GLOBAL WARMING IN THE INDIAN CONTEXT An Introductory Overview

This booklet is based on conversations with many people from different states, chats with fellow-activists, public meetings and talks by others, activist reports and published books and scientific papers. It is mainly aimed at students, other young people in towns and cities, and activists.

- Nagraj Adve

What they told us in GujaratThree years ago, a group of us went to parts of Gujarat to find out how climate change was affecting small farmers there. In villages in eastern Gujarat, they told us that the winter maize crop had been getting hit. Because winters had been getting warmer, the dew (os) has lessened, or stopped entirely for the last few years. For those without wells – most of them poor households – dew is the only source of moisture for their crop. With less or no dew falling, either their crop dried up, or they were being forced to leave their lands fallow. Maize is a very important source of nutrition for poor households in these and nearby regions. In other villages in north Gujarat, we were told of other effects: that nowadays, it is not raining when it should, that lots of rain happens in little time, people are facing new illnesses and cattle are falling sick more often, pest attacks have gone up, etc.

The people’s response there to all this was interesting. When we asked them why these changes were happening, they would say, “Prakruti ki baat hai (it has to do with nature).” It is striking that they did not consider it even imaginable that human beings had the power to alter nature on this scale.

We do. Whenever we burn coal and oil – the fuels that are the engine of all modern societies, now and for the last 250 years – the carbon in those fuels combines with oxygen in the atmosphere to form carbon dioxide (CO2). Like oxygen, it is invisible and nor can it be smelt. Unlike oxygen, carbon dioxide has the capacity to absorb and trap the Sun’s radiation that is bouncing off the Earth’s surface. There are other gases that do this, such as methane (natural gas) and nitrous oxide (from fertilizers), but carbon dioxide is the most important because it lasts for thousands of years in the atmosphere. For that reason, and for simplicity, we will focus on carbon dioxide in this booklet.

The Earth’s razai is making us warmerCarbon dioxide is not the villain; in fact, it is essential to life on Earth. Without carbon dioxide, the Earth would not have been habitable, certainly not for humans. It is the presence of CO2 naturally in the atmosphere that maintained temperatures which helped the growth of agriculture and the spread of human civilizations.

But now we are adding to the amount of carbon dioxide that is naturally present in the atmosphere. We dig carbon out from under the Earth, and burn it to run cars, generate electricity, run factories, fly planes, transport goods, fight wars. Some of it essential activity, some completely unnecessary. In such activity, the world sent up 32 billion tonnes (1 tonne = 1,000 kgs) of carbon dioxide in 2011, the latest year for which worldwide data is available. Another 4 billion tonnes get added by our cutting forests; when wood burns or rots, it emits CO2. Little over a quarter of it gets absorbed by the oceans, making their waters more acidic. About the same amount gets taken up by trees and grasslands, etc on land. The rest – little under half – remains in the atmosphere. Roughly

every 8 billion tonnes of CO2 in the atmosphere equals 1 part per million (ppm). On 9 May 2013, CO2 levels in the atmosphere touched 400 ppm not just for the first time in human history, but for the first time in the last four million years.

Carbon dioxide, once emitted, spreads all over the Earth’s atmosphere in about a year. Up there, this CO2 acts like an invisible razai, or blanket. A blanket does not create its own warmth, it traps our body’s heat. Similarly, CO2, methane and nitrous oxide trap some of the Sun’s invisible heat radiation coming up off the Earth, hence causing global warming. Adding CO2 and other gases to the atmosphere each year is like adding a layer to the blankets that we have covered ourselves with. A thicker blanket traps more heat.

How much hotter have we become? Between 1961-1990, India used to be 24.87 degrees celsius, on average. That’s an average of those 30 years of all seasons, mind you, and includes the cold heights of Ladakh and the hot plains of central India. By the first decade of this century, 2001-2010, the average had risen to 25.51 deg C. Importantly, though temperatures expectedly went up and down between years, not a single year was cooler than the 1961-1990 average. The coldest year was 0.4 degrees C warmer than that average, and the warmest year was 0.93 degrees warmer.

What about the world as a whole? They compare that with what it used to be in the mid-18 th

century, at the start of the Industrial Revolution. The world has become a little less than 1 degree Celsius warmer since then. The Earth’s average used to be little over 13.5 deg C then, it is 14.47 deg C now. (This is an average of the air temperature just above the surface of the Earth all over the globe.) Much of this warming has happened over the last 40 years. Within this average, some areas, like the Arctic, North Africa, southern Europe and the Himalayas are warming a lot more.

One important point: all the warming does not happen immediately as soon as carbon dioxide is sent into the air. There is a gap of some years between carbon dioxide being emitted and the full warming it causes. Hence, the effects of the billions of tonnes we have emitted over the last few years are yet to be felt. This unavoidable, further warming will be at least 0.6 degrees C, likely higher.

