Energy and sustainable development at global environmental summits
Energy and sustainable development at global environmental summits
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Introduction
The 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) was the most recent of a series of attempts to deal holistically with global environmental issues by holding high-profile, multi-issue policy summits. The last thirty years of such summitry have not only yielded a rapidly expanding global environmental agenda but have also witnessed a noteworthy evolution in the policy framing of global environmental issues.
The first of these mega-meetings, held at Stockholm, Sweden, in 1972, was called the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE) and dealt with – as its name rightly suggests – a rather small set of issues that were most directly related to the ‘human environment’. Twenty years later, a far more elaborate agenda came under discussion at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, when the more ambitiously titled United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) sought to radically expand the global agenda by moving well beyond the merely environmental and seeking to establish ‘environment and development’ as the central policymaking framework. By 2002, in Johannesburg, South Africa, the concept of ‘sustainable development’ which had already begun to assume salience at Rio gained further centrality not only by being incorporated into summit’s title but also by becoming the key motivator of the expanded Johannesburg agenda, which now included such issues as sanitation, HIV/AIDS and poverty eradication.
If this evolution – from a policy framework principally rooted in ‘environmental’ concerns to one imbedded in the broader and more integrated notion of ‘sustainable development’ – is to be anything more than rhetorical it should be reflected not only in the titles of the major conferences but also in how particular issues are tackled at these summits. This paper will review one such issue, energy, in terms of a) how it relates to sustainable development at a conceptual level; and b) whether there is any noticeable difference in how it was treated at the three major global environmental summits, in particular, at WSSD./.../
posted by Aloyzio Achutti at 11:56 PM
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Considered the inventor of quantum theory, Max Planck shocked the science world by showing that atoms emit or absorb energy in bundles, or quanta, not in a continuous stream as taught by Newtonian physics. This insight, along with subsequent developments by Einstein, Bohr, and others, established the revolutionary quantum theory of modern physics and earned Planck the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics. In 1945, Planck's son was executed following a failed attempt to assassinate what political figure?
