The G20 and the EU: a failed relationship?

by | Nov 4, 2011 | Cooperation and coherence, Economics and development, Europe and Central Asia, Global system

The G20 summit in Cannes is over.  Here’s a grumpy little post about it that I first published on the ECFR blog this morning:

There’s something a little fraudulent about big international summits.  In the run-up to each conference, politicians and pundits promise that they are going to solve the crisis of the day in a single meeting.  Sometimes they do.  Mostly they don’t.  And then they (and you) forget the whole event in a few weeks.  Test yourself.  Can you remember all fourteen or fifteen summits that have been held on the Euro crisis?  Or all the conclaves that have marked supposed turning-points in the Afghan war?  Of course you can’t.

But it’s likely that, five or ten years from now, you’ll still have a vague recollection of this week’s G20 meeting in Cannes.  Not, sadly, because the assembled leaders will have achieved anything of world-historical significance.  Instead, historians will mark this down as the moment that Europe’s weakness on the world stage was laid totally bare.

The EU’s leaders have stumbled into this summit without a credible plan to save the Eurozone.  It’s not because they didn’t try.  As I note in an article for Política Exterior that was published this week, European politicians saw the summit as an important deadline for ending the crisis:

On 9 October, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced that they were working on a plan to reinforce Europe’s banks and, in doing so finally halt the financial markets’ loss of confidence in the Eurozone.  Their goal was to complete this before the Group of Twenty (G20) summit in Cannes on 3-4 November.

The Eurozone’s leaders had been under international pressure to get their act together before Cannes.  British Chancellor of the Exchequer had called the G20 meeting a “clear deadline” for the Eurogroup.  Other G20 members ranging from Canada to Indonesia had publicly expressed concerns about the Eurozone.  For Merkel and Sarkozy, the idea of heading to Cannes empty-handed must have seemed too humiliating to contemplate.

Whoops.  Despite their best efforts, Chancellor Merkel and President Sarkozy have been surprised and embarrassed by the Greeks’ failure to fit in with their game-plan.  The Euro crisis continues to overshadow the summit, leaving the Europeans present looking silly.

Where the Eurozone goes from here still isn’t clear.  But I’m ready to bet that, before long, some commentators will be blaming the whole debacle on the G20 itself.  Although President Sarkozy and former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown were early advocates of the G20, a lot of Europeans feel uncomfortable with the forum.

As a whole, the EU’s members have less influence in the G20 than they wield in the G8.  At times, the U.S. and the non-Western emerging economies have ganged up on the Europeans in G20 debates, as they did in a dispute over reducing Europe’s political influence the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the run-up to last year’s G20 summit in Seoul.  The Europeans have also worked with China and other rising powers to criticize U.S. policy at recent summits, but they still fear they’re being marginalized.

So is the G20 bad for the EU, as I ask in my Política Exterior piece?  Not really.  Right now, it’s the EU that’s bad for the EU:

Crucially, the major obstacles to the EU performing effectively within the G20 continue to lie within the EU itself.  After the 2009 Pittsburgh G20 summit, for example, the U.S. and other powers gave the EU’s members almost a year to resolve the mechanics of IMF reform themselves.  It was only after it became clear that the Europeans could not or would do this that the Obama administration forced them into making hard choices before Seoul.

Similarly, the burst of pressure on the Eurozone to put its house in order this October followed a long period in which European countries had tried to halt the Euro crisis at their own pace.  The fact that Euro crisis came to overshadow the run-up to the Cannes tells us more about the deficiencies of decision-making in the Eurozone than in the G20, and EU leaders should not try to distract from their errors by grumbling about the G20.

When I wrote that, I still thought the EU would raise its game sufficiently to get through the Cannes summit in decent shape.  It hasn’t.  You won’t forget this moment for a while.

How many people are hungry?

by | Nov 4, 2011 | Economics and development, Global Dashboard

The good news: poverty is in retreat. The bad news: hunger isn’t.  That’s the headline finding for the first Millennium Development Goal , which aims to halve the proportion of people living on less than $1.25 a day and the proportion of people living in hunger between 1990 and 2015.

Great strides have been made on poverty, as I explained in a recent post, with the proportion of the poor projected to fall to 14.4% of the population of developing countries, from 41.7% in 1990. But what about hunger?

According to the UN’s 2011 assessment of the MDGs, the news is not good. In 1990, 828m people were hungry or 20% of the population of developing countries. Progress has been very slow since then:

The proportion of people in the developing world who went hungry in 2005-2007 remained stable at 16 percent [837m people], despite significant reductions in extreme poverty. Based on this trend, and in light of the economic crisis and rising food prices, it will be difficult to meet the hunger-reduction target in many regions of the developing world.

