2022 has been a difficult year, in which the UK has often been hit harder than its peers in the G7 – the club of the world’s wealthiest democracies.
Russia’s bloody attack on Ukraine leads to dramatic increases in energy costs.
A global cost of living crisis was stimulated by soaring inflation and interest rates.
In the UK, struggling public sector workers are on strike.
The unprecedented political instability of the ruling Conservative Party means there have been three different prime ministers in the same year.
Meanwhile, billions of us are struggling with digital technology and connectivity. Some worry that social media will make traditional representative democracy impossible while empowering autocrats and irresponsible corporations. Online communication has certainly made us more angry and less tolerant of others.
The world population has exceeded eight billion people this year, further increasing the existential pressure that humanity exerts on the planet. Extreme weather events attributed to global warming are more common than ever.
Globally, the COVID pandemic has claimed more than six million lives, and counting, with a million more deaths expected in China as the Communist Party rolls back its zero COVID policy.
Taken together, these issues paint a grim picture of life in 2022, but as we try to deal with them, there are glimmers of hope. As we head into the new year, I want to lift the gloom and find some reasons to be joyful.
Hope and unity emerge from war in Ukraine
No one should minimize the horror of the war in Ukraine, which has claimed tens of thousands of lives on both sides and is still suffering deliberate destruction by an aggressor of a modern European state. Russia’s size superiority may still mean that Ukraine never recovers all of its territory.
Yet the course of the war so far has confounded all of President Vladimir Putin calculations and shattered the dreams of dictatorial regimes elsewhere. Russia did not conquer in a few days.
Western democracies have not proven weak and venal. NATO is not “brain dead”, as President Emmanuel Macron mocked a few years ago. It is stronger, with Finland and Sweden joining the military alliance.
Led by the US, UK and Poland, Western countries have given billions of dollars in military aid while taking in refugees. Equally important, the thirst for freedom, peace and democracy of the Ukrainian people and their leaders, underlined by President Volodymyr Zelensky in his impassioned address to the joint session of the United States Congress, reminded us all of the values that should unite and worth fighting for.
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For all their flaws, Prime Ministers Boris Johnson and Liz Truss gave strong support to Ukraine, even if it went against their main post-Brexit foreign policy of turning away from Europe. Now British governments are likely to understand the importance of good relations with the UK’s closest and most important trading bloc, based on practical cooperation rather than ideology.
A healthy democracy
There is no going back on leaving the EU. But the UK has the chance to enter a new phase without being obsessed with the Europe question, which has plagued the Conservative Party at least since the 1990s, tormenting the nation in the process.
Conservative governments no longer have an excuse to distract themselves from dealing directly with more important issues such as growth, productivity and equity.
If the ruling party does not adapt and resolve these issues, opinion polls and recent local and by-elections suggest that the electorate may be ready to make a change.
Whatever the outcome of the next election, it is a sign of a healthy democracy. Something that the increasingly restless peoples of Russia, China and Iran, for example, cannot take advantage of.
In elections in the West this year, the tide seemed to turn against populist leaders with ties to Russia.
Candidates most associated with Donald Trump, who called Putin a “genius”, fared poorly in November’s midterm elections. The Democrats retained control of the Senate. In France, President Macron won re-election in April, defeating a challenge from Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Rally.
Revolutionary future technology
US scientists have performed the first-ever nuclear fusion experiment to achieve a net energy gain
In the era of modern communications, the world should not and cannot de-globalize. The shock of the loss of Russian energy, however, has led to greater emphasis on the importance of producing our own green energy and trading with friendly and stable partners.
2022 will be a banner year for the commissioning of renewable energy programs, a trend that was already accelerating before the Ukrainian invasion.
Other scientific breakthroughs this year point to game-changing future technologies. In the United States, experimenters have for the first time achieved atomic fusion, producing more energy than was used to trigger it.
Chinese scientists claim to have found a way to produce hydrogen by electrolyzing salt water. Applied on an industrial scale, this would dramatically increase the supply and affordability of a potentially “green” fuel.
A test case in the Amazon
Climate activist protests at COP27 climate summit in Egypt
There have been two major global environmental meetings this year – COP27 in Egypt on climate change and COP15 in Canada on biodiversity.
Neither was dramatic, but both reaffirmed commitments that were already moving in the right direction. Crucially, at both summits, the wealthiest countries agreed to remove one of the greatest obstacles to faster progress.
They agreed, though much more in principle than in practice, to pay poorer nations for the loss and damage caused by Western industrialization and to protect vital ecosystems. Both are battles against time and the rhythm of decay.
Brazil will be a test case. Deforestation in the Amazon has increased catastrophically under the encouragement of outgoing President Jair Bolsonaro. Lula da Silva, who takes office in January, successfully campaigned on a commitment to zero deforestation in rainforests, wetlands and savannah. He reappointed a very committed environment minister,
Marina Silva, and increased the budget to fight destruction.
We live longer and healthier
68.7% of the world’s population has now received at least one dose of a COVID vaccine. A total of thirteen billion doses were distributed. The ability of the disease to kill diminishes.
A malaria vaccine also became a real possibility this year. Global life expectancy has increased to 73 years in 2022, albeit by 0.24%. A woman born in Britain this year can expect to live to be 83, up 21 years on the average female lifespan in 1926, the year Queen Elizabeth II was born.
The increase in life expectancy is leveling off in the United Kingdom and the United States. The most spectacular progress is in the poorest countries. Today, 9.2% of the world’s population lives in what is defined as extreme poverty, compared to 36% in 1990. This still represents more than a billion people. During the same period, deaths of children aged five and under fell from 34,200 a day to 14,200.
Pioneers believe that humanity is on the verge of a much greater transformation in preventive and therapeutic medicine – thanks to the use of AI technology to map the human genome and proteins, and the possibilities of CRISPR gene editing.
A better technological universe
We don’t control how online technology changes nearly every aspect of our lives. Authoritarian regimes use it to control information and their own citizens. In free societies, trolls and conspiracy theorists send lies around the world, aided by robots from hostile nations.
Ordinary people take to social media to vilify others and “cancel” them. The fury on both sides over Jeremy Clarkson’s flippant and vicious comments about Meghan Markle is just the latest example.
Meanwhile, tech companies and entrepreneurs have become absurdly rich.
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In 2022, we began to respond to this stupidity hesitantly. The US government has legislated against the transfer of strategically vital technologies to China. The UK government has considered key issues in the Online Safety Bill. The EU has acted against US tech cartels.
FTX’s collapse in fraud has burst the cryptocurrency bubble. Elon Musk’s humiliating mismanagement on Twitter has shown the world that tech geniuses don’t have all the answers. A better, less unequal technological universe should emerge from all this, in particular because the rising generations are growing up there.
Beyond the metaverse, digging deep into the worlds of politics, health, and the environment reveals a few reasons to be joyful this year.
All the same in 2023, as the teachers write at the bottom of the bulletins, MUST DO BETTER.