There’s another way of viewing global warming. Every square metre of our globe, on average, now gets excess energy of 2 watts. If you have a home of 50 square metres – many middle class homes tend to be at least that much – you could light up a 100-watt bulb with the excess energy being trapped in that space.

People, and newspapers, often tend to use both terms ‘global warming’ and ‘climate change’ as if they mean the same thing. Global warming is what we have discussed above. Climate change is a change in weather patterns, rainfall, storms, etc, over time. It is the most important consequence of global warming but not the only one. Global warming also causes, for example, sea ice to melt in the Arctic. It causes the ocean waters to get warmer. It causes soils to get drier. Some of these would in turn contribute to climate change but they are not the same as climate change.

Who is responsible for global warming?There are different ways of approaching this question. One way would be to examine different kinds of economic activity. World over, industry and manufacturing is responsible for 37% of CO2 emissions; transport 23% (includes road transport 16%); homes 18%; and agriculture 14% (IEA data). Deforestation accounts for another 14% or so. Transportation is one of the fastest growing sectors among these. Of India’s emissions of 1,904 million tonnes of CO2-equivalent in 2007, the latest year for which official data is available, 719 mt (38%) was from electricity; industry was 412 mt (22%); agriculture 334 mt (17.6%); transport 142 mt (7.5%); and homes 137 mt (7.2%). Land use changes, in

forest lands, cropland, grasslands, wetlands, etc cause a net absorption of 177 million tonnes, hence India’s net emissions were 1,727 million tonnes.

Another way of looking at emissions is: which areas is it coming from? Only 30% comes from rural areas. As much as 70% comes from urban areas. Urban areas tend to have a lot of wasteful consumption by the better-off, such as air-conditioning, or in malls. Over 35% of electricity in Mumbai is used in running ACs. Cities also have a lot of structures, which though used by most people, take a lot of resources and energy to build, such as bridges, Metros, flyovers, etc.

A third way – a very common approach – is to see which nation is responsible for how much carbon dioxide emissions. China, at 8.7 billion tonnes of CO2 out of the total of 32 billion tonnes in 2011, has been jumping like a kangaroo past the United States (5.5 billion tonnes). India at 1.8 billion tonnes is a distant third, followed by Russia (almost 1.8 billion tonnes), and Japan (1.2 billion).

Each of these approaches has its merits, and would help strengthen some of our demands, such as, say, that more public transport is necessary, or that rich, industrialized countries need to pay for the ecological damage they have caused. But they do not address issues at the heart of global warming. At the core of global warming are industrial capitalism, and questions of income and class.

The roots of the problemSome people say that the problem began thousands of years ago, as the human race spread across the world. Human beings cut trees to clear land for settlements, agriculture, and firewood. A dead tree releases CO2. Rice farming in China and India over thousands of years used standing water and floods from rivers, which emits methane. So in a sense, they are not wrong. Yet, industrialization, and the beginnings of capitalism around the mid-18th century, marks a radical shift for what we are discussing. It is so in three ways.

One, in the use of energy sources. Although coal was in use in London and a few other cities in Europe for centuries earlier, the scale of its use with the establishment of the factory system in England in the late 18th century was different and massive. Oil and gas were discovered and begun to be used later, in the 19th century; all these three fossil fuels are very energy- and carbon-intensive.

Two, profits are key to corporations. They profit by using the cheapest sources of labour and raw materials. China is the biggest emitter of CO2 because so much manufacturing now happens in China, which has lots of coal and cheap labour. Corporations pursue profit at any cost, the people and environment be damned.

The capitalist system is also different from anything that existed before in a third, very important way. Just as profit is essential to the individual corporation, economic growth and accumulation are essential to the system. Economic growth – calculated for a country, a state, or the world as a whole – is a change in output, value of service or income over a period, usually a year. Accumulation is the logic due to which industrialists have to reinvest a part of the surplus value extracted to expand the business. Basically, growth and accumulation come from making workers work for more hours in a day, or faster, usually both together. It also comes from exploiting nature. Corporations take from nature, and dump on nature recklessly.

The world economy has grown at 2-3% a year on average since the Industrial Revolution in the mid-18th century. It has meant a constant and expanding use of resources –a 3% annual rate of growth means that the amount of resources we use doubles every 23 years (if it is 7%, every 10 years; 70 divided by growth rate = number of years in which use of resources double). Every

doubling is more than all the resources that were used before (8 is more than 1+2+4, 16 is more than 1+2+4+8).

Along with an ever-expanding resource-use is an ever-increasing dumping on nature – waste, acids, toxic sludge, etc. Such pollution was seen as local or in the region: to groundwater, to fields, to forests, to streams, rivers, and near the shore. Now we realize it is also global. The oceans and the air are a common resource for human beings and other species. They are now being used as a waste dump.

