The First Global Revolution

The First Global Revolution is a book written by Alexander King and Bertrand Schneider, and published by Pantheon Books in 1991. The book follows up the earlier 1972 work-product from the Club of Rome titled The Limits to Growth. The tagline of "The First Global Revolution" is, A Report by the Council of the Club of Rome. The book was intended as a blueprint for the 21st century putting forward a strategy for world survival at the onset of what they called the world's first global revolution.^[1]

Contents

• The Problematique

• The Whirlwind of Change
• Some Areas of Acute Concern
• The International Mismanagement of the World Economy
• Intimitations of Solidarity
• The Vacuum
• The Human Malaise
• Conclusion: The Challenge

• The Resolutique

• Introduction
• The Three Immediacies
• Governance and the Capacity to Govern
• Agents of the Resolutique
• Motivations and Values
• Learning Our Way Into a New Era

Overview

The book is a blueprint for the twenty-first century at a time when the Club of Rome thought that the onset of the first global revolution was upon them. The authors saw the world coming into a global-scale societal revolution amid social, economic, technological, and cultural upheavals that started to push humanity into an unknown. The goal of the book was to outline a strategy for mobilizing the world's governments for environmental security and clean energy by purposefully converting the world from a military to a civil economy, tackling global warming and to solve the energy problem, dealing with world poverty and disparities between the northern hemisphere and the Southern Hemisphere.

The book saw humankind at the center of the revolution centered on:

• Global economic growth
• New technologies
• Governments and the ability to govern
• Mass Media
• Global food security
• Water availability
• Environment
• Energy
• Population growth
• Learning systems
• Values/Religions
• Materials

The work being the product of a Think Tank, it attempted to transcend the nation-state governance paradigm of the nineteenth-century and the twentieth-century and sought a way to eliminate some of the challenges seen inherent with those older systems of global governance. As such, it explored new and sometimes controversial viewpoints.

Criticism

Many of the members of the Club of Rome are seen as Elites, and critics argue passages in the book looking at how to unite divided nations by motivating them to rally around a new common fabricated enemy are clear indicators the work is conspiratorial in nature. In one passage the authors conjecture about new needed enemies or rally points for global society, "either a real one or else one invented for the purpose." Critics argue that statements like the previous made the book conspiratorial. Although, this kind of viewpoint can be seen as conspiratorial in one interpretation, it can also be seen as simply a group of well-intentioned geopolitical leaders and academics like Henry Kissinger "thinking outside the box" and exploring how to prevent shortfalls in the global governance models of the nineteenth-century and the twentieth-century like balance of power. the failure of those older models are widely blamed by Henry Kissinger in his 1994 book Diplomacy with leading to the global human catastrophes of the First World War And the Second World War.^[2]

The following passage is generally pointed-to as a smoking gun and radical in the extreme by critics:

Because of the sudden absence of traditional enemies, "new enemies must be identified."^[2] "In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill....All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself."^[3]

See also

• Politics of global warming
• United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and accompanying Kyoto Protocol (CO2 Regulations)
• 2012 United Nations Climate Change Conference
• Post–Kyoto Protocol negotiations on greenhouse gas emissions
• Green Climate Fund
• Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer and accompanying Montreal Protocol (Ozone Regulation - Context)
• Climate and Clean Air Coalition to Reduce Short-Lived Climate Pollutants
• Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change
• Scorcher: The Dirty Politics of Climate Change

References