Maurice F. Strong, Marc Nerfin, Pope Francis’ Laudato Si’, SDGs and COP 21
UNITED NATIONS, 21 Mar 2016
Branislav Gosovic – TRANSCEND Media Service
www.ipsnews.net
During 2015, five interrelated events took place – Maurice F. Strong and Marc Nerfin passed away, Pope Francis issued his Encyclical “Laudato Si’”, the UN General Assembly adopted 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the 21st Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 21), held in Paris, reached what has been lauded as a landmark agreement.
The purpose of this essay is to contribute to the institutional history of the United Nations by highlighting some less known details and the continuity of the process launched in the World Organization some 50 years ago, when the challenges of what is today referred to as “sustainable development” and exemplified by climate change issues were placed on the global agenda for the first time.
It is written as a tribute in memoriam of Maurice F. Strong and Marc Nerfin, two remarkable and visionary United Nations personalities and leaders, who – with the support of a team and a global network of distinguished and committed internationalists, both from the South and the North, whom they attracted and assembled and some of whom are mentioned in this text – played important roles in helping to launch, orient and implement this process and laid the foundations for Pope Francis’ Encyclical, the UN Sustainable Development Goals and COP 21.
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Today, climate change has emerged as a major preoccupation of the international community, and also the media, and become an issue that a large majority of people throughout the world seem to be aware of. Yet, generally little attention is paid to the fact that climate change is but one facet of a broader set of issues, to how these issues came to be included on the global agenda, and how the perceptions and approaches for dealing with them have evolved over the decades.
The topic of climate change has been extirpated from the much larger context of how humankind should face and deal with the multiple challenges of the highly complex, transcendental global problématique, referred to as “human environment” when it was first placed on the agenda by the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE), held in Stockholm.
“Human environment”, as an intrinsically difficult and controversial subject, which spanned disciplines and sectors, could not be boxed within the traditional institutional frameworks and was discordant with some key axioms of classical economics. The picture was further complicated by UN member countries being at widely different levels of development, with varying capacities and abilities to deal with local environmental problems, with differing degrees of accountability for global problems and differing roles in their solution. Moreover, all this was superimposed on decades-long political and development controversies and sharply divided interests and views of the South and the North.
Whether the Stockholm Conference was to be held at all was in doubt because of misapprehension on the part of many developing countries, which perceived “environment” primarily as the issue of pollution and thus one of concern only to the industrially advanced countries. They also feared that it could spawn obstacles to their own development and generate added costs. For example, the import of the needed technologies from the North, and the diversion of the already limited resources from other, pressing priorities. Some developing countries from tropical regions were wary that the conservation of nature and wildlife could lead to interference in their domestic affairs by developed countries.
With the preparatory process in disarray, enter the picture Maurice F. Strong of Canada, as the Secretary-General of the Stockholm Conference, and Marc Nerfin of Switzerland, as his chef de cabinet. Both were sensitized to the reasons for the reluctance of developing countries to engage in a conference that would treat “environment” (even though softened by the addition of the adjective “human”) in a manner preferred by the developed countries, i.e. as a specialized, sectoral issue, focused on pollution, environmental-impact assessment, technological fixes, conservation, monitoring and management.
In order to overcome the looming political impasse, Strong and Nerfin sought to recast the approach by introducing the development perspective into the picture. This was achieved by holding a meeting of a group of experts in 1971, the well-known Founex Seminar on development and environment. The link between environment and development was thus established and the need for a holistic, integrated and global approach to environment challenges was advanced. This represented a fundamentally different approach, which also encompassed the development needs faced by the developing countries, including a myriad of environmental problems caused by poverty and underdevelopment in general.
This may not have been to the liking of the key developed countries. But, the Founex Seminar Report helped to save the Stockholm Conference by bringing into consideration the development aspects of environment problems and the interrelationships between environment and development. In this way, it helped temper the scepticism and even hostility to the Conference of many developing countries and made them interested and willing to take part in the Conference proceedings. The Founex Report also provided a framework that facilitated the bridging of differences between the South and the North during the negotiations in Stockholm and the arriving at an outcome that included elements and measures for addressing the needs and concerns of the developing countries.
