This June, the 20-year anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit will be held in Rio de Janeiro. The first summit was the world's largest meeting of world leaders and came up with Agenda 21--an international framework for sustainable development--the Convention on Biodiversity, and the Framework Convention on Climate Change. In a nutshell, decision-makers from around the world realized how issues of poverty, environmental degradation, and consumption are interrelated and sought to begin a process to solve them.
President Obama is entering the 2012 campaign season with messages of economic equity, environmental quality, and social welfare. That is the essence of sustainable development, which could help him tie together the disparate threads of his campaign into a meaningful message that resonates with voters and sets an ambitious agenda for his second term that clears away the missteps and disappointments of his administration thus far.
How would sustainable development look as a campaign message?
President Obama is entering the 2012 campaign season with messages of economic equity, environmental quality, and social welfare. That is the essence of sustainable development, which could help him tie together the disparate threads of his campaign into a meaningful message that resonates with voters and sets an ambitious agenda for his second term that clears away the missteps and disappointments of his administration thus far.
How would sustainable development look as a campaign message?
- The economy: Sustainability sees the current economic system, which is based on debt-financed growth that flows primarily to the world's wealthiest, as destructive and unable to make the majority of Americans happier. Instead of pursuing a reckless growth agenda, which was at the root of the recent financial crisis, we should focus on improving the quality of our lives. Sustainability can put us on the road to long-term economic prosperity.
- Social equity: The worst part of the current recession and the economic trends in the past decades is how one sector of the U.S. population has enriched itself as the majority has become more financially insecure. Obama's calls for a "Buffett Rule" and a tax system fairer to the middle and working class play into sustainability's call for social equity. His health care plan is also compatible with this theme.
- The national debt: This is perhaps the political issue that is easiest to tie explicitly to sustainability, but which hasn't yet. It is not sustainable to ask future generations to pay for the excesses of a government that can't pay for itself. A sustainability agenda would call for major structural budgetary changes to guarantee long-term fiscal balance.
- Gas prices: Gas prices are rising because global demand for oil is rising precisely as the easiest reserves run dry. Americans are unique in the developed world in our lack of transportation freedom: the overwhelming majority have to drive to their desired destinations. This is tyranny of the worst sort, and makes us slaves to gas prices set on the world market. A sensible gas policy would call for a larger diversity of transportation, coupled with land-use planning that made it possible to walk or bike to work, school, or the grocery store; take a bus to the library; and ride the train to grandma's. Only in that way would gas prices--which will only get higher in coming decades--lose their harmful grip over us.
