---

This entry was originally made on Orange Hues blog on 5 May 2008.

---

You may be surprised to learn how inefficient that shiny new car is that you drive to work everyday. Thankfully, there’s a solution in sight.

I think a lot about cars and urban transport. I honestly believe that cars are unsustainable for a large number of reasons and that we must give them up in favor of walking, using the bicycle, two wheelers and public transport. In my personal life, I’ve taken the first step towards that by placing a moratorium on single and dual passenger car travel – will only take out the car when there are three or more people traveling (more on that later).

One of the reasons cars are unsustainable is their horrible inefficiency. I’ve mentioned this before but here’s what Amory Lovins of Rocky Mountain Institute has to say:

I’ve been thinking in background for 20 years about the physics of cars and why are they so inefficient that you know, your car’s using a 100 times its weight in ancient plants everyday and yet only 0.3% of that energy ends up moving the driver. This didn’t seem very good.

Of all the fuel energy you put into the car, 87% (seven eighths of it) never gets to the wheel. It’s lost first in the engine, driveline, idling and accessories.

Of the 1/8^th of fuel energy that does reach the wheels, half of that either heats the air that the car pushes aside or heats the tires and roads. Only the last 6% of the fuel energy actually accelerates the car and then heats the brakes when you stop.

- Amory Lovins in Car of the Future

Not everyone is as inspired to give up their cars — most people actually love theirs — so we must live with them for some time. The only alternative then is to produce more efficient cars. But the auto industry has refused to budge so far, you say. Soooo… you get the independent auto makers to produce efficient cars. But how do you do that? It’s not as simple as producing water bottles, you know. Well, give them an incentive. Announce a $10 million prize for a car that is over 3 times as efficient and sells in large numbers.

This is precisely what Auto X-Prize is all about.

I’ve been following Auto X-Prize development for almost two years. I think it’s a great initiative though I feel they should have aimed higher — 300 MPG instead of 100 (today’s cars average about 29 MPG in US). We need to make a big leap to make up for the inefficiencies of the past century. Nevertheless, it’s an exciting venture and I can’t wait to find out who among the 64 contenders wins the X-Prize and what it does to the industry. 

Popular Mechanics magazine just announced a list of the top 10 contenders according to them. They’re all good but the one that has the greatest likelihood, in my opinion, isn’t on anyone’s radar. It doesn’t feature in the list and it’s never been mentioned on AutoBlogGreen or TreeHugger, two popular blogs covering green cars and low-impact living. Both of them have dozens of posts on other X-prize contenders.

The Solution

I’m talking about Poulsen Hybrid. A product of a European US company* called Alpha-Core, it’s essentially a couple of rear wheel hub motors which can be installed in any conventional car to convert it into a plug-in hybrid, increasing its mileage significantly. So you get 2 hub motors, two controllers along with batteries and a charger which go in the trunk — all for $3300. Give it a couple of hours and you car’s now a plug-in electric hybrid!

(* Founder, Ulrik Poulsen has an unmistakable Scandinavian accent so I assumed it’s a European firm but Alpha-Core website says they’re based in Connecticut, US.)

I think it’s an absolutely brilliant concept. Totally inexpensive, efficient, simple and it doesn’t even mean getting a new car. If it works as promised, it should sell in huge numbers – many times more than any of the fancy cars in Popular Mechanics list. Converting an existing internal combustion engine car into a plug-in electric to get mileage in the range of 100 MPG without any substantial mechanical changes to the car and at such low cost is an unbeatable proposition.

More reasons why I like the Alpha-Core/ Poulsen Hybrid solution:

• Retrofitting existing cars to make them more efficient is the most effective and sustainable way of tackling auto emissions. There are well over 600 million cars in the world. Any new new alternative automotive solution will take several decades to become mainstream provided it is cost effective and is available worldwide. While we need new technologies, the greatest impact will come from a technology that can improve the existing one running inside each of those 600 million cars.
• Alpha-core has been in the manufacturing business since 1982. So unlike most other X-Prize contenders, it’s not a startup – it doesn’t need any funding to get going.
• The product is ready for launch. There’s no long development cycle in between by the end of which most companies discover their technology isn’t yet ready or that it has a fatal flaw. In an audio interview, founder Ulrik Poulsen says it’s expected to be available by June 2008. That’s next month!

Go Poulsen Hybrid!

UPDATE 7-May-08: AutoblogGreen makes amend, writes about Poulsen Hybrid. Links to this post. Most people commenting are overwhelmingly positive about this.

---

This entry was originally made on Orange Hues blog on 3 April 2008.

