I waited till this morning’s newspapers before writing this post. I was looking for a media story on how and why the Indian government has forced a change in the slogan for this year’s World Environment Day.
The actual slogan worked out by the United Nations Environment Programme for the World Environment Day 2008 is CO2: Kick the habit! Towards a Low Carbon Economy. While the whole world is going by this slogan, in India it has been changed to simply “Pick Right! Making the right choices”.
For the last three years I have been tracking the WED slogan mainly because of my daughter’s WED school projects as well as to help organize WED programs for a local NGO and a strong advocate of protecting natural waterbodies, Vasaman.
As I also do a fair amount of English to Bengali translation work, for a fee, of course, the slogan is particularly interesting to me because I look out for the Bangla version of the English slogan – usually, the UNEP guys come up with extremely good translations which are worth learning from. For example, the Bengali version of the 2006 slogan: Don’t Desert Drylands is a case in point. The Bengali version punned on the Bengali word “Bandhur” which means “of a friend” and also “drylands” or “arid lands” in Bengali and which said “be a friend to dry lands”.
This year too , I had checked up the WED slogan and was waiting for the usual UNEP and Environment Ministry, GoI, sponsored WED ad in Bengali newspapers on June 5 (WED) to find out how they had translated this year’s slogan. We (me and my daughter) had already worked out a Bengali version and were sort of waiting for our exam results to come – how close was our version to the UNEP/GoI version?
When we saw the UNEP/GoI WED ads in the newspapers yesterday, we were shocked: the slogan had changed! A quick check on the Internet showed that the UNEP had stuck to its slogan – there had been no change there. The obvious conclusion was that the slogan had been changed by the Indian government for consumption by the Indian public. I told my daughter here is a story that environment beat journos should be covering in tomorrow’s newspapers, of course, if they are good enough and if they are doing their jobs assiduously. That the change had been made by the government was confirmed when I read the government’s Press Information Bureau release on the subject. Further confirmation came from President Pratibha Patil’s address on Thursday during a meet on WED.
Today’s newspapers are as shocking as yesterday’s. Not one newspaper or for that matter any electronic media (as far as I know no TV channel has carried such a story nor have I found any on the Internet) has written or broadcast a single word on the subject. With my ungagged professional colleagues failing to do their job, I now have no option but to cry out loud through my gags. Although I don’t have the opportunity or resources to interview the Cabinet minister for environment and forests, Dr Manmohan Singh (yes, in case you did not know, the PM holds charge of this ministry and there is no minister of state to help him – so much for the importance we attach to this subject! You may, of course, interpret this any which way you like – the PM looking after environment? See how much importance we give to this subject! Or you could argue – the PM? With no MoS to help? How can the PM find time to look after a ministry that needs more than whole-time attention if that were at all possible?), and find out from the horse’s mouth why we have changed the slogan in India, as a citizen journalist let me post my 2 cents and hazard a guess. So, here goes:
Obviously the Indian government cannot agree to a slogan that calls for kicking the habit of high carbon usage because in its eyes high carbon usage is synonymous with economic development. And economic development is synonymous with poverty eradication. And the government is naturally committed to poverty eradication in case you didn’t know by now! So, the slogan had to change as it attacks the very process of economic development which is naturally energy-intensive and high-carbon in nature. (But more on this later).
Of course, the fact that economic development means economic development of people who are either owners of resources (industrialists, businessmen, big landowners) or are gainfully employed with high salaries (top notch professionals – managers/technocrats/lawyers/doctors etc) or, in short, all those 20-30% of Indians at most who happen to earn high incomes and have money to spend, and increased poverty for the rest 70-80% Indians who by being mere sellers of human labor power create all the wealth by getting paid only a subsistence wage and also bear the brunt of the pain of development – being driven out and dispossessed of home and hearth and means of livelihood, rising prices, shrinking employment for unskilled/low-skilled workers and no opportunity to become skilled because if they were given those opportunities then there would be too many skilled unemployed which can be socially dangerous, short supply of essentials and oversupply of luxury goods etc., – though known to one and all is conveniently forgotten in all elitist/illuminati discussions of India’s role and contribution to global warming and climate change.
Development means more cars on the road, more a/cs bought off the shelves, more refrigerators , more TVs, more home theatres….(the more energy-intensive and bigger the better), more energy-intensive high-rise buildings, more energy intensive malls, super markets and multiplexes, more enrgy-intensive entertainment such as the IPL being played at night under floodlights, cheaper air fares so that more people travel by the fuel guzzling airplanes, and so on – the developmental tamasha that makes the rich richer and the poor poorer is known to all and especially the poor. They know best what development means and it is no wonder that they are unwilling to give up their lands for the sake of development that they know will only enrich the rich and super-rich.
As President Patil says “India has no international obligation to reduce emissions”, so we need not go along with a slogan that calls for kicking the habit, the addiction for carbon, and to strive for a low carbon economy. But then as President Patil says “as a responsible member of world community” we are “taking action to domestically contribute to the global efforts. Climate change is receiving high-level and focused attention in India. Prime Minister’s Climate Change Council is comprehensively examining country’s response to this global challenge.” In short, we have found a typical Indian way of responding to the challenge of climate change and global warming – we have formed a grandiose Climate Change Council to comprehensively examine the country’s response to this global challenge and the whole ballyhoo is receiving high-level and focused attention. Yes, we are giving the whole thing a lot of high level focused attention and we have got a gang of gabbers to gab about it and spend some more public money in energy-intensive five star hotels with a few energy-intensive international junkets thrown in as well so that the gabbers can learn from each other and come back and do an ever better job of gabbing in an uninterrupted fashion – after all we don’t like coitus interruptus – but taking any concrete action to curb emissions is simply ruled out. How can we do that? Development will stop. The rich people will stop getting richer, the poor will step getting poorer – we obviously cannot stop this wonderful process of economic development.
