The Age of Global Warming: A History (11 page)

At that time, counter-arguments to environmentalism tended to come from the Left rather than the Right of political spectrum. Beckerman was an economic adviser to Tony Crosland, a senior Cabinet minister in the 1964–1970 Labour government and the Labour party’s foremost intellectual. Environmental policies had a distributional impact because they were inevitably skewed towards meeting the wants of the better off in society at the expense of the poor, Beckerman argued. There was a natural hierarchy of human wants. As societies became richer, improved quality of life became more important. Collective policies favouring improved quality of life therefore favoured the better off.
[33]
Crosland himself had a famous difference of opinion with the American economist J.K. Galbraith. In a brilliant put-down, he mocked Galbraith and then set out a point-by-point defence of economic growth.

In a 1971 pamphlet, Crosland warned that parts of the environmental lobby were hostile to growth in principle and indifferent to the needs of ordinary people, reflecting manifest class bias and a set of middle and upper class value judgements:

Its champions are often kindly and dedicated people. But they are affluent and fundamentally, though of course not consciously, they want to kick the ladder down behind them … We must make our own value judgment based on socialist objectives: and that objective must … be that growth is vital, and its benefits far outweigh its costs.
[34]

The triumph of environmentalism during the West’s years of plenty was assured by the structural weakness of its opponents. Right-of-centre political parties represented class interests favouring environmental initiatives, but left-of-centre parties were divided between representing blue-collar workers (Crosland’s position) and members of the middle-class intelligentsia, such as Galbraith. There was one obstacle to environmentalism that could not be so easily overcome: obtaining Third World support needed for any global agreement on the environment.

In 1972, a representative of a leading member of the G77 challenged the fundamental basis of ecologism. Brazil’s Miguel Alvaro Osório de Almeida, who served as ambassador to the US and the UN and led Brazil’s preparations for the Stockholm conference, delivered an insight of great subtlety:

the problem to be solved in fact is not achieving an ‘ecological balance’, but, on the contrary, obtaining the most efficient forms of ‘long-term ecological imbalance’. The problem is not to exterminate mankind now, in the name of ecological equilibrium, but to prolong our ability to use natural resources for as long as possible.
[35]

A year earlier, de Almeida had shocked western delegates at a preparatory meeting for the Stockholm conference. ‘To be many and to be poor is offensive to the sights and feelings of developed countries,’ he told them. ‘Most of their suggestions do not concern cooperation for increasing income, but cooperation to reduce numbers.’
[36]

Without a formula to reconcile rich countries’ environmentalism and the developing world’s hunger for economic growth, the Stockholm conference, due to convene on 5
th
June 1972, was heading for disaster. In fact, the germ of that formula was to be found in Adlai Stevenson’s final speech, the passengers on the little spaceship, ‘half fortunate, half miserable’. 

The person who planted it there would do more than anyone else to fashion it into a political doctrine to form the basis of a treaty of convenience between environmentalism and the Third World. Her contribution was to be decisive in ensuring that the Stockholm conference would be a starting point rather than a showdown – something that could not be avoided, only postponed.

*  Insofar as human rather than climatic history was used as a source for argument, it was of pre-industrial societies that had suffered the effects of resource depletion and natural climate variation. Thus Al Gore in
Earth in the Balance
(1993) writes of the impact of volcanoes on the climate and the disappearance of the Minoan civilisation (p.58), on the lead up to the French Revolution (pp. 59–60); on the ending of warm periods and the fall of the Roman Empire (p. 64) and in triggering the Black Death and wiping out the Viking settlers on Greenland towards the end of the Middle Ages (p. 67); other climatic changes, such as changes in rainfall, leading to the disappearance of the Mycenaean civilisation in 1200 BC (p. 65) and the abandonment of Fatepur Sikri in India in the sixteenth century (p. 64); the onset of warmer periods, possibly causing the collapse of the Mayan civilisation around AD 950 and the Irish potato famine in the middle of the nineteenth century (p. 69).

*  The authors evidently realised their error, because the argument was shifted to a different issue from resource depletion to the system’s responsiveness to feedback loops. ‘Delays in the feedback loops of the world system would be no problem if the system were [sic] growing very slowly or not at all.’  Dennis L. Meadows et al,
The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Humanity
(1972), p. 144. No evidence was offered for this to conflict with the common sense observation that dynamic societies are more adaptable than static ones.

8

Stockholm

Its real leader, the source of its inspiration and the directions it set for the future of our planet, was Lady Jackson, whom the world knows best as Barbara Ward.

