Dealing with hot air

My Week

Nicholas Stern, the British economist who had just visited the Capital, lectured on climate change and left. The figures were still dancing in the air. India emits just one tonne of CO2 per capita per annum. The Americans are 20 times more guilty. But Asia will suffer the worst impact. I could see through the roof. The heavens were falling down as I began a week packed with conferences on climate change. The only little diversion was this rally of a few thousand villagers asking for a central commission on land reform. The organisers were funded by a British Government agency and some European groups. It did ring a bell of sorts. Is this another trick to unlock land? For multinationals, biofuels. Didn't Stern warn of food shortages and climate change? But this one would be owing to land use change.

Tuesday Sunita Narain at a UN workshop on climate change in Manesar discussed global inequity in climate change. How the rich had their industrialisation first and hence got to pollute the atmosphere for a longer time. I think of G M Trevelyan, the author of my college text book on British history and his fine chapters on industrial revolution. Trevelyan would have rewritten them had he met Stern and Narain. Energy is the problem and transport has been the biggest user, says Narain. Forget carbon credits she says. That is a corrupt solution. Forget biofuels. It will leave you hungry. Think real. Cut fuel use.

Wednesday R K Pachauri, on the following day, says much the same things. Buy cars. But don't use them. And what is the ammo India and the rest of the poor lot have for Bali at the next round of talks of the UN on climate change? Pachauri suggests sectoral cuts, even as speakers see this 'WTO in environment' reaching nowhere. Chinese and Pakistani journos bid adieu and talk of meeting in Bali. I think of the thousands of dots of islands in the ocean and the shrill warnings of apocalypse are drowned in the roar of the waves. This, as I rush for another conference on carbon credits. This is by the World Bank and FICCI.

Thursday Pachauri is organising a conference on sustainable development. I hear Bunker Roy advocate barefoot engineers. Never give them certificates if you want to keep them in villages, he says. A strange formula for growth. I decide to run.

Friday I barely peep into an India carbon market conclave organised by the World Bank and FICCI and wonder whether I should be happy that India has registered the most number of green credits.

Also... The world needs to cut emissions by at least half to survive beyond 2050. Is that possible? They haven't cut even three per cent since 1990, I tell myself as someone from an NGO calls me in the morning to request that I attend a meeting on nutrition. She offers to pick me up and drop me back if I agree to come. Bad as I am at answering in the negative, I surprised myself. Pick me and drop me? Definitely not. Just for a half an hour thing that won't change a thing? Why waste fuel? Think of the emissions. She was not expecting this. She quickly agreed to email me a press release. I almost shot off an email to the editor asking him about the merits of working from home and video conferencing on Mondays. I stop myself. Can't be so good.