Democratizing
Blame
By Somnath Mukherji
13 March, 2007
Countercurrents.org
The release of a summary of findings
by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in early February
has created flutter around the world – it is as if the findings
somehow actualised and legitimised the phenomenon of global climate
change. Concerned personalities and organisations have filled newspaper
columns in the western media expressing their concerns and distributing
the blame across the entire humanity.
The panel reports a huge
increase in carbon-dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane – collectively
known as the greenhouse gases (GHG), in the atmosphere. Air bubbles
trapped in ice cores dating back 650,000 years have been systematically
analysed. Concentration of GHGs in the atmosphere, for the last 10,000
years, has been represented graphically that exhibits an exponential
rise from the year 1750. It also documents the rising global temperature;
the falling snow cover and the consequent rising sea levels, for the
last one and half centuries. It observes “changes in Arctic temperatures
and ice, widespread changes in precipitation amounts, ocean salinity,
wind patterns and aspects of extreme weather including droughts, heavy
precipitation, heat waves and the intensity of tropical cyclones”.
The report attributes the
increase in carbon dioxide mainly to burning of fossil fuels and the
increase in nitrous oxide and methane to agriculture (this includes
cattle rearing) both of which are lumped under anthropogenic or human
activities. The logic of ascribing the cause to “human activities”,
sweeping all of humanity under a single head remains unclear when the
majority of the humanity did not participate in the suicidal desecration.
Why this democratisation of blame when the fruits have been monopolised?
While 5% of the world’s population residing in the US emits 23%
of carbon-dioxide, 17% of the world’s population in India is responsible
for 4% of the emissions [International Energy Agency data for 2003].
In other words, a person residing in the US emits 20 times carbon dioxide
and a person in the UK 10 times than that of a person in India.
Not only is this disparity
true for the present but has been maintained historically since the
Industrial Revolution. According to the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis
Center, in 1899, the UK emitted 37 times more than India and 4000 times
more than China. It was the logic of colonization that ensured the starkly
unequal access to the atmosphere. In the post-colonial world, it was
the paradigm of development that unleashed the homogenizing forces and
ushered the former-colonies into catch-up mode.
A report titled “Livestock’s
Long Shadow” released by the Food and Agricultural Organisation
(FAO), holds the 1.5 billion cattle, in the world, most of which goes
to feed the rich, to be responsible for 18% of the GHG emissions. It
is also responsible for a widespread loss in biodiversity and requires
vast amounts of water. A total of 33% of the earth’s arable land
is dedicated to raising feedcrops for these cattle. In India, only 8%
and in sub-Saharan Africa only 7% of daily calories/per-capita comes
from animal products when the numbers for North America and Western
Europe are 22% and 31% respectively. This is on top of the fact that
the average calorie intake in Asia and Africa is significantly lower
than those of the developed nations. Given its significantly smaller
footprint, the global south should not have to shoulder the blame for
global warming equally with the minority responsible for it.
“Eleven of the last
twelve years are the warmest recorded global surface temperature”,
observes the IPCC report. The accelerating melting of snow and glaciers
all over the world would affect millions living by, and depending on
rivers and other fresh water bodies. Rising sea levels will affect the
coastal population, displacing millions from heavily populated areas.
The school of oceanographic studies in Jadavpur University has recorded
the submergence of 4 islands of the Sunderbans in the last two decades,
rendering thousands of families homeless – and the water level
is rising steadily. The Tsunami and hurricane Katrina in the US has
given a macabre preview of the fury of a destabilizing nature along
with the vulnerabilities of the population on the margins of society.
Thousands if not millions will be paying with their lives and livelihoods
because some people far away are engaged in a pursuit of happiness that
depends on ever increasing acquisition of material wealth.
The majority of the solutions
put forth by the “developed” countries have been technological
in nature, based on shifting of costs from one realm to the other. None
of the solutions touch the fundamental problem of over-consumption,
equating well-being to material gratification and making economics the
organizing principle of societies.
The much touted solution
of carbon-sequestration seeks to shift the carbon-dioxide pollution
from the atmosphere and store it in land and water bodies when the oceans
are already turning acidic from absorbing increased carbon-dioxide from
the atmosphere and affecting marine life adversely. The Clean Development
Mechanisms (CDM) under the Kyoto Protocol will allow richer nations
to put out emissions by planting enough trees in the tropical countries
whose already marginalized population will face displacement, loss of
livelihoods and control over natural resources. Further, the sort of
monoculture that is advocated can never provide the ecological base
of a natural forest. In effect, these technocratic solutions amount
to commodifying the ecology and putting it at the disposal of the economically
powerful.
Merely substituting the sources
of energy without stemming the ever growing dependence on it, can go
only so far in undoing the disastrous effects that the energy-addicted
have wrought on this planet. The side effects of substitutes cannot
be ignored when they proliferate in scale. A study in the Journal of
Geophysical Research established the warming and drying effect of a
large-scale wind farm and likened it to “local atmospheric changes
that occur with large scale deforestation”.
Global warming is a consequence
of a fragmented worldview that has put disproportionate emphasis on
the material aspects of human life. The economics that took birth from
such a worldview has sought to hide the actual costs. Slavery, colonialism
and now “development” have been increasingly refined ways
of exploiting vast populations and their natural resources. Ironically
it is the same hegemonising and homogenising philosophy that is being
peddled by coercive means and half-truths, as the only path forward.
The resource base of the planet is being stretched to its extreme not
so much by the increasing population but by the increasing needs (or
greed) of a small section of the population.
Scientific rationality has
been narrowed down into technological rationality where technology becomes
the sole legitimate tool for attaining the truth: weather comes to a
person through computers and TVs, communication comes to be dominated
by electronic channels, education trains the masses to serve technology
and above all, technology becomes the yardstick in dividing populations
into “forward” and “backward”. Hence the only
solutions coming out of the industrialised world are technological in
nature. Searching for a solution to the multi-dimensional problem of
global warming solely in the technological space is nothing more than
a futile exercise.
While epistemological impoverishment
obscures the basic reasons for the predicament, convenient collectivism
provides justifications to distribute the blame amongst the entire humanity.
There are solutions and alternatives available in the world, but not
in the hyper-industrialised parts of it. There still are many societies
in Asia, Africa and Latin America living closer to nature with capacities
to evaluate the costs in their entirety; societies that have defined
progress and pursue happiness in more benign and sustainable ways. Instead
of pushing them to the margins, the “developed” world should
be learning from them.
(The author is an electrical
engineer based in Boston and can be reached at [email protected])