Excerpt
Mainstream Economics and International Treaties
One reason why the international community has not been successful in forging agreements that could resolve the environmental crisis is that countries involved in the process of negotiating these agreements routinely invoke the legal principle of state sovereignty to protect their economic interests. There is, however, another major reason why these agreements have not been effective. The economic interests that the representatives of nation-states are seeking to protect are based on unscientific assumptions about the dynamics of market systems in neoclassical economic theory. Another related problem is that these assumptions are embedded in the mathematical theories that serve as the basis for making cost-benefit analysis and the results of these analysis almost invariably indicate that the costs of implementing scientifically viable economic policies and solutions are greater than the benefits. The unfortunate result is that the scientifically viable economic policies and solutions are typically nothing more than distant memories when the terms of a final agreement are approved.
This explains why the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (1992) failed to protect the climate system, why the Convention on Biological Diversity (1992) did not even begun to reduce losses in biodiversity, and why the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification (1994) did not slow, much less reverse, this process. The U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (1982) and a host of other international agreements intended to reduce ocean pollution, prevent overfishing and protect endangered species failed to meet any of these objectives. Nonbinding principles that would promote more sustainable management of forests were agreed to at the U.N.'s Earth Summit (1992) but negotiations broke down prior to the point where a general framework convention could be articulated. A U.N. Convention on the Non-Navigable Uses of International Watercourses has been negotiated, but it has not gone into effect because some sovereign nation-states perceived this agreement as a threat to their economic interests.
Scientific evidence may play a supportive and enabling role in some negotiations, but only as a minimum condition for serious consideration of an environmental issue. But what is not widely known is that these agreements made a mockery of the scientifically based solutions. In the vast majority of negotiations on a great range of issues, such as commercial whaling, hazardous waste trade, loss of biodiversity, conditions in the Antarctic, and ocean dumping of radioactive waste, the scientific evidence was not given serious consideration. When this evidence was perceived as a direct threat to the perceived economic interests of particular nation-states, it was either systematically ignored or explicitly rejected by the representatives of these states.
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