The important point for us here is: accumulation and profit are part of the logic of the capitalist system. Those who see and discuss the issue only in nation-state or other terms miss this underlying logic. One cannot hope to solve a problem if one has not defined the problem correctly in the first place.

Household consumption and classHow many gadgets does one use regularly at home? How many bulbs, fans; does the house have a water heater, a toaster, a fridge, an AC? Do we cycle, take a bus or drive a car? Our carbon emissions depend on all of these things. When going out of town, do we catch a bus, train, or fly? Say, if you took a train from Warangal to Delhi – 1,545 kms – you would emit roughly 35 kgs of CO2. In a plane, each passenger would emit over 200 kgs.

All of this obviously depends on one’s income and consumption. There are huge differences of incomes and wealth in India. Government policies over the last 20 years have increased these disparities. As many as 350-400 million people in India, including about 30 million in urban areas, don’t have access to electricity even now (2011 Census), let alone any of the gadgets mentioned above. A colleague has done workshops in colleges in Delhi on measuring how much carbon dioxide a household emits. We found that most of Delhi’s middle class emits 4-5 tonnes of CO2 per person a year; the rich households in India emit much higher, European levels. Whereas, factory workers or security guards who earn Rs 5,000-7,000, domestic workers who earn less, agricultural workers who earn much less, how much CO2 can they possibly emit?

A nation-state frame of looking at global warming chooses to ignore the huge internal differences of wealth. For instance, the Indian government says ‘India’s per capita emissions are low’. It is hiding behind the poor. A Planning Commission report said more than 800 million Indians consume less than Rs 20 a day. There is no one ‘India’. In international negotiations, the government rightly argues for equity between nations. But the principle of equity should also apply within a nation, not only between nations. Greater equity implies that the rich in India should be made to consume less. How we ensure that and yet generate decent work and employment for the millions of young people seeking jobs each year is one key question.

IMPACTS OF GLOBAL WARMINGBefore we spell out impacts in India and elsewhere, a few things are useful to keep in mind.- Impacts began to be felt in different parts of the world about 35-40 years ago, from the mid-1970s.- Unlike most other forms of pollution, the source of pollution and where it affects can be very far apart. CO2 that is generated in the US affects the Maldives.- A significant portion of CO2 remains in the atmosphere for tens of thousands of years. Also, climate change continues for a thousand years even after emissions stop. Hence, c limate change is here to stay. It is the new ‘normal’.

- Impacts will worsen. Some of it is unavoidable. Our urgent intervention is needed to make sure they do not get much worse, and that the situation does not get out of our control.

Major Impacts of Global Warming in IndiaClimate change adds on to all the other issues facing small and marginal farmers, and other communities in general, in India – higher costs of seeds, fertilizers and other inputs; falling groundwater levels; plots becoming smaller over time; landlessness among dalit communities; takeover of agricultural lands by industry and real estate companies, land alienation among adivasis, how women are treated, etc. For millions of small farmers – who are 87% of the agricultural holdings in this country – for agricultural workers, poor women and other groups, climate change will be like the last straw that broke their backs.

1. Irregular rains and impacts on agriculture: The most common impact across India has been to rainfall patterns. Farmers say they noticed changes 15-20 years ago, but that it has intensified over the last five years.

It rains when it should not and does not rain when it should. The southwest monsoon has begun to come early in some places and late in others. Farmers sow crops expecting rains, that don’t come. Or there is a lot of rain at the time of harvesting and threshing, which damages the crops and fodder. Farmers are being constantly forced to react. Both the kharif and rabi crop is getting affected. Those in rain-fed areas and without access to groundwater, poorer households, bear the brunt of this. Let us not forget, essential crops in India are still extremely rain-dependent: for instance, half the land under rice and wheat is dependent only on rainfall.

2. More intense rains in little time: Earlier it used to rain more or less evenly over a season. Nowadays, in most places, it does not rain for many days and then a lot of rain falls in a few hours or couple of days. This has been linked to warmer sea surface temperatures. It also happens because warmer air, due to global warming, has the capacity to hold more moisture, which it lets go in a more intense burst. Intense bursts of rain in general damage the standing crop, affect the planting of crops, and damage the topsoil. It causes flooding, affects people’s access to water, etc.

Though it is not possible to ascribe single rainfall events to climate change – climate change is a process over time, not an event – there is no doubt in my mind that the huge disaster in Uttarakhand of June 2013 was induced by global warming. It is the worst climate change disaster to have been forced on the Indian people. So much rain over a huge area for 3 days has not happened before in Uttarkhand and beyond – as much as 340 mm of rain fell in a single day in Dehradun on 15 June. The official figure of those missing is 5,748, and over six hundred dead. The National Disaster Management Authority said 11,000 people may have died. The worst loss of life was in Kedarnath, Rambara, and below. Extreme rains burst the wall (a moraine) of a mountain lake (Chorabari Taal) just above Kedarnath. The surging waters rushed downhill destroying that town, everything and everybody was either swept away or submerged in mud and rocks.

