Abstract
As we have seen in Chaps. 1 and 2 of this book, despite being essentially an interdisciplinary field of studies, international relations theory has traditionally been treated as if its main purpose was the study of inter-state relations, not inter-national relations, because the focus of both the realist and the idealist paradigms is power politics and therefore the relationships between peoples, ethnic groups, religions, cultures and the trade and commerce characteristic of the world economy are not usually considered within its classic perspectives. Nonetheless, if we accept that the international system is the appropriate field of studies of the discipline, then it is logical to acknowledge that the different components of the said system are the political, military, economic, social, and cultural subsystems, hence any theory of IR must include not only the political science approach but also the economic, anthropological, cultural and social science standpoints. In other words, a holistic paradigm is necessary in order to generate a satisfactory IR theory. This understanding of the discipline also embraces environmental sciences and ecology as disciplines that contribute to this field of knowledge because the base of sustenance of the international system is the planetary system, the Earth itself. Consequently, all the states, nations, peoples, cultures, religions, transnational corporations and so on exist and operate thanks to the fact that humanity has the planet (Gaia in Lovelock’s perspective) as its “common house”, as Pope Francis calls it in his Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’. This explains why the Anthropocene represents much more than a new geological epoch and why its importance is emphasized in these times of great menaces like climate change and health pandemics. Is our species facing the sixth mass extinction of life on the surface of the planet? Do religion and science now coincide in their way of comprehending this marvellous planet that we all inhabit?
Geophysiology, the discipline of Gaia theory, had its origins in the 1960s Gaia hypothesis. Geophysiology sees the organisms of the Earth evolving by Darwinian natural selection in an environment that is the product of their ancestors and not simply a consequence of the Earth’s geological history. Thus the oxygen of the atmosphere is almost wholly the product of photosynthetic organisms, and without it there would be no animals or invertebrates, nor would we burn fuels and so add carbon dioxide to the air. I find it amazing that it took so long for biologists even grudgingly to acknowledge that organisms adapted not to the static world conveniently but wrongly described by their geologist colleagues, but to a dynamic world built by the organisms themselves.
Lovelock (2009: 48)
Ecology studies the relationship between living organisms and the environment in which they develop. This necessarily entails reflection and debate about the conditions required for the life and survival of society, and the honesty needed to question certain models of development, production and consumption. It cannot be emphasized enough how everything is interconnected. Time and space are not independent of one another, and not even atoms or subatomic particles can be considered in isolation. Just as the different aspects of the planet – physical, chemical and biological – are interrelated, so too living species are part of a network which we will never fully explore and understand. A good part of our genetic code is shared by many living beings. It follows that the fragmentation of knowledge and the isolation of bits of information can actually become a form of ignorance, unless they are integrated into a broader vision of reality.
Pope Francis, Laudato Si’ (2015: 166)
Earth is a very particular planet because at the same time that she has expressed her marvellous disposition to give birth to the living world she is a global ensemble and a complex system. The knowledge of Earth requires the use of resources of all its diverse constituent parts. In other words, to understand our planet it is necessary to go from the parts to the whole and from the whole to the parts. And in the field of knowledge, at the moment, this fact is absolutely illustrative and exemplary.
Morin (1999: 454)
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Notes
- 1.
It is worth pointing out that acceptance of the term is “defined by the standard means for a unit of the Geological Time Scale, via a Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP), colloquially known as a ‘golden spike’”; that “its beginning would be optimally placed in the mid-twentieth century, coinciding with the array of geological proxy signals preserved within recently accumulated strata and resulting from the Great Acceleration of population growth, industrialization and globalization”; and also that “the sharpest and most globally synchronous of these signals, that may form a primary marker, is made by the artificial radionuclides spread worldwide by the thermonuclear bomb tests from the early 1950s”, as quoted by Brauch (2019: 5).
- 2.
“The Pleistocene is divided into four ages, but only two are shown here. What is shown as Calabrian is actually three ages – Calabrian from 1.80 to 0.781 Ma, Middle from 0.781 to 0.126 Ma, and Late from 0.126 to 0.0117 Ma. The Cenozoic, Mesozoic, and Paleozoic are the Eras of the Phanerozoic Eon. Names of units and age boundaries usually follow the Gradstein et al. (2013, updated) compilation. The numbered epochs and ages of the Cambrian are provisional. A “ ˜ ” before a numerical age estimate typically indicates an associated error of ±0.4 to over 1.6 Ma.” Walker, J. D., Geissman, J. W., Bowring, S. A., and Babcock, L. E. (compilers), 2018: “Geologic Time Scale v.5.0” (Geological Society of America 2018).
