A fairly large proportion of us agree that taking concrete measures to combat global warming is an idea whose time has come. I feel public opinion on this issue is currently like a super-saturated solution where crystallization is eminently possible, but is not happening for want of exciting thought-leadership.
There is no dearth of good ideas floating around as to how we can reduce energy consumption and fuel combustion. This is a point that many of my fellow-bloggers have made.
There are a multiplicity of views as to what overall direction to take, which is causing some confusion. I would like to simplify things by submitting that Climate Change is caused primarily by technologies based on combustion-based energy -- primarily thermal-generated electricity and combustion-engines of vehicles. And so I believe that the way forward is to choose technologies that minimise dependence on combustion for their day-to-day running.
I repeat: We need to rebuild our systems and economies around technologies that are not dependent on combustion of fuels. I think the Bicycle is an excellent emblem to exemplifies such technologies.
Our challenge at this point in history is to provide thought-leadership that will enable this broad direction to be converted into a sustainable action.
Firstly, why do we need an emblem?
Emblems help in this regard because a picture is worth a thousand words. In the days of the Independence Movement, the Charkha and Khadi acted as emblems that enabled crystallization of the Independence Movement around the concept of self-reliance.
Similarly, riding a bicycle whenever one can and wearing a T-shirt/shirt with a bicycle logo on it can be a key to creating a movement, especially if the leaders of the movement themselves are seen doing so BEFORE everyone else gets on the bandwagon.
Secondly, why the bicycle?
What does it symbolize?
1) Balance and continuous re-alignment in many senses of these terms. Humankind now faces the continuous challenge to choose sustainable technology with mimimal adverse implications as we move into the future.
2) Willingness to use ones own energy in a smart, efficient way. Human power instead of external power. The thin tracks that a bicycle leaves symbolizes a minimal carbon footprint and zero combustion for running.
3) Something that is immediately doable for many of us, and for our near and dear ones.
4) Wholesome, childlike fun. Many of us have good childhood memories associated with riding the bicycle, and would like to enjoy that state of childlike joy again. It is time for us to actively seek that state of joy again.
5) Healthy activity with family and friends. We need to help people discover the pleasure of one another’s company, which doesn’t require a lot of money.
6) Sustainable progress with good speed, caring for the safety of pedestrians, giving employment to large numbers of the poor in our own neighborhoods for maintaining it.
7) People-friendly diversion of existing infrastructure. Creating bicycle lanes on existing roads to facilitate the environment-friendly cyclist, giving him some preference over the motorist.
8) Self-generated & self-sustaining momentum. Unlike petroleum-driven vehicles, bicycles can coast along nicely under their own momentum. This is an important characteristic that our Climate Conservation movement should have.
Key points for us to apply our mind:
Are we willing to adopt the bicycle as an emblem and do what it takes to popularize it, and make it attain an emblematic status?
Are we willing to take our awareness to the next level – Action?
Are we conscious of our historical responsibility for building a popular movement with a momentum of its own? Do we agree about the need for such a movement?
Awareness + Leadership + Emblem = Popular Movement + Sustainable Action
Please think it over.
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
Global Warming: What do we do?
I'm thrilled at the amount of awareness and concern there is on the issue of Global Warming. (And by the way, I am delighted that Al Gore and Dr R K Pachauri won the Nobel Prize. I know very little about Dr Pachauri, but Al Gore has brought an enormous amount of global awareness to this cause with his movie, An Inconvenient Truth.)
However, I'm also alarmed at how much our thinking gets tripped up by petty technicalities, political ideologies and ego tussles.
Some of us seem to believe that this entire Global Warming thing is a scare, a shibboleth, an urban myth motivated by faulty science, bad politicians, crackpot activists and sloppy journalists who don't check their facts. This particular post is not intended for people who hold this opinion.
This post is intended for those who believe that our collective burning of hydrocarbon fuels has brought us to a grave situation, and are wondering what mitigating responses would make a meaningful difference without being too painful to implement.
For those of us who accept that there is indeed a problem in terms of our collective burning of hydrocarbons, I want to propose an approach which may be broadly stated as:
CONSUME WHATEVER REQUIRES MINIMAL
MANUFACTURING & TRANSPORTATION.
