Let’s be Norway (part 2)

by | Jun 15, 2012


So I’m in South Korea this week, and yesterday heard a presentation on ‘Green Growth’ from a senior government official.  Korea wants to stay at at the head of the global agenda on green growth, so what are they doing – only building a whole new ‘green growth park’, with plans to set up a technology centre, a new globlal institution for capacity building on green growth, and even maybe a new international academic centre on green growth too….The confidence, and the resources available, and the speed with which they are put to use, are quite staggering.

And then this morning I look at the newspaper in the hotel and it’s all Eurozone crisis and US election nightmares – and a tittilating little piece in Newsweek saying that at long last it looks as if the USA is going to sign up to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, because they’re more worried about curbing China’s power than about the possible implications for their own freedom of movement on the oceans. This is what the transfer of power from West to East looks like.

Well I’m about to get on the plane and go back to a country that, from here, looks pretty irrelvant.  But it could all turn out for the best.  As Alex suggested here two years ago – let’s be Norway!

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