- 3.
James Lovelock’s ‘Gaia theory’ refers to the confluence of the best available scientific understanding of Earth as a living system with the social science and cultural philosophy that conceives society as a “seamless continuum of that system”. Lovelock’s theory posits that the organic and inorganic components of the planet have evolved together as a single living, self-regulating system that has always automatically controlled global temperature, atmospheric content, ocean salinity, and other factors in a way that maintains its own habitability in a comparable manner to other living organisms like plants, animals and human beings. This means that life permanently maintains the conditions suitable for its own survival. As a consequence, Lovelock’s main hypothesis is that the living system of Earth can be considered analogous to the workings of any individual organism that regulates body temperature, blood salinity, etc. So, for instance, even though the luminosity of the sun – the Earth’s heat source – has increased by about 30% since life began almost four billion years ago, the planet’s living system has reacted as a whole to maintain temperatures at levels suitable for life. The Gaia theory has been supported since the outset by Lynn Margulis, an influential microbiologist at the University of Massachusetts (Lovelock 1979).
- 4.
It is pertinent to remember that in the domain of the philosophy of law, both the Greek philosophers – like Plato and Aristotle – and Catholic theologians of the Middle Ages (e.g. Thomas Aquinas) spoke about “natural law” as the source of the norms enacted by kings and rulers.
- 5.
- 6.
However, in contrast to the biological vision of James Lovelock (for whom the Earth itself – Gaia – is a living organism), or to the spiritual conception of Teilhard, for Vernadsky (1997) the determining factor of the origin of life is physical matter itself. According to him, humanity, thanks to the scientific thought that permeates the noosphere, can modify and take control of nature from a perspective in tune with the dialectical materialism that predominated in Soviet Russia at that time.
- 7.
Ruddiman (2005) argues that the Anthropocene was initiated about 8,000 years ago with the onset of agriculture because anthropogenic methane and carbon dioxide emissions started then and created the conditions to prevent another global cooling. Agriculture spread throughout the world thanks to migrations across all continents at the beginning of the Neolithic revolution, during which time humans developed agriculture and the domestication of animals that led to livestock of all kinds. This also allowed hunting and gathering to be replaced as the main source of food supply. Such innovations were not purely positive, because they were followed by a wave of extinctions, beginning with large mammals and land-birds. This wave was driven by the direct activity of human beings (such as hunting) as well as by indirect consequences arising from the change in land use for agriculture, but there are those who claim that such extinctions did not have an anthropogenic origin.
- 8.
The scientists who worked on the elaboration of these graphs explain it in the following way: “What have now become known as the ‘Great Acceleration’ graphs were originally designed and constructed as part of the synthesis project of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP), during the 1999–2003 period. The synthesis aimed to pull together a decade of research in IGBP’s core projects, and, importantly, generate a better understanding of the structure and functioning of the Earth System as a whole, more than just a description of the various parts of the Earth System around which IGBP’s core projects were structured. The increasing human pressure on the Earth System was a key component of the synthesis. The project was inspired by the proposal in 2000 by Paul Crutzen, a Vice-Chair of IGBP, that the Earth had left the Holocene and entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, driven by the impact of human activities on the Earth System (Crutzen 2002; Crutzen/Stoermer 2000). Crutzen suggested that the start date of the Anthropocene would be placed near the end of the eighteenth century, about the time that the Industrial Revolution began, and that that a start date would coincide with the invention of the steam engine by James Watt in 1784. As part of the project, the synthesis team wanted to build a more systematic picture of the human-driven changes to the Earth System, drawing primarily, but not exclusively, on the work of the IGBP core projects. The idea was to record the trajectory of the ‘human enterprise’ through a number of indicators and, over the same time frame, track the trajectory of key indicators of the structure and functioning of the Earth System. Inspired by Crutzen’s proposal for the Anthropocene, we chose 1750 as the starting date for our trajectories to ensure that we captured the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and the changes that it wrought. We took the graphs up to 2000, the most recent year that we had data for many of the indicators” (Steffen et al. 2004).
