The jokes about the Nano, Tata Motors' new affordable car for the Indian middle class, were harmless, if very old. They told the same jokes about the Fiat 500 and the Citroen 2CV in the 1950s, when mass car ownership first came to Europe. 'How do you double the value of a Nano?' 'Fill the tank.' 'How many engineers does it take to make a Nano?' 'Two. One to fold and one to apply the glue.' But the hypocrisy wasn't funny at all.
The typical story in the western media began by marvelling that Tata has built a car that will sell for only 100,000 rupees (HK$19,800). Everybody agrees that it's 'cute', and it will take five people - provided they don't all inhale at the same time. It has no radio, no air conditioning, and only one big windscreen wiper, but it really is within reach of tens of millions of Indians who could only afford a scooter up to now. And that is where the hypocrisy kicked in.
'India's vehicles spewed 219 million tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in 2005,' fretted The Guardian in London. 'Experts say that figure will jump almost sevenfold to 1,470 million tonnes by 2035 if car travel remains unchecked.' And the Washington Post wrote: 'If millions of Indians and Chinese get to have their own cars, the planet is doomed. Suddenly, the cute little Nano starts to look a lot less winning.' But practically every family in the United States and Britain already has its own car (or two).
Don't they realise how ugly it sounds? Don't they understand that everybody on the planet has an equal right to own a car, if they can afford it? If the total number of people who can afford cars exceeds the number of cars that the planet can tolerate, then we will just have to work out a rationing system that everybody finds fair, or live with the consequences of exceeding the limits.
'Contraction and convergence' is the phrase they need to learn. It was coined almost 20 years ago by South-African-born activist Aubrey Meyer, founder of the Global Commons Institute, and it is still the only plausible way that we might get global agreement on curbing greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.
The notion is simply that we must agree on a figure for total global emissions that cannot be exceeded, rather as we set fishing quotas in order to preserve fish stocks. Then we divide that amount by 6.6 billion, the global population, to give us the per capita emission limit for everyone on Earth.
