Come winter, the air quality in Delhi and other cities in the national capital territory goes off the charts — literally. Cities like Calcutta also find pollution spiking. In the NCT, apart from seasonal phenomena like thermal inversion and the lack of wind dispersal, stubble burning plays a big role in exacerbating pollution.
Heads are scratched, administrative ingenuity taxed and judicial importunity stretched beyond constitutional remits even as winter only deepens a permanent problem: studies over the past few years, for instance, the World Air Quality Report by the Switzerland-based IQAir, have found that Indian cities dominate the list of most polluted sites. The public-health emergency and the global-warming dimension of the problem have to be dealt with — now.
On November 7, 2023, the Supreme Court passed an order extending its ban on non-‘green’ firecrackers in the NCT to the whole country. In its judgment, it said a complete ban was not possible until people took it upon themselves to stop bursting crackers. It was not only the duty of the court “when it came to environmental matters”; “[s]ensitivising the people is the key” and “[i]t is for everyone to manage air and sound pollution,” it said. The next day, the West Bengal chief minister, Mamata Banerjee, similarly requested the people to burst just green crackers and said only these should be used in the state on Kali Puja. We all know how that played out.
Both Banerjee and the SC made good-faith appeals. Unfortunately, they play into bad-faith tropes. Let’s go beyond firecrackers, which, truth to tell, are a small part of the problem. The biggest issue is the continued use of, and addiction to, fossil fuels to power electricity grids, vehicles, factories — our daily lives. We must wean ourselves away from fossil fuels by switching to renewable energy.
The problem is that there is a great reluctance among governments — bureaucrats and politicians — to bring policy to bear on disincentivising fossil fuels and incentivising renewables. This is happening throughout the world because the fossil-fuel lobby has put its considerable weight behind sabotaging the transition.
In the early years of climate activism, the sabotage mostly took the form of outright denial. Thus, the big corporations involved in extracting, processing and distributing fossil fuels would fund ‘think tanks’ and ‘research institutes’ that would put out wrong data, misrepresentations, ambiguous claims — this was the age of climate-change denial.
When climate science came of age, with the sophistication of methods and the acquisition of complete datasets, this kind of denial became impossible. With nowhere to hide, the fossil-fuel lobby developed more devious ways of undermining climate science and activism. As Michael Mann, the climate scientist and activist, argues with great effect in The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet, one of the ways was to foreground individual lifestyles as the primary cause of global warming and climate change and individual responsibility as the main way of solving the problem through advertising blitzes and media capture. This tactic sought, often with great success, not only to deflect attention from the problem of the continued extraction and use of fossil fuels and the role of corporations in blocking government regulation that could reduce them but also to sow divisions among climate activists. For one faction, personal carbon purity became an article of faith, which led to public shaming, scolding and pointless bickering over irrelevances.
It’s not that individual responsibility is unimportant or that people shouldn’t make an attempt to reduce their carbon footprint, but until systemic change implementing policies that punish fossil-fuel use lead to their replacement with renewables, the emission of greenhouse gases, global warming and climate change cannot be stopped.
Suhit K. Sen is the author of The Paradox of Populism: The Indira Gandhi Years, 1966-77
