(Bloomberg Opinion) -- If you’re a politician accused of short-term thinking, here’s a strategy: Set a bold policy goal and a deadline far enough in the future that you can be sure you will no longer be in office. And remember to make that date a nice round number.
Most promises of this kind revolve around public health or the environment. In England, the government has pledged to end smoking by 2030. Around the world, 13 countries have announced plans to phase out fossil fuel-powered vehicles between 2030 and 2040. Some cities have even gone further: Amsterdam plans to ban all polluting vehicles by 2030. The new president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, called for a 50% reduction in carbon emissions from their 1990 levels by 2030 – only to raise that target to 55% after pressure from European lawmakers.
Such long-term commitments exist in other areas, too. The pledge North Atlantic Treaty Organization members took in in 2014 to increase defense spending to 2% of economic output “within a decade” is a famous example.
All these promises have something in common: They aren’t set down in any binding legislation. Politicians who want to look like long-term, strategic thinkers are courteous enough to their successors not to tie their hands. In the U.K. and most other countries, parliaments aren’t allowed to bind their successors – but erasing environment-friendly laws from the statute book would eat into future legislators’ political capital.
When the nice round date draws uncomfortably close, though, the preferred mode of operation is simply to move the goalposts.
A 2018 report by Frontier Economics, commissioned by tobacco company Philip Morris, suggested there’s a chance the goal will be met – in 2029. According to the Office of National Statistics, the proportion of adult smokers has been falling, on average, by 0.6 percentage points a year since 2001. That implies the 5% goal should be reached by 2038. Expect the target to be moved to 2040 in coming years.
This, after all, is what happens to ambitious climate goals. During last year’s talks to produce a coalition government in Germany, politicians agreed to water down the country’s target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 40% from their 1990 level by 2020. The coalition treaty only talks of “reducing the gap” between reality and the target set in 2002. The latest projections see only a 32% cut being achieved by 2020. Obviously, the government that made the original pledge is no longer around.
It’s pretty safe to say, too, that NATO’s European members won’t meet the alliance’s 2% spending goal by the end of 2024. On average, they have increased defense spending by 0.03 percentage points of gross domestic product every year since 2016; at that rate, they will need another 15 years to hit the target – even with continued goading from the U.S., which isn’t guaranteed.
The same fate probably awaits the fossil fuel car bans. In France, for example, 10,569 battery electric vehicles were sold in the first quarter of this year – about 1.9% of new passenger car registrations. That marked a 44.3% year-on-year increase. At this rate, France could phase out internal combustion engines by 2030. But it’s unclear what exactly the French government is doing to maintain this pace. If growth drops to a tamer, but still ambitious, 15% a year, it would take until 2048 for all new car sales to be electric. It would take an outright ban on petrol and diesel cars to hit the target faster – but that is unlikely to be a politically popular decision.
Setting ambitious long-term goals looks good for governments. It shows they care about future generations, and not just the next election. It’s also useful to analyze and project current trends while trying to figure out how various interventions could affect them, so there’s no harm in trying to look far into the future.
But big headline pledges are counterproductive, even somewhat irresponsible. After all, hitting climate-change goals sooner, for example, requires sustained political courage – and the long-term nature of the targets merely shows that, in many cases, current governments lack it and are only willing to express the hope that their successors will be braver.
While keeping the big goals in mind, governments should only commit publicly to what they can achieve in a foreseeable time frame – within the next legislative period, for example. That doesn’t mean the goals should be more modest – just more honest, detailed and pragmatic.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Edward Evans at eevans3@bloomberg.net
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Leonid Bershidsky is Bloomberg Opinion's Europe columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.
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