---

Two recent articles in Hindustan Times challenging human induced climate change raise questions about credibility of its reporting and integrity of its correspondent. It also raises a question for serious environmentalists on how to respond to such reports.

Two days ago ( Apr 1, 2008 ) Hindustan Times carried an article titled Climate change not as big a problem: report. Lest anyone should think it as an April Fool’s joke, it was a completely serious piece based on real events. Today ( Apr 3, 2008 ), the same correspondent published a report titled: ‘Sun too causes global warming.’

Both articles are highly misleading, contain factual inaccuracies and at the very least deliberately hide widely known facts that counter its argument to paint a biased picture. In the following paragraphs, I will attempt to highlight the key issues raised by each of the stories.

Climate change not as big a problem: report [1]
by Chetan Chauhan | Page 14, HT New Delhi, Apr 1, 2008 | 353 words

Opening excerpt:

An international civil society report has debunked the claims of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, saying there is no evidence available to show loss of human life directly due to climate change.

The report of the Civil Society Coalition on Climate Change [CSCCC], to be released in India on Tuesday, says there is no evidence to suggest climate change has caused an increase in diseases.

Highly Misleading

By pitting CSCCC [2] directly against IPCC [3], the article creates the impression that both organisations are of similar stature. Nothing could be further from the truth. IPCC is a Noble prize winning United Nations body made up of hundreds of scientists and governmental representatives while CSCCC is merely a coalition of so-called global “think tanks” – corporate lobbyists funded by big oil corporations, the likes of ExxonMobil, to further their interests.

The HT article makes no mention of the background of CSCCC – who comprises the coalition and how are they funded. Unlike IPCC, which was formed two decades ago, CSCCC was only organised a little more than an year back [4] by International Policy Network (IPN) which is a well known recipient of Exxon funding. IPN has received $390,000 from Exxon [5]. Several other members of the coalition have also been a beneficiary.

Paul Reiter, the expert cited in the article, for example, sits on the “Scientific and Economic Advisory Council” [6] of an organization called the “Annapolis Centre.” What is Annapolis Centre? It’s a US based “think tank” [7] that has pocketed $793,575 from ExxonMobil and has been very active in playing down the human contribution to global warming.

Reiter doesn’t have anything too substantiative in his research papers [8] published in scientific peer reviewed journals to back his claims of lack of relationship between disease and climate change. It’s unclear how many other claims of CSCCC report are backed by research in peer reviewed journals.

Yet, here’s a newspaper that reaches out to a country of one billion, publishing unsubstantiated “research” of corporate lobbyists that have a direct financial interest in sensationalising their so-called findings; and pits them against a neutral, highly conservative group of scientists and government representatives whose work is completely based on pure scientific research published in peer-reviewed journals.

‘Sun too causes global warming’ [9]
by Chetan Chauhan | Page 17, HT New Delhi, Apr 3, 2008 | 327 words

Opening excerpt:

FRESH RESEARCH by Danish Space Research Centre can possibly give a new twist to the controversy whether Green House Gas emissions is the major contributor for global warming. The Center’s research based on climate date [sic] of 150 years shows that varying activity of the Sun is the most systematic contributor to natural climate variations.

Completely Inaccurate

The article falsely states that new research claiming sun as the cause of global warming has now emerged and that it may alter the widely held belief in man-made global warming. Global warming skeptics have been arguing sun as the cause for several decades. In fact Danish Space Research Centre’s (DNSC) Galactic Cosmic Ray theory itself is over 11 years old. [10] So it’s absolutely false to imply that this is a new discovery that somehow challenges man made global warming.

Not only is it old research, it has also been debunked several times (see here, here, here, here and here). In July last year the prestigious Royal Society of UK published a study concluding that the Sun’s output cannot be causing modern-day climate change. [11] To quote BBC News on it: Mike Lockwood’s analysis appears to have put a large, probably fatal nail in this intriguing and elegant [Galactic Cosmic Ray] hypothesis. He said: “It might even have had a significant effect on pre-industrial climate; but you cannot apply it to what we’re seeing now, because we’re in a completely different ball game.”

Mysteriously, the HT article quotes Deepak Lal, former Indian Foreign Service officer in support of the Galactic Cosmic Ray theory. How is Lal related with the Danish Space Research Centre is not mentioned in the article. I looked up his background. Among other things, Lal is the author of a little known book on globalisation called “In Praise of Empires.” [12] More interestingly however, he is a Senior Fellow at the CATO institute. [13] What is CATO institute? You guessed it — a US “think tank” funded by ExxonMobil. It has received $110,000 from Exxon. [14]

Questions about journalistic ethics and accountability

The two articles raise serious questions. Why did the Hindustan Times publish misleading, inaccurate, unsubstantiated and biased reports on climate change. Did the correspondent receive an incentive for publishing these from outside or is there an organisation wide effort to discredit opinion against climate change?

