PUNDITS who try to predict the details of future catastrophes notoriously get it wrong. Back in the 18th century, the Rev Thomas Malthus famously predicted that Britain would starve if it did nothing about its burgeoning population, yet, within a century, Britain had become the greatest of world powers, and – for a time – the wealthiest nation on Earth. And towards the end of the 19th century, just before the invention of the motor car, there was that well-known prediction that London was about
So I couldn't help feeling a slight flinch of recognition this week, as some green campaigners in the West began to throw up their hands in horror over the launch of the wittily-named 'Tata Nano', a new small-scale urban motor car – made and develop
ed in India, and costing just £1,277 – that seems set to make drivers of the entire 20-million strong Indian middle class, in less time than it takes to say "high carbon emissions". For somehow, a chorus of miserabilist western wailing about how the people of India and China cannot and should not hope ever to enjoy the luxuries we in the West generally take for granted seems like the wrong way to go on this issue.
It can hardly be disputed, in the first place, that the West has no moral authority to lecture the planet on this issue. It's only 50 years, after all, since our own society passed joyfully through its Tata Nano stage, with lower-middle and upper-working class families graduating blissfully from bicycles and motorbikes to little Hillmans and Minis. I can remember the day the Hillman Imp was launched, at the Rootes plant in Linwood in 1963, and the sheer sense of proprietorial excitement people in Renfrewshire felt, as the little square-cut cars began to appear on the roads.
For us to tell the people of India that they now have no right to that moment may therefore make some kind of sense, in strict environmental terms. But it makes so little sense in political and psychological terms that it simply cannot be done. Like the effort to reduce global population growth, the effort to reduce carbon emissions seems increasingly like one of those tasks which actually become more difficult, the more directly and aggressively we try to tackle them.
If we are concerned about population growth, it has long been clear that our best tactic is to stop wailing about the undesirability of the "surplus population", and to start working to put economic power and social autonomy into the hands of women, who rarely seem to want more than two or three children once they are given the choice. And, by the same token, it seems unlikely that people will ever volunteer to live low-carbon lives so long as they are infantilised, bullied and lectured about what they may and may not have. On the contrary, they need to be empowered – like the people of the Nordic countries, increasingly successful in reducing carbon emissions – to find fulfilment, security, conviviality and a challenge in ways that do not involve devouring ever-larger amounts of irreplaceable resources.
What wisdom suggests, in other words, is that the West has nothing at all to gain by haranguing India and China about the size of their carbon footprint. On the contrary, there is a high chance that by doing so, we only reinforce the feeling that this is a battle, not for the survival of the planet, but for the right of once-colonised nations to follow the same path of economic development once trodden by the West. Instead – as Friends of the Earth argued this week, and as The Scotsman's own 'Let's Go Green Together' campaign suggests – we can best employ ourselves in sorting out the shameful mess that is our carbon-reduction policy here in Scotland and Britain, where, with or without the possible new generation of nuclear power-plants announced for England this week, we seem locked into a pattern of ever-higher consumption, and unlikely to meet even the hopelessly inadequate reduction targets currently set by the government.
And we should do this not as an act of useless self-flagellation – given Britain's small overall contribution to the global carbon problem – but because the moral authority we would regain in beginning to make serious reductions in our own carbon footprint is not only good in itself, but useful in practice. In western political argument, there is often a fatal tendency to pose morality and practicality as opposites – morality says we should shut up about the new Indian car, goes this kind of argument, whereas hard practicality says we have to stop it from being bought by millions.
But in the end, without moral credibility, nations – like individuals – lose all influence and internal coherence, and gradually become powerless to affect the course of human history. If the West wants a serious place at the table in future climate-change talks, in other words, its first task is to put its own house in order. And if it wants serious partners in facing what may be humankind's greatest challenge yet, it had better stop lecturing, and start listening, and begin to give the new powers of the 21st century both the respect they demand, and the space, through their own increasingly vibrant civic life, to draw their own conclusions about climate change, and to act on them.
The full article contains 913 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
