Term 2 has Media, Culture and Globalization being taught by Prof Radha Hegde. This obviously means that there’s a lot of reading to be done. There’s also a lot of watching that has to be done. This is the first course I have been a part of which showed an R Kelly video (Snake). The video was used to portray Orientalism. But I digress.

One of the course particulars includes us watching this video from Ghana where I suspect some NGOs Anya Kandel, founder of Momentus International (more about it here) and a graduate student at NYU, went around asking the kids about the questions they had for “The Man”. Here’s a video for your viewing pleasure:

Some questions are simple, such as why don’t the Heads of State fight wars themselves like duels of the past, as was the case during Aristocracy or why do Western nations come and work in Africa but make it tough for Africans to work there. Those are the hardest to answer. Then there were those which asked, why was it that in Africa they cane people. The answer to that I suppose could be because developed nations seem to have found an expensive alternative: suing.

One simple enough question on which I indeed had an opinion was when one boy asks whether there were mosquitoes in other countries, because here in Ghana, they bit them like crazy.

A simple check would tell you that Canada and US has anywhere between 400-2000 (?!) cases of Malaria each year, most of them attributed to immigrants from Asia and Sub saharan region. (Source). This is hardly surprising given the temperate regions that these nations lie in.

Jeffrey Sachs in End of Poverty and Commonwealth highlights how with the onset of rising temperatures, there are higher chances of US and other temperate regions facing a rise of malaria apart from a myriad of other diseases they’d have never experienced. As I have always maintained, while climate change will affect all of us (Remember in the long term, we’re all dead ), in the short term it will create winners and losers. Of course, with the rising temperatures, that’s going to be the least of their worries.

Update: After watching the video, we had a skype call with Anya to discuss her work and learning in Africa. Some interesting take aways from that:

1. The schools in South Ghana that Anya met had Muslim and Christian associations. Yet, when Anya asked them about a communal rift, they seemed puzzled. Anya shared that there was absolutely no communal issue, at least at the school level there.

2. The children were puzzled by the amount of waste that was being dumped into Africa by the developing nations. Having read a little about it earlier, I am aware that Africa is one of the largest dumping ground of electronic waste in the world.

3. Western nations have a intricate and violent history and there’s no escaping that. Any development work that takes place there needs to keep that in mind. At the same time, it’s also important to understand that Africa isn’t a homogeneous continent. Some nations have stable governments, some don’t. Some have done well for themselves as far as governance and economy goes (Rwanda for example under the leadership of Paul Kagame), some have well…not done so well.

It was nice chatting with Anya. She was quite patient with our questions and told us that she too was facing similar questions (Academia vs Corporate world/ notions of development/ impact vs approach ). Sort of tells us, despite the cultural differences, twenty somethings (or people in general) around the world have multiple strands connecting them.

Rishabh Kaul is Economics & Engineering student at BITS Pilani who is interested in entrepreneurship and social innovation. Check out his profile at Linkedin or buzz him at rishabhkaul[at]gmail[dot]com

About 50 people have already asked me about my trip to Copenhagen and I have yet to give them a proper answer. I merely say something to the tone of “Hmm it was pretty cold” or “We didn’t really get that great a deal, I am sure you can read all about it in the papers”. The reason for that is because (and my buddy Abhishek will ditto me on this) Copenhagen was a very disappointing meet.

And on more than one grounds.

It had human rights violations, with the police capturing and beating up people, often for no fault of theirs.

One of the major issues for debate this time was the expulsion of NGO and civil society during the 2nd week of the conference. Rumors are that this was done so that Obama would face no difficulty when he was inside the center. It got so bad that there was an instance when R K Pachauri had to wait outside the Bella Center because the UN authorities wouldn’t let him in. (I had to confirm that twice before publishing it).

One interesting impact this had on the developing nations was that they lost a vital voice inside the Bella Center.  Why? Well Copenhagen is an atrociously expensive city and I suppose that was a major reason why there was such little representation from the global south at COP. And so that made it all the more important for the NGO to propagate their message inside the center and put pressure on the negotiators to come up with a fair legally binding treaty.

So much money was spent on the conference ( a number going to hundreds of millions of dollars viz an average per delegate expenditure of 15000 USD) and yet we didn’t reach a conclusion. Well, sort of. What we finally got was something weird. A politically binding accord. Check this WRI piece on what it actually means

Ah, now doesn’t that put us straight into the crux of the issue. Everybody wanted a treaty. Finally what we got was much lesser than what the science demands. 2 degree rise in temperature, billions short of the funding that’s recommended and a deal that isn’t even legally binding.

There were of course other issues whose answers will be revealed in due course of time, such as who will get how much money from the adaptation fund. That will be a critical question as far as I am concerned.

There are decisions to be taken but time isn’t on our side. India has already rolled out a massive solar project earlier this year and it will be interesting to see how that come along. At the same time we have also been making nuclear deals with US, Canada, Russia.

The talks at the Fresh Air Center (media center belonging to Tcktcktck, who funded my trip) were amazing. We had Andy Revkin, UN officials, Yes Men, Climate Action Network (CAN) guys come to speak. CAN told us few days before itself that there would be a massive campaign to spread the propaganda of China (and maybe India) being the major culprit behind the failure at Copenhagen, to take some of the blame off USA [here is one example, though I am not doubting Lynas' credibility, I am merely saying that such an opinion was always there on the table]. Truth be told, its not as simple as that. There are too many parties involved, each trying to ensure that they aren’t caught on the wrong side of the deal.

It seems clear that the biggest issue here isn’t a political or an economic issue, but is an issue of trust. Apart from that there’s also the issue of big oil spending lots of big bucks, but that’s another story.