MANUFACTURING & TRANSPORTATION.
I am detailing this approach with five points each as to what we can do at three levels or spheres of influence.
INDIVIDUALS:
Be aware of your carbon footprint, and make choices that minimize it.
Watch what you eat and drink. Serve your guests home-made lemon-sherbet instead of the contents of a PET bottle of coke to save money and reduce your carbon footprint. The manufacturing process of PET bottles and soft drinks involve combustion of large amounts of fuel, and so does the transportation from the bottling plant to your grocery store. Similarly, an apple imported from China involves air transport. It is more eco-friendly to consume fruits grown in Nasik or Mahabaleshwar. Anything that is home-made and does not come out of a bottle or can is more eco-friendly.
Watch what you wear. Imported clothes brought to your neighbourhood store through a complex distribution chain involve large amounts of transportation. Choose clothes that have been produced geographically as close to you as possible. Also, every additional set of clothes lying unused in your wardrobe is a wastage of global resources involved in manufacturing them. For every new dress that you buy, discard an old one so that someone else gets to wear them and does not have to buy new ones.
Watch how you entertain yourself. A walk in the park, talking with friends at home or in the neighbourhood, playing a game of chess or cards etc. involves no external energy sources, and is also good for health. Listening to music, watching television, phoning a friend is also relatively low on energy consumption. Compared to these, driving to the multiplex, the shopping mall, the bowling alley or the restaurant involves consumption of large amounts of hydrocarbons. Please minimize environmental cost of your enjoyment.
Watch what you drive. Avoid buying or driving oversized status-symbols. Step down to modest vehicles that have better fuel economy. Also, use public transport during non-peak hours, and walk or use a bicycle over short distances.
Watch your power and water usage. Switch off lights and air-conditioners when you are leaving the room. Avoid recessed or concealed light fixtures that absorb rather than emit most of the light, or cast light at the ceiling rather than directly. Minimize heating bathwater in summer, and do not waste water by leaving your tap running unnecessarily.
CORPORATES:
Play a leadership role in mitigating the problem.
Organize employee commute programs to minimize costs.
Reduce business travel emissions. Consider combining trips, and the taking the aid of technology (video conferencing) to create virtual meetings.
Set your A/C thermostat as high as you comfortably can (around 24 degrees C). Instead of air-conditioning, open the windows of offices as often as you can and enjoy fresh air. While designing office interiors, choose openness over enclosed settings, ceiling fans over air-conditioners, and some natural lighting over a complete dependence on artificial lighting. Minimize having light fixtures for aesthetic rather than functional reasons. Avoid recessed light fixtures that absorb rather than emit most of the light. Avoid installing ‘caverned’ fixtures that direct light at the ceiling.
Assign a department to audit your company’s energy and transport (including flight) kilometers etc, and devise ways to achieve a 2% reduction in these costs every month.
Incentivate junior staffs to walk, use bicycles and scooters. Also, encourage all employees to choose the stairs over the lift as often as they possibly can.
MUNICIPALITIES:
Legislate and regulate for lower fuel costs.
Reduce motorized transportation within residential neighborhoods and office localities. Vehicles, including public transport, must be discouraged from entering neighborhoods and office localities. Passengers should be dropped off at well-planned nodal points with large parking lots. People should be encouraged to walk the last half kilometer to their destinations. This will improve the air quality in work and living environments, give people peaceful zones for walking, bicycling etc and improve people’s health overall. It will also considerably reduce traffic jams and reduce per capita petroleum consumption.
Maximise the facilities for pedestrians and cyclists. Wide, continuous footpaths unobstructed by clutter, parked vehicles and hawkers, should be a norm to encourage walking. Create a bicycle lane for at least two kilometers on roads near schools. Children who enjoy walking or taking the bicycle to school will not have to be dropped to school by car or scooter.
Dim the traffic lights between midnight and 5 am to save electricity. Also, switch off the lights on advertisement hoardings after 10 pm.
