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Business Needs Rules to Cooperate |
Time for Peace {Greenpeace International Executive Director Gerd Leipold delivered this keynote address to the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil. February 1, 2002.} Friends, ladies and gentlemen Let me tell you a story. Many years ago I was an activist in Germany. I campaigned for peace, against nuclear weapons. One day I took part in a protest in which two of us flew a balloon across the Berlin Wall, from the free west, to the Communist East. We all know what happened. The balloon came down, the wall came down and capitalism triumphed. Though I must emphasize that the events were not directly connected! The vigor of capitalism is now the problem. Capitalism defeated communism but now it is destroying the planet. We have left the Cold War behind only to find we have replaced it with a global menace just as deadly - the Hot War, waged against the Earth itself.
Study after study details how our economies are laying siege to the planet. In this war technology provides the weapons, multinationals muster the armies and advertisers provide the propaganda. Individual consumers are the foot-soldiers. We excuse ourselves because we are, "just following orders." This war is global and nature is losing. On one side, material goods pile up. One the other, forests fall and glaciers retreat, fish stocks are wiped out, the climate is thrown into chaos, the ozone layer is shattered, and industrial chemicals penetrate our inner bodies, our food chain, the remotest corners of the earth. It is everywhere but it is not anarchy. Governments still set the rules. Rules which even the most powerful generals of business must ultimately obey. So governments could bring the Hot War to an end. If they wanted to. Their record is not good. They meet, they promise, they renege. The road from Rio is knee deep in shattered promises. Aspirations as usual. Business as usual. Result - ruin. And who calls the shots? It is the wealthy, the 20 percent who consume 80 percent of the resources and make 80 percent of the pollution, and the big businesses who increasingly finance "democratic" elections. Business dominated democracy is destroying our planet. The genuine efforts of reformers and leaders in sustainable business are welcome but utterly overwhelmed by the dominant players in market economics. There is absolutely no doubt that unless governments now intervene to give capitalism new limits, a new purpose and new direction, to make it fairer and more globally constructive - this Hot War will end in tears. We hardly need reminding that survival depends on making peace with the planet and peace with one another. Survival of families, of nature, of civilizations. Since September 11, 2001 many politicians have spoken of new forms of war but we also need a new form of peace: a real peace. To achieve that we need security based on a willing interdependence between individuals, cultures, communities and states. To achieve that we need to make our economics fairer, and more ecologically intelligent, and our development more secure. That is the vision I would like to explore today. A fairer system Great concern focuses on globalization. We agree that if freer trade is to be socially acceptable, then a fairer and different kind of globalization is needed. We need to globalize the good, such as new renewable energy technologies, and identify and eliminate the bad. Fundamentally polluting and destructive practices have no right to enjoy global markets, however much they might increase profits by exploiting lower standards.
Critics often say there is too much free trade but might not the problem be too little tax? Used well, tax is a civilizing influence on capitalism. It can bring intelligence to the operation of the free market. It can take some of the profits created through trade and redistribute them for public benefit. That can protect common resources, or fund health, education and public infrastructure. But globalization can stretch the pattern of commercial activity so that the benefits of tax are not felt in the places where workers, communities or natural resources most need them - and this undermines any hope of sustainable development. So we need somehow to look at tax across boundaries. Economics and technology have changed society, and politics has yet to catch up - and not only over geography. Industrialization has also changed risks and concerns. Governments now need to recognize that new technologies create risks which citizens may not wish to carry - and that the creation and distribution of risks needs as much political debate and accountability as does the creation and distribution of wealth. The current controversy over the use of genetically modified organisms in food and agriculture is a case in point. Economists and politicians must learn the lessons of global environmental disasters and recognize that the Earth should not be used as a free laboratory for any new technology which might be profitable. To refocus economists on new tasks we also need to redefine the objectives of government and the tools by which we measure success, happiness or progress. Environmental and social damage is often counted as an economic plus when it should be a minus. A national and corporate focus solely on economic growth as GNP makes as much sense as measuring a body's pulse, and ignoring other, life threatening, indicators. Studies show that since 1996 the world has been exceeding biological capacity by at least 30 percent - we are burning up the capital, destroying the basis of life. Not good economics. So let me turn to the question of - making economics intelligent. "Greed is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed cuts through, clarifies, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. So said Gordon Gekko, the trader portrayed by Michael Douglas in the 1987 movie "Wall Street." Gekko was right: fuelled by our greed, the capitalist economic system is relentlessly effective in supplying material goods, and voracious in consuming resources. But it is blind to the consequences. Fish for lunch? Let's empty the whole sea. Chair