The recent cartoon by Bill Leak depicting impoverished Indians eating broken solar panels is not racism. If I was an Indian I would feel insulted and think the cartoonist was an idiot, but I would not feel racially vilified.
The cartoon is just a continuation of the campaign by The Australian newspaper to deny climate change and to promote the fossil fuel industry. Leak is saying that the first world should not fund solar power projects in India. Instead it should fund fossil fuel projects. His point is that solar power will not lift poor Indians out of poverty. He clumsily makes this point by saying that poor Indians cannot eat solar panels. But presumably they can't eat coal either. We get that he thinks that if they can get their power from fossil fuel they will be better off and consequently will have more to eat.
The problem with his and The Australian's position is that they do not assess all the pro's and con's. For example, it is estimated that 19,000 people per day die in China from pollution related illnesses. Why encourage people in third world countries to move from the dangerous burning of cow dung to fuel their stoves, to the dangerous burning of coal? Bill Leak and The Australian knows that energy technology is in a phase of rapid innovation. The advances in methods of clean energy production are extraordinary and include the development of battery technologies to store solar energy, both at the power plant and in the home. Why would we encourage the third world to build new coal fired power plants when at the time of writing they are becoming obsolete? A move from burning cow dung to getting energy from the sun and the wind is a huge improvement, and a healthy one at that.
And then there is the elephant in the room. The world has just come from a historic meeting aimed at reducing global warming and devastating climate change. All countries including the first world and the third would are being asked to cut their green house emissions to prevent the catastrophes that will beset all of us. Of course it would be terrific if coal did not produce dangerous pollutants and green house emissions. But it does. For Bill Leak to ignore this is stupid and an insult to the intelligence of his Australian audience and impoverished Indians alike.
