Det danske Fredsakademi
Kronologi over fredssagen og international politik 9. Juni 2012 / Time Line June 9, 2012
Version 3.006/09/2012
Shalom, Educating for Peace Wins Global Peacemaking
Award
Shalom, Educating for Peace (SEP), a peace education NGO registered
under the law of South Africa and working in Rwanda, will be
awarded the Global Peacemaking Award from the International Public
Policy Institute (IPPI) on the 9th of June. SEP has been educating
communities for peace since 2008, reaching thousands of people in
the Ndera, Rwamagana and Rulindo areas. The organisation has
developed several programs, including a weekly radio broadcast on
peace, training in nonviolent communication, and peace education
through sports, theatre and song, amongst others.
06/09/2012
Four Futures
By John Scales Avery
Introduction
Today, the world is faced with a number of problems which are both
serious and interconnected, but which all have solutions. Although
the problems are well known, it is useful to list them:
• THREATS TO THE ENVIRONMENT: The global environment is being
destroyed by excessive consumption in the industrialized countries,
combined with rapid population growth in developing nations.
Climate change threatens to melt glaciers and polar ice. Complete
melting of Greenland's inland ice would result in a 7 meter rise in
sea level. Complete melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would
produce an additional 5 meters of rise.
• GROWING POPULATION, VANISHING RESOURCES: The fossil fuel era
is ending. By 2050, oil and natural gas will be prohibitively
expensive. They will no longer be used as fuels, but will be
reserved as feedstocks for chemical synthesis. Within a hundred
years, the same will be true of coal. The reserve indices for many
metals are between 10 and 100 years. Reserve indices are defined as
the size of the known reserves of metals divided by the current
annual rates of production.
• THE GLOBAL FOOD CRISIS: It is predicted that by 2050, the
world's population of humans will reach 9 billion. This is just the
moment when the oil and natural gas, on which modern
energy-intensive agriculture depend, will become so expensive that
they will no longer be used as fuels. Climate change may also
contribute to a global food crisis. Melting of Himalayan glaciers
threatens the summer water supplies of both India and China. Rising
sea levels threaten to inundate low-lying agricultural land, and
aridity produced by climate change may reduce grain harvests.
Furthermore, aquifers throughout the world are being overdrawn, and
water tables are falling. Topsoil is also being lost. These
elements combine to produce a threat of widespread famine by the
middle of the 21st century.
• INTOLERABLE ECONOMIC INEQUALITY: Today 2.7 billion people
live on less than $2 a day - 1.1 billion on less than $1 per day.
18 million of our fellow humans die each year from poverty-related
causes. Meanwhile, obesity is becoming a serious health problem in
the rich part of the world. In 2006, 1.1 billion people lacked safe
drinking water, and waterbourne diseases killed an estimated 1.8
million people. The developing countries are also the scene of a
resurgence of other infectious diseases, such as malaria,
drug-resistant tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS.
• THE THREAT OF NUCLEAR WAR: Despite the end of the Cold War,
the threat of a nuclear catastrophe remains severe. During the Cold
War, the number and power of nuclear weapons reached insane heights
- 50,000 nuclear weapons with a total explosive power equivalent to
roughly a million Hiroshima bombs. Expressed differently, the total
explosive power was equivalent to 20 billion tons of TNT, 4 tons
for each person on earth. Today the total number of these weapons
has been cut approximately in half, but there are still enough to
destroy human civilization many times over. The danger of
accidental nuclear war remains severe, since many nuclear missiles
are on hair-trigger alert, ready to be fired within minutes of a
warning being received. Continued over a long period of time, the
threat of accident will grow to a near certainty. Meanwhile, the
number of nations possessing nuclear weapons is growing, and there
is a danger that if an unstable government is overthrown (for
example, Pakistan's), the country's nuclear weapons will fall into
the hands of subnational groups. Against nuclear terrorism there is
no effective defense.
• THE MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX: In 2008, world military
budgets reached a total of 1.7 trillion dollars (i.e. 1.7 million
million dollars). This amount of money is almost too large to be
imagined. The fact that it is being spent means that many people
are making a living from the institution of war. Wealthy and
powerful lobbies from the military-industrial complex are able to
influence mass media and governments. Thus the institution of war
persists, although we know very well that it threatens to destroy
to civilization and that it responsible for much of the suffering
that humans experience.
