2011 Year-Ender (II)

The power shift from the old Atlantic world to the emerging economies of Asia was going to happen eventually in any case: the five centuries when the Europeans and their overseas kin were global top dogs are at an end. But the arrogant risk-taking, blind greed, and sheer ignorance that caused the crash of 2008 and its after-shocks are making the shift happen a lot faster.

And so to the really bad news. The Arctic sea ice is disappearing faster than even the pessimists feared, massive floods are devastating huge areas (Pakistan, Thailand, Australia), and sea level is rising at twice the predicted speed, but nothing will be done about it for the next ten years. That, effectively, was the decision – or rather, the non-decision – taken at the annual climate change summit in Durban in December.

It has been clear since the debacle at Copenhagen in 2009 that a global agreement to curb the warming was in grave trouble, but the deal in Durban may have been worse than no deal at all. The only existing agreement, the Kyoto Protocol of fifteen years ago, has been extended for another five years, but it only limits the emissions of the developed countries, and even they will not be required to meet any stricter targets than those they accepted in 1997.

The emerging economies, whose emissions are growing very fast, still face no restrictions at all, although China is already the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. The target date agreed for a new, more ambitious global agreement is now 2015, but they won’t even start talking about that until 2013. And even if they do make a new deal by 2015, which is far from certain, they have already agreed that it will not go into effect until 2020.

It is not the first time that short-term self-interest has triumphed over the long-term common interest, but it may be the worst time. By 2020 it will probably be impossible to prevent the rise in average global temperature from exceeding 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F), which is generally agreed to be the point of no return. After that, we will probably find ourselves in a new world of runaway warming. We know it, and yet we do nothing.

Compared to these huge changes in world politics, the global economy, and climate policy, everything else that happened in 2011 was very small potatoes, but some of it was very interesting.

Three bad men died, two of them violently: North Korea’s Kim Jong-il, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, and al-Qaeda’s founder Osama bin Laden. Four Latin American countries – Argentina, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Peru – elected new presidents. Five African countries – Congo, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Zimbabwe and Zambia – achieved higher economic growth rates than Brazil (though that was partly due to higher commodity prices).

An earthquake and tsunami devastated a large area of northern Japan, and the radioactive emissions from damaged nuclear reactors – about one-tenth of what came out of Chernobyl in 1986 – caused a global mini-panic. But in the end, the only country that announced a plan to shut down its reactors was Germany. (They’ll burn coal instead. Oh, good.)

American troops finally left Iraq in December, still insisting that they had accomplished their mission, whatever it was. NATO deployed its air power to help the rebels win in Libya, but it isn’t going to Syria. And the final shuttle flight from Cape Canaveral went into orbit in July. Dr Mike Griffin, the former head of NASA, said that “the human spaceflight program of the US will come to an end for the indefinite future” – but the Russians and the Chinese are still sending people into space, and the Indians and the Europeans are working on it.

The multi-national African “peacekeeping” force that is fighting in Somalia grew dramatically in size, although that is no guarantee of success. Sudan split into two countries. And Nigeria faced a growing terrorist threat from the Islamist “Boko Haram” sect.

The race to become the Republican presidential candidate in the United States started as farce and went straight downhill, with each “anybody but Mitt Romney” contender less plausible than the one before. It resembled the old film “Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines,” about a 1910 air race from London to Paris, in which a collection of extremely weird pilots in ramshackle biplanes and tri-planes took turns being briefly in the lead and then crashed and burned. So Barack Obama will probably be back in 2012.

There were widespread riots in England in August, and the “Occupy” movement spread across the United States like measles (and went away almost as quickly). They were both really about the growing gap between the rich and the poor, but they had as little visible impact on how governments do business as anti-corruption campaigner Anna Hazare’s televised hunger strike in India.

India probably grew faster than China this year, though the final figures are not in – and India’s economy, unlike China’s, is not threatened by the biggest housing bubble in the history of the world. That race, if it really is a race, may have an unexpected result, though we will have to wait a couple of decades to know for sure.

Oh, and the world’s population reached the seven billion mark in 2011. It passed through one billion around 1800, and was still only 2 billion in 1940. Enough said.*

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