Remember Erin Brockovich?

Amit Sengupta Delhi

It’s like the peak of summer. The heat moves like insomnia on the scorching streets of the Capital and the fumes of the millions of swanky cars and car-trucks — Scorpios, Tata Sumos, Innovas — condense and hang like poison inside the lungs. You look for a nip in the air because it’s the end of September as the festive season begins; but the chill is missing. Instead, it’s the madness of the method, the freak heat (or freak rains) as repetitive realism, the absence of monsoon a lingering absence, the desert becoming a lake, the river becoming drought, the drought becoming mass tragedy.

They found snow in Dubai, and parts of Europe saw a blinding heat wave which killed many, especially the elderly, since they just don’t know how to cope with these unpredictable extremities. Mumbai, the financial capital of globalised India, collapsed for the second year running when the rains completely crippled its infrastructure. In totalitarian China, where mindless industrialisation ‘conquers’ nature, thousands of tonnes of dust settled on the homes of Beijing this summer. This is because of endless construction, deforestation, digging on a mass scale and total concrete as the only utopia of modernity’s progress.

The glaciers are receding (as the Gomukh glacier, the origin of Ganga), and ecologists and  scientists have been crying hoarse that your river systems will dry out if the glaciers burn out, that this is perverse, this manufactured disaster. George Bush might not agree and the US might refuse to sign the Kyoto Protocol, but the freak accident is becoming a ritualistic cliché across the globe. Indeed, global warming is a dark irony in this neo-liberal theatre of the absurd where profit sharks call the shots while we breathe the air we breathe.

The irrefutable scientific truth is that there is an evident increase in the average temperature of the earth’s atmosphere and oceans in recent decades and most of the warming documented over the last 50 years is due to human activities. The increased amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are the principal reasons behind the human-induced reality of global warming. This dangerous phenomenon of climate change is linked to the release and burning of fossil fuels, land-clearing and industrial activities, especially in the advanced capitalist societies. The climatic changes can lead to extreme ‘weather events’; the changes can create hurricanes, floods, droughts, tornadoes, heat waves. This can directly impact agricultural patterns, glaciers, rivers, streams, forests. Species can become extinct, strange diseases epidemics can spread.

But the Empire and its breathless, relentless, soulless profit machines refuse to act or react. As if Planet Earth is a damned video play station.

Remember Erin Brockovich? Listen to Guardian columnist George Monbiot’s revelations and warnings. For instance, in his latest book Heat (published by Allen Lane), he argues that oil giant ExxonMobil gives money to scores of organisations that debunk the science of global warming. “It's a strategy that has set back action on climate change by a decade, and it involves the same people who insist that passive smoking is harmless.” 

Monbiot writes, “The website Exxonsecrets.org, using data found in the company's official documents, lists 124 organisations that have taken money from the company or work closely with those that have. These organisations take a consistent line on climate change: that the science is contradictory, the scientists are split, environmentalists are charlatans, liars or lunatics, and if governments took action to prevent global warming, they would be endangering the global economy for no good reason. The findings of these organisations are labelled ‘junk science’...”

It’s like the neo-cons’ oil for blood policy in the Iraqi occupation termed as a war against (the mythical) WMDs. It’s like bauxite for mass displacement and ecological catastrophe in the eastern ghats of Orissa; the gigantic, destructive dams in the Narmada Valley with 300,000 displaced; the submerged valleys of Tehri where the Ganga is pushed into a tunnel. It’s like the obsessive destruction of the Amazon, China’s Three Gorges, ravaged Africa and the banana republics of North America. It’s like when you cock a snook at nature in such terrible bad taste, nature will get back to you. This is nature’s revenge. The Future Shock, present continuous.