Scheer Solar Economy Renewable Energy for a Sustainable Global Future (Earthscan, 2005)

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tion and environmentally damaging production processes. It is within the bounds of possibility that lengthy and tortuous negotiations might result in the incorporation of social and environmental standards into an expanded global trade treaty. But it is unlikely that such standards would be sufficiently tightly worded to bring about socially and environmentally sustainable practices on a global scale, or that states would have sufficiently powerful measures at their disposal to be able to mount an effective defence of sustainable business forms.

Many people see GATT as the Bible for the global economic system, a sort of world constitution that has primacy over all other treaties – or at least over those with direct implications for business activity. But this is ideology talking. In reality, GATT, GATS and TRIPS are just three treaties among many, including the conventions of the International Labour Organization (ILO), which, among other things, guarantee the right to join a trade union and the right to negotiate salary and conditions of employment in every signatory state; or the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, the Antarctic Treaty, or the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Convention on Climate Change. All these treaties have equal standing in international law, which recognizes no umbrella treaties other than the United Nations Charter and the UN Convention on Human Rights, both of which have constitutional character or should be interpreted as such. In taking it upon itself to put free markets before existing social and environmental agreements, the WTO is exceeding its mandate.

Demands for the inclusion of social and environmental standards within the remit of the WTO would indirectly accord the organization a role as an international arbiter in economic, social and environmental issues. The remit of the WTO, however, must be bounded by other international agreements. Cases of conflict between the WTO and the ILO conventions or a global agreement on the environment would be referred not to the WTO, but to an international court. It is because the WTO is accorded greater authority than provided for in international law that no such conflict has yet been tried in a court of law.

In sum: there have long been provisions for social and environmental standards in international company law, as Julius

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K Nyerere has pointed out. Prior to his death in October 1999, the former President of Tanzania and Chairman of the South Centre was firmly opposed to the inclusion of social standards in the WTO treaties.6 Whether future trade agreements explicitly acknowledge the validity of social and environmental agreements is irrelevant: they have force in international law. Attempts to incorporate them into GATT and GATS put them at the mercy of negotiations on the future development of the WTO, when WTO delegations have no business deciding which other international agreements shall have force in international law. Heribert Prantl from the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung neatly summarizes the overblown aspirations of economic liberalization in an ironic reversal of the German constitution, the Grundgesetz or Basic Law, whose first and second articles declare the freedom of the individual to be inviolable: ‘German competitiveness is inviolable. The undisturbed practice of investment is guaranteed. No-one may be compelled against his conscience to protect the environment, to respect privacy, to provide protection from summary dismissal or to enact any other measures that may place restrictions upon him.’7 International law deserves equal protection from erosion when it conflicts with WTO rules.

Which rules and rights are respected, especially in company law, and even more particularly in disputes between countries, also depends on whether those affected have the courage to stand up for their rights. Without trade unions, consumer organizations and a few bold individuals, many national laws against the ruthless application of economic power would exist only on paper. Governments only decide to bring suits against other countries under international law after carefully weighing up the implications for their relations with the country in question. If international environmental law is to be enforced, then individuals must be allowed to bring suits before international courts, and not just governments. There also needs to be an international court of environmental law for this purpose, parallel to the International Court of Human Rights.8

Whether countries would abide by the judgements of such a court remains a question of international power politics. The USA takes the liberty of erecting trade barriers even in the face

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of WTO rulings – for example, against countries that don’t observe the trade embargo against Cuba. As no international organization has sufficient force at its disposal to ensure that rulings by the WTO, ILO or international courts are respected, compliance is always a question of the balance of power between those involved. A verdict is more likely to be respected when it favours an economic power with the ability to impose its own sanctions, whereas rulings in favour of those without further influence are often empty words if the more powerful party chooses to ignore them. While international law may impede the powerful in the pursuit of their own interest, it rarely stops them entirely. As national economies become ever more dependent on transnational corporations and the global market, even for basic supplies such as food, energy and raw materials, they are increasingly at the mercy of an economic force against which no recourse to international rules on the environment, social issues or even trade can help. Whether right is on their side or not, countries can be blackmailed with threats to cut off essential supplies if they do not yield to the economic powers who control the world’s resources. Hence resource autonomy at the level of the national economy is a fundamental objective that grows in importance as economic relationships become more international in scope. From an unblinkered perspective, this is in the economic interest not just of small nations, but of all countries, including those with the highest consumption of resources, the USA above all.

Already, even leading industrialized countries are harming themselves if their governments:

•act in the interest of the global market power of ‘their’ international resource companies, whose products destroy both the global and their own environment;

•provide military forces, including ‘rapid reaction forces’, to this end; and/or

•take the flak for the global economic plundering of resource reserves by the global players.

