Peter's Blog

I met Peter a couple of times in Delhi - we arrived and left about the same time too. I don't know what it is but Peter really has a way with words and sentiments that I whole heartedly agree with...

From his latest blog:

The Natural Consequence of Human Greed

When I'm asked to name the single biggest difference between living in Golden Bay and India I always reply with a single word: "people", which is to say the lack of them.

Every day I walk down the long empty beach in front of our house and find myself, without fail, reflecting on the luxury of the peace and space afforded to residents of this place.

But the sense of my own good fortune is always tempered by the sinking feeling that however nice it is in this rural cloister, out there in the world the planet is reeling from the sheer numbers of us human beings and there is nothing we can do about it.

Golden Bay likes to think of itself as ‘green'. Sustainability and recycling are part of the unspoken credo of the Bay (at least among the hippy set) but having lived in India I sometimes find myself irritated by the unreality of it all.

This is a place where (quite rightly) you get censorious looks for over-filling the kettle or admitting to driving to a nearby town for coffee on a rainy day, just to entertain the kids - ‘We don't do that sort of thing,' my wife was stonily informed by one fellow mother, ‘we're environmentalists.'

I don't want to belittle efforts of well-meaning people, here and elsewhere in the developed world, "for doing their bit" to arrest global warming, but it really is like using the teacups to bail out the Titanic.

Living in India for a few years made me realise quite how environmentally sunk the planet is, and how depressingly little we can do it about it.

When Manmohan Singh, the Indian prime minister, launched India's climate change plan, he used that oft-quoted line of Gandhi's that the "earth provides enough to satisfy everyone's need, but not everyone's greed".

True, but Singh wasn't counselling restraint; on the contrary, as he explained, "every citizen of this planet must have an equal share of the planetary atmospheric space."

What does that mean? Simply that Indians want to pollute the planet just as much as Englishmen, Americans and even Kiwis do. And why not? They want cars, fridges, heaters and coolers, dishwashers and all the other trimmings of developed world living just as much as we do. A Chinaman will feel no different.

So, ‘you do the math', as they say. Multiply even the most abstemious Golden Bay life by 2.4 billion (the combined population of China and India) and what do you get? Answer: Environmental catastrophe.

Look about even the most modest developed world home, and tot up the amount of power steel, cement, copper, aluminium etc etc that goes into maintaining even a lifestyle which passes a bare, legal miminum.

Multiply by 2.4 billion. The truth is that there simply isn't enough to go around. You only have to look at falling water tables in India and China, the pollution of Yellow and Ganges rivers, the price of oil and grain, plummeting tuna stock and the vanishing forests of the Amazon, to see that obvious truth.

And if we are to follow the logic of Dr Singh's statement, then the only way that this can be arrested is if the developed world cuts back radically on its plunder of the planet, something he knows can't and won't be done.

The clock cannot be turned back, and even if hypothetically the developed world did decide to switch off their cars and factories and return to living in mudhuts to save the planet, India and China wouldn't follow suit.

In many ways, the science of global warming is arguably moot, since the speed at which the world population is increasing, multiplied by the ability of the people to consume the planet's finite resources might just make it irrelevant anyway.

As I potter down the beach here, drinking in the stunning views and lungfuls of fresh air, I find myself wondering if we should stop wasting valuable time and resources trying to prevent what is inevitable.

Perhaps we should stop kidding ourselves and accept that the human race does not ‘do' restraint, and start investing our ingenuity in mitigating the environmental consequences of meeting everyone's needs and greeds.

Peter's Daily Telegraph Blog