How to Run the World

by Parag Khanna

  Some countries can’t sell anything to the world, so they have to bring the world to them as much as possible. Tourism is thus a kind of short-term adoption—and a longer-term one as well when visitors bond with, return to, and sponsor the economies of places they visit, such as Nepal and Cambodia. Tourism accounts for 10 percent of global GDP and employs more than 250 million people. In Africa, tourism has grown faster than other sectors and benefits particularly women. As ecotourism grows, game reserves in South Africa and Botswana give special benefits to local tribes. The best thing a country can do to attract tourists is simply to be a safe place. Even after a year of riots and unrest, Kenya got lucky with the U.S. presidential election of 2008, after which tourism jumped 15 percent as the country began to offer “Obama’s roots” tours.

  While Western diplomats and scholars are busy dreaming up grandiose new “Marshall Plans” for Africa, a more practical reality is emerging as migration-driven remittances expand, historical allegiances rekindle, new trade and investment partners rise, and Asian tourists flood the world. Micro-credit operations, social investment funds, family foundations, and social entrepreneurs are not ethereal, flash-in-the-pan phenomena on the margins of the “real” global governance of governmental institutions. Rather, they are the talisman of the emerging world order in which the local becomes the global faster than the reverse.

  *Debt relief also shouldn’t be allowed to masquerade as aid. A decade ago, the IMF, the World Bank, and the “Paris Club” of creditors slashed $45 billion in debt for twenty-three countries in Africa and Latin America, and in 2005, G-8 countries canceled another $42 billion. For all these seemingly generous gestures, creditors have known for decades that they would never have gotten paid back, so the cycle of granting more loans to pay interest on loans has been little more than a pointless shell game.

  *By contrast, Canada and European donors give their food aid either totally untied or through the WFP.

  Chapter Ten

  Your Planet, Your Choice

  Don’t throw it away.… There is no “away.”

  —Shell advertisement

  The green business of the future will no longer be called green, it will just be business.

  —VIJAY VAITHEESWARAN,

  The Economist

  Al Gore’s 1992 book warning about global warming was titled Earth in the Balance. If there were a sequel two decades later, it would have to be called Earth Out of Balance. Most people are aware that climate change is happening, but few think they can do anything about it. That is the problem. Like the economy, the environment is a truly global issue that impacts our industrial viability and geopolitical stability. Every individual, company, city, and country can take steps to protect, ensure, adapt, and mitigate climate change before it’s too late—which is what it will be if we leave it to the world’s governments to negotiate for us.

  No issue has greater potential for dot-gov, dot-com, and dot-org collaboration to tip the balance back in favor of sustainability. Getting on the right path isn’t about bashing Mideast despots but making the most efficient use of the resources we already have. The eclectic experiments under way from Brazil to India in alternative energy, water sharing, and emissions reductions hold the greatest promise for sustainable living, and the new partnerships emerging among clean-tech companies, mayors, and conservation groups are the real story of climate diplomacy today. Diplomats often aspire to save the world—this is your chance to actually do it.

  All Politics Are Ecological

  The following headlines are coming to a newspaper near you: “Indonesian Rain Forest Dwindles to Few Million Hectares,” “Nile River Flow Reduced to Silt Sludge,” and “OPEC Pushes Pedal, but Oil Gushers Gone.” The only question is when—ten years, twenty years, or thirty years—but each scenario is all but inevitable given present trends in deforestation, overconsumption of water, and demand for oil.

  Yet imagine this scene: A half-mile-long super-cargo ship pulls into port, hulls painted deep blue with bold white inscriptions, its deck covered bow to stern with shiny new electric-powered automobiles whose lithium-ion batteries can carry four passengers more than 185 miles before recharging at stations already installed on the country’s highways. Thousands of eager citizens have already prepaid for the cars, and even dropped off their gas-powered vehicles in a special recycling lot near the harbor. Behind the cargo ship is another one, and another one, and another one. The country that manufactured the car has captive export markets worldwide and has earned hundreds of billions in hard currency, while the countries buying the cars are cutting their greenhouse gas emissions and dependence on unstable oil supplies. Which country is the seller and which is the buyer? We don’t know yet, but both will be winners.

