The Return of a Forgotten Killer

Hours before Donald Trump announced that the US would be quitting the Paris carbon-cutting treaty, UN Secretary General António Guterres took to the President's preferred medium, Twitter, to declare that climate action is “unstoppable”.

The clear message, reinforced by leaders from the European Union and China, is that the rest of the world will continue with the Paris Treaty without US involvement. Their resolve is quickly going to smash into three incontrovertible truths.

The trade war between the United States and China has prompted many commentators to focus on the economic pain that will be felt by the two sides: hitting U.S. consumers in the pocket, and causing pain for Chinese exporters. There are a small number of supposed winners, with production predicted to shift from China to countries like Vietnam, Cambodia or India.

But there’s a far bigger concern, which is that decision-makers across the world have shifted sharply against the most powerful global economic development tool ever been discovered.

In a world prone to fickle media attention to short-term crises, we often neglect to consider a long-term game plan for humanity. But right now the world’s 193 governments are gearing up to set our priorities for the next decade and a half at the United Nations’ annual meeting in September 2015. This is a debate worth having, but almost no one has heard anything about it.