The Nonsense At The Heart Of The UN's Sustainable Development Goals

[hatrack]

EDIT

Our friend Joe Brewer, a linguist who, with George Lakoff and others developed the concept of "framing," wrote a thoughtful piece on the language of the UN's sustainable development goals, now scheduled for ratification in September. Just take a moment, though, to consider the embodied ignorance of a term like "sustainable development." What is it, exactly, that we wish to sustain? Development? What kind? Do we want Donald Trump to build condos for billionaires in Namibia? Or maybe we want more jobs for Namibians assembling smart phones in Chinese factories while former Chinese factory slaves spend their renminbi vacationing in Dubai?

Last month the long laboring UN Open Working Group announced it had formalized 17 Sustainable Development Goals with 169 associated targets and deemed them “integrated and indivisible.” It submitted a lengthy report for ratification by the 69th Session of the UN General Assembly in September. Beaming with pride at its accomplishment, it bragged:

Never before have world leaders pledged common action and endeavour across such a broad and universal policy agenda. We are setting out together on the path towards sustainable development, devoting ourselves collectively to the pursuit of global development and of “win-win” cooperation which can bring huge gains to all countries and all parts of the world.

And then, in the next breath, it snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

We reiterate that every state has, and shall freely exercise, full permanent sovereignty over its wealth and natural resources. We will implement the Agenda for the full benefit of all, for today’s generation and for future generations. In doing so, we reaffirm our commitment to international law and emphasize that the Agenda is to be implemented in a manner that is consistent with the rights and obligations of states under international law, taking into account different national circumstances, capacities and priorities.


With these caveats, the UN essentially emasculated its own achievement. It was kind of like saying, “From now on, no-one shall be allowed to shoot heroin or smoke crack. We will accomplish this through voluntary self-regulation by all would-be addicts.”

EDIT

http://www.resilience.org/stories/2015-08-11/snatching-defeat

[Demeter]

1. Sorry, but there's no world dictatorship

And nobody but the self-appointed, would-be dictators even want one...

Dictatorship leads to war, war leads to degradation of the environment, the society, the individual people, and costs more to the planet than any other human endeavor.

Work for global peace and equal prosperity, and then you have a recipe for sustainable humanity. Because if you can get those two, you can get everything else.

And if you really mean it, you must break the backs of global multi-national corporations, because THEY are the would-be dictators, as witness the TPP, TiPP, TISA, etc.

[appal_jack]

3. Hatrack & all, please heed this.

Starting on the local, regional, and national levels certainly seems slower and more difficult than a global emperor decreeing "everybody be sustainable!" But that's because achieving environmental protection and meeting human needs simultaneously is difficult, especially now that there are seven billion of us. Like Schumacher said, small is beautiful, and devolving power and decision-making to more local levels is important for sustainability.

I paid a lot of attention to the UN during the early nineties, when the Rio Summit happened and the first round of UN sustainable development goals were articulated. Unfortunately then, as now, it's all just window dressing and hot air. The true multi-national power lies in the binding 'agreements,' which Demeter correctly states are the TPP, TiPP, TISA, and also GATT, the WTO, NAFTA, etc. These truly powerful and coercive multinational forces are used by the powerful to ravage people and the planet further: the exact opposite of sustainabillity.

-app

[kristopher]

4. +1

[GliderGuider]

5. To go back to the OP, what does the word "sustainable" mean?

My definitions of "sustainable" go something like this:

“A sustainable activity is one that can be supported indefinitely, without its impact posing short or long term risks to the the integrity of the environment or the environment's ability to support life.

A sustainable population is the maximum population that an environment can sustain indefinitely, given the food, water, habitat, ecological services and other necessities of life available in the environment."

By these definitions, humans are far from sustainable at our current population and energy-driven activity levels. We are in overshoot by a factor between 60 percent and one million percent (!), depending on how rigorous we want to be about the word "indefinite".

Breaking the backs of the multinationals is a noble goal, but it won't make us sustainable. Only massive reductions in our numbers and activity levels will accomplish that, and we are highly unlikely to undertake the necessary reductions voluntarily.

The issue is one of biology, physics, geochemistry and ecology. In other words the issue is physical, not political. Like other social "technologies" like economics and engineering, politics acts as a growth-enabler. We can't look to it for help in reduction.

[kristopher]

7. Tell us about that peak oil cliff again!

All of your biases that contributed to that are still in place and still leading you around by your short and curlies. Including your conclusions expressed here.

The UN efforts are admirable and should be encouraged and supported to the maximum extent possible.

[GliderGuider]

8. The UN efforts are pusillanimous.

It could hardly be otherwise, since the UN is a political organization that operates largely on consensus. When it comes to "sustainability" the UN is firmly on the side of growth, aka Business as Usual.

[kristopher]

9. That's uninformed bullshit.

I'd expect nothing less from you though.

Peak oil. ROFLMAO.