- 9.
According to the French demographer and sociologist Emmanuel Todd, an explanatory hypothesis of terrorism in Islamic countries could be formulated on the basis the resistance to modernization that exists in many Muslim countries with high fertility rates (Libya 3.9, Qatar 3.9, Syria 4.1, Kuwait 4.2, Sudan 4.9, Iraq 5.3, Pakistan 5.6, Saudi Arabia 5.7, Nigeria 5.8, Afghanistan 6.0, Oman 6.1, Mali 7.0, Yemen 7.2, Somalia 7.3, Niger 7.5, Bahrain 2.8, Indonesia 2.7). The influence (or presence) of Islamist terrorism in those countries would then be explained by the rejection of modernization and the cultural change of mentality regarding the reproductive health of women, in a manner analogous to the violence that this demographic transition unleashed in Western countries during the seventeenth century (the English Civil War), the eighteenth century (the French Revolution) and the beginning of the twentieth century (the Bolshevik revolution in Russia), which assumes that these phenomena of violence and terrorism should be seen as part of the general process of the development of societies, and thus the solution is to promote education and social development, not repression or military means. Another of Todd’s interesting observations is that in the countries of central Asia which were part of the USSR, the education promoted by the Soviet state produced a demographic transition that has caused the Muslim religion to lose influence, and therefore the radical Islamist movements also lack strength there. This can be demonstrated by the relatively low birth rates in the former Soviet republics of Azerbaijan (2.02), Turkmenistan (2.68), Kyrgyzstan (2.9), Tajikistan (2.4) or Uzbekistan (2.38) in 2021. The same applies to the Maghreb countries that were colonized by France, such as Tunisia (2.13), Algeria (2.94) and Morocco (2.37) or by the English, such as Malaysia (1.80), United Arab Emirates (1.39), Jordan (2.69) or even Saudi Arabia (2.27) which, although still relatively high, are lower than those countries such as Iraq (3.58), Pakistan (3.42) or Syria (2.7). And, a propos, Iran (a country not exposed to radical internal terrorism) had a birth rate of 2.14 in 2020.
- 10.
Even though this data is from 2001, it allows comparisons between the fertility rates of, for example, Canada (1.4), the United Kingdom (1.7), France (1.9), Germany (1.3), Italy (1.3), Spain (1.2), the USA (2.1) and Japan (1.3) with the Philippines (3.5), India (3.2), Mexico (2.8), Peru (2.9), Brazil (2.4), Colombia (2.6), Venezuela (2.9), and Argentina (2.6); or, more seriously, those of Africa, because if there is no sustainable development, Africa is the continent that will have the largest number of inhabitants in 2100: 42% of humanity – about 4 billion people – will live in it, given the fertility rates – to cite the example of some countries, though all have high indicators – of 7.0 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 6.1 in Zambia, 6.3 in Sierra Leone, 6.7 in Liberia, 5.8 in Rwanda, and 5.9 in Ethiopia, with the lowest fertility rate being in South Africa – one of the most developed countries on that continent – at 2.20 (2020), almost the same as Mexico in Latin America. Figures from: Populations et Societés, 151 (July/August), quoted by Todd (2002: 40) and of the World Population Review in the Web.
- 11.
Let’s take as an example the case of a country like Guatemala, which is one of the most backward in Latin America in terms of indicators of inequality and social development (its social development indexes are barely better than those of Haiti). Although its fertility rate decreased from 3.8 in 2005 to 2.9 in 2015, there are notable differences when examining the figures by area. The areas with a majority indigenous population still have very high fertility rates (Alta Verapaz 4.8, Huehuetenango 3.6, Quiché 3.7, San Marcos 3.2, Totonicapán 3.0, Baja Verapaz 4.3) while the area of the department of Guatemala, where the capital city is located, has lower poverty rates because there is a greater number of people who belong to the middle class, and its fertility rate is 2.3 (hence below the national average of 2.9). Source Statistics from 2015 according to data from the National Institute of Statistics (INE) of Guatemala at: https://www.ine.gob.gt/index.php/estadisticas/tema-indicadores.
