A Promethean Revisiting of Copenhagen: Man-Made World: Choosing between Progress and Planet
More than two years since the failure of the COP15 Copenhagen climate summit, the meanings of that debacle continue to be both politically and intellectually contested. A recent contribution has come from Andrew Charlton, who was the Australian Prime Minister’s representative at COP 15, in his short book Man-Made World: Choosing between Progress and Planet.* Charlton will be best known to a global readership as the youthful co-author with Joseph Stiglitz of Fair Trade for All: How Trade can Promote Development.
Charlton’s central thesis is simple: existing analysis of the Copenhagen fiasco is in his view largely misplaced, because ‘the chaos was merely a symptom of a deeper discord’, which he describes as ‘the central dilemma of our century: the choice between people and planet”. He contends that it is only ‘rich countries’ who have the luxury of caring about the planet, while ‘developing countries want more economic growth, more food for their hungry people, more light in their dark villages and more vehicles shipping goods from farms to markets’. It is a profound disjunction of imperatives which, Charlton argues, explains the deadlock in relation to climate change and other failures in relation to global environmental problems. In order to break the stalemate on these issues, Charlton proposes what he considers to be a novel approach to global environmental governance: “new frameworks that reconcile progress and planet by harnessing technological means to achieve green ends.”
While Charlton is to be commended for seeking to make a sober contribution to Australia’s somewhat intemperate environmental debates, his analysis suffers from a series of significant problems. First, his account of the global politics of climate change – the departing premise on which the rest of the work is founded – is less than convincing. Second, his argument fails to properly account for the forces of political economy. Third, he relies on a straw man for his critique of environmentalism. Fourth, he is beholden to a materialist technological fallacy. Each of these will be dealt with in turn.
1. Despite his inside knowledge, Charlton’s assessment of Copenhagen – that developing countries would not accept the deal that developed countries were imposing because it was too onerous – is a partial interpretation of events. China may well have opposed tough targets for solely economic reasons, but the African and small island states maintained the highest ambition of all – well above what the developed world was prepared to offer, which is entirely contrary to Charlton’s essential thesis that it was the poor countries that resisted the deal. As the new strategic reality of COP 17 in Durban revealed, the abiding cleavage is far more about ambition than GDP, with Europe and most of the world’s poorer countries lined up as the aspirational camp, ranged against the rest.
2. Charlton spends much of Man-Made World assessing various clean energy options as part of his preferred Plan B. There is an unevenness of tone here, as Charlton mounts an extended and at times sarcastic critique of the scalability of renewable technologies, which is then followed by a rather gentler handling of the debates around ‘clean coal’. However, the real problem with his analysis is deep inconsistency in relation to political economy.
Charlton makes much of Roger Pielke’s “iron law of climate policy” that “when policies focussed on economic growth confront policies focussed on emission reductions, it is economic growth that will win out every time.” So, Charlton argues, “[i]nstead of seeking to make fossil fuels expensive, we should focus on making clean power cheap...” which he wants to achieve through “massively increased support for research and development of new technologies”. At an international level, Charlton asserts that “[r]ich and poor countries should work together to develop breakthrough technology to deliver cheaper energy for the world”.** The “missing element”, Charlton maintains “is technology, not political will” and “[t]ackling climate change in a way that works for the poor will be first and foremost a technological challenge”.
The flaw in Charlton’s analysis here is that he treats an observation about political behaviour – that trade and industry generally trumps environmental concerns – as if it were an immutable economic formula rather than a contingent product of politics. It is a misconception which then causes Charlton to imagine that the forces of political economy which have derailed the development of effective climate policy so far would not similarly be deployed against the grand program of R&D which he proposes. As David Roberts has observed:
“Climate change is a polarized and polarizing issue, that’s true enough. But lots of people these days act like that’s an immutable fact of nature. It’s not — climate was rendered polarizing, by people explicitly seeking to do so. This is a well-known, well-documented story. People with political access, financial backing, and legal/regulatory advantage set out to make climate change controversial and they succeeded.”
Late in Man-Made World, Charlton seems to realise that he’s got a major analytical weakness on his hands and seems to contradict his earlier pronouncements, declaring that “the best advice of scientists and the best plans of economists are not enough. Executing such plans requires the will to act. Without a public consensus, we cannot move forward.” Charlton can’t have it both ways: either there is political will or there isn't; but as it stands, one of the central arguments contained in Man-Made World seems neither consistent nor coherent.***
3. Charlton makes a mistake when he recycles the tired claim that there is a fundamental opposition between the environmentalists on the one hand and the world’s poor and oppressed on the other. Three observations can be made. First, the catch-all expression “green groups” elides the radical divergence that exists within the environmental movement. When Charlton asserts that “[t]hose who are focused mainly on the environmental challenge are usually based in rich countries”, he is merely reifying a certain bourgeois conception of ‘environmentalism’ which obscures the every-day struggle of poor people’s politics and social movements around the world for better conditions of life, free from pollution, and with better access to the natural world.