[appal_jack]

13. The rules have changed, but that's no reaason for contempt.

Even though I was never as much a proponent of Peak Oil as some, I still find myself surprised by how radically the projections of supply and demand have changed over the last 5-10 years. But it's worth pondering what precipitated that change: particularly the extraction of tar sands and hydrofracked oil and gas. It should not be surprising to any of us that capitalist systems have found these sources profitable as demand exceded supply in the early and mid-2000's. But it really should shock us that nations with supposedly mature environmental protection regimes, Canada and the US in particular, should permit such wholesale degradation of land and water resources in the name of petroleum extraction and profits.

I predict that there will come a time, not too far off, when people are truly baffled that citizens of western, advanced 'democracies' passively permitted the wholesale destruction of their boreal forests, ancient and pristine aquifers, and other irreplaceable resources for the sake of a few years' more petroleum to burn. The fact that these short term remedies to Peak Oil have changed the rules of the game for a decade or two mean almost nothing in the truly big picture (even as I admit they mean quite a bit regarding the expense of filling my kerosene tank in advance of this winter).

Look, we all know that the Peak Oil doom and gloom'ers were wrong, just as the Population Bomb doom and gloom'ers were wrong before them. But in each case, the error was more about what we humans would tolerate rather than a fundamental error in extrapolating trends of their respective times.

By all means, call out the error, but be sure to acknowledge that in this current reaity, it's an entirely different game being played.

-app

[kristopher]

14. The malthusians became the peak oil 'doomers'

In my opinion there is one sure route out of the global mess, and that is restructuring our societies around distributed renewable energy sources.

There is such a thing as the "political economy" of a culture, and there is also a "domestic economy". There are two broader elements respectively make use of these different economies. You're undoubtedly familiar with a similar term, but in this case let's look at the 'mode' of production, and balance that against the the mode of 'reproduction'.

A "political economy" is the cultural infrastructure for the controlling and operating the mode of production and it tends towards centralized control. The degree of centralization of control over the elements comprising this political economy (including but not limited to political, economic, education and military) is a major factor in how strongly the goals within a culture are calibrated to favor the needs of these productive systems over the needs of the "domestic economy" that goes along with the mode of reproduction.

Although he didn't write about it in these terms, Amory Lovins was keying on this dynamic when he wrote of the Hard Path/Soft Path options for the global energy system. The hard path is what we've been following, and by its nature it flourishes on massive flows of good and services. Thus, pursuing the consumption oriented consumerist lifestyle that has swept the world came to be valued as a "good" thing. War is embraced by these entities of centralized control as it is but another grand scheme for resource distribution among the constituent elements of that political economy. Centralized control of education encompasses control of the distribution of information in most of its forms.

The soft path seeks to focus resources on the needs associated with nurturing the components of culture associated with nurturing our species. By it's nature it concerns itself with basic consumption and exchange within communities. The distribution of control over the energy of living brings with it a power at the local level that is totally lacking under the present balance of forces.

Anyway, that is probably already too much, so, back to the topic of peak oil. As far as I know anyone trained in basic economics who is capable of maintaining objectivity knew the general way 'supply and demand' was going to play out. The key is maintaining objectivity. That only sometimes comes naturally, and even then objectivity can't truly function without actively acquiring the analytic foundation and tools help cut through the noise of irrelevancies.

[appal_jack]

15. I'm 1005 with you, especially regarding distributed renewable energy sources. nt

[GliderGuider]

10. So you have any comments on the validity of the UN's usage of "sustainable development"?

Or are you simply going to use my posts as opportunities for personal slams?

[kristopher]

11. I've expressed my opinions about the UN's sustainable development efforts in this thread.

As to the "personal slams" - they are no more "personal slams" than when someone hears one of the architects of the Iraq Invasion telling us that Obama's agreement with Iran is totally effed up. People who are so grossly, consistently and obstinately wrong deserve to be confronted on their judgement.

[hatrack]

6. The contradiction in the UN goals cuts both ways . . . .

If every nation has control of its own wealth and natural resources, then there can be no coercive taking of those resources, by world dictatorship, hemispheric dictatorship, Martian dictatorship or any other kind of political mechanism.

If any nation yielded control of its own wealth and natural resources for the sake of some overriding global environmental goal, how would that not be seen as coercion? I would argue that any such move would be seen by many if not most of any nation's citizens as treasonous, even if undertaken voluntarily.

More to the fundamental point, what the UN is arguing is the ultimate eat cake and have it too.

They're saying that a nation's natural resources are at the disposal of that nation, and not subject to external limits. Got coal? Burn it! Got oil? Pump it! Got minerals? Mine them! But don't worry - the UN will be standing by to make soothing clucking sounds about "sustainability", reality be damned.

[kristopher]

12. I don't see a contradiction

At least, no more of a contradiction than would be present in any democratic, consensual endeavor.

The efforts of the UN have been the foundation of virtually ALL efforts on carbon control, global population control, and elimination of global poverty. There are real problems, but the nature of these attacks do nothing to address those problems and fall more in line with standard antiUN rhetoric that comes from the more uninformed among us.

Might as well give up, I suppose.

[pscot]

2. There will be pie in the sky bye and bye