The Stockholm Conference ended on a positive and optimistic note. It appeared that the first steps on a promising road to the future had been taken on the basis of what could have been considered a unifying compromise or a bargain. The developing South was joining the environmental bandwagon, so dear to and championed by the developed North. In return, it was hoped that the developed countries would cooperate in the stalled negotiations on implementing the international development agenda. In this way, they would assist the developing countries also in overcoming environmental problems linked to poverty and underdevelopment, which was emphasized in Prime Minister of India Indira Gandhi’s statement at the Conference that “poverty is the worst form of pollution”.
Moreover, via a new, i.e. “additional” development assistance, including resources raised through global taxation and exploitation of the global commons, and via the development of appropriate technologies and their diffusion and transfer on “favourable” terms, the North was to help the developing countries to deal with environmental issues that they would increasingly come to face as they industrialized, developed and modernized their economies and societies.
The “environment and development” formula encapsulated the essence of this outcome and the need to make progress on what was de facto a single, unified global agenda. Strong and Nerfin played the leading role in conceiving and shepherding the tenuous compromise and structure that emerged.
Soon after UNCHE, significant developments, spearheaded by the developing countries, took place in the global arena. They were of major relevance also in terms of the environment-development agenda acquiring a more definite shape. This was, particularly, the case with the OPEC action of raising oil prices. The OPEC decisions resulted in the “energy crisis” and also led to the initiatives of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) for sovereignty over national natural resources and the establishment of a New International Economic Order (NIEO). All this culminated in the convening of the 6th Special Session of the UN General Assembly and its adoption of the Programme of Action on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order.
It is in this context that Maurice Strong, now in his capacity as the Executive Director of the newly established UN Environment Programme (UNEP), and Marc Nerfin, as a UNEP consultant and adviser, felt that an updated environment-development response was necessary. For this purpose they contacted Gamani Corea of Sri Lanka, a participant in the Founex Seminar and the newly appointed Secretary-General of UNCTAD. This led to UNEP and UNCTAD jointly organizing a symposium on Patterns of Resource Use, Environment and Development Strategies in Cocoyoc, Mexico, in 1974. The Symposium produced the landmark Cocoyoc Declaration.
Today, official institutional memory and public awareness of past events seldom reach back beyond the 1992 Rio UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED). It is thus important to acknowledge the not widely known Cocoyoc Declaration, which keeps on being as relevant and topical today as 40 years ago, when it was launched. It is closely related to what has been transpiring in the global arena, including to Pope Francis’ Encyclical, the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), COP 21 and, in general, the controversies spawned by the global warming challenge, the continuing South-North differences over how to implement the environment-development link, and the conundrum over global policy, systemic and governance issues.
While Strong, Nerfin and Corea played the key roles in conceiving and organizing the Cocoyoc Symposium, which was preceded by meetings of two preparatory working groups, it is necessary also to acknowledge those who produced the draft text of the Declaration submitted to the participants for discussion and approval, namely the core trio of Johan Galtung of Norway, who wrote the first working draft, Ignacy Sachs of France, and Barbara Ward of the UK, the Chairperson of the Symposium.
The Cocoyoc Declaration was inspired and made possible by the very unique moment of NIEO and the newly-found political clout and bargaining power of the South in the wake of the OPEC actions and the resulting energy crisis, which highlighted the scarcity of oil and finiteness of non-renewable natural resources. It was a very brief, fleeting period in history when it appeared that systemic change was possible and was going to take place, and that the North would in earnest sit at the negotiating table and agree to the South’s long-sought development demands and objectives, including those called for by the Stockholm Conference.