- 12.
Again by way of example, SDG 3.7 clearly states that signatories will commit themselves to ensuring by 2030 “universal access to sexual and reproductive health-care services, including for family planning, information and education, and the integration of reproductive health into national strategies and programmes”, as stated by the United Nations, General Assembly resolution A/69/L.85.
- 13.
- 14.
The views of Andrew Feenberg about the political importance of technology are comparable to the views of Jeffrey Sachs on the political sphere of sustainable development – and to my own thinking concerning democracy and cosmopolitism (discussed in the final chapter) – when Feenberg states that the idea of technology as an autonomous force separated from society is erroneous because: “[T]his conception of technology is incompatible with the extension of democracy to the technical sphere. Technology is the medium of daily life in modern societies. Every major technical change reverberates at many levels, economic, political, religious, cultural. Insofar as we continue to see the technical and the social as separate domains, important aspects of these dimensions of our existence will remain beyond our reach as a democratic society. The fate of democracy is therefore bound up with our understanding of technology.” As Harari and others (like Henry Kissinger) have said concerning internet technology for the purpose of civil society surveillance applied by authoritarian states (like China), because of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020/21 it is absolutely essential to be aware of these issues, otherwise “these dimensions of our existence will remain beyond our reach as a democratic society” (Feenberg 1999: 7).
- 15.
This exercise involves adding together the GDP of each country to obtain a ‘world GDP’ and then dividing that figure by the number of inhabitants of the planet – a methodology which does not yield an accurate picture of the reality as it fails to take into account the enormous gulf which currently exists between the richest and the poorest people in the world.
- 16.
To obtain an idea of this monstrous concentration of wealth we can refer to Jeffrey Sachs (advisor to the UN Secretary-General for sustainable development and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York), who, during the high-level segment of the UN’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) in New York (October 2017), stated in a very energetic and critical manner that if the $127 trillion World GDP (with per capita income of $14,000 for each inhabitant of the planet) were appropriately distributed, it would be enough to finance the attainment of the UN 17 SDGs, but the problem lies in the iniquitous concentration of wealth. Just to give an idea of this heinous distribution, some $20 trillion are deposited in tax havens and just 2,043 of the world’s richest individuals own $7 trillion between them, while $13 trillion is wasted on wars and armaments. With regard to this, it is possible to watch a recording of the 43rd meeting of the high-level segment of the 2017 session of the UN’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), posted by the United Nations Information Service; see at: webtv.un.org.
- 17.
Hence, from an ethical perspective, Trump’s campaign slogan (Make America great again) was part of his own ‘fake news’, since the US economy has been in the first place at world level since the late nineteenth century.
- 18.
But the explanation also has to do with the fact that Luxembourg is an EU financial centre, Switzerland is a tax haven and Ireland has a policy of fiscal incentives for transnational corporations.
- 19.
Both Hong Kong and Taiwan appear in the list as states separated from China but strangely without an official number of positioning, because – I suppose – they are, in China’s view, both ‘officially’ provinces of the People’s Republic of China and not independent states. And curiously, Hong Kong has a higher per capita income than the US (US $60,553 for Hong Kong while the US has ‘just’ $59,609).
- 20.
This coefficient measures the inequality in the distribution of wealth in such a way that a perfect distribution would be equal to zero. Lower figures indicate less inequality, while larger numbers correspond to the countries or situations of greater inequality.
- 21.
Therefore, if we analyse the situation of Hong Kong or Taiwan with this kind of methodological approach, it is clear that for the time being the democratic processes within China are not compatible but it is also important to accept that foreign interference is not the solution.
- 22.
For the great French writer and thinker of the nineteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville, the “passion for equality” is one of the main reasons why people struggle for democracy. In the years that he wrote his masterworks, Tocqueville mainly studied the French Revolution and American democracy, explaining how the abolition of the privileges of nobles and aristocrats is fundamental to the establishment of formal equality before the law. Nowadays, it is possible to argue that with the same passion we could engage in the fight for equality – understood as a decrease in economic inequalities – and that is why less unequal countries – like the Scandinavians – are much more democratic than other developed countries (Tocqueville 2003, 2011).
- 23.