• LIMITS TO GROWTH: A “healthy” economic growth
rate of 4% per year corresponds to an increase by a factor of 50 in
a century, by a factor of 2,500 in two centuries and 125,000 in
three centuries. No one can maintain that resource-using,
waste-producing economic activities can continue to grow except by
refusing to look more than a certain distance into the future. It
seems likely that the boundaries for certain types of growth will
be reached during the 21st century. (Culture can of course continue
to grow.) We face a difficult period of transition from an economy
that depends on growth for its health to a new economic system:
steady-state economics.
In this paper, I will present four scenarios for the future, two of
which are very dark indeed. The other two scenarios present
solutions. Our world is not doomed to undergo a dark fate. Modern
science has, for the first time in history, offered humankind the
possibility of a life of comfort, free from hunger and cold, and
free from the constant threat of death through infectious disease.
At the same time, science has given humans the power to obliterate
their civilization with nuclear weapons, or to make the earth
uninhabitable through overpopulation and pollution. The question of
which of these paths we choose is literally a matter of life or
death for ourselves and our children.
Will we use the discoveries of modern science constructively, and
thus choose the path leading towards life? Or will we use science
to produce more and more lethal weapons, which sooner or later,
through a technical or human failure, may result in a catastrophic
nuclear war? Will we thoughtlessly destroy our beautiful planet
through unlimited growth of population and industry? The choice
among these alternatives is ours to make. We live at a critical
moment of history - a moment of crisis for civilization.
No one living today asked to be born at such a moment, but by an
accident of birth, history has given each of us an enormous
responsibility, and two daunting tasks: If civilization is to
survive, we must not only stabilize the global population but also,
even more importantly, we must eliminate the institution of
war.
The problem of building a stable, just, and war-free world is
difficult, but it is not impossible. The large regions of our
present-day world within which war has been eliminated can serve as
models. There are a number of large countries with heterogeneous
populations within which it has been possible to achieve internal
peace and social cohesion, and if this is possible within such
extremely large regions, it must also be possible globally.
We must replace the old world of international anarchy, chronic war
and institutionalized injustice, by a new world of law. The United
Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the
International Criminal Court are steps in the right direction, but
these institutions need to be greatly strengthened and reformed. We
also need a new global ethic, where loyalty to one's family and
nation will be supplemented by a higher loyalty to humanity as a
whole.
The Nobel laureate biochemist Albert Szent-Gy ¨rgyi once wrote:
“The story of man consists of two parts, divided by the
appearance of modern science.... In the first period, man lived in
the world in which his species was born and to which his senses
were adapted. In the second, man stepped into a new, cosmic world
to which he was a complete stranger.... The forces at man's
disposal were no longer terrestrial forces, of human dimension, but
were cosmic forces, the forces which shaped the universe. The few
hundred Fahrenheit degrees of our flimsy terrestrial fires were
exchanged for the ten million degrees of the atomic reactions which
heat the sun.”
“This is but a beginning, with endless possibilities in both
directions – a building of a human life of undreamt of wealth
and dignity, or a sudden end in utmost misery. Man lives in a new
cosmic world for which he was not made. His survival depends on how
well and how fast he can adapt himself to it, rebuilding all his
ideas, all his social and political institutions.”
“...Modern science has abolished time and distance as factors
separating nations. On our shrunken globe today, there is room for
one group only - the family of man.”
Scenario 1: Nuclear Catastrophe
Today the danger of a catastrophic war with hydrogen bombs hangs
like a dark cloud over the future of human civilization. The total
explosive power of today's weapons is equivalent to roughly half a
million Hiroshima bombs. To multiply the tragedy of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki by a factor of half a million changes the danger
qualitatively. What is threatened today is the complete breakdown
of human society. Although the Cold War has ended, the dangers of
nuclear weapons have not been appreciably reduced. Indeed,
proliferation and the threat of nuclear terrorism have added new
dimensions to the dangers.
