Damned if we don’t

Wind and solar power, will both be cheaper, or on par with, coal by 2025 and 2030 respectively.

I dealist environmental organisations badly need to pull their heads out of cloud cuckoo land and tackle issues of extreme importance in a responsibly sane manner with ‘Friends of the Earth’.

Their latest lunacy is to go gung-ho against hydropower, which, in the immediate aftermath of Fukushima, doesn’t make sense: This international gang of ‘Friends’ would have countries on the front line of climate change; Pakistan being a prime example. Drop any and every damn building programme in favour of wind and solar power, which they claim will both be cheaper, or on par with, coal by 2025 and 2030 respectively. This may well be true but they are overlooking the fact that dams do far more than just generate power: These vast reservoirs of increasingly precious water are necessary to keep people alive and fed and to prevent massive flooding caused by the predicted increase in extreme weather events such as the one Pakistan experienced last year. The obvious downside of dam construction is the unfortunate loss of land and communities whose ancestral homes and livelihoods are lost to the promise of rehabilitation, which rarely occurs on an acceptable level.

Ever since the ‘Friends’ arrival on the American scene back in 1969, and more so since going international in 1971, they have always attracted sclerotic individuals with visions of personal aggrandisement, well to the fore of actively saving the earth they profess to love. Members — I have met many and even attended some of their UK meetings many years ago — rarely do anything other than preach the converted. They also, rightly so it seems, have it in for that well-known baddie The World Bank (TWB) which they accuse of being part of the climate change problem rather than the solution. But there is a catch: Banks, no matter their size, are only in anything for profit and appointing TWB as interim trustee of the new Green Climate Fund in Cancun last December was a ridiculosity if ever there was one.

TWB has massively increased investments in hydropower over the last eight years, as has the Asian Development Bank, and this gets right up the noses of self-righteous ‘Friends’ residing in countries which rarely suffer power outages, where there is, at the moment, always water in the tap, where more food is tossed in the garbage than eaten, where the plague of consumerism was born and whose carbon footprints are, in comparison to Asian ones, absolutely giant sized.

Not being a fan of TWB’s undeniably exploitative acumen, much preferring indigenous solutions to indigenous problems when possible, the harsh reality is that developing countries are often not in the kind of economic health hydropower development requires and, with climate change already a painful reality in Pakistan, we do not need psychotic ‘Friends’ promulgating against our right to electricity, to water, to feed ourselves and, ultimately, to survive.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 21^st, 2011.