The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
The jokes about the Nano, Tata MotorsÕ new affordable car for the middle class in India, were harmless. ÒHow do you double the value of a Nano? Fill the tank.Ó ÒHow many engineers does it take to make a Nano? Two. One to fold and one to apply the glue.Ó But the hypocrisy wasnÕt funny at all. The typical story in the Western media began by marvelling that Tata has managed to build a car that will sell for only 100,000 rupees (US$2,500). The car will take five people provided they donÕt all inhale at the same time. It has no radio, no air conditioning, and only one big windshield wiper, but such economies mean that it is within reach of tens of millions of Indians who could only afford a scooter up to now. And that is where the hypocrisy kicked in. What will become of us when all those Indians start driving around in cars? ThereÕs over a billion of them, and the world just canÕt take any more emissions. ItÕs not the ÒPeopleÕs Car,Ó as Tata bills it, but rather the ÒPeopleÕs Polluter,Ó moaned CanadaÕs National Post. ÒA few dozen million new cars pumping out pollution in a state of semi-permanent gridlock is hardly what the Kyoto Protocol had in mind.Ó But hang on a minute. ArenÕt there more than a dozen million cars in Canada already, even though it only has one-thirtieth of IndiaÕs population? ArenÕt they on average twice the size of the Nano? Does the phrase Òdouble standardÓ come to mind? ÒIndiaÕs vehicles spewed 219 million tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in 2005,Ó fretted The Guardian in London. ÒExperts say that figure will jump almost sevenfold to 1,470 million tonnes by 2035 if car travel remains unchecked.Ó And the Washington Post wrote: ÒIf millions of Indians and Chinese get to have their own cars, the planet is doomed. Suddenly, the cute little Nano starts to look a lot less winning.Ó But practically every family in the U.S. and Britain already has its own car (or two). DonÕt they understand that everybody on the planet has an equal right to own a car, if they can afford it? If the total number of people who can afford cars exceeds the number of cars that the planet can tolerate, then we will just have to work out a rationing system that everybody finds fair, or live with the consequences of exceeding the limits. ÒContraction and convergenceÓ is the phrase they need to learn. The notion is simply that we must agree on a figure for total global emissions that cannot be exceeded, rather as we set fishing quotas in order to preserve fish stocks. Then we divide that amount by six and a half billion (the total population of the planet), and that gives us the per capita emission limit for everyone on Earth. Of course, some people (in the developed countries, mostly) are currently emitting 10 or 20 times as much as other people (mainly in the developing countries), but eventually that will have to stop. The big emitters will gradually have to ÒcontractÓ their per capita emissions, while the poor countries may continue to grow theirs, until at an agreed date some decades in the future the two groups ÒconvergeÓ at the same level of per capita emissions. And that level, by prior agreement, will be low enough that global emissions remain below the danger point. If you donÕt like that idea, then you can go with the alternative: a free-for-all world in which everybody moves towards the level of per capita emissions that now prevails in the developed countries. No negotiations or treaties required: it will happen of its own accord. So will runaway climate change, meaning a future of famine, war and mass death. Clucking disapprovingly about mass car ownership in India misses the point. At the moment there are only 11 private cars for every thousand Indians. There are 477 cars for every thousand Americans. By mid-century, there will have to be the same number of cars per thousand people for both Indians and Americans Ð and that number will have to be a lot lower than 477, unless somebody comes up with cars that emit no greenhouse gases at all. Otherwise, everybody loses.
