Monday, September 27, 2010

Sveriges nya mittenpartier

För en sådär tjugo år sedan gjorde vi på Sifo (jag var Sifo-chef på den tiden) en värdering av hur långt Socialdemokraterna skulle kunna sjunka i väljaropinionen. Hur stor var själva kärntruppen? Efter analyser och samtal blev vår bedömning att partiets nedre gräns, "bottom line", var 25 procent.

Analysen gjordes mot bakgrund av de nya strömningar som börjat dra genom Europa och USA under 1980-talet. Thatcher och Reagan förde in en ny ekonomisk politik. Sovjetunionen vittrade. Upproret 1989 på Himmelska Fridens Torg ingav hopp om demokrati också i Kina.

Även Sverige hade börjat avreglera. Kanslihushögern kämpade mot löntagarfondsvänstern. Rosornas krig avlöste varandra.

Moderaternas unge Fredrik Reinfeldt uppfattade tidigt det pågående opinionsskiftet och påbörjade - inifrån - marschen mot de framgångar som bara ett parti i den politiska "mitten" kan uppnå i ett land som Sverige. Socialdemokraterna gjorde det inte. I regeringsställning koncentrerade de sig på att ta ansvar för Sverige, gömde behoven av inre förnyelse, förlorade så småningom regeringsmakten.

Det är tämligen ofarligt att anta att den gamla Socialdemokratins väljare nu har krympt till mellan 15-20 procent av väljarkåren. Men också dess institutioner och folkrörelsebastioner har oåterkalleligen vittrat och krympt. Men därmed inte sagt att dess värderingar inte representerar mycket av det centrala i det långa och ständigt fortgående svenska samhällsbygget. Socialdemokraterna har också förflyttat sig mot det som nu är mitten i 2000-talets politik: Solidaritet, kampen mot utanförskapet, företagande, kunskap och miljö.

De två svenska "arbetarepartierna" - (S) och (M) - är den nya mitten i svensk politik. De har 60 procent av väljarkåren bakom sig. De representerar båda den politik som väljarna har beställt. Småpartierna förblev små i valet. Miljöpartiet skulle säkert ha fått över tio procent om de inte gått i koalition. FP, C och KD är marginalpartier. SD ligger bortom den sedvanliga höger/vänsterskalan. De har ingenting med, eller i, "mitten" att göra bara för att slumpen gjort partiet till en parlamentarisk tunga på vågen.

Jag tror faktiskt att Socialdemokraterna har gjort ett ganska bra val, trots bristen på intern förnyelse och att Moderaterna faktiskt borde ha gjort ett bättre val på basis av sitt långa förändringsarbete.

I den rättvisaste av världar borde väljarna få som de har röstat: en bastant majoritet för de båda arbetarepartierna som positionerat sig i mitten av mitten, till förmån för att Sverige fortsatt kan utvecklas som en förebild i den värld av gemenskap och ömsesidighet som har givits etiketten globalisering.


Publicerad i Dalarnas Tidningar: 2010-09-26 21:37

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Den tredje berättelsen

Vår tid präglas av två berättelser. Den dominerande berättelsen är den om ekonomisk tillväxt. Det är en materialistisk berättelse om jobb, välfärd, rikedom och makt. Vi antas inte kunna få för mycket av någondera. Sedan långliga tider har ekonomisk teori och politik formats för att bära berättelsen framåt. Företagsstrategier och kapitalmarknader kan numera inte fungera utan tillväxt av marknadsvärde och utdelning.

Näringslivets belöningssystem - och i ökande grad den offentliga sektorns - är konstruerade för att belöna tillväxt. Men de är också oftast konstruerade så att de eliminerar pinan för chefer som misslyckas. De eliminerar därmed också den personliga risken, som är själva kärnan i kapitalismen.

Den andra och konkurrerande berättelsen är den om tillväxtens gränser och om ekosystemens - oceanernas, atmosfärens, skogarnas, den biologiska mångfaldens - gränsvillkor. Den storyn har bara femtio år på nacken. Den berättas främst av forskare och vetenskapsmän inom en rad naturvetenskapliga områden. Kunskapen om biosfärens komplexitet ökar snabbt, därmed också insikten om dess sårbarhet. Den storyn är existentiell och moralisk.

