Our bright future can't have black heart of coal

Elizabeth Farrelly.

So we're driving from Jaipur to Agra – slowly, because northern India's December fogs are earlier than usual, and chewier. They're also smellier because – let's be frank – this is more smog than fog; weeks-long pea-soupers that seem like a hangover from industrial revolution London. Perhaps, indeed, they are – and perhaps if I'd seen it this way, more Hogarthian satire than sci-fi future, it wouldn't have scared the tripe outta me quite as it did.

Along the road, for hundreds of kilometres, people burn rubbish and crouch for warmth around small roadside fires. In stacks and house-sized mounds, on hayricks, rooftops and median strips, millions of cow-dung patties are drying for burning. In the fields, tall-chimneyed brick kilns belch black smoke into air already viscous with particulates. And then there are the vehicles, in their teeming, honking millions.

Read Elizabeth Farrelly’s comment piece in the Melbourne Age - “Our bright future can't have black heart of coal.”