to sit on? Let's fell the Amazon. Breathing space for the four wheel drive? Let's fill up the sky with CO2. The system is also ingenious; it has an answer to everything. But it is environmentally stupid. Refrigeration? CFCs. Transport? Fossil fuels. Electric lighting? Plutonium. So we get cars and computers, plastics and air travel for vegetables, while in return we get Bhopal and Chernobyl, extinctions and climate change. Not really very clever is it? Now according to conventional wisdom, it is not the place of politicians to interfere in this worldwide system of free-market, liberal economics. Well, we disagree. We need ecological intervention. We want a market system that works in the public interest. One that acts as if people and nature matter. It is time to learn the lessons from the decades since the first UN Conference on the environment held in Stockholm more than a generation ago, in 1972. Environmental learning has been the great missed opportunity of politics and economics. We need to reset economic and political systems according to environmental knowledge, to define ecological limits, for example in energy, fishing and forests. To make it mandatory that economies, enterprises, goods and services comply with the rules and principles of best environmental design - creating no waste for example, and using no persistent pollutants. To set and raise standards, not let them drop to make goods cheaper - at the cost of environmental quality and the quality of life. This is not anti-business. The best businesses already achieve this. Some call it Natural Capitalism. Many people are deeply concerned about trade, business and the economic system. Much of that concern boils down to the fact that the system lacks any moral purpose or discipline. We believe the time has come for economics to have an explicit moral purpose. The hand of economics may be invisible but its purpose needs to be seen, and be seen to be politically accountable, if trade and business and economic systems are to enjoy wider public support. Consider electricity, and what could be done with existing technology. Two billion of the world's poorest have no electricity. They are denied clean evening light to read or study by. No electricity to pump water, to work farm machines, to cook with or play under, let alone to use for the Internet or computers for children's learning or electric fans, air conditioning or washing machines. Meanwhile, most of the richer world uses fossil fuels to make electricity, which is plunging our climate into chaos. Commercial technology exists to convert the world to renewable electricity. We have been told as much by a prestigious panel of government appointed experts. There is no shortage of engineering know-how, nor of money. The missing factors are organization, political will and directed commercial tasks - directed by permissions and laws, incentives and public investments. One example: since the Rio Earth Summit, the British Government, which is supposedly an advocate of climate protection, has financed over £15 billion worth of fossil fuel and nuclear projects in developing countries. Meanwhile, just seven pounds in every thousand pounds of the British aid budget went on supporting renewables. Renewable energy can provide an alternative power source for the large centralized grids that already exist but its greatest value is in creating entirely new, dispersed energy systems. Homes, communities and workplaces that generate their own energy where they need it - with solar heat and electricity for example. Renewables also have a huge job potential which is normally ignored in energy policy. Their suitability for small and medium scale work makes them ideal for many developing countries. Our proposals to supply electricity to the two billion who have none, would create some 60,000 new businesses.
Where there is no grid, developers can go straight to the modern choice which will be on-site or local power - with no transmission line losses, no waste of resources building long cable runs, and power under local control. Like telephone land lines, grid systems are essentially nineteenth century technology, and it seem very likely that just as many countries are developing mobile phone networks rather than landlines, we will see future buildings making their own power. To avert climate change requires the organizational equivalent of war. Governments will not achieve this by waiting for the oil industry to voluntarily forgo profits and invest in renewables over fossil fuels, so long as governments still allow that market to exist. Right now governments provide few incentives to develop renewable energy but subsidize conventional energy sources by up to $US300 billion per year. Consider the fact that after September 11 the U.S. Congress found $US40 billion dollars to finance a "war on terrorism." It took just hours. Yet for 30 years the U.S. has been the richest, most wasteful nation on earth - and consistently rejects international environmental protection as too costly. We call on the U.S. to reverse its opposition to international environmental laws, focus its industrial strength on the task of giving the world renewable energy, and start by helping the two billion poorest who have none. Real peace Following September 11 much has been written about a new peace, a new deal, or globalizing responsibility. Many hope the Johannesburg Summit will revitalize sustainable development. Whatever happens, we must not go back to the peace that existed before September 11. That was a fundamentally insecure peace - because it was unfair. Unfair like a house in which 20 percent of the inhabitants took up all the best space, ate 80 percent of the food and used 80 percent of the water; a house with rotten foundations, corroded by its own waste and an atmosphere choking on fumes from the 20 percent of overfed consumers. It was also a peace sustained by force of arms and the force of economic dominion rather than willing interdependence. Such a peace leads to resentment, and in the end, violence. As Napoleon said, "There are but two powers in the world, the sword and the mind. In the long run the sword is always beaten by the