Den ena berättelsen handlar om pengar. Den andra om miljön. Ingendera handlar egentligen om, eller utgår från, människans framtida villkor.

Man måste fråga sig varför klimatfrågan, som under förra hösten dominerade allas agendor, sedan efter Köpenhamnsfiaskot dog ut. Det var politiskt helt ofarligt att misslyckas i Köpenhamn. Det blev ingen folkstorm. Ingen minister någonstans tvingades avgå. Man bör fundera över varför? I valrörelsen har den blivit en bisats.

Jag tror vi behöver en tredje berättelse som tar människans bästa som utgångspunkt, inte ekonomin och inte ekologin. Givetvis behöver människan både ekonomiska och ekologiska resurser. De senare är en avgörande förutsättning för de förra.

Det har aldrig varit en framgångsrik strategi att både äta kakan och försöka ha den kvar. Vi kan inte såga den gren som sju och snart nio miljarder människor sitter på. Det kommer inte att gå att gömma sig för naturen. Ledande vetenskapsmän i Europa och USA varnar för att dagens mångfald av extrema väderhändelser i Ryssland, Kina, Pakistan, Niger, Chad, USA, Australien, Centraleuropa, Norra Ishavet, Honduras och Indien blir morgondagens normala.

Den här valrörelsen är förlorad i klimat-, energi- och miljöfrågan. Därför bör vi dagen efter valet påbörja samtalet om hur vi människor vill leva i framtiden. Vi är ohjälpligt beroende av, och utlämnande till varandra och till naturen.


Publicerad i Dalarnas tidningar 2010-09-17

Saturday, September 18, 2010

Climate politics

Climate is a system, an atmospheric system. A part of the biosphere, part of the living Gaia. Do we understand Gaia? Do we actually know – evidence-based - how the complex, interactive, adaptive systems of the biosphere work? Of course not. But at times, we – you and I – pretend we do.

Yes, we do have patches of knowledge, theories and some reliable science, also streams of observations.

Now, politics is also a system, a decision-making system. A part of civilization. Part of the ever-expanding civilization of humanity. 7 billions of us are just around the time corner.

Arriving at 450 ppm (of CO2 atmospheric concentration) is also just around the corner – a few decades away. Hansen (et al) showed in 2008 by collecting evidence from ice cores and out of the generous sources of geological history that the icing of the poles and glaciers materialized only at 450 ppm± 100.
350 ppm is the bottom line, as we say in business.

The Holocene’s – the last 15 000 years – climate was favourable for the growth and development of the human species. The atmospheric concentration never exceeded 280 ppm.

Over the last one million years the ppm concentration has been as low as 180 and as high as 280 during warm inter-glacial periods. We might have, in geological, been as high as 1000 ppm and over. But there is no hard evidence.

Climate has been around for billions of years. Politics only for a couple of thousand years or so. Democracy for 235 years or so. Climate science – and Earth sciences – is young disciplines, even given Linnaeus, Tyndall, Arrhenius and Keeling.

Perhaps the best news around is that the mighty and intricate climate system in all its myriad of interactions with a myriad of parts of other systems, has been thrown off its past short – for 15 000 years? – period of “balance” by human manipulations of the biosphere.

In that case, we should – at least with linear logic – be able to push it back into balance. If the effect has a cause, remove the cause and, voilà, the effect - the warming - will disappear. That is the logic dominating climate politics.

But, in systems logics, change patterns are not linear. Interdependencies change interdependencies. Feedback loops seek and create new behaviours. The very nature of inter-dependencies changes. The formidable energy contents in the atmosphere (and the troposphere and stratosphere) continuously behave differently in relation to oceans, forests, land- and ice masses and to the biodiversity. Once destabilized, can we expect a moderately stable evolutionary process like the forever ongoing climate change to be restabilized back to its original pattern of change? By humanly organized politics?

Politics is a process through which we humans come to agreement on what to collectively do. Sometimes to reach for a vision. More often than not to reach a compromise. More commonly politics react rather than preact. Climate politics are reactive to observed and foreseen fallouts of human behaviour. If the observed and foreseen fallout would mean death of billions, simple logics pray: change our behaviour.

The science community – the IPCC-crowd - evaluates the probability for catastrophic climate events to be more than 90 percent, if no massive adaptation of human and systems behaviours is undertaken. The cost of the full risk fall-out is the loss of civilization as we know it. Collapses have happened before.

