s merchandise imports from India increased by over 60% and imports from China have risen to over $44 billion per year. 

From a horse of such giddying height as the one he obviously saddled before cantering into Durban, can Peter not see that where a nation commits itself to emission reduction targets, if it then simply increases its imports of goods from the very developing nations it criticizes, it’s not actually reduced the level of carbon emitted into the atmosphere, but simply shifted production from its own back yard to somebody else’s? 

Climate control has descended into a debate between developed and developing when, in truth, there’s only one atmosphere and everyone will lose from a negotiation stalemate. Kent suggests that the Green Climate Fund is a “guilt” payment demanded by developing nations when it is simply one proposal to finance cleaner power in developing nations. The Fund and the global carbon tax are strong ideas that deserve rational consideration – perhaps Kent’s projection of morality and guilt onto the negotiating floor belies his own state of mind more than anything else, especially after Greenpeace produced this terrific piece of satire about him earlier this year.