Who:
Carl Pope
Sierra Club Executive Director
Where:
Mumbai, India, Other
Bombay, India -- I am spending the day in India's most populous city, hearing about and trying to understand what "extreme" weather really does and, in an all-too-practical sense, what global warming could really mean if we don't do something now to reverse it.
Two weeks ago, in a foreshadowing of what we can expect to see happen more and more often as we destabilize the global climate, this city received 37 inches of water in one day. I cannot begin to fathom what that must have been like to experience -- more than three feet of water falling in a single day. One friend said it was like a river falling straight down from the sky.
For many people, this rain meant the end of their world. Entire hillside communities were washed away as if perched on a river bank. More than 1,000 people died. Some drowned. Some were electrocuted. Some were buried alive when their shanty homes were suddenly at the bottom of a mudslide. Even in normal rains, these shantytowns are dangerous. Every year, a few people are killed. But because of population pressure, there is no place else to live -- this city is now home to 17 million people.
No one here has ever seen this kind of rain before. But scientists are warning that global warming will mean all kinds of weather that has no precedent. The cynics in the oil industry and the reactionaries in the Bush administration and Congress tell us, "It would be better to let this happen and then adjust to the new climate." Well precisely how do you adjust to three feet of water falling in a single day? Reactionary economists tell us it wouldn't be cost-effective to take preventive action on global warming. Well, this city generates 40 percent of the tax revenues for the whole government of India. For three days, no buses ran and the stock market was closed. Multiply this tragedy by a thousand, by ten thousand.
Would having cars and trucks that accelerated a little less quickly, installing more modern equipment in factories, sealing leaks in houses, or building windmills in the Dakotas instead of importing oil from Saudi Arabia really be too high a price to pay to avoid such disasters?
For the people of Bombay, the unwillingness of my own government to act responsibly is, literally, a matter of life and death. I sometimes wonder why they are so nice to us.
