The entire article can be found here: Tata Motors - The Peoples Car
Mr Nussbaum quite rightly questions the potential additions to global warming as the middle classes of India and China express their rights to have the freedom and pleasure of their own vehicle as we in the Western world have enjoyed since the invention of the automobile.
Supporters of the Tata vehicle and of the emerging economy of India are quite justly outraged at some of his contentions that perhaps Tata would be doing the environment a benefit by investing in newer electric technologies rather than adding to our already growing environmental problem.
While he may be right, his arrogance in suggesting a finally, emerging economy like India’s to be the one’s to start with the more expensive non-polluting technologies, is just that Arrogant!
While the West has stifled the economies of India and China for centuries, we have been happily expressing our rights of freedom and driving our own personal gas guzzling global warming machines for over 100 years. The only way we should expect the emerging nations to lead us into the next realm of automobile technology is by investing in the factories for electric vehicles in their countries ourselves.
India and China are NOT the main cause of global warming, we in the West are.
They deserve to enjoy the pleasure and freedom of their own car as we have for 100 years. They didn’t take a technology like the General Motors EV-1 and destroy it, simply to preserve profits for their oil industry cousins for a couple more decades. We did! General Motors could have quite easily sold that technology to India, rather than watch them follow our automobile industry down the garden path of environmental destruction.
Our pathetic governments stand by and let the technologies that our planet needs for survival, get suppressed and destroyed to preserve corporate profits. Yet we feel justified in pointing fingers at the emerging countries for simply wanting what we have taken for granted for over a century.
Yes, the prospect of the “exploding” middle classes of India and China all driving gas burning vehicles points us in the direction of utter environmental disaster, but the West only has itself to blame. Rather than let multi-national conglomerates manipulate and suppress technology for their own financial gain, we should have had the foresight to invest in clean automotive technologies decades ago to show the leadership that China and India would have followed.
I believe the leadership and foresight exists in these countries, to see that they have the opportunity to accelerate their economies even more by becoming the leaders in manufacturing of Zero emission vehicles. Despite what it might do to our manufacturing base, I would not shed a tear to see India and China become the home of the GM or Ford of the Electric Vehicle industry .
In fact, it may be the only chance our planet has.
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