Also check out this excellent post by Dan Kammen who writes about the ups and downs that he experienced during the COP (he left Copenhagen after the first week).

Rishabh Kaul is Economics & Engineering student at BITS Pilani who is interested in entrepreneurship and social innovation. Check out his profile at Linkedin or buzz him at rishabhkaul[at]gmail[dot]com

A week before going to Copenhagen I had come across a rather intriguing news item which reported that 2 high level executives of Coca Cola held a press conference condemning their employers’ sponsorship of Hopenhagen (Hopenhagen was a festival/campaign held alongside the COP15 by the UN and included concerts, green exhibits and other niceties).

Check out the video below

(via GristTV)

This should have created quite an uproar in the corporate sector. Well it would have, in case it were true. But don’t let that let you undermine the efforts of the Yes Men, who are soon topping my list of the most creative activists around. They go around impersonating high level corporates and bureaucrats and inflicting shame upon them.

I got the chance to meet them at the Fresh Air Center where they spent an evening interacting with the bloggers and showing the premiere of their latest stunt (check that out here), trust me you do NOT want to miss it.

They fund themselves and are amongst us. And no, they haven’t been sued yet, or wait have they?

I was having a chat with a friend if he’d like to open a chapter of the Yes Men in India and while the prospect sounded exciting at the beginning; almost at once something inside the both us clinched our gut and made us retract. It’s the same reason we didn’t take part in the protests in Copenhagen. Because we were too scared.

Sigh.

Rishabh Kaul is Economics & Engineering student at BITS Pilani who is interested in entrepreneurship and social innovation. Check out his profile at Linkedin or buzz him at rishabhkaul[at]gmail[dot]com

Image: Attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/barefootcollege/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Originally published at Project Survival Media day before yesterday

There has been a lot of discussion about the magnitude of the fund that will be set aside for the developing countries to cope up with climate change. Bangladesh has already made it clear that they deserve 15% of whatever the amount is decided upon. Other nations might have similar demands.But while the size of the pie is an important issue, I am more interested in how this pie will be eaten, meaning, where will the money be invested and in what technologies.

Well, Larry Lohmann seems to think he has an answer and he elaborates on it in his very interesting paper called Climate as an Investment where he says that the future of the world lies in locally produced energy using sustainable methods.

So what does that mean? It means that our notion of industrialization has to completely change, which in turn means that we must move further and further away from fossil fuels as well as fossil fuel substitutes such as agrofuels. Why agrofuels you might ask, two reasons: Firstly, the massive impact they will have on food productivity since they will end up eating a lot of our land (yes the pun was intended) and secondly (and more importantly), they provide security to the fossil fuel infrastructure which many view as a crucial hindrance to our future.

His idea might seem radical to many but this practice isn’t something new. In fact it has been put to practice for over 2 decades in a tiny village in rural Rajasthan called Tilonia in an establishment called the Barefoot College. Barefoot college and it’s founder Bunker Roy have received immense praise for the work they have been doing. Apart from a college for the poorest of the poor, it’s a self sufficient community which produces its own energy using the ample sunlight that it receives. It maintains its own water supply through their rain water harvesting which is stored in hundreds of underground tanks and recycles its own waste to create fodder. The 100,000 people who are taking part in this probably don’t realize that they are leading by example for the whole world to see.

This is a stunning example for 2 reasons:

Firstly, the place where it is being done isn’t paradise, at least not in the conventional sense. When they first started out, it was a wasteland, a desert. And now through their practices they are getting some of the green cover back.

Secondly, they did it out of necessity. As Seth Godin says, today being innovative isn’t a luxury, its a necessity. And that’s what Bunker Roy has been doing for the last thirty years. He didn’t wait for the government to help him. He took matters in his own hands for his community’s survival depended on it.

So while such a project can work in developing nations and small communities, for a city things become quite different mostly because of the difference in ideology of the governments and the corporates (read big oil et al)

So what is the problem, you ask?

As Lohmann puts it:

That can only happen through a process that involves ‘taking over the City’. These include campaigns to reduce the overwhelming influence of Wall Street in Washington; increase workers’ and farmers’ participation in management; disallow banks’ claims about the value of the ‘toxic’ assets they hold; roll back limited corporate liability; challenge shareholder primacy; halt public handouts for CCS and nuclear development; force the World Bank to obey its review panel’s recommendations to stop investing in fossil fuels

I am not saying that this is the solution to the climate change problem, but what I am saying is that with more and more nuclear reactors being set up (and that waste isn’t going to get disposed on its own), with more and more people and less land at our disposal, with Big Oil working overtime to ensure that the laws wont be giving them a raw deal, with geo engineering suggesting that we send sulphur packed rockets every now and then to prevent global warming, we need to start having more discussions and weigh our options and figure out if our leaders’ plan for our future is really going to make it better, for our survival depends on it. Perhaps investing our time in what some communities have already been doing to support themselves might be answer to some of the developing worlds’ climate problems.

Rishabh Kaul is Economics & Engineering student at BITS Pilani who is interested in entrepreneurship and social innovation. Check out his profile at Linkedin or buzz him at rishabhkaul[at]gmail[dot]com

  

How many COPs to sustain a lightbulb?

Well this is the Climate Change version of a popular joke. Foudn it online somewhere.

Youth reporters asked Daniel Kammen (he’s the lead author of the IPCC Policy report on Renewable Energy) how any more COPs were required to get the right deal to which he replies

One, this one! If you think that on average it costs USD15’000 per person to come to COP, it’s even clearer that we can’t waste more time and resources.

Rishabh Kaul is Economics & Engineering student at BITS Pilani who is interested in entrepreneurship and social innovation. Check out his profile at Linkedin or buzz him at rishabhkaul[at]gmail[dot]com