The Melting Point

In the rich tradition of poor Indian documentary film making, The
Melting Point today came on CNN IBN, presented by Bahar Dutt.

Sure enough, we found ourselves in front of the idiot box, and we must
be taken for idiots, for nobody else would actually watch and be taken
for the same ride again and again. We went to the Himalayas, saw some
ice melting, and a sage who also takes photographs of retreating
glaciers, and spoke to people who spoke of how a gushing stream is now
a trickle, of how one particular glacier is retreating at twenty
metres per year. Oh, we also heard that a billion gazillion square
kilometres of ice is now MELTING!

Everything is MELTING! The world is MELTING! The Clicking Baba says
so, and he thinks this could be the end of the world. What else can
poor Bahar Dutt do, other than sit at his feet and listen in rapt
attention? This is, after all, profoundly important.

Anytime you go to the Himalayas and look at ice in bright sunshine,
you will find water dripping off it. THAT is NOT global warming! It
is simply a regular cycle of ice forming and melting. That is not the
image we should be seeing. But this is lazy, insidious film making,
at its worst when done by a typically clueless Indian documentary film
maker. Okay, okay, we get it, the world is melting. So what? Why
did you have to drive your crew all the way upto the Himalayas and
pollute it some more to tell us what we already know? Why can't you
tell us anything new? Did you find out anything from YOUR trip that
we should absolutely be enlightened by? Of course not, Bahar Dutt.
Because you have not done the basic homework needed to make a
documentary. You have no story!

Why would CNN IBN put out such a poorly formed documentary on air?
That shouldn't surprise us, coming from a channel that sends out
equally dumb reporters on other programs that claim Hindi as the
National language, but let's not lose focus of the issue itself - poor
presentation of a subject already well known. In other words, there
is no film here. There is no story, and this whole Melting Point
episode is nothing but a gaping hole.

She also claimed we're living in denial. That's really pushing it,
unless this documentary is five years too old or we're about five
years old. Sorry, but this is an inconvenient truth. We are in the
middle of a well represented international summit in Copenhagen, for
heavens sake, on climate change, global warming, and all related
issues, and what each country in the world must do. This is
definitely not living in denial, and it looks like this woman is high
on thin Himalayan air and low on IQ.

Why is it so hard to even copy from the best in the business? The
same country that has polluted the earth the most for so long, the
USA, has long since leaped forward and found answers for reversing its
oil dependency, and has developed technologies to run entire cities,
for instance, on solar power. It is already here. A solar powered
aeroplane left the ground years ago and has been flying non stop for
years. Again, not Indian. There is no denial. It is time we ran the
stories that can actually make a difference to us.

A little bit of intelligence will go a long way in judging for
ourselves what we CAN do to fight againt climate change, assuming of
course that we caused it in the first place. India is one of the
lowest energy consumers in the world. Our per capita pollution is a
small fraction of those bums in the USA and now, China. We should be
happy we're concerned, but switching off all lights for an hour in
Mumbai, and all the young fools driving to the beach to join some
arbid human chain is just plain stupidity. Here's why -

83% of the world's atmospheric pollution is caused by power
generation. That 83% is not going to be touched even by a fraction by
any of our cities even having a blackout. If the power coming to your
grid is from a hydro electric or nuclear source, don't even try. The
nuclear fuel has already spent its heat on the heavy water and it has
already transferred its energy to the turbine that is running the
generator, well before you decided to switch off your lights. The
water that gushed through the turbine in your hydel plant is simply
running through it because of gravity. In other words, hydro electric
power is virtually free, and has no consequence on the environment.

Thermal power, on the other hand, is an issue. But still, the power
plant isn't going to run any slower because of you groping in the dark
for an hour and feeling good about it. Not only is India a very small
polluter, our biggest electricity consumption doesn't come from
lighting homes! It goes into heavy industries, running our trains,
and so on. There's no stopping any of that.

What we could do is run our vehicles more efficiently. Get more
mileage out of them, drive the longer route if it promises fewer gear
changes, do some hypermiling if we are expert drivers, and just plain
walk instead of drive when we can. The exercise cannot hurt, and we
can feel good for more than one reason. Public transportation is
miserable so there is no point sacrificing our productivity and having
to take a shower after each trip. A two wheeler instead of a car is a
great idea, but may not be practical. Driving without the A/c on is
simply not an option given how much grime and dust there is in the
air.

Too bad, but you as an individual living in India, don't count for
much when it comes to polluting the earth. But don't get to your
Melting Point, just because Bahar Dutt is so concerned about looking
concerned about it on TV. She doesn't count for much either.