And more recently (2018) Guatemalan authorities decided to put an end to the work of the UN International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG). They were worried about investigations carried out by the CICIG concerning high-level officials and private sector personalities involved in organized crime, money-laundering and corruption. The figures cited about this problem (of the US, China, the Scandinavian countries and Guatemala) are taken from Juniper (2016: 72–73).
- 24.
I have already mentioned the position of the German school of critical theory regarding ideology. Nonetheless it is worth remembering that the seminal contribution regarding this matter was made by Habermas (1987) in his text (quoted in Chapter I) about “technology and science as ideology”., translated into Spanish by Manuel Jiménez Redondo and published by the Tecnos editorial house in Madrid in 1986 with the Spanish title Ciencia y Técnica como ‘Ideología’.
- 25.
A report of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) prepared by Pedro Vasconcelos and cited by Roshni Mujamdar in a newspaper article, states that remittances sent by migrant workers doubled in the last decade, increasing 51% from $296,000 million in 2007 to $445,000 million in 2016, which helped lift countless families from poverty throughout the world. The largest shipments of remittances come from immigrants in the United States, followed closely by Saudi Arabia and Russia. The money sent is used for health, education and food expenses, says the IFAD study. Although 85% of immigrants’ income remains within the host country, the remaining 15% that is sent to their countries of origin can constitute 60% of household income in rural areas. Since one in seven people in the world is a sender or beneficiary of remittances, this means that about a billion inhabitants of the planet participate in these transactions in some way. Even during the 2008 financial crisis, remittance flows remained stable, and it can be said that the flow of money has exceeded the migratory flow, which grew by only 28% in the last decade. This means that there are approximately 800 million people around the world who depend on the monetary remittances of migrant workers, which number around 200 million worldwide. See at: http://www.ipsnoticias.net/2017/06/remesas-migrantes-suman-billones-la-economia-mundial/.
- 26.
The carrying capacity is a concept that refers to the maximum weight that the environment can support of a biological species living in a certain ecosystem or, for some, the “maximum load limit that an ecosystem can support before it cannot recover or self-regenerate”. Therefore, it is defined as the maximum ecological load that a certain number of inhabitants can exert on the environment, the number of people that an environment can sustain indefinitely with resources such as food, habitat, water and other available needs, and there must exist a certain balance between inhabitants and the ecosystem.
- 27.
Business Insider, stated the following: “China had an urban population of 730 million people in 2015. So even if that figure doesn’t change (and it will only grow), by 2022 over 550 million people in China will be considered middle class. That would make China’s middle class alone big enough to be the third-most populous country in the world. According to McKinsey, in 2012, 54 per cent of China’s urban households were considered ‘mass middle’ class, meaning they earned between US $9,000 and US $16,000 per year. But by 2022, thanks to a growing number of higher-paying high-tech and service industry jobs, 54 percent will be classified as ‘upper middle’ class – meaning they earn between US $16,000 and US $34,000 a year.” See at: http://www.businessinsider.com/chinas-middle-class-is-exploding-2016-8.
- 28.
“[The] culture of discarding affects both excluded human beings and things that quickly become garbage. Note, for example, that most of the paper that is produced is wasted and not recycled. It is hard to recognize that the functioning of natural ecosystems is exemplary: plants synthesize nutrients that feed herbivores; these in turn feed the carnivorous beings, who provide important amounts of organic waste, which give rise to a new generation of vegetables. On the other hand, the industrial system, at the end of the production and consumption cycle, has not developed the capacity to absorb and reuse waste. It has not yet been possible to adopt a circular model of production that ensures resources for all and for future generations, which means limiting the use of non-renewable resources to the maximum, moderating consumption, maximizing the efficiency of use, reusing, and recycling. Addressing this issue would be a way to counteract the culture of discarding, which ends up affecting the entire planet, but we note that progress in this regard is still very scarce”, in: Laudato Si’ (2015: 20).
- 29.
Juniper (2016: 89–90).
- 30.
