Readers Write In #766: Climate Change for people in a hurry

By Jeeva P

I had been wanting to write about Climate Change for so long. It is not because I had read a couple of books about them recently. It is because of how pressing the issue has turned out to be and how directly intrusive it has become to our daily lives. How much the seasons, their intensities, the floods, the storms, their unpredictability have changed and become global! The fact that rainy seasons which were usually the best time for anyone to stay in Chennai have turned into periods of alarm and uncertainty driving us to nearby kirana stores to stockpile stuff for the next few days, is something that made me write this one earlier than I had planned.

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It all started in England. In the 16^th century. When the island nation was turning out to be the largest manufacturer and exporter of textiles. When the invention of steam engine went hand in hand with the arrival of tons and tons of raw cotton from the colonies of Great Britain. When the British capitalist manufacturers of cloth had decided to stop using clean energy from water-wheels located alongside the rivers in England. When steam-engines which made use of coal for propelling the mills started transforming raw cotton into spun threads and yarns faster and year-round as opposed to past practices where spinning happened only during periods when the water flow in the rivers were at seasonal highs. When coal which was used until then only for domestic heating purposes in very trivial quantities became an essential and indispensable fuel that was needed in larger and larger quantities to drive spinning mills year-round and deliver yarns to weavers on-time. When land-holding classes in England were ready to lease their lands for exploration and extraction of coal which soon became an extremely lucrative business. When spinning mills which were dependent on water-wheels located in towns that adjoined rivers until then decided to move to newer, more central locations to receive loads of coal from adjacent mines and transform themselves into mechanized spinning mills delivering greater and more reliable output. When towns that housed these new mechanized mills were planned such that they were located closer not only to local markets of consumption but also to cities and ports with better transportation facilities to enable domestic as well international distribution of their finished products. When workers who until then had a larger role to play in co-ordinating spinning mills powered by water-wheels were condemned to assuming the roles of mere accessories and supervisors in the mechanized versions of these mills, losing their collective bargaining power along with their hitherto reasonable daily wages for sustenance. When workers rebelled later against their capitalists for pushing their roles in the processes of commodity production to the margins, demanding not only higher wages but also newer forms of government primary among which was the system of ‘electoral democracy’. When capitalist manufacturers who, propelled by the inclusion of steam engine into their production processes started seeing windfall profits throughout the year witnessing so many newer entrants into their markets and competed against one another through further mechanization and expansion, the demand for coal rose like never before and the smoke and soot that emanated from these mills engulfed the new towns and cities of Britain, the earliest foundations for Climate Change had already been laid firmly and irrevocably.

From then on, there has been no looking back. Britain laid the blueprint for the Industrial Revolution for the rest of the world to follow. And the rest of the world gleefully jumped into the rabbit hole. Neighbours of Britain started searching for more colonies for raw materials in Asia, South America and Africa. More raw materials were hauled across oceans through steam-powered ships to the European centres of power. Newer mechanized mills sprang up all over the continent. Steam-powered trains played crucial roles in transportation of raw materials and finished products between ports and industrial towns. Industrial production grew exponentially, foreign products flooded the colonies, local products and businesses perished and the project of colonization had become an inevitable reality.

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Andreas Malm, a Swedish writer traces the above story with a ton of interesting detail, statistics, anecdotes from journals, government records and newspapers of the early Industrial era in the book titled Fossil Economy, The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. A lot of new facts and observations take the reader by surprise some of which I would like to enumerate in the following paragraphs.

Until the arrival of the era of Industrial Capitalism, there was absolutely no obsession among human societies with concepts such as production and profits that needed to be growing year-on-year, slowing down of which could trigger panic, economic stagnation and downturns. Commodity production until then was mostly local or regional at the max and there was no reason why it should exceed demand of the local populace. To put it in other words, this mad craze to compete with another manufacturer, beat him year-on-year, expanding into lands and continents never-seen-before, to establish industries and monopolize commodity production at the cost of the environment was never a feature of human psyche until the unfortunate arrival of Industrial Capitalism. To people who always tell me that greed – the urge to acquire more and more possessions as long as one is alive is very much a primal basic human instinct, I would really love to hand them this book to read. 