There are 26,000 nuclear weapons in the world today, about 4,000 of
the on hair-trigger alert. The phrase “hair trigger
alert” means that the person in charge has only 15 minutes to
decide whether the warning from the radar system was true of false,
and to decide whether or not to launch a counterattack. The danger
of accidental nuclear war continues to be high. Technical failures
and human failures have many times brought the world close to a
catastrophic nuclear war. Those who know the system of
“deterrence” best describe it as “an accident
waiting to happen”.
A nuclear war would a global ecological catastrophe, and all the
nations of the world would suffer - also neutral nations. Recent
studies by atmospheric scientists have shown that the smoke from
burning cities produced by even a limited nuclear war would have a
devastating effect on global agriculture. The studies show that the
smoke would rise to the stratosphere, where it would spread
globally and remain for a decade, blocking sunlight, blocking the
hydrological cycle and destroying the ozone layer. Because of the
devastating effect on global agriculture, darkness from even a
small nuclear war could result in an estimated billion deaths from
famine. This number corresponds to the fact that today, a billion
people are chronically under-nourished. If global agriculture were
sufficiently damaged by a nuclear war, these vulnerable people
might not survive. A large-scale nuclear war would be an even
greater global catastrophe, completely destroying all agriculture
for a period of ten years.
There are many ways in which a nuclear catastrophe could occur, and
indeed the world has many times been close to such a disaster, for
example during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and on the occasion in
1983 when the Soviet warning system falsely reported an American
attack, and only the outstanding skill, courage and coolness of Lt.
Col. Stanislav Petrov averted disaster.
In this scenario we will consider the threat of a third world war
triggered by an Israeli attack on Iran. The government of Israel,
under Benjamin Netanyahu, is reportedly planning a unilateral
military attack on Iran, perhaps as early as the autumn of 2012, at
the height of the US presidential election. President Obama's
response, on behalf of the United States, has been to state that if
Israel is attacked by Iran, all options are on the table,
diplospeak for US military involvement in the war. But if Iran is
attacked by Israel, how can Iran fail to respond? Thus the stage is
set for escalation.
Most probably, a military attack on Iran by Israel will provoke
Iran to retaliate by closing the Strait of Hormuz, and also provoke
an Iranian missile attack on Tel Aviv. The United States will very
probably respond by sending warships to the Strait of Hormuz, and
bombing Iranian shore installations. This will very likely lead the
Iranians to sink one or more of the US warships by means of
rockets. The public in the United States will demand massive
retaliation against Iran.
Meanwhile, one can anticipate that, in Pakistan, the unpopularity
of the US -Israel alliance (as well as memory of numerous
atrocities) will lead to the overthrow of Pakistan's government and
the entry of the new revolutionary government of Pakistan into the
war on the side of Iran, thus providing Iran with nuclear weapons.
Israel will then decide that a preemptive first strike against
Pakistan's nuclear weapons installations is necessary, and for this
purpose Israel will use its own large arsenal of nuclear
weapons.
Russia has already prepared for the threatened war by massing
troops and armaments in Armenia, and China too will be drawn into
the conflict. In this tense situation, when nuclear weapons have
been used for the first time since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there
will be a danger that a much larger scale nuclear disaster will
occur because of a systems failure or an error of judgement by a
political or military leader. Such a disaster will have both
environmental and economic dimensions.
Scenario 2: Large-Scale Famine Produced by Overpopulation,
Climate Change and the End of Oil and Gas
During the first decade of the 21st century, a child died from
starvation every six seconds - five million children died from
hunger every year. As the 21 st century progresses this tragic loss
of life will increase to unimaginable proportions.
As glaciers melt in the Himalayas, threatening the summer water
supplies of India and China; as ocean levels rise, drowning the
fertile rice-growing river deltas of Asia; as aridity begins to
decrease the harvests of Africa, North America and Europe; as
populations grow; as aquifers are overdrawn; as cropland is lost to
desertification and urban growth; and as energy prices increase,
the billion people who now are undernourished but still survive,
will not survive. They will become the victims of a famine whose
proportions will exceed anything that the world has previously
experienced.
