At first blush an E8 seems pretty useless. The G8 leaders are already up to their hips in climate change.
Environmentalists broke into power stations across Italy and shed their clothes in downtown Rome on Wednesday as world leaders discussed a new deal to combat global warming. Dozens of activists from 18 countries scaled smokestacks and occupied four Italian coal-fired power plants, hanging banners that called on the Group of Eight summit in central Italy to take the lead in fighting climate change, Greenpeace said.
So why press for an E8? The Council on Foreign Relations website suggests why:
Meetings are intended to foster consensus on global issues such as economic growth and crisis management, global security, energy, and terrorism. Because the G8 is limited in its membership and unable to force its members to comply with the summit's policies and objectives, some experts question its overall effectiveness.
Democracy Journal's Edward Gresser (reg req at the link) makes the further case for global enforcement.
The gains of Copenhagen will be fleeting unless the world's nations create a Global Environmental Organization to enforce them.
Here's a summary of what a E8 would consist of, including this difficult to swallow bit:
Fourth, an E8 could facilitate a more integrated treatment of global environmental issues, both within and among governments. Too often environmental issues are consigned to marginalized environmental ministries, despite the capacity of these issues to affect the economy and national security.
Translation: We'll bypass each country's defense, economic and environmental priorities to make sure we get what we want done. G8 lets industrialized nations carry forward on their own terms. That's not good enough. The E8's role will be creating and enforcing environmental law - climate law in particular - like some sort of global EPA. You think cap and trade is a mess? Just wait.
JBS.org's James Heiser warns that the last thing we need is a body of global climate czars that isn't accountable to any government:
[T]he proposed E8 would be the ‘power behind all the thrones’; whether inside or outside of existing environmental conventions, it would be setting the terms of debate, sort of like a band of Ecological Rosicrucians. All of the pesky problems of allowing national governments — which are arguably accountable to their citizenry — to be meaningfully engaged in environmental decisions would simply be swept aside.
Indeed.
So the idea of an international, independent environmental body is already hatched. All we need now is a President and/or Senate and/or a Supreme Court who are willing to turn over the keys to the country.
Or an American population that will allow it.
One more thought from a Christian perspective in the comments here:
Conservatives, who normally acknowledge the sovereignty of God in other matters, need to face a - dare I say it? - inconvenient truth: He has already made His will known on this subject as well. He built certain laws into His Creation, namely the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, and so on - laws that apply to all humanity, believer and nonbeliever alike, with no regard for national borders - laws that we ignore or try to circumvent at our peril. Therefore, it makes sense that we should discuss our actions in light of those laws, and do so as a species.
True, God's law does transcend man's political boundaries. But does that mean "what would Jesus do?" for the planet include abandoning our representative government?
