Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker (Ed.): Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker: A Pioneer on Environmental, Climate and Energy Policies
– Presented by Uwe Schneidewind, Pioneers in Science and Practice, vol. 28 (Cham – Heidelberg – New York – Dordrecht – London: Springer, 2014)

Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker: A Pioneer on Environmental, Climate and Energy Policies

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The core of the answer to the energy challenges may not come from modified energy supplies but from a systematic, long term strategy of increasing energy productivity, which essentially means curbing energy demand while further increasing prosperity.

As a matter of fact, huge efficiency increases are theoretically available. In a book, Factor Four, also available in Chinese [1], fifty examples were presented of a quadrupling of energy and material productivity. A more ambitious sequel, called Factor Five [2] is under preparation and will focus more on systemic productivity increases beyond isolated efficiency technologies. Eventually, even a factor of twenty should be feasible, which could solve most energy-related problems of climate, the local environment and social equity, both in China and world-wide.

A strategic increase of energy productivity looks like a highly attractive national goal for China.

Surprise lesson from history: resource prices have been falling

Despite basically well-known potentials, there are few signs in any country of aggressively pursuing the energy productivity agenda. Australia’s and other countries’ decisions of phasing out incandescent light bulbs, Japan’s top runner program, the EU’s emissions trading system ETS, and China’s commitment in the 11th Five Year Plan to increase energy productivity compare favourably with the inertia in other parts of the world. But even these laudable measures fall very far short of meeting the challenges.

The basic reason for inertia on this front, so it seems, is a world-wide policy of keeping energy prices as low as possible. This has understandable social reasons but it also sends a signal to consumers, manufacturers, and investors that energy efficiency and productivity will be mostly left to idealism or some mild state intervention. The trillions of yuans, dollars, and euros invested annually in new businesses and infrastructures have almost no commercial motive of addressing energy productivity. This is the reason why many of the of the Factor Four examples, such as Amory Lovins’ high tech ‘Hypercar’ needing less than 2 litres per 100 kilometres, have not made it to the market. For reaching the market in significant numbers, they require huge investments, which won’t pay off under present conditions.

To make such strategic investments in resource productivity profitable, resource prices should go up. But so far, the opposite has happened. Combined efforts by politicians, entrepreneurs and mining engineers have established a long term trend of continuous decreases of resource prices, as shown in Fig 1 for “raw industrials”, meaning natural resources of industrial importance, including energy. This comes as a big surprise to many who are accustomed to complaining about high resource prices. The price hikes of the past couple of years have just brought us back into the lower confidence interval of the long-term downward trend. (The picture does not reflect the development after 2004!)

Fig. 1: Industrial raw resource prices, inflation adjusted over 200 years. Prospecting, mining and transport technologies were the main drivers. The price hikes since 2000 have just brought us back into the lower confidence interval of the downward trend! Source: The Bank Credit Analyst, 2005

There have been a few periods during which resource prices increased, notably the two World Wars. More memorable in our times have been the oil price shocks of the 1970s, which can also be seen in Fig. 1. In 1973, the oil exporting countries managed to quadruple oil prices overnight and push it further up in 1978. However, the rest of the world reacted by stepping up prospecting and mining until, by 1982, oil prices had come down to pre-1973 levels.

During the first years of the 21st century, many people felt that now, finally, resource prices were now going up irrevocably. The new surge of oil, gas and other mineral resource prices was triggered by steeply rising demand from the rapidly developing Asian economies, led by China. But China and the world wide mining companies have immediately thrown a lot of money into new prospecting and mining, which brought the surge to a halt and there are indications that commodity prices come down again, at least in constant dollars.

Typically, it is the geological limits and extraction and refinery cost that ultimately determine prices. In earlier decades, also access and transport limitations played a major role, but the share of transport cost has been falling systematically over time. If the geological limits remain the main determinant factor for resource prices, it can be assumed that oil prices will come down to something like $80 per barrel, reflecting the price of coal (at a high estimate of $100 per short ton of coal) plus the liquefaction cost at industrial scale plus company profits. Clearly, this price would be a blow to all investors putting their money into high tech vehicles like the Hypercar.

Active policies of raising energy prices

If markets (plus socially motivated price subsidies) lead mostly to low prices and if low prices are seen as the main obstacle to the efficiency revolution, then it would seem evident that China and the world should go for a policy shift from keeping prices low to actively increasing them.

Different instruments are available to put price tags on energy or, for that matter, on carbon dioxide. Theoretically, prices can be fixed by the state, — although in the past this was mostly done to keep prices low. Fees and charges can be levied. The EU’s ETS, a cap and trade regime, serves to put a price tag on fossil fuels. Some states, notably in Europe, beginning in Scandinavia, have introduced energy taxes.

An interesting variant of energy taxation has been the “escalator” idea of adding small annual price signals that were agreed for many years in advance. This has been first introduced in Britain and copied in Germany with some modifications. In retrospect, it can be said that the escalator proved very effective in reducing demand, as can be seen in Fig 2, which compares the two countries with Canada and the USA with regard to fuel consumption/ CO2 emissions per capita and year.

Fig. 2: Steering effect of fuel tax escalators (Picture: FÖS, 2006, Database: DIW, 2005)

Increasing energy prices in parallel with energy productivity gains

Combining the escalator idea with the long term goal of increasing energy productivity, leads to a novel policy proposal, namely to politically establish a trajectory of steadily progressing energy and commodity prices, with the slope of the trajectory being determined by the statistically established increases of energy and resource productivity.

If energy prices increase only in line with average energy productivity gains, then, by definition, there would be no additional suffering. This is of highest political significance and contrasts favourably with experiences from the past of rising energy prices causing major hardship for families, small enterprises, and whole branches of industry. The negative effect, however, has always been associated with the size and suddenness of the price increase and with its unpredictability, allowing no advance adaptation.

