Global warming, its Impacts and Capitalism

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”.
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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-18th 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.


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 f aster 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.
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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 20th 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.

Nagraj Adve  : nagraj.adve@gmail.com
Published in Social Action, journal of the Indian, Social Institute, April 2008

Note: The author is with Delhi Platform, a group active around global warming and equitable
development (see www.delhiplatform.blogspot.com; delhiplatform@gmail.com). This piece and
my last one year has been enriched enormously by discussions with friends in and around Delhi
Platform, Arun Bidani in particular. They are of course all equally responsible for any errors this
piece may contain!

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