Governments that act in this way take on the role in the public consciousness of the ‘ugly American’, as Senator Fulbright

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noted back in the 1960s, or of the ‘ugly European’ or ‘ugly Japanese’, standing in for a few firms with US, European or Japanese names. Even the governments of the industrialized world are faced with the question of whether they would not better serve their interests by embarking on the road to a solar resource base, rather than continuing to defend the ‘free’ global commodities market.

Free trade should only continue to hold sway in the market in which the two core economic arguments for it actually obtain: that is, the market for technological goods. The first argument is that protectionist isolation is ultimately damaging to a manufacturing economy, as there is less incentive to seek productivity gains in a closed economy. The longer insulating tariffs remain in force, the further behind the economy falls as its productivity drops. The second reason is that every product for which there is a demand should be available everywhere, even if it is not domestically produced.

The flaw in the reasoning occurs where global market rules are extended to cover those products whose production depends on factors not under human control. In respect of commodities, this is always the case. Denying this difference and subjecting energy, raw materials and foodstuffs to the same global market rules as manufactured products is an error that criminally disregards the laws of nature. It is an error of the same magnitude to extend the free-market principles applicable to manufactured goods to cultural goods, the spiritual and intellectual resources of humanity and all its diversity in language and way of life.

Cultural levelling and the abuse of the natural environment, through to its irreversible depletion and destruction, are the consequences of these errors. Globalized markets have led in practice to an economic structure that rides roughshod over all moral principles and has no regard for the natural basis of life on Earth. The market principle is exposed as extremist economic dogma. A sustainable market regime must rescind all global market regulations pertaining to the resource industry, restricting their scope to manufactured goods. The global market for technology and technological products must be truly free and open to all comers. In the commodities market,

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however, every national economy must have the ability to prioritize locally produced over imported resources. This means:

•Domestic agricultural commodities such as grain, milk, meat and vegetables must have priority. Anything that cannot be produced domestically – in northwest Europe, this includes tropical fruit and vegetables and olive oil – must be freely tradable. The same applies to all foodstuffs where demand cannot be satisfied from domestic production. Equally, there can be no artificial restrictions for quality goods such as wine and speciality cheeses. This basic pattern can be expanded upon with regional preference regimes for basic agricultural commodities in countries with large land areas or in trading blocs such as the EU or the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA).

•Domestically harvested or extracted energy and raw materials must be given priority over imports. This would automatically boost the market for renewable energy. Even countries with conventional energy reserves would lose their current cost advantages with the end of mass production for the global market.

This approach would be considerably better targeted, less bureaucratic and of more direct relevance than defining global standards for the entire domain of social and environmental policy. To be effective, standards necessarily have to be detailed

– an enormously complicated undertaking, given the very different economic and environmental starting points in each country and their very different social and environmental legislation. The approach I propose returns the economic initiative to the level of national and regional economies, vital if social standards are to be upheld. By starting with the resource base and according priority to regional resource flows, it incentivizes sustainable business practices far more than would an environmental policy that merely sought to rein in the environmental excesses of traditional business through a plethora of individual regulations. How can a system that barely works on a national level be made to function on a global scale? Traditional environmental policy expends considerable administrative

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effort on improving conventional resource use. A modern environmental policy must focus on environmentally sustainable resources and traffic reduction. A global drive towards regionalized commodity markets furthers both these aims, being the swiftest route to a self-regulating sustainable economy. Regional markets make it possible to largely circumvent the intermediate resale agents that are a particular characteristic of the global market in agricultural products, and thus to avoid higher prices for consumers. It is the middlemen who take the money from the pockets of agricultural businesses, thereby accelerating their demise. Producerorganized direct marketing for foodstuffs and regenerable resources can, with political support, remove the need for intermediate trade, including the use of labels to indicate the origin of the product. One common argument against such a thorough regionalization is that developing country and East European agricultural and resource producers would lose their export markets. Yet all these countries have difficulty feeding their own populations, and in most cases it is not the population at large or domestic companies that profit from resource exports, but rather transnational resource corporations.

Trade not talk: beyond the energy industry

‘The congress dances.’ Such was the disparaging view taken of the 1815 Congress of Vienna, where for many months the diplomatic envoys of the governments of Europe negotiated the political future of the continent, following the ‘big bang’ of the French Revolution (1789) and the Napoleonic Wars. In terms of results, however, that congress achieved more that the negotiations, now in their tenth year, on the international treaties supposed to establish a global environmental protection regime. An unprecedented conference marathon produces agreements, when it produces anything at all, that are promptly ignored. Worse still: elsewhere, at the same time, the same governments are signing international agreements whose direct consequence is to negate the agreed environmental targets, from the WTO treaty to the European Energy Charter through to agreements on aviation. Unlike environmental accords, these agreements are

