ROW Episode 28

In this episode we explore the importance of engaging in a two-step process of crafting and agreeing to a new principle of the responsibility to protect our global commons followed by the creation of a supranational institution capable of acting as a trustee of those resources for the collective benefit of humanity.

Transcript

Sovaida: 0:08

Hello and welcome to Reimagining Our World, a podcast dedicated to envisioning a better world and to infusing hope that we can make the principled choices to build that world. In this episode, we explore the importance of engaging in a two step process of crafting and agreeing to a new principle of the responsibility to protect our global commons, followed by the creation of a supranational institution capable of acting as a trustee of those global commons for the collective benefit of humanity. It's wonderful to have you join me today. Let's just dive straight in. The last time we talked about the importance of taking a three step process if we want to improve the state of our world. The three step process entailed identifying a set of shared global ethics or universal principles, achieving consensus around them, and then applying them methodically to solving any given global challenge. We also addressed the concerns of skeptics who might say this is not possible, and we looked at the fact that this not only can be done, but that it had been done in the recent past with the passage of the principle of the Responsibility to Protect, and its acceptance universally by all the nations of the world in 2005. What I want to propose today is that we take the next step and adopt a really important new universal principle and that universal principle is what I would term the responsibility to protect our global commons. We should really call on our leaders to start focusing on this and starting to undertake the processes that are necessary to come to agreement on this. What this principle essentially means is that all nations have the responsibility and acknowledge that they have the responsibility to protect what we call the global commons, which are the shared natural resources that are part of humanity's common heritage. So why is this not only important but a necessary step if we are to create a better world? For one, if we were to effectively tackle one of the biggest global challenges of our time, which is climate change, we will need to start here. Why is that? We know that in order to stop global warming, to arrest the process and to limit it to warming not beyond 1.5 degrees centigrade above pre industrial times by the end of 2100, by the end of this century, we know that we need to stop burning fossil fuels, stop spewing carbon dioxide into the air, and and replace our use of fossil fuels with clean sources of energy, right? And a classic example of this is cars. Instead of having fuel driven cars, we need to shift to having electric cars. At least that's the thinking now. But in order to have electric cars, we need to have access to certain minerals that are necessary to create the lithium ion batteries that power these cars. Some of the essential minerals that are necessary to do this are cobalt, lithium, and zinc, and nickel. Unfortunately, as with most natural resources that are critical to all of us, they're not found everywhere in the world. Not every country has access to them, but they're found in a few places. For instance, like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or Indonesia, the Philippines, New Caledonia, Chile, Argentina, and so on. Another thing we know that we need to do to tackle climate change and to arrest and in any event mitigate global warming is to preserve what are called carbon sinks, things like forests that absorb vast quantities of CO2 and in return give us wonderful oxygen. And the oceans do the same. Unfortunately, we know that these forests like those in the Amazon and in Siberia and those in the Congo, which are really viewed as the lungs of the world because they do absorb this carbon dioxide in vast quantities and give back oxygen, they are under threat. They're being torn down and razed in order to extract timber which is another natural resource, or they're being raised to the ground in order to clear land for agriculture or to set up ranches. And what ends up happening is that the countries on whose territory, these forests happen to be located, tend to treat them as though they were national assets and they believe that they have absolute sovereignty over them and that they can do with them as they please. And of course, the famous spat that occurred between the president of France and the president of Brazil in 2019 is illustrative of this, where, you know, Mr. Macron was angry about the fact that Mr. Bolsonaro was, in his mind, allowing all these such vast swathes of forest in the Amazon to be burnt and to be felled in order for ranches to be created, and Mr. Bolsonaro said,"Wait a minute! Are you trying to treat us as a colony? We have absolute sovereignty. We can do as we please." Clearly there's a fundamental difference in view between who owns and has the right to manage these forests. Now, what this example illustrates is that we have a key problem if we're to tackle climate change. If we're to have access to the minerals to create things like batteries for electric cars or if we are to ensure that our carbon sinks are preserved we have to first acknowledge that the way we currently extract, manage, and distribute critical natural resources is severely problematic and has many flaws. Let's quickly look at what some of these flaws are. The first we've already alluded to, the role of geography. A natural resource happens to sit on the land belonging to a certain nation, and what ends up happening so far is that the leaders and people of that country sometimes mindlessly plunder what are