Despite this socially most welcome feature, the long term escalator sends a strong signal to investors, manufacturers, consumers, and infrastructure planners to be prepared and to adapt. In all likelihood, the signal will actually accelerate investments into energy efficiency technologies and energy productivity creating systems.

The trajectory would have to be kept stable for many decades. Investors will be all the more courageous the longer they can rest assured of the trend. The time horizon of the measure should be at least as long as the payback time of the most important investments, meaning long lasting infrastructures. A glance back in history shows that under the conditions of the low gasoline prices in the USA, an investment like the Japanese bullet train (Shinkansen) would never have been possible.

Are there alternatives to a tax system for establishing the price corridor? Just theoretically, increasing resource prices can also be induced by an ambitious cap and trade regime with gradually tightened cap levels. However, past experiences with cap and trade regimes show very unpredictable fluctuations, resulting in part from speculation. There is no way of linking resulting prices to previous efficiency gains.

Is there a problem for the poor or industry or inflation?

Objections against an ecological tax escalator can come from advocates of the poor, from industry and from inflation fears.

Advocates of the poor will hint at the relative importance for the poor of the energy costs in the consumer basket. Energy and water taxes tend to be “regressive”, i.e. hitting the poor more than the rich. To answer this problem, it is possible to grant a tax free or tax reduced minimum tableau of, say, one gigajoule of energy per person and week. Then the really poor would actually benefit, while the burden would shift towards middle income and rich strata of the society.

Blue collar workers, too, have a tendency of opposing energy taxes. They typically use the lines of arguments of the poor and have apprehension that energy taxes might destroy industrial jobs. But as demand for industrial output is rising, a country like China need not fear net job losses if the price increase goes slowly and predictably.

Industry and investors are actually likely to benefit from the predictability of the transition. They can move into ambitious technological and infrastructural projects with very limited risks, leading eventually to major advantages over competitors working under conditions of fluctuating if somewhat lower resource prices who invariably giving too little attention to the long term scarcity of resources.

Another concern, very relevant in China today, is inflation. However, a tax shift could be made from value added taxes to energy, which a net neutral effect on inflation.

Evidently, it would be desirable for both ecological and economic reasons to find international agreement on price trajectories. But if the increase is linked to productivity gains, pioneering countries are likely to benefit, not loose because they will be at the forefront of a trend that will come world wide anyway.

The paradigm of a twenty-fold increase of labour productivity

The history of technological progress so far is the history of the increase of labour productivity. It has been a revolution indeed, the Industrial Revolution. Labour productivity grew easily twenty-fold over time. During the 19th century, the increase in what became to be the industrialised countries was some one percent per year, which is not all that spectacular. The rate increased to one and a half percent during the first half of the 20th century and to two percent thereafter. But there have been phases like Germany during the late 1950s, Japan during the 1960s and China after 2000, where it increased more than seven percent per year, — to a large extent by copying technologies that had been developed elsewhere.

One fact, well-known by organised labour and by employers, is that wage negotiations have always taken labour productivity gains as their yardstick. It was only during the recent neo-liberal and neo-conservative phase since the early 1980s, that wages began to lag behind productivity gains, due mostly, as the employers saw it, to competition from low wage countries. What is not so well known is that productivity gains also went up in parallel with gross labour cost. What was the hen and what was the egg? Empirically, we observe wages and productivity going up in parallel (Fig 3).

Fig. 3: Rise of wages and of labour productivity mostly in parallel. The picture shows this for a time span of fifty years in the USA, but very similar pictures are available for other countries and other periods of time.

This trend of labour costs spurring labour productivity is an exciting indication for the potential of using energy price signals for spurring energy productivity gains. As a matter of fact, the “oil crisis” of the 1970s served as an (unplanned) experiment for this hypothesis. As energy prices went up across the board, a new mentality set in that focused on energy efficiency. Fig 4 shows the effect.

Fig. 4: The oil price shocks of 1973 and 1978 triggered a steady increase of energy productivity in the USA. The new mindset of energy efficiency survived even the period 1981–2000 of receding energy prices.

A revenue neutral ecological tax reform

The paradigm of labour productivity seems to support the idea of a steady increase of energy prices. As said before, if energy prices increase in line with average energy productivity gains, there would be no average suffering. The situation can become even more attractive if the fiscal income from energy taxes is re-channelled into the economy by reducing the fiscal or parafiscal load on human labour thus giving an additional push to overcome unemployment. But if inflation is the highest concern, the reduction of VAT is a more plausible candidate.

The new idea is to make the trajectory of energy prices very predictable by compensating world market fluctuations. Downward fluctuations would be compensated upwards and upward fluctuations such as the painful price hikes of late 2007 could be compensated downwards, so as to bring prices back to a previously agreed price corridor. The slope of the upward corridor could be determined annually (or every five years by the cycle of Five Year Plans) in line with measured average efficiency gains over the previous year (or years). Adjustments could be allowed on a quarterly basis so as to make prices even more predictable.

The system could be differentiated for vehicle fuels, electricity, carbon content, and other criteria. It will be a matter of political priority setting weighed against simplicity.

This system of increase should be made a law that is valid for some twenty years or even fifty or more years, with fairly tough clauses for exemptions or deviations from the rule.

It is conceivable to develop a similar system for materials and for water. If prices for primary raw materials and for water extracted from nature go up steadily, the incentives increase for reuse of materials and for water purification. Simultaneously, the profitability of mining operations go down, — which is exactly what we want.

