ROW Episode 34

In this episode we explore the idea of pooling critical energy resources in the hands of a supranational high authority for energy as a way of solving a trifecta of global challenges namely: equitable energy distribution, climate change, and nuclear proliferation.

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 idea of pooling critical energy resources in the hands of a supranational high authority for energy as a way of solving a trifecta of global challenges, namely equitable energy distribution, climate change, and nuclear proliferation. I believe that we, the people, need to educate ourselves and have lots of conversations, consultations, brainstorming events to explore how we can create a better world. As we have these conversations, we'll also be preparing ourselves, albeit unwittingly, but maybe we can do this intentionally, to elect fit leaders who are capable of meeting the needs and challenges of our world today, and to take the kind of action that the former Foreign Minister of France--this is in the 1950s-- Robert Schuman referred to in his famous comment when he said,"World peace cannot be safeguarded without the making of creative efforts proportionate to the dangers which threaten it." And while it's important for us to make creative efforts, I also believe that as humans we tend to fear taking big leaps all at once. It's therefore a good idea to think about incremental steps that we can take, and this is certainly something that would be advisable if we're to figure out what we can do to solve the myriad global challenges before us. Now, I've believed for a number of years now, and I've been talking about this and writing about this for a long time, that we should pursue a particular course of action that would give us the biggest bang for our buck, so to speak, and would take us a long way to solving a triad of global crises, three major dangers that the world faces. Remember Robert Schumann says we need to make creative efforts that are proportionate to the dangers we face. What is this triad of interrelated global threats? As you will see here on this caption, the equitable distribution of energy, climate change, and nuclear proliferation are the three major global challenges that I believe are intimately interrelated, as we'll see in a second here and that, and therefore, a solution to them needs to take account of. All three of them. Let's look a little bit at the first one, the equitable distribution of energy. I think we're all becoming, as a result of the conflict in Ukraine, very familiar with the idea that all nations need to have equitable and fair access to the correct amounts of energy that they need to sustain themselves and at reasonable prices. It's definitely a challenge that's plaguing us today, and what we're seeing is the complete opposite of anything that's a system that's equitable. In fact, we're seeing that we've got groups of energy rich countries who are acting with impunity to hold other countries hostage. They're saying to countries who don't happen to sit on barrels of oil and gas or whatever other forms of energy they need, they're saying,"Tough luck. We've got you over the barrel and you now need to comply with our demands or else we will deprive you. It's as simple as that." They fail to recognize the reality of our interconnectedness and the fact that their behavior is going to impact not only other nations but themselves. Consequently, we're already seeing that the world economy has taken a massive body blow and is reeling from the effects of this behavior, as is evident by rapidly rising inflation and the high costs of energy and other things food and so on, and commodities. And it's clear that the world is sinking into a global recession. We've also seen in the mix that the system again is broken because of the action that we've seen just in this month of October with the OPEC plus, the oil cartels deciding to restrict output just as nations are going into winter in Europe and need more access to energy and they're doing it with the sole purpose of keeping energy prices high. The behavior is based on self interest of certain nations and expediency rather than the collective good. That's the first major challenge that we're facing. The second challenge is climate change. It's yet another crisis. And unfortunately, because we've become so focused on nations scrambling basically to satisfy their energy needs for the upcoming winter season, especially in, as I say, Western Europe, we have lost focus. We've become distracted from the need to figure out how we can very quickly reduce our reliance on these very fossil fuels that we're worrying about getting access to, and to reduce our reliance on them to zero, because we absolutely need to do that in order to avoid the worst impacts of climate change That we have covered in previous sessions of this program. If you want to learn more about those, feel free to go and scroll through the YouTube channel to get more details on that. And we've got this other problem of climate change. Energy experts also agree that in this period of transition between reliance of fossil fuels and relying completely on renewable clean energy, nuclear energy has got to be in the mix. We simply can't survive without it, because we are unfortunately not at the point yet where we can completely substitute clean, renewable energy for for fossil fuels. During this period of transition, we need to have nuclear energy in the mix, but this brings us to our third global challenge, which is the fear and the reality of nuclear proliferation and the threat of nuclear conflict. Now the threat of nuclear conflict has already gone up with the war in Ukraine and with the saber rattling that's been going on,"Oh, we might use our nuclear weapons, and we mean it. We're not bluffing here." So the fears and anxieties around the use of nuclear weapons has gone up again. It's at the highest pitch it's been since the Cuban Missile Crisis, according to the experts. So the idea of allowing more nations to be able to build civilian nuclear reactors in order to have access to more electricity for their people, which is something that we want for folks, also means that we're increasing the risk of that a subset of those countries will also develop illicit, destructive, nuclear technologies and