Monbiot: If an hour is a long time in politics, we must start thinking in centuries

From banking to the climate, the wreckage of short-termism is stark, and the need for a 100-year committee is plain

The financial crisis is just one consequence of a system which demands that governments sacrifice long-term survival for short-term gains. In this case, political leaders on both sides of the Atlantic - from Reagan to Brown - decided to appease business lobbyists and boost short-term growth by allowing the banks to use new financial instruments, many of which were as dodgy as a three-pound coin. It made perfect political sense, as long as the inevitable crash took place after they left office.

For similar reasons we are likely to be ambushed by other nasty surprises: runaway climate change, resource depletion, foreign policy blowback, new surveillance and genetic technologies, skills shortages, demographic change, a declining tax base, private and public debt. Politics is the art of shifting trouble from the living to the unborn.

At first sight, the government's strengthening last week of the UK's climate change target seems like an exception to this political short-termism. In fact something rather interesting is taking place in Britain. While prime ministers in Italy and eastern Europe are demanding a bonfire of environmental measures in order to save the economy, in the UK politicians from all the major parties have made the connection between environmental destruction and economic meltdown. One of the fastest spreading memes is the proposal for a Green New Deal: a Keynesian package of environmental works designed to boost employment and channel public investment. If this idea is adopted, it won't be the first time that it has helped to rescue a major economy. The biggest and most successful component of Roosevelt's New Deal was the Civilian Conservation Corps, which employed three million people to plant trees and stop soil erosion.

But all such proposals soon collide with the realities of the political cycle. As Ed Miliband, the climate change secretary, admitted, "signing up to an 80% cut in 2050, when most of us will not be around, is the easy part; the hard part is meeting it, and meeting the milestones that will show we are on track." A recent paper in the journal Energy Policy shows that the government is pursuing the wrong policies to meet the wrong targets, produced by using the wrong methods to assess the wrong data. (Otherwise it's more or less on track.)

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/21/economy-green-politics