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usually observed. And yet there seems to be no alternative to global governance on environmental issues. Hence the many conferences, preparatory conferences and follow-up conferences at which protective measures for the climate, endangered species, land, sea, tropical forests and the ozone layer are negotiated. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) also concentrate their activities largely on shadowing the global conferences in order to present them with their demands. The result is a growing body of international environmental law,9 whose further development makes undoubted sense. But the fate of the planet must not be made contingent on the success of efforts in such conferences, be that explicit environmental treaties or new WTO rules. Calls for and attempts to initiate international agreements present an ideal excuse for governments not to undertake even the most urgent revision of policy on global resources, allegedly because an international understanding is a vital prerequisite – usually without any particular effort to bring such an understanding about. ‘Talk globally – procrastinate nationally’, was how my book A Solar Manifesto characterized this abuse of international negotiations as a smokescreen for business as usual.10

Ross Gelbspan’s book The Heat is On: the high-stakes battle over earth’s threatened climate describes in detail how the ambitious UN Conference on Environment and Development in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, at which Agenda 21 was agreed, has remained ‘bogged down in diplomacy’.11 Even with dedication on all sides, the broad consensus needed to negotiate an international treaty that will be ratified by a large enough number of countries to give it the status of international law makes for a tortuous process. Not only do the participating countries make concessions to each other, they also grant concessions to transnational firms. Serious and increasingly acute dangers cannot be resolved by such long-winded and ineffectual methods.

It is noteworthy that the only international agreements on the environment to have been achieved so far do not significantly touch on the interests of big business. The Antarctic Treaty, the Treaty on Maritime Law and the Montreal Protocol on the use of ozone-damaging gases are all examples of limits placed on environmentally damaging activities that have either not yet begun or – in the case of the Montreal Protocol – did

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not endanger powerful economic structures. Protracted efforts to achieve international agreement are scarcely amenable to fast-tracking. There are several proposals for global action, including the proposals contained in A Solar Manifesto for an International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), parallel to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), to organize international non-commercial technology transfers for renewable energy on global scale; and for a ‘proliferation treaty’ on renewable energy in the form of a protocol appended to the existing non-proliferation treaty on nuclear technology. But as useful as these initiatives may be if they succeed, it would be negligent to rely on successful negotiation alone.

In the case of renewable resources, it is also simply inappropriate. There is no need to agree access arrangements for a resource that is universally available. The only requirement is the right technology, for which no international treaty is required. Ultimately, it is a question of individual action, the only possible obstacle being national, European and international market rules that directly or indirectly favour the fossil resource industry. This absurdity must be brought to an immediate end, without waiting for changes to international treaties to establish market precedence for self-sufficient and sustainable resource use. International and European law already enshrines a sufficient number of such principles so that it would be possible merely to give these existing principles priority over market rules. No country need allow itself to be compelled by market rules to accept imports of crude oil or coal or electricity from nuclear or coal-fired power stations to the detriment of renewable energy. Every government can give priority to renewable resources, even if that means taxing environmentally damaging goods. It then has only to apply the same policy domestically, and give priority to renewable over fossil resources in the domestic economy. Governments have greater freedom of action than is generally assumed or claimed: it is just a matter of seizing the opportunities that already exist. And because the transition to renewable resources is not a burden but brings important advantages, there are no real economic constraints. The constraints are mostly imaginary.

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Consensus among the masters of the existing superannuated global resource industry is not a precondition for the transition to a solar resource base. As long as this misconception holds sway, the opportunities that renewable energy and resources offer will fail to be adequately and appropriately exploited. We must be prepared to think and act outside the energy industry box. The solar economy will not blossom in debating chambers and boardrooms, but among practitioners of sustainable architecture, cultivators of energy and materials crops and designers of energy technology. Action must be taken locally, not globally.

C H A P T E R 11

The visible hand of the sun: blueprint for a solar world

SOCIAL DEVELOPMENTS MAY seem unpredictable,

but that does not mean that the course they take is wholly determined by chance. Provided that no great war or natural disaster plunges everything into chaos, they follow a clearly discernible pattern of events. The fossil energy system has shaped the global economy from its inception, leading the world to the lip of the abyss. A global shift towards renewable resources will overturn the structure of the fossil global economy and draw mankind back from the abyss, towards a sustainable future. Sooner or later there will be general recognition of the need for fundamental change.

When the way to a lasting supply of clean energy becomes clear, people will not let the opportunity slip through their fingers. It could be a long time before the optimum path is known, and the route chosen will determine the pace of change. But the capacity of existing norms and structures to hold up the transition that the planet and its people so badly need may mean that it comes too late.

Over the course of history, many civilizations have fallen victim to their failure to wake up to mortal dangers. The fossil fuel crisis places the entire world in such a life-or-death predicament. Political and business leaders have so far shown an inability to rise to the challenge. They shrug their shoulders, content to blame anonymous market forces, to the approval of all those who hold that political institutions are in