Long term price elasticity is high

Generally, it can be said that energy and resource consumption have a rather low price elasticity in the short term. (Otherwise, the upward curve in Fig. 4 would have started in 1973 or 1974, not in 1977!) In the long run, however, the price elasticity is astonishingly high, as can be seen from an observation made by Jochen Jesinghaus [3].

The picture shows a striking negative correlation between fuel prices and per capita fuel consumption. Ten years after the introduction in the US of the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, this country although admirably catching up on per mile fuel consumption was still the country with by far the highest per capita fuel consumption. In other words, under the condition of low fuel prices what CAFE conveyed to automobilists was: “Now you can drive more miles for your bucks”. Which they did.

Fig. 5: Even for petrol consumption which is often referred to as nearly inelastic to price changes, we observe a near perfect price elasticity – if we ask the right question. The question asked for this graph was: how much petrol is consumed per capita and year in different OECD countries that have nearly equal levels of wealth and mobility? Countries had more or less stable policies on domestic fuel prices for many years preceding the year (1988) in which the data were collected. The picture reflects long term price elasticity.

This experience is very valuable for determining a price trajectory overcoming the dilemma of short term instruments. We can safely rely on small signals if we give the society assurance of a long term upwards trend for energy and other resource prices.

[1] Von Weizsäcker, Ernst Ulrich, Amory Lovins, Hunter Lovins. Factor Four. Doubling Wealth, Halving Resource Use. London. Earthscan, 1997; also available in 12 other languages including Chinese.
[2] Von Weizsäcker, Ernst Ulrich, Charlie Hargroves, Michael Smith. Factor Five. London Earthscan, 2009.
[3] Ernst von Weizsäcker and Jochen Jesinghaus. 1992. Ecological Tax Reform. London, Zed Books.

CCICED Taskforce on Economic Instruments for Energy Efficiency and the Environment
Interim Report 2008, Draft segment submitted by Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker

There is one unchallenged parameter for quality rankings of universities: publications in peer-reviewed journals. The same holds for quality measurements of candidates applying for professors’ chairs at ambitious research universities. Peer-reviewed publications typically have a rather narrow disciplinary scope. Moreover, the flow of research money also follows disciplinary logic. The scientific peers deciding on research grants tend to share the same mentality with the publication peers. All this makes for a strong bias in favour of disciplinary excellence when academic quality is measured.

The bias is exacerbated when the ranking of journals is taken into account. For academic research careers, you have to show publications in so-called “A journals”. Their peer review tends to be strictly disciplinary, although top journals like Nature or Science have a multidisciplinary appearance and at least encourage some interdisciplinary consideration of a paper’s impact.

In public debates about this bias, representatives of the disciplines would reply that their impact is universal and their methods often come from neighbouring disciplines, so they are not so “disciplinary” as they may look. But that is no satisfactory excuse, given the fact that some of the biggest research challenges of our days find no adequate resonance in the submitted papers sections of A journals.

The general public as well as politicians and the media are aware of the quality rankings of universities, research institutions and countries. The most popular and most visible indicator is, of course, the head count of Nobel Prize winners. What politicians and the public are typically unaware of is the strong disciplinary bias that governs publications in A journals and even more the Nobel Prizes. These exist only for three natural science disciplines, physics, chemistry and medicine/physiology. The Peace and Literature Prizes are outside academia, and the Economics Prize, since 1969, is not a Nobel Prize proper but the Swedish Central Bank’s Prize in Economic Sciences “in Memory of Alfred Nobel”. Even this has become more and more a prize reflecting disciplinary excellence.

Complex systems and truly transdisciplinary problems are at a disadvantage when it comes to peer-reviewed journals, university rankings and academic careers. It is not easy at all to measure the extent of that disadvantage because scientists aiming at academic careers typically don’t even try to address complex and transdisciplinary problems, knowing that it would be difficult to find adequate journals.

Practical problem solving requires interdisciplinary research

Real world problems such as the ecosystem of the Black Sea and its eutrophication; the cultural determinants for the spreading of contagious diseases; or explanations for the miraculous growth since fifteen years of the Chinese economy, require interdisciplinary approaches. Solving them typically is a highly political affair, and quick results are rare. It may take decades to prove a hypothesis. Researchers engaging in such complex problems cannot realistically hope to win a Nobel Prize or similar honours during their life time. Universities that are in need of public recognition, i.e. high academic ranking scores, tend also to neglect interdisciplinary research even if they are encouraged by governments, local communities or the private sector to engage in it.

According to Einstein, we cannot solve problems using the methods that have created the problems. But in the present mindset, humanity tries exactly to do that. Many of the problems of our world relate to relatively blind applications of science and technology and leaving the steering to market powers or to state bureaucracies. The competition for economic achievement and scientific excellence is a reflection of that mindset. And the mechanism of scientific quality control nearly excludes the growing of sciences that analyse the complex, non-disciplinary nature of the prevailing destructive mechanisms.

A chance for Europe

Universities in Europe may be well positioned just to take a bold and new approach and embrace complex, interdisciplinary research. As a rule, they are not in a position financially to compete with disciplinary excellence of the mega-enterprises of US American universities. The latter can throw hundreds of millions of dollars at one problem such as the biochemistry of Alzheimers disease. Given the history and culture of European countries, European universities may well be better equipped than their American counterparts to successfully work on the fascinating array of complex and interdisciplinary problems our world is facing. Europe provides unique “laboratory” conditions for the study of some of the biggest real world problems.