“The market for purely electric vehicles is in its infancy. The Nissan Leaf was the first to become available in the U.S., with Ford, Toyota, and Honda rolling out models in 2011 and 2012. The Nissan Leaf sold 8,720 in its first 11 months. Nissan expects to sell over 10,000 of the Leaf within the first year of rollout. The Tesla Model S, a luxury BEV, received considerable attention including Motor Trend’s ‘Car of the Year’ award in 2012. In the long term, Pike Research projects that BEVs will account for 0.8% of U.S. car sales by 2017.The market for PEVs and EREVs is more developed, but has yet to reach rapid deployment. Hybrids have been retrofitted for plug-in capability since they were introduced in the early 2000s. The Honda Insight was the first hybrid available in the United States. Since then, most of the major auto makers have introduced hybrid models in the U.S. The best-selling hybrid currently on the road is the Toyota Prius, which sold nearly one million units between 2000 and 2001.” See at: http://www.iedconline.org/clientuploads/Downloads/edrp/IEDC_Electric_Vehicle_Industry.pdf.
- 31.
An internet publication refers to hydrogen vehicles as follows: “With the recent arrival of the Honda Clarity, there are now three automakers offering cars powered by hydrogen fuel cells. The first was the Hyundai ix35 in early 2013, and then came the Toyota Mirai – and more than a dozen other automakers have fuel cell vehicles in development. Driving a hydrogen-powered car has some ups and downs. On the plus side, you get the green benefits of an EV without the range anxiety, because you can refill the car with more hydrogen. On the minus side, hydrogen refuelling stations are rare – at least for the moment. It’s also challenging to obtain hydrogen in a way that’s both green and efficient. Further, as with any new technology, there’s some understandable hesitation to be among the first people to take the leap and commit to several years (at least) with a power source that may or may not work out. But keep reading and we’ll give you enough background that you can make your own decision”; at: https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/does-hydrogen-make-sense-as-an-automotive-fuel/.
- 32.
The most advanced project in nuclear fusion is the magnetic confinement or ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor), a prototype based on the Tokamak concept. In addition to the reactor, this uses auxiliary systems but does not generate electricity, which is obviously the main purpose of all this great international effort in the field of renewable and clean energy. The European Union, Canada, the US, Japan and Russia are participating in this project. The objective is to determine the technical and economic feasibility of nuclear fusion by magnetic confinement for the generation of electrical energy, as a preliminary phase in the construction of a commercial demonstration facility, although ITER is a technological project whose construction is estimated to take ten years and will require another twenty years to complete the investigations it has already started. Robotics, superconductivity, microwaves, accelerators and control systems stand out among the technologies used for its construction and subsequent operation and maintenance. As previously underscored in the ITER reactor now built, no electric power will be produced, only solutions to the problems that need to be solved to make future nuclear fusion reactors viable. This ambitious research project installed in France will have its first results in the long term: 2050; at: https://energia-nuclear.net/que-es-la-energia-nuclear/fusion-nuclear.
- 33.
Carlsen’s article can be found at: https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/11/24/what-weve-learned-from-nafta/under-nafta-mexico-suffered-and-the-united-states-felt-its-pain. An interesting study on the first twenty years of NAFTA (1994–2014) with a number of comparative graphs about the performance of the Mexican economy compared to the rest of Latin America (some based on ECLAC studies) shows that Mexico did not fare well in indicators of growth, per capita income, or employment in addition to the social indicators of poverty already mentioned by Carlsen. The study (conducted by American researchers) points out, for example, that comparing poverty indicators with the region as a whole shows that Latin America reduced its poverty on average from 46 to 26% while Mexico went from 45.1 to 37.1%. Regarding these issues, see also Weisbrot et al. (2014), at: http://cepr.net/documents/nafta-20-years-2014-02.pdf.
- 34.
The carbon footprint is the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions that come from certain products, activities or services. A citizen of an industrialized country has a footprint more than a hundred times greater than that of a peasant from India or a sub-Saharan country, because his consumption of food, transportation, heating, recreation, electricity, communications and products of industrial origin is within the activities that generate 10 tons of CO2 per year. Lifestyles with higher consumption are becoming generalized as the middle class grows.
- 35.
I refer to the case of Guatemala, a country where, even though the national constitution prescribes the obligation to enact a law on that matter, no normative has so far been approved by the Parliament. An interesting book on this topic has been produced by a researcher at the Institute of Investigations on State Policies at Rafael Landívar University (Padilla 2019).
- 36.
