Kids in my village Adve had a tough time bursting
crackers on Diwali last year. Which
was not surprising, because it was raining, and the
crackers were not sufficiently dry. The
surprise though was that it was raining at all.

The village is located near the coast in southern
Karnataka, between Udupi and
Mangalore. The regular monsoon in this coastal belt
usually lasts about three months. In 2007, it
rained for five months, all the way up to Diwali, in
early November. It is unheard of in this
region: my aunt, who has lived here for 20 years, said
she had never experienced anything like it;
two elderly relatives, who are roughly 75 and 80 years
respectively and who have lived in the
village all their lives, said they don’t remember it
ever raining so long during their lifetimes.

Though one cannot link every aberration in weather to
global warming, irregular rainfall
patterns are very much among its predicted impacts.
But what actually got me going on the
subject with them was that anyone I asked, “How are
things?” would reply, “It’s been bad this
year.” It was bad was because excessively long monsoon
affected the paddy crop, the most
important crop in this fertile belt. Normally the
harvesting and threshing of paddy crop happens
immediately after the monsoons when it becomes dry.
With rains going on and on, farmers are
unsure whether to leave it in the fields, where if it
is left for too long, either insects get to it and/
or the grain falls off. To harvest it when it is still
wet is also a problem since the crop first needs
to dry adequately before threshing else some of it
just rots. Everyone I asked told me their yield
fell by 30-50 per cent. The crop is measured in a unit
called mudi, roughly 38 kilos to 1 mudi.
Usually one acre generates about 25-35 mudi if is
well-watered and about 10-20 mudi if it is not
and situated on higher ground. This time it was only
about 15 mudi. My uncle summed it up,
“It’s just been a loss this year.”

They had other side-effects on their mind. The quality
and volume of hay declined, also
because it was too wet and rotted. The price of hay,
used to feed cattle, rose from Rs 1.50 to Rs 2
a bundle. Being landowners, they also complained about
the higher wage costs: since the paddy
crop was wet, it took longer for the (male) farm
labourers, who are paid Rs 160 a day, to
transport it from the fields. I spoke to three
labourers who were threshing paddy nearby: this year
they got 30 days of work transporting the paddy,
spread over 8-9 houses, work that in a normal
year would have been done in 20 days. Did they then
gain, having 10 extra days of work? Yes.
However, of the three workers I spoke to, two owned
land themselves near Hubli that was being
worked on by other family members: there the onion
crop was hit because of the excess rain.
One of them, who makes Rs 15,000 in a normal year,
said this year “there was nothing”.

---

I started off with this narrative about my village
Adve simply because there is not enough
information in the public domain about how global
warming is already impacting people in
India, particularly the poor. Information is coming in
bits and pieces. Sometimes it is anecdotal:
for instance, landowners in Kerala I talked to said
the irregular rains also affected them:
cardamom yields fell sharply, also resulting in a
sharp rise in the price of cardamom. Some gets
reported. In Rajasthan, frost and irregular cold
conditions this January affected the standing
crop – mustard and gram in particular – in 10 lakh hectares
over 22 districts, prompting farmers to
approach leaders for relief from the Calamity Relief
Fund (Hindu, 3 February 2008) and the state the
connection between current impacts and global warming
is made clear and in the public
domain, so that varied impacts in different regions,
topographies and climatic zones can be
anticipated and prepared for better. Getting a clearer
sense of detailed impacts would also help
mobilize around the issue.

