The Brave Pedestrian

1) Individual consumers need to consciously consume less of whatever it is that they consume. The government or NGOs should incentivate families to benchmark their current levels of consumption on various fronts, then reduce them. Consuming fewer air-miles each successive year should be high on our list of priorities, considering their huge addition to our individual carbon footprint. (As a cheap and effective alternative to flying, we may consider video-conferencing.) 2) Advertising aimed at making people buy more should be tapered off. Only adverts giving information should be allowed. 3) Roadside advertising hoardings should be reduced by 50%, and they should not be illuminated, as they use up precious energy for a relatively non-productive purpose. 4) Stop adding power generation capacities, whether thermal or otherwise. Freeze them at existing capacities and merely replace thermal capacities with wind-energy and solar generation capacities. 5) Stop registering new privat...

"There is enough on Earth to satisfy every man's need, but not enough to satisfy even one man's greed." We need to keep this thought at the centre-pinning -- the hub around which we build our lives. We are historically in a period when wants and comforts are confused with needs. Thanks to many decades of relentless industrial development and advertising, our psychology and culture is one of Endless Consumption and Insatiability. Please let us take perspective: Each modern middle-class individual enjoys the level of comfort that was not available even to kings and aristocrats less than one century earlier. What do we take for granted today? Instant atmosphere-modification Instant personalized communication Rapid personalized transportation Endless variety of entertainment options Endless variety of foods and beverages Endless supply and variety of clothing & personal possessions Elimination of need for manual labour and repetitive task...

For millions of years, nature has been taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere — taking carbon out of circulation — and stashing it away, not only as trees, but also as enormous coal and crude-oil reserves under the earth.   But since the discovery of the steam engine and the industrial revolution, mankind has been taking these carbon and hydrocarbon reserves and burning them. Every passing year, we thus undo the work of a few thousand years of nature. Humankind is now a rampant force of nature. Our GDP and per-capita consumption is rapidly rising at close to 10%, and so the carbon footprint of each  individual  human-being on earth is doubling every 20 years or so.  [ Very brief explanation:  Each extra shirt we buy and stash in our cupboards or each apple that we eat that has been flown in from  Australia  or  China , or even lorried in from Himachal Pradesh, represents an unnecessary load of carbon in the air that we have contrib...