Hundreds of villages have been devastated. In village after village in different river valleys, homes have been swept away, standing crop destroyed, fields submerged in river water or mud and debris, animals for which locals depend for manure and milk, drowned. Tourism – on which lakhs of locals and migrant workers depend for jobs and earnings – has been hit indefinitely. Children are not being able to go to school. Women in particular are badly hit as they nurture households, cook food,

get fodder. Huge numbers are homeless or have flimsy shelter as winter sets in. We now understand what global warming means in a fragile and difficult terrain.

As usually happens, the devastation in Uttarakhand was made worse by chaotic ‘development’: blasting of hills for run-of-the river hydro projects, dumping of the rubble, unsafe widening of roads, shoddy constructions for tourists near rivers, etc. The worrying thing is hydropower and this kind of unregulated ‘development’ is being promoted across the Indian Himalayas, from Himachal Pradesh to Arunachal Pradesh in the east.

3. Droughts in Central India: Areas of central India in a region called Bundelkhand (across part of UP and MP) have been experiencing continuous drought for the last 15 years. It is known that global warming causes Intensified droughts in interior lands. When we visited a couple of years ago, we saw a complete collapse of agriculture, large lakes had dried up for the first time, huge migration of agricultural workers, small farmers, poor women, with their entire families. Livestock were being abandoned to a dusty death because of lack of water and fodder.

Droughts are now happening in regions that rarely or never had droughts before – parts of the Northeast, parts of Jharkhand since 2000, Kerala recently. It is also happening more frequently that droughts happen in one place and floods happen close by.

4. In the Himalayas/ Garhwal hills/ Himachal region: Warmer winters are being felt all over India but in particular at higher altitudes. The Himalayas have warmed by almost 2 degrees C, which is a lot. Oak trees, apple trees, some vegetables, are climbing higher, looking for temperatures in which they can grow well. A survey in the Northeast reported locals feeling that there is less frost, less snow, that rainfall has changed, and that winters are warmer. Warming is causing a change in snowfall in Kashmir and Ladakh, and reduced snow at mid- to high-altitudes. Instead of snowing, precipitation is happening as rain. Or it snows at the wrong time in the season. Small glaciers are disappearing and large glaciers melting from above and below. This impacts people’s access to water for drinking and for irrigation. There’s drying of streams on which locals are dependent and increase of forest fires and pests in some hill regions.

5. Impacts on Health: Many factors affect health; to isolate climate change is neither easy nor necessary. There’s been reduced nutrition for the poor due to less food as a consequence of climate change. This adversely impacts health over time. Climate change has contributed to – among other factors – higher food prices in recent years. The reduced food intake has resulted in increased rate of death and serious illness among the poor in parts of central India in the last one year. It is also hitting the urban poor in Delhi and other places.

Mosquitoes and diseases like malaria, dengue and chikanguniya have spread wider. There has also been an increase in the number, area and duration of heat waves in parts of India. This causes heat stress and deaths, particularly of the poor and aged.

6. Coastal Areas: Much of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases goes into the oceans. Sea level rise due to warmer oceans has been experienced by coastal peoples for 30 years in the Sunderbans, in Gujarat, and elsewhere in India. For them it has meant a slow erosion of their villages, homes, wells, fields and other livelihood sources. The space to do post-catch work, often done by fisherwomen, shrinks. As it is, numerous ports, coal plants and other projects on the coast are seriously eroding coastlines, displacing people and damaging agriculture, water bodies and local

ecosystems. Once again, climate change comes on top of chaotic ‘development’. We need to ask whom this development is benefiting.

Rising sea surface temperatures is causing storm surges and greater intensity of storms along the Eastern Coast. (It is quite likely that this contributed to the intensity of Cyclone Phailin that hit Orissa and Andhra in late 2013.) The salt water that comes in with storms, and that which seeps into the groundwater harms coastal agriculture and drinking water sources. Fisherpeople in Karnataka have told us that their going out to sea has become more uncertain because there is no clear pattern any more of rainfall and storms. Surface currents are changing in unexpected ways. Some species have disappeared, catch of other yields are falling. Climate change feeds on other factors in causing this.

Who are getting impacted in India?As expected, global warming tends to hit the poor much more, in India and elsewhere. In India, it is:- Small farmers, particularly those in dryland areas. Typically, they tend to be of poorer households, dalits and lower castes, or adivasis.- Poor women, who tend to do the work of getting and using water, other household work and in fields.- Urban poor: water supply is beginning to get affected in some cities. They are also being hit by higher food prices.- Agricultural workers: Their livelihood gets affected when agriculture suffers badly. At such times, little attention is given to agricultural workers.- Fisherpeople and other coastal communities, including fisherwomen, who do much of the post-catch work.- Adivasis and other forest dwellers, as forests on which they depend get affected.

