The 2000-Euro zero-frills Tata Nano is about to hit the market. Millions of Indians will become more mobile, the living standard goes up. Definitely, a cause for celebration.
Until you think of the price that it comes with. Not the 2000-Euro price tag, but the hackneyed environmental impact. Despite the wee size and motorcycle-style engine, the Nano's fuel consumption is worse than of the Toyota Prius, and let's not even get started on the 2-stroke engine's gas emissions.
It's a very difficult dilemma: it's surely nice to wish people in the developing countries have better lives, but the day every family in China achieves the Western life standard, this world will probably explode, literally.
The problem is double-edge. On one hand, the so-called Western life standard promoted as the most desirable is barely sustainable even now. The paragon of that consumerist dream, the US of A, sucks 40% of world's energy to maintain it. On the other hand, the overpopulation in the developing world has never been addressed in any meaningful, non-PR way, which would be nation-wide birth control education programmes and free supply of condoms for every family.
I remember an interview with an Ethiopian woman in Cooking In The Danger Zone. All her 6 or 7 children have been brought up almost solely on foreign food aid. When Stefan Gates asked her why she had so many children if she had no means to feed them, she answered that in those days she did not know better, nobody told her and now nothing can be reversed.
The only long-term solution would be cutting down on the excesses of the First World and keeping in check the population growth in the Third World.
Strangely enough, the now defunct Second World was approaching that balance, if not always intentionally: the former Socialist countries were chronically underpopulated (the trend is still continuing) while the consumption was kept next to bare basics. And that was exactly what brought the system down: the American Dream looked so sweet from behind the Iron Curtain that everyone was relieved when Communism collapsed. Blatant consumerism proved irresistible.
Now we live in the world where a personal car, a wide-screen TV and flying on vacations abroad are the Aspiration, the Salvation and the Redemption of every specimen of middle-class office plankton worth his annual salary growth. The world vision initiated, among others, by Ford and General Motors in the 30s buying out and dismantling whole rail and trolleybus networks throughout America, so that everyone would need to buy a car.
It all could even be cute and laughed away, were there a few times fewer of us on this planet. As it is, it is not the case. Our appetite for resources is becoming more and more voracious and there will hardly be any major shifts in the mass conscious towards desire for more sustainable lifestyles. So let's wait and see until the last litre of gas disappears in the fuel tank of a Tata Nano. That will be our first call for change.
No comments:
Post a Comment