However, I, for one, am not convinced that a massive, swift, global change of human behaviour – like instantaneously eliminating carbon emissions – would affect the climate system of today, as it would have affected the climate system of two hundred years ago. But, of course, we never know.

The very good news, if the dominating hypothesis that human behaviour is the trigger of global hotting (as Lovelock prefers to say), is that we logically should be able to do something about it; that politics can have a role to play; that new technologies can have a role to play.

The famous climatologist Stephen Schneider, who recently died, formulated in his last book “Science as a contact sport” the question: Can democracy deal with complexity? It is a smart question but, I am afraid, the wrong question.

Democracy – as a political decision-making system, be it in a village, municipality, region or nation – has developed as a response to the increasing complexity of modern society over the last 250 years. Democracy is a process to reconcile juxtaposed, contradictory interests in society. Society’s complexity has intensified with the exponential growth of stakeholder interests. Political systems have evolved to become more effective to deal with the complexity of nations, markets, civil society, financial systems and cultural differences.

Democracy is a process of achieving consensus on legally building agreements and to use force if they are not followed. The more parties to the process the more complex this becomes. Hence the explosion of lobbies and special interests media. In Copenhagen at Cop15, 192 countries convened and at least 10 000 special interests were assembled. Result: chaos, anger, disappointment. Democracy could not deal with the simplicity of the issue at hand: to backtrack the atmospheric concentration of CO2 to 350 ppm or less.

I took the position – after visiting Cop14 in Poznan, that the design of the negotiating process was so flawed that it could not work. To go to Copenhagen would, in my eyes, be to indirectly support something designed to fail. Most people who walked down the Copenhagen Lane were either there to make an agreement not to happen, to get a slice of the media or research cakes, or… just to be there.

It was a make believe, an illustration of action never meant to happen. A few were there in earnest. Sic transit mundi.

The fiasco of Copenhagen created no political uproar or unrest – anywhere. No prime minister, not a single minister of the environment resigned. The negotiating lobby and institutions continued intact. I can even suspect that Cop 15 with some was never seriously meant to be a success. It was the success of failure.

Climate politics – and all its beneficiaries – are about make believe, not about the realities as Hansen, Lovelock, Schneider and Pachauri see them.

I believe that Climate Politics is not about a relative situation. It is about an absolute condition. Binary. Black or white. Go or no Go. Die or Live. It is a simple choice, not complex. Democracy has proven bad to deal with simplicity of choice. Hitler or no Hitler, nuclear arms or no nucleus, Saddam or no Saddams, ethnic cleansing or not, stoning of woman or no stoning. 350 ppm or 550 ppm. Democracy is bad at dealing with simplicity of choice. It makes people die in the millions. In the end we are always forced out of our comfort zones to deal with the evil; but more often than not when it is late in the game. Ask the Tutsis. Climate politics is about the endgame.

And my own inability to speak up makes me an accomplice, an actor in the play.

Last autumn, the country of Sweden held the chairmanship of the European Union. Highest on the agenda of prime minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt, was to prepare for Copenhagen and deliver an effective agreement. But of course, the containment of the financial crises was still the overriding agenda.

In Sweden, we have one more week to go to the parliamentary elections. I can tell you that climate is but a tiny part of the agenda. In the world I come from - Business - the price of failure is brutal - bankruptcy, loss of jobs, extinction of assets.

Remuneration systems for financial and business elites have removed the pain of failure. The system is flawed by short-circuiting crucial feedback loops.

In the world of “Realpolitik”, climate politics is a make believe.

The objectives of the EU, is to cut carbon emissions by 20% from the level of 1990 by 2020. They said, however, that if other industrial countries would do the same, they would increase the target to 30%. That, my friends, is what I call truly genuine and courageous leadership.

Sweden has adapted a target of 30%, but as the country had been so successful in cutting CO2 before 1990 – not least thanks to nuclear power, it actually had the possibility to increase its emission by 4% under the Kyoto protocol.

Sweden boasts that it has succeeded to lower emissions to 8 tons per person (US 20 tons). However, if you take a systems approach, we should add 6 for the emissions that are a result of our imports and also another 8 tons per person linked to the emissions that the government owned utility Vattenfall emits over Europe. The financial results of Vattenfall are duly consolidated in the accounts of the Kingdom of Sweden.

