It's Nanozilla, Al Gore's Worst Nightmare
Filed under: South Asia
"I observed families riding on two-wheelers - the father driving the scooter, his young kid standing in front of him, his wife seated behind him holding a little baby. It led me to wonder whether one could conceive of a safe, affordable, all-weather form of transport for such a family."
Those are the words of Ratan N. Tata, head of the Tata Motors conglomerate, shown above standing proudly next to his company's newest vehicle, the Tata Nano, which comes with a stunning sticker price of $2,500 and was designed to get all those Indian families (up to 600 million of them by the middle of the century) off their precarious scooters.
Al Gore's people are up in arms, as you can well imagine. Within a few decades, India could well have far more cars (over twice as many) on the road than America does, cars whose low cost means they have bare-bones emissions controls, making India a far greater incipient threat to global warming than the United States -- to say nothing of China. The billions of people in those countries don't give a rat's ass about carbon credits, and the Chinese probably like the idea of global warming. It means that Siberia will start melting, and that will give them plenty of extra space to move into (at Russia's expense) as their population explodes.
So perhaps Mr. Gore needs to learn a new language . . . or two.
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