Another even more important fact that Andreas Malm shocked me with was how wrong climate scientists of the previous generation were in predicting the speed at which the Earth is getting warmer and warmer by the day. Malm proves with statistics collected from various sources that the Earth is warming faster than we all have anticipated and within the end of many of our lifetimes, we will be witness to numerous climate disasters like floods that destroy crucial crops and millions of lives and livelihoods, droughts that lead to skyrocketing food prices, starvation in many parts of the world leading to large-scale migrations, weather variations that could no longer be tolerated, etc. The prognosis left me with a heavy, frustrated heart not certainly because there are no ways to subvert this. The current establishment- governments world over pretty well know the gravity of the situation but have not been acting appropriately due to pressure groups that keep throwing hindrances towards remedial policy making.

The biggest corporations in the Fortune 500 list are all fossil fuel companies who have been spending billions and billions not only to lobby against a worldwide shift against Green Energy but also to create a new, powerful propaganda campaign called Climate Change Denial, victims of which include the most powerful man on the planet right now, Donald J Trump, according to Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs Climate. 

Both Andreas Malm and Naomi Klein give us two important points to remember – even if we immediately put an end to carbon emissions today bringing them to zero and convert into harnessing solar and wind sources for our everyday consumption, the Climate Change disasters that I have mentioned above will remain unpreventable, the reason being that these fallouts were not the ones that were triggered due to our reckless practices in the last few decades. These disasters are the consequences of the emissions that we gave rise to at least two hundred years ago during the formative years of Industrial Capitalism and the after-effects of what we have been doing today in a much more expanded form will be felt as the current century comes to an end in scales that might easily defy our imagination leaving our grand-children and great grand-children super-vulnerable.

The second point is that alternatives to Climate Change and their remediation are not something as is often considered to be, too expensive or impractical to be implementable on a global scale. Experts on this subject advise one important thing for the whole of human kind to follow- to scale down our necessities and move onto a much frugal lifestyle. That shall involve at the first place, extricating ourselves from today’s maddening consumerist revelry that seem to engulfing societies world over and contemplation of alternatives for adopting a radically different lifestyle. But that I acknowledge, would be easier said than done. Such a move would have to call the entire logic of capitalism into question at a juncture where capitalism is being projected as the only inevitable and the most rational path for mankind to follow. Consumers who would like to say no for products that they don’t need are huge obstacles for modern, capitalist progress. Lesser demand for commodities would mean shutting down of factories and business enterprises which would lead to loss of jobs. Loss of jobs would lead to even further shrinking of demand, closure of even more business establishments and further shrinking of the economy. We would be landing in a dystopia made of joblessness, poverty and recession in our attempts to save our planet.

Klein and Malm suggest alternatives that a yesteryear Gandhi would have lauded -small, village-level, self-sufficient economies where production is planned, small-scale and demand-driven. Klein suggests the example of a town called Preston in England where all products are locally made, prices are reasonable, jobs are locally generated and very less integration with the global supply chain is preserved.

Towns in Denmark too have started making use of solar-power stations owned by small farmers who link their supply channels to national grid, generating cheaper and cleaner power.

But the most important question persists – who shall be paying for the transition from fossil-based economy to a greener one, world over? Experts on this subject want fossil-fuel companies that have extracted and made profits for generations together to pay for the damage they have caused. A very minimal carbon tax of 1 percent imposed upon these corporations shall put humongous amounts of money into our green coffers which can easily finance the transition. But recent talks among world leaders on Climate Change have been running into stalemates quite often – poorer countries that are yet to or still making their forays into industrial capitalism towards their journey to economic prosperity are demanding compensation from developed countries in Western Europe and the United States for having brought the whole planet to this precarious state. Their indiscriminate exploitation of fossil resources on their path to economic supremacy has put the lives and livelihoods of innocent millions located miles away on different, underdeveloped countries in danger. The contribution of these third-world countries towards global warming is trivial to say the least while leaders of developed nations continue to refuse to pay for their ravages. 

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Whenever I read about Climate Change and discuss it with my friends, I would avoid doing it in the presence of my 7-year old son in order not to scare him away. The future we are living our children with is already terrible and pathetic to say the least, though none of us are directly responsible for it. The rules for the working of the world have not been written by us and hence it is only right that we don’t have to feel guilty about having reached here. But there is something we can do – to make more conversations about this with a lot more people, make this issue at least as important as the Nayantara-Dhanush spat, forge coalitions with the global populace with the help of smart trans-national communication networks we currently leverage using our fingers and force the rule-writers to make amends. Having reached a bad place is not our fault, but failing to move on from there is definitely one.

P.S: I am not discounting the contribution of the USSR and its satellites to global warming here. The Communist countries too followed the same industrial model as those of the Capitalist West just that the intention of the model and the extent of the damage are qualitatively and quantitatively less pernicious. When one dreams of a Communist State in the future, ecological considerations too I admit need to assume primacy.