Attempts to increase the size of the area under cultivation will
meet with failure. In Southern Asia, in some countries of Eastern
Asia, in the Near East and North Africa there will be almost no
scope for expanding agricultural area. In the drier regions, it
will even be necessary to return to permanent pasture the land that
is marginal and submarginal for cultivation. In most of Latin
America and Africa south of the Sahara, there will still be
considerable possibilities for expanding cultivated areas; but the
costs of development will be high, and it will often be more
economical to intensify the utilization of areas already settled.
Many of the remaining tropical rain forests will be destroyed in
attempts to increase the area under cultivation.
Rather than an increase in the global area of cropland, we will
encounter a future loss of cropland through soil erosion,
salination, desertification, loss of topsoil, depletion of minerals
in topsoil, urbanization and failure of water supplies. In China,
North Africa, the Middle East, India and in the south-western part
of the United States, water tables will fall to such an extent that
the agricultural use of water from wells will become impossible.
Attempts to convert arid grasslands into wheat farms will fail,
defeated by drought and wind erosion, just as the wheat farms of
Oklahoma were overcome by drought and dust in the 1930's. Much land
will be turned into desert by salination and overgrazing and wind
erosion.
Especially worrying is a prediction of the International Panel on
Climate Change concerning the effect of global warming on the
availability of water: The prediction is that by the 2050's, global
warming will have reduced by as much as 30% the water available in
many areas of world that now a large producers of grain.
Added to the agricultural and environmental problems, there will be
problems of finance and distribution. Famines will occur even when
grain is available somewhere in the world, because those who are
threatened with starvation will not be able to pay for the grain,
or for its transportation. The economic laws of supply and demand
are will not be able to solve this type of problem. One will say
that there is no “demand” for the food (meaning demand
in the economic sense), even though people are in fact
starving.
Green Revolution plant varieties will prove to be less valuable
than might be expected because they require heavy inputs of
pesticides, fertilizers and irrigation. Monocultures, such as the
Green Revolution varieties will also prove to be vulnerable to
future epidemics of plant diseases, similar to the epidemic that
caused the Irish Potato Famine in 1845. Even more importantly,
pesticides, fertilizers, irrigation, and the use of farm machinery
all depend on the use of fossil fuels. Therefore high agricultural
yields cannot be maintained in the future, when fossil fuels become
prohibitively scarce and expensive. Furthermore, food crops will be
converted into biofuels, and biofuels will be grown on land that
could be used for food production.
The ratio of the fossil fuel energy inputs to the food calorie
outputs depends on how many energy-using elements of food
production are included in the accounting. David Pimental and Mario
Giampietro of Cornell University estimated that in the 1990's, if
the energy expended on transportation, packaging and retailing of
food is included, the U.S. food system required 10 input calories
of fossil fuel energy for each food calorie produced, and this
figure did not include energy used for cooking. Thus, by 2050, just
as global population reaches unprecedented levels, a severe blow to
modern agriculture will be dealt by prohibitively high prices of
oil and natural gas. The result will be global famine on a scale
never before experienced. As desperate refugees from the worst-hit
parts of the world attempt to enter more fortunate countries, the
severity of the disaster will be compounded by xenophobia, loss of
empathy, and a shift to the political far right.
Scenario 3: Steady-State Economics
Like a speeding bus headed for a brick wall, the earth's
rapidly-growing population of humans and its rapidly-growing
economic activity are headed for a collision with a very solid
barrier - the carrying capacity of the global environment. As in
the case of the bus and the wall, the correct response to the
situation is to apply the brakes in good time.
The size of the human economy is, of course, the product of two
factors the total number of humans, and the consumption per capita.
If we are to achieve a sustainable global society in the future, a
society whose demands are within the carrying capacity of of the
global environment, then both these factors must be reduced. The
responsibility for achieving sustainability is thus evenly divided
between the North and the South: Where there is excessively high
consumption per capita, it must be reduced; and this is primarily
the responsibility of the industrialized countries. High birth
rates must also be reduced; and this is primarily the
responsibility of the developing countries, in many of which birth
rates are too high to be sustainable. Both of these somewhat
painful changes are necessary for sustainability; but both will be
extremely difficult to achieve because of the inertia of
institutions, customs and ways of thought which are deeply embedded
in society, in both the North and the South.