Let me sketch out some of the problems that are worth studying:

• Healthy societies need a fair balance between public and private goods, or else between democratically legitimated laws and the powers of markets. Today’s markets are international, while laws remained national. This gives markets an unfair superiority over the law. Only through international legislation do we have a chance of re-balancing public and private interests. The EU tries to do exactly that. We need to study how well that works and what the limits and what the obstacles are.
• Global warming has become the highest environmental concern. Which are the realistic measures of mitigation and what can we do in terms of adaptation? I suppose we are in need for a new technological revolution that allows us to more or less de-couple economic and social well-being from the growth of energy demand. But which are the technologies doing that? And which are the policies to give those new technologies a realistic chance to take off?
• Ageing societies are in need of a fundamental restructuring of their social security systems. I suppose that on average people will have to work some five years longer. But they need not do the same work that has been designed for people aged 25–50. In fact, there are hundreds of societal and economic functions that can be better performed by the elderly than by the young. Think of all the tasks requiring experience, judgement, caution and care. In addition, there are many functions where age represents at least no major disadvantage. The respective jobs have to be designed, and regulation has to be developed and adopted encouraging the elderly to accepts the new assignments.
• Globalisation, migration and rapid structural change have put an enormous stress on people. In part that can be answered by life-long learning, – an exciting challenge to our educational system. In part, however, the new rapid changes have made people insecure, fearful and often wildly angry. In this state of mind, many have resorted to fairly primitive, often fundamentalist religions. The nexus between rapid-change economies and religious fundamentalism has consistently been denied. I suggest it should be addressed.

These are four out of perhaps fifty major and complex questions waiting to be addressed. Let me venture to say that old Europe, after having gone through the abysses of political fundamentalism, ethnic and racial violence and devastating wars, has emerged to be uniquely qualified to address such kinds of complex and intricate problems. The European unification movement, starting with Robert Schuman, Konrad Adenauer and Alcide de Gasperi and leading in 2007 to the 27 members European Union stretching from the Atlantic to the Black Sea, has been a unique success story, unparalleled in human history, of peace making, of multiculturalism, and of cultural and scientific rejuvenation. We Europeans should not be shy about ourselves, even if China has higher growth rates, the USA have a more formidable military power, and the Islamic world shows a more passionate dynamism. Hasty growth, powerful armies and aggressive passion may turn out to be part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

Opportunities for the elderly

It would lead too far into fields beyond the competence of the author to expand further on European visions. Instead, I choose to use the Festschrift for one of the grand old men of intellectual Europe as a welcome occasion to say a few words about new opportunities for the elderly.

The demographic transition from the predominance of the young in a growing population towards a stable population with a high proportion of old people is typically deplored by politicians, journalists, and by the managers of the pension systems.

In reality, I suggest, this is the natural and unavoidable state of a “sustainable” society. It also represents a new cultural universe full of exciting new opportunities. One of them lies indeed in harnessing the specific capacities of the elderly.

Let us begin with the family. What is a better holiday from young families’ stress than leaving the children under grandparents’ supervision? Actually, children tend to like that too, for a change, exploiting the seasoned habits of tolerance of the old generation.

But we can go further into public life and the private sector. Who is there in the local community to defend and protect cultural heritage and the beauties of the environment? Who is there to come with wise judgement as opposed to profit maximising options for the economically powerful? Who has the time to welcome guests from near and far and make them feel at home? Who can repair an old radio manufactured in 1970? And who is so attached to the village or the small town not to be lured into the already overcrowded megacities? It’s all the old generation folks.

One word about social security. The present system of employment knows one sharp moment in one’s life where retirement begins. Only self-employed people such as farmers, doctors, independent craftsmen or artists have maintained the habit of a gradual retirement. It is the masses of employed people who constitute the “demographic problem” as they sharply retire by the millions. What I suggest is not what is presently introduced in Germany, namely a mechanical prolongation of the work life before retirement from the age of 65 to 67. What I would find a lot more attractive is the establishment of a “third phase” of life with new job opportunities for the elderly and with very flexible working hours. The elderly would have options how much of the pension benefits earned during the “second phase” of ordinary work they want to consume during their third phase. The earlier they do that, the lower the benefits. Conversely, if they gainfully work in the third phase until the age of eighty without touching their benefits from the second phase, then they would earn bonanza payments easily three times as high as normal after retiring from the third phase. All sides would benefit: Gainful and meaningful work beyond second phase retirement means added value to the economy; the public or private pension funds benefit from not having to pay for fifteen years; and the elderly workers enjoy satisfaction and a significantly higher income during their old age. Sweden has introduced a somewhat similar system (without explicitly speaking about a third phase) and has reduced youth unemployment dramatically, chiefly because there was more added value around, from which added employment arose.

Virtues of 21st century universities

Let us now go a step further into the academic world that has been particularly impatient kicking the elderly out, – because they seemed incompetent to publish in A journals. If the complex and interdisciplinary problems of which I mentioned a few are to be addressed, it will be specifically the wealth of experience and oversight of the old generation scientists that qualifies them. The scarce resource in such fields is not methods of mathematics or molecular biology that impress the peers working for the A journals. It is rather the judgement about which elements from quite different disciplines are needed to be brought into a synergistic relation.

Think of the challenge of re-balancing public with private goods. That work will require an understanding of internationally mobile capital; international law, notably trade law; some history and philosophy of public goods and democracy; concrete experience with successful public-private partnerships; knowledge of the working methods and legitimacy of civil society groups, etc. etc. The disciplinary departments of political science or economics or law would be completely overwhelmed by the complexity of this challenge. Hence they tend show no inclination to engage in that kind of research and they don’t reach out to other departments to overcome their perplexity.

The study of global warming faces similar challenges. Here there is need of first class scientists of meteorology, botany or ocean dynamics to cope with the challenge, but also questions abound of international law, capital markets, political analysis, civil society or technologies.

