good article.

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.