 Global Warming, Global Impacts

The impacts of global
warming have been truly global
and extraordinarily varied. The average rise in global
temperatures may seem small – 0.8 degrees
C since the Industrial Revolution in roughly the
mid-18^th century, the Earth’s average
temperature reaching 14.5 degrees C in 2005 – but this
is only an average. The farther one goes
from the equator, in northern latitudes in particular,
the rise is much higher than the average. The
warming so far has caused lands to be nibbled by
rising sea levels in the Sunderbans and the
Gujarat coast, the 2005 floods in Bombay that killed a
thousand people and Himalayan glaciers
to recede. Millions were affected by floods in 2007 in
South Asia alone. The WHO says that an
extra 1,50,000 people are dying each year due to
global warming. It has caused flooding in
Yugoslavia, Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria, droughts in
the Sahel in Africa, Hurricane Katrina in
the US, forest fires as far afield as Greece, Spain,
Australia, near Los Angeles and Portugal,
melting glaciers worldwide, recorded loss of species,
the shrinking of Arctic Ice to historical
lows, accelerated melting in Greenland and Antartica,
more intense hurricanes in the Caribbean,
the melting of permafrost that had remained frozen
since the last Ice Age ended 12,000 years
ago. It has caused a northerly shift of fish species
in Europe, an upward shift in the growth of
apples on hills in Himachal, decrease of rice yields
in the Philippines, increases in tick-borne
encephalitis in Sweden, chikuguniya in Italy, the
greater spread of malaria in highland areas of
Kenya, formation of large lakes due to glacial retreat
in Nepal, the Andes and the Alps, and
increased frequency of glacial lake outburst floods in
Nepal, Bhutan and Tibet. It has affected
things as vast and fundamental as ocean currents, the
length of seasons, and rainfall patterns
(Brown 2006; IPCC 2007b: 86-99; Lynas 2007; Monbiot
2006). I could go on and on.

It is not usually understood that current impacts
being described above or what we are
already experiencing are the effects not of current
emissions, but of carbon emissions from about
25-30 years ago. It takes those many years for carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere to achieve its
full effect (Brown 2006: 45). This is mainly because
the vast oceans, being cooler than the
atmosphere, and because water’s thermal capacity is
much higher than the atmosphere, take a
while to warm and catch up. We are already at 0.8
degrees C above the Industrial Revolution, but
because of this lag in the climate system, a further
warming of about 0.7 degrees is built in.
Hence reaching 1.5 degrees C, almost twice the current
levels of rise, is assured even if we stop
emitting gases today. There is nothing we can do about
it, nor can we avoid further, more intense
or more frequent impacts.

Not just are the effects of emissions of the past few
years yet to be felt, emission levels
have been intensifying in recent years. Worldwide CO₂
emissions from fossil fuels was 21.39
billion metric tonnes (Gt) in 1990 (the benchmark year
to measure cuts), was 22.97 Gt in 1997
when the Kyoto meeting happened, 26.40 Gt a year over
2000-2005, and reached 28.19 Gt in
2005, when the Kyoto Protocol was finally ratified
(EIA 2007; IPCC 2007a: 3). The big sources
of these emissions are electrical power (24%) industry
(14%), and transport (14%). Even
agriculture contributes 14%, but agriculture is vastly
more useful socially than the 800 million
cars plying in the world at present: billions depend
on agriculture for livelihood and all of us for
our food.

Finally, a further 7-8 billion tons of CO₂ and other
gases get emitted due to land use
changes (18%), which mainly happen due to
deforestation, burning and decay of biomass, decay of
peat and peat fires. When trees are cut or die, they
emit carbon dioxide. In India, a
disproportionate amount of deforestation is happening
due to industry destroying forests due to
mining, commercial logging, setting up of industry,
etc and this is going to increase as our
destructive pattern of development continues. But if
one were to take deforestation and land use
changes worldwide, a staggering amount has happened
(EPW Research Foundation 2008: 89) in
Brazil (1.11 billion tonnes of CO₂ a year between
1990-2005) due to deforestation from the
Amazon, and in Indonesia (2.27 billion tonnes a year
1990-2005) mainly due to the destruction
of forests to grow biofuels. In both cases, the
primary consumers are first world elites in the US
and Europe.