mind." In contrast, development based not on old economics but on the environmental insights of the past 30 years could help create a genuine new peace. Take the conversion to renewable energy. This will not cure all the world's ills over night. But it would eliminate nuclear power and it would replace oil and gas and coal with biomass, solar, wind, wave, hot rocks. It would replace centralized depots full of inflammable hydrocarbons, and nuclear reactors full of plutonium and uranium and other elements too dangerous to go near for thousands or millions of years - with windmills for communities, with solar panels and electric cars, with homes that make their own power, dependent more or less on nobody. By this single action, terrorism would become harder to conduct, and the resentments that foster violence would be significantly reduced. Many other changes could also increase security by increasing environmental security. Better local control over water or fish or forests - such as by the Deni Indians whose land we have helped demarcate in the Amazon. Organic farming methods that do not make farmers dependent on the chemical and so-called life science industry. There also has to be a cultural dimension to governance. Partly because of globalization, nation states cannot negotiate or sustain peace and security just among themselves. We need an inclusive, pluralistic multilateralism in which governments accept that they are not the only players. Governments of states need to recognize and allow cultures and individuals to connect within and across borders. The state cannot be the exclusive organizing unit of global debate, decision making and representation. Conclusion We need to rethink economics and rethink security in a new triangulation of economics, politics and environment. Only then can we have real peace based on real security, and only then will development be sustainable. The World Trade Centre does not need to be rebuilt so much as world trade needs to be rebuilt. Built as a new economics with visible moral purpose - and for that, we need political leadership. Governments must make a quantum jump in their leadership on these issues, or lose their legitimacy altogether. At the end of the 20th century national government lost its way. Many leaders felt that their only role was to facilitate capitalism - to convert nation states into a series of ever better business parks with minimal regulations, maximum efficiency and an unspecified output. In so doing, human values were often forgotten, cultures were sometimes abused, everything pushed aside if it got in the way of material progress. As a result our planet has lost its natural atmosphere, is losing the very last of its forests, the coral reefs are dying, the poles are melting, and we are mining water for the restaurants of the rich while the poor die from starvation or contaminated water. But the role of the state is not just to run a business park. The role of the world's governments together, is not just to commoditise and privatize the planet. To sell the air, the life, the water, to the lowest bidder, leaving the general public - and nature - to pick up the cleanup costs. For real peace to be achieved there must be no more hostage to hostile technologies, no more hostaging of the planet to material growth, no more hostaging of the poor to provide rich people with cheaper luxuries. We need secure futures as much as we need free trade. Until now politicians have held back from serious action against climate change and the timetable was set by the financial plans of the fossil fuel industry and their biggest corporate clients. Business has dominated democracy and that has to end. Perhaps most of all, we must end abuses of the peace. Real peace is not simply an absence of war or armed conflict. If peace involves widespread and prolonged abuses of human or environmental rights, or iniquitous and unfair development, or if inequalities grow and become gross - these are abuses of peace, and likely to lead to conflict. All the more so if governments claim they are justified by democracy or economics. If nations repeatedly undermine international efforts at protecting the environment or human rights - that is an abuse of the peace. Recently released papers show that the U.S., Britain, Germany, Netherlands, Italy and France conspired to undermine the Stockholm Conference of 1972 - and their particular target was to stop any adverse impacts on trade.
Today there is an ugly and cynical collusion by the United States, Canada and Australia to cripple nearly every effort by the international community for effective environmental protection. These countries are abusing the peace and they threaten the Earth Summit. Is there hope? In 1972 six nations plotted to block progress. Now there seem to be three. Perhaps that is half a step forward. Friends - for the saddest of reasons we have an opportunity. There are moments in between continuous times, moments where we hold our collective breath, where we stand blinking in a new reality, waiting to understand what we see. Since September 11 the world has been paused, waiting to see if any major new direction would emerge. The opportunity is there to renew the moral purpose of economic systems, for politicians to learn from three decades of environmental disasters, and for us all to use new environmental solutions to build secure foundations for real peace. At Rio governments set out on the road to sustainability but most of them are stalled. Our challenge is to kick-start political leadership for sustainable development and a new peace. Without us - civil society - it will not happen. The dinosaurs still have the ear of government - we must grab them by the balls - the rest will follow. |
Greenpeace International Executive Director Gerd Leipold (Photo courtesy Greenpeace)
Corus Steel Works, Teesside, England (Photo courtesy 
Solar panel powers a home in rural Pernambuco, Brazil (Photo by Roger Taylor courtesy 
Greenpeace led demonstration in Bali, Indonesia June 6 against the U.S., Canada and Australia for blocking progress at the last preparatory conference before the World Summit on Sustainable Development (Photo courtesy 