E3G

Facing up to Reality: Choices for a Sustainable World

By Tom Burke

To avoid this risk, Stern concludes we must keep the eventual concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to between 500 and 550 parts per million carbon dioxide equivalent. This is no small task. As Environment Minister, Ian Pearson, recently pointed out, it means we have to get all of the carbon out of our energy system by about 2050 and then we must keep it out, effectively for ever.

Let me illustrate this prospect with a graph I call Stern on a page.

All four pillars of prosperity are coming under increasing stress as the rate of change in the global economy accelerates. Climate change stresses all the other stressors.

We will not ever be short of energy, but unless we invest – at least twenty trillion dollars by 2030 according to the International Energy Agency’s latest forecast – in the technologies to make that energy available, energy insecurity will increase.

On current plans most of that investment will make the climate problem much worse. Changing its technology trajectory so that it becomes carbon neutral is, by a very long way the single most important political choice we face in the 21st Century.

These are not just choices of what we do, but also of how we do them. At the beginning of the 20 Century nations could, for the most part, secure the pillars of prosperity by their own actions. At the beginning of the 21st Century, no nation, no matter how big and powerful, can do so.

There are two common features to all of these issues.

First, there are no hard power solutions to the problems. Conquest cannot secure a stable climate or seize water or food that is not there. Iraq has the world’s second largest oil reserves but since our ill-judged and probably illegal invasion of Iraq they have been barely available to the world.

Second, maintaining the pillars of prosperity increasingly requires us to pool sovereignty to manage our shared destiny. The world’s only sustained experiment in the pooling of sovereignty is the European Union. Paradoxically, just at the time when we, and the rest of the world, need that experience most there has been a massive failure of political leadership in Europe.

Neither the U.K. nor the Netherlands can any longer secure the pillars of prosperity for its citizens on its own. We can only do so if the European Union can deliver, on a wide range of issues, the global leadership it is currently delivering on climate change. Europe came together to avoid the mistakes of a divided past. We will only be able to continue to deliver prosperity and security if we can build a more united future. To do that Europe must see itself more clearly in the mirror of the world and face up to the reality that in that world a strong Europe is an imperative not an option.