But hang on a minute. Why is the UN trotting out data for 2005-2007? That’s before the global food crisis, which hit at the same time as the financial crisis and has been just as slow to go away.

Food prices hit rock bottom in 1999, but then rose quickly with vicious increases in 2007 and 2008 (20% and 18%) and 2010 and 2011 (17% and 28%) as illustrated in the chart below.  Yet we’re still relying on data from five years ago to estimate hunger.

The UN reported ‘dire’ news of a spike in its 2009 and 2010 MDG reports, with an estimate of more than 1 billion people hungry by 2009. But then it backed off in 2011, simply reporting the old data (which, oddly and without explanation, had been revised up slightly for all years, including 1990).

What gives? The problem is that our data on hunger are extremely patchy and rely on assumptions so heroic that I am left wondering if we are currently able to say anything useful about global hunger at all. (more…)

US carbon emissions down 7% in 4 years; UK material consumption in decline since 2001

by | Nov 3, 2011 | Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development

Surprising news from the US via Lester Brown:

Between 2007 and 2011, carbon emissions from coal use in the United States dropped 10 percent. During the same period, emissions from oil use dropped 11 percent. In contrast, carbon emissions from natural gas use increased by 6 percent. The net effect of these trends was that U.S. carbon emissions dropped 7 percent in four years.

So what’s driving it?

The initial fall in coal and oil use was triggered by the economic downturn, but now powerful new forces are reducing the use of both. For coal, the dominant force is the Beyond Coal campaign, an impressive national effort coordinated by the Sierra Club involving hundreds of local groups that oppose coal because of its effects on human health.

The campaign started by focusing on opposing new coal power stations, which Brown says was “hugely successful”, before turning its focus to closing existing plants – and now 68 of a total of 492 are slated to close. This helps reduce oil emissions, too, given that 40% of US freigh rail diesel fuel is used to transport coal. (Brown doesn’t talk about the shale gas glut, one of the other reasons why emissions are falling – instead focusing on the high rate of growth in renewables. But let’s forgive him that.) Meanwhile, US oil emissions are falling for other reasons too, including…

…a shrinkage in the size of the national fleet, the rising fuel efficiency of new cars, and a reduction in the miles driven per vehicle.

Fleet size peaked at 250 million cars in 2008 just as the number of cars being scrapped eclipsed sales of new cars. Aside from economic conditions, car sales are down because many young people today are much less automobile-oriented than their parents. In addition, the fuel efficiency of new cars, already rising, will soon increase sharply. The most recent efficiency standards mandate that new cars sold in 2025 use only half as much fuel as those sold in 2010. Thus with each passing year, the U.S. car fleet becomes more fuel-efficient, using less gsoline.

Miles driven per car are declining because of higher gasoline prices, the continuing recession, and the shift to public transit and bicycles. Bicycles are replacing cars as cities create cycling infrastructure by building bike paths, creating dedicated bike lanes, and installing sidewalk parking racks. Many U.S. cities, including Washington, D.C., Chicago, and New York, are introducing bike-sharing programs. Furthermore, when people retire and no longer commute, miles driven drop by a third to a half. With so many baby boomers now retiring, this too will lower gasoline use.

Cheery stuff, eh? And that’s all before the spread of electric cars gets factored in to the equation – which will decarbonise things still further if emissions from power generation continue to fall.

Meanwhile, in the UK…

2001 may turn out to be the year that the UK’s consumption of ‘stuff’ – the total weight of everything we use, from food and fuel to flat-pack furniture – reached its peak and began to decline.

That’s according to  Chris Goodall, a Green Party candidate and former McKinsey consultant who’s been trawling through the UK Material Flow Accounts, prepared by the Office of National Statistics. The Guardian’s Duncan Clark isn’t so sure that the 2001 peak is accurate (he thinks it might be a blip) – but he does conclude from exploring Goodall’s data that

…despite rising GDP, material consumption started falling from 2005; second, that after the recession hit, our consumption rates quickly dropped all the way down to sub-1970 levels.

Clark has a more detailed analysis piece about the data on the Guardian’s Environment Blog, which breaks the data down by sector – and shows steep declines on variables including household waste per capita (down about 15% since 2000), overall fertiliser use (nitrogen fertilisers down by a third since the early 80s, phosphate more than halved since 1970), per capita food consumption (down from almost 2,280 calories a day in the mid-90s to less than 2,070 today), and energy (total primary energy use down 10% since 2000.

Of course, there are lots of methodological issues behind these data: how much is due to the economic downturn, and how much due to genuine ‘decoupling’ of environmental impact from economic growth; how much is due to ‘exporting’ dirty industries to China and elsewhere; how much is due to one-off political factors like the ‘dash for gas’ in UK power generation in the late 1990s and so on. But still – good news is good news, and being rather a scarce commodity, you have to grab it when you see it…