Electric cars won't solve climate change, Amitav Ghosh says

TOI correspondent from London: Kolkata-born New-York-based author Amitav Ghosh says renewable energies, carbon credits and electric cars will not solve climate change and has called for the world to focus on local community solutions invented in countries like Bangladesh instead.

“There is no pathway through this mess. If we look at recent COP, all the absurdities have now been laid bare, and when Greta Thunberg says it's blah blah blah, I think she is right,” he said, speaking at the Global Cultures Institute’s annual lecture at King’s College London on Thursday night.

He said the West was obsessed with statistics and macro-driven data and all the literature on climate change — overwhelmingly produced by theWest — is largely centred on technical and economic issues.

“The only solution on offer – a quick changeover to alternative energy — we all know that’s not going to stop the extractivism, or the battle for resources, already present in many conflicts,” he said. “Everyone having an electric vehicle is not going to solve the problem. It just seems absurd. How many emissions are there in making the electric vehicle and in making the batteries? But people seem to want to believe that story,” he said.

When asked by TOI as to whether renewable energy, carbon credits or nuclear energy, were solutions, he said they were not. “Solutions and resilience will consist of very local initiatives and endeavours,” he said.

“Climate change is a global problem but manifests locally and that is where my interest lies. How do people at a local level respond? In Bangladesh, they have been disseminating information about climate change for years and the population is very well informed and they have their own solutions. They haven’t given up. Resilience mitigation, in the end, won’t come from technological solutions, it will come from community ties and from knowing your land,” he said. “If there is a collapse scenario, who would you rather be with? The nerd who has a calculator or the farmer who knows how to run land? India has always been a water stressed region and yet farmers have been able to wrest a crop from that soil for millennia. Every farmer who can do that carries an entire library in his head - which can’t be bought.”

“Militarisation is the single most ecologically destructive human endeavour. But research on the environmental impact of militarisation is non-existent," he said.

“During the Iraq war, the US military was consuming 1.3 billion gallons of oil annually – this was more than the annual consumption of Bangladesh. It could be said that conflict and national rivalry are the fundamental drivers of climate change, yet these issues are rarely discussed,” he said.