Climate change, Paris agreement, Climate deal, are the buzz words these days with approximately 198 countries approving the Paris deal.
Looking at things at the grass root level, part of the problem has been that we have been the victims of a campaign of systematic misdirection, consumer culture and capitalist minds over these years, especially after the onset of the industrial revolution.
An inconvenient truth helped raise consciousness about global warming. Now things are being projected towards the general masses to substitute active personal lifestyle choices for organized political resistance. For example, use of vehicles with even numbered plate on even number dates and vehicles with odd numbered plate on odd number dates, use of LED bulbs, etc.
If you notice, till now, almost all of the solutions presented has to do with the personal consumption, changing light bulbs, driving half as much, car pool, cutting down water consumption for bath washing and other purposes, and so on, and has very little to do with shifting power away from corporations or stopping the drastic globally growing economy and urbanization that is destroying the planet.
Kirkpatrick summarized Al Gore's statement well, “Each one of us is a cause of global warming but each of us can make choices to change that, with the things we buy, the electricity we use, the cars we drive, we can make choices to bring our individual carbon emissions to zero”. This way the carbon emissions would fall to only about 20%. Scientific consensus is that carbon emission must be reduced by at least 75% worldwide.
Individual energy consumption and residential, by private car and so on is never more than about a quarter of all consumption as per stats. The vast majority of consumption is commercial, industrial, corporate, by agribusiness and government. So even if we all took up cycling and wood stoves, it would have a negligible impact on energy use, global warming and atmospheric pollution.
Often we hear that the world is running out of water, people are dying due to lack of water, rivers are drying. Well no. As per stats more than 90% of the water used by humans is used by agriculture and industries. The rest of the 10% is split between municipalities and actual living and breathing humans. People, flora and fauna are not dying because the world is running out of water but they are dying because the water is being stolen from them through dams, artificial reservoirs, blocking the surface of the earth with constructions which prevent the water from seeping down the earth, pumping out excessive water from the earth for industries, irrigation, etc.
Considering wastes, land, water and air pollution which greatly contribute to global warming. Municipal waste accounts to only about 10% of total waste, roughly 530 kilograms/capita as per available stats. Inappropriate waste management again impacts the environment through soil and water contamination, air quality, climate, land use and landscape.
The causes that are responsible for major part of pollution, global warming and ecological imbalances are excessive industrialization, urbanization and economic growth topped up with materialism and capitalistic policies.
There are many issues that go unnoticed by the general people or many a times them turning a blind eye to it. Inappropriate landfills, again hazardous, release of methane and other toxic gases add to pollution, ozone layer depletion and global warming. It also produces toxins which pollute the water.
Another issue is, since live stocks are cheap source of nutrition and non-vegetarian diet is consumed vastly, cattle are being reared in huge quantities. Infact it is a huge industry. These cattle need to graze, and huge amount of grass as fodder is required to feed them. To fulfill this need, is to have more grassland. Thus forests are brought down and converted into grassland. So the trees which recycle carbon and toxin in the atmosphere are no more. These giant livestock farms, which can house hundreds of thousands of buffaloes, cows, chickens, goats, pigs, produce vast amounts of manure, often generating the waste equivalent of a small city. A problem of this nature and scale is tough to imagine, and pollution from livestock farms seriously threatens humans, fish and ecosystems. They are again a major source of air, land and water pollution. Ammonia, a toxic form of nitrogen released in gas form during waste disposal, can be carried more than 300 miles through the air before being dumped back onto the ground or into the water, where it causes algal blooms and fish kills. High levels of nitrates pollute the water. And there are many more such issues....the list goes on.
At this point it should be pretty easy to recognize that every action involving the industrial economy is destructive. And we should not pretend that solar photo votaics, for example, exempt us from this. They still require mining and transportation and infrastructures at every point in the production process. The same can be said for every other so called green technology.
With the entire world at stake, why are we only told to retreat into these entirely personal “solutions”? These “solutions” are not sufficient. Personal change does not equal social change. So how then, have we come to accept these utterly insufficient responses? I think a part of it is that we are in the double bond. A double bond is when you are given multiple options. But no matter what option you choose, you lose.
Withdrawal is not an option. And, I am not saying that we shouldn’t try and live simple, we should, but we shouldn’t pretend to not buying much, or not driving much or not having kids.
Any option is a better option than a dead planet. The good news is that there are still options to what can be done to actually stop the murder of the planet? Let’s throw out the concept of ‘Take, make, consume and dispose’ and work on the concept of ‘caring and sharing’.
For those of us who can understand all this, it is very necessary for us to talk and create awareness about it amongst the rest of the masses who are unaware of it or have shut their eyes to it so that they may also develop sense of responsibility and concern and respond to the situation and act accordingly.
I should surely have much hopes from this Paris Convention. Nevertheless we can always follow the examples of brave activists to bring about a change at our own level. They actively opposed the injustices that surrounded them. We can follow the example of those, who remembered that the role of an activist is not to navigate systems of oppressive powers without much personal integrity as possible but rather to confront and take down those systems.
