Global Warming in the Indian Context

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 Gujarat

Three 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 andtrap 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 warmer

Carbon 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 temperatureswhich 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. Another4 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 thiscentury, 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 0.4degrees Cwarmer 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-18th 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 andthe 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). Indiaat 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, industrializedcountries 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 problem

Some 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 citiesin 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, orfaster, 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 isan 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 class

How 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 wecycle, take a bus or drive a car? Our carbon emissions depend on all of these things. When going out of town, do wecatch 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 WARMING

Before 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, climate 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 India

Climate 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 rainsin 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 surfacetemperatures. 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.Itcauses flooding, affects people’s access to water, etc.