Besides CO₂, methane and nitrous oxide are the other
significant greenhouse gases. A
couple of important points about greenhouse gas
emissions. One, it does not matter where and by
whom the emissions are made, i.e. it does not need
people in Tuvalu or Maldives to emit CO₂
for these countries to disappear from future maps as
they surely will; emissions anywhere in the
world hurts them equally much. Two, roughly half the
emissions get absorbed by the oceans and
forests, the rest remaining in the atmosphere, but
their absorption capacity is declining. Three,
methane and nitrous oxide warm more than CO₂ but have
short lifespans. Carbon dioxide has a
lifespan of thousands of years: about a half of it
stays in the atmosphere for a hundred years, a
third for over 500 years and a quarter for over a
thousand years. It means the faster we cut down
emissions today, less of it will be warming and
impacting us in the future.

Because of all this human activity, CO₂ has jumped
from 280 ppm at the start of the
Industrial Revolution to 385 ppm at present, much of
it in the past few decades. Since they block
the long-wave radiation that radiates back, most human
emissions warm the planet. Some
emissions, aerosols such as sulphate, organic carbon,
soot, etc cool it down by blocking sunlight.
As the excellent website realclimate.org recently
explained, factoring in the warming and
cooling effects of other emissions, that figure stood
at the equivalent (CO₂e) of about 375 ppm
in 2006, and is going up by at least 2 ppm each year
(Schmidt 2007).

Feebacks and the 2-degree tipping point:
Unfortunately, it is not only carbon dioxide
and other gases that is contributing to warming. The
warmer earth is triggering off certain
‘feedbacks’, which could be understood as the Earth’s
systems themselves contributing to
warming: as Arctic ice melts, there is less of it to
reflect heat, warming further, melting more,
and so on. Warmer Antartic and Greenland ice sheets
create meltwater on the surface which,
being darker than ice, absorbs more heat. Oceans, like
sponges, absorb less over time. Warmer
soils accelerate metabolic processes that allow carbon
dioxide in soils to escape. Melting
permafrost in the Arctic Tundra will release CO₂ and
methane trapped within.

These processes are already being triggered. Arctic
ice was 1 million sq km less in 2007
compared to the earlier lowest in recorded history
(2005). Waters from melting ice-sheets in
Antartica are flowing through moulins to the bottom of
the ice sheets lubricating them towards
the sea. CO₂ escaping from warmer soils have been
recorded. Surveys in 2005 tell us methane
has already begun escaping from the melting Arctic,
and there are 70 billion tonnes of it. Recent
studies published in Nature, Science and elsewhere
suggest that oceans are currently absorbing
less than they were a few decades ago (Archer 2007).
Each of these elements has separate
tipping points, of which the Arctic is imminent. A
recent conference of the American Geophysics
Union suggested that it may have already tipped
(Raypierre 2007), meaning that in the not too
distant future the Arctic will have no ice in summer.
Since Arctic ice acts as a huge reflector, the
less there is of it, the more warmth will be absorbed
by the sea water around and by the Earth.

These feedbacks are crucial. It’s fairly widely
accepted that were the Earth to become
roughly 2 degrees warmer than pre-Industrial times –
1.5 degrees, remember, is assured – it
would catalyze feedbacks together on a scale so
massive that global warming could effectively
get out of human capacity to control the process.
Climbing 2 degrees is likely if greenhouse
gases are allowed to build up to roughly 450 ppm CO₂e.
But there is uncertainty as to what
levels of CO₂ correspond to what levels of warming.
Hence we don’t really know when 2
degrees will be reached. Some say we have barely about
20 years to prevent dangerous global
warming. The UK’s Stern Review puts the date at 2035,
but it is calculating 2 degrees at 550 ppm
CO₂e (Stern 2007: iii). To be safe, we need to
restrict ourselves to 400 ppm CO₂; we already are
at 385 and are rushing there at over 2 ppm a year.
James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute
for Space Studies – one of the world’s most respected
climatologists – has said we have until
2015 to avoid dangerous levels of global warming in
the future, less than ten years.

