"Earth Summit II" meets at the United Nations five years after the first UN "Earth Summit", held in Rio de Janeiro. That first summit occurred amid concern about the state of the world environment but also with some optimism that at last world leaders would start seriously addressing the ecological crisis.
That optimism has proven unfounded. In nearly every aspect — global warming, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, fresh water supplies, toxic chemical pollution — the planet is in worse condition than it was five years ago. In five years, 30 million hectares of forest have been lost and the number of endangered species has increased 30%.
Agenda 21, adopted at Rio, was supposedly a blueprint of measures needed to bring about sustainable development on a world scale. In fact, it has been little more than one more bureaucratic document — fought over until any meaningful commitments are compromised out of existence, then filed and forgotten.
The reason for the failure is simple: the changes Agenda 21 promised would have been expensive for the big corporations and the governments that serve their needs. Companies can make more money through wasteful and polluting forms of production than through sustainable production, so they have no intention of changing.
It shouldn't be surprising that capitalists act in their own interests, and insist that governments protect those interests. What is surprising is that there are still people who imagine that capitalist profits and the interest of the rest of us in environmental protection can be reconciled.
One major reason for the lost opportunities of the past five years is that many environmental and non-government organisations, instead of campaigning politically to force change, have tried to work within the system to "implement" Agenda 21. Too much effort has been spent trying to convince governments and business that a switch to sustainable development is in their own interest.
Those efforts failed and will continue to fail because their argument is not true: it's not in the interest of the people who are destroying the planet to stop doing it — if it were, there would be no need to talk them into stopping. It doesn't even do any good to prove, for example, that over the long term, more money can be made from Amazon rainforest by preserving and harvesting it selectively: the companies that are clear-felling it today are more interested in immediate profits, and in the longer term count on some other (probably equally destructive) way of making profits.
This conflict between private profit and public welfare is also highlighted in the Australian government's resistance to an international agreement on binding targets for greenhouse gas reductions. The government claims that Australia would "lose" more than other countries from such reductions; but this is simply the reflection that Australia, per capita, currently produces more greenhouse gases than most other countries.
To buttress its case, the Howard government has trotted out the highly questionable forecasts of a new and untested computer model, and claimed, among other absurdities, that compulsory greenhouse gas reductions would lead to a 20% decline in Australian wages.
Dr Clive Hamilton of the Australia Institute and 130 other economists last week released a statement documenting ways of reducing greenhouse emissions "without harming the economy". The statement is useful in debunking Howard's special pleading.
It would be a mistake, however, to see such a statement as a way of helping to "persuade" John Howard, coal mine owners or aluminium corporations to change their position. Howard's position is not one of special pleading for "Australia", but only for a handful of big corporations, so the future welfare of "the economy" as a whole doesn't come into their calculations.
The lesson of Rio's failure is that private profits and public environmental welfare are in conflict; they can't be reconciled. Sweet reason will not persuade business and governments to save the planet. We need a political movement that can force the necessary changes.