Many still do not realize that impacts are necessarily going to intensify and will happen simultaneously. It will hit food security, access to water, livelihoods, lands, health, etc of the poor everywhere.

Impacts in the World Droughts in parts of Africa since the mid-1970s Rise in ‘extreme events’, such as the floods in Pakistan and the heat wave in Russia in 2010, and the drought in Texas, US, and northern Mexico in 2011 In September 2012, Arctic sea ice melted to its lowest area and mass ever Oceans have warmed to a depth of 2,000 metres, and even lower Sea levels are rising by an average of 3.2 mm a year over the last 20 years Wildfires in Western United States have increased 4-fold in the last 30 years Of the 800 Himalayan glaciers being monitored in China, India and other countries, 95% are melting. Melting is happening at over 20,000 feet altitude Food production is beginning to get hit in some of the poorest countries

Impacts on Other Species- In India, as ocean waters have become warmer, the range of mackerel, oil sardines and other fish species has moved north along both coasts. Earlier found up to Ratnagiri in Maharashtra, mackerel

can now be found in Gujarat. In the Bay of Bengal, earlier only up to Andhra, now found in Orissa waters. A similar shift of range is happening with river fish.- Migration of species to higher altitudes in North Indian mountains, such as oak and apple trees, and some vegetables.- Greater spread of pests and growth of weeds in some forest areas.- Early flowering, such as of mango in Orissa.- Slow death on a large scale of cows and other livestock in times of drought.

Worldwide, a survey of over 800 published papers covering hundreds of species showed:- Species are moving northward, or away from the Equator, towards the poles, to look for the right temperatures.- Bird migration is happening earlier.- As it gets warmer, mountain species are moving upwards. - Birds are laying their first eggs earlier.- Decline in krill, a basic food for many fish, sea birds, and sea mammals.- Disruption in timing between lifecycles of predators and prey, and of insect pollinators with flowering plants.- Extinction of species due to global warming has begun. A high percentage of all known species – scientists now believe up to 40-70% - could become extinct because of heatwaves, drought, more acidic oceans, and other effects of global warming.

The sceptical viewDespite these changes happening all over the world, sceptical views are still often heard: that it is not warming at all; that it is warming but it is not significant; that yes, it is warming but that humans are not responsible; that yes it is warming, but has happened before.

A short booklet is not the place to respond to these in detail. Official data given above shows how much warmer India has become since the base years of 1961-1990. Let alone the data, one only needs to open one’s eyes to responses in nature to warming that are happening all over India or indeed in any country – the early flowering of trees, melting of glaciers, early spring, warmer winters, submergence of small islands, Arctic ice melting, etc.

If humans are not responsible for global warming, what is? The Sun? The first years of this century was a low phase of the Sun’s radiation, and we were warming even then.

To say it has happened before naturally is not enough. When? How fast was the change then? Human civilization itself evolved over the last 10,000 years and we are pushing changes that have not happened for millions of years, outside human experience. Ecosystems are able to adapt only when things change very slowly. Changes are now happening much faster than ecosystems and species can cope with.

Some people have begun to say that global warming is not an urgent issue because it has slowed down in the last 15 years. Actually, a good part of the heat being trapped has been going into the deeper oceans in these years. Even if this is transported into the deeper oceans, it will show up as warming sooner or later. We should not forget: if we put more CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, they will trap more heat energy. This basic physics of global warming has been well established for over a hundred years.

The reasons for urgency

As mentioned earlier, we need to act on global warming quickly so that impacts do not get much worse than they already are. But there are other significant reasons.

In some ecosystems, global warming can cause changes that themselves cause further warming. These are called feedbacks. We mentioned above that the Arctic sea ice has melted to its smallest area ever this year. Arctic ice acts as a giant mirror, reflecting sunlight. Less ice means that more heat is getting absorbed in the Arctic, and the Earth’s climate system in general. Second, in Arctic lands, beneath the frozen layer on top, are billions of tonnes of methane. Melting ice will release this methane, a strong greenhouse gas, causing further warming. This feedback has already been happening for the last ten years. There are other known feedbacks that have already been seen. A current debate is whether the amount of carbon dioxide being absorbed each year by some oceans has stopped increasing. If so, more CO2 remains in the atmosphere, causing further warming.

Some of these feedbacks have already gone out of hand. For instance, we will soon have Arctic summers without ice, it can’t be stopped. The urgency to tackle global warming comes from the fact that these feedbacks will happen together on a scale that makes it impossible for humans to prevent seriously dangerous levels of warming, or even irreversible warming. The urgency has never been greater.