 Impacts in India

One massive area being impacted and
clearly visible to all is the
Indian monsoon. What used to be ‘natural’ phenomena
are not natural any more, Bill McKibben
lamented in The End of Nature nearly 20 years ago
(McKibben 1990: 45). Human interference
has certainly made the Indian monsoon fickle. A recent
widely reported paper spelt nine major
tipping elements, “subsystems of the Earth system that
are at least subcontinental in scale and
can be switched into a qualitatively different state
by small perturbations” (Lenton, et al 2008).
These include, significantly, the Indian summer
monsoon. Lenton suggests that the Indian
monsoon could potentially change its nature strikingly
from one year to the next. Aerosol
emissions, mentioned earlier, could well weaken it
whilst warming from greenhouse gases tends
to strengthen it. It leads to what is essentially a
chaotic monsoon year on year that is able to
switch ’modes’ with aerosols and warming pushing it in
different directions. There is reason to
believe that the tipping point for the Indian monsoon
may have already been crossed or is
imminent. The implications of this for agriculture in
particular are obvious.

Another major impact in India is going to be reduced
water availability. Overuse by
industry and change in agricultural patterns to crops
that consume more water, and the excess
pumping of groundwater has already resulted in water
scarcity for millions, and in many places
the drying of small rivers that people depended upon.
As it is, access in India to irrigation and
drinking water is mediated by one’s caste, with dalits
having the least access and 118 million
homes – 62% of our households – already do not have
drinking water at home. This situation is
going to worsen with global warming resulting in the
melting of Himalayan glaciers. A study of
466 glaciers, which included small mountain glaciers
and ice fields in “three highly glacierized
basins of Chenab, Parbati and Baspa” in Himachal
Pradesh revealed a 21% reduction in glacial
area from the middle of the last century, from 2,077
to 1,628 square kms, reduction in mean area
from 1.4 to 0.32 sq km, fragmentation of glaciers that
is “much higher than realized earlier”. The
study concludes that if additional global warming
takes place, it “will have a profound effect of
availability of water resources in the Himalayan
region” (Kulkarni, et al 2007: 74). New data by
Anil Kulkarni from Warwan and Bhut river basins
confirms this (Hindu, 28 February 2008). It
would be shortsighted for urban dwellers far from the
Himalayas to think that they won’t be
affected since it will widely affect water and food
supply, and so much of India’s electricity is
hydropower. Impacts are certainly mediated by class,
but global warming affects everybody.

Global warming can also cause “increases in the
occurrence of intense tropical cyclones
and high [storm] surges”, something that has been
already witnessed in the Bay of Bengal during
November (Unnikrishnan, et al 2006: 362). A slower but
catastrophic change is and will be sea level rise.
Though a study indicated that sea level rise in some
Indian coastal cities has been
quite mild so far, less than a centimetre a decade
(Unnikrishnan, et al 2006: 367), it did not
specify its rise in recent years. This has been much
sharper worldwide, over 3 centimetres a
decade since 1993 (IPCC 2007c: 1). Already, villagers
on Gujarat’s coasts, in eastern Orissa and
in the Sunderbans have seen their lands, wells and
homes eaten away by rising sea levels. In
areas of the Sunderbans, erosion started 35 years ago,
some islands such as Lohachhara
disappearing 25 years ago. Today, Gobardhanpur
village, Suparibhanga island, southern
Sitarampur village and most of fertile Ghoramara
island only exist in the memories of “10,000
environmental refugees [who] struggle for survival
here” (Mukherji 2008).