In this scenario we will look at the features of a new type of
economics, which will be needed to avoid an ecological crash:
Steady State Economics. In the future, the population of the earth
will be gradually decreased to a level that can be maintained by
organic agriculture. The changes which will be used to break the
cycle of overpopulation and poverty are all desirable in
themselves. Besides education and higher status for women, these
measures include state- provided social security for old people,
provision of water supplies near to dwellings, provision of health
services to all, abolition of child labor and general economic
development.
When women have higher education, higher social status, and
independent careers outside the home, they will not be forced into
the role of baby- producing machines by men who do not share in the
drudgery of cooking, washing and cleaning. Women will take their
places beside men in positions of responsibility, thus contributing
their uniquely life-oriented point of view to the ethos of
society.
As the global population first becomes stabilized and afterwards
gradually decreases to a sustainable level, the problems of
eliminating poverty and providing adequate infrastructure will be
simplified.
In the industrialized countries, per-capita consumption will be
drastically reduced. Material goods will no longer be used as a
means of social competition. Public education, mass media and
religious instruction will all reenforce the perception that
“conspicuous consumption” is vulgar and antisocial.
Riding a bicycle will become more fashionable than riding in an
automobile, since it will be seen as contributing to the salvation
of the earth's environment. In general, private transportation
(apart from bicycles) will disappear, and will be replaced by
public transport systems driven by renewable energy sources.
The use of fossil fuels will be gradually reduced and finally
eliminated. This will be achieved with the help of high taxes on
fossil fuel use. All forms of renewable energy will be intensively
developed with the help of state subsidies. In particular, the
solar energy potential of arid desert regions in North Africa, the
Americas, Asia and Australia will be fully exploited. Solar energy
will be used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. These gases
will be liquefied and transported to other parts of the world,
where they will be used in fuel cells.
In so far as is possible, food will be grown locally. The
consumption of meat will be very much reduced in order to shorten
the food chain, and in order to avoid the release of
nitrogen-containing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. New forms
of food will be found - for example high-protein algae and
high-protein edible seaweed.
The institution of war will be eliminated, thus releasing
productive forces for more constructive purposes. Aid to
underdeveloped countries will be very much increased. Wasteful
energy use will be avoided, partly because it will be considered to
be antisocial, and partly through governmental regulations. Goods
will be made more durable and repairable.
In the world of the future will be a world of changed values.
Non-material human qualities, such as kindness, politeness,
knowledge and musical and artistic ability will be valued more
highly, and people will derive a larger part of their pleasure from
conversation and from the appreciation of unspoiled nature.
Governments already recognize their responsibility for education.
In the future, they will also recognize their responsibility for
helping young people to make a smooth transition from education to
secure jobs. If jobs are scarce, work will be shared with a spirit
of solidarity among those seeking employment; hours of work (and if
necessary, living standards) will be reduced to ensure that all who
wish it may have jobs. Market forces alone cannot achieve this. The
powers of government are needed.
The present financial system of the world, characterized as it is
by fractional reserve banking and the need for growth, will not
survive in the future, when growth is no longer possible. Private
banks will be replaced by national banks.
In the future world as it can be if we work to make it so, a stable
population of moderate size will live without waste or luxury, but
in comfort and security, free from the fear of hunger or
unemployment. People will derive more of their pleasure from the
enjoyment of their families and friends, from music, art and
literature, and from the beauty of the environment.
Scanario 4: Global Governance
The problem of achieving internal peace over a large geographical
area is not insoluble. It has already been solved. There exist
today many nations or regions within each of which there is
internal peace, and some of these are so large that they are almost
worlds in themselves. One thinks of China, India, Brazil,
Australia, the Russian Federation, the United States, and the
European Union. Many of these enormous societies contain a variety
of ethnic groups, a variety of religions and a variety of
languages, as well as striking contrasts between wealth and
poverty. If these great land areas have been forged into peaceful
and cooperative societies, cannot the same methods of government be
applied globally?
