New Delhi, April 2 : What is the way to counter effects of climate change that are thought to be the greatest threat to humankind and the earth in the coming decades? While the Nobel Prize winning Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) thinks a drastic cut in carbon emissions, which supposedly causes global warming, is the only way out, a competing report offered a completely different take.
The report, released on Wednesday by an international organisation called Civil Society Coalition on Climate Change (CSCCC), suggested Governments all over the world to remove subsidies and taxes on agriculture and forestry, and privatise Government-owned land and water. While terming the IPCC as “alarmist” and “heavily biased”, the report urged the administrations to lift restrictions on ownership of property and barriers to entrepreneurship such as licensing systems.
The organisation, that seeks to educate the public about the science and economics of climate change, was of the view that such steps would make people richer and therefore strengthen their capability to adapt to climate change.
“Given the strong relationship between prosperity, health and clean environment, the best policy for reducing the vulnerability of people to potentially negative aspects of climate change is to enable them to become rich, and thereby avail themselves of all the positive measures that the wealthy can afford,” the report said.
Arguing strongly against any mitigation efforts, it said that “we might end up blowing a trillion dollars and still find ourselves without a planet.” The report asserts that “to the extent that global warming occurs gradually, the best strategy likely is adaptation”.
In rejecting mitigation strategies, the report banks on the ability of human beings to think and come out with intelligent solution to any problem. “When faced with a threat, humans are not generally passive. We react, identify the source of the threat and seek to address it. The more entrepreneurial among us convert the threat into opportunities,” it said.
The report rejected the theory that the observed global warming was a result of carbon emissions. “In his famous film on climate change An Inconvenient Truth, former US vice-president Al Gore shows a graph depicting the correlation between earth’s temperature and carbon emissions. But correlation is not causation,” said Deepak Lal, a professor at the University of California, who was present at the function.
He said efforts were on to prove an alternative hypothesis which suggests that the warming was being caused by cosmic rays that keep bombarding the earth.
The report was released by Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia, who is closely involved with India’s efforts to come up with a National Action Plan on climate change under the instruction of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Clearly uncomfortable in the company of people who were challenging widely-accepted beliefs on the issue, Montek wondered aloud whether more than 2,500 scientists in the IPCC could go so horribly wrong as the current report made them out to be.