The IPCC has predicted a max rise of 59 cm by the end
of the century. It says those
subject to flooding will increase from 13 million to
94 million and “60% of this increase will
occur along coasts from Pakistan, through India, Sri
Lanka, and Bangladesh to Burma” (IPCC
2007b: 484). But the IPCC’s estimate of sea level rise
is considered too low a figure. James
Hansen has said IPCC’s analysis “assumes an inertia
for ice sheets that is incompatible with
palaeoclimate data and inconsistent with observations
of current ice sheet behaviour”. He says
the last time the planet was 2-3 degrees C warmer
(which is a certainty the way we are going), “it
was a dramatically different planet then with no
Arctic ice in the warm seasons and the sea level
[was] about 25 metres higher, give or take 10 metres”.
He wagers that it is far more likely that
sea levels will rise the better part of 5 metres by
the end of this century! (Hansen 2007: 32;
Hansen, et al 2007). India has over 7,000 kilometres
of coastline, and if the rise is even half what
Hansen predicts, can one imagine the relentless
impact, physical and psychological, it will have
on fisherpeople, small cultivators along the coast,
and the millions of urban poor in India’s
populated coastal towns and cities? And some of
India’s most fertile regions – where a lot of
India’s rice grows – lie along the coasts and deltaic
regions.

In fact, all of this – irregular monsoons, less water,
rising sea levels – will impact badly
on Indian agriculture. And as it is, major crop yields
will be affected by higher temperatures. A
recent study by the Indian Agriculture Research
Institute found that increases in temperature by
about 2 degrees C “reduced potential [wheat] grain
yields in most regions”, and that “overall,
temperature increases are predicted to reduce rice
yields”, the impact on rice yields being most in
eastern India. Even the IPCC, scarcely alarmist, says
“a 0.5 degree C rise in winter temperature
would reduce wheat yield by 0.45 tons per hectare in
India” (IPCC 2007b: 480). And this when
Indian agriculture has already been pushed into
crises, and 1.5 lakh farmers have committed
suicide since 1995.

Keep some things in mind. One, these and other impacts
will exacerbate almost all
existing inequalities of resource use, including
access to food and water scarcity, and
inordinately affect dalits, adivasis, rural women,
agricultural workers, even urban workers. Two,
it will intensify almost all existing contradictions
of India’s complex and violent social structure.
Three, as its varied impacts exacerbate, they will be
felt simultaneously: hence, various
underclasses will be caught between the devil and,
literally, the deep sea. Four, its impacts will
hit an already impoverished country in which, a recent
official report shockingly revealed, 836
million people live on less than Rs 20 a day (NCEUS
2007: 6). Finally, in almost all significant
areas examined worldwide (very likely also applies to
India), impacts are happening faster or to a
greater extent than climate models said they would.
This is partly because measurements have
improved, but basically because reality is unfolding
faster than the science expected. The Earth
has had enough.

 Global Warming, Non-solutions and Capitalism

It is
not a coincidence that the basic cut-off
point in most discussions is what CO₂ levels were at
the time of the Industrial Revolution circa
1750 (280 ppm) and how much it has shot up since (385
ppm), rising each year. It’s not that
resource exploitation, trade, markets, warfare,
consumption, technological development, mining,
etc did not happen in feudal societies and in the
ancient world; it’s just that in the last 250 years
they have happened at a rate, intensity and
geographical scale unprecedented in human history.
Anyone who doubts the umbilical links between global
warming and capitalism should look at
the recent rise of emissions from fossil fuels in
China, from 3,050 million metric tonnes in 2001
to 5,322 mmt in 2005 (EIA 2007). As a consequence, the
long-term trend of declining CO₂
emissions per unit of energy supplied reversed and
rose after 2000 (IPCC 2007c: 4). This mirrors
the changing contours of capitalism; by the 1990s,
goods that were still being consumed by First
World and other elites began to get manufactured in
China as capital searched for cheaper labour
markets and lower input costs.

