Climate Crisis; defining a new paradigm

By Renton de Alwis

Written and published in late 2010, it was a lead up to the much touted UN Climate Change Conference held in Copenhagen that year. The conference and those held thereafter have all fallen short of expectations of people who have expressed concern of the disaster humankind together with all the earth’s species may face within the context of an impending climate catastrophe. It is reproduced here to both serve as a reminder to us all of the issue (that has been bouncing up and down like a rubber ball) and as a baseline to compare where we were two years ago and where we are now on the action front on issues that matter to us all.

 “Lowáda Sangarawa” is an instructive poetic work done in the 15^th Century authored by the monk Ven.Vidagama Maithriya. Like its title says, it is about “What’s good for the world” and is inspired by the Buddha’s word. A work I read as a child, among the several poems I vividly remember, is one about the crabs in the pot on the fire. The imagery it creates and the substance it presents in Sinhala is amazing and its relevance to what is happening around us in today’s world is profound. The portrayal is of a pot with live crabs in it, placed on a fire yet to be lit. The crabs enjoy the cool comfort of the pot, imagining that it is a state of bliss, until the pot begins to heat-up slowly killing the crabs ending the short-lived state of that enjoyment and happiness.

Still greed driven

We as the human-race have for some time now, lived in a state of enjoyment with the false belief that the pot will not heat on us, consuming our very own existence. What climate scientists tell us is that the ‘developed’ countries need to reduce their carbon emission levels by at least 40 per cent and that the whole world needs to get back to emission levels of the 1990’s, if we are to contain an impending climate catastrophe that can otherwise happen, closer to the middle of this century. Hope is placed on energy efficient technologies, carbon off-setting mechanisms and creating clichés such as ‘eco-civilisations’. New techniques are proposed to replace the old ways of exploiting resources, with some savings in the process through efficiency gains. New greed driven stock-markets for carbon trading are created to continue the exploitation, with crumb-like payoffs held as carrots. The very nations that  presented growth models that led and made all of us on earth believe that ‘greed is good’ and having as wide a choice for consumption of goods and services was the ideal way to create successful lifestyles, are today attempting to provide us, the developing nations, funding and assistance to “go green”.

Solid penalties

At the recently concluded, G-20 summit, Sri Lanka proposed that the developed nations that created the climate crisis, must compensate those who are affected by it by offsetting the debt-burden of those countries, enabling them to make new beginnings. The point made is that handouts such as assistance to set up ‘do good’ initiatives must be replaced with solid penalties for the ‘sins’ committed in the past.

Defining our own model

I am at a loss as to why we as Sri Lankans, leading an alliance of like-minded nations, can not go further and propose a whole new model of creating a ‘new civilisation’ based on the “sufficiency economy” principals, where shunning greed and not feeding on it will form its core thinking. We do not have to look too far beyond, but at the principles of Buddhist Economics enumerated in Schumacher’s 1970’s work of “Small is Beautiful – Economics as if people mattered”.

We of course need to have for ourselves as a nation, the moral authority to present such a model by truly practising those ways. We need to widely celebrate the greenness we already have and put an end to all deforestation. We need to expand on our national programmes for reforestation with the widest possible participation of the people, with our media making it almost a mantra. We need to take on bold efforts to wipe-out corruption, establish the rule of law, meritocracy, human dignity and respect for individual rights to establish a Sri Lanka that we can all be proud of. We need to shun the decadent ways of the dominant culture, but create our own sustainable ways of using modern communication, production, construction and service-based technology tools that are available. Our sustainable and self-sufficient lifestyles must be moulded to be an example to others.  Clean methods of governance our leadership must practise, needs to form the basis for us to achieve that state.

Strong call for action

Many organizations around the world are also calling out for justice and for real change on the Climate Change domain, as the world’s governments approach the Copenhagen negotiations in December this year. Among them some I would recommend are, Sri Lanka’s own Centre for Environmental Justice, the Global Humanitarian Forum, the TckTckTck Campaign, and the World in Action Campaign. President of the Global Humanitarian Forum, a TckTckTck founding partner, and former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in a recent media release said, “We must end the deathly silence around this crisis.” He might just as well have said “deadly silence”, because the voices that have been most effectively silenced in the climate change debate are those of its first and worst victims. “Although developing countries did not cause the climate crisis,” Annan says, “poor nations are suffering the most, as unpredictable weather patterns and the increase in natural disasters affects access to food, water and shelter.”

The ‘Pin- Paw’ Fund

With the impending climate crisis, the world is at cross-roads. What is significant about this situation is that there is not much time left for human-kind to experiment on models.  Creating Carbon-offset funds also to promote greed driven agenda will only make the situation worse and not any better. 

I have long called the carbon-offset fund mechanism the “Pin–Paw Fund” or the “Merit and Sin Fund”. This is for it facilitates enabling the buying of carbon credit from those who practice good sustainable ways, by those who seek to pollute or sin with the credit they have purchased. This mechanism may seem innovative to those who do not realise that it will only leave a negative impact on carbon emissions on planet earth.  The scheme demonstrates the ingenuity of those who innovate within the greed-driven model.

A whole new civilisation

They do not seem to realise that laws of nature have now held us captive, giving us no more room to experiment. Perhaps the only option before us is to take on models that will lead us to a whole new paradigm in defining a whole new civilisation, where our new ways of life will be very different to that we knew before. The option may be to create a civilisation where austerity, sustainability and living in harmony with nature define all else we do. Given the challenges before us and its insurmountable nature, this may be the only way forward we shall have for our future survival.

Useful Web addresses:

(PS. These links are related to the time the article was written. You may need to search within them to find the applicable context)

Center for Environmental Justice in Sri Lanka - http://www.ejustice.lk/

World in Action – http://www.avaaz.org/en/
Time for Climate Justice Campaign - http://tcktcktck.org