Addressing the Challenge of Sustainable Development: The Need for a Global Clean Energy Treaty

If the main road to global environmental law began at Stockholm in 1972, it could be argued it came to an end at the neighbouring Scandinavian city of Copenhagen in 2009. Despite a return from the brink of collapse of the multilateral environmental agreement (MEA) negotiating system in relation to climate change, and possibly more widely, in Cancun in 2010 and Durban in 2011, only tentative, modest steps have been taken towards a post-Kyoto regime at these meetings. The negotiations seem destined to limp slowly forward for some years yet. The failure of the international negotiating process to produce a post-Kyoto regime that embodies commitments on a global scale to the effective reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reflects a deeper malaise in global environmental law and governance. Essentially, the global treaty system has failed to establish and implement the concept of sustainable development by establishing appropriate limits on the underlying drivers of unsustainability – namely, unconstrained economic growth, consumption, population growth and poverty. The 2012 Rio + 20 Conference is very much a step in the right direction in addressing this challenge by seeking to focus on two key themes – the “green economy” and global environmental governance. But, just as the original Rio Earth Summit Conference in 1992 saw the substantial diminution of a proposed, binding Earth Charter by producing instead the soft-law Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, there are strong concerns that the Rio +20 conference will fail to achieve a consensus on the kind of path-breaking change in the direction of human civilisation that is needed to avoid a major ecological crisis, or even collapse, within the next one to two generations. Whilst there is no single, simple solution to the challenge of addressing the unsustainability of humanity’s current mode of existence on Earth, there are two aspects of this existence that cry out for urgent attention and which, if effectively addressed, could greatly contribute to the goal of sustainable development, or “sustainability” as it might now be more appropriately termed. The first relates to the production and consumption of energy, which underpins most human activity and particularly represents the single, greatest source of GHG emissions. The second is food production and distribution, where the limits of the Green Revolution are being reached at the same time as current levels of food production are being threatened by the loss of fertile farmlands to urbanisation, degradation and desertification, and through the utilisation of food crops for new generation biofuels. This paper will address the first of these two areas, by exploring the option of developing a new, global treaty on renewable (or “clean”) energy. The proposed treaty would be based on firm commitments by States, in accordance with the principle of common but differentiated responsibility, to achieve a transition from dependence on fossil fuels to a decarbonised, clean energy economy. It would thereby contribute to both of the key goals of Rio + 20 – by enhancing a shift by States to a green economy based firmly on renewable energy and also by providing significant, fresh impetus to the stalled global effort to reduce GHG emissions substantially over the next 10-20 years (thereby restoring or reinforcing confidence in global environmental governance). In proposing a global clean energy treaty, the paper will seek to identify and address the obstacles that quite obviously need to be overcome. These include technical and economic constraints that it is often suggested prevent the uptake of renewable energy on the scale required to replace fossil fuels and to meet ongoing energy demand. It will also address the common excuse of “treaty fatigue” as a reason for not pursuing new MEA’s and focussing instead on enhancing the “synergies” between existing MEA’s. Its conclusion is that these obstacles are surmountable, particularly if the concept of a global clean energy treaty is presented as an opportunity for a positive step forward towards a new, visionary future for humanity, in contrast to the unfortunate depiction of the currently proposed climate change regime, involving targets and timetables for GHG reductions, as a negative and uneconomic constraint on human activity. Environmental psychology is a critical tool in this context. If it were to be adopted, a global clean energy treaty might represent possibly the most promising and feasible pathway to avoiding extreme climate change and achieving the elusive goal of sustainability