The Digital Civilizations Interviews

As soon as he took office, Obama boosted the second round of Kyoto discussions, actively driving them to a conclusion at the end of 2009. Europe and all other G8 countries committed to halving their CO2 emissions by 2050, and to meeting again 5 years down the road in order to consider more ambitious goals. For the first time, most emerging economies and developing countries (China being the exception) also agreed to CO2 emission reductions, under the condition that developed countries would provide financial help, technology transfer and more importantly, open up their markets – which they mostly did. The Doha trade negotiation cycle was reopened and made swift progress, despite strong protests in the West. Within one year, 183 countries had signed the Kyoto II protocol.

In political circles, «Green» had become a passport to election. Everybody came up with their new idea: SUVs were banned from several cities and states, private swimming pools were heavily taxed, garbage recycling was made mandatory, climatization became subject to strict rules. Public R&D funding was reoriented towards sustainability, with a focus on quick and visible results: Renewable energy, energy efficiency, resource-efficient and nutrient genetically modified plants and animals, ecosystem modelling, next-generation nuclear energy, etc.

Corporations followed suit. All large corporations published environmental commitments and many were serious about fulfilling them. Smaller corporations and developing country firms, though, had more difficulties and often complained this move was another way of putting pressure on subcontractors or of closing the door to smaller competitors.

Of course, not everybody liked that new environmental bias. Free market advocates warned that this surge in regulatory activity would stifle growth and might produce consequences worse than the problems they were supposed to solve. Oil producers, who had until then been investing heavily in new extraction methods, planning on continued growth of demand, started worrying. Their lobbying efforts against ecotaxes were made difficult by the general feeling that they were at least (and in some cases, politically) morally responsible for the state of the planet – and indeed, California passed an ecotax in 2012, followed by the EU in 2013.

So when a series of deadly bombs went off almost simultaneously in capitals that were all part of the spearheading group of «enlightened» countries (as they called themselves), including London on the eve of the 2012 Olympics closure, killing more than 4,000 people… well, there were serious doubts as to where the decision and the means of execution came from. London's Olympics were to be the first «carbon-neutral» major sports event; Rome, the second targeted city, was a leading proponent of the European ecotax; San Francisco was the third and Delhi the fourth, a few months after the Indian government had announced its plans to lead a second «Green revolution» in the third world, this time mixing agricultural productivity and environmental sustainability – and with a strong focus on agrofuels.