The Hindu Business Line : Getting real about global warming

The moral problem is that the developed world cannot tell the developing world that the rich can keep their cars and their modern lifestyles, while the poor must preferably walk or take public transport.

C. Gopinath

The beginning of the year is always a good time to make resolutions knowing full well that one will not be able to keep them. Recall all the resolutions you have made about learning a new language, exercising regularly, and cleaning out that trunk full of your college stuff. Did they last one week? Well, you can add a new one to that list, and that will be the things you will do to save the planet from global warming.

The corporate world, even while they grumble and lobby with governments to go slow on regulations concerning pollution, has realised that they can extract some mileage out of it. While it may well be the fad of the day, if something good comes out of it I suppose that is a good thing.

Bow to global warming

An advertisement by Ricoh, the Japanese copier company, that is a full page of text, begins by extolling how their CEO does not like wastefulness (really!) and so they are going to work on extending the life span of their office equipment by the use of upgradeable software and parts. They have also introduced power-saving innovations in their products. After this preamble, the rest of the advertisement is the usual stuff.

This bow to global warming and sustainability has now become de jure. Many product and corporate advertisements begin with the respectful bow towards their efforts to save the planet and then comes the extortion to make us buy more stuff that we don’t need.

It won’t be too long before Coca-Cola announces to us that their new bottle washing machine uses one gallon less water for every 100 bottles washed. See, they have all become the good guys.

‘Ecomagination’

The new slogan of the sustainable world is ‘Reuse, Reduce, Recycle.’ Oddly enough, that is what the poor of the world have always followed and is something that they can now teach the rich!

General Electric, the US conglomerate, adopted ‘ecomagination’ as a major theme to represent and direct corporate efforts towards ecological issues.

Now, with GE’s Earth Rewards MasterCard you can consume your way to doing good. Up to 1 per cent of net spending with the card will be channelled into greenhouse gas emission-reduction projects. So we reduce, reuse, recycle and buy more? How does one reconcile all this without becoming a schizophrenic?

Morgan Stanley put out an attractive digital ‘Little Green Book’, with 50 heartwarming tips on how ‘to make life greener and help tackle climate change.’ This has been doing the rounds as an attachment to email messages.

The design encourages you to pass it to a friend with just the click of a mouse. Tip number eight says to switch-off the lights when you leave the room and thus help save electricity. I’m sure you knew that one from before. Wait till you get to tip number 32. ‘Take shorter showers.

Making your shower one or two minutes shorter saves up to 700 gallons a month.’ What about all the people who are now bathing with one bucket of water? I suppose once they become prosperous and get to take showers, they can then shut it a couple of minutes earlier and feel good about themselves.

That’s the problem with our whole approach to saving the planet. One or two. It is the incremental solutions. One or two minutes less standing in a shower. Make the car engine give one or two miles more per gallon of petrol. Save one or two watts by switching off the computer rather than leaving it on stand-by mode.

Some media consultant has probably decided that saving the planet must be made effortless. It will be just one or two more years on the planet before we are all drowned by the rising sea levels.

Lifestyle changes

I think the biggest stumbling block in all our efforts of sustainability is the fact that the rich world and its apologists in the poor world do not want to make the drastic lifestyle changes that it entails. On a societal level, the technologies that have been developed in the past and that circulate around the world are all based on the needs of the developed world. These are the technologies that will continue to be developed in the foreseeable future as well.

Thus, the newer modern factories that come up even in over populated and labour surplus economies are based on economising on labour! Productivity continues to be measured on an output per head basis and the more ‘productive’ nations are said to be those that use less labour. Then why are people complaining about the lack of any trickle down from globalisation in Asia, Africa and Latin America?

The lifestyles that are the standards for the world are also set in the developed nations, developed in nations many of whom relied on slavery or colonisation to take off into sustained growth.

The same ideas, ideals, and measures are used by the rest who have now have to adopt modern labour, environmental and human rights standards. Don’t we all love our cars! They may be smaller, and cheaper, and more fuel efficient, but they are still incremental changes in a technology of personal transportation.

China has about one car for every 100 people and India has about one for every 142 people, compared to about one for every two persons in western Europe. And that is the model of personal success that we all aspire for. If China and India reach US levels of energy consumption, total world emissions will be triple what it is now. Watch those sea levels rise.

The moral problem is that the developed world cannot tell the developing world that the rich can keep their cars and their modern lifestyles while the poor must preferably walk or take public transport. When do we start re-thinking our concepts of development?

We just finished a conference on climate change at Bali that was generally regarded as a success. Deforestation is now on the map as deserving our attention.

With 15,000 delegates flying in from around the world (and surely all supplied with bottled water) it is conceivable that the savings likely from the decisions made would be less than the carbon footprint of the event.

Tweaking won’t help

Unless we are all ready to make drastic changes in our lifestyles, how and where we live, what we eat, how we travel, what we buy, this tweaking will not get us very far. When are we going to have a global conference on changing lifestyles?

Till then, keep that reminder about having shorter showers on your New Year Resolution list. When you step out of the stall, tell yourself that but for your concern about sustainability, you would have stayed in the shower one minute longer. You can feel good as you dry yourself and this would be one resolution you have kept.

(The author is a professor of international business and strategic management at Suffolk University, Boston, US. He can be reached at cgopinat@suffolk.edu)

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