Another objective in climate politics in this part of the world is not to allow the warming to exceed +2oC, counting from the beginning of the industrial age.

That objective is nothing but allowing politics to stay within its own comfort zone. No political action is demanded to correct the infusion of CO2 emission into the atmosphere that has happened hitherto.

But moreover, I think it is an illusion – no a delusion - to invoke people in the belief that the biosphere could be managed like a machine; that there is a thermostat out there that we can, with absolute precision, calibrate to +2oC, neither less nor more. Switch on or off.

The +2oC objective is a make-believe that we are not dealing with a living system.

We have to apply a systems analysis to a systems problem. Climate, as all of you know, knows no borders. Solutions can not be subject to national politics. The brutal truth is that there is no governance system to deal with borderless problems. (No legitimate military or policing force to put behind laws and agreements on climate, ocean, the arctic, biodiversity…)

Of course we cannot negotiate with nature. Ask the Pakistanis or the Russians or the Inuits, the Guatemalans or the people of Darfur, Tchad or Niger. Or for that matter, of the US, China, India or Central Europe.

The dominating narrative of our time is “economic growth”. Economic theory, political theory forges the institutions that are realizing this story. This story influences the demand on new technologies. The fulfilment of the narrative designs the incentive systems that encourage further economic growth to further growth. The incentive systems of the financial and business worlds are interlinked, locked in, with the incentive systems of the political world.

The competing narrative begun to emerge some 50 years ago. This narrative is one of “limits to growth and one of ecological boundary conditions” to human and economic development. This story has not yet found a solid footing in the worlds of politics and of business. The dominating narrative is materialistic and pragmatic - the limits story is existential, spiritual and moral.

The first story’s point of departure is power and money. The second story’s point of departure is the ecosystem. Neither story really has the wellbeing of human beings, people, as its point of departure.

Kofi Annan created the Global Humanitarian Forum which solidly took the people perspective on climate change and ecological decline. He, Mary Robinson and others introduced the concept of Climate Justice. I do not think that we will be able to create the politics to stabilize and protect the environment needed, if we don’t take the human being as the point of departure, not the economy, nor the ecology.

Barbara Tuchman, the great historian, observed that the only successful politics is the politics that serve people’s self interest. Solidarity with others is a part of self interest. If grand visions, utopias, are not linked to the self interests of people, we embark, as Barbara Tuchman observed, on the “March of Folly”.

It is a fact that fish, horses, trees and birds don’t vote. But people do. The politics of Climate Change can only start by creating an enlightened self-interest of the middle class and of the masses. Today it hasn’t and I’m afraid that the leadership is not taking us there.

Not even the stories of the wild-fires in Russia (and today in Siberia!), the flooding of Pakistan or the draughts in Australia are understood as evidence of threats to everyone on the planet. Interdependent as we are.

Kennedy formulated the vision for Americans to place a man on the moon within a decade. I think the proper vision for us is to state the vision to make man remain on earth. The bridge to this is how we produce the energy needed for our sustenance and value creation. The concrete vision I wish to formulate is that every human being should have access to clean electricity within 25 years. For free.

Is this doable? Of course. But things will have to be changed.

Finally, we need democracy to evolve, to deal with the rapidly increasing complexity of the human society. But we also need a legitimate political system whereby we can deal with simplicity with the Gordian knot. The simplicity of finite situations like not transgressing the life giving balances of nature.

We have to provide an operational answer to the question: “How on earth can we live together – we the humans and we with nature”.

Let me finish by reading a poem, written in 1977 by my dear friend and associate James Wine:

Is it enough that we are Americans, Brazilians, Chinese and Danes?
Is it enough that we are Economists, Family, Girls, Happy and Intellectual?
Is it enough that we are Jews, Kids, Lost, Musicians and Navigators?
Is it enough that we are Open, Powerful, Quislings, Right and Stereotyped?
Is it enough that we are Teachers, Unbelieving, Visionary, Wrong, Xenophobic, Yellow and Zen?

Is it enough that we are all the Earth’s?

Let’s celebrate.
It’s Interdependence Day!

(Draft notes for key-note at Berlin event, Sept 10-12 2010 - Interdependent Day)