The New Nation - Internet Edition

Paul Kennedy

THERE are many losers in our brave new world of costly gas and pricey foodstuffs - the poor almost everywhere, the lower-middle classes, the airline industry, food-importing societies, etc. And now one further casualty is emerging. It is the environmentalist dream of achieving a more sustainable, balanced and equitable global society. That vision of a harmonious Earth finds itself under threat from all sides.

To some readers, this might seem an odd conclusion to draw. Are not sky-high oil prices curbing our spendthrift ways? Isn't this driving us towards more clever alternative sources of energy, towards solar and thermal power and wind and wave power; in all, towards greater energy-preservation measures?

Well, yes it is. But at the same time it is also driving the public and politicians to adopt policies that the environmentalist movement has opposed, often successfully, for the past 40 years. Desperate to soften the blows inflicted by oil that's hovering around $140 or more a barrel, and to head off social and political discontents, governments are turning to measures that chill most environmentalists' hearts.

This list of reversals is long. While individual families in the north are returning to wood-burning stoves, communities in the tropics are intensifying slash-and-burn forestry, and in India the poorest of the poor remain reliant upon dung-burning and supplies of dubious kerosene. At a larger level, there are congressional pressures in the United States to increase drilling and extraction in environmentally delicate zones offshore, along the North Alaska slopes, and even in a great swathe of upper New York State. Many governments are making a major return to nuclear power, with dozens of new reactors being planned, thus joining the numerous coal-fired plants under construction.

Of course, environmentalists will fight back, but one wonders if their organising powers will be sufficient in these troubled times - sufficient, that is, to beat back the contrary pressures, arguments and campaigns: the arguments concerning national security and the need to 0 reduce dependence upon insecure foreign energy sources; the pressures for increasing fuel subsidies in developing countries; and the campaigns to reduce oil and diesel taxes by the fishermen, truck drivers and small industries in industrialised countries.

Until fairly recently, there existed a strong argument that a large hike in fuel taxes could help reduce our fondness for gas-guzzling SUVs (as well as enhancing government revenues). Except in the most liberal and affluent constituencies, it would be a foolhardy politician who advanced such a proposal today.

Then there is the highly controversial move to increase that alternative-energy "flavour of the month," ethanol, particularly in its least sensible form, that of producing the fuel from corn. Not only is it far less efficient than the sugarcane-to-ethanol process, and not only does it benefit the agricultural and business special interests backing it to a disproportionate extent, but it also has - at least in the case of the United States - a bad displacement effect.

With farmers in the American Midwest turning virtually into monoculturalists, converting thousands of acres of soybean and wheat crops into corn, the price of the former is correspondingly driven up by the reduced supply. This is no longer - perhaps never has been - a matter of being hurt in the wallet; when the rising cost of soybean imports causes Chinese farmers to slaughter their pig flocks and engage in violent protests, the ripple effects become political as well.

This brings us to the second assault upon environmentalists' assumptions: the hope that we are moving to environmentally nicer (read: "organic") food production, with local farmers being paid decent prices (read: "fair-trade goods") by grateful, healthier consumers.

Not only is the energy crunch driving many of those farmers and fishermen to the wall, but spiraling food costs in general, along with the rising demand from a billion more affluent Asians, are also leading to the revival of calls for measures that environmentalists have always loathed.

There is no doubt that the arguments for genetically modified food production stand a much better chance of acceptance nowadays than, say, 10 years ago. Weighing the undeniable dietary needs of 6.5 billion people (by 2050, perhaps 9 billion people) against the fears and often unproven claims of chiefly middle-class liberals regarding genetically modified food products points to the likely outcome.

It is that the demand for food will outweigh apprehensions about the method of production. The same is likely to be true in response to the calls by certain large agrochemical companies for the greater use of fertilisers and pesticides. Each contender in this debate will claim to have science on its side, and will deploy its own experts. Yet, at the end of the day, political and security considerations could well outweigh health and environmentalist concerns.

Already, and as a further twist to this story, insecurities about food supply have led protectionist agricultural lobbies from France to Japan to argue that their high-tariff policies against foreign foodstuffs have been well justified, because it is only by keeping those barriers that the nation can be assured of having bread and apples on its breakfast tables in times of crisis.

Such self-interested claims can only worry development economists, who have argued that the best way in which, for example, Europe can help Africa to prosper would be to permit the uninterrupted import of foodstuffs and thus boost the livelihoods of millions of African growers of fruit, olive oils, cereals, wine and other produce. Whatever the strength of that contention, the chances of it happening, and of establishing a regime of global agricultural free trade more generally, are slimmer now.

We have not talked in detail about the growing possibilities of political and social turmoil as a consequence of costlier fuel and pricier food - something about which the World Bank and the World Food Organisation has been warning and which at last the G-8 nations have placed high on their agendas. All we have done here is to point out that these two relatively new trends are likely to erode even further many of the gains and assumptions held by the environmentalist movement.

Intensified oil drilling, the return to nuclear power, the pressures upon forests, the favouring of corn-based ethanol, the increased possibility of a turn to genetically modified farming, and the boost to First World agricultural protectionism - all of this must make for glum reading among The Friends of the Earth. And they should make glum reading others, too.

Of course, environmentalists will resist, and over the longer term excruciatingly high-energy prices will probably stimulate some wonderful alternative technologies. To readers living in highly educated, environmentally conscious (and well-off) communities from Seattle to Stockholm, and enjoying smart new technologies being introduced every year, this article may seem unduly bleak.

Yet they in turn may fail to recognise how special and privileged their own position is compared with that of the bulk of humanity. Right now the massive increases in fuel and food costs are leading to calls for a lowering of standards on many fronts. Should such calls prevail, our world is probably going further away from the environmentalists' dream of how humankind might order itself.

Perhaps that dream was unrealisable in the face of our continued demographic expansion, the huge surge in demand for more goods and services that accompanies it, and the depletion of key material stocks and reserves. Whether or not that be so, the unpleasant truth nowadays is that things are getting tougher, rather than better, for the advocates of a cleaner, gentler planet.

Paul Kennedy is the J. Richardson Professor of History and the director of International Security Studies at Yale University, US. He is currently writing a history of World War II