  The environment insinuates itself in all of the neat lenses we falsely use to prioritize human activity, such as security or economics. Take geopolitics: Controlling natural resources—particularly oil, gas, timber, uranium, gold, and other precious metals—is the new environmental “Great Game.” And there are no nice guys: democratic India and authoritarian China are both in the hunt, from East Africa to Myanmar. In the oil-rich Middle East, nuclear power likely also means nuclear proliferation. Global warming could even give birth to an independent Greenland, replete with gold, diamonds, and zinc buried under melting glaciers—and access to the potentially ninety billion barrels of oil and 1,670 trillion cubic feet of natural gas under the Arctic Sea.1 Russia, Canada, and America are already fortifying bases, operating stealth submarines, and flying bombers over the Arctic to stake their claims. As Canada’s premier, Stephen Harper, said during an Arctic visit in 2009, “Use it or lose it.”

  But making the climate a security issue—as Tony Blair did by raising it at the UN Security Council—doesn’t impress poor countries that resent any potential excuses for Western interventionism within their borders and prefer to retain the focus on poverty. And yet poor countries, which contribute little to climate change, are sure to be the biggest losers from it. Among rising temperatures, soil erosion, deforestation, desertification, melting glaciers, pollution of freshwater, depletion of fisheries, and changing disease patterns and oceanic currents, the unpredictable flux of the environment will force a mixture of adaptation and suffering on almost all countries, but certainly not equally. Rising sea levels are sinking small island nations in the South Pacific, the increasingly frequent droughts of northern Kenya have led to what some call a “permanent emergency” for a growing number of nomadic farmers squeezed into smaller and smaller plots of arable land, and Bangladesh’s monsoon flooding now comes every five years instead of every twenty, drowning entire villages and turning the country into a perma-swamp in which communities cluster along the sides of higher roads to escape rising tides.

  Humans live where they do—along coasts and rivers—because of the climate, and yet increasingly they cannot live in these areas because of the climate. Absent an integrated view of climate, health, food, and energy, sustainability is the victim of perverse and naïve thinking. Environmental decay is not merely an “externality,” an unintended consequence of the greater goal of economic growth. It can, in short order, destroy that growth. Just look at how America’s biofuel subsidies led to diminished food production and thus contributed to food price surges that have forced worldwide belt tightening. Similarly, China’s main obstacle to superpower status isn’t the United States but rather the ecological and health costs of reckless industrialization. Its labor force is stricken with lung cancer and other diseases that not only cut 3–4 percent off its GDP but ruin families and morale.

  Imagine measuring income not just in GDP terms, but also weighing a nation’s health and environmental stress factors; or a standard for calculating the carbon emissions consequences of deals between firms that regulators could use in determining the legality of mergers; or credit-rating agencies taking a firm’s sustainability score into account in its investment grade. This may seem like hard work, but we should know better than to
live behind the lies of numbers divorced from the ecosystem.

  When it comes to the environment, there is an element of personal responsibility that people don’t feel with other issues, a sense that particularly a younger generation has innately grown up with. Many seventh graders in America log on to CarbonRally.com as part of a nationwide competition to reduce their carbon footprint. Citizen activists promote causes town by town, from flushing toilets less frequently to Paul McCartney’s “Meat Free Monday” campaign in favor of vegetarianism—a “low-carbon” diet—to preserve forests slashed for cattle grazing in Brazil. In New Delhi, the paper versus plastic debate in supermarkets and bazaars has been settled in favor of cotton: keep and reuse. And in Hong Kong, an NGO recycles rice sacks into sturdy grocery bags labeled “re-sack-le” and makes them available across the densely populated city. Sustainably transitioning the economy will take what former White House environmental adviser Van Jones calls “thousands of heroes at every level of human society.”

