The much touted Kyoto protocol is meaningless unless the big-daddy of green-house gas emission, the US, agrees to it. Also we have to remember that the world’s biggest spending on funded-scientific research is done by the US. So any scientific reports that come out of such funding will most certainly not be against the US. So it is refreshing to read the report of a study ( Yahoo News) by 15 scientists from 13 nations commissioned by the governments of China and Brazil and is the product of two years of workshops organized by the InterAcademy Council, the Netherlands-based network of national academies of science. The report titled ‘Lighting the Way: Toward a Sustainable Energy Future’ talks of coal-usage as the single most important environmental hazard and squarely blames the power-consumption of developing nations for releasing poison to the environment. And as is expected from such reports, it talks glibly about energy-conservation, finding renewable energy resources and all that kind of known clich’s. The hope that this paper would be pro-active and unbiased is slowly shattered.
Expectedly, the Americans on the team are the most smug. And why should they not be? A few months ago some US scientists complained in international conferences about the complicity of the US in increasing global warning. Bush’s environmental cronies got furious. They drafted guidelines about what may and may not be said by US scientists to their foreign counterparts. So it is understandable that the onus of cleaning up the environment lies with poorer nations while the US carries on polluting the environment. The study advises the use of atomic energy but that to acquire the technical know-how a country has to sue and bow for grace from America. The US may be willing to impart this knowledge but the cost of such forbidden techniques is often humiliating for a nation. So that route too is fraught with neo-colonial traps. The US often is entering the environmental-action arena from a superior stance. In effect, the paper asks other nations to clamp down on their use of carbon-fuels so that the total emission of the US does not harm the world. Of course, the world in such cases means the land of milk and honey, America.
One issue that the paper does not deal with is the vicious way in which a nation’s economy stifles her environmental concerns. Even if poor nations want to curb emission, doing so would result in starvations and spiraling unemployment. At this point, let us reflect that often this condition of these nations is from no fault of their own. They were robbed and pillaged by white nations who are today wealthy from what they stole from these impoverished countries. Instead of lecturing what needs to be done environment- wise, this paper could well have critiqued how the economies of the world need to be tuned to make such drastic cleanups possible. It should rather have talked about what the largest and most alive economy of the world, the US needs to do to get us a clean world.
VIA: Yahoo News
Image: MSNBC MEDIA
