Why India Must (and Can) Do More to Fight Pollution Than the U.S.

Journal Roblimo's Journal: Why India Must (and Can) Do More to Fight Pollution Than the U.S. 10

Journal by Roblimo on Tuesday December 08, 2009 @10:54AM

This is a screed I originally posted on an Indian friend's Facebook wall: Don't worry about the US [on the pollution front]. We're down from using 40% of the world's resources (and generating 40% of the pollution) to under 30% -- and dropping. Our richie-riches are determined to keep us "competitive" in the world labor markets, which seems to mean they expect the majority of us to live in dirt-floored shacks, same as the rural poor in China and India. At the rate our working people's incomes are dropping, we will hardly be able to afford any carbon dioxide production at all within a few decades, and we'll be shipping our brightest University grads to India, not the other way around.

One thing to note is that the U.S. has a lot of really old industrial infrastructure. I know of textile mills in the state of Massachusetts running 100 and 150 year old machinery that has been modernized but is still dreadfully inefficient by today's standards. In contrast, Germany and Japan have hardly any factories built before 1946 because we bombed their previous ones in WWII. India, Vietnam, and other countries that had hardly any industry before the 1970s have even newer plants, on average.

And then there's technology leapfrogging, the phenomenon of jumping over old technology on purpose and going straight for the latest. Telephones are a prime example. The U.S. and other long-industrialized nations put in copper phone wires almost everywhere 75 or 100 years ago, then started switching to microwaves and satcom for long distance 50 years ago, and are now switching to fiberoptics and cellular systems. Countries now building out their telecomm infrastructure for the first time are going straight to fiber and cellular without the evolutionary steps.

In other words, they're using resource-efficient commo technology from the start instead of mining and manufacturing endless kilometers of copper wire first.

The same idea can and should apply to power generation. The U.S. has many 100 year old coal-fired electrical plants that still work well enough that, pollution (and mining damage) aside, there is no economically justifiable reason to replace them. And we have enough coal to power the U.S. for hundreds of years, so our government and power industry spend endless money on patchwork cleanups for coal-fired plants, while India can get right to the business of building clean, 21st century generating facilities.

Technology leapfrogging can and does happen in many other fields, too. The Tata Nano can be built cheaply in large part because it stands on the back of generation of (primarily) American, European, and Japanese auto and production engineering. Meanwhile, the big American car companies are still using some plants that -- while heavily modernized over the years -- were built in the 1920s and 1930s and are nowhere near as efficient as a brand-new Tata plant but are so expensive to replace that they go on being modified and patched up apparently forever. And the old auto plants that *have* closed become huge eyesores, too expensive to use for anything else, often too expensive to tear down so we can use that land for something else. So they sit there, rotting, a blight on the landscape, testimony to our country's former greatness.

The final indignity: I lost my job at the end of last year, and my chance of finding an equivalent one at my age (57) is essentially zero. This means I had to give up my mortgaged house because I could no longer afford the payments on it. The bank that held our mortgage went broke and was absorbed by a larger bank, which also went broke and got absorbed by an even larger one. Finally, nearly a year later, they are getting around to the legal foreclosure and title transfer process. But as part of that process, they have representatives call us several times a week to ask if there is any way we can start making at least partial payments and to threaten us with a severe drop in our credit rating -- which has already happened anyway, because of my job loss, so the threats are essentially meaningless.

Now, guess where those annoying calls come from? That's right. India. Wells Fargo Bank, which is still in business (and has manged to absorb other, even weaker, banks) only because of massive cash infusions from the U.S. government, is hiring Indians to harass Americans who have lost their jobs and can no longer pay their bills.

I'm sure those Indian debt collectors are glad to have their jobs, and are happily spending their paychecks on cellular phones, furniture, flats and houses, computers, clothes, motorcycles and perhaps even Tata Nanos.

Meanwhile, Americans like me, who have essentially been cast aside as unwanted surplus by American businesses, are buying hardly anything. We are, therefore, accounting for a lower percentage of global pollution than we did even a few years ago. At the same time, the Indian collector and his family are busily *increasing* their resource use and pollution production.

If I was in my 20s instead of in my 50s, I would move to one of the rising countries. But I'm not, so I stay here, watching my savings and my economic impact (and carbon footprint) dwindle every month.

This is why India and other rising countries need to do more, not less, than the U.S. to stop pollution and use resources more efficiently.

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