A few million years ago when a few asteroids strayed out of their orbits and blundered unto earth in swirls of dust and streaks of fire, they brought in their wake, amongst other things, death and destruction for the dinosaur. It was history's immense loss that CNN wasn't there to cover the cataclysmic upheavals LIVE. The TRP they would have squeezed from that singular piece of logistics would have far exceeded the deluge of viewership they muscled during their 1990 light show in the Gulf.
Pertinently, that collision brought with it a change of guard. Upright land mammals ascended to earth's throne. A lower pecking order on the food chain grabbed the opportunity to spread its supremacy over fauna and flora, slowly diffusing to plunder treasures in earth's many veins, impelled in varying proportions by motives of survival, dominance and pursuit of pleasure. The chase brought with it draconian demands on energy sources. And now energy's principal excreta, carbon dioxide, brings home the knowledge of our civilisation's fragility in a world raging with molecular hazards.
Global warming after Kyoto is suddenly not a Hollywood conspiracy or a comment on middle-class vulnerability to predictions of eight-ft rodents snapping at mankind's heels—or even El Nino-armed cockroaches invading Argentina—but of US abstinence from recollections about who stuck the goo up in the sky in the first place and attempts to drag in bystander nations to shoulder responsibility for something that is primarily their own guilt.
For a nation that's been dismantling missiles, it should have been easy to heat its radar on easy monsters like pollution and, say, tobacco, but the pursuit of pleasure, as we call it, has an industry following that throws in $13 million worth of ads on any talk of greenhouse gas stabilisation. Americans like Republican Pat Buchanan see it as an attack on civilisation. On CNN, primetime, Buchanan also labelled Indian energy use one-third as productive and four times as polluting compared to the US.
We can't dodge that but we would like to lob back a deflating statistic about high density consumerism related to just automobile mileage in the US. A study in the '90s found that 17 per cent of the US mileage had been just 'for the heck of it' and in terms of gas it was enough to feed the transport needs of the entire Scandinavian group of countries for one whole year. Americans consume double the energy of Europe without, as a former UK environment minister puts it, "having twice the population or producing twice the GDP". CNN also tells the world that the Indian per capita consumption of carbon is one whole tonne. It is actually .25 tonnes, which shuffles it to the lowest end of the developing vertebrae.
What the Americans and a few of their sidekicks like Australia and Canada do not want to realise is that fossilising emissions of developing countries like India even at levels 30 years from now would basically mean giving up decadent frills like health, education, drinking water and basic electricity. By arguing against the developing nations' right to survival economics, the US is essentially arguing for the right for its females to use 10 shades of lipstick and the right for some genetically deformed punk-head to step on the pedal from New York to Los Angeles "just for the heck of it".
A speech by US representative Melinda Kimble at Kyoto hinted that the rest of the world should kiss American backsides for their readiness to stabilise emissions at 1990 levels for if the American hunt for pleasure continued at current growth rates, emissions would be 30 per cent more by 2010. That's like Jack the Ripper arguing that he should be let off because if he had been loose for another 20 years he would have slit the throats of 100 more women.
In fact, there are strong parallels between how industry in the US is lobbying against a climate treaty and the manner in which tobacco manufacturers have presented their case to the American public and courts since the '60s. Let your lawyers attack your critics, defy conventional morality, buy politicians, oversee and fund research that is essentially self-serving, do a dance about what's 'proven' and what isn't, what's casual and what's just an association—and, in the end, stonewall. Yes, use blondes with blue eyes and big tits to mouth obligatory, ceremonial lies on CNN about the deadliness of their products for that kind of glamour gives you hope against the enormity of annihilation that in reality you could be facing. You like to believe outlandish lies if they support your irrational lifestyles for there is pain in thinking otherwise.
You would like to believe, as they tell you by situating themselves on the cutting edge of advertisement and advertising in the Washington Post, that "the UN Global climate treaty isn't global because it excludes countries like India, China and Mexico". That "95 US senators and millions can't be wrong". That there is no such thing as a 'consensus view' on global warming and that the whole 'greenhouse' industry is essentially a splendid gravy train providing luxurious jobs for bureaucrats, lavish grants for scientists, lashings of publicity for green groups and the debate itself is a devastating exercise in imperial strip tease. That whether or not global warming is happening or about to happen has less to do with science than personal philosophy. Of course, we must note that these are the same 'scientific skeptics' who, in the '80s, had challenged theories about ozone depletion till NASA discovered the big ozone tear in the stratosphere and nations rushed to ban CFCs. What is being missed out is that when industry spokesmen and interest groups persist in denying the undeniable, they are guilty both of sounding Neanderthal and perpetuating a fraud.
If current cigarette claim suits are about the heaving and straining of chemically panicked hearts and lungs over decades, it doesn't take too much imagination to see a situation where attempts might be made to take the General Motors and other such transnational giants to the cleaners by ordinary citizens who have had their drawers whipped into the ozone layer by Hurricane Linda which was caused by El Nino, which in turn a NASA model establishes to be global warming's enfant terrible. Underlying the subconscious position of the US could be the fact that the nation that has polluted and continues to pollute the most needn't necessarily be the worst affected by a little rise in global temperature. For the tyranny of geography is such that the sulphur over Ohio could drop over New Mexico and we don't have models yet that could tell us that acid rain over London had to do with a Du Pont plastic plant at say Connecticut.But in time, which is not far, this irrational US stance might be morally on par with slavery and the Holocaust.