All the assumed fifty odd complex questions referred to earlier show the same feature of needing disciplinary facts and interdisciplinary reasoning and analysis. In most cases, academic study is just not enough. Universities also need to leave the ivory tower and interact with real world actors in the public and private sectors. This is a demand that cannot be easily met by academic youngsters. They tend to be too impatient, too ignorant of the needs and limits of public life, or too greedy of making money in the private sector.

It is my belief that European universities of the 21st century should try to excel in the study of such complex, interdisciplinary problems. Also academic teaching would benefit from it, because universities should not graduate their students packed with disciplinary knowledge and methods and without exposure to the real world complexities. If non-European universities join in, – all the better.

The university staff would highly benefit from a healthy mix of young and old, of “hungry”, impatient researchers and wise and patient scholars having the overview of complex problems. As for the qualifications of the elderly, they must enjoy the mentality of the impatient youngsters but they should also have a credible dignity hat typically comes with age.

It would be the best of all (academic) worlds if also a new generation of A Journals emerged that accepts publications with a definitely interdisciplinary scope, using peers of outstanding credibility and judgement. Peers like Professor Mircea Maliţa!

Festschrift at the occasion of the 80th birthday of Professor Mircea Maliţa, “Coping with Complexity at the Beginning of a New Century”

In my role as Chairman of the parliamentary Select Committee on Economic Globalisation I learned with a degree of surprise that the term globalisation was brand new. It began to play a role in public life not earlier than in 1993. Fig 1 shows it for the German language but similar pictures are obtainable for other languages.

Fig. 1: The career of “Globalisierung”, i.e. globalisation in the German newspaper FAZ.

The strongest reason for the sudden appearance of the term globalisation has been the end around 1990 of the Cold War. 1990 was a real watershed date of history.

Nearly everybody was happy at the time. After all,

• We were freed from the spectre of a Third World War;
• Democracy, free speech and free press spread throughout the world;
• Well-positioned and well-governed countries enjoyed exciting new opportunities, e.g. the US (owning the largest amounts of capital which could be invested at the places of highest profitability world-wide) and China (with its immense labour force, emerging high technologies and high discipline).
• Stock markets soared, letting market capitalisation of the world’s total stocks triple within ten years. The sharp increase of foreign assets shows that this growth of value was interlinked with the globalisation of capital markets.
• Inflation was sent down in most countries to the lowest levels since the 1950s.
• The Internet became an immensely powerful tool of worldwide communication. It also massively spurred economic globalisation.

Fig. 2: The 1990s saw a jump in foreign assets. The picture shows foreign assets as percentage of the World GDP, Source: Nicholas Crafts, IMF in: Financial Times 01/23/03.

Fig. 3: The rise of the Internet, measured by the number of Internet hosts.

The downside of globalisation

However, for all the good news, there is also a downside to globalisation. During the Cold War, international capital had always to seek consensus with national governments and parliaments in the North and the South. In the South, governments used to play on the East-West tensions to induce the inflow of official development aid or of private capital.

In the North, the Cold War had forced governments to establish an attractive social security net to prove to the masses that capitalism took better care even for the poor than communism. In Germany it was the Social Market Economy launched by Ludwig Erhard in the 1950s. But the entire European Union was constructed around that model of an “inclusive” capitalism. Progressive income taxes and hefty corporate taxation were never seriously disputed. For business and for the rich this may have been annoying but it was anyway better than communism.

With the end of the Cold War, the need for consensus disappeared. Now the name of the game was catch as catch can. Competition got ever more brutal. You can see it from the number of business bankruptcies in many countries, including Germany.

Fig. 4: The rising tide of annual business bankruptcies after 1990 in Germany. 2003: HERMES-Prognosis.

Let me illustrate what happened by an anecdote from the automobile sector. Volkswagen got into deep troubles in 1993 because its cars were simply too expensive for the competitive world market. In response, Volkswagen hired a fairly controversial Spaniard, Mr. Ignacio Lopez whose task was to reduce costs, which he did by squeezing the last penny out of the parts suppliers, by saying they had to supply the same quantity and quality of parts next year, but at ten percent lower costs. If they complained hinting at their own costs, he coldly replied that Volkswagen would then go to another supply firm, maybe in Malaysia or Czechia.

It sounds brutal and it was brutal. But then, Fiat, which, I am sure, was much gentler to its part suppliers, ran into deadly difficulties a couple of years later.

For the state, the situation was not at all more comfortable. The increasing weakness of the state in negotiating with the private sector was soon felt in the field of taxation. Fig. 5 shows the steady decrease of corporate tax rates, resulting from ever-increasing pressures the private sector imposed on the states, in this case the OECD states.

Fig. 5: Corporate tax rates have been systematically reduced during the 1990s.
Source: KPMG Corporate Tax Rate Survey.

The joy of the winners and sadness of the losers

You can imagine that many people were truly happy with the new situation. The market philosophy originating with Adam Smith in the 18th century became something like a new religion. The Adam Smith Institute had a Christmas card recently showing the exuberant joy on the part of the new religion:

Fig. 6: A Christmas card from the Adam Smith Institute.

Unfortunately, there were also many losers, notably the poor in the developing countries. Fig. 7 shows the unfortunate dynamics of a growing gap between rich and poor in the world. Since the 1970s, the factor of the accumulated income of the richest 20 percent of the world population divided by the accumulated incomes of the poorest 20 percent rose from 30 to 75!

Fig. 7: The gap is growing between the rich and the poor.

During the 1980s, the reason for this growing gap were the “forerunners” of globalisation, the debt crisis and the “Washington Consensus”, which mandated the IMF to force liberalisation, privatisation and budget austerity upon countries needing IMF money. In the mean time, Joseph Stiglitz and others have brilliantly demasked the Washington Consensus as something that mostly benefits capital and rather impoverished the poor. In Latin America the effects were aggravated by the skyrocketing since 1979 of the US dollar interest rates leading in heavily indebted countries to what is now called the lost decade.