Meter the water usage of individual flats/apartments rather than entire buildings in order to encourage more thrifty utilization of water, in order to conserve both water resources and the power used for pumping them to the taps.
Incentivate vehicle owners to reduce the size and number of vehicles they own. Road tax on households owning two or more four-wheeled vehicles must be fixed at disproportionately higher rates. Road tax on luxury vehicles that occupy more space and give a low mileage should also be hiked up. On the other hand, tax on smaller vehicles and two-wheelers should be slashed, and purchase of bicycles should be cross-subsidized.
Implementing these measures would have some side-effects on the economy, and on some sections of people in particular. I welcome ideas that are more painless and more easily implemented than the ones proposed, provided their effectiveness is not much less than the ones proposed.
Time is of the essence. Let us act now!!!
Global Warming: Pressing the Panic Button
Pardon me for for oversimplifications if any, because of my effort to keep it very simple and brief.
For millions of years, nature has been taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere -- taking carbon out of circulation -- and stashing it away, not only as trees, but also as enormous coal and crude-oil reserves under the earth. But since the discovery of the steam engine and the industrial revolution, mankind has been taking these carbon and hydrocarbon reserves and burning them. Every passing year, we thus undo the work of a few thousand years of nature. Humankind is now a rampant force of nature.
Our GDP and per-capita consumption is rapidly rising at close to 10%, and so the carbon footprint of each individual human-being on earth is doubling every 20 years or so. [Very brief explanation: Each extra shirt we buy and stash in our cupboards or each apple that we eat that has been flown in from Australia or China, or even lorried in from another state of India, represents an unnecessary load of carbon in the air that we have contributed.]
As our population grows at a galloping pace -- rising as much in 10 years as it did in the entire millennium between 1 AD and 1000 AD -- the collective carbon footprint of humankind doubles every 10 years or so. In other words, the 'weight' or 'impact' of humankind on earth is doubling every decade.
The upshot of having more carbon-dioxide in the air than ever before in the last 650,000 years is: All that CO2 is storing solar heat in the atmosphere. This increased heat energy will transform, and is already transforming into more kinetic energy as (i) more rapid evaporation and precipatation (ii) more frequent, widespread and powerful hurricanes (iii) a higher water-level in the oceans as the polar ice-caps melt, stronger waves and tidal movements, which will over the next decade require every human settlement and activity on the coastline including fishing villages, metros and ports to be relocated further inland.
I don't know if remedies are available. Personally, I think we are already in deep shit and blissfully unaware of it, like a guy who is falling to his death from a skyscraper, but is heard saying as he whooshes past the 10th-floor window, "So far so good! Everything feels great!"
Still, because of our human nature, we like to believe that it is never too late to mend.
Statement of One Possible Remedy
Our economies, which depend primarily on combustion, need to be urgently unhooked from combustibles and hooked onto alternative sources even if they are uneconomical at first. Energy from combustibles seems economical only because it does not take into account the environmental cost; in other words, such energy is environmentally 'subsidized'. However, such subsidies are no longer sustainable, and there is an enormous 'natural deficit' that has built up that needs to be balanced.
So we need to learn to consume solar energy, wind energy, tidal and hydro-electric or human-generated energy, even if it seems terribly uneconomical at first. Simultaneously, we need to learn to live with drastically lowered energy consumption.
Immediate measure 1: We need to impress on decision-makers (and not just general public) at various levels the urgency of our situation. We must make presentations before people in the government and administration at all levels, as often as possible.
Immediate measure 2: We need to show that we ourselves believe in our message. It is not very convincing for us to continue to go around in our big air-conditioned cars and sit in air-conditioned offices, air-conditioned homes and air-conditioned chambers of commerce. We need to show our willingness to step down into less-stylish cars, or maybe even scooters, public transport etc. We need to send out a clear message by (1) scaling down our own usage of electricity by opening our windows and using ceiling-fans etc, (2) walking and bicycling as much as possible instead of taking motorised transport and (3) depending on non-energy consuming forms of recreation such as going for long walks or playing cards together.
