KEY POINTS:
The jokes about the Nano, Tata Motors' new affordable car for the Indian middle class, were harmless, although 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. But the hypocrisy wasn't funny at all.
The typical story in the Western media began by marvelling that Tata has managed to build a car that will sell for only 100,000 rupees ($3300).
It has no radio, no air conditioning, and only one big windshield wiper, but such economies mean that 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.
What will become of us when all those Indians start driving around in cars? There's more than a billion of them and the world just can't take any more emissions. "It's not the 'People's Car', as Tata bills it, but rather the 'People's Polluter,' " moaned Canada's National Post. "A few dozen million new cars pumping out pollution in a state of semi-permanent gridlock is hardly what the Kyoto Protocol had in mind."
But hang on a minute. Aren't there more than a dozen million cars in Canada already, even though it only has one-thirtieth of India's population? Aren't they on average twice the size of the Nano (or, in the case of the larger SUVs, five times the size)? Does the phrase "double standard" come to mind?
"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 1470 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 1/2 billion (the total population of the planet), and that gives us the per capita emission limit for everyone.
Of course, some people (in the developed countries, mostly) are emitting 10 or 20 times as much as other people (mainly in the developing countries), but eventually that will have to stop. The big emitters will gradually have to "contract" their per capita emissions, while the poor countries may continue to grow theirs, until at an agreed date the two groups "converge" at the same level of per capita emissions.
And that level, by prior agreement, will be low enough that global emissions remain below the danger point.
If you don't like that idea, then you can go with the alternative: a free-for-all world in which everybody moves towards the level of per capita emissions that now prevails in the developed countries.
No negotiations or treaties required: it will happen of its own accord. So will runaway climate change, with average global temperatures as much as 6C higher by the end of the century. That means a future of famine, war and mass death.
Clucking disapprovingly about mass car ownership in India or China misses the point entirely. At the moment, there are only 11 private cars for every 1000 Indians. There are 477 cars for every 1000 Americans.
By mid-century, there will have to be the same number of cars per 1000 people for Indians and Americans - and that number will have to be a lot lower than 477, unless somebody comes up with cars that emit no greenhouse gases at all. Otherwise, everybody loses.
* Gwynne Dyer is a London-based journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
