I don’t have any serious interest in cars but at the Dubai EXPO city, venue of the 28th edition of the United Nations climate talks, I stopped dead in my tracks at the sight of two coupes. The Ford Mustang ‘67s, one blue and one green, the staple of James Bond movies of a certain vintage, and serious objects of desire, were parked at an outdoor exhibition booth. Admiring visitors shot 360-degree videos and selfies, and several Emirati asked pointed questions to the marketing representatives. To my journalistic eyes, the presence of the Mustangs at the world’s most high-profile climate conclave screamed incongruity. “Gas guzzlers,” I thought. It was akin to a disco at a dirge, a barbeque at a PETA protest, or an Armani at the beach.
But I was wrong. The marketing executive at Charge Cars, the British startup exhibiting the models, specialised in recreating “iconic, classic cars,” and making them electric. The vroom and acceleration would remain but powered by lithium-ion batteries. Clean and emission-free (we can skip the rare-earth mining for now). Every car would be custom-made. The premise of Charge Cars is that the affluent aficionado (each car costs $450,000) no longer needs to compromise on luxury and aesthetics to be a responsible climate citizen.
In many ways, the experience encapsulates one of the major dilemmas that has been driving debates and negotiations for 28 summits of the Conference of the Parties. There is the science: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports have synthesised mounting evidence over decades that the record-breaking rise in average, global temperature is making cyclones more frequent and furious, monsoons more erratic, and floods more destructive. Over just two centuries, humans have taken a clean break from how they made sense and organised their lives since the Stone Age. The extraction of fossil fuels has created new modes of consumption. Plastic, the most ubiquitous product of the Age of Oil, which has shape-shifted into every imaginable consumable, was used in the earliest rolls of film stock. Cinema, the gift of the gilded age, owes itself to oil. Would the music industry without its start in vinyl become what it became, if not for oil? Fossil fuel and industrial capitalism not only democratised excess but shaped our very understanding of comfort, beauty and desire.
For the last two centuries, science has generally been an ally of technology, enabling new materials and goods to be made, but it has now suddenly turned adversarial. Its inconvenient truths about the conflict between industrialisation and climate processes is now asking the affluent minority of humanity — the developed world — to consciously embrace discomfort and wean off the life that they consider basic.
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But would that be a life worth living? We could give up some goods, like bakelite switches, but can we give up culture and comfort? Certainly not, from what it looks like at the ‘developing’ end of the world. While the original climate commitment, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, envisaged a future where these two worlds would cooperate, spread the wealth, and equitably solve their way out of the crisis, things haven’t quite turned out that way.
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Instead, the belief that only more wealth can help us buy our way out of the crisis has gained greater ground. While we pray for the technological miracle of stumbling into the equivalent of Clean Oil, we will continue to engage on terms of mutual distrust and find small victories in newer forms of legalese. We will reassure ourselves that by flying into a different conference in a different part of the world next year, on fossil-fueled jets, we will be on our way to a “historic” solution.
