At the onset of the financial crisis the United Nations put together an all-star group of global economists and economic policy-makers, chaired by Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, to assess the causes and consequences of the financial crisis and to make a set of recommendations to make sure such a crisis never happens again. The commission’s report was published with great fanfare and fed into a 2009 UN conference on the financial crisis that was met with little fanfare outside the UN system. After the conference the UN focused primarily on the global climate crisis and the Copenhagen meetings in 2010. The UN is only now beginning to pick up where it left off on global finance. This summer the UN is to decide whether it should implement one of the Stiglitz’ Commission’s core recommendations: form a panel of experts modeled after the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It should.
Did environmentalists kill climate legislation?
Climate legislation, even in its most modest and repeatedly compromised variety, failed last year. And there won’t be a second chance with anything like the current Congress. What caused this momentous failure?
Broadly speaking, there are two rival stories. It could be due to the strength of opposing or inertial forces: well-funded lobbying by fossil fuel industries, biased coverage by increasingly right-wing media, the growth of the “Tea Party” subculture and its rejection of science, dysfunctional institutions such as the U.S. Senate with its filibuster rules, and the low priority given to climate legislation by the Obama administration.
Or it could be because environmentalists screwed up and shot themselves in the foot.
Principles for a Green Economy
Henrik Selin, Guest Blogger
The organizing of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD) is just over a year away, scheduled for June 4-6, 2012. The conference preparations are fast under way, focusing on “a green economy within the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication” and the “institutional framework for sustainable development.”
Hopefully – but definitely not a given – UNCSD can help accelerate progress where a long line of earlier conferences and other major political efforts have come up embarrassingly short, moving from grand rhetoric to actual change. It is vital to recognize that this is not just an exercise in politics, but of critical importance to people all over the world as well as future generations.
The Dollar versus the Euro
Triple Crisis blogger Matias Vernengo published the following working paper for the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College on why the dollar is not currently threatened as the dominant international currency.
Hegemonic Currencies during the Crisis: The Dollar versus the Euro in a Cartalist Perspective
Conventional wisdom has suggested that the US dollar is on the verge of loosing its hegemonic position in international monetary markets at least since the 1960s with the seminal work of Robert Triffin. In fact, many authors believe that the collapse of the Bretton Woods system was the proof of the weakness of the dollar. The creation of the euro in 1999, and to a lesser extent the spectacular rise of China, consolidated the view that the dollar’s days as the key international reserve currency were numbered.
Read the full working paper at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College.
Good News on the Right to Food
Those of us advocating for changes in global and national policies on food and agriculture just got some good news. The UN Human Rights Council just renewed for another three years the mandate of Olivier De Schutter as the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food.
If you haven’t followed De Schutter’s work since the 2007-8 food price spikes brought renewed attention to the issues of hunger and agricultural development, he has been a clear and uncompromising voice for change. His rights-based approach has taken him well beyond the withering rise of hunger to the roots of the global crisis, linking climate change, agribusiness concentration, commodity speculation, and the ongoing debates of industrial versus agro-ecological development.
Recovery: The Global Green New Deal
Jomo Kwame Sundaram, re-posted from the World Policy Institute’s World Policy Blog, a Triple Crisis partner. The World Policy Journal, in its Spring 2011 issue, asked nine global experts – including Esther Duflo and Triple Crisis blogger Timothy A. Wise, among others – to provide short answers to the journal’s “big question”: What policy fixes or new innovations are needed to sustain the global economic recovery? Jomo K.S.’s answer follows. Read all the responses here.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the Green Revolution dramatically increased crop yields and food production in wheat, maize and rice. It was an achievement that would have been impossible without considerable financial support from governments, international institutions, and philanthropists. Yet, 40 years later, we need a second Green Revolution for other food crops, especially water-stressed food agriculture in arid areas. The key is finding a way to finance it that will sustain, rather than threaten, the global economic recovery.