Keeping a balance between public and private interests

Before coming to solutions let me first recapitulate that Adam Smith himself made it clear that at least three conditions needed to be fulfilled before markets could become a blessing for all. (i)External peace and (ii) internally the rule of law are necessary to let the “invisible hand” work for the wealth of nations. Moreover, (iii) the state has to safeguard services and investments that are not by themselves profitable on the markets. Among them you would count mass education, infrastructure, social cohesion, culture or care for the environment.

“Inclusive” capitalism can be seen as one of the best ways of fulfilling Adam Smith’s conditions. When globalisation began to attack social justice and the provision of elementary infrastructure services, it thereby began to destroy the balance between public and private interests and thereby the very basis of healthy capitalism.

To visualise the idea of that balance, let us go through a small series of pictures symbolising the shift of power from the public to the private sector:

Fig. 8: In the 1970s the state was dominant but the business sector was happy.

Fig. 9: In the 1980s, the state was on the retreat.

Fig. 10: In the 1990s, globalisation set in and made the private sector dominant over public interests.

Let me submit that it is now high time to re-balance public and private interests.

Democracy, US unilateralism and WTO

To put it in more dramatic language: What we are up to is nothing less than a re-invention of democracy.

How that? Have I not said at the outset that the end of the Cold War helped the spreading of democracy? True enough, but at the same time nation states have lost much of their power to shape their own future because they have to obey the rules of world markets.

There is one country that feels differently about the new situation after 1990, the USA: Thomas Friedman, author of the brilliant book The Lexus and the Olive Tree wrote an enlightened article the New York Times (June 2, 2003) by, entitled Why the rest of the world hates America. He quotes a Pakistani saying that America is touching the daily lives of Pakistanis more than their own government does. This disturbing observation would not have been true before 1990 because it is only since 1990 that the US remained as the only superpower. If Washington judgments and decisions touch peoples lives more than their own parliament’s and government’s decisions do, the very meaning of democracy is at stake: What’s the use of going to the ballots if whom you vote for matters less than how some fellows on the Potomac behave?

To prevent too much of US unilateralism, many governments in the West – understandably – put their hopes on multilateral agreements. But then, what kind of agreements are there that have the capacity to impress America? America coldly disregards the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto Protocol and even the ABM treaty negotiated between the superpowers twenty years ago. The set of rules impressing America most are the free trade agreements. But there we are in a Catch 22 situation. Governments try further to strengthen the WTO, but in doing so sacrifice even more of their own democratic sovereignty. And regarding the aforementioned balance, WTO rather makes things worse by its inbuilt tendency of protecting the private sector at the expense of public sector needs.

As I write this, it is not clear yet whether the next WTO Ministerial at Cancún will make headway on global investment protection and the other “Singapore Issues”. There is no need for me to advise governments and NGOs from the South to be extremely cautious about the Singapore Issues, which further erode the shaping powers of national democracies.

NGOs have been active in challenging recent developments of the free trade agenda, including in particular GATS and TRIPS, both addenda to the old GATT during the “Uruguay Round” of negotiations.

I am not saying that trade in services (GATS) and patent protection (TRIPS) are per se undesirable, but we need a context of rules ensuring a reliable balance between public and private interests. How can that look like? Is there a chance of re-strengthening democracy, the public sector and the good sides of the nation state?

Global governance and civil society

I suggest that there are two mutually supportive strategies available for re-inventing democratic mechanisms:

• International rule-setting, often called “global governance” but also rules-based regional governance such as in the EU;
• The strengthening of a third actor, civil society, the NGOs, which can case by case line up on public issues with democracy thus strengthening both.

International rule setting and global governance should, of course chiefly address those aspects of political life that have come under that awful pressure of global competition. That is human rights, social equity, and environmental protection. The subordination under WTO rules of social and environmental treaties must under all circumstances be avoided. Shame on negotiators at the World Summit on Sustainable Development (Johannesburg, 2002) who tried to do exactly this! Climate change is likely to hit the poor far more than the rich. Also biodiversity losses could be disastrous for small farmers in developing countries. The ILO is right to insist on core labour standards that are essentially human rights protecting the weakest actors of the global economy. And the Forum on Financial Stability was right to establish recommendations (hopefully to become rules) against wild currency speculations.

Global governance also needs structures. The most important structure is the system of the United Nations. The UN are the hope also for those who are afraid of too much US unilateralism.

More realistic than global governance is regional governance. We see a number of regional economic groupings such as NAFTA, Mercosur or APEC. But none of them has so far attempted, let alone achieved a degree of democratic rule setting of the type built up in the process of European unification.

While deepening economic cooperation and integration, the EU (formerly the EEC and the EC) has created impressive mechanisms of democratic control, legal supervision, geographical spread of the benefits accruing, and political including environmental coordination. We have a European Parliament, a European Court of Justice, the “Cohesion Funds” and a regular coordination of policies at the Council level. Soon we shall even have a European Constitution. The EU is also reasonable open to cooperation with the NGOs, although so far the industrial lobbies are far stronger in Brussels than their NGO counterparts.

What is systematically deficient about global governance and even regional governance is direct and democratic participation of citizens. It is virtually impossible for “the man or the woman on the street” to influence the European Commission, the WTO or the Conference of the Parties to the Climate Convention.

