Carbon: From Life Giver To Villain

Today I was reading about how plastic bottles are good for the environment. Sounds counterintuitive? But this is about wine bottles, and the story says transporting wine in glass bottles emits more carbon and, hence, plastic bottles are a better proposition. Well, the talk now everywhere is about reducing your carbon footprint. Imagine, suddenly an element that is the building block of life on earth and a gas that has helped keep the earth's atmosphere warm enough for life on earth to flourish are being looked upon as life's worst enemies! The irony here is that however much we hate carbon and carbon dioxide, they are really needed for life to survive on this planet. The current cause of this crisis is human activity, nay, greed. And unless we learn to cut back on competitive consumption and greed I see no end to this crisis.
You can introduce more energy efficient technologies, better alternative fuels, and a lot more, but they will all serve only up to a certain extent. Human greed will soon find even the slack afforded by such technologies and fuels aren't enough - we will soon be back on square one as far as global warming is concerned.
In this context I remember what Mahatma Gandhi had said about how earth has enough resources to fulfil the needs of everyone but not enough to fulfil the greed of everyone - or words to that effect. So that is it: if we don't cut back on our greed, all our policies and emission limits will soon come to naught.
And putting limits on our greed is not something that is easy to implement. I cannot foresee our governments and leaders calling to the people on earth to limit their luxuries and greedy lifestyles. How will they, when their very survival as power wielders depend on fostering such greedy ambitions of the masses?
It will all boil down to changing our leaders, and for that we need to change our own outlook on life. So the ball is back in our court; each individual will have to take responsibility for global warming. That is a tough ask. But once it happens, I guess most of our problems will be solved as well - including that of global warming!