Having reached pensionable age, I qualify to be a grumpy old man. I should be boring my children, and the students at Oxford University where I am chancellor, with grumbles about how everything is going to the dogs. But that is not quite how I see things.
I went to university in 1962. My first term coincided with the Cuban missile crisis. The world seemed to be teetering on the brink of nuclear catastrophe. Those were the days when global peace was sustained by a concept known suitably enough by the acronym MAD — Mutually Assured Destruction. Was that world a worse and more dangerous one than today, where our main nuclear concerns are how to prevent proliferation and strengthen the treaty that has deterred it for the last generation?
At the end of my years at Oxford, I went as a student to the US and visited Alabama. You may recall the story of former US president Richard Nixon attending the independence celebrations in Ghana. At a gala reception, he went up to one guest, mistaking him for a local, and asked what it felt like to be able to vote and enjoy freedom under the rule of law.
“I wouldn’t know,” the man replied, “I’m from Alabama.”
Within my adult lifetime, we have moved from the murder of civil-rights campaigners in the US to the election of a black president. Nothing to be grumpy about there.
Elsewhere, some of our biggest problems have a sort of Hegelian quality. They are the result of solving past problems or of past success. Consider, for example, the biggest challenge facing us, which deserves to be called existential: global warming and climate change.
In the last century, the world got richer; its population quadrupled; the number of people living in cities grew thirteen-fold; and we consumed more of everything. Water consumption rose nine-fold and energy use thirteen-fold. Industrial output soared to 40 times its level at the beginning of the 20th century.
But — and here comes the real hit — carbon-dioxide emissions grew seventeen-fold. That is the biggest problem we face: the unforeseen result of increased economic activity and prosperity.
Looking at preparations for the Copenhagen summit in December, when we will try to broker a new global agreement to combat climate change, does not make me grumpy. At last, the big players are taking the issues seriously. The US is no longer in denial on the question. US President Barack Obama and his advisers do not deny the scientific evidence of what is happening to us all. In China, political leaders seem genuine in their commitment to reduce the carbon content of their runaway economy.
The big problems, of course, are how we take account of past responsibility for the carbon in the atmosphere, how we balance aggregate national emissions and per capita figures — China leads in the first category; the US, Australia and Canada are the biggest culprits in the second — and how we manage technology transfer from developed to emerging and poor economies. There will be plenty to moan about if we don’t solve these problems sooner rather than later.
This is where old men seem past their political expiration dates. Let me explain. For all of our lives, my generation has defined success in terms of rising GDP growth: more money in more pockets, more resources for public programs and more jobs.
None of these will necessarily be a measure of future success. We need to talk more about the quality of growth. French President Nicolas Sarkozy has raised this issue, and he is right to do so.
I am not arguing that growth is bad. Try telling that to the poor. But what we should want to promote is the right sort of growth — growth that won’t ravage our future prospects.
We have to define the sustainability of growth in ways that create an attractive narrative for our citizens. At the moment, people applaud sustainable growth, but they don’t vote for what it means in practice.
German voters balk at any suggestion that we should limit the environmental damage caused by big and expensive cars. British voters line up behind the truck drivers when protests are launched against hikes in the price of petrol, not least through the introduction of higher energy taxes. Ideas for carbon taxes run into resistance everywhere.
I have five grandchildren below the age of four. By the time they qualify for pensions and the license to grumble, the century will be into its seventh or eighth decade. We hope!
How much will they have to get angry about then because of the way that we are behaving today?
Chris Patten, the last governor of Hong Kong and a former EU commissioner for external affairs, is chancellor of the University of Oxford.
COPYRIGHT: PROJECT SYNDICATE
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
In the intricate ballet of geopolitics, names signify more than mere identification: They embody history, culture and sovereignty. The recent decision by China to refer to Arunachal Pradesh as “Tsang Nan” or South Tibet, and to rename Tibet as “Xizang,” is a strategic move that extends beyond cartography into the realm of diplomatic signaling. This op-ed explores the implications of these actions and India’s potential response. Names are potent symbols in international relations, encapsulating the essence of a nation’s stance on territorial disputes. China’s choice to rename regions within Indian territory is not merely a linguistic exercise, but a symbolic assertion
More than seven months into the armed conflict in Gaza, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to take “immediate and effective measures” to protect Palestinians in Gaza from the risk of genocide following a case brought by South Africa regarding Israel’s breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention. The international community, including Amnesty International, called for an immediate ceasefire by all parties to prevent further loss of civilian lives and to ensure access to life-saving aid. Several protests have been organized around the world, including at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and many other universities in the US.
In the 2022 book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, academics Hal Brands and Michael Beckley warned, against conventional wisdom, that it was not a rising China that the US and its allies had to fear, but a declining China. This is because “peaking powers” — nations at the peak of their relative power and staring over the precipice of decline — are particularly dangerous, as they might believe they only have a narrow window of opportunity to grab what they can before decline sets in, they said. The tailwinds that propelled China’s spectacular economic rise over the past