The President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus dismisses concerns over the environment and accuses Al Gore of being an “apostle of arrogance”. I had the opportunity to watch this BBC show of Hard Talk today. I found the president to be convincing and sincere in the interview. What if Vaclav Klaus was right? Is there a world conspiracy on global warming? Could the opinions of the score of thousand of ‘experts’ prove to be erroneous?
Can you imagine the amount of energy and world resources put behind the threat of global warming and climate changes? Who are the immediate beneficiaries of these initiatives? The predictions that I have read from some quarters seems apocalyptic.
I wish President Vaclav Klaus is right. I sense that there is exaggeration on the part of so called ‘experts’ to predict doom’s day soon. They want to shock the world to move to a cleaner environment and some politicians are riding on the wave to their benefits. On the other side, we have to be prudent. To discard the signs observed, like the erosion of the permafrost in the arctic region, would be to act irresponsibly. Vaclav Klaus is right in the sense that the decision makers are not the ‘experts’: they are the politicians. Often, too often the criteria of decisions used by politicians are not reasonable. They decide on what is right for them; not for the right reason to the benefit of mankind.
Thomas Friedman, the columnist of the New York Times and Author of ‘The world is flat’ yesterday published on his column on the opportunities that are knocking on the doors of India: a greater jackpot than the Y2K software glitch at the turn of the century. He coined this new phenomenon E2K.
“E2K stands, in my mind, for all the energy programming and monitoring that thousands of global companies are going to be undertaking in the early 21st century to either become carbon neutral or far more energy efficient than they are today. India is poised to get a lot of this work.â€
By the way, I am ever so grateful to the New York Times for having given to the world the possibilities of reading its columns free of charge recently.
Nicolas Sarkozy this morning on his address to the congress of the United States pleaded for the largest economy of the world to attend to resolving the issue of the global warming.
On the other hand, Oil at 100 dollars is imminent. Without fail Carbon emission and efficient energy are the topics of the near future and of tomorrow. Carbon neutral legislation will soon be the name of the game.
The final paragraph of Thomas Friedman’s article, The Dawn of E2K in India, should instill our Mauritian entrepreneurs to look in the direction of Green Consulting, Green designers and Green builders.
“So, mom, dad, tell your kids: if they’re looking for a good stable-growth career — green consultants, green designers, green builders are all going to be in huge demand. And if they can speak a little Hindi — all the better.â€
Why and how can we in Mauritius jump on the bandwagon?