UN Climate Change Conference: The Babel Tower Comes To Paris

Forbes - Jean-Pierre Lehmann

Tower of Babel painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1556)

When I began teaching as Visiting Professor in the MBA program at the University of Hong Kong in February 2012 I had entitled the course “Asia in the New Global Order”. At the first class one of the students asked, “Order? What Order?” Good point, I noted, and the course was re-titled “Asia in the New Global Disorder”. It is the title that has been used in Hong Kong since, but also of the courses I have been teaching at NIIT University in Rajasthan, India, and the theme for my Forbes blog.
Asia which extends from the Red Sea to the East China Sea and across the Indian Ocean to the Pacific is the continent where the main narrative of the 21st century will be written. It is a continent many parts of which (especially in East Asia) are experiencing dynamic developments, but, as I argued in a previous blog, it is also a continent in turmoil.
Asia is a continent in turmoil geopolitically, politically, socially, economically, ideologically, culturally, demographically, but also, and emphatically so, environmentally. Selecting randomly recent news items: Singapore and Malaysia have been once again choked by the (euphemistically called) “haze” due to arising from forest fires in Indonesia; prospects of Bangladesh (population 160 million) sinking due to rising global warming induced rising sea levels are real; New Delhi has acquired the dubious distinction of beating Beijing as the world’s most polluted city; while urban China continues to fester, causing, among other things, an exodus to brighter skies of some of the country’s brightest brains at a time when they are most needed to confront the many challenges the country is facing; an article by Simon Kuper in the Financial Times quotes from a report entitled “Climate change in the Fertile Crescent and implications of the recent Syrian drought” that the Syrian civil war was at least in part caused by the extremely severe droughts the country experienced from 2007 to 2010 forcing “1.5 million Syrians to abandon their farms and move to already dysfunctional cities”; etc
Just a quick addendum on the situation in Syria and the Levant generally: while political scientists see no end of armed conflict in the short or medium term, environmentalists note that climate change conditions will, on the basis of currents trends, get significantly worse. The consequences could ineed be awesomely awful – eg in dramatically increased climate change induced refugees.
All this is happening – and much more – at a time when the global governance architecture that prevailed for five decades following the end of World War II, and successfully maintained the peace during the cold war, is breaking down. The system led to significant increases in prosperity in various parts of the world – notably the stellar economic rise from acute poverty to comfortable prosperity of the four East Asian dragons, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan, that could never have even been dreamed of had the global rules-based architecture, especially in respect to the trade regime, not been solidly in place.
Paris today (Climate Change) and Nairobi tomorrow (WTO Doha ministerial meeting) will painfully illustrate the truism that since the beginning of the 21st century we have a system of global governance that has been reduced to a sham. The show goes on, but it is devoid of content.
The opening lines of Shakespeare’s poem seem highly apt to describe contemporary global governance: “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances”; as indeed the concluding lines give a powerful foreboding of where things will be after Paris CoP21: “Last scene of all, … Is second childishness and mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything”.
It was in 2003 when I was in Cancún attending the WTO ministerial meeting (the first to be held after the launch of the Doha Development Agenda) that I was struck by the imagery of the Tower of Babel. All the ministers were talking, none were listening, hence there was no understanding – hence the meeting collapsed and hence ministers left “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything”.
[The image of the Tower of Babel is all the more relevant to our theme of “Asia in the New Global Disorder”, as Babel was located in Asia, believed by archeologists to have been in Shinar in northwestern Syria, then known as Mesopotamia.]
The same imagery applies – in spades – to the so-called UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC); my Hong Kong student might well ask, “Framework? What framework?” A trivial pursuit question might well be: “in what major city of the world has there not been a climate change summit?” As Paris 2015 will mark the 21st (and the 22nd is already scheduled for Marrakesh in 2016), previous summits (in chronological order) were held in: Berlin, Geneva, Kyoto, Buenos Aires, Bonn, The Hague, Bonn, Marrakesh, New Delhi, Milan, Buenos Aires, Montreal, Nairobi, Bali, Poznan, Copenhagen, Cancún, Durban, Doha, Warsaw, and, last year, Lima.
Readers will recall that the 2009 Copenhagen summit was especially cacophonous, a real venomous bust-up along lines drawn between North and South. The Copenhagen disaster was to be followed by Cancún. At an international conference prior to the event I asked the then Mexican Foreign Minister Patricia Espinosa Cantellano, since the consequences of Copenhagen had not yet been digested and expectations that Cancún would produce something substantial were zero (or below), why simply not cancel the meeting and thereby save money and especially energy?! She looked at me in shock. The very thought of cancelling a summit, even when it is known that nothing will happen, is blasphemy.
When I argue that these summits (not just UNFCC, but also WTO, G-20, etc) should be stopped and other formulas sought I often have Winston Churchill quoted back at me, “to jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war”. But I do not think Churchill had the Tower of Babel in mind!

Besides, these negotiations are undertaken not in a spirit of cooperation, but of confrontation: to score points, “defend national interests”, and the usual mercantilist crap we hear ad nauseam.
The facts here (for once!) seem reasonably clear and on the issue of climate change I am a southerner. There has never been a “green industrial revolution”. As the rich countries got rich, they generated infernal pollution. Once they are rich, they become more environmentally conscious. Show me an exception! This is true, for example, of South Korea, which was renowned for its terrible industrial smog. Today (with a GDP per capita of some $35k) the air is clear and fish have returned to swim in the Han River.
If we want the developing countries from Asia (and other continents) to limit emissions and diminish environmental degradation, the north has a historical, moral and human obligation to transfer as much technology and capital as possible to achieve that end which is imperative not only for Asia but indeed for the entire planet. As we stupidly and vacuously squabble at the Tower of Babel, things continue to deteriorate at accelerated speed.
For the sake of all our children and grand-children, South and North, East and West, we need not to negotiate, but to brainstorm on constructive global solutions to this epic global challenge. If Paris could produce this kind of mindset change and resolution, it would be truly wonderful.