Immediate measure 3: To make a dent on the public consciousness, send out a clear message, and set off a mass movement, those of us who are aware of this problem and deeply concerned about it need to do something emblematic. How about something like dressing very simply and riding a bicycle to work (and everywhere else) one day of every week – something that is directly opposed to our increasingly ostentatious lifestyle?
Footnote: I do realize that these ideas are not exactly "civilized", and they make me sound like I urgently need a shrink. But maybe taking such drastic measures will show that we clearly understand the gravity of our situation. Our collective existence depends on this sort of response.
For millions of years, nature has been taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere -- taking carbon out of circulation -- and stashing it away, not only as trees, but also as enormous coal and crude-oil reserves under the earth. But since the discovery of the steam engine and the industrial revolution, mankind has been taking these carbon and hydrocarbon reserves and burning them. Every passing year, we thus undo the work of a few thousand years of nature. Humankind is now a rampant force of nature.
Our GDP and per-capita consumption is rapidly rising at close to 10%, and so the carbon footprint of each individual human-being on earth is doubling every 20 years or so. [Very brief explanation: Each extra shirt we buy and stash in our cupboards or each apple that we eat that has been flown in from Australia or China, or even lorried in from another state of India, represents an unnecessary load of carbon in the air that we have contributed.]
As our population grows at a galloping pace -- rising as much in 10 years as it did in the entire millennium between 1 AD and 1000 AD -- the collective carbon footprint of humankind doubles every 10 years or so. In other words, the 'weight' or 'impact' of humankind on earth is doubling every decade.
The upshot of having more carbon-dioxide in the air than ever before in the last 650,000 years is: All that CO2 is storing solar heat in the atmosphere. This increased heat energy will transform, and is already transforming into more kinetic energy as (i) more rapid evaporation and precipatation (ii) more frequent, widespread and powerful hurricanes (iii) a higher water-level in the oceans as the polar ice-caps melt, stronger waves and tidal movements, which will over the next decade require every human settlement and activity on the coastline including fishing villages, metros and ports to be relocated further inland.
I don't know if remedies are available. Personally, I think we are already in deep shit and blissfully unaware of it, like a guy who is falling to his death from a skyscraper, but is heard saying as he whooshes past the 10th-floor window, "So far so good! Everything feels great!"
Still, because of our human nature, we like to believe that it is never too late to mend.
Statement of One Possible Remedy
Our economies, which depend primarily on combustion, need to be urgently unhooked from combustibles and hooked onto alternative sources even if they are uneconomical at first. Energy from combustibles seems economical only because it does not take into account the environmental cost; in other words, such energy is environmentally 'subsidized'. However, such subsidies are no longer sustainable, and there is an enormous 'natural deficit' that has built up that needs to be balanced.
So we need to learn to consume solar energy, wind energy, tidal and hydro-electric or human-generated energy, even if it seems terribly uneconomical at first. Simultaneously, we need to learn to live with drastically lowered energy consumption.
Immediate measure 1: We need to impress on decision-makers (and not just general public) at various levels the urgency of our situation. We must make presentations before people in the government and administration at all levels, as often as possible.
Immediate measure 2: We need to show that we ourselves believe in our message. It is not very convincing for us to continue to go around in our big air-conditioned cars and sit in air-conditioned offices, air-conditioned homes and air-conditioned chambers of commerce. We need to show our willingness to step down into less-stylish cars, or maybe even scooters, public transport etc. We need to send out a clear message by (1) scaling down our own usage of electricity by opening our windows and using ceiling-fans etc, (2) walking and bicycling as much as possible instead of taking motorised transport and (3) depending on non-energy consuming forms of recreation such as going for long walks or playing cards together.
Immediate measure 3: To make a dent on the public consciousness, send out a clear message, and set off a mass movement, those of us who are aware of this problem and deeply concerned about it need to do something emblematic. How about something like dressing very simply and riding a bicycle to work (and everywhere else) one day of every week – something that is directly opposed to our increasingly ostentatious lifestyle?
Footnote: I do realize that these ideas are not exactly "civilized", and they make me sound like I urgently need a shrink. But maybe taking such drastic measures will show that we clearly understand the gravity of our situation. Our collective existence depends on this sort of response.
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