This is where the NGOs come in forcefully. Everybody can join an NGO and strengthen its influence. Civil society can play and does play an increasingly important role in global affairs. NGOs can cry alarm whenever something scandalous goes on. Civil society consists of churches, trade unions, environmental NGOs, philanthropic clubs, scientific groupings, and the whole gamut of charitable or at least not-for-profit NGOs. Nearly all of them, almost by definition, defend some public good. In many cases have these groups made themselves heard and forced the private sector to withdraw from unacceptable practices. One of the earliest cases was the “Nestlé kills babies” campaign against Nestlé’s attempts to shift African mothers from breast-feeding to formula milk. In some case NGOs can cooperate with private companies on safeguarding particular public goods. A case in point is the “Marine Stewardship Council” formed by Unilever and WWF to ensure sustainable fishery by the firm.

Without NGO power both national democracies and international treaties such as the Climate treaty or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights can easily be marginalized or ignored!

NGOs can systematically cooperate with democrats in parliaments and political parties. I see lots of synergies. Parliaments can adopt transparency rules making it easier for NGOs to look into business practices including long and complex supply chains for consumer goods.

Fig. 11 symbolises the new and emerging coalitions that can be formed between the State and the NGOs.

Fig. 11: The NGOs can be seen as an emerging power helping the state defending public goods and services.

We have a long way to go both on national and international levels to develop a world society that is rooted in democratic control, in citizens’ participation and in international fairness. But then, when Charles de Montesquieu developed his fundamental ideas in the 1740s about the need for the division of power, no division of power existed in his own country, France. It took a couple of decades until, as the first country in the world, the USA took up his ideas and created a democracy built on the division of powers.

The answer to this question should be yes and no.

Yes, we are closer than ten years ago. During all of he 1990s, an irritatingly optimistic mindset was dominating the world. The very expression of ‘saving the planet’ would not have been politically correct in these days, because it sounds ‘pessimistic’.

What caused the air of optimism of the 1990s? The Cold War was over, alright, that was a great relief because it was also the end of the fear of a Third World War. Capitalism was celebrated as the only remaining ideology, constituting the ‘end of history’, as Francis Fukuyama put it. In its radical, Anglo-Saxon version it was politically hailed as the engine of growth and thereby as a cure-all, with slogans like “rising tide lift all boats”. ‘Creative destruction’ was seen as legitimate whenever what was to be destroyed had a smell of communism. Well, markets are a growth engine and a healthy cleansing mechanism, but at least two billion people felt outright cheated and exploited. They saw their ‘boats’ sinking, not rising at all.

Stock exchange quotations were another cause of optimism, as they seemed to rise without limits. That was a deception, too, as the collapse of the ‘dot com’ bubble showed in 2000. Concerning the environment, the prevailing paradigm was the optimistic Kuznets curve of pollution, meaning that once countries turn rich they will spend enough money on pollution control, and countries end up rich and clean. In terms of local pollution, the Kuznets curve was a reality, but for global warming and biodiversity losses the paradigm was dead wrong.

I must say, I was in a state of alarm during the late 1990s about the careless optimism and the uncompromising arrogance behind it. I felt rather helpless raising my voice against it.

So I see with a degree of relief that the days of the blatant type of arrogance are over and that it has become almost mainstream once again to address the real problems. What made this sea change happen? There were many different factors. The billions of people in their ‘sinking boats’ are no longer silent. The world community has addressed their situation in the Millennium Development Goals (MDG), acknowledging that markets will not do the trick. The end of the dot com bubble was a wake up call to some but the broader public did not hear the signals until the sub-prime mortgage crisis of 2007, originating in America but spreading worldwide. Some of the once celebrated investment gurus and their institutions got unmasked as irresponsible speculators using the money of credulous clients.

In the political arena, the military and ideological answer to the insidious attacks on the World Trade Center and other targets (‘9/11’), the “War on Terror”, more and more became a nightmare for all parties involved. The arrogant US unilateralism once impersonated by the Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz Pentagon lost its support even in the White House, let alone the US Congress after its mid term elections.

The environment is back on stage, after a quarter century of denial among the leading classes in the USA, and under the weight of evidence from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the devastating pollution in the industrial centres of the high growth countries, notably China. The EU has taken the lead in politically addressing global warming, setting up the ETS, the European Trading System for carbon dioxide emissions. The two remaining candidates for the US presidency have expressed a clear commitment on mitigating global warming. China has become very serious about addressing pollution, climate, and energy efficiency. Renewable sources of energy constitute a dynamic growth sector. The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) is enjoying increasing visibility in the signatory states, i.e. nearly all states except the USA.

It is fair to summarise, then, that the last ten years have seen a tidal change in appreciation of the real problems the world community. Overcoming the arrogant optimism of the 1990 has been a huge and necessary progress.

It was necessary, but is surely not sufficient for an agenda of saving the planet. This is the core of the No answer.

Global warming got worse throughout the past ten years. New figures and extrapolations, e.g. from NASA’s James Hanson seem to show that stabilising atmospheric carbon dioxide at 450 ppm is far from sufficient and that we should rather aim at 350 ppm, which is still well above the pre-industrial levels of 280 ppm.

Biodiversity losses have accelerated, notably in the tropical countries. Fish stock depletion went on and partly accelerated. China aggressively began to access mineral and energy resources in Africa and elsewhere so as to continue its steep increase of resource consumption. India, Brazil, South Africa, Angola and a few other countries enjoy tremendous growth rates, all based on accelerated resource extraction, at a comfortably high price level. No end of the trend is in sight, not even a flattening of the curves. All countries of the world seem to work under the assumption that they have a right to the same kind of prosperity as the USA. And after many years of brainwashing that the American way of life was the best one could aim at, this assumption is hard to deny. But six or eventually ten billion people living by US American life styles is just not possible. We would need four or five planets Earth to accommodate their ecological footprints, according to the Global Footprints Network.