Maurice Strong
[1]

Swedish scientists were finding an increase in the acidity of rain falling across Scandinavia. The Swedish government raised their concern at the UN. In 1968, the General Assembly passed a resolution to convene the world’s first intergovernmental conference on the environment.

For all its enthusiasm, hardly any preparations had been made for the conference, to be hosted by Sweden in 1972. Through a mutual friend, Sweden’s ambassador to the UN approached Maurice Strong to head the conference secretariat. Undersecretary of state Christian Herter for the Nixon administration lobbied Strong to take the assignment. A formal offer from U. Thant, the UN secretary-general, followed. Strong did not need much persuading. It was the opportunity he had been preparing for all his adult life.

Born in Canada in 1929, as a boy growing up in Depression-era Manitoba, Strong remembers asking his mother: ‘If nature could be so right, how could human society be so wrong?’
[2]
Inspired by Churchill and Roosevelt’s vision of a global organisation to ensure world peace, ‘I knew at once that I wanted to be part of that endeavour.’
[3]
Strong lived side by side with Inuit people in the Canadian Arctic working for the Hudson’s Bay Company. At seventeen, he got his first job at the UN as a junior clerk in the passes office.

Reading
Silent Spring
deepened his concern about the environment, Carson’s ‘cry of alarm’ confirming what he already believed.
[4]
It also reinforced his belief in global governance. The environment is supranational and transcends the nation state – ‘one of the great underlying truths of environmental politics’, according to Strong.
[5]
The establishment of effective global governance and management was the single most important challenge of the next generation, Strong said in a lecture marking the fifteenth anniversary of the Stockholm conference. ‘I find it hard to conceive that civilisation could continue through the coming century if we fail to do this.’
[6]

In a career straddling politics and business, Strong worked in the oil and mining industries before becoming head of the Canada’s international aid agency in 1966. Where some saw a contradiction between his environmentalism and digging minerals out of the ground, Strong saw ‘positive synergy’ between mankind’s economic and environmental needs.

It’s through our economic life that we affect our environment, and it’s only through changes in economic behaviour, particularly on the part of corporations, which are the primary actors in the economy, that we can protect and improve the environment.
[7]

Strong’s sole foray into elective politics was not, he admitted, his finest hour. In 1977, Pierre Trudeau persuaded him to become a parliamentary candidate. Within weeks, Strong asked Trudeau if he could withdraw. It was the making of him. As an unelected politician, Strong could make a far greater impact on global affairs.

Strong’s lack of educational qualifications, he believed, barred him from a traditional ascent in international politics, so he pursued a business career to get noticed and get on. Power is augmented by influence derived from extensive and diverse networks, he found.
[8]
Through them, Strong became powerful. 

The list of his positions takes up four and a half pages of his autobiography. They include membership of the advisory boards of Toyota and Harvard’s Centre for International Development, UN undersecretary and adviser to the UN secretary-general, senior adviser to the president of the World Bank (he talent-spotted the bank’s president, Jim Wolfensohn, in the 1950s), Chairman of the Earth Council, trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation, a board member of the Davos World Economic Forum and of the regents of New York’s Episcopalian cathedral St John the Divine, as well as being a member of the Vatican’s Society for Development, Justice and Peace, Fellow of the Royal Society and member of the Club of Rome (
The Limits to Growth
was on the right lines but ahead of its time, he thought). He knew how to obtain political access and hedge his bets. In the 1988 American presidential election, Strong donated $100,000 to Mike Dukakis’s campaign, became a trustee of the Democratic National Committee and fundraised for the Republican National Committee at the same time.
[9]

He believed the best form of conflict resolution was conflict avoidance. ‘I had learned never to confront but to co-opt, never to bully but to equivocate, and never to yield ... The oblique approach can often be the most direct one.’
[10]
Strong was the right man for the job, as the Stockholm environment conference was threatened by two sets of global divisions, between East and West and between North and South.  Strong could not overcome the former. If East Germany was invited, the US and West Germany wouldn’t attend. If East Germany wasn’t invited, the Soviet Union and its main Warsaw Pact allies wouldn’t show up, which is what happened. Nonetheless, Strong insisted on having a Soviet on his staff (he ended up with two) and at the conference itself he met the Soviet ambassador to Sweden almost daily to brief him on the conference.

The division between North and South was a bigger threat. In March 1971, Strong received a signal from Yugoslavia of a potential boycott by developing countries. It galvanised him. He decided he had to win over India and Brazil as the most important members of the G77. In June he went to New Delhi hoping to arrange a meeting with Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. It was a long shot as rising tension with Pakistan would lead to war six months later. He got his meeting and persuaded Mrs Gandhi to deliver the keynote address to the conference.  