There’s another reason for urgency. Global crude oil production has likely levelled off. This is known as ‘peak oil’. Like global warming, it is linked to dependence on fossil fuels and overuse of resources. Initially, crude oil that is closer to the surface, easier to take out, and better in quality hence cheaper to process, is extracted. By the time half of all available oil is used up, – whether in a single oil field, in a region, or world as a whole – production stops rising. It levels off for a while and then begins to decline. Many of the top 65 oil producing countries have crossed their peak. The US passed it way back in 1970. The production of conventional crude oil may have peaked on a world scale five years ago. As a consequence, global conventional oil production is falling, at 4% - or 3.5 million barrels a day/year – over the past few years (Non-conventional liquids include oil from shale, oil from coal, etc. which can be extracted but are expensive processes and need more energy inputs).

With peak oil, the gap between demand and supply of oil widens, pushing up oil prices. Many believe that peak oil is one key reason why crude oil prices have remained stubbornly high at over $100 a barrel over the last few years, even though the world economy has been in crisis and demand for oil is slack. Higher oil prices pulls up the prices of other fuels like coal and gas.

Crude oil is like the lubricant of all modern societies including India. What comes to our mind when we think of diesel or petrol use? Transport, cars, trucks, machines, generators. 95% of transport runs on oil, for which substitutes are difficult. But it is widely used even in agriculture, and even in India, in pesticides, to run motors, pumpsets, and tractors.

A surprisingly wide variety of items crucial to our well-being or in use in daily life have crude oil as an important input – medicines, synthetic fabrics, chemicals, paints, plastic bags, all plastics, computers. The prices of some of these are already beginning to rise. A constantly high level of crude oil prices will mean for us in India constantly high inflation, as transport and a range of other activities get affected. Peak oil is soon going to impact every single sphere of activity in our world with interconnected markets – agriculture, manufacturing, prices of food, transport, ‘defence’, train travel. India is particularly vulnerable as we import 70% of our crude oil.

There is obviously an overlap between the benefits of tackling global warming and measures to cope with peak oil. But we need to do so with urgency.

What are the governments doing?The Indian government: Given the urgency and scale of these problems, very little. About cutting emissions – referred to as ‘mitigation’ – the government’s position is that India’s carbon emissions per unit of GDP will be reduced by 25% between 2005 and 2020. That is, not less, but less than what it might have been. Is that a proper response to a crisis? It’s like someone having a heart attack and saying, I will put less oil in my biryani.

About coping with impacts (adaptation), there is a lot of research going on in several bodies and institutes, but most of it remains at the level of academic work. Little of it is visible at the ground level to help the small farmer or rural working women. The one exception would be the digging of ponds and water harvesting structures under NREGA. The government claims that 2.5% of the Union budget has been allocated for adaptation; some of this is just a re-classification of existing government programmes as climate change adaptation.

In 2008, the central government announced the setting up of a National Action Plan on Climate Change, which has 8 missions – solar, energy efficiency, water, agriculture, knowledge mission, etc. Progress has been slow. In many areas – water, agriculture, energy, etc – the government attempt has been to give greater scope for private industry. The concerns of poor farmers have been largely sidestepped. At the state level, State Action Plans have been drafted or are in the process in 22 states, but a common criticism has been that these are top-down measures, with little consultation with local people, unions or other organizations. The Uttarakhand disaster shows how poorly prepared the state and central governments were despite have a state action plan in place.

The economic policies of the last 20 years – cheap flights, easy finance for cars, malls in cities, easy access to ACs, fridges, TVs, opening up mining and other sectors to foreign private capital, reduced taxes on the rich – are all geared towards emissions by the better-off, while the government continues to hide behind the poor by saying that ‘India’s emissions are low’. In the meantime, it is planning a huge expansion of dirty coal power and dangerous nuclear power over the next 20 years to meet the demands of the richer sections.

Other governments: For the last 20 years, governments have been meeting annually in a process called Conference of the Parties (COP) under the United Nations. In 1997, at the Kyoto COP, most developed countries agreed to cut emissions by a small amount by 2012 over their 1990 levels. Different countries had slightly different pledges; the average was 5.2% between 1990-2012, the first period under the Kyoto Protocol. Hardly any major economy has met its target. Most have overshot it substantially.

The situation is currently a mess. Developing countries, such as China and India, were not required to make pledges. The US, which was meant to, has refused to join. Which means the three largest emitters are out of this Kyoto track. Russia and Japan, the next two biggest emitters, have said they will not participate in a second commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol, starting 2012 and extending possibly to 2020. As for beyond that date, countries said at the 2011 COP in Durban that they would have an agreement in place by 2015 to come into effect in 2020. But the commitments under it are vague.

In recent COP meetings, the US, supported by China, India, Brazil and South Africa, has started a parallel track of negotiations, of voluntary pledges of emission cuts. It’s a looser frame, with no common target. Several countries have made such promises. Let alone meet the sharp

emission reductions necessary, present pledges of emission cuts by all governments, even if they are met, will lead to greenhouse gas emissions 10-20% above today’s levels by 2020.

