Noted Himalayan environment conservationist and climate activist Sonam Wangchuk today stressed on demand side management to tackle climate change, calling for redefining the very idea of development. He was speaking at Envision 2025, an energy conference organized here by the IIT Madras Research Park.  

“When demands are going on unbridled, just tweaking the supply side will not help,” Wangchuk said. He said that the present concept of development, which emphasized more production and consumption, was appropriate for the time it was born—the industrial revolution. Back then, people were dying of hunger; today people are dying of excessive food, he said. 

The answer to today’s problems cannot come from New York or London, but from ancient wisdom, he said. For example, rather than shift from fossil fuels to solar, it would be better to reduce the use of electricity itself. 

If this sounded like a religious “baba” talk, then one should look up the ‘Easterlin paradox’, which says that after a certain point more income does not lead to more happiness. 

Recalling Buddha’s teachings, Wangchuk said that desire was a bottomless bucket that people try to keep filling, observing that buying a fifth car or a third house or the 41st pair of shoes would not give additional happiness. Wouldn’t it be simpler to put a bottom to the bucket, he posed. 

Wangchuk called for redefining the legal system, noting that if it is a crime to kill a person, it is also an equal crime to cause deaths by pollution. He observed that nine million people die every year—equal to the number of deaths of the two World Wars. “Why don’t we see the violence that happens in the form of sleek cars and shining shoes?” he asked, calling it a “violence of lifestyle”. 

Wangchuk wondered if it would be possible to bring in a new currency that was based on oxygen released or carbon dioxide avoided, just as currency was once based on gold. Stressing that it was just a wild thought, he said that if such a currency were to be brought in, people would, (for instance), stop cutting down trees. He also pointed to the irony of forest research institutes teaching how best to cut down trees and noted that trees gave oxygen, food and sequestered carbon dioxide – yet we cut them down, like the proverbial idiot who cut the branch on which he sat. 

Later, in a fireside chat with Anson Sando, Head of Energy Programs, IIT Madras Research Park, Wangchuk was asked about what nudged him down the path of conservationist thinking. He replied that he was born in Ladakh, which was the “capital of scarcity”, where even oxygen in the air was scarce. “Amidst this scarcity and adversity was born problem-solving,” Wangchuk said. 

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