The Hindu Business Line : Green is the colour of peace!

Smoke signals: The growing automobile industry is the most serious polluter. We must plan for adequate green fuels, Jatropha being the best candidate.

K.P. Prabhakaran Nair

The just-announced Nobel Prize for Peace brings into sharp focus the grave crisis of global warming. Al Gore, the former US Vice-President, and the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) headed by Dr R.K. Pachauri, Director-General of The Energy Research Institute (TERI) in New Delhi, did what was needed to focus on this grave crisis. As rightly pointed out by Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan-born Peace Laureate of 2004 and an active environmentalist, following the a ward announcement: “I hope that the world will wake up to the fact that we are dealing here with a real crisis, that there is a real risk to the way of life as we know it on this planet.”

Maybe, we have to take a leaf out of Mahatma Gandhi’s teachings. He said: “Live simply so that others may simply live.” Though India is pointing an accusing finger at the West, in general, and the US in particular, things are not anywhere near perfect here.

The grim Indian scenario

Imagine the entire Kerala coastal belt — from Kanyakumari to Manjeswaram — inundated by the sea, and coastal cities such as Kozhikode, Kannur and Kasaragod submerged under water. Or the Ganga, the Brahmaputra and the Indus, India’s perennial rivers, becoming seasonal and going dry between monsoons as the Himalayan glaciers continue to retreat, possibly vanishing by 2035.

Or the already low crop yields falling further in the dry tracts of Andhra Pradesh or Maharashtra due to rising temperatures. And, millions of flood-hit Bangladeshis crossing over to neighbouring West Bengal in search of a new life as their country loses close to 1,000 sq km of land to floods.

These are some of the grim aspects of climate change. Sea levels are expected to rise by at least 40 centimetre by 2100, inundating vast areas, including some of the most densely populated cities. Rising temperatures will pull down the already plummeting crop yields, thanks to fossil-fuel based industrial agriculture, the so-called ‘Green Revolution’, which has ruined our soil and environment.

The poor will be the worst hit, as food will become more expensive than what it is now. Both agriculture and fisheries will be hit, the former due to rising temperatures and loss of cultivable area, and the latter by inundation and coastal erosion in low-lying areas. Heat-related deaths will increase, with the poor, elderly, daily wage-earners and agricultural labour suffering the most.

Climate change related to glacier melt would severely impact a billion people in the Himalaya-Hindu Kush region, impacting most South Asian countries that depend on glacier melt for irrigation. India would suffer the most. Himalayan glaciers are most vulnerable to climate change.

The “ablation period”, when glaciers melt in summer, has increased and the snowing time has shortened. Glacier melt in the Himalayas will increase flooding, rock avalanches and affect water resources over the next two to three decades.

Who is the culprit?

It is time we started introspecting. We cannot blame the West alone for the malaise here, and it would pay to put our own house in order.

Quite often, policy planners point to the national average to justify that India is among the world’s lowest polluters. But though the national average hides the real level of pollution contributing to global warming, the vast majority of Indians living in the rural areas simply cannot pollute; it is the well-off people in the urban belts who are among the world’s highest polluters.

The national average also misses out on those who lead an environment-friendly lifestyle, influenced by our traditional habits. Our elders still carry their shopping from the neighbouring retailer in a cloth bag, shunning the plastic one; are mostly vegetarian (it takes about an acre to produce a kilogram of beef because of low conversion rate of fodder/feed to meat); and eschew all kinds of spray perfumes, which simply contribute to aerosol loading of atmosphere thereby increasing the level of “GHGs” (green house gases that lead to excessive warming of the ambience).

Instead, they use sandal paste, which has a remarkable medicinal value too.

Go to the countryside. How many own a second air-conditioner or a second petrol-guzzling car? And how many mothers keep changing the diapers of babies 10 times a day? Are we aware of the amount of energy that goes into the production of a single diaper? And where is all the e-waste discarded? Do we ever pause to think what havoc all this is causing to the environment?

Mistaken economics

A key point economic analysts overlook is that clean-up and pollution prevention are cost-intensive exercises; they may discover that the country’s “net economic value” has been falling over 20 per cent, though the illusion is that the nation is growing at 8 per cent plus GDP!

The irony is that the economy would grow better if the environment is factored in. A lot more jobs can be created and a better quality of life ensured by leveraging traditional knowledge.

The road ahead calls for recognition of an indisputable link between environment protection and socio-economic benefits. A recent Nicholas Stern report says that global warming could shrink global economy by 20 per cent. The worst affected will be the world’s poor, India included. But acting now will cost less than 1 per cent of India’s GDP.

What action now?

As of now, the growing automobile industry is the most serious polluter. The inconvenient political truth about the Iraq War was that it was for oil, as recently admitted by the US Federal Reserve chief, Mr Ben Bernanke. And with the ever-growing number of new models of automobiles being introduced here, it is time we asked if India needs to put the brakes to this madness.

Where will the oil to run these gas-guzzling machines come from? This is where we must seriously plan on green fuels. Jatropha is the best candidate for green fuel. India must consciously avoid the temptation to go for food-based fuel (sorghum/corn/sugarcane/oilseeds such as rapeseed, palm and soybean).

It is also time we gradually shifted to the more healthier organic farming, as far as agriculture is concerned. It is a fallacy to think that organic farming leads to lower crop yields. It is just that we threw it out of the window following the onslaught of the American-inspired industrial agriculture more than four decades ago. The environmental and soil-related havoc are there for all to see.

Finally, punish the polluter. The next time somebody asks for “high speed” fuel at the petrol pump for his luxury car, tell him there is a penal tax on its excessive use. The Dutch started doing it more than four decades ago and one can see their Nobel Laureates cycling to the university campus.

(The author is a former Professor, National Science Foundation, The Royal Society, Belgium and can be reached at kodothprabhakaran@yahoo.co.in)

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