Ep# 15 | WTF is Climate Change? Nikhil ft. Sunita, Bhumi, Navroz and Mirik

Everybody has heard of the word climate change, but when I ask them to describe it to me or tell me what it is, uh, not many are able to. [upbeat music] Ready, Meghna? Start. [chuckles] Hi, guys. Welcome, everyone. Uh, I've not done this for a while. We took a break of sorts. The very first thing we do when we begin is introduce each one of you. Uh, who would like to go first?

Sure.

So tell us a bit about you, where you grew up, how did you get into the domain that you are in right now, uh, and just highlights and low points in your life so far.

Okay.

Okay.

Well, for those of us who've been around for a little bit longer, it may take a little longer, but we'll-- I'll try and keep it, keep it brief. You know, I, um, followed the standard South Asian path, as especially as a South Asian male. I started out as an engineer, but I really didn't enjoy it. I started enjoying my political science, politics, history, all this stuff, much more. And so I started getting interested in development and, uh, and I had the opportunity when I was studying. It was, uh, the late nineteen eighties. There was, there was sort of emergence of discussions around the environment, and I took myself off, uh, to the Narmada Valley, and I introduced, and I interviewed people who were associated with the Narmada Bachao Andolan, and many people from my generation actually got into environmentalism through that. It was a very high-profile movement.

Mm.

Do you actually, uh, uh, you know, do you have to break eggs to make omelets? Is that inevitable consequence of development, or can you do it in a way where you actually don't harm poor people, where you don't dam rivers, where you don't despoil the environment? And I thought this was fascinating. So this was my first kind of entry point, and I wrote a thesis about this and so on and so forth. And then when I graduated from college, and this was in the US, I've had this, uh, uh... I was just in the right place at the right moment. Uh, I'd also done some work on climate change. It was nineteen ninety, and there were preparations to start negotiating a climate change convention. So I got in touch with an organization who was, uh, involved, uh, in the periphery of the Narmada movement, and I said, "Look, I'm looking for a job." And they said, "Well, as it happens, we need somebody to help build a global network on climate change called the Climate Action Network, and are you interested? We don't have very much money." So I was fresh out of college, and I was like, "Well, yeah, sure." Uh, and so I called up, uh, Sunita and Anil Agarwal at CSE. I called up people in Latin America. It was the old days. It was fax machines, photocopiers. I didn't really know what to do in an office. You know, I had a filing cabinet, and I had two files, faxes in and faxes out. I didn't really know what I was doing. You know, I used to read the newspaper under the table because I, I, I'd had never been in an office before. But over the next couple of years, we built up this network, and, uh, uh, civil society organizations from Africa, Asia, Latin America, all showed up, and that organization exists today. It's called the Global Climate Action Network. It's now hundreds, uh, of people. Uh, and the key part was that it brought representatives from the developing world to this global process, because until then, it had only been Americans and Europeans, right? So development issues emerge as part of the conversation, and I'll just give you one anecdote from that period. Very early on, we sat around the table with the Americans, Europeans, people from Malaysia, India, everywhere else, and the Americans, who'd been at this for a while, said, "Okay, we need to come up with a common lobbying position. So what we should say is that we, the richer countries, have caused most of this problem. So we should reduce, you know, say, uh, fifty percent by the year two thousand." This was in nineteen ninety. Very ambitious, right?