The Declaration was adopted despite some voiced opinions that it was provocative and too radical. It pointed out that the principal world problems – including environment-development ones – were all interrelated and interdependent, and stemmed from the same basic causes. It implied that such causes, including their systemic and structural roots and origins, needed to be addressed in an integrated manner, if solutions were to be found for successfully dealing with the multiple predicaments and mounting challenges faced by humankind.
The Cocoyoc Declaration was the first international document that articulated the need for change in the lifestyles and patterns of production and consumption. It highlighted problems of “maldevelopment”, both in the North and in the South. It reiterated the concept of “outer limits” of the Earth’s tolerance for anthropogenic abuse. It stressed the special responsibility and role of the developed countries in meeting global environmental challenges.
It was also a gauntlet thrown to the world system and its masters. The following paragraph of the Declaration merits to be quoted to illustrate this:
“Large parts of the world today consist of a centre exploiting a vast periphery and also our common heritage, the biosphere. The ideal we need is a harmonized co-operative world in which each part is a centre, living at the expense of nobody else, in partnership with nature and in solidarity with future generations.”
No wonder that the Declaration touched a raw nerve with the developed countries, especially the United States. Soon thereafter, Strong received, in Nairobi, a long telex from the State Department, signed Kissinger. The message was highly critical of the Cocoyoc document, especially its ranging over world problems and explicit issue linkage of development, peace and environment that it argued. The telex stated that most of these problems had no place either in the document or on the agenda of an environment organization, and should be left to other competent fora to deal with, while UNEP should limit itself strictly to “environmental problems”.
It was obvious that too much latitude, a proactive and advocacy role of heads of UN organizations were not to the liking of the North’s main world power. This was especially so when such initiatives by the executive heads were close to or favoured the views and aspirations of the developing countries, as was the case with Raùl Prebisch in UNCTAD a decade earlier, or when they represented a structural and systemic questioning of and challenge to the very foundations of the existing system. The latter was the case with Maurice Strong, one of the North’s leading figures in business and entrepreneurial world. He was criticized by some of working at counter purposes to his own camp and burrowing into and undermining the very structure of the existing world order, by promoting a holistic, integrated approach in dealing with the environment-development challenges on the global agenda.
Thus, it can be said that the Cocoyoc episode further intensified the underlying inclination of the North’s leading power, fully supported by other developed countries, to carefully screen candidates for the high UN posts, to weed out the “inconvenient” ones and make certain that personalities inclined to be too independent and likely not to obey its signals and follow its strictures to the letter are not appointed or elected, or allowed to remain in such positions. This became increasingly evident in the period that followed and mushroomed into a standard, imposed practice throughout the UN system after 1990. The most prominent case was that of Boutros Boutros-Ghali of Egypt, the only UN Secretary-General who was denied the second term by the veto of this permanent Security Council member.
Also, after the Cocoyoc episode, the United States, which had committed itself every two years to contribute up to a half of the resources available in the UNEP Environment Fund for the implementation of the newly established organization’s Progamme, announced that it would withhold its due contribution. This was a sign of displeasure with the direction UNEP’s work on socio-economic issues was taking. It not only affected the organization’s activities, but heralded the systematic use of voluntary funding by donor countries to influence and shape activities and programmes of international organizations, tightly tie the hands of and keep in line their secretariats and executive heads.
The 1974 Cocoyoc Symposium, together with the NIEO-related events and initiatives, contributed to triggering a determined counter-offensive by the North against the South and for control of the United Nations. The offensive has been underpinned by a decades-old strategy. The strategy includes the rejection of any issue linkage and any holistic approach, and, at the same time, the imposition of a disaggregated agenda, the “salami” tactics and “silo” approach, whereby issues are dealt with on a case-by-case basis and often in separate institutions. It features a pronouncedly restrictive and negative attitude on both the environment-development and the traditional development agendas, an attitude that has accompanied the ascendance to power of the hard right in the North’s two key countries.
