By Santhosh Shyamsundar
There are no two opinions on whether our planet is warming or not; since the last ice age, Earth has been warming for certain. Without the warming, perhaps we’ll all be living like Eskimos. That said, shouldn’t we be alarmed by the current state of affairs of our planet? We are stripping all our forests; we are depleting natural resources, damaging biodiversity, driving many a species to extinction, poisoning water systems and the air we breathe—we are on a grand destruction mode.
No one doubts the fact that our environment is in tatters – there are holes in the ozone layer; on one side we witness large-scale destruction through floods, tornadoes and hurricanes, and on the other side we see humans and animals perishing to unprecedented droughts – farmlands have turned to wastelands. The fish stocks in the oceans too are dwindling… the situation is grim.
To add to the woes, our addiction to fossil fuel is triggering the collapse of our civilisation. The price of crude oil, which is threatening to break the – USD150 a barrel – barrier, holds the potential of a giant tsunami, which could create chaos, poverty and civil unrest in many parts of the world. Inflation is high in all corners of the world; food prices have never been so high – we are in a state of global economic crisis.
The US Dollar is slipping, there is poverty in large scale in poor nations – people are dying of hunger and lack of shelter and healthcare. We are talking about fundamental rights of every global citizen: Food, Shelter, and Healthcare. We are told it is a free market economy that rules and the governments can’t do much to fix the economic problems we face. The richest nation in the world pushes itself into a war in Iraq, wasting trillions of Dollars, which could have helped protect the fundamental rights of a billion people.
The sad truth is: the economic crisis we face in the new millennium is being masqueraded as an environment crisis. Global warming is only a façade to cover a rapidly disintegrating global economy. Without fixing the economy, the environment is not going to get better.
Market has been pushing terms such as Global Warming, Climate Change, into the public conscience with the help of a subservient mainstream media. And when things go wrong, and many thousands die, they can call it Collateral Damage. The choice of language in the global warming discourse should worry us all. We don’t get to read or hear the word ‘Pollution’ in the mainstream media anymore; not as often as it used to anyway. Pollution has been replaced with ‘Emission’.
Pollution creates an imagery of poisoning, which is not at all good for commerce. Emission doesn’t evoke the same revulsion or fear in the general public. Systematically pollution has been sanitised into emission, and converted to a tradable commodity! Are we, the general public – every inhabitant of this planet, so stupid?
Every single day we are bombarded with information that sounds sensible, on how the ordinary citizen is causing all the environment problems. We humans exhale anything above 14 million tonnes of CO2 every 24 hours. Does that make us carbon sinners? Do we have to offset our emissions? The big problem with carbon emissions comes from the industrial sector – in other words industrial pollution.
We put man on the moon in 1969. Then the fuel-combustion efficiency of a motor car engine was at around 21 per cent. Almost 40 years later, we are busy investigating soil on Mars, and the fuel-combustion efficiency of the motor car hasn’t changed much.
How can the growth of markets be a definitive indicator of the health of a nation? How can we count the nuclear warheads as an economic asset while calculating the GDP?
Market and governments have to share the responsibility for the mess we are in. The governments have a responsibility to make sure the markets don’t abuse the freedoms they enjoy. We need new market standards, regulations and strict enforcement too. We need them now.
