Save the planet. It's in fashion Farrukh Dhondy | The Asian Age | March 21, 2007
http://www.asianage.com/ "Woe betide the day When the prophets have nothing to say When politicians Have noble missions And idols feet of clay" >From Occasional Prayers by Bachchoo All the people can be fooled, but not all the time, they said. It now seems that most of the people most of the time is the closest circle to the bull's-eye. I don't profess to be fooled, but very many things leave me puzzled. And even the Internet is no help but that's perhaps like expecting police to catch thieves. There was once a blind faith placed in the ability of the BBC to inform. I heard a broadcast recently in which an aristocratic German, who served in Hitler's Panzer divisions and found himself with Hitler in the final bunker, was said to have chronicled the last days of the Fuehrer. The bunker was isolated from the world and all information. The diarist recorded that Hitler and the German high command were forced to rely entirely on reports on the BBC radio to get a grasp on the closing scenario of the European war. The enemy brought them truthful news of their defeat, peril and doom. Today the BBC transmits pleas by some great and good to give money to agencies that will help the people of Darfur. There is a relentless stream of information about the genocide that is in progress there. People are being killed and displaced by a force called the Janjaweed. Whole forests have been sacrificed to tell us about this slaughter, but I have searched in vain for any explanation of what this is about. The United Nations has pleaded for a cessation of the killings and the Organisation of African States has sent troops. But what the hell is the conflict about? Who is killing whom and why? George Bush has pleaded for the killing to stop but other sources say the killing is financed by the Saudis and George is a great friend of theirs. Who are these millions of victims and why do the Janjaweed want to kill them? Is it land? And if it is, what's the land good for? Minerals? Some wicked ploy by the universal capitalists to get oil or diamonds and if that's the case why would they get them from the Janjaweed and not from the people who are already there and whom the Janjaweed are killing? I live in darkness. And the darkness gives rise to the suspicion that someone is not telling the public something. Is this a religious war and the press conspire in silence? Is it that the Muslim Janjaweed (are they?) are killing their Christian co-citizens? Is it a racial war with the Arab- mixed Sudanese killing the "sub-Saharan" black tribes? I want to sign petitions and demonstrate on London's streets to stop the killing but don't know for and against whom I shall be signing or walking. Another issue about which the media have lately confused me is this business of global warming. It's the biggest game in town. Every newspaper and TV channel is playing it and politicians are falling over each other to race the rumbling bandwagon or construct their own. Tony Blair, having announced his intention to resign the prime ministership in the next few months has no opinions on the issue that anyone cares about. The men to watch are David Cameron, the Conservative PM in waiting and Gordon Brown, the Chancellor who has been anointed to succeed Blair when he goes. Brown, being an operative Chancellor who will have to match his words with actions has managed to satisfy nobody. He has made gestures towards the Green and anti-global-warming lobbies by raising the tax on air fuel. Critics call it too little too late and super-critics in the anti-Labour press have even written articles to prove that the airlines will make a hefty profit from the Chancellor's moves to regulate or control their fuel consumption. The mechanics of this deal are never adequately explained and I can only assume that the rise in price of the fuel will be passed on to the buyers of tickets and only part of the increase will be passed on to the government. It's the sort of calculation we made in India when rupees, annas and pice were replaced by what were then called "naye paise." Instead of sixty-four pice to the rupee there would now be a hundred, and since sixty-four didn't divide neatly into a hundred, the exchange would leave a fractional residue which, my grandmother said, the shopkeepers would make huge profits out of. Even I, though a mere boy, worked out that in the translation of a price tag from old money to new the figure would have to be rounded up a few pice or down a few pice. I was wise enough even at that age to realise that the sellers would prefer up to down and the buyers wouldn't have a choice. But to get back to global warming and the British dishonesty about it, David Cameron finds himself in a political dilemma. He and his new Conservative team have set out to refurbish the image of the Conservatives who are seen, after the Thatcher era, as the "nasty" party. His team knows that to enunciate any actual policies or measures would pin them down and perhaps even negate the image of being for all the people all the time, which they seek to project. But on the Green issue, which is of course out of the UK's control but which the middle classes feel happy gesturing about, Cameron gave a lead. He would cycle to work to save fuel and reduce his "carbon footprint." The hostile press pointed out that a chauffeur followed him with a car carrying his papers! Global warming and giving things up to save the planet have become dinner party conversation. Is your house insulated? How many holidays do you take a year? Do you drive your children to work? And yet the truth is that Britain contributes perhaps 4% of the world's carbon emissions. If it stopped using cars and planes altogether it would save 25% of this figure. Which amounts to a huge and untenable effort put into saving 1%. Which would give the smug of Britain a lot of satisfaction but wouldn't save the planet. Then there's the information that cows, sheep and other farmed animals release gases from their intestines which contain methane a gas 20 times more lethal to the corruption of the ozone layer and therefore 20 times more significant to global warming than my journey to drop a child at school and yet the same dinner parties, at which not-bicycling to school is tut-tutted, will merrily serve New Zealand lamb and Scottish beef. A conveniently ignored statistic to avoid the naked lunch? Into this debate Channel 4 lobbed the biggest cracker yet. It demonstrated, in an hour-long programme, that global warming and the rise of carbon dioxide did indeed go hand in hand. The graph of the one rising, accompanied and paralleled the graph of the other. Then the programme produced climate scientists who pointed out that one may certainly be the result of the other, but it was far from decided which was the cause and which the effect. They said nuclear explosions on the sun have always and will (for as long as the sun lasts) change the temperature of the earth and that global warming in our time is almost certainly caused by this phenomenon which in turn through several mechanisms causes the rise in carbon dioxide levels. This is undoubtedly a minority view, but shouldn't it be comprehensively and convincingly disproved before the world starts begins to believe that marsh gas causes malaria or that the emperor really has set the fashion?