The 1981 North-South Summit in Cancun marked the turning point. The Summit had as its objective to approve and launch the implementation of the recommendations presented in the Brandt Commission Report. Instead, it was used as a platform by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to announce, to the assembled heads of state and to the world, their unilateral decision to terminate the North-South dialogue and their flat rejection of the international development agenda.
Thus, the Cocoyoc and Cancun events, hosted by Mexico while it was still one of the leading members of the Group of 77 and before it was induced and co-opted into OECD, significantly marked the period that followed. The name Cocoyoc has been associated with open challenge to the dominant order and system, and the name Cancun with the end of the development dialogue and negotiations between the North and the South, and the dawn of the neo-liberal globalization era.
The seeds planted by and the spirit of the Cocoyoc Declaration have remained alive in spite of the changing political environment. UNEP took the early lead, with Mostafa Tolba of Egypt, also a Stockholm Conference veteran, assuming the post of the Executive Director after Strong, always on the move, left the organization in 1976, before his term expired, to head the newly established PetroCanada. Together with the UN Regional Economic Commissions, UNEP organized regional seminars on alternative patterns of development and lifestyles in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America.
The civil society that emerged from the UNCHE environmental movement also became actively engaged. Nerfin, as one of the early pioneers, continued to work on promoting and keeping the notion of “another development” topical through the 1980s in his own International Foundation for Development Alternatives (IFDA) and in collaboration with the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation. Ashok Khosla of India left UNEP to return home to establish the Development Alternatives, an NGO that has since the early 1980s worked on translating into practice and applying these ideas in the rural and poverty conditions prevailing in his own country.
Strong was moving in spheres of business and politics while also pursuing the broader objectives embodied in the Founex, Stockholm and Cocoyoc undertakings. He was a member of the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), which experienced difficulties and conflicts between its North and South members and also among its Secretariat staff. They could not agree on key underlying issues, including those that traditionally pitted the developed and the developing countries against each other in UNCTAD and generally in the North-South encounters.
He contributed to the efforts made to bridge these divides and calm the passions within WCED, aware of the developing countries’ problems and with a marked empathy for their views and position. Eventually, a compromise was found by including, in the Commission’s Report, an elaborate chapter on “sustainable development”, a concept first coined and launched a few years earlier in the1980 UNEP/IUCN/WWF World Conservation Strategy. The Chapter was masterly crafted by Nitin Desai of India, who was brought midway into the WCED Secretariat, as an “economist from a developing country”, to salvage the proceedings by helping to find formulations acceptable to the opposing sides of the deep North-South divide.
“Sustainable development” was taken up as the main theme by the 1992 Rio UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), also referred to as the Earth Summit. Strong was the Secretary-General and Desai his deputy, who was also in charge of elaborating the background documentation and Draft Agenda 21 presented to the Conference.
Agenda 21, as adopted by UNCED, offered a blueprint for the future and reiterated and broadly endorsed a number of demands of the South, including those going back to UNCHE and earlier. Strong played a role in this outcome, including, importantly, with his actions prior to the Conference. During the preparatory process for UNCED in New York, he was struck by the difficulties experienced by the Group of 77 due to many delegates of its member states not being fully conversant with the background of the complex issues, and due to the absence of institutional and secretariat support for the preparing of a common group position for Rio. Strong felt that, without adequate preparation, the developing countries would risk diminished chances for a balanced and positive outcome of the Conference. He telephoned the Chairman of the South Centre Julius K. Nyerere and urged that the Centre prepare an input to help G77 in elaborating a platform of its own.
The Centre convened a group of experts chaired by Gamani Corea, as a leading South personality familiar with the underlying issues. A working paper, suggesting a framework and specific proposals for the developing countries’ position, was produced and submitted to G77. It energized the Group and gave it basic elements for elaborating its own negotiating stand and demands at UNCED. These were largely reflected in the Conference outcomes, one of which was the all-important, overarching principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities”, frowned upon by the main developed countries. Not surprisingly, the application of this principle continues to be a bone of contention and is resisted by the North, as recently illustrated at COP 21 in Paris.