So what do we do? We simply change the WED slogan and remove all mention of carbon emissions from it. Now what do we have? The changed slogan – “Pick right! Making the right choices” is quite impotent – it says nothing about carbon emissions and in any case it means exactly what we want it to mean – that is nothing – just a lot of gas – of course, everyone’s got to pick right and make the right choices – and of course our choice is development – so how can we talk about moving towads a low-carbon economy when we know very well that the more developed we become the more high-carbon economy we will have. So, we are definitely making the right choice about climate change – let all that ballyhoo go to hell, we are making the right choice baby!
So, just like the US, we have no international obligations to meet. People in the US have an average ecological footprint of over 4 hectacres when the per capita arable land availability in the world is less than 0.25 hectares. Environmental scientists Dr Mathis Wackernagel and Dr William Rees write “Since the beginning of this century, the available ecologically productive land has decreased from over five hectares to less than 1.5 hectares per person in 1995. At the same time, the average North American’s footprint has grown to over 4 hectares. These opposing trends are in fundamental conflict: the ecological demands of average citizens in rich countries exceed per capita supply by more than a factor of three. This means that the earth could not support even today’s population of 5.8 billion sustainably at North American material standards.”
In short, the Indian and Chinese dreams of catching up with America through the American model of market capitalism is simply nothing more than a dream – in fact, the discrepancies between land availability and eco footprint of rich people is so much that any kind of development today along the path of market capitalism is unsustainable because for more than several decades now we have already been living in a totally unsustainable era.
Indian economists who still try to argue about development along the path of market capitalism are either plain morons or are deliberating and knowingly talking about development because they know the rich can’t get richer without development, and to hell with climate change!
[Click the link on morons to get a counter view point - that of a US Congressman with an unpronouncable name - I am asking the same question Congressman! Now dear readers: Pick the right moron! Make the right choice baby!]
Market capitalism and economic development within market capitalism can never ever succeed in halting climate change or moving towards a low carbon economy. A low carbon economy can be created only when we move towards a structural change – when collectively owned Firm-Household combines directly manage resources and produce only those things that we need for existence. All industries which produce “destructive” goods and services or goods and services that we do not need for existence have to be simply shut down – all the arms and ammunition factories, all the spending on armed forces and the military has to be completely abolished – something that cannot be done in market capitalism but can be done in a collectively owned world where there are no national boundaries and no states – only self-administered, self-managed and more or less self-sufficient collectively owned Firm-Household combines.
Such a model will also do away with the need for daily commuting of workers as workers will live where they work, will drastically reduce the need for transporting materials from one corner of the world to the other because humans can easily exist in self-sufficient rural communities largely powered by solar and other renewable forms of energy, will do away with the need for energy-guzzling and highly polluting cities, will drastically reduce the need for using non-renewable resources irrespective of whether it is fossil fuels or minerals such as iron ore, bauxite etc so that the energy spent on mining too will drastically come down, and so on. I will try to write another post on this aspect later. Interested readers can take a look at Jeremy Rifkin’s book Entropy for a brilliant discussion of the energy question and how we can move towards a low carbon economy. He also happens to be one of those who writes about worker run companies.
For the moment, it is enough to point out that at present nearly 50% of the world’s total GDP of about $30 trillion is spent on the military or for keeping the world’s states armed to the teeth to impose the rule of the rich over the poor. Another roughly 10-20% of today’s GDP comes from industries that feed and power the arms economy – industries such as steel, petroleum, aluminium, thermoplastics, petrochemicals, thermal and nuclear power plants and all kinds of materials and minerals (zinc, tungsten, etc and of course the radioactive elements such as uranium, thorium, plutonium etc).
In a structurally new world geared to ensure human existence rather than the mad way it is configured now to ensure human destruction, these industries too can be shut down more or less totally – the little of these materials that we may still need can be mined at one or two locations and we may have a few steel or other such mineral/material/energy producing plants around the world to meet this much lower demand once the arms economy is shut down and we transit into a low carbon solar-intensive (read mainly organic/natural) economy.
Of course, no one is going to listen to either the scientists or other sane people around the world – least of all to a gagged journalist. So, we have to wait for the deluge to begin – the poles to melt, the Himalyas to melt, the environmental refugees to start causing havoc and then perhaps we will begin to stop gabbing and start taking action. It might be too late by then – but if you are like me and dreaming of a Noah’s Ark think hard – we will not only need a boat but we will need a craft floating about 5000 feet high up in the atmosphere. Anywhere closer to land would be too hot and humid for sustaining human life.
The rich, of course, will fly off into space and live in a Mars colony till things cool down on earth! You don’t believe me? Just ask the Google Guys Larry and Sergey what they think about a Mars colony or Project Virgle? They also happen to be among the ten youngest billionaires in the world – they are worried man!
[Also try and check out The Google Story by fellow journo David A.Vise if you haven't read it already - it's a great book!]
The future does look good!
Till it hits us – let’s pick Right and make the Right choices Baby!
To hell with turning Left and towards a low carbon economy! Are we all morons?
1 Comment
June 7, 2008 at 8:18 am
Climate change is a scam by the developed countries to stop the growth of emerging countries. Additionally, there are Malthusians in the environmental movement, whose goal is to reduce the world population to 2 billion, Europeans.