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There are currently around a billion people without electricity with approximately 200 000 000 Indians still cooking and heating with wood, coal and cow dung (very low energy density and causing health and environmental problems). If put onto the electricity grid they will need to buy appliances with their poverty level incomes. How does India address this problem?
Now, here’s my two cents on what has to happen to Capitalism (let’s face it, it’s the only economic system which can possibly support the population) if we are to reverse the changes we are seeing in climate.
Capitalism and consumerism needs a shake up, and it starts with ending the practice of ‘planned obsolescence’. What’s that you ask? (Dammit, click the link!) Well, have you ever bought a widget with X years warranty and it breaks irreparably just months out of warranty? Well, some engineer got a fat fucking bonus for designing that vital, irreplaceable part that broke.
That’s ‘planned obsolescence’. It forces you to consume at a fairly predictable rate which keeps the sales target of Widget Manufacture XYZ Inc. on track to beat forecasts and give directors a nice fat fucking bonus. Continued and accelerating consumption results in Amazon forests burning, continued oil/coal consumption and XYZ widgets being far out of the price range of an Indian cooking their tandoori chicken over cow shit. Remember getting poor people to use electricity means getting affordable appliances (and affordable electricity) into their homes!
Stopping the unbridled exploitation by big business of the environment is going to mean turning consumption patterns on it’s head. And it starts with giving bonuses to engineers who invent a widget which has a viable working life of a hundred years or more.
When I was a kid, my grandmother had a toaster which lasted her over fifty years. When she passed on, it went to my mother who used it for another ten years, and only replaced it when she couldn’t buy a filament. SIXTY YEARS. And only ended it’s life when widget X couldn’t be found (hint: ‘planned obsolescence’).
I can hear you all now —
“But that’s going to collapse Capitalism/consumerism”, “Widget Manufacturer WYZ will go out of business!”, “Where is the drive for innovation and invention if widget XYZ has to last one hundred years?”.
Yes. I know. I did say that Capitalism would need to be turned on it’s head, and here it is…
Manufacturer XYZ guarantees that they will offer a trade-in value for widget XYZ — according to the age of the widget — on a brand new widget ABC. Manufacturer XYZ now has second-hand product in good working order which they can offer for sale to another market... a market which is environmentally aware and perhaps out of the price range of widget ABC. Rinse and repeat until the working lifespan of widget XYZ is complete. Once widget XYZ has reached the end of it’s working life, it gets recycled.
This cycle can continue until the price of widget XYZ is cheap enough for the poor Indians recently connected to their newfangled solar electricity (which they can now afford because the infrastructure is hand-me-down from first World Country, GHI Widget Manufacturer).
I never said it was going to be easy, did I? But it starts with stopping teaching ‘planned obsolescence’ to engineers.