Solutions to problems? A green idea!

Perhaps one of the most illusory ideas of the 20th century is that all problems have solutions. The illusion is largely fostered by politicians whose job it is to recognise and solve problems and whose credibility would be damaged if they admitted that some problems have festered for so long that they are an integral and unavoidable part of the human condition.

One thinks of attempts to resolve ethically and religiously inspired wars and hatred, and attempts to solve the transport problem. Those who do believe solutions are still possible tend to opt for one extreme or the other: leaving it all to the market and keeping the nose of the government out of it, or letting government increasingly dictate not only what we do but how we do it. All solutions are predicated on the idea that things will not get so bad that some kind of disaster will befall us, or, at least, that we can act successfully before the disaster falls.

James Morgan thinks that self-destruction is a distinct possibility but he belongs to the category of people who believe we can avoid it with some imaginative solutions. He rightly argues that globalisation has an important consequence for solution making: the solutions themselves have to be global. He also rightly points to the real risks: conflict and major environmental threats such as biodiversity loss, ocean biomass depletion and global warming. And he argues that solutions have to be mutually acceptable to the main players. We get precisely nowhere by trying to tell a slash-and-burn agriculturist in Brazil that it is "wrong" to set fire to the forest. It is also idle and fruitless to argue for a reversal of economic growth as if long-term growth is even a viable target for policy in one country, let alone in 200 acting together. So we need solutions that, as far as possible, make people better off with the solution than without it, and that account for the continued existence of nation states in a "globalised" world.

The recipe for minimising the chances of self-destruction involves accepting a system of globally tradable rights to pollute, establishing the largest polluters as an "environmental eight" (E8) who will develop global bargains between stakeholders, encouraging "green" accounting systems for nation states, making foreign aid conditional on population-control policies, taxing pollution at as global a level as possible, creating an environmental prize, worth perhaps $1 billion, for a truly clean fuel technology, and setting regional targets for key environmental and social variables.

These are all worthy ideas, although Morgan seems strangely uninformed about some of them. For example, global trading in pollution permits is already enabled under the 1997 Kyoto protocol to the Climate Change Convention. Nor does the idea emanate from the source he quotes: it has been around for a long time.

Green accounting has been tried but we have yet to see any evidence that it changes behaviour. Taxing pollution has long been advocated by environmental economists. "Bargains" between countries, aimed at securing global environmental gains, are increasingly commonplace, whether through debt-for-nature swaps, carbon offsets, deals over intellectual property rights, and so on. Morgan seems to be unaware of all these initiatives, most of which conform to the prescriptive model he has in mind.

This book is sponsored by the World Humanity Action Trust (What) and the trust promises more work along the lines of Morgan's book. The inspirations are noble, but those concerned will need to demonstrate that they are more abreast of what is happening and what ideas have been advocated than is evident in Morgan's contribution. Nonetheless, the book makes for a fairly interesting read.

David Pearce is professor of environmental economics, University College London.