The Montreal Protocol is a protocol arising from the Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer, designed to protect the ozone layer by reducing the production and consumption of numerous substances that have been studied and proven to react with the ozone layer. The Protocol addresses the causes that are believed to be responsible for the depletion of the ozone layer, with the objective of enabling it to make a full recovery. The agreement was negotiated in 1987 and entered into force on 1 January 1989. The first meeting of the parties was held in Helsinki in May 1989. Since then, the document has been revised several times, in 1990 (London), in 1991 (Nairobi), in 1992 (Copenhagen), in 1993 (Bangkok), in 1995 (Vienna), in 1997 (Montreal), and in 1999 (Beijing). It is believed that if all countries meet the proposed objectives of the treaty, the ozone layer could have recovered by the year 2050. Due to the high degree of acceptance and implementation that has been achieved, the treaty has been considered an exceptional example of international cooperation; at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol.
- 37.
The ozone layer was discovered in 1913 by French physicists Charles Fabry and Henri Buisson. Its properties were examined in detail by the British meteorologist G. M. B. Dobson, who developed a simple spectrophotometer that could be used to measure stratospheric ozone from the Earth’s surface. Between 1928 and 1958 Dobson established a worldwide network of ozone monitoring stations, which continue to operate today. The Dobson unit, a unit for measuring the amount of ozone, was named in his honour. Ozone acts as a filter, or protective shield, against noxious, high-energy radiation that reaches the Earth, but it allows other rays to pass as the long wave ultraviolet, which thus reaches the surface. This ultraviolet radiation is what allows life to survive on the planet, since it is what enables photosynthesis to take place in the plant kingdom, which is at the base of the food pyramid. Apart from the ozone layer in the stratosphere, the 10% of the remaining ozone that is contained in the troposphere is dangerous for living beings because of its strong oxidizing character. High concentrations of this compound at surface level form the so-called photochemical smog. Ten per cent of this ozone is transported from the stratosphere and the rest is created by various mechanisms, such as the interaction between sunlight, hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides, or by electrical storms that ionize the air and make it, very briefly, a good conductor of electricity (two consecutive lightning strikes sometimes follow approximately the same trajectory). In 2013, the dangerous exposure to the sun’s rays without ozone protection reached the underwater world and caused the species that inhabit the Great Barrier Reef of Australia to suffer from skin cancer; at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_layer.
- 38.
According to experts, Hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) are considered the third generation of refrigerant gases, since they have been created to replace CFCs and HCFCs. At first, they were considered ecologically benign, because they do not damage the atmospheric ozone layer, but the presence of fluoride in their composition causes them to behave like a greenhouse gas when they are emitted, contributing to global warming. For this reason, they have to be subject to restrictions regarding their use to minimize their emissions. Their PAO (polyalphaolefin, a synthetic hydrocarbon) content is zero, but in general they have high Global Warming Potential (GWP) values, which implies a high influence on the global greenhouse effect. This means that in future all refrigeration and air-conditioning installations will be controlled by regulations related to the environment. Although HFCs represent only a small fraction of all greenhouse gases, they are growing rapidly in the atmosphere. The emission of these refrigerant gases could increase by almost twenty times in the next three decades if no measures are taken to reduce them (as can be seen in Fig. 3.4 of the US National Oceanic Administration Agency); at: https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/aggi/aggi.fig2.png.
- 39.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in 1988. Its function is to analyse, in a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent manner, scientific information of technical and socio-economic relevance in order to understand the scientific elements of the risk posed by climate change caused by human activities, their possible repercussions and the possibilities of adaptation. Approximately 2,500 scientists and representatives of roughly 100 governments participate in this Panel (cf.: http://www.ipcc.ch/home_languages_main_spanish.htm#1).
- 40.
