India needs an environmental opposition party.

• Author: Dorschner, Jon P.

Part I--The Perfect Storm

We once lived in a world of infinite possibilities. It was filled with hope. But the world has undergone a radical transformation. It has reached the "tipping point." Decisions taken today will determine the future of life on this planet.

The rapid ascension of conservative ideology in the United States and other countries has been accompanied by environmental changes of epic proportions, providing a recipe for a perfect storm. Not only does the world face unprecedented environmental challenges due to pollution, deforestation and other deleterious impacts of human activity, another ecological threat to all life on this planet has emerged, climate change. Scientists have been aware of the deleterious effect of carbon on the atmosphere and world climate for a long time, but were unable to attract the attention of the world population until recently.

While world governments have promoted economic development, economic growth and poverty alleviation, the environment was always the elephant in the room. It was always there and always too big to ignore

Bent on economic growth at all cost, power elites in the United States and many other countries dismiss environmental rules and regulations as "impediments to growth," that must be downplayed, eliminated, or ignored. They emphasize the economic costs of regulating industries to ensure adequate pollution controls. To them, this money is better spent on "investments" aimed at continued economic growth. In this world view, polluted air, polluted water, and food laced with unhealthy additives are simply the unavoidable costs associated with economic growth and prosperity.

But the elephant remains in the room, and he does not get any smaller. Rather, he grows larger and larger, every day, and now there is climate change. The industrial revolution fuelled a consumer economy. By the 1950's this consumer lifestyle was epitomized by the United States. There arose an economic model which now dominates political and economic thinking which equates economic success with "economic growth," defined as growth in the output of goods and services. To achieve success in this model, consumers must consume more products, so that factories can produce more goods and services. It is an economic model based on infinite growth.

There are inherent problems with this economic model. It equates prosperity with the acquisition of material objects. However, once basic material needs are met, demand begins to slacken. For the system to succeed, it must constantly increase output. Demand cannot slacken. Therefore, industrialized societies must constantly maintain demand. They do this in two ways. They create "artificial needs" by turning luxuries into necessities, and they harness research and technology to constantly create new products, which eventually become the new necessities.

This constant output of goods and services comes with a heavy environmental price. Industrial production processes have always created unwanted and dangerous byproducts, including substances that pollute the air, water, and soil.

Pollution became intolerable in the more advanced industrial countries. Public outcry and growing scientific research on the deleterious impact of pollutants led to calls for their control. Populations realized that unrestricted environmental pollution was too high of a price to pay for economic progress. These countries began to regulate industrial production processes and control pollution.

The publics in these countries were willing to pay the price to clean up their environment. It quickly became evident that private producers would not regulate themselves and that only government could accomplish this task. Some countries began to clean up some of the damage caused by unrestricted economic growth.

Now, however, a new factor threatens the dominant economic paradigm. Industrial systems run on energy. Every industrial process requires energy to convert raw material into finished products.

Until very recently, this energy came almost exclusively from fossil fuels. The original energy source for the industrial revolution was coal. However, coal is a dirty and highly polluting fuel. This spurred the development of new energy sources, and of technology to "scrub" coal of its most harmful pollutants. However, fossil fuels (coal, natural gas, petroleum) remained almost the sole sources of energy. Although hydro electric projects captured flowing water to turn massive turbines to produce energy, and later nuclear power plants provided an alternative to fossil fuel, for many years, these were the only non-fossil, energy sources. As more of the world industrialized, fossil fuel consumption skyrocketed.

Scientists discovered a terrible secret about fossil fuel consumption only after the world had grown dependent on it. Fossil fuel spews carbon into the atmosphere. The carbon is trapped and does not leave. As it accumulates, carbon traps heat, which radiates back to the surface of the Earth, pushing up global temperatures. The increase in heat sparks climate changes of various types depending on individual ecosystems.

As scientists began to measure the affects of carbon in the atmosphere, they became more alarmed. The increase in temperature results in dramatic changes in climate. Ice caps melt, the ocean level increases, inundating low lying areas. As glaciers disappear, rivers dry up. Populations dependent on rain fed agriculture begin to experience drought and then famine. Climate becomes more extreme. Tropical storms become Tsunamis that sweep through coastal areas killing hundreds of thousands and causing unprecedented economic damage. Floods become more frequent and more extreme, especially in areas that have already been deforested.

These dramatic climate changes come at a time when the world's population continues to climb. Although birth rates have declined dramatically in much of the world and many countries have reached zero population growth (ZPG), with some actually experiencing population declines, population in the developing world continues to increase at a rapid pace.

In some developing countries, especially in those with conservative social systems, much of the population continues to reject family planning and birth rates remain at pre-industrial levels. In these countries the birth rate remains unchanged, while infant and child mortality rates are vastly reduced by modern medicine. These societies endure unsustainable population growth rates that double their population in as little as 25 years.

In other developing countries, family planning has gained wide acceptance...