Brazil felt its sovereignty threatened by environmentalists claiming the Amazon as a global preserve. Although Strong started a dialogue with the Brazilian government, it continued to lobby the rest of the G77 to back its hard line text at the UN emphasising national sovereignty, more additional aid and the curtailment of Strong’s authority. A Swedish text supportive of Strong was adopted by a large majority while Brazil’s position received the support of a smaller majority (the US and the UK voting against). 

A split was averted due to Strong’s recognition that bridging the divide required more than diplomatic skill. It needed something he did not possess: the intellectual creativity to devise a formula that would turn the conflict between the North’s environmentalism and the South’s ambitions for economic development into a new synthesis. Barbara Ward was the person he needed. 

Although she did not have the instant fame Carson experienced with
Silent Spring
, it could be said that of the two, Ward’s contribution was the more important. Few today take seriously the science in
Silent Spring
but Ward’s concept of sustainable development has grown to be one of the dominant policy doctrines of our age.

The
New York Times
described Ward as a ‘synthesiser and propagandist’.
[11]
She was much more than that. Perhaps the closest comparison is Harry Hopkins’ relationship with Churchill and FDR. Whereas Hopkins lived and worked in the White House, Ward’s arena was global, projecting her ideas through the numerous political leaders who trusted her. At a White House meeting between the British Prime Minister Harold Wilson and Lyndon Johnson in February 1968, Johnson gave Wilson a note on the economic situation. Two and half pages of quarto, single spacing. ‘It was drafted in terms which would appeal to him – the pure Roosevelt approach to the dangers of another 1931,’ Wilson recalled. ‘For the rest, I did not agree with the analysis. But, I said, I could trace a feminine hand in its drafting, English at that. He roared with laughter. No one knowing Washington would underrate the importance nor fail to recognise the handiwork of Barbara Ward.’
[12]

Ward took her father’s Quaker earnestness to improve the world and her Roman Catholicism from her mother. After graduating from Oxford, she lectured extensively and wrote her first book at the age of twenty-four. The next year she became assistant editor of the
Economist
, becoming its foreign editor four years later. She used to write the
Economist
leaders from her bed without effort or correction, what she called her ‘fatal facility’. 

Such was her remarkable talent as a speaker and broadcaster that in 1943 the British government sent her to the United States to win support for Britain’s war effort. She stayed five months, lunching with Eleanor Roosevelt, dining with Vice President Wallace and amassing a circle of American admirers. In the 1945 election, she campaigned for Labour, escorting a young American naval officer, John F. Kennedy, whom Ward had come to know through his sister Kathleen. A speech she gave on full employment reduced the hard-bitten Ernest Bevin, Britain’s most powerful trade union leader, to tears. 

The next year she struck up a life-long friendship with J.K. Galbraith (a woman of rare and slender beauty, Galbraith recalled), who got her a post at Harvard’s department of economics. Later she was appointed Albert Schweitzer Professor at Columbia (Nelson Rockefeller, Governor of New York, was also one of her circle) and her work received substantial backing from the Carnegie Foundation. Friendship with Adlai Stevenson opened doors to the leading figures in the Kennedy administration. She became a confidante of Robert McNamara, with whom she retained a strong influence during his time as president of the World Bank. Although she found Kennedy a cool personality who always kept his distance, the same was not true of his successor.
[13]
Ward fascinated Johnson. Her books were the only ones he ever read, Johnson once said.
[14]
She contributed to his speeches, including the 1964 Great Society speech. Two days before leaving the White House, Johnson wrote to her: ‘Whatever mark we have made in these last five years clearly bears your stamp too.’
[15]

In the 1950s, she lived in Africa and was friends with the first generation of African leaders – Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya and Zambia’s Kenneth Kaunda – whose economic policies helped ruin their countries. Visiting India in 1952, she met Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who had better things to talk about than five-year plans, and met his daughter, Indira Gandhi, who became a life-long admirer, a relationship crucial in persuading Gandhi to come to Stockholm.
[16]

She lobbied the Second Vatican Council on Third World development. In 1967, Pope Paul VI established the Pontifical Commission for Justice and Peace, with Ward as one of its members. The encyclical,
Populorum Progressio
, ‘The Development of the Peoples’, with its criticism of ‘unbridled liberalism’, its call for ‘concerted planning’ and the creation of a ‘World Fund’ are evidence of Ward’s imprint.
*
[17]
It’s no wonder that, for Strong, the prospect of working with Ward was ‘a dream come true’.
[18]
 

Like Strong, Ward believed world government was necessary and achievable. ‘We live physically and socially in a post-national order. But we still worship the “idols of the tribe,”’ she wrote in a 1973 paper for the Vatican.
[19]
The urgent economic problems of the day required policies which could only be achieved at a ‘planetary level’.
[20]
Underlying the debate on Third World development was the ethical issue of world distribution of income and resources, a debate sharpened because of the unsustainability of ‘the reckless economic expansion of the last three hundred years’.
[21]
 

The belief that without massive aid transfers, developing countries could not improve their living standards was central to Ward’s worldview.