  A hero in this sense is someone who realizes that simple, individual steps matter as much as high-level negotiations—the latter is, in fact, meaningless without the former. For rich people that means triple-layer windows, LED streetlamps, inflating car tires regularly, upgrading to hybrid cars, teleconferencing and reducing air travel, and using solar-powered lawn mowers. For the poor, the mundane strategies include water harvesting for agriculture, fixing leaky pipes that waste up to half of irrigated water—which can lead to “more crops with fewer drops”—and using fuel-efficient and biogas-powered stoves. And for oil exporters such as Mexico, Russia, and Iran, this means greater foreign investment in their energy sectors to improve their antiquated and inefficient technologies. Energy guru Amory Lovins says, “Increasing energy efficiency is the largest, least expensive, most benign, most quickly deployable, least visible, least understood, and most neglected way” to meet future energy demand.

  We can’t negotiate with nature. Solving the world’s environmental problems has so little to do with the diplomacy of setting targets and caps and so much to do with scaling these prosaic behavioral changes. The planet doesn’t care if targets are set for 2015 or 2020 if energy consumption will double by 2030. What matters more than the fancy language of “ecological debt” are meaningful initiatives that tackle the principle sources of emissions: electricity generation, home heating, automobiles and airplanes, mineral and oil extraction, and deforestation. The real story of sustaining human life is thus about private-sector innovators and motivated citizens more than international regulations. Even if governments muster the political will to agree on targets, achieving any of them requires an even greater dose of human will.

  Supply and Demand

  Sinopec, Petrobras, Exxon Mobil, Gazprom—these and the world’s other energy giants live and die by one rule: supply and demand. Public or private, they comb the world in search of oil, gas, uranium, coal, and other raw materials. Like water for humans, energy is a matter of national survival: Hungary has appointed a special ambassador just to handle the Nabucco gas pipeline project, which would ensure a steady gas supply evading Russian control. The International Energy Agency can’t govern the competition for energy in a world in which the national oil companies of Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia have captured the high ground in the world’s highest value business. But even these single-minded titans can still be steered down the path of sustainability and diversification, mitigating dangerous rivalries in the process.

  Coal, oil, and uranium are the world’s three main sources of energy, with China most reliant on coal, America the largest consumer of oil, and Europe the leader in uranium-fueled nuclear power. But as oil peaks, coal wreaks atmospheric havoc, and uranium remains expensive, dangerous, and narrowly located, we have to rethink both how much and how we use these energy sources. If the people of China and India drove cars at anything approaching the rates of Westerners, OPEC would need to produce twice the amount of oil it does each day. But such projections are actually farcical: OPEC countries know—and fear—the limits of their supply. There can’t be a worldwide middle class on this earth living the way the West does.

  The geography of geology is unfair. Most of the world’s oil, gas, coal, and metals lie in what Commanding Heights coauthor Joseph Stanislaw calls the Saudi-Caspian-Siberia-Canada corridor. These resources do more than just satisfy energy demand; they bring poor and landlocked countries such as those of oil-rich central Asia into the global economy and give them a fresh identity. For Brazil and Indonesia, deforestation for timber and agriculture are economic pillars but the cause of 70 percent of their carbon emissions. As their rain forest resources dwindle, they must be careful not to reap what they sow: Industrial development generates employment but also rapidly absorbs precious arable land. We are running out of other resources that are just as important as oil.

  It’s become a cliché that the Stone Age did not end because we ran out of stone, and the fossil fuel age will not end because we run out of fossil fuel. After a decade of drought, Australians began to grow less water-intensive fruit while constructing desalination plants for Sydney and Melbourne. Kevin Rudd, the country’s prime minister, actually campaigned on the climate change issue and has announced a multibillion-dollar public-private proposal to build the world’s biggest solar power plant (even though the country is a massive coal producer). Diversifying energy supply has all sorts of positive spin-off effects. Shifting away from coal improves public health, shifting away from oil can ease geopolitical tensions while relieving economic pressures, and slowing deforestation can restore biodiversity and its many medical benefits. If just one company, Asia Pacific Resources International Limited, carries through with its plan to create a ring of tree plantations around one of Indonesia’s densest forest peninsulas, it would curb Indonesia’s emissions by 5 percent.

