On the road to Liberty

June 5, is World Environment Day. This is a good occasion to look at some of the impacts of environmentalism on the people. This article looks at the widening divide between the environmental crusaders and ordinary citizens. A shorter version of this article titled "Let them eat cake or air!-Green Crusade Against the People" appeared in The Economic Times newspaper on June 5, 2000. This famous statement supposedly made by Marie Antoinette, the Queen of France over two centuries ago, has come to symbolise the divide between the elite and the influential on the one hand and the common man on the other. The current battle in Delhi to clean the city's air has once again brought to light this age-old divide. Let's look at some facts. Over a quarter of this capital city's population about 12 million live in slums. Between a third to almost forty percent of the population do not have access to clean drinking water and sanitation facility. Yet for over two years, the iss...

My article titled "Poverty, Wealth and Waste" is Reproduced from the March 2000 issue of PERC Reports. The original pdf version of the journal is available here . PERC, a think tank based in Bozeman, Montana, USA, is dedicated to Providing Market Solutions to Environmental Problems. In 1986, a waste-to-energy plant opened in Delhi, India, financed by the Danish International Development Agency at a cost of over $10 million. The plant was expected to generate 3.8 mw of electricity from garbage, and its success was to be copied in other Indian cities. However, the plant was a failure. Two years later, the government was spending about $100,000 a year to burn garbage without producing energy. Surprisingly, the principal reason was the fact that there wasn’t enough urban waste in Delhi. It turns out that the waste—paper, rags, plastic, etc.—in Delhi produces only about half the caloric value of a Western city. This contrast tells us a lot about the treatment of waste in rich and...