Thus in terms of climate and the ecological situation, the picture has become quite a bit grimmer, not better.

How can we now deal with this odd combination of the Yes and No answers? I submit that we can break out of the vicious circle of seeking wealth in material growth alone. I suppose we can decouple wealth creation from energy and material consumption very much like we decoupled wealth creation from the number of hours of human labour. The latter was the achievement of the Industrial Revolution. Labour productivity rose easily twenty fold in the course of 150 years of industrialisation. In other words, from one hour of human labour we learned to extract twenty times more wealth. Now is the time to do the same for energy and materials. We can learn and must learn to extract four times, ten times, and eventually twenty times as much wealth from one barrel of oil or from one ton of bauxite as we do today. Technologically speaking, this should not be more difficult than the rise of labour productivity. Resource productivity should become the core melody of the next industrial revolution.

Labour productivity rose in parallel with wages. Rising wages were justified by rising labour productivity, and rising labour cost stimulated ever further increases of labour productivity. Energy prices, on the other hand saw a secular decline (in constant dollars) over 200 years. The latest price hikes have not even brought us back to the price levels of some thirty years ago. Tragically, the political zeal has always been to keep energy prices as low as possible, thereby frustrating most attempts at increasing energy productivity. Energy price elasticity is very much a long term, not a short term affair. Infrastructure investments, which are crucial for an energy efficient society, take a lot of time.

What our societies ought to learn now is creating a long term trajectory of energy prices slowly but steadily and predictably rising in parallel with energy productivity. By definition, this would not cause any hardship, on average. But it would set a clear signal to investors and infrastructure planners that energy efficiency and productivity will become ever more profitable and necessary. It is bound to become more profitable and sexier even than the renewable energies.

If our societies, starting perhaps with the EU, embrace this new agenda of technological progress, and if later historians see the period between 1998 and 2008 the kick-off period for this new technological revolution, I suppose that those historians will agree that this time span has brought us closer to saving the planet.

Fig. 1: The career of the word “globalisation” in the German newspaper FAZ.

The strongest reason for the sudden appearance of the term globalisation has been the end of the Cold War. We all, I am sure, were glad about many things that happened in this context.

• We were freed from the spectre of a Third World War;
• Democracy, free speech and free press spread throughout the world;
• Well-positioned enjoyed exciting new opportunities, notably the US (owning the largest amounts of capital which could be placed at the places of highest profitability world-wide) and China (with its immense labour force, emerging high technologies and high discipline).
• Stock markets soared, letting market capitalisation of the world’s total stocks triple within ten years.
• Inflation was sent down in most countries to the lowest levels since the 1950s.
• The Internet became an immensely powerful tool of world-wide communication.

However, for all the good news, there is also a downside to globalisation. During the Cold War, international capital had always to seek consensus with national governments and parliaments in the North and South. In the South, governments used to play on the East-West tensions to induce the inflow of official development aid or private capital.

In the North, the Cold War forced governments to establish an attractive social security net to prove to the masses that capitalism took better care even for the poor than communism. Progressive income taxes and hefty corporate taxation were the rule. For private sector capital this may have been annoying but is was anyway better than any move towards communism.

With the end of the Cold War, the need for consensus disappeared. Now the name of the game was global competition not only among companies but also among states. Tightened cost competition was just too much for many companies. Business bankruptcies soared in many countries.

Fig. 2: The rising tide of business bancruptcies after 1990 in Germany.

In other countries, e.g. in Latin America, in Eastern Europe and in Africa, the situation was worse. The number of people living in poverty is on the rise. Least developed countries went through a demoralising period of de-industrialisation.

The strengthened bargaining position of the private sector was able to force the states to systematically reduce corporate taxation.

Fig. 3: Corporate tax rates have been systematically reduced during the 1990s.

These few pictures and passages are just the beginning of the story of globalisation.

The German parliament, the Bundestag, has established a select committee on economic globalisation in December 1999. I was appointed chairman of the committee. In June 2002, we published a report of 600 pages and 200 recommendations. The full text is available online. English, German, French and Spanish summaries are also available.

The International Labour Organisation (ILO) has created the World Commission on the Social Dimensions of Globalisation. I was appointed member and am happy recommending their website where you will find the final report of the Commission which was released 24 February, 2004.

On my website you will also find a few papers I wrote on globalisation.

On the other hand, we are already now overexploiting the earth. Just to stabilise carbon dioxide concentrations, we would need a reduction of annual carbon dioxide emissions by more than fifty percent. Similarly, ocean fishing should be cut in half. We seem to loose some fifty animal and plant species every day. To stop this trend, we ought to radically reduce land conversion. It is fair to say that we should reduce the consumption of natural resources by roughly a factor of two.

Fig. 1: The daily toll of environmental destruction.

Doubling wealth while halving resource use, that is quite a challenge. The answer could be quadrupling resource productivity. In a book co-authored by Amory Lovins and Hunter Lovins, “Factor Four” (Earthscan, London 1997) fifty examples of quadrupled resource productivity are featured.

Fig. 2: Factor Four was translated in many languages.

My friend Friedrich Schmidt-Bleek goes considerably further and suggests to increase resource productivity tenfold: Factor 10 Institute.

If you are interested in the factor four agenda, have a look at some of my papers in this field. You may as well visit the Wuppertal Institute’s factor four homepage, administered by Raimund Bleischwitz.

My environmental interest go beyond the factor four agenda. In October 2002 I was appointed Chairman of the Bundestag’s Environment Committee. Here we are working on

• The adaptation to German laws of EU environmental directives,
• The interface of environment and agriculture,
• The promotion of renewable sources of energy,
• International environmental agreements,
• Commenting draft legislation from other policy fields.