The old saying is you can wake someone who's asleep but not one who
pretends to be asleep.

Acknowledging climate change means to drill less for oil, and that's a
civilizational challenge for the rich people in the here and now rather
than fifty years from now. The poor people will die first meanwhile, and
that's ok because they don't call the shots.

The really terrible thing is that the gas being burned by an SUV today is
going to mean less oil for fertilizers and essential ingredients tomorrow.
I see more expensive food and famines in India's future.

We can't feed a billion people without oil. We can't make the pesticides
and fertilizers that agriculture depends on, and we can't transport the
food to the people.

Crude Oil was $30 a decade ago, $110 now and likely $250 in a decade. India
doesn't have the extraction capability, the military or economic might or
the underground reserves to satisfy its population by a very long shot.
China has more of everything and it's unlikely that even China will emerge
with all its population intact.

I saw a forgettable doomsday movie from Hollywood where they rush the Mona
Lisa aboard an ark; I can hardly imagine the 1500+ year old living
tradition of Indian temples being rushed onto a ship. The underlying
message was the Western culture of the last few hundred years is the only
thing worth preserving. That's going to be how the world reacts when India
loses about a third of its people, temples, towns and more to famine and
weather in the next fifty to a hundred years. They'll blink, nothing will
register and they will move on. When Mao destroyed China and the Taliban
Afghanistan the world looked on, remember.

Indians are indeed planning by moving abroad, but India isn't planning at
all because to  not plan is the plan.

India is largely a non-operative player for the rest of the world. Modern
economics is about the efficient use of people, resources and money. To
have relevance in this world you need to control one of these three. India
has plenty of the first and little of the rest, yet India gives away its
best brains to the world quite freely, so there's little reason to engage
with or protect India as a nation. (This operative logic has implications
for the current economic pickle too)

Small countries have a vivid collective memory of what it means to fight
for their lives.

Unlike the US, or other new civilizations, India has for long taken its
civilization for granted. This is easy to do when you've survived as long.
India possesses a kind of macabre immortality in the belief that it won't
run out of people or culture to seed the civilization, it never has. This
has caused India to often sacrifice a good number of its people to
avoidable causes through history, and this has never been seriously
questioned.

India is a damn good one-trick pony in the survival game. I fear this time
that trick won't be good enough.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/science/earth/extremely-likely-that-human-activity-is-driving-climate-change-panel-finds.html

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