Second, at least some of the most significant and high profile global “green groups”, very consciously and systematically locate all of their campaigning within a normative and policy insistence that environmental sustainability must be symbiotic with social justice and human rights. For example Kumi Naidoo the global head of Greenpeace, told the New York Times in December that “the struggle to end global poverty and the struggle to avoid catastrophic climate change are two sides of the same coin.” In other words, Charlton is on shaky empirical ground. Third, even if his generalisations about the position of “green groups” were accurate, if Copenhagen proved anything, it was the impotence of the environmental movement. Ultimately, Charlton’s “green groups” are a straw man.
4. Charlton seeks to distinguish himself from “optimists” who view history as “a steady upward path of human advancement” and “believe that progress is the answer to our future challenges”, but it is not easy to discern the force of his distinction. Mostly it appears that what distinguishes Charlton from his definition of “optimists” is that he defines the latter as free marketeers, whereas the author is calling for a massive increase in state spending on R&D. However, what is essentially a debate over the rights and wrongs of different public policy options, does not alter the extent to which Charlton’s perspective appears comfortably located within an environmental discourse identified fifteen years ago by political scientist John Dryzek as the ‘Promethean Response’ to ecological problems, defined as an “unbounded faith in the ability of humans to manipulate the world in ever more effective fashion”. Charlton simply thinks that interventionist research and development is required to ensure that the manipulation is effective.
Charlton cites with approval the work of the late Julian Simon who (though Charlton is silent on this) forecast human access to cheap energy lasting seven billion years in to the future. He also incants the aphorism of former Saudi oil minister Sheikh Yamani that the “stone age didn’t end because the world ran out of stone”. According to Charlton, material dependency does not lead to collapse, because in each case “innovation” heralds “a new era of human progress that facilitated a transition to new materials”. The problem with this kind of whiggish teleology, is that it does not account for the dead-ends: as Jared Diamond argued in Collapse: How Societies choose to succeed or fail, the historical record grimly demonstrates that successful innovation by societies cannot be taken for granted. On Easter Island, to choose the iconic example, the stone-age ended precisely because the ‘world’ of the island ran out of stone. It is also worth observing that the staggering decline in global biodiversity, rainforest coverage and fish-stocks (for example) show little sign of the salvation by innovation that Charlton preaches as news of impending deliverance.
Conclusion: Progress and Planet
Charlton’s central contention has force, but identifying the tension between ‘progress’ and ‘planet’ is at such a meta-level as to be little more than a restatement of the problem. And as Charlton himself observes, the progress/planet binary is “false” in any event, because if “we focus on one, we will destroy both”, so “[t]he only way out of our predicament is to reconcile economic development and sustainability”. There is nothing remotely original in this assessment of course: the Bruntland Commission coined the doctrine of ‘sustainable development’ a quarter of a century ago, and the doctrine has been the keystone of mainstream environmental policy making ever since.
In his work (more of which in a future blog) the new Director of the London School of Economics, Craig Calhoun reminds the reader of the significance of understanding people within their social context. Certainly, it is worth having regard to autobiographical matters when reading Charlton’s Man-Made World. For a wunderkind like Charlton, an individual of genuinely rare and undoubted brilliance, the sky is indeed the limit. He is a man for whom boundaries and restraints must seem unthinkable: so it is psychologically unsurprising that he sees world history as travelling along the same trajectory. Clean coal will be so. Technology will see us through. Nations of the world will cooperate in finding the funding to get the smart kids together in a room to work out the solutions. Hopefully that messy politics business will sort itself out. Seven billion years in the future, perhaps all will still be fine.
Follow David Ritter on Twitter here.
Notes
*Actually instalment 44 in the (in an Australian context) absolutely essential and agenda setting Quarterly Essay series, each of which is published as a short book of around 25,000 words.
** As an aside, intuitively, one might think that the best framework for such planetary R&D would be the UNFCCC with one of its principal aims being tech transfer between the developed and the developing world. But for Charlton the failure of the Kyoto Protocol would actually be no bad thing because it would allow greater flexibility for “countries to formulate their own strategies”.
*** I’m grateful to my colleague Joss Garman for pointing out that Charlton’s arguments in Man-Made World closely resemble those made by the Breakthrough Institute in the USA. I am sympathetic to the criticism of this work elaborated by Joseph Romm and Stephen Lacey and David Roberts.
**** I work for Greenpeace and am very conscious that this entire post can be viewed through the Mandy Rice-Davies prism of ‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’ The reader will have to decide for themselves whether the analysis in this review holds water.