Those of us who understand the severity of this planetary emergency have watched every mention of this issue in mainstream Indian media with interest over the last year. Most of us can also recall a time prior to the release of the IPCC report when climate change was conspicuously absent from Indian media. The Stern report for example, which was hailed as a landmark event in UK (released at the end of Oct 2006), never found a mention in India’s two main newspaper for months. This conspiracy of silence was broken only when the crescendo of international reporting on the issue reached mile-high by the time the IPCC report came out (Feb 2007).

Poor reporting is worse than no reporting. In this particular instance, it’s hard to accept that this came out simply as a result of ignorance. Chetan Chauhan has been covering environmental issues for HT for some time and it’s hard to imagine someone at that position being incapable of making a distinction between CSCCC and IPCC or being unable to conduct simple background checks through web searches prior to writing.

A bigger question for those of us who see through such reporting is: how do we address this problem. How do we respond to such reports to bring the truth to public attention. And how do we make the media accountable for what it writes or does not write.

On my part I plan to follow this post with a formal complaint to the Press Council of India unless HT issues a well-placed corrective article in the following days.

Notes and Links

This entry is also posted on Green-India mailing list and copied to the following:

Chetan Chauhan, HT correspondent and writer of said articles
Vir Sanghvi, Editorial Director Hindustan Times
Dr Rajendra K Pachauri, Director-General TERI
Sunita Narain, Director Centre for Science and Environment
Malini Mehra, Founder & Director Centre for Social Markets

References:

1 HT April 1, 2008: Climate change not as big a problem: report

2 Civil Society Coalition on Climate Change [2] (CSCCC) website

3 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on Wikipedia

4 The CSCCC is organised by IPN according to this Wikipedia entry.

5 International Policy Network fact sheet on ExxonMobilSecrets.org

6 Paul Reiter on Science and Economic Advisory Council of The Annapolis Center

7 The Annapolis Center fact sheet on ExxonMobilSecrets.org

8 Reiter’s research background on DeSmogBlog

9 HT, April 3, 2008: Sun too causes global warming

10 DNSC 1997 research papers on sun-Climate connection [PDF] and cosmic ray flux and global cloud cover [PDF]

11 BBC News on Royal Society study: ‘No Sun link’ to climate change

12 Deepak Lal’s In Praise of Empires

13 Deepak Lal at CATO

14 CATO fact sheet on ExxonSecrets.org

---

Updates on this post, including a response from IPCC chairman R. K. Pachauri, can be found on Orange Hues blog

---

---

This entry was originally made on Orange Hues blog on 20 June 2007.

---

A recent talk by Donald Brown at IPCC exposes the moral and ethical bankruptcy of the developed world and poses important questions for all policy makers grappling with how to respond to climate change. Video and transcript of his talk follows

Transcript of Don Brown’s talk on Moral and Ethical Dimensions of Climate Change
I’ve tried to retain the original emphasis of the talk below, though not always successfully. Words I could not make out are left as blanks.

What are the moral and ethical dimensions of climate change?

Vice President Gore in his movie^[1], I’d assume most of you saw the movie, says three times that climate change is a moral issue. And he makes this emphasis but he doesn’t explain. What does it mean to say that climate change is a moral and ethical issue?

What does entail by that? I’m here to convince you that there’s a lot more to the assertion that climate change is a moral and ethical issue and how important it is. How desperately important it is. That we encourage others to have this conversation about moral and ethical dimensions of climate change.

One of the reasons why this is so urgent, not only it is the steepest of the cuts we need that is so urgent but a lot of the moral and ethical issues are actually hidden in scientific and economic arguments about climate change. We need to educate others what the moral and ethical issues are.

It’s not just one moral and ethical issue. It’s many different moral and ethical issues. I work at Penn State, we’ve created a program called… a collaborative program on the ethical dimensions of climate change. We’re working with 17 ethics institutes around the world on this and if this weren’t such a very very very very scary problem, it’d actually also be an exciting problem because it’s gonna force us to think through multi levels of institutions – how we make international law. It’s going to bring every…climate change in my view is going to force us to rethink moral norms, ___ norms and international norms.

Let me dig into what we believe the moral and ethical dimensions of climate change are. There are many of them. We’ve identified eight major issues. What we’re trying to do and what we encourage others to do is to not talk about morality or ethics in the abstract but to pay really a close attention to the international debate about climate change.

