Sifting through the pile of letters
from organisations announcing news conferences, my attention was drawn
to one that claimed the group would be setting up a major initiative in
India “to help bypass polluting and inefficient technologies and create
more green jobs and a green economy”. The letter was from Sierra Club,
a us -based ngo. What, in effect, it proposed to do was help India
leapfrog high-carbon emitting technologies and yet be on the road to
development adopting technologies that draw from renewable energy
sources. A noble intention, but easier said than done. Intrigued as to
what prompted an organization to make such preposterous claims, I
decided to go to the press conference anyway, since climate change was
my beat.
Without
much ado, Carl Pope, executive director of Sierra Club, made
the important announcement: a Green Energy and Green Livelihoods Award
of us $100,000 to recognize outstanding
environmental success in India by grassroots level civil society
organisations— ngos, cooperatives, small
business and labour unions.
And the winner of the
first such award will be announced in early 2009 in Mumbai.
Pope also announced the
setting up of a ‘Centre for Green Livelihoods
in India’ in partnership with other civil society organizations “to
explore other ways of creating a robust dialogue on developing a green
economy”. Simply put, this centre will bring together various ngos
and explore how green jobs, which lead to a green economy, can be
created in India. Apart from all this Sierra Club will also “network,
collaborate and share information”. Sierra Club, informed Pope, had
started a similar exercise in China.
There it goes again. It is
always India and China that are the two emerging villains of climate
change. The developed world has built their infrastructure and created
wealth, based on technologies that are high on carbon emissions. Even
now, it refuses to deliver on its promise to bring down carbon
emissions. Yet goes about patronising the developing world on the need
for green economy.
To quote Pope: “The us has to get rid of old stuff and India has to
create new stuff. The Sierra Club can help
India make that transition...India does not have fossil fuel to run a
carbon economy, so it should leapfrog to low- carbon economy and switch
to renewable sources such as solar, wind power, etc. And all this is
available in plenty in India.”
By the same logic,
California
should be leading in the switch to green technology as it has plenty of
both sun and the sea. If switching to a low-carbon economy was indeed
so simple, what was keeping the industrialized world from making the
transition?
Next,
it was the turn of Sunil Deshmukh, an nri,
who moved to the us
30 years ago. But, he proclaimed from the dais, his “heart was in
India”. He was therefore committed to see India make the transition.
“India gets extremely good sunshine and also has huge potential to tap
wind energy, so what is the problem? All the ingredients for a
low-carbon economy are available in India, but what is needed is
networking, which Sierra Club will facilitate. We will learn from you
and provide a platform for sharing information and communication,” said
Deshmukh.
Deshmukh clearly has much
to learn about
implementation. On an earlier assignment that took me to far-flung
villages in Jaisalmer, Rajasthan, I have seen solar lighting being
provided, but there was no system for their maintenance and servicing.
Villagers were not trained and it was not viable for government
mechanics to travel all the way to rectify snags in one solar lighting
system. Tariff issues and regulatory mechanisms needed urgent sorting
out.
At the global level, there
was much more that needed sorting out.
Political will, for one. Pope claimed his organization was working on
that front too in the us. Sierra Club acted
as a watchdog to us policymakers. “We are
working towards pushing the us
government to drop coal-based thermal power plants. It has already
cleared 12 such plants. But we have stopped 50 such plants and are
working towards stalling another 150 that are in the pipeline,”
emphasized Pope.
Since the us
was the largest polluter, with the highest per capita carbon emission,
it would make more sense to focus on Washington rather than on New
Delhi or Beijing, I would have thought. But Sierra Club and its head
thought otherwise: India and China are big countries and if they shift
to low carbon then the entire world will follow.
