All That Matters

To Copenhagen with Love


I confess I get a little befuddled by all the hoopla and talk about going green, sustainable energy development blah blah blah…. I can understand being environmentally friendly, avoiding water contamination, putting CFCs out of use, cleaning up spills but when it comes to cutting greenhouse emissions via reduction of global dependence on fossil fuel, I just don’t get it. What are the alternatives really – wind, solar, what? How many wind turbines and how much land do I need to generate enough energy electricity to run a factory? At what cost? And don’t solar and nuclear sources generate toxic wastes with headaches to store? Sustainable my a**.


Most renewable, sustainable, green (choose your preferred adjective) energy sources are at best at experimental stages. Heck for all the three decades of hype and work, no car yet run 100 per cent on electricity except prototypes that run at 40km/hr for 30 minutes and then stop dead. And that’s even at motor shows. And what’s the major component of the batteries they run on? Lead? Really, isn’t that stuff dangerous too?


Let’s assume all the cars in Lagos have gone green and now run on lead. Lead based batteries everywhere and tokunbo (meaning second-hand) ones now available at Ladipo auto parts market dumped in careless heaps same way as other spare parts. Leachates seeping in the subsoil, contaminating the ground water in the parts where public waterworks are dinosaurs and people depend on wells and boreholes for daily living. What sweet sustainable world it will be for our organs?


The only green source of energy that is cheaper and more efficient than fossil fuel is nuclear. And where do we store the waste? Oh well, maybe we just dig up the Sultan of Sokoto’s backyard and put it underground. We’ll check in a million years and see how it doing. And really why not? For all the talk of nuclear non-proliferation and nuclear-free world (Utopia?) France has the highest number of nuclear power plant in the world. Britain plans to build four more. Does it matter any? Paris is the City of Lights – literally – and the London Metro always runs on time. That’s all that matters.


They say we’ll be shooting ourselves in the leg if we disregard climate warnings. I say so? If the Chinese, the Indians and the Americans shoot themselves in the leg to pull their people out of poverty by all means let’s chop ours off. If we that’s our chance to make a decent living, I’ll give my leg. Now do I trust my government to do the necessary to get the job done like the Chinese and the Indians? Nope. I guess I have no toe worth of trust in my government so I’ll keep my leg. And that is all that matters. Survival.


Most of the debates so far at the Copenhagen submit has focused unfairly on curbing carbon emissions cap and trade that allows rich nations to pollute but pay a token and then trade these rights across boundaries. This means developing countries mortgage their right to human physical development which cannot be achieved without industrialization. As someone who lives in one such country, I remain skeptical of the scientific argument put forward to justify this stance. What is known is that human activities where not carefully mitigated impact negatively on the environment. There’s yet to be an agreement that the climate is indeed warming up significantly as a direct result of these activities.


Already we’ve seen the abuse of this system with corruption charges rocking the highest quarters of government in Papua New Guinea which in essence shows that the proposed system isn't fool-proof. But then which system is? Without a proper and established system of control, there’s no guarantee that whatever cap and trade agreement is eventually knocked in Copenhagen will be operable. The rational way to go will be an agreement that guarantees the right of developing nations to industrialize but one that sets strict standard for emissions and safeguards for the environment and individual rights protection. That to me will be the first step toward achieving climate justice.