My mother still lives in Toronto; she lives right in the city's heart. She loves the big city. The art galleries, the symphony, the opera, the museums - they are her world. However, I was talking to her on the phone this past summer, and she was having misgivings about living there. She said that walking down the street a block could almost make her sick to her stomach because the exhaust fumes were so bad.
Southern Ontario had one of its worst summers for smog warnings this past year. Our first air-quality warning came as early as April, and this was followed by, during the worst of the heat waves, 23 days in a row of air-quality alerts. In my small city of 116,000, 60 air-quality-related deaths were anticipated. We have no heavy industry, but we are downwind of Toronto and are one of the most humid cities in Canada. It's a sure-fire combination for bad air.
So when I see a picture of a massive city like Beijing, where the majority of people pedal their way to work, I don't get quite the massive worry about how much greenhouse gas China contributes to our atmosphere. I'm sure that will change in the future. Economic prosperity leads to the desire for symbols of status, and nothing says status like a car.
India is already experiencing that with Mumabi already reporting more than 300 new car-license requests each month. Given the state of India's infrastructure, which has old roads not designed for the automobile, it may soon start experiencing the same sort of gridlock that we do in Ontario.
That's what we need to be planning for, for that day in the not-so-distant future when the world's largest nations begin to reap material rewards for their economic prowess. This is where we need to start looking at the world from their point of view, which has been shaped by years of being treated as an inferior.
For far too many years, both China and India were subservient to other masters. Both gained their independence in the first half of the 20th century. China became a closed country, retreating behind the veil of communism and pretty much relegating its people to a feudal status. India, on the other hand, received plenty of foreign investment from companies who wanted cheap labor. India's wake-up call came in 1984, when a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal leaked toxic gases into the environment. As is typical, the company fought tooth and nail against giving any significant compensation to the people who lived in the surrounding area.
Article comments
1 - Bill Wallo
As memory serves, there was an alternate to the Kyoto accord mentioned recently that the U.S. and China were propounding. I can't remember the details.
I have to admit being slightly confused by this post, however. Are you suggesting that China and India ought to be able to avoid "anti emission devices, filters, and alternative fuels" right now and instead build their economies? This seems to ignore the fact that China is presently in the midst of an incredible developmental boom, that its citizens are rapidly purchasing vehicles, and that when any society opts to take the low road "for now," that is generally where they end up staying simply because the cost of converting an entire industrial sector is almost impossible to bear after the fact.
The post also makes lots of assumptions about the relative cost of anti-emission technology without noting that since many things have already been developed, it seems odd to say that they shouldn't be incorporated into the industrial structures of developing nations from the outset in order to avoid some of the problems later. Call it the Katrina corollary: spend a few billion now to avoid paying many more billions (or trillions) later, after things have become a problem.
2 - steve
I do not understand how we came up with the Kyoto Protocal...yet refuse to participate in it. although I'm conservative...I disagree with Bush on environmental issues.
3 - Silas Kain
Add a 1.50 tax to a gallon of gasoline and have it go directly to mass transportation development. We're pigs. We consume too much and get back too little. It's time for us to change our paradigm. At the rate we're going, we'll be importing rickshaws from the Far East because nobody will be able to afford a car much less find gasoline.
4 - Dave Nalle
There is nothing like a hot, humid summer's day in a big North American city during morning rush hour to give you an idea of how bad auto-emitted gases can be. The city doesn't even have to be that big.
So true. So very true. 20 years ago.
Todays cars produce so little pollution that cities whcih in the 1980s were smog-bound all summer long now have no smog at all. The entire issue of automobile emissions will be basically irrelevant by 2010 when almost all cars on the road will produce near-zero emissions. This is a problem which has been solved and without any role being played by the Kyoto agreement.
The real issue is and remains the pollution output of heavy industry, and this is the area where the emerging nations like India and China are in real, serious trouble. They cannot continue to grow their economies without these industries and they are in no position to modernize quickly enough to reduce emissions to the levels of the US or European countries.
The problem with Kyoto is that it puts restrictions on the countries which have already solved most of the problems its addressing and either provides breaks to or hasn't managed to get the signatures of the countries which are the largest problem.
Dave
5 - Marcia L. Neil
Obviously the 'where' of the accord has confused many, since the initiative was first broached in the good ol' USA. As explained to a Canadian web-site linked from a war-veterans' website, a cache of historical mental images of world-wide trees was released into common northeast USA conscious-ness in a high school home room and transmitted ceaselessly since that time from population to population. Some in the immediate vicinity of the 'release' thought that a Korean War veteran was the carrier since the image of a west coast tree was transmitted first -- the image of the tree when it was young. Significant numbers of people carry that one image embedded in their memories as occult input (never having actually seen the tree when it was young); some people carry an entire set of worldwide trees.
Others thought the mental cache was a KKK phen-omenon, making a mental leap from 'Korea' to 'Kyoto' when the protocol was first initiated, with some apparent rationale that WWII Japan figured somehow in the accumulation of floral memory input into population brains. The different locations around the planet where each such historical plant in the mental cache can be found, have become the subjects of unusual attention -- tour, travel, business-scheme, emigrant, and hence war -- such that an environmental protocol has become necessary to preserve the historical regions from total ruin (using any name). What should the next name be, after the use of 'Kyoto' has expired?
[Computer viruses consistently interfere now when Canadian websites are personally accessed, perhaps as a demonstration using a traveling white 'gator as 'inspiration'.]