This centrality of capitalism as cause and constraint
has certain implications for how we
look at global warming. One, we need to expose the
limitations and sometimes fraudulence of
looking at it through the lens of the nation-state,
and instead place class, elite consumption and
capitalism at our conceptual core. Global warming is a
problem caused by the rich, but which
will be borne largely by the poor. So when Manmohan
Singh says that ‘India’s’ per capita
emission levels will never be higher than western
countries, he is being too clever for our own
good. Such a nation-wide aggregate averaged out hides
the enormous disparity in incomes and
consumption that have intensified in India in recent
years. This trajectory is one in which
economic ‘growth’ benefits a section of urban elites,
even as official reports admit that over 800
million people consume less than Rs 20 a day, and
someone who consumes so little can hardly
contribute to global warming. Class, and not nation,
is central to global warming.

Two, we need to recognise the limitations of
technological solutions under capitalism.
Don’t get me wrong. Some of these technologies –
solar, wind power, etc – will reduce CO₂
levels, will help delay its impacts, and will
undoubtedly play an important part in more equitable
social arrangements. But why is it that these
technologies are not being and have not been
implemented on a scale large enough to solve the
problem, let alone preventing global warming
becoming such a dire issue in the first place? John
Bellamy Foster tells us why: “At every point,
capitalists have blocked the implementation of solar
power alternatives. … Under capitalism, it
is those energy sources that generate the most profits
for capital – of which solar power is
certainly not one – that are promoted, not those most
beneficial to humanity and the Earth
(Foster 2003: 100).

It is the inherent tendency of capitalism to opt for
the cheapest inputs. Why else would
China, despite facing staggering environmental
disasters, continue to build coal-powered plants
at the rate it is, such that “coal [still] accounts
for three-quarters of China’s primary energy
consumption (Wen and Li 2007: 140)? What’s more, as
one found in Delhi when factories were
being closed in the mid-1990s, under capitalism, each
individual enterprise cuts corners to make
profits, thus taking the cheapest, easiest route,
which also usually happens to be the most
polluting. Profit is not just the mantra, it is the
only mantra. Even if we assume technological
solutions have the technical capacity to solve the
problem, which I doubt, capitalism’s inherent
drive to cut costs, generate profits and promote
relentless growth prevents technological
remedies from being adopted on a scale large enough to
avoid reaching 2 degrees and hence
cross dangerous levels of global warming.

Three, capital is trying to make money out of the
crisis, by creating carbon trading, and
by pushing some very dangerous policies as
contributing to a solution, biofuels and nuclear
power in particular. Each certified emission reduction
(CER) unit – for each tonne of CO₂
notionally saved – is currently trading at 13 euros,
around Rs 750. Its global market is currently
worth US$ 70 billion, estimated to reach $100 bn in 2
years, of which India’s share will be 25
billion dollars (D’Monte 2008). Carbon trading
benefits the bigger polluters and is nothing but a
way of some businesses making money while business and
elites carry on their unsustainable
levels of consumption. What’s more, it actively works
against the drastic cuts in consumption
and emissions that are needed so urgently to ensure we
do not reach dangerous levels of
warming.

Re biofuels, palm oil, maize and jatropha plantations
have expanded with the EU and US
setting higher targets for biofuels in their fuel mix.
The consequences have been massive
emissions from deforestation to grow palm oil in
Malaysia and Indonesia, and people being
driven out of lands they use (but designated
‘wasteland’) in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh.
These crops also consume huge amounts of water and use
land that could otherwise be used for
basic foods. It has contributed to spiralling prices
of wheat, rice and maize worldwide, sparking
protests in Mexico and elsewhere. Should we be
diverting resources on this scale to feed cars
rather than feed people?

Nuclear power is routinely prescribed as contributing
to a solution even though it will be
only a tiny percentage of power generation, and has
obvious, serious hazards: the real possibility
of serious nuclear accidents; nuclear waste being
recklessly dumped, as happened in the UK
(Monbiot 2007: 91); the long-term problem of nuclear
waste; finally, the spread of nuclear power
is more conducive to the proliferation of nuclear arms
because of the fine technological line
between nuclear power and weapons. In all three cases
– carbon trading, biofuels and nuclear
power – only sections of capital will stand to gain,
but consumption will continue and emissions
will carry on growing.