weapons, as history has demonstrated that a number of countries have already done. We're already finding ourselves as an international community in a pickle with those countries, like North Korea and Iran's continued efforts to gain nuclear weapons according to the international agency that is monitoring this stuff. So this is the third crisis. You can see the interconnection between equitable distribution of energy, What kind of energy do we use, because climate change is a problem? And gee whiz if we need to use nuclear in the mix, how do we do that while also keeping humanity safe against the threat of nuclear proliferation and potentially nuclear war? So this brings us to the very simple idea. This is not my idea, I will immediately hasten to add, and I'll let you know in a minute where this idea came from. But it's an idea that requires collective action, that is dependent on a new kind of thinking, and an approach to solving problems that takes the long view into consideration as opposed to acting expediently considering only short term interests and narrow nationalistic interests. Fortunately, it's an idea that's born of a historical precedent, and the good news about that is that we've already experimented with this idea, albeit at a regional level in Europe, and it has proven very successful. So we have a historic model for action. Now, the idea is that we pool a subset of critical resources, in this case energy resources, and have them be jointly controlled and managed by a supranational authority, a high authority that sits above nations. This idea was proposed by Jean Monnet, who's considered the father of the European Union. It was based on his deep belief about the need for the common management of common problems, and his understanding and belief, again, that humanity was at a stage, and Europe was definitely a stage in the aftermath of the Second World War, where its interests were fused, and so we needed to be considering collective interests, as opposed to this game that we play in international relations, which is this constant seesaw game of attempting to maintain an equilibrium of national interests. Honestly, it is exhausting. It is not really successful. As soon as you think you've achieved equilibrium, something else goes wrong and there you go off again. And you're constantly trying to deal with bilateral, trilateral, four nations, five nations, occasionally multilateral relations, but without binding agreements. So people pull out and the whole thing goes into seesaw mode again. This just doesn't work very well and Jean Monnet, who had been the Deputy Secretary General of the League of Nations, had observed this in the League of Nations and thought, We've been doing this for hundreds of years, it doesn't work so well, so let's try something different. He also believed that by starting an incremental process pooling resources in a narrow economic sphere, which was coal and steel at this time, this group of nations that engaged in this experiment could build link by link a chain of ever increasing integration that would eventually lead to a deeper federal unity between them. So his idea revolved around pulling coal and steel, which were the two most critical resources necessary for rebuilding and reconstructing Europe after the devastation it had suffered as a result of the Second World War. Today, the resources that are akin to the coal and steel in those days are oil, gas, and nuclear energy, basically energy resources that all the world needs, that we need to figure out how to manage together as a collective whole, while taking into account all of the things that we need, including to resolve the climate change issue and to make sure that, in our quest to ensure clean energy transition, we don't increase the risks of a nuclear proliferation. Now, there is much that we can learn from Monet's proposal. Interestingly, this whole idea of a supranational authority included that there be a customs union and a common market in which this high authority would ensure the supply, today it would be of coal, gas, and nuclear energy, on equal terms to participating nations. The high authority would be transparent. It would collect information about how much of these resources each nation needed and how much was being used and what the production levels were so that you could meet everybody's needs on reasonable terms at reasonable prices. And you could ramp up or reduce production in accordance with needs, not just to make money and increase profits. That there should be a built in transparency that we've just talked about and adequate proper representation of different countries. It required putting aside nationalistic interests and advancing collective interests. For example, the high authority functioned as a college for the purposes of decision making. There was no requirement of unanimity like we have, with the veto on the Security Council, where one of the P5--permanent five members-- can veto a decision. Decisions were to be taken by a majority once a quorum of half--the presence of half the members-- had been met. There was also to be autonomy in decision making. The representatives were not to seek or accept instructions from their national governments. They were there to act for the common good. It's just phenomenal that this man had this vision back in the 1940s and 50s. He also wanted to ensure financial independence for this institution because we all know that when nations contribute to, say the United Nations or any one of these quote unquote international organizations, as opposed to supranational organizations, they feel they have more say then in how things are done and the decisions that are made. Again, Jean Monnet had seen this with the League of Nations and he didn't want to replicate that. So it was completely independently funded by imposing a 1 percent levy on the production, the value of the goods, the coal and steel produced. The decisions of the high authority should have binding effect on all nations and should be enforceable inside nations. So you don't have this lame duck institution that spouts out resolutions, the way our UN General Assembly does these days, without those decisions being binding. The decisions would have direct effect. Inside all the member countries, you didn't have to pass independent legislation