The commitments of the signatory States of the Kyoto Protocol “to promote sustainable development” are as follows: “(a) Apply and/or continue to develop policies and measures in accordance with their national circumstances, for example the following: (i) the promotion of energy efficiency in the relevant sectors of the national economy; (ii) the protection and improvement of sinks and deposits of greenhouse gases not controlled by the Montreal Protocol, taking into account their commitments under the relevant international agreements on the environment; promotion of sustainable practices in forest management, afforestation and reforestation; (iii) the promotion of sustainable agricultural modalities in the light of climate change considerations; (iv) research, promotion, development and increased use of new and renewable forms of energy, carbon dioxide sequestration technologies and advanced and novel technologies that are environmentally sound; (v) progressive reduction or gradual elimination of market deficiencies, tax incentives, tax and tariff exemptions and subsidies that are contrary to the objective of the Convention in all greenhouse gas emitting sectors and application of market instruments; (vi) promotion of appropriate reforms in relevant sectors to promote policies and measures that limit or reduce greenhouse gas emissions not controlled by the Montreal Protocol; (vii) measures to limit and/or reduce emissions of greenhouse gases not controlled by the Montreal Protocol in the transport sector; (viii) limitation and/or reduction of methane emissions through their recovery and use in waste management as well as in the production, transport and distribution of energy” (Art. 2 of the Kyoto Protocol to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change); at: http://unfccc.int/resource/docs/convkp/kpspan.pdf.
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The French internationalist Badie (2012) has criticized the parallel establishment of “oligarchic” power groups that are not democratic in international relations and that practise a “democracy of connivance”. So the fact that the UNFCCC has been approved by 197 parties (a greater number than the 193 member states of the UN) is of great importance, a true feat of democratic multilateralism that must be regarded as a high point of contemporary international relations.
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Bear in mind that carbon footprint is one of the simplest ways to measure the impact or the mark that a person leaves on the planet in their daily lives. It is a count of the emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) which are released into the atmosphere due to their daily activities or the commercialization of a product. Therefore, the carbon footprint is the measure of the impact caused by human activities in the environment and is determined by the amount of GHG emissions produced, measured in units of the carbon dioxide equivalent. Obviously, manufactured products also leave a carbon footprint (analogous to the water footprint already mentioned), to establish it, an analysis must be made that covers the life cycle of a product (from the acquisition of raw materials to its management as waste). The carbon footprint of a product should be put on the label so that consumers with an ecological conscience can better decide which foods or products to buy based on the pollution generated as a result of the processes through which it has passed.
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“The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is one of the three mechanisms established in the Kyoto Protocol to facilitate the implementation of projects to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by developing country parties (parties not included in Annex I) in cooperation with developed countries (Annex I). The CDM is defined in Article 12 of the Protocol and aims, on the one hand, to help the countries that are parties to Annex I to comply with their targets regarding the limitation and reduction of GHG emissions, and on the other to foster sustainable development in countries that do not belong to this Annex. The mechanism allows parties not included in the aforementioned annex to benefit from project activities that result in certified emission reductions. The parties included in Annex I may use the certified reductions in emissions resulting from these activities in projects designed to comply with part of their emission limitation and reduction commitments.” Be aware that these certificates have been criticized a lot because they are market mechanisms, since the credits resulting from GHG emission reductions are commercialized and used to fulfil the party’s reduction commitments. However, between this and nothing, it is often considered better to have the CDM.
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The conclusion of the Club of Rome report (1972) was that if the current increase in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production and the exploitation of natural resources remained unchanged, the absolute limits of growth on Earth would be reached during the next hundred years (before 2072). The main thesis of the report sustains that in a limited planet the dynamics of exponential growth of population and industrialized production is not sustainable, since the Earth itself limits the growth, as the natural resources are not all renewable, arable land is finite and the capacity of the ecosystem to absorb pollution and garbage has limits. Thus, exceeding the exploitation of natural resources will lead to their depletion, followed by a collapse in agricultural and industrial production which will drastically affect the human population. For this reason, ‘zero growth’ or a steady state is considered a sensible way to avoid the collapse of the species, stopping the exponential growth of the economy and the population so that natural resources are not depleted by economic growth. The authors of the report believe that that is the only way to achieve an ecological stability that remains sustainable in the long term. Global equilibrium, then, should be based on the satisfaction of human needs, an approach which corresponds to the human development paradigm subsequently elaborated by Manfred Max Neef, Antonio Elizalde and Martin Hopenhayn and by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), which I will discuss in the next chapter, as well as the UN Report on Sustainable Development (Brundtland 1987).
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Padilla, LA. (2021). The Anthropocene: Are We in the Midst of the Sixth Mass Extinction?. In: Sustainable Development in the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene: Politik—Economics—Society—Science, vol 29. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80399-5_3
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