essentially collective resources that humanity needs. Shared resources, right? The global commons, as we termed it. And we saw the forests example. We see minerals that are located in places like the Congo and New Caledonia that are necessary for batteries to be made, for electric cars is another example. Access to clean water is another huge problem, and in the recent past we've seen, for instance, Ethiopia building a new dam on the Blue Nile in 2011 and it's starting to fill the dam up at a very rapid rate that got Sudan and Egypt, which are two of the other 10 countries that share the same waters of the Nile, it got them very upset and worried because they felt that filling the reservoir so quickly in Ethiopia would diminish the quantity of water that was available for their people and for much needed agriculture. And so it ended up in them being at loggerheads and even threatening war. And of course, we have many examples of access to oil and gas, natural gas. Historically the countries that have sat on it have decided what the price of these commodities are, how much they're going to extract, and have insisted to a certain extent through cartels held the rest of the world hostage. The second flaw in the current system of extraction management and distribution of natural resources is the role of wealthy companies who often get access to these resources who manage to lock in access because they have the money to do so. Especially countries that need money and finances and are poorer, will grant concessions. An example that has been in the news recently is Tesla's bid to try and get direct access to the nickel in one of the biggest--actually, it is the biggest-- nickel mine in the world on an island, New Caledonia, situated in the South Pacific between Australia and Fiji. And understandably, Tesla wants to lock in the supplies of nickel so that it can continue to ensure that batteries are made so that the electric car company can continue producing and earning profits. And also it's good for climate change but on the other hand many people around the world need access to these same commodities and the fact that a wealthy company can go in and lock up a third of the supplies over the next five years, as Tesla is proposing to do, could be perceived as being unfair. The third flaw with our current system is that it leads to a lot of pollution and hazardous conditions, dangers for the people especially engaging in the extraction or living in those areas. Let's again take the example of this nickel mine in New Caledonia. What they do to extract nickel from the soil is that they create a soil slurry and then they blast sulfuric acid at high temperatures through the slurry of soil in order to extract the nickel. This acid then ends up going into the water and the surrounding area, contaminating the water and the land. Also the tailings, which is the residue of what is left after they finish with the process. It's called the tailings. They're left over and they're collected in dams. This is basically toxic material that very often ends up bursting the dams and seeping into the soil, contaminating it, and then ending up in the water and contaminating it as well. This is certainly not ideal. Another example of this that I have found really fascinating that I've learned about lately are the cobalt mines in Congo. Congo sits on about two thirds of the world's cobalt reserves. The people of Congo are by and large very poor. So what they've been doing is that, when they believe that there is cobalt in the earth underneath their homes, they literally start digging underneath their own homes. As soon as they find a vein of cobalt, they will start tunneling and following that vein under their neighbor's homes. And they don't shore these tunnels up properly. So they're very dangerous and very often ended up end up caving in on them, crushing and killing them. Then you have the problem that the ore, the cobalt, needs to be washed and very often it's the women who do the washing and the stuff is toxic and so it causes infertility and stillbirth. And you have the children that are brought in to help with the whole mining process, and they want them to work hard and not get hungry, so they end up drugging them in order that they won't feel hungry. And soldiers are sent in to protect the openings to these mines and yet the soldiers are then paid off by being given a cut of the cobalt that's extracted. The lakes end up getting polluted, the water ends up getting polluted, so it's absolutely disastrous in terms of pollution and unsafe conditions. This has got to change. The fourth flaw that we see in our current system is that the distribution of the natural resources that we end up extracting is inequitable. Countries who sit on these natural resources, once they're extracted, can decide,"Oh, who do I want to share this with? Who do I want to sell this to? I'll sell it to my friends. If I consider you a foe, a country that is unfriendly, I'm not going to sell to you." And again, we've seen this in spades in the past with oil and gas, with Iran at one point refusing to sell oil to certain countries; Venezuela, Russia, with natural gas and one country being able to hold other countries who need critical natural resources whether they're for energy or for other reasons like producing batteries to hold them hostage it does not lead to the kind of world that we want to live in. The fifth flaw that we see is that we forget that many of these resources are finite and non renewable and so they need to be marshaled with great care. On the contrary, what we're actually doing is we're mindlessly decimating and depleting the environment upon which our very lives depend. As a result, every year the world loses an area of forest the size of the country of Costa Rica. Another result is today about 1 million plants and animal species are in danger