An Irish appeal for a global p2p architecture for climate change

Via Helen Titchen Beeth and Chris Chapman:

Topic: Citizen’s initiative to start building an independent global climate architecture Who else is thinking along these lines?

Basis of the appeal:

* “The latest news from the climate scientists leaves no doubt that climate change presents humanity with an unprecedented challenge – we face an emergency which could even possibly be terminal for human civilisation.

* Nothing less than a radical transformation of the global economy is needed if current trends are to be reversed. We need to replace a system designed to produce money-growth for the benefit of the rich, a system that treats the Earth’s life-support systems an externalities, with one designed for sustainability and social justice.

* The mainstream system is far too rigid to be able to change itself. Moreover the system is itself in crisis at this time due fundamentally to the impossibility of endless growth on a finite Earth. So this may be an opportunity to start building a new global architecture from scratch.

* New systems always evolve by reconfiguring many of the components of the old system. A new global structure could be designed around two familiar concepts: the commons and the trust. The concept of the Earth’s life-support systems as commons has been developed by Peter Barnes in his two books ‘Who Owns the Sky?’ and ‘Capitalism 3.0’. The global atmosphere is a commons which, like any other over-used commons, must be regulated, regulated in the way that many other commons are already regulated, by establishing a trust to take responsibility for restoring the commons.

* This requires a global trust. here has already ben a lot of thinking on how such a trust could work (see www.earthinc.org/earth_atmosphere_trust).

* Establishing such a trust is something we don’t need governments to do: anyone can set up a trust. So we are asking ourselves: why don’t we simply do that? Just as a small group of Swiss citizens took the initiative that led to the International Red Cross being established in the 19th Century (see story below), so our idea is that a small group of world citizens can start the process of building a new global architecture by setting up a global climate or atmosphere trust.

* This is an enormous task but it is doable and the first step is to form a small group to set about doing this.

Will anyone else already thinking along these lines, or who can point me to anyone who is, or who would like to discuss this, please email me at [email protected].

Background: Where this proposals fits in with other work:

This proposal seeks to fill a big gap in the current responses to the increasingly bad news coming from the climate experts. The UK-based Transition Movement is one very important response (see www.transition.org). Another is the work being done on schemes to limit emissions (by organisations such as Feasta and Peter Barnes’s Tomales Bay Institute and authors such as Oliver Tickell – see www.feasta.org, www.capanddividend.org and www.kyoto2.org), whilst campaigns to put pressure on governments on this and related issues have mass support in many countries (see www.climatecamp.org).

But in terms of the global architecture, the global structures through which to make the necessary global level decisions and administer global level schemes to meet the crisis, the process under the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and 1997 Kyoto Protocol is generally seen as ‘the only show in town’. Most campaigners see lobbying governments as the only way to forward the agenda and very few people seem to be looking at how whatever new system might be set up by governments to operate from the end of 2012, when Kyoto expires, could be insulated from ‘malign’ forces.

This proposal challenges these assumptions. There is another way. In Tom Paine’s words ‘we have the power to build a new world’. Even on the global stage, we don’t have to leave it to governments to take the initiative. Henry Dunant and his colleagues who founded the International Committee of the Red Cross proved that in the middle of the 19th Century: see their story below. Professor Philip Allott in his two books Eunomia and The Health of Nations – Society and Law beyond the State, has provided the theoretical vision for international society as a society of which we, the people, are members, as opposed to the conventional idea that it consists of a collection of states, together with a number of intergovernmental organisations. And within the last couple of decades, as Philippe Sands has written in his Principles of International Environmental Law, in the environmental field, “international law is gradually moving away from an approach which treats international society as comprising a community of states, and is increasingly encompassing the persona, (both legal and natural) within and among those states”.

Climate change is but one of a clutch of inter-connected global crises facing the global community. These are now very widely recognised as way beyond the control of governments to cope with adequately. This, surely, is the moment to challenge the state government monopoly of the global stage, to which they have no natural or democratic right. Most people feel powerless to even think of doing this. But one way, perhaps the only way, to do this is to start something new in parallel, and make sure that it is well designed for the purposes for which it is created, just as the Transition Movement is doing at the local level.

Moreover today we have the advantage of the many insights of scientists and systems thinkers over the last few decades. We can now see the global economy as a self-organising system, and Gaia – James Lovelock’s hyothesis put forward in 1972 and eventually recognised by the scientific community in the Amsterdam Declaration of 2001 – as the self-organising system with which the human economy must develop a balanced relationship. That is the principle that has to be respected if our civilisation is to be sure of surviving this century. And we now also have principles for organisational management based on self-organisation, in particular Stafford Beer’s Viable Systems Model, to guide the design of a new global architecture.

The initiative proposed here can be developed in parallel with, not in competition with, continued pressure on governments engaged in the Kyoto process and other existing governmental entities at all levels. As the proposal is developed and gains public support, public pressure can be directed at persuading governments to cooperate with the trust. We will need people power; and I believe we will have people power, making maximum use of new communications technology and techniques for mass collaboration.”

1 Comment An Irish appeal for a global p2p architecture for climate change

  1. AvatarSusmita Barua

    I am very much in agreement that the global warming challenge requires: “Nothing less than a radical transformation of the global economy is needed if current trends are to be reversed. We need to replace a system designed to produce money-growth for the benefit of the rich, a system that treats the Earth’s life-support systems an externalities, with one designed for sustainability and social justice.”

    And I beleive it is possible to build a global p2p architecture for economic transformation by replacing the debt-based colonial money paradigm with a new vision, mindful definition and shared understanding of currency.

    http://conscious-capitalism.blogspot.com

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