The market alone cannot begin to accomplish the scale of readjustment that will be needed once the concept of unlimitedly growing wealth, mediated to all by a ‘trickle down’ process, ceases to be a rational possibility for tomorrow’s world economy.
[22]

In an
Economist
article on the eve of the Stockholm conference, Ward argued that the pursuit of ‘destabilising growth’ was not the answer because it didn’t reduce the gap between the rich and poor nations. ‘It has no built-in tendency to redistribute the surpluses and tends on the contrary to skew still further the patterns of income it creates’ – a view that has not withstood the test of time in a new era grappling with the implications of China’s huge trade surpluses.
[23]

The Marshall Plan should be the model for the whole world, a case she made in 1957 from the same podium on the tenth anniversary of General Marshall’s speech, when she became the first woman to give the Harvard commencement address. Five years later in
The Rich Nations and the Poor Nations
, Ward argued that high income countries should allocate one per cent of their national income to aid programmes. Selected by the Book of the Month club, the
New York Times
called it ‘wise and inspiring’.

It was imperative, Ward argued, to manage the future. Collectively, human beings must know where they’re going and what the world will look like in twenty years’ time, she said in her 1966 paper
Space Ship Earth
. ‘It is surely inconceivable that we should turn the whole human experiment over to forces of change which we can neither master nor even fully understand.’
[24]

Marx and Engels have been heavily criticised for claiming to have discovered the scientific laws that govern history. Forecasts of environmental doom also depend on a deterministic view of history, in particular that the values and state of human knowledge of future societies are knowable by the present. In doing so, they presume the social organisation of the anthill or the beehive and the curtailment of individual freedom and initiative – forces we can never fully understand or predict.

Strong commissioned Ward and the microbiologist René Dubos to write a book summing up the ‘knowledge and opinions’ of leading experts Strong had selected on ‘the relationships between man and his natural habitat at a time when human activity is having profound effects upon the environment’.
[25]

Only One Earth
couldn’t hide the divide between experts from First World and Third World. One from the former argued that societies should retreat from industrialisation to agriculture. Representatives from the Third World argued the opposite. Industrial development should have priority over worries about future environmental damage and ‘dreams of landscapes innocent of smokestacks’, as one of them put it.
[26]

Global warming made a somewhat tentative debut in 1972. Small changes in the planet’s balance of energy could change average temperatures by two degrees centigrade, ‘downwards, this is another ice age, upwards to an ice-free age. In either case, the effects are global and catastrophic’.
[27]
The greenhouse effect could mean that temperatures rise 0.5
o
C by the end of the century. But if developing countries consumed energy at levels in the developed world, might that risk temperatures rising uncomfortably close to the catastrophic two degree centigrade threshold?
[28]
  

At that stage, global warming was not considered the main threat to mankind’s survival. What was? ‘Pockets of urban degradation in affluent countries provide us with a foretaste of what could become man’s greatest environmental risk,’ the authors of
Only One Earth
wrote. ‘Spreading urban misery, city quarters of unrelieved ugliness and squalor in which imaginative life of young children may be as systematically starved as their bodies are undernourished.’
[29]
Catastrophe was just around the corner.

Although living things had survived ice ages, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and typhoons of ‘our unstable planet’, they served as a warning. ‘Like the giant reptiles of the Jurassic ages, some species have gone the “way to dusty death.”’
[30]
What was the lesson of the extinction of the dinosaurs, given that it wasn’t caused by the human activities that were risking the planet’s viability? ‘A need for extreme caution, a sense of the appalling vastness and complexity of the forces that can be unleashed and of the egg-shell delicacy of the arrangements that can be upset,’ was the answer.
[31]

The more immediate eggshell was Third World hostility to the promotion of environmental concerns at the expense of their development agenda. Strong convened a group from the development movement in New York. He would assess progress with Ward at one-to-one dinner meetings, always over a bottle of Dom Perignon, her favourite champagne.
[32]
The message was simple and devastating. As expressed by Pakistan’s Mahub ul Haq, industrialisation had given developed countries disproportionate benefits and huge reservoirs of wealth, at the same time causing the very environmental problems that they were now asking developing countries to help resolve. Those who had created the mess in the first place should pay the costs of cleaning it up.
[33]
Strong realised more needed to be done to save the conference.