Op-Ed: Here’s how companies can strong-arm their suppliers into cutting carbon emissions
Couples on the beach. Children play on the sand. But the air in this community is saturated with pollutants, and the people of this town feel like they stand by a roadside waiting for a car to pass. This was a community in India called Anantnag, which is the subject of an op-ed by environmental activist and professor Pavan Kapur.
Kapur says that the people of Anantnag have built an entire system to avoid the polluting exhaust of cars, trucks and planes. This system consists of the community, a small army of farmers, an air-quality monitoring system, a trash collection system, and the public transit system.
These are all components that can help reduce India’s emission of carbon dioxide, a powerful greenhouse gas that is linked to the warming of the planet.
The trash collection and air- quality monitoring systems are funded by taxes, as Kapur writes. And the public bus system is funded by subsidies and government grants.
The air has to be cleaned up with the help of people like Kapur, who are willing to be quiet and let others take care of the problem.
But the fight against carbon emissions doesn’t stop there. In order to combat climate change on a national scale, governments will have to act forcefully.
And they will have to do so with a growing public, not just the ones who are paid to say what is good for the environment.
One country where the fight against carbon emissions isn’t just the private citizens — it’s the government, too — is the United States of America.
Kapur sees this in a lot of the way the U.S. government works, which is why he’s now a faculty member at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, where he’s conducting his research.
Kapur has spent the past seven years traveling the U.S. to study the way our school systems work. In his new op-ed he discusses the way schools have been forced to