UNCED was the last major world conference and event that had firm roots and inspiration in the preceding period and was held before the neo-liberal globalization took firm hold. The massive, all-azimuths, globalized tide to roll-back and block various concepts, measures and strategies was only beginning. It was principally spearheaded and inspired by the North’s global superpower and often determined by its national interests, politics and divisions. It was also strongly influenced by what was acceptable to this power’s influential corporate sector, which consistently and firmly opposed any form of international regulation of its practices and also began to resist domestic environmental measures and regulation. The international action and the “global possible” gradually found themselves ensnared in the resulting ideological weltanschauung and systemic trap – including the domestic gridlock in the most important and leading country of the North – from which the international community has not been able to extricate itself to the present day.
Progressive and with the South “like-minded” governments in the North, such as those of the Netherlands, Sweden (during Olof Palme) and Canada (during Pierre Trudeau), were fading away. The right-wing political credo and parties became dominant in the North. The Soviet Union collapsed and disappeared. All this made possible a deep paradigmatic and ideological reversal, embodied in the Washington Consensus, and the neo-liberal globalization that the North has been propagating and imposing worldwide.
This effectively did away with some of the main assumptions required for holistic and effective global responses to environment and development challenges, including climate change. These assumptions included, as they still do, the need for both concerted intergovernmental and individual national action and regulation; the development and diffusion of the needed and appropriate S&T and their worldwide accessibility on easy, including non-commercial, terms; global public goods; international taxation, including of the global commons, as a way to obtain the necessary financial resources for environment and development actions; a world economic order supportive of development in the South and national efforts to overcome poverty. Such approaches were not only politically discredited but also disallowed via various international mechanisms and agreements, including those that resulted from the Uruguay Round. And they were rejected and systematically resisted by some key governments, in alliance with powerful corporate and financial interests.
The new mantra was to have solutions sought through reliance on the “magic” of an unrestrained free market, foreign direct investment, free capital flows, a technological development spearheaded by private corporate interests that relied on the neo-liberal intellectual property rights regime, and all this in the context of denial of the international development agenda, the weakening of governments and dismantling of developmental state in the countries of the South, and refusal to recognize the primacy of governments’ roles and responsibilities, individual and collective, domestically and internationally.
UNCED also provided the opportunity for putting final touches on and opening for signatures two important conventions – one on climate change and one on biodiversity. Both conventions first evolved in the framework of UNEP, under the leadership of Executive Director Tolba, after the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer was concluded and before they were taken up by the UN itself. The two Conventions were entrusted for implementation to specialized secretariats that were not set up within UNEP, but were eventually based in Bonn, for climate change, and in Montreal, for biodiversity.
The implementation of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which entered into force in 1994, stoked the underlying South-North controversies. Michael Zammit Cutajar of Malta, who was a member of Strong’s original UNCHE team, was entrusted, as the first UNFCCC Executive Secretary, with the difficult and delicate task of steering and putting on track the process of the Convention’s implementation.
For the official North and its establishment UNFCCC implied a potential opening of a Pandora’s box, being that climate change ultimately calls for a holistic, integrated approach, if solutions are to be found to the challenges it poses. Keeping the climate issue and the Convention physically separate from the main UN fora and UNEP, and from the G77 strongholds, such as those in Geneva and New York, made it easier for the North to control the process, stay clear of the “issue linkage” and avoid “excessive politicizing” more likely to occur in the centres of multilateral activity. The implementation of the Convention has been a complex, controversial and often highly polarized process, which surfaces into public view at annual COP “get-togethers”, COP 21, in Paris in December 2015, being the latest such instance.
