We only have one planet. But we are managing it by outdated means: sovereignty was good at controlling feudal lords a couple of hundred years ago. Perhaps it is in the area of the climate change that the supranational EU can be a model for the rest of the world?
The Copenhagen summit was the last chance that the world's almost 200 states had to show that they could be part of the solution to the problem of global warming. Unfortunately, it is now obvious that the states are part of the problem. It is time for a quantum leap. We have to think of how to expropriate their capacity to decide on the future of the planet. Politics really only consists of deciding how much authority is to be assigned to each level in order to resolve problems. Institutional designs do matter: problem-solving possibilities are closely tied up with the mechanisms we use for solving them. The Spanish state has renounced its own currency, delegating the power to a supranational monetary authority: thanks to the fact that the government cannot start cranking out money to deal with the crisis, the crisis is not even worse than it is.
We only have one planet, but we are managing it with a system of government based on the outdated concept of sovereignty. Sovereignty was once a useful invention, to put an end to the wars of religion, and to control feudal lords. But nowadays, when it comes to handling the question of climate change, Obama, Wen, Medvedev and the rest do not look much different from those medieval warlords bent on preserving their autonomy even at the cost of collective disaster. In Somalia, multiple factions govern, who only look to their own interests, and we call it a failed state. How are we to define our climate governance, when no one watches over collective interests? A failed planet?
Copenhagen might have ended otherwise. Just as the US and Russia have been able to reach important agreements on nuclear disarmament, the US and China might well have agreed on long-term reductions of emissions, by means of a binding agreement incorporating sanctions. We might have seen the 168 states agree on a decentralized system of climate management, with voluntary state objectives and minimum coordination. There are precedents of similar systems that work (such as the community of irrigators in Valencia). But both possibilities were very unlikely. Life is full of cases in which the sum of rational decisions made from an individual point of view leads to collective disaster: arms races, the deforestation of the Amazon, runs on banks... The non-existence of agreements binding on all parties, and of a higher authority to oversee them, are normally at the root of the problem.
The EU, though left on the sidelines of the struggle between the US and the emerging powers, has two sorts of technology with which to attack the problem. The first includes the system of emissions trading (improvable but still important); its capacity for technological innovation in energy efficiency; and its experience in green fiscal measures. These are exportable technologies, which have already made Europe a leader in efficiency, emissions reduction and renewable energies.
But Europe's most important technology is of the institutional kind. However much we criticize it for its irrelevance in the world, the EU is palpable proof that it is possible to apply effective supranational solutions to problems in which irreconcilable state interests are at odds. Europe resolved the Franco- German rivalry, which cost so many millions of deaths, with an imaginative, equitable formula for access to coal, steel and nuclear energy. Today it seems obvious that only a supranational authority capable of setting and collecting green taxes and of distributing them equitably, financing the necessary adaptations and technical innovations with these resources, can prevent global warming. So that, for once, Europe has something along the lines of an ideal solution. All that is lacking is a capacity for selling this solution. Want to know my prediction? The planet will go on getting warmer.
This piece was first published in El Pais.
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