We are all going to have to be more imaginative, more demanding and less forgiving in our future political choices, writes TONY KINSELLA
THE GOOD news is that Barack Obama was right in asserting “Yes we can” – the bad news is that it’s down to us to grasp the nettle.
The consecutive global crises of 2009, from recession through climate menace, have left many of us reeling and made this year’s festive respite seem just that bit sweeter.
Jobs, houses, beliefs and institutions that once seemed so certain, immutable and vital, have revealed themselves to be vulnerable, or not actually all that important.
Although a plethora of catastrophic warnings may have hammered us into a state of semi-conscious impotency, a gnawing insecurity-fuelled spark of inventive determination still glows within us.
When we, however reluctantly, focus on future challenges, we are quickly confronted by fairly obvious, and not overly radical, answers. Once you have an idea of where you want to go, the essential question becomes the one of “how?”.
Answers to that imponderable only come through deciding priorities and allocating resources. That decision-making process is called politics.
The fact that much has been done, not least by some of its current practitioners, to devalue political decision-making, simply obliges us all to be more imaginative, more demanding and less forgiving in our future choices.
It was mathematically obvious for decades that every driver could not take their car into our city centres. The more car owners there were, and the more extended our cities became, the faster gridlock approached.
It was clear that the answers included better public transport and a disincentive pricing regime for use of the scarce resource of city centre streets. The latter measure was first proposed in the UK by the 1964 Smeed Report. An overwhelming miscellany of reasons was quickly advanced as to why it could never work.
London introduced its congestion charge in 2003. It improved traffic flows and has helped finance public transport. What had long been seen as theoretically impossible became obviously desirable. Stockholm, Milan and other cities have now introduced similar schemes.
A British civil servant, Russell Bretherton, once warned his colleagues: “Gentlemen, you’re trying to negotiate something you will never be able to negotiate. If negotiated, it will not be ratified. And if ratified, it will not work.” He was talking about what would become the European Union, back in 1955, when the first drafts of that entity were being discussed by the Spaak Committee. Bretherton has happily been proved wrong on every count over the last 54 years.
The Copenhagen summit was a fiasco. A great deal of post-summit energy has been wasted on different blame games, yet the negotiating strategies of the different participants represented their appreciations of where their best interests lay.
However, we know that the average difference in temperatures between our current climate and that of the last Ice Age is around four degrees. Scientists concur that if we continue to pollute our atmosphere at the current rate, temperatures will rise by a similar amount by 2100. We may be a clumsy species, but since we are not a suicidal one, we will not let that happen.
Volkswagen has further developed the “1L” (one litre) prototype it unveiled at this year’s Frankfurt show. This super light two-seater diesel hybrid can travel 100km on a litre of diesel (235 mpg). Robert Lutz of General Motors told the Los Angeles auto show earlier this month that: “The automobile industry simply can no longer rely on oil to supply 98 per cent of the world’s automotive energy requirements.”
Not only are our machines changing, but so are our attitudes to using them. The Dublinbikes scheme offers one foretaste. Paris has announced that its similar “Autolib” rental system of 3,000 electric vehicles will begin operations in September 2011.
A system that would allow us access to clean vehicles when we need them would not only deal with air pollution and traffic congestion, it would also liberate the billions currently tied up in vehicle ownership for investment in other areas, changing our economic ethos in the process.
Agreement on the need for such a change comes from some surprising sources. Stephen Green, group chairman of HSBC, recently told Der Spiegel: “The reform of the capitalist system, which is necessary . . . has just begun.”
Governments have torn up conventions on public borrowing requirements to prevent a global economic meltdown. This does divert resources away from productive investment, but only became necessary because the market revealed itself to be incapable of such productive investment.
One of the most bizarre and outrageous sources of criticism are the three US-based credit rating agencies, Moody’s, Standard Poor’s, and Fitch. These agencies, which until recently validated toxic sub-prime derivatives, now sit in judgment and influence the interest rates we must pay on the debts their incompetence has imposed on us all.
In 1970 one half of international financial transactions flowed from the real economy; the other half was speculative. Thirty years later speculative movements outnumbered real ones by 120 to one.
The Nobel prize-winning economist James Tobin first proposed the idea of a tax on international financial transactions in 1972. The idea is simplicity itself – an electronically collected global transactions tax of around 0.05 per cent would, according the Austrian Institute for Economic Research, generate up to €480 billion a year.
Pressure for such a tax is becoming irresistible. Its original objective of deterring wild currency speculations has now been superseded, as the revenues generated could fund global development and climate change commitments while reducing public deficits.
Where we once selected our leaders for their affability, this is one of the many luxuries humanity can no longer afford.
How about courage, competence and foresight as replacement criteria?
Now there’s a way for all of us to wish ourselves a happy new year.