Strong and Nerfin, had they had a chance to read the Paris COP 21 Agreement, or, indeed, the UN document on the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, adopted by the UN General Assembly a couple of months earlier, would have recognized and welcomed the advances made and the fact that the sustainable development agenda continues to be at the centre of the global community’s attention. And they would have been gratified that these new, highly acclaimed multilateral instruments encompass the issues and reinforce the objectives that they and the United Nations began to work on half a century ago. On the other hand, had they witnessed the proceedings and negotiations leading to the adoption of these important decisions, and had they closely scrutinized their wording, they would have no doubt also recognized the continued presence of the key unresolved problems and North-South divisions, which have hobbled the needed international action for decades on this very long march to the desired and hoped for future.
Strong and Nerfin were also not in a position to read and appreciate the Laudato Si’ Encyclical, a courageous think piece of a world leader, which, inter alia, articulates anew a number of basic themes first launched at Founex, UNCHE and, especially, in the Cocoyoc Declaration. The Encyclical reaffirms the basic and enduring themes of Cocoyoc – including the need for a global, integrated approach to world problems, which are, by definition, interrelated and which, such as global poverty and environmental crisis, stem from the same root causes; a change in lifestyles and patterns of production and consumption; the implementation of the international development agenda agreed in the United Nations; and the need for a structural, systemic and paradigm changes in the existing world economic, political, as well as technological order.
Given the author and his position, the Encyclical can be of lasting value and influence in the global battleground of ideas, and will not be easily dismissed or discredited. It offers support and adds weight to progressive political and economic thought worldwide, to the United Nations, multilateralism and to the democratization of world politics and affairs, all of which have been marginalized and systematically belittled during the last three decades dominated by unilateralism and the neo-liberal globalization.
The year 2015, as the year of the SDGs, COP 21 and Laudato Si’, has provided a renewed impulse to the quest for global responses to global challenges, a process in which Maurice Strong and Marc Nerfin, with many others who belonged to their pioneering generation, played important roles at critical junctures. In view of the urgency and importance of the issues at stake, the challenge for the international community, today and in the years to come, is to find ways how more resolutely and effectively to reach equitable agreements, put into effect the needed responses to these global challenges, and overcome the decades-long delays and often impasses that have been standing in the way.
Past experiences have amply demonstrated powerful obstacles and forces, including mindsets and ways of thinking, which oppose the needed global systemic responses and changes. These obstacles and forces need to be focused on, analyzed, documented and overcome, which is a task for the generations following in the footsteps of the early pioneers. As it is, many environment-related issues first flagged in 1972 – and not just greenhouse effect and global warming but also health, water, soil, biodiversity, toxic and harmful chemicals in the food chain and the environment, oceans, human settlements, air and water pollution among others – are on the global agenda with renewed urgency.
Yet, it is difficult to imagine that today individuals and personalities of a calibre and vision similar to those that Strong, Nerfin, and many of their “generation” embodied, and Pope Francis personifies today from his lonely perch in the Vatican, would be allowed or tolerated in positions of leadership and influence in international organizations and given the necessary freedom, policy space and resources to work, act and speak as their predecessors were able to do. This is not likely to be possible until the United Nations is liberated from the constraints and hegemonic embrace that it has been subjected to during the recent decades.
The developing countries are most likely, individually and together as the Global South, to bear the brunt of the status quo, the existing trends, and also the global environmental and economic impacts. These countries account for the overwhelming majority of world population and an ever-increasing share of the world economy, and they are potentially in a position to assume the leadership role and fill the policy deficit at the world level, if they rely on South-South cooperation and collective self-reliance. This is the direction that the “Third World Pope”, Pope Francis, similar to his Argentine compatriot Raul Prebisch five decades ago, is pointing to with his solitary action in the realm of political thought. For the Global South, the South-South direction is by far more realistic and promising than continuing to hope and wait for a politically enlightened and cooperative North to materialize on the world scene.
In the meantime, while the governments and intergovernmental process are bogged down in disagreements, often over marginalia, the civil society that first emerged from UNCHE has assumed the role of a principal torchbearer and mobilizing force, with a number of its academics and thinkers exploring issues and obstacles in areas that countries and governments have so far avoided or feared to address.