There are rare exceptions among governments. Some of the small island nations, facing the threat of sea level rise, have been pressurizing big governments to act, but with little success. Among other countries, Bolivia stands out. Pressured by indigenous peoples who form over half its population, the Bolivian government’s efforts have been a magnet to many progressive forces in Latin America and elsewhere. In 2010, Bolivia passed the Law of the Rights of Mother Earth, recognizing that all living things have rights, including the right to biodiversity without genetic manipulation, the right to water to sustain life, and the right to restoration of ecosystems damaged by human activity. Other countries – such as Ecuador – have put in their Constitutions that Nature too has rights just as humans do. Bhutan has been trying to promote measures that are consistent with their notion of ‘gross national happiness’. These are rare exceptions in an otherwise bleak picture at the government level.

Most governments represent national elites. As stated above, the root cause of global warming lies in the workings of industrial capitalism. Most governments are unable to question the systemic issues of capitalism or class. To expect that government elites would show us the way out would be to put our faith in the wrong hands.

What Should We Do?Sure, we ought to put pressure on governments for policies that are good for us all, such as more land distribution, public transport, subsidized solar power, creation of cycle paths, more rainwater harvesting, etc. But basically we need to work together, on different things, many of them simultaneously.

There is a view that technology can provide the answer. To expect that a solution will come from that which has caused the problem in the first place is unrealistic. Technology has a place. For example, we do need to expand solar power. But the way forward comes from social and political change, not from technology alone.

What follows are some suggestions of what I think are ways forward. They are by no means exhaustive. Global warming is the greatest and most complex crisis humanity has faced. It also presents opportunities for us to look at our organization of social life, economic activity, and our relationship with Nature differently. However, the urgency of global warming does not allow us the luxury of too much time.

Individual effortsThe market is taking over our minds. Not just in the obvious symptom of unnecessary consumption – gadgets become a way we present ourselves – but also begins to influence our relationships and interactions with other people, and the natural world. Resistance to this is hugely important, but also not easy.

Other than this, cut your carbon emissions. This obviously applies only to the better-off. This would include minimizing the use of energy-guzzling gadgets like ACs; using buses and other public transport, cycles and walking as much as possible; using local produce; minimize flying to essential situations and emergencies, etc.

At the household level, for those who can afford it, a range of measures help. These include installing rooftop solar panels, rainwater harvesting and growing food on top of and around your house/ housing complex. The last has begun in Delhi, Bangalore and a few other cities but is so far

restricted to the well-off. Urban agriculture has been carried out extensively in Cuba over the last 20 years. Rooftop generation of solar energy is currently expanding hugely in Germany. Not just will this help in the context of global warming, it reduces our dependence on fossil fuels. With oil production peaking, already or soon, it will not be a luxury, but become a necessity.

There is a view that since global warming is a huge and systemic problem, individual efforts are not worthwhile. I do not agree. Individual efforts sustain our engagement. They help start dialogues with friends and family about the issues that concern us. Also, our lifestyle should be consistent with our beliefs.

Collective ways forwardWhile it is relevant, the usefulness of individual action is also exaggerated, by elites. They ask us to turn our lights off on Earth Day for one hour, or change our light bulbs, so we think we have done enough. We then tend to avoid questioning the systemic inequalities and problems at the root of these problems, discussed above. Social and political change usually happens collectively, when many people realize that something is wrong and needs to be changed or improved.

Global warming touches on so many things that it enables us to engage in different ways. Note that the suggestions below include community efforts, influencing state policy and challenging the system. We need to work at different levels simultaneously.

1. There’s a need to strengthen a people’s perspective on climate change. For that we need to talk to people, both in urban and particularly in rural areas, about how climate change is affecting their lives. What do they think about it, how they view it, what they are doing (or not doing) about it. For instance, some may revert to traditional seeds, others may change cropping patterns. Let us not assume that humans can cope with all climate change impacts. But to know what responses work is particularly important since what adaptation has been successful can be replicated elsewhere in similar ecological conditions. This work can be done particularly by groups of students, or young people, and also by mass organizations.

2. Work in our locality or city: Issues in Delhi, for example, that overlap with global warming concerns include the campaign to extend the BRT corridor, which is exclusively for buses and public transport. There’s an opposition to a waste-into-energy plant in South Delhi, and against the ongoing privatization of water in three localities as pilot projects. A campaign to expand rooftop solar power is also beginning.

Issues of public transport, solar power, or equitable distribution of water apply to any city or locality where you live. Many towns, even a state capital like Dehradun, do not have a public transport system to speak of, and run on ‘Vikrams’. Or take rainwater harvesting, which saves both water and the huge energy spent in pumping water. Essential in an age in which water supply is beginning to get erratic due to climate change. Large employment is also possible in towns, in creating water harvesting structures, in planting trees, in digging new or cleaning existing water bodies, in re-laying the water distribution network more equitably. The pressure of a popular campaign is needed to pressurize governments to create the infrastructure for rainwater harvesting along roads and public places. Along with this, equitable distribution of water, so that every single person or household can access a minimum volume for decent living, is essential.