We are following the debate, teasing out at the moral and ethical issues and then doing rigorous ethical critiques of those issues. There’s a paper, a White paper on the Ethical Dimensions of Climate Change^[2]. Looks like I didn’t bring enough of this. This is the first start. You’ll see it’s a fairly rigorous attempt to dig deeply into the moral and ethical dimensions of climate change. Let me just identify what we think are the most pressing moral and ethical issues of our time about climate change at this moment in history. These are gonna change as this debate unfolds and we attempt to try to follow it.

The first issue is, how much warming should we tolerate. Another way of stating this issue is what is the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases that this world should identify as a target. There is no more obvious moral and ethical issue than this issue. It will literally determine who lives and who dies. Whether ___ survives, whether ___ islands survive. The issue of atmospheric targets, we must see it simply not as a scientific issue but as the most profound kind of moral and ethical issue. Issue#1.

Issue#2. The world is emitting 7 billion tons of carbon. We’re headed to 20 billion tons of carbon in this century under one of the IPCC scenarios. We’ve got to reduce the 7 to 2.5 billion tons in next thirty years. The moral issue is, how do we allocate who gets to use those two and a half billion tons of carbon. How do we allocate? Does United States get to use more per capita than China or India? There could be no more obvious moral and ethical issue than who gets the right to use the atmosphere as a sink. And it’s hardly on our lips.

Issue 3. Who’s gonna pay for damages from climate change? This is the issue the developing countries are now starting to bring to the negotiation. And it is also a moral ethical issue. Morals and ethics would have the Plato’s Phaedo principle^[3] – there’s this whole area of philosophy called retributive justice^[4] that has a lot to say about this. This is a justice issue.

Now, they’re the obvious ethical questions that climate change raises. There’s a whole host of probably more important moral and ethical issues but they are hidden inside scientific and economic arguments about what we should do.

The next issue is, how about scientific uncertainty. What are the ethical and moral dimensions of scientific uncertainly. Why is no one articulating the scientific uncertainty as a moral issue. Clearly, all across the world if you do dangerous behavior, it is criminal to do very dangerous behavior and you can’t use as a defense that you didn’t know for sure it was going to happen. It is criminal to do very dangerous behavior. Once you have enough evidence. Once science says there’s a rational risk, it is a moral issue.

In this case, there are a certain aspects of climate change which makes the excuse that United States and a couple of other countries was, for 20 years of scientific uncertainty, morally and ethically bankrupt. What are aspects of the scientific uncertainty? Well, if you wait for all uncertainty to resolve, its too late, the damage has already been caused. Those that wanna hide behind the scientific uncertainty haven’t asked the victims of climate change what bet they wanna take. There are questions of procedural justice. There are enormous questions of justice involved in an attempt to use scientific uncertainty as an excuse.

But no one is calling those that want to rely upon uncertainty as an excuse and identifying that as a moral and ethical question.

Issue#5. Cost. For 20 years United States, I used to represent the Clinton administration here. I’m the former negotiator. And for 20 years we used the excuse we don’t have to do anything because the cost to our economy alone is prohibitive. Think about that. One country states the costs of its economy alone when the harms are somewhere else?

There are various variations of the cost argument that we need to see in moral and ethical terms. One form of it is cost-benefit analysis. There’s a whole series of dueling cost-benefit analysis about Kyoto and post-Kyoto regimes. Those cost-benefit analysis raise the most profound kind of ethical questions and no one is calling the proponents of those costs-benefit analysis about the ethical issues.

Issues such as harms and benefits are disaggregated. The fact that the cost-benefit disenfranchise future generations though discounting. The fact that cost-benefit analysis think everybody and everything in the world is a commodity. The fact that cost benefit analysis makes people in poor countries lives less valuable than people’s lives in rich countries. And I could go on. The fact that people use cost-benefit analysis on this problem and people don’t identify the more obvious moral and ethical questions is very strange, is very very strange.

What are the other issues? Well, the issue of no country has to do anything until everyone else does something, okay. That’s the third excuse, unfortunately my country has been using for twenty years. We don’t have to do anything until everyone else does something. That’s a moral issue. Can a co-criminal decide that they don’t have to stop their crime because the other co-criminals haven’t stopped doing it? As a matter of moral and ethics, we believe that that excuse is also morally bankrupt.

What about the issue of well, we don’t have to do anything until there are new less costly technologies which can be invented that would get us out of this mess. What does ethics have to say about that issue?

What about the trading regimes? Are there ethical problems in trading regimes? And there in fact could be. It all depends upon what form the trading regimes take.

The long and short of it, in the White paper what we’re trying to do is to get philosophers and religious people to look at these issues rigorously and begin and deepen the ethical critique of these issues.

Now, if the world took climate change as a moral and issue, it would radically, radically change the way this is being negotiated. Countries