Truemors
The question people are asking themselves more often than ever
before. Everybody loves technology; our hunger for better, faster &
gen-next devices never quenches. But as the issue of global warming and
its impact on the lives of common people like us is being discussed
with increasing concern, we find ourselves caught in a classic moral
dilemma.
A few days back I
was reading an article about ‘food miles’. It explained how the
physical distance traveled by a food product from the farm to our
plates contributes the carbon dioxide emissions. I thought what can we
do about this, we can’t just stop eating food or move to the farmlands
so that the food doesn’t have to ‘travel’ much to reach me.
In
the past few months there have come up numerous websites which help you
calculate your ‘carbon footprint’. Yahoo! too came up with its ‘Green’
site encouraging people to pledge some amount of carbon dioxide that
they would try to save by using their appliances & vehicles more
efficiently. But how many of us really follow that and what percentage
of our ‘pledge’ do we actually succeed in achieving. Most people tend
to calculate their carbon footprint as a fun thing or they treat it
like a game. Very few of us seem really serious about it.
People
tend to blame their governments or more commonly the developed
countries. I don’t have the numbers but I’m pretty sure that the CO2
emissions due to our individual activities (buying big cars & our
habits of leaving appliances running when we don’t need them, to name a
few) easily outdo the industrial emissions.
Many
of us wish & want to do our bit to minimize our individual carbon
emissions but more often then not we find ourselves trapped between our
desires for technology & comfort on one hand and our conscience
which tells to fulfill our responsibilities towards our planet.
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