3. Demanding renewable, less harmful energy choices. Nuclear power has obvious dangers, coal plants cause many serious health hazards and there is opposition to dams in many regions. Given this, solar power and wind seem the way forward. We need a smooth transition to these cleaner energy sources. Solar power has the potential to be used in channelizing heat energy, needed in cooking and a range of other basic uses. Re electricity, it can be deployed both decentralized application (rooftops) and concentrated solar power fed to the electricity grid. Badly needed in urban areas, from where much of the carbon emissions come. But this won’t happen without pressurizing governments to move away from subsidizing and promoting coal and other fossil fuels, and strongly promoting solar and wind. One reason why solar power has spread so much in Germany is because there has been a sustained people’s movement demanding it. Alongside, we also need to power down as a society. Ensure the cutting of wasteful use (which happens only by the well-off).

4. Support and strengthen ongoing struggles against displacement and for local community control over commons resources like forests, rivers and the sea. These have been intensifying all over India over the last ten years. Some of these also raise questions on energy choices: for instance, Kudankulam (nuclear), Jaitapur (nuclear), Narmada (large hydro) and Polavaram (hydro). There have been a range of movements against dams in the Himalayan states from Himachal Pradesh in the northwest to Arunachal Pradesh in the Northeast. Huge coal and other projects have been planned all along the coasts, in Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and elsewhere, and resistance to them has been building up.

Movements are increasingly beginning to feel that resistance is not enough. That there is also a need to say what kind of development would be appropriate for their region or context. This too is growing, by groups and organizations in many places.

Global warming and other ecological crises throw a number of questions in our face: do we really need high economic growth? Where does this growth come from? Does high economic growth really result in quality work and large-scale employment? Who does ‘development’ actually benefit? My own view is that growth basically comes from making people work harder and faster and from Nature. It has mostly resulted in contractual, insecure, stressful and poorly paid jobs in the last 20 years in India. Rather than accept ‘growth’ as a mantra, I would argue for a more equitable development trajectory that largely focuses on basic goods and services that most people need in their lives. As people’s lives improve, low but more sustainable growth will happen automatically, but growth need not be an end in itself.

5. Challenging Capitalism: Capitalism is currently facing multiple and interconnected challenges – economic (the ongoing economic crisis); political (Occupy movement; anti-WTO; workers’ resistance); and of resources (peak oil; anti-displacement struggles in India). Capitalism has historically and in the present been the most brutal system – in its history of colonialism, violent cornering of resources, resource wars, in its exploitation of workers. We simply have to understand, constantly question and challenge the system, in whatever work we do. The problem is that political alternatives to capitalism exist, the difficulty lies in evolving an economic alternative on the scale necessary.

Much criticism has rightly been levelled against 20 th century Left practice – its lack of democracy; the primacy it gave to technology; its scale and ecological destruction, etc. Many of

these mirrored capitalist relations with Nature. Progressive politics cannot henceforth remain blind to these issues.

6. Equity is at the core of ways forward in tackling global warming. Furthering many aspects of equity ought to be part of our rethinking and changed practice. In a global warming context, there are at least four aspects to equity, and possibly more:a. Equity between people: This is linked to our development trajectory itself. Land distribution, and female control over that land, is an important part of such equity. In such a complex society as India’s, equity also implies equity between castes, communities, genders. It’s also crucial for us to power down as a society, which means getting the rich to consume less, putting a cap on incomes, and changing collective societal priorities.b. Furthering the capacity of people to cope with the impacts of climate change. Coping is not merely reaction after the event, it is also preparing, cushioning impacts, improving lives before something adverse hits. c. Equity between generations. Do we accept that we are not the only generation who have the right to consume? That future generations have a right to common resources as much as we do? That is part of what sustainable development means.d. Equity between species: Basically, we need to move away from a worldview that focuses on humans, and conflict between humans alone. Internalise that other species have as much a right to the commons, to energy, etc as we do. That humans are only one among 1.7 million known species. Ecosystems are intertwined. Life is a web, and we need to preserve that web better.

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December 2013

Note: This is an updated version of the booklet Global Warming in the Indian Context, published by Jana Vigyana Vedika (A.P.) in October 2012.

To discuss or respond to anything contained in this booklet, or if you have any queries about climate change, feel free to email me at nagraj.adve@gmail.com, or call at 09910476553.

Any organization is free to reproduce, print or translate this booklet into other languages. Hindi and Kannada translations will soon be available. Only please do not alter the text. Acknowledgement (of authorship) would be nice but not essential.