The Cloud - Joseph Robertson

South Asia is gasping under a two mile thick cloud of toxic pollutants and carcinogens. This mega-smog is caused by industrial and automotive emissions, and is said to be killing half a million people a year. It is so vast that it is altering some of the most powerful, established weather systems on the planet. And its influence is not restricted to South Asia. It is estimated that the cloud is capable of reaching half-way around the globe at any given time, meaning that the Americas may be seeing environmental impact from this unfettered pollution.

There are serious questions to be asked. First, if we don't get our own house in order, how can we justify asking that others not send their smog our way? If we won't protect ourselves, why should anyone else look out for impact on our shores? Second, what role do we each play in this unfolding crisis? We use products made in the region, products belonging to American multinational corporations who have sought manufacturing resources in Asia due to lax environmental and labor laws.

While the support of cross-border trade is good for democracy and good for people everywhere, in theory, is its current mode of practice violating the very ideals we hold most dear, i.e. freedom, the right to prosper, the right to live one's life without the imposition of outside constraints? Is this the best and most imaginative use of technology, science, and the free exercise of human intellect? Or are we participating, however unwittingly, in a regime of irresponsible and reckless disregard for human safety and for the preservation of the only habitat our species has?

The Cloud is coming, yet another in a long series of none-too-subtle harbingers warning us that dire predictions are not to be ignored wholesale. There is always the possibility that inattention and inaction will cause the very devastation that many think to be an outlandish fantasy and nothing more. If half a million people are dying from this single pollutant phenomenon, it is incumbent upon all human beings to seek solutions that reduce our contribution to the crisis.

Environmental protection, and even regulation, does not mean irrational, big-government intrusion on the rights of individuals to take advantage of the capitalist system. It means requiring that the largest businesses taking advantage of our system do what they are already expected to do: use their best science and their best imagination to create solutions that move us all forward, and to do so for the lowest possible cost to the consumer. That is the general good-faith expectation of consumers in any healthy market. Furthermore, the costs that will be incurred from chronic inaction will far outstrip any interim development costs related to technological innovations, to curb fuel and energy emissions and to create new efficiencies.

It has been said that we are 'living in the future', that everything, except flying cars, has come to be, and now it is our duty to choose the better or the worse path for implementing the technology that we have. In a science-based knowledge economy such as ours, we are always living in the future; it is contained in each of our actions today. It is possible to plan for a healthy, stable future in which democracy and capitalism can thrive together and humanity as such can reach its full potential, and to forestall the collapse of the structures that allow us our freedoms and our hopes.

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