Naomi Klein, Strong’s fellow Canadian and activist and popularizer of complex global issues, in her recent volume, on capitalism and climate, discusses and documents some of the barriers that obstruct the desired progress. Her book This Changes Everything, Capitalism vs Climate is a useful empirical and analytical companion to the “SDGs, COP 21 and Laudato Si’ trio”. Somewhat optimistically, as a newcomer to the subject, she feels that global climate is an issue that will inescapably require and bring about systemic changes. This feeling was indeed shared by many 50 years ago, including by Maurice Strong and Marc Nerfin. At the time of and after the 1972 Stockholm Conference many saw “human environment” as the deus ex machina that would help make possible major improvements and changes in human condition, society and affairs.
Will “climate change” be this magic bullet, or catalyst, that will bring about the hoped for changes? This remains to be seen. The possibility is very real that the status-quo forces, relying on their power and S&T superiority, will try to use global warming and its effects as yet another opportunity and vehicle by means of which to extend and reinforce their dominion, renovate the basic existing structures without changing their essence, and extract as much benefit (aka profit) as possible for themselves while skirting the global inequities that persist between the North and the South and between the top of the pinnacle of the global pyramid and the rest.
This subject is addressed in The Secure and the Dispossessed, How the Military and the Corporations are Shaping a Climate-Changed World, a volume edited by Nick Baxton and Ben Hayes, which documents how big business and the military in the “centre” are positioning themselves to respond to and profit from global warming and the resulting climate change effects and challenges. One would think that this type of empirical analysis belongs in the United Nations and hopes that it will eventually find its place there, as an essential ingredient and a basis for international deliberations, policy making, and action.
In the meantime, an enterprising inventor in France has designed the “eolian tree”, presented at COP 21, which generates electricity via its 63 “leaves” that react to the slightest air current. One such “tree”, it is claimed, is capable of producing 83% of the electricity needed by a 4-member household (heating not included), or can be used to charge an electric car for covering 16,364 kilometres a year.
Indeed a promising technological breakthrough. Those lucky few able to afford this “tree”, “planted” on exhibit outside a bank in Geneva, could have bought it for a “mere” 51,500 Swiss francs and saved 9,100 CHF had they made the purchase before 1 March 2016, when the list price of 60,600 CHF came into effect.
This is a forewarning that the BigPharma approach to life-saving medicines and discoveries will be replicated in the field of renewable energies and applied to future S&T breakthroughs in this domain, as yet another instance of predatory and monopoly pricing of basic human needs and entitlements. It shows how justified have been the repeatedly voiced concerns of the developing countries about the use of S&T advantages by the North to impose additional burdens and costs on their economies.
This is a problem that should motivate the South and the United Nations to renew with vigour the effort and work initiated several decades ago but interrupted due to obduracy of the North on how to channel and harness S&T breakthroughs and human ingenuity to address not only global warming and climate change challenges but human and civilizational needs in general. This, of course, calls for a radical revision and change of the existing global intellectual property regime, one in part inspired and originated by Big Pharma itself.
The question of S&T in the 21st century and beyond, including how to make “eolian tree” technologies available to the impoverished masses worldwide as a public good, is a worthy topic for Pope Francis to present his views on to the world public in a sequel to his Laudato Si’. By offering a different and fresh vision, such a document would help to challenge the deeply entrenched and dominant mythology and shibboleths of neo-liberal economics and politics that manacle the potential of advanced S&T to contribute to dealing with and resolving global challenges.
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Branislav Gosovic is from Yugoslavia. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley. Gosovic joined the United Nations in 1971. He worked in UNEP 1973-1981 and was on the staff of World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) 1985-1986. He wrote The Quest for World Environmental Cooperation, The case of the UN Global Environment Monitoring System, Routledge, 1992, and several articles on environment-development issues.
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 21 Mar 2016.
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