Sitting on the fence is hard

 It is also tiring.

How do I know? It all started sometime in the late 1980s, when I wrote a letter criticizing people driving down to be a part of the then “woke” people concerned about carbon emissions. Global warming was not even on the horizon, if I remember right.

My letter to the editor of the local newspaper Lexington Herald got published. I became one of the “woke”s but more so than those who came by cars with occupancy number not going beyond two. There was an alternative, the local bus service. There were calls even then for people to car pool. This was a golden opportunity to have done so, but they never did.

Then came “acid rain” (perhaps it pre-dated the car emissions stuff), “Global Warming” and now, “Global Heating”. I have just ordered my cylinder of LPG for cooking, yet, by not using coal or wood, I am “woke”!

I am very convinced of the fact of global heating. I have been since the past more than thirty years. But, I do not dare say it loud. The sort-of-scientist in me does not allow me to be certain on any issue, even beyond the five-sigma standard acceptable for physics experiments. So, I continued to sit on the fence.

Counting the years, it is nearly three and a half decades. It is time I “came out”, on global heating, and its cause, consumption driven economy.

The units of electricity my family consumes – produced mostly in dirty coal burning thermal power stations – is nothing to brag about, in either the “woke” crowd or the “unwoke”. Yet, my philosophy allows to me to do so.

If today, I feel that I have shown the least tiny bit of additional awareness of the dangers global heating pose to the next generation (I have no kids, by choice), I am proud. I say to myself that I have no interest in what the world would be after another decade or so (I would be gone by then), but I am worrying about the children of my small group of friends, colleagues, the others I come across in my daily life like the milkman, the auto rickshaw driver and others.

That is where I jumped off the fence, proclaiming my loyalty to the environmentally “woke” crowd, the side of promoting environmental awareness. I wonder how anyone who has heard of and seen the Keeling curve can ever doubt that global heating is a fact, given that you are not Donald J. Trump or any one of his minions.

I have to use a lot of paper in writing my class notes, and ink, of course. I also use a lot of electricity in scanning the written pages, uploading the resulting.pdf files on to my Google Class Room and so on. (If anyone thought that going paperless by turning to the Net is in her own world –the huge data centers must be the most intense consumers of power.) I do not see a way out of what this has become for me – a conundrum with no easy answers.

But, when I see my scribble pad, it looks like one is seeing the top of the canopy of the Amazon rain forest. I try filling in every pixel of space and succeed to a large extent. The fully garbled-in piece of paper that I do throw out is still my environmental imposition. I understand, but I feel happy that I filled in more today than yesterday. That is my philosophy.

Don’t look at yesterday; look at today, and importantly when tomorrow comes, compare that tomorrow to the current today, which would have become yesterday. So, another conundrum, but I simply do not care to take my philosophy in that direction. And, about history, the less the better.

Jumping off the fence has been cathartic. I seem to have cared for someone whom I have no reason to be worried about.

Of course, as someone who does not accept “scientism” but feels science offers perhaps the most rational way to move from where we are, and who believes in movement per se, I have a lot to defend. I will try my best.

Raghuram Ekambaram