 Equity is the only way forward

Until we recognise
that global warming is capitalism’s
greatest failure, that it is the deepest crisis ever
faced by humanity and innumerable other
species, and that real solutions to this crisis are
not possible from within capitalism, we will not
be able to come out of it. We must focus on an
entirely different trajectory of development, one
that has equity, sustainability, respect for nature,
and a fair space for other species at its core. As
one article put it, “equity is central to
sustainability … development can only be truly
sustainable, when equity is made its leading edge”
(Heredia 1994: 22).

In India, this means, as a starting point, questioning
and resisting the entire current
trajectory of development, towards which I will make a
few broad points. One, with 650 million
people dependent on it, any meaningful development
trajectory in India has to start with
agriculture, for which land reforms and land
distribution are central, but small-scale agriculture
also needs to be made viable. It also helps our
purposes that agriculture has lower emissions than
most other human activity. Two, we need to question
the mainstream focus on growth as the
marker for a successful development experience. Recent
years shows us that high growth can
happen with little employment generation, skews
resource allocation in society, and can only be
accompanied by and because of inequality in society.
Three, the current industrialization
trajectory is to some degree socially useless,
environmentally unsustainable, and wasteful in its
consumption of resources that could otherwise have
been used in agriculture or for daily life, such as
land, water and power. The vibrant struggles taking
place around SEZs, in Nandigram,
against Posco, against diversion of dam waters in
Orissa, against displacement and corporate
capture of people’s resources all over India suggest
that this point is being made by millions of
people. Unfortunately they are being met not with
dialogue but repression by governments.

When we say all this to students and in meetings, we
are asked: Are you against
industrialization, against development? No, but we
argue for equitable development, and a more
appropriate industrialization that is more in tune
with people’s basic needs, producing what is
socially absolutely necessary, for small industry that
ties with agriculture, one that generates
greater employment locally.

A more sustainable pattern of development, and a
reduction of the global warming crisis,
is only possible if the unsustainable levels of elite
consumption are curtailed. We are right to
blame capitalism but the system is not just out there,
it also seeps within us. The disturbing part
of the recent Tata Nano car display was not merely
what havoc the car will cause, but the
frenzied response to it among Delhi’s public. Lower
levels of consumption by the well-off is also
necessary so that today’s and future under-consumers
can legitimately raise their consumption to
levels that afford dignity. The principle, and goal,
ought to be equal emissions per person with
lowered targets. Conversely, saner levels of
consumption are only possible in a development
trajectory that is more equitable than the present.

The key to the global warming crisis lies in equity,
and the transcending of capitalism.
But the transcending of capitalism, though necessary,
is not enough, as the history of 20^th century
socialist societies tell us. It also requires us to
abandon the faith in technological progress as the
solution to all of society’s ills and shortcomings, to
restore balance with nature, to reduce
consumption to what is absolutely necessary, to reduce
speed and more speed in our daily lives,
and to reflect and have time to reflect. As Delhi
Platform’s Resolution on Global Warming says:
“We, the people of the world, must force all
governments everywhere to create systems and
structures that will allow people to exercise their
choice for a wiser course of humane
development with far lower levels of consumption. We
call upon people everywhere to compel
their governments to adopt equity, including between
generations and between species, and equal
rights to the global commons, as the basis for all
proposed solutions.” (Delhi Platform 2008). All
this can only come from reflection, resistance and
struggle, individual and collective. We have
very little time and no choice left.

References:

Archer, David 2007. “Is the Ocean Carbon Sink
Sinking?”, realclimate.org, 1 November.

Brown, Paul. 2006. Global Warning: The Last Chance for
Change, London: Dakini Books.

Delhi Platform. 2008. “Draft Resolution on Global
Warming”, www.delhiplatform.blogspot.com.

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