Is India ready to face the challenge of global warming and climate change?
There are some events which are curve jumping, trend producing, paradigm shifting- call them what you want...just plain revolutionary. Some times such events occur ever so stealthily (would the Iraqis Americans have known how it would impact them when Osama Bin Laden was exiled from Saudi Arabia and decided to start attacking western assets worldwide?). Some times though, these events happen in the glare of the public eye, and yet few understand how deeply it would impact them.
This month, the European commission announced that it would unilaterally cut 20% of its carbon emissions by 2020 and go upto 30%, if the USA moved its ass, on its own emissions. This is not one of those hot air balloon announcements governments routinely come up with. The targets are binding and the EU is going to invest billions of dollars to achieve its goal. This was closely followed by the IPCA (Inter-Govt panel on climate change) report,commissioned by the United Nations, which essentially, sought the opinion of thousands of scientists around the world, to get to the heart of whether or not carbon emissions due to human activity are responsible or not for the spectre of global warming. The scientists unanimously agreed that the answer was a Yes. The mainstream European print and electronic media is awash with stories related to global warming like never before, so much so that these days, nothing other than related stories seems to capture their imagination. Its amply clear that the rhetoric around Global warming is no longer so, that Europeans (and Americans- except the USA Govt, it would seem) have accepted the inevitability of us having to do something tangible about climate change. The European Union in fact has gone as far ahead as terming this ' The Second Industrial revolution'. Now nobody, much less a Pan-govt. body, uses such words lightly.
What would change in our lives?Where to start? Every area of energy generation and industrial production would be impacted fundamentally. Our consumption patterns- what, where and how we eat, drink, travel,wear, live...everything and everyone of us would be impacted.
Yet, it staggers me to know that in India, this has not even registered, forget gauging its true impact. Not that news papers and news channels here did not do their two bits in running these stories. But other than doing the 'needful', no body has bothered to explain how fundamentally our lives could change within the next few years and over many many decades to come.It was a big disappointment, to put it mildly to watch our Indian media caught up with Big Boss, Rakhi Sawant, Abhishek-Aishwarya, KBC with Shahrukh and some such and gloss this over.
India's position on global warming is ambivalent to say the least. While we accept the need to act we are (rightly)putting the onus on developed countries who are by far responsible for Global Warming and would continue to do so going ahead. But having said that, we must also take this up as an opportunity to leap frog technology and avoid the costly mistakes that developed nations have already made. For one we need to move conscious towards sustainable modes of energy production and consumption both industrially as well as individually. This means that, for example, we need to dis-incentivize automobiles running on fossil fuels (Ex: Maruti, Hyundai and the rest) and incentivize those using non-conventional fuels (ex: Maini automobile produced REVA). The TATA project of making cars affordable to every man by selling it at 1 lakh rupees would ruin not just the TATA's (!) but also India and its environment. They need to be stopped, forcibly, if need be. Public transport ought to be encouraged and huge investments are needed to improve it. There would be a need to possibly reduce our dependence on mass farming and slaughter of animals for human consumption, since this is leading to slashing and burning of forests to feed these animals.The NTPC's of the world which rely on fossil fuels ought to be told to move on to nuclear technology and invest in technologies which aim to push emissions deep into the earth's surface instead of releasing them into the atmosphere.Companies like Suzlon which produce non-conventional sources of energy are India's new stars, in this future, and need to be given every helping hand.
This doesn't even scratch the surface of what we truly need to do as a society. Individually, nothing less than a fundamental change in our lifestyles is due or rather- overdue.
Are we warming up to this challenge yet?
This month, the European commission announced that it would unilaterally cut 20% of its carbon emissions by 2020 and go upto 30%, if the USA moved its ass, on its own emissions. This is not one of those hot air balloon announcements governments routinely come up with. The targets are binding and the EU is going to invest billions of dollars to achieve its goal. This was closely followed by the IPCA (Inter-Govt panel on climate change) report,commissioned by the United Nations, which essentially, sought the opinion of thousands of scientists around the world, to get to the heart of whether or not carbon emissions due to human activity are responsible or not for the spectre of global warming. The scientists unanimously agreed that the answer was a Yes. The mainstream European print and electronic media is awash with stories related to global warming like never before, so much so that these days, nothing other than related stories seems to capture their imagination. Its amply clear that the rhetoric around Global warming is no longer so, that Europeans (and Americans- except the USA Govt, it would seem) have accepted the inevitability of us having to do something tangible about climate change. The European Union in fact has gone as far ahead as terming this ' The Second Industrial revolution'. Now nobody, much less a Pan-govt. body, uses such words lightly.
What would change in our lives?Where to start? Every area of energy generation and industrial production would be impacted fundamentally. Our consumption patterns- what, where and how we eat, drink, travel,wear, live...everything and everyone of us would be impacted.
Yet, it staggers me to know that in India, this has not even registered, forget gauging its true impact. Not that news papers and news channels here did not do their two bits in running these stories. But other than doing the 'needful', no body has bothered to explain how fundamentally our lives could change within the next few years and over many many decades to come.It was a big disappointment, to put it mildly to watch our Indian media caught up with Big Boss, Rakhi Sawant, Abhishek-Aishwarya, KBC with Shahrukh and some such and gloss this over.
India's position on global warming is ambivalent to say the least. While we accept the need to act we are (rightly)putting the onus on developed countries who are by far responsible for Global Warming and would continue to do so going ahead. But having said that, we must also take this up as an opportunity to leap frog technology and avoid the costly mistakes that developed nations have already made. For one we need to move conscious towards sustainable modes of energy production and consumption both industrially as well as individually. This means that, for example, we need to dis-incentivize automobiles running on fossil fuels (Ex: Maruti, Hyundai and the rest) and incentivize those using non-conventional fuels (ex: Maini automobile produced REVA). The TATA project of making cars affordable to every man by selling it at 1 lakh rupees would ruin not just the TATA's (!) but also India and its environment. They need to be stopped, forcibly, if need be. Public transport ought to be encouraged and huge investments are needed to improve it. There would be a need to possibly reduce our dependence on mass farming and slaughter of animals for human consumption, since this is leading to slashing and burning of forests to feed these animals.The NTPC's of the world which rely on fossil fuels ought to be told to move on to nuclear technology and invest in technologies which aim to push emissions deep into the earth's surface instead of releasing them into the atmosphere.Companies like Suzlon which produce non-conventional sources of energy are India's new stars, in this future, and need to be given every helping hand.
This doesn't even scratch the surface of what we truly need to do as a society. Individually, nothing less than a fundamental change in our lifestyles is due or rather- overdue.
Are we warming up to this challenge yet?
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