  Like oil, water is unevenly distributed around the world, and so much of the supply—ocean water—is undrinkable in its present form. Swirling around in the Pacific Ocean currents is a giant blob of discarded plastics and zooplankton allegedly twice the size of Texas. This “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” is perhaps the best metaphor for how far along we are in the quest to sustainably manage the global commons. Two-thirds of the planet’s surface is covered by oceans, yet oceanic governance is at best in its infancy. The Law of the Sea Treaty demarcates oceanic zones, but who will enforce its provisions for protection of marine life? Right now it’s NGOs from the San Francisco Bay Area that are working with marine scientists to figure out how to recycle the oceans’ gathering plastic heaps before they leak back onshore and pollute our food cycle. The world’s major river systems—the Amazon, Nile, Mekong, Yellow, Indus, and Tigris-Euphrates—are being dammed and polluted, their drying causing water tables to drop and lakes to disappear. Global drying means that tropical heat spells will spread disease faster and lower agricultural productivity. The dry-lands belt of North and East Africa, the Middle East, and central Asia is the worst-affected region—and the recent famines in Niger, Malawi, and the Horn of Africa may be an unfortunate sign of things to come.

  Most countries depend on others for their oil and water, making these resources either the greatest impetus for future conflict or its greatest opportunity to transcend borders. The population of the Middle East is expected to reach four hundred million by 2020, with about two-thirds of the currently low level of freshwater available per person. Along the way, the strategic value of the Golan Heights has shifted from military to environmental as it provides about one-third of Israel’s water supply. In southern Asia, India and Bangladesh have already declared that China is engaged in a “water war” against them due to its hydroelectric dam and water diversion projects of the Brahmaputra toward China’s northern plains. Receding glaciers in Kashmir have made India’s own Ganges River one of the world’s most endangered sources of freshwater even as five hundred million people depend on it for drinking and irrigation. The Indo-Pak rivalry over Kashmir’s strategic headw
aters is increasingly a sideshow compared to the necessity of sharing what is left.

  There are many opportunities to barter resources to rectify the imbalances inherent in our increasingly arbitrary borders. In central Asia, tiny Tajikistan has bet its future on producing and selling hydroelectric power to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, which sell it oil and gas. Rather than the fruitless summits they regularly hold to condemn one another for damning rivers upstream and raising electricity prices downstream, the three countries could set a price relationship for the resources they control and promise adequate supply in all directions. Saudi Arabia pumps water north into Jordan, while plans are moving forward to construct a Red Sea–Dead Sea canal that would replenish the latter’s dwindling waters while desalinating it at the same time. Whether oil or water, there is still enough supply to meet demand, but only if we think in terms of channels, not borders, between countries.

  The Climate Olympics

  October 17, 2009, was no ordinary day in climate politics. Instead of putting on their suits and going to the presidential office in Male for their daily meeting, eleven cabinet ministers of the Maldives islands in the Indian Ocean put on scuba gear, took a twenty-minute boat ride, and dove sixteen feet underwater. Amid soft brown coral and zebra-striped fish, they sat at a rectangular table and passed around a laminated document calling for the world to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Using hand signals to communicate, they each voted and signed the declaration. During an underwater interview, Maldives president Mohamed Nasheed said, “This is what will happen to the Maldives if climate change is not checked.… And if the Maldives cannot be saved today we do not believe there is much chance for the rest of the world.”

  Environmental diplomacy is like the Olympics: many events, variable numbers of players, some games long and others short, some high-tech and others not. Climate debates also break down North-South divides. Brazil, China, and India often speak for the world’s poor, but they are also among the world’s largest carbon emitters. Poor countries don’t want to hear about the primacy of environmentalism over economic growth since they are achieving the latter but claim they can’t yet afford the former. India, with four hundred million people living in the dark with no access to electricity, won’t sign emissions cuts until it finally caters to those in need.