nano hypocrisy: Straightgoods.com
 
Date: Thu, 7 Feb 2008 13:02:35 -0600 (CST)


from: http://www.straightgoods.ca/ViewFeature8.cfm?REF=71
Nano hypocrisy

India's new cheap "people's car" causes rich media to fret about more 
pollution.

Dateline: Tuesday, February 05, 2008

by Gwynne Dyer

The jokes about the Nano, Tata Motors' new affordable car for the Indian 
middle class, were harmless, although very old. They told the same jokes 
about the Fiat 500 and the Citroen 2CV in the 1950s, when mass car 
ownership first came to Europe. "How do you double the value of a Nano?" 
"Fill the tank." "How many engineers does it take to make a Nano?" "Two. 
One to fold and one to apply the glue." But the hypocrisy wasn't funny at all.

The typical story in the Western media began by marvelling that Tata has 
managed to build a car that will sell for only 100,000 rupees (US$ 2,500). 
Everybody agrees that it's "cute", and it will take five people provided 
they don't all inhale at the same time. It has no radio, no air 
conditioning, and only one big windshield wiper, but such economies mean 
that it really is within reach of tens of millions of Indians who could 
only afford a scooter up to now. And that is where the hypocrisy kicked in.

What will become of us when all those Indians start driving around in cars? 
There's over a billion of them, and the world just can't take any more 
emissions. It's not the "People's Car," as Tata bills it, but rather the 
"People's Polluter," moaned Canada's National Post. "A few dozen million 
new cars pumping out pollution in a state of semi-permanent gridlock is 
hardly what the Kyoto Protocol had in mind."

But hang on a minute. Aren't there more than a dozen million cars in Canada 
already, even though it only has one-thirtieth of India's population? 
Aren't they on average twice the size of the Nano (or, in the case of the 
larger SUV's, five times the size)? Does the phrase "double standard" come 
to mind?...

whole article at: http://www.straightgoods.ca/ViewFeature8.cfm?REF=71

Penney Kome, author and journalist
http://penneykome.ca
Editor, Straight Goods, http://straightgoods.com