Today there is a pressing need to enlarge the size of the political
unit from the nation-state to the entire world. The need to do so
results from the terrible dangers of modern weapons and from global
economic interdependence. The progress of science has created this
need, but science has also given us the means to enlarge the
political unit: Our almost miraculous modern communications media,
if properly used, have the power to weld all of humankind into a
single supportive and cooperative society.
Many of the large regions within which internal peace has been
established are federations, and in this scenario, the United
Nations is developed from the confederation that it now is to a
World Federation. We visualize a reformed UN General Assembly, with
the power to make laws that are binding on individuals. These laws
will be enforced by a much more developed International Criminal
Court, whose jurisdiction will be extended to cover the full range
of international law.
The decisions of the ICC will be backed by a World Standing Army,
with a monopoly on heavy weapons, and with more power than any
national military force. The manufacture or possession of nuclear
weapons or other weapons of mass destruction will be forbidden.
Mass media, public education and religion will all be used to build
up the loyalty of citizens of the world to humanity as a whole.
Global citizens will feel that it is their duty to report
violations of international treaties and laws, in particular laws
banning nuclear weapons. Whistle-blowers will be protected and
rewarded by the World Federation. International trading in light
arms will be forbidden.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights will take on a central
position in defining the aims of the World Federation. Gross
violations of human rights will be prevented by the World
Federation. National politicians violating human rights will be
arrested by the World Standing Army and tried by the International
Criminal Court.
The voting system of the UN General Assembly will be reformed, and
final votes will be cast by regional blocks, each block having one
vote. The blocks will be: 1) Latin America 2) Africa 3) Europe 4)
North America 5) Russia and Central Asia 6) China 7) India and
Southeast Asia 8) The Middle East and 9) Japan, Korea and Oceania.
A reformed Security Council will still exist, but without the
special privileges of the P5 members, and without the veto
power.
The World Federation will be given the power of taxation. One of
its sources of income will be the so-called “Tobin
tax”, named after the Nobel laureate economist James Tobin of
Yale University. Tobin proposed that international currency
exchanges should be taxed at a rate between 0.1 and 0.25 percent.
Even this extremely low rate of taxation will have the beneficial
effect of damping speculative transactions, thus stabilizing the
rates of exchange between currencies.
The volume of money involved in international currency transactions
is so enormous that even the tiny tax proposed by Tobin will
provide the World Federation with between 100 billion and 300
billion dollars annually. By strengthening the activities of
various agencies, the additional income will add to the prestige of
the World Federation and thus make the organization more effective
when it is called upon to resolve international political
conflicts. Besides the Tobin tax, other measures will be used to
increase the income of the World Federation, for example, resources
of the sea bed be given to the UN, as well as income from taxes on
carbon dioxide emissions.
In the future, the budgets of agencies, such as the present World
Health Organization, the Food and Agricultural Organization, UNESCO
and the UN Development Programme, will not just be doubled but will
be multiplied by a factor of at least twenty. With increased
budgets these agencies will sponsor research and other actions
aimed at solving the world's most pressing problems - AIDS,
drug-resistant infections diseases, tropical diseases, food
insufficiencies, pollution, climate change, alternative energy
strategies, population stabilization, peace education, as well as
combating poverty, malnutrition, illiteracy, lack of safe water and
so on. The United Nations will be given its own television channel,
with unbiased news programs, cultural programs, and “State of
the World” addresses by the Secretary General of the World
Federation.
The need for international law will be balanced against the
desirability of local self-government. Like biological diversity,
the cultural diversity of humankind is a treasure to be carefully
guarded. A balance or compromise between these two desirable goals
will be achieved by granting only a few carefully chosen powers to
a World Federation with sovereignty over all other issues retained
by the member states.
Concluding Remarks
Although the problems facing the world in the 21st century are both
severe and difficult, nevertheless they have solutions, as
scenarios 3 and 4 attempt to show. Solutions such as these are
vehemently opposed by the powerholders of today, who control both
governments and mass media. Indeed this opposition by powerholders,
who profit from the status quo, is the main reason why rational
solutions to global problems have not yet been found. But in the
last analysis, it is ourselves, the people of the world, the 99%,
who have the collective ability (and responsibility) to choose the
future world that we want. We have the weight of numbers on our
side, and we also have reason on our side.
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