to make them effective. They would automatically have the same effect as national legislation. The high authority had the power to penalize enterprises that didn't follow the rules. It could use the courts of the nation states and their legal systems to enforce these rules, which is just so farsighted; talk about creative effort, proportionate to the dangers. This is what we need today. We need such a high authority that is capable of making decisions that are binding on all nations, that can use state courts to implement, and that could suspend payments due to nations if they fail to comply. So it really had teeth. And in addition, it also had its own court of justice whose judgments were binding on all the member nations. So this is the idea: pooling our oil, gas, and nuclear energy resources in the hands of a global supranational authority. Now people sometimes ask me, Isn't this the same as having a cartel? Isn't this just another form of cartel?" It's a really important and good question. I'm going to go ahead and anticipate that question and just very simply answer by saying, No. It is nothing like a cartel. Cartels, as we've seen with the recent decision of the OPEC plus, seek to restrain output with the goal of increasing profits for themselves. The high authority's goal would be to increase productivity. The goal is to meet the needs of member nations, not to make profits. Cartels tend to have their deals made in secret. The high authority, by contrast, is transparent and publishes both demand and supply information, and encourages open agreements. Again, transparency. And cartels serve the private interests of industrialist members, while the high authority serves as the agent of the broader public. It's very existence and its goal is to serve the broader public good. Now one of the boons of implementing this proposal, as we saw happened in Europe and is very likely to happen if we implement this at a global level, is that it brought peace to Europe. It was a huge benefit. The nations of Western Europe, particularly France and Germany, for once and for all put aside all the wars that they'd been engaging in, most of which involved their desire to access territory that was rich in coal so that they could then produce the steel. You need the coal to burn in furnaces in order to create the steel.-- I cannot tell you what a huge boon this is. If we were to put in place such a high authority for oil, gas, and nuclear energy, chances are that we would reduce border conflicts around the world by about 80 percent, because most of them are fought over access to resources, very often energy resources. This is another huge incentive for us if peace is to be one of the windfalls of this arrangement. Now some of you may be skeptical, completely understandably, and say, This is never going to fly." And to those of you who are the skeptics in this group, I'm going to respond in the same way Jean Monnet did. He used to propound his proposal, go around. He was actually considered a bit of a pain in the neck. Wherever he went, dinner parties, whenever he met his group of friends, he would talk about this proposal and people would say,"Ah, you're dreaming. This is never going to happen." And his retort was that when the current system failed, as it inevitably would. And honestly, when we look at the world around us, we can see the systems unraveling before our eyes. And we can see that countries don't really know what to do. Just think of the economic crisis right now. How do we manage just inflation and energy costs and food costs of food and other commodities? So he said, once the system fails, as it inevitably would, those very same people who were naysayers and said this scheme is not going to work, would be the very first to adopt the plans that somebody had thought about in advance, had planned long term, and prepared. Our job is to be prepared. Our job is to have a vision, to hold a high vision, to have some ideas, to have plans. Goodness knows the world needs these. And when everything crashes about our ears, as it is already in the process of doing, then maybe some of these plans will prove useful. Obviously, it will be up to humanity to decide at that stage, and up to our leaders, and up to our decision makers to decide what to do. But in the meanwhile, our job as the public, as the masses who elect those leaders, is to educate ourselves about what's possible, what the vision might be, how we might bridge the gap between where we are to where we want to be, and take those steps, get those ideas out into the environment so that we can elect the leaders that, who hopefully, when the time is right, may take on board some of these ideas and implement them. Okay, that's the end of my spiel here for today. For those of you who are interested in learning more about the nitty gritty details of how would the system work, and you who have questions, obviously I've spent just 20 minutes covering the subject today, but I've treated it at length in a book called Bridge to Global Governance, Tackling Climate Change, Energy Distribution, and Nuclear proliferation. It's available everywhere on the world on Amazon, both as a paperback and as an e-book. So if you're interested, feel free to pick up a copy, take a read, reach out to me, share your thoughts here on the YouTube channel, on Facebook, wherever you're listening to this, on LinkedIn. And I look forward to engaging in conversations with you. I'm going to check to see if there are questions or comments. So I'm just going to put this up here."Collective action and the long view, two huge challenges, but indeed, Jean Monnet's EU plans did come into fruition, and those who leave, e. g. the UK, see how much worse off they are by going their separate ways." Yes, there's some very interesting articles in the media in light of what the UK is especially going through now with the new government and the economic proposals that apparently proved disastrous, and commenting on the fact that this is a compounding effect of several decisions that were made, including Brexit, and that we're now paying the piper for these decisions. Again, long term thinking is so key. All right. Thank you, everyone. I look forward to seeing you again next month. Take care and goodbye for now. 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.