Poverty and Climate Change
Every morning I leave a very modest hotel and travel across New Delhi, sometimes in a three-wheeled open taxi, others in a closed car. The conference hotel is not very modest. It is the pick of the Ministry of Telecommunications.
The Delhi Sustainable Development Summit started while I was somewhere over the North Atlantic, between Labrador and Norway, on a flight that took me over Greenland and Iceland. It came to an end while I was working on issues relating to the Internet, minutia no wampum reader is likely to ever think about, things like clarifying the correctness of the semantics of inet_addr(), which I suppose I deserve (see link), or the fact that entries in ISO 3166 are not necessarily "countries", nor are they necessarily "territories", which involves groveling about in code tables and updates, and finally, whether an "internationalized domain", whether the ASCII label originated from a table entry in ISO 3166 or from the US Doc (.com, .net, .org), or from the ICANN "new gTLD process", is operated by one, or several registry operators, was an unexplored assumption.
I wish I were contributing even half as significantly as this small list of minutia to the Delhi Sustainable Development Summit. It follows on the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC, and the 13th COP (conference of parties) held at Bali in December 2007, venues where Al Gore was "a contributor".
Yesterday the headline in Le Soir in Bruxelles, which I read in New Dehli, was the mention that thousands of people die from pollution each year in Belgium. Every evening leaving the island of green and quiet of the first class hotel and returning across Dehli to a vastly more modest hotel, my eyes fill with grit and I pass a half hour with the fumes and dust of third world metropolis. The connection between global warming, fossil fuels (types, mode of use, gas and particulate combustion by-products), public health, and poverty is obvious.
Climate change, carbon, this isn't just about penguins and polar bears sometime over the event horizon rainbow. Its about cities gasping for air, and water, and while the rich, those with health care, can eke out a living, even a beautiful life, down the wealth curve to the walking poor its just days taken from our lives.
h/t to Susie for Al Gore.
