The Digital Civilizations Interviews

Organization

Such a turnaround in human affairs required some organizing.

The UN was only too happy to provide its basis, although governments also insisted on creating two separate, hopefully leaner and meaner, international agencies: ClimaPlan, dealing with climate change, NoWaste, dealing with CO2 emissions, pollution and waste, and PowerShift, dealing with renewable energy and energy efficiency. These agencies were given real supranational powers to enforce decisions, and fund large-scale projects. «Oil Severance» was succeeded by two programmes, «Factor 4» – taking into account the Kyoto III discussions, which were looking at a 75% reduction in emissions over 2007 levels by 2060 – and «Emergency Readiness» – designed to forecast, detect and manage extreme climate-related catastrophes and their aftermath. But perhaps the most innovative (and controversial) decision was to give these agencies some supervisory power over national, local or corporate environmental regulations and programmes.

The counterpart to these powers was extreme accountability. All the agencies' internal information, all their emails, were open to public scrutiny, each of their activities had its own discussion plaza on the Metaverse, to which thousands of lobbies, groups and private citizens contributed at least occasionally.

The third Doha cycle on international trade finally produced an agreement in 2022, 21 years after its launch. The agreement included the abandon of most Least Advanced Countries' debts, the dismantlement of agricultural subsidies in developed countries (including the EU's Common Agricultural Policy), the opening of northern market to products from the South. Perhaps its most innovative provision was a clear encouragement to «offshoring» of service-related activities, seen as a way to help developing countries the resource-hungry industrial development phase – and possibly, to relieve migratory pressures, so that developed countries could more easily set up immigration quotas based on their needs and common training & co-development programmes.