Green is the new Black

By Ranjan Yumnam *

If you had followed the climate change news over the last few days, you would have felt mesmerised and hugely entertained. Tomorrow, the Copenhagen Climate Summit would kick off and world leaders, scientists, climate change evangelists and nay-sayers must have had their hottest war plans all prepared, ready to unleash Katrina and tsunamis upon one another—so to say—and in the process generating a lot of incredulous conspiracy theories and passionate shouting from the podium with all the ingredients of a Reality TV show. I have never thought that reading news reports on a dull subject like global warming would have been that thrilling and gripping like reading a Tom Clancy's fiction.

The more I think about it, fiction is what all this debate about climate change is beginning to precipitate into. Last week, a top scientist involved with the cutting-edge research into global warming compared it with Nazism and Slavery and denounced the lack of urgency shown by the leaders of the global community. "On those kinds of issues you cannot compromise. You can't say let's reduce slavery, let's find a compromise and reduce it 50% or reduce it 40%," the impatient scientist observed.

He was clearly alluding to the fact that biggest polluters such as China, US, Russia, India, etc were pledging to cut down emissions by certain percentage rather than entirely eliminating it. My sympathies go to these countries because there is no magic wand to eliminate emissions at one's whim, and I am inclined to conclude that the scientist's mind must have recently gone into some rough weather because of all the confusing graphs and pedantic statistics that climate experts like him conceive and study.

By the way, isn't the term 'climate expert' not an oxymoron (a self contradicting idea)? How can one be an expert on climate when we can't even predict weather for the next few days? In climate change studies, the time range under consideration is not in weeks, months, or years—researchers deal with millennia, billions of years dating back to the period when we all were apes and monkeys and went nuts after peanuts.

That's beside the point. It seems that we all are trying to outdo one another in going green in the competition called "Mirror mirror, who is the greenest of all?" without making any substantive behavioural change—more froth and less broth. (If you ask me, Shrek is the greenest..shhh).

An interesting take on this hypocrisy and the extent of our cynicism is the question how much CO2 the delegates of Copenhagen Climate Summit will generate in flying to the Denmark's Capital City to deliberate about precisely how humanity can get rid of dirty fossil fuels like the variety which propels the aircrafts.

A question indeed. The conspiracy theories lead to even more questions. Skeptics say a mere increase of some fractions of a Celsius Degree in mercury doesn't warrant this entire hullabaloo over imagined apocalypse feared to be brought on by global heating. They say the seeming rise in earth's temperature is due to the phenomenon of natural variation which is an intrinsic feature of the earth's climate history.

On the face of it, this reasoning seems plausible and might convince any fence sitter on the climate debate. Scientists are now divided over this hypothesis and are actually setting up rival camps. The naysayers are being portrayed as Holocaust deniers and on the other side are people like Al Gore, Pachauri, Thomas Friedman and their ilk. The plot has thickened and is getting more preposterous by the day with the deniers claiming that instead of global warming, the planet has entered a period of cooling since 1998! That's truly amusing.

Whatever be the truth; we the lay people should not get alarmed and press the panic button hastily. It may take time but human spirit of enquiry and proclivity for getting at the truth will prevail and whether global warming will do us in or not, only time can tell.

But we can't take chances. I am on Al Gore's team, partly because I have been deeply moved by his genre defining documentary on the subject—The Inconvenient Truth. If there is any documentary that showed Al Gore in his best form as a green activist, this is it.

The other virtue of 'The Inconvenient Truth' is that it could well be a tutorial on the art of Powerpoint presentation. There's one famous scene in the film in which Al Gore used a tall ladder to explain how the earth's temperature had shot up suddenly during the last few decades from that prevailed from thousands of years before. He actually climbed up the ladder because the bar in the graph that showed the rise in temperature had veered to a great height beyond his reach to great dramatic effect.

If global warming is what it is projected to be, the consequences are serious and unmanageable. There may be famines because of floods and droughts. Studies have linked effects of global warming with escalating conflicts around the world. There may be civil wars for food, water, habitable land and control over last remaining bio-resources.

We, as individuals have a moral obligation to pitch in with our small lifestyle changes, even if symbolically. And a local context of climate change is that, by the most fortunate twist of destiny, global warming can actually be good for Manipur because green technology that nations are going to adopt in the future to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will be cheap and readily available. Say for example, the renewable energy sources like wind and sunlight are found in abundance in Manipur—in this at least, God has been very equitable and kind to us.

To be a part of the Save-the-Planet project, you can do all you can from this green laundry list: Stop eating meat. Fly less. Drive hybrid cars. Don't cut trees. Use solar energy. Replace bulbs with CFLs or LED light. Throw away anything with CRT technology, embrace LCDs. Put pressure on the public authorities to be sensitive to ecological concerns…and many more.

I wonder how many of us have done anything from the above wish-list. I have practised a few of these but in many cases, to adopt green choices, they should be made available to us in the first place. Where is the Prius showroom anyway? When is MANIREDA going to take over the electricity department?

Despite my tongue-in-cheek hyperbolic expressions of ambivalence on the phenomenon in the foregone paragraphs, I believe global warming is for real. And this is not a distant irrelevant issue any more; it has knocked on our door and affected us. The erratic rainfall patterns that led to drought this year and the rise in temperature in Manipur over the last some years is the tell-tale signs of climate change reaching the nine hills and one valley of Manipur. Airconditioners have become a common sight now in offices and homes. Crops have failed because of droughts.

So let's act. There're two ways of doing it—by mitigation and adaptation. Let's focus on the first approach by reducing our carbon footprints because it is doable and comparatively cheaper. We can become vegetarians; we can plant more trees; we can walk more, drive less; we can switch off our lights every now and then when not in use; we can embrace renewable energy; so on and so forth. On the other hand, the price of adaptation is high. If it's hot, relocate to Shimla or install AC. If there is drought, buy truckloads of Bisleri and Basmati. If there is flood, live in the tallest building. Such are the adaptation options.

The rich will remain unscathed by global warming; it's the poor who will be worst affected. And that's why the fight for preventing global warming is not just atoning for our carbon sins but a fight to ensure that the price is paid equitably and the poor are protected from the consequences of collective wrongdoing of humanity.

And that's why we all should do our bit—and fast, before it's too late.

"Global warming can actually be good for Manipur because the green technologies that will be developed to reduce emissions will stand us in good stead because we have plenty of sunlight and wind to produce clean energy, writes the author."

Ranjan Yumnam

* Ranjan Yumnam, presently an MCS probationer, is a frequent contributor to e-pao.net. He can be contacted at ranjanyumnam(at)gmail(dot)com. This article was webcasted on December 07, 2009.