To answer my own question, he does – sort of.

The Ethical Man completes his “exotic experience” with a rickshaw ride
img: via BBC

BBC’s Justin “Ethical Man” Rowlatt, after spending a year living ethically, translation – reducing his carbon footprint, takes a trip to India to create an Indian version of the Ethical Man and comes away disappointed.

Carbon footprint is, of course, the buzzword in environmental circles these days thanks to the recent onscreen production of the almighty creator of the Internet.

Justin makes some great points. India, the second most populous country in the world, is the fourth largest carbon producer, and this was back in 2000.

It has already overtaken Japan to become the fourth biggest producer of greenhouse gases on earth. In 2000 India was responsible for 1.89 billion tonnes of CO2 (5.6 per cent of the world total) – just a few million tonnes behind the Russian Federation – 1.91 billion tonnes (5.7%).

The official stance of the Indian government is that of self entitlement. While the government recognizes that global warming is a major issue, their stance is that the responsibility of battling global warming lies squarely with the developed nations and not the developing nations. Presenting as evidence this mind boggling quote from Environment Minister A. Raja.

“We are the lowest polluter. According to Kyoto Protocol, we are safe and cannot make any commitment on further reducing emission levels,” Raja said.

While India is nowhere close to China or the US in terms of carbon emissions, with a booming economy and upwardly mobile middle class, Indians are set to become big time consumers of fuel and energy. Car companies are falling over each other to peddle their wares to the newly affluent Indians. Justin wonders if Indians should be driving cars, and answers his own question in the negative, something we (sort of) agree on.

What dilutes Justin’s argument is his holier-than-thou attitude and the disparaging tone of the article. His major mistake is in comparing India’s carbon emissions with Britain’s.

By comparison to India, Britain’s emissions – 0.66 billion tonnes (1.95% world total) – seem relatively modest.

He also goes on to link the scenarios of Indians owning cars, taking flights and using household appliances, to a global catastrophe.

For example, imagine every Indian bought a car or took a return short haul flight or even just used a tumble dryer 90 times a year. That would be enough to increase their carbon footprint by a tonne of CO2 and would add (obviously) a billion tonnes to the national total – almost twice Britain’s current total emissions.

Newsflash for Justin: Indians are simply aping what the Western world including UK has been indulging in for ages. As money from the Western world flows into the Indian society, so do images of their opulent lifestyle. Maybe this does come from a sense on entitlement, but if they can live that lifestyle, how can they preach a different lifestyle to us?

Justin is losing sight of the simple fact that Britain is 16 times smaller than India, and has about 1/20^th India’s population (60 million Brits to 1.1 billion Indians). The carbon emissions of Britain are however just 1/3^rd of India’s. Simple math says the Brits emit almost 11 tonnes of carbon per capita (660 million tonnes carbon/60 million people). By that same measure, Indians emit only 2 tonnes of carbon per capita (1.89 billion tonnes carbon/1.1 billion people). Americans by the same measure emit a whopping 23 tonnes of carbon per capita per year, twice that of the British and almost 12 times more than the Indians.

While the potential is there for India to wreak havoc on the global climate, this by no means is a problem endemic to India or China or any one nation for that matter. The reason I point this out because India and China have been referred to as climate offenders times ad nauseum in the Western media. Like the Indian government cannot just sit on their kundis and expect developed nations to tackle global warming with a sense of entitlement of once being a third world nation, similarly the more developed nations cannot simply brush off their guilt by pointing fingers at the developing countries. The long term solution instead of pointing fingers at poorer (or richer) nations is to jointly come up with efficient, practical and cleaner solutions for power and fuel and until such time, the Ethical Man is but a straw man.

Sidin @ DesiPundit has an interesting angle on this entire global warming problem. He lays the blame on Bipasha. Definitely worth consideration – both the global warming problem and laying it (the blame, I mean) on Bipasha.

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