of extinction. The loss of biodiversity is on an unprecedented and really untenable and undesirable scale. The sixth flaw we see is that this inequitable system that we have for managing our resources has a high cost in terms of the number of conflicts it engenders as people understandably try to lock in access to natural resources that they need, especially energy resources to live by. The U. N. Environmental Program estimates that 40 percent of intrastate--so within state-- conflicts over the past 60 years, are related to natural resources, and that when those conflicts end, they're likely to relapse. In those areas where there is a conflict over resources they're likely to relapse into war or conflict within five years of the previous conflict ending. And the last point that I will raise is that many nations who sit on natural resources are poor and have a lot of problems. The irony is that they don't end up seeing much benefit to their own people financially. from the extraction of these resources and they end up continuing to be mired in poverty. So clearly it's time to make a shift to something different. We're trying to reimagine what a new world would look like, a better world than what we have. First we identify and accept that we have certain problems. We accept that we've made choices that are not really desirable and sustainable, and then we choose--because we have free will choice-- to make different, more constructive, and life empowering choices. So the first thing that we need to do as one of the folks who is at the Council for Foreign Relations, Stewart Patrick, has said,"It's time to govern the world as if the earth mattered." But that's not enough. We actually need to go beyond governing the world as though the earth mattered. We really need to understand and acknowledge that our destinies, the destinies of all nations, are inextricably connected because of our essential oneness and interdependence as human beings. Once we recognize this specific truth, then we will be able to advance what I call a spirit of global solidarity. That's really where we need to begin. We need to get our understanding and insight to develop to the point where we start to evince a spirit of global solidarity. Once we start to show the spirit, we'll start to recognize that these resources we've been talking about are a sort of natural capital, and they're the heritage of humanity, and they're there for all human beings to access equitably and fairly--all nations-- in ways that cause minimal pollution at reasonable cost. So essentially we end up coming to an understanding that this earth's natural capital needs to be exploited mindfully, carefully, and sustainably because it is finite. Now, while it is good news that some countries are starting to come to this recognition, internally. For instance, Chile is in the process right now of drafting a new constitution that is going to take into account climate change and answer questions such as to whom do these natural resources belong, including water, because Chile is rich in lithium that lies in its brine waters in these areas that are covered in sea salt. But it's going to have to think hard about how it wants to continue extraction of lithium in ways that are sustainable and that don't damage the environment and don't cause further losses in biodiversity. So while countries like Chile are doing this, right now the situation around the world is so urgent with climate change and global warming that we can't afford to wait until country by country slowly comes to this recognition. It's time for us to act globally and collectively in order to create the spirit of global solidarity and then express the global solidarity in the form of collective action. Ultimately, this is where we need to get to: collective action to save the environment and to tackle this crisis of climate change. Now, the first steps in collective action, are first of all to adopt this universal principle of the responsibility to protect the global commons. We do that by starting to define what we mean by the words natural capital or global commons. In other words, what do we mean by these shared resources? In an interview that Christine Lagarde, the current president of the European Central Bank, gave in 2021, this past year, she talked about the need to start thinking about a new social contract. And one of the elements of that social contract is really deciding and identifying what constitutes common goods or global commons, and that therefore can be appropriated by the community at large, and what should remain in the hands of individuals. And this is really a key distinction. So the first step is to identify that, to adopt the universal principle that we talked about, and then having decided and agreed on what these shared global commons are, take them and pool them in the hands of a supranational institution that acts for the collective good in the collective interest that represents us, first and foremost, the interests of humanity as a whole. Because in a world that is so interconnected and interdependent, the advantage of one country can only be ensured by ensuring the advantage of the whole. We're like the human body. One part of the body, the lungs, can't say to the heart, I don't care how you're doing; I'm just out for number one. What happens to the lungs will impact, if it develops emphysema or cancer, it will impact on the heart and the rest of the body. So we need to deeply understand that. And ideally, this world body would be elected in a way in which all the people of the world participate. It will hold, have the responsibility of holding the vast resources of the planet as a trustee for humanity, and will regulate how we extract and use these natural resources in a sustainable way and equitable manner. This is really important, these two words, sustainable and equitable. We should also, as part of this system, have a global monitoring system that can monitor and verify and ensure that nations are complying with the regulations created by this body that acts as the trustee of these natural resources. And for those of you who are skeptical that this has been done, I invite you to go back and look at Episode 13 of the Reimagining Our World series that you'll find on the YouTube channel and also maybe Episode 12 that talked about our experience with the European Coal and Steel community and how successful it was using exactly the same pattern of pooling resources, natural resources, that were needed by all the countries involved in the hands of a supranational institution that then regulated how these resources were distributed and ensured that they were distributed equitably and at reasonable costs. Now, fortunately, we're starting to see some leaders of thought coming around to understanding and acknowledging elements of the plan that I've just proposed. Christine Lagarde is one of them. Stewart Patrick at the Council of Foreign Relations is another. Imagine how different our world would be and how much better if we were to take this first simple step of adopting this principle of responsibility to protect the global commons. There are multiple benefits. One is that we are more likely to survive, because we depend on our environment to survive, and by protecting our environment, by arresting and mitigating climate change, we can ensure our own survival, which is a first step. To do anything else, we have to survive first! The second is that we create a more just and equitable system for accessing critical resources such as energy, clean water, minerals and eventually food. And thirdly, we'll see a dramatic reduction in conflict. That will lead to peace. So we'll have a more peaceful world, a more just world, having survived. I think these are worthy goals. They're worth striving for. So onward and upward we go and I look forward to hearing your thoughts and comments. I will now go to the comments section to see what we have. From Nolo, what will it take for nations to acknowledge the principle of universal global commons? Will it require all nations to accept this? I think the roadmap that we laid out in the last episode, Episode 27, for nations to acknowledge the principle of the Responsibility to Protect which was a different principle. We can use the same roadmap, and it was a five year process. It involved going out and talking to the leaders of all nations, having conversations with them and dialogue about why such a principle is really important for the welfare and well being of their own country and their own people--so we have to be persuasive-- getting them on board using language that appeals to their better natures and crafting things in language that doesn't make countries feel like we're trying to usurp their rights. And, having done so, slowly over the years achieving consensus, then at a meeting as we had at the summit in New York in 2005, raising it and getting nations to sign on to it. But first we have to first articulate the principle clearly and tell nations that they will need to come up with what is included in these shared resources. For example, the high seas. Forty-three percent of the surface of the planet is in the high seas with all its resources and so on that are so critical to humanity and the biodiversity. Can we include that, for example, start small and build up and will all nations be required to accept this? Ideally all, but as many as we can get. Get as many as you can. And then over time, as other nations start to see the benefits, they will hopefully sign on. I hope that helps. Why did COP 26 fail to adopt this point of view? I'm not an expert on COP 26, but I'm not aware that there was a distinct push to have countries adopt the principle of the responsibility to protect the global commons. There may have been discussions around it, but having it as a targeted, focused conversation and plan of action I don't know that that was even attempted, and COP26 was trying to do a whole lot of things, and unfortunately didn't succeed in doing the main thing, which was getting countries to pledge enough to ensure that global warming stays below 1.5 degrees centigrade above pre industrial periods. But I think if we do what the Canadians did, maybe create a commission that focuses just on the responsibility to protect our global commons, get them to work on it, produce a report, get the UN to approve the report, get the Secretary General to approve it, endorse it, as happened with the Responsibility to Protect, then get people to travel around the world and talk to the leaders. It requires very focused, deliberate attention. We've done it before in the recent past. I feel confident that if we set our minds to it, we can do it again. Thanks, Nola. All right. I don't see any other comments, so I'll leave it at that. If you do have comments, I'd love to see your thoughts. Please post on the YouTube channel to which you can subscribe for free, and I encourage you to do or post on Facebook. Let's see. Let's get this conversation and dialogue going and maybe the next time you have a conversation with your colleagues at work or your friends or you get together for even coffee over Zoom, maybe you can raise this and say, Hey, we, came across this idea. What do you think of it? Because as the idea is spread at the grassroots, they will eventually percolate up or down to our leaders who are in a position to, to take action. That's all for this episode of Reimagining Our World. I'll see you back here next month. If you liked this episode, please help us to get the word out by rating us and subscribing to the program on your favorite podcast platform. This series is also available in video on the YouTube channel of the Center for Peace and Global Governance, CPGG.