Source: BBC World Service, The World This Week
URL: N/A
Date: 10/09/2016
Event: Matt McGrath: "the world is full of very many dangers..."
Credit: BBC World Service, The World This Week
People:
Caroline Wyatt: Hello, I'm Caroline Wyatt, and welcome to The World This Week, the programme that tells you how the world has changed in the past seven days. This was the week when China and the United States brought the Paris Climate Accord a big step closer to coming into force, an accord which "No Drama Obama" described in uncharacteristically dramatic terms.
Barack Obama: Some day we may see this as the moment that we finally decided to save our planet.
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Caroline Wyatt: ... But first, this week saw China and America formally join the Paris global climate agreement, the key step because together they're responsible for 40% of the world's carbon emissions. The Paris deal will only come into force legally after it's ratified by at least 55 countries, who between them produce 55% of global carbon emissions. President Obama said that China and the US signing up together could be a model for much more.
Barack Obama: Despite our differences on other issues, we hope that our willingness to work together on this issue will inspire greater ambition and greater action around the world. Yes, diplomacy can be difficult and progress on the world stage can be slow, but together we're proving that it's possible.
Caroline Wyatt: We'll be assessing the significance of that in a moment. But first, please take a moment to listen to Mr. Obama speaking a few days later, to an audience of young people in Laos.
Barack Obama: If you had a choice of when to be born, and you didn't know ahead of time who you were going to be, what nationality, whether you were male or female, what religion, but you said "When in human history would be the best time to be born?", the time would be now. The world has never been healthier, it's never been wealthier, it's never been better educated, it's never been less violent, more tolerant than it is today.
Caroline Wyatt: Some of which may come as a surprise to people living in Syria, for example. But still, the climate change deal is a genuine and important step forward. Our Global Affairs correspondent Naomi Grimley and our Environment correspondent Matt McGrath join me to discuss whether Mr. Obama is right to be so upbeat about the state of the world, and what that climate change deal means.
Matt McGrath: It's quite significant and it's way ahead of schedule, and there are a number of good reasons for that, but I think principally what's happening here with the US and China and a number of other countries signing the Paris climate agreement - not just signing it but ratifying it - is fear of President Trump undoing all their good work, and the hope is, amongst many countries, they can get it ratified before the election takes place in the United States, then the United States will be tied in for four years, at the very least. And even though Donald Trump has said he would, you know, pull out of it, it would still give - the agreement would be alive and living and maybe could survive without the United States.
Caroline Wyatt: So this seems like good news. Naomi, as news broadcasters, we normally look at the world as being full of doom and gloom, of war and dying and people fighting. President Obama also made clear that he believed this is in fact the very best time to be alive, as a human on this planet. Is that measurably true?
Naomi Grimley: Well, certainly if you look at - I've got a raft of graphs in front of me, and on many indicators things are getting better. The homicide rate, globally, is falling, the number of people dying on the battlefield is falling, life expectancy has shot up, worldwide, child mortality down in every country - in fact, it's halved, worldwide, in the last 20 years. I could go on and on and on - we are becoming less violent, we're better fed, better educated, and of course, journalists like you and I do not often cover these stories, because they're happening incrementally, they're not news, like an earthquake is, and we do tend to have what's called a "negativity bias", we're drawn to telling people about bad things - that goes back to our evolutionary fight or flight, we tend to focus on the bad things, and that gives us an adrenaline rush. And more and more academics are saying, you know, perhaps we should focus a bit more on the good things that are happening in the world.
Matt McGrath: Nah, there's definitely good things - I wouldn't want to disagree with my esteemed colleague in saying that there wasn't lots of positives happening for people born at this particular point. But the world is full of very many dangers, as well, in particular in relation to the environment - the pressures on the environment being put by the increasing numbers of us, the increasing consumption of those resources that we're using. Give an example - Bangladesh, held up as a great example of a country that's very vulnerable to climate change, doing its best to get on board with solar power. They've increased their number of people, there's several million people, 12 or 13 million people using solar power in Bangladesh. But at the same time, they're committed to using much more coal, so they're going to increase their coal from 2% of their electricity to 50% of their electricity, by 2030. And at the same time, the tide is rising all the time, so, you know, people may be living longer in Bangladesh, enjoying more fruitful lives, enjoying more of the benefits of, you know, the Western way, or whatever it might be. But they're living at a very - in a very risky place, as well, and we are seeing an absolute increase in the number of significant weather events, and the risks of those weather events and the damage that they can cause has never been greater.
Caroline Wyatt: So in fact it's not all good news, Naomi.
Naomi Grimley: Matt makes a good point, that sometimes we think we're progressing - so, life expectancy gets longer but then that leads to overpopulation in certain areas. The other thing to point out is with technology, we think, on the whole, that technology is a good thing - more transparency with governments and better data, we understand more about what's going on in the world, we're better connected with our friends across the world. But then there are a host of other problems that come out of new technologies - there's a lot written recently in Britain about loneliness and the danger that we're spending too much time on social media and that we're not interacting in the way that our parents and grandparents did, with each other, also things like online porn, and is there a crisis there that's being stored up for the future. So maybe we think we're progressing and then we create new problems which hold us back, in other ways.
Matt McGrath: I think that's true, I mean I think there's a great arrogance that comes from our belief that we can conquer and do everything and change the world. And you only have to look at things like what happened in Louisiana, with floods recently, you know - they built defences there for once in a hundred years flood, they got a flood that was a once in a thousand years, many people believed it was exacerbated by climate change. And the defences are are useless. We have power cuts in India, a regular way of life, you have a power cut in New York for half a day and there's a crime wave. You know, we have these societies that are very vulnerable to these events that we don't think will happen to us again, and in a time when the environment has never been at a greater stretch, never having more of us there, never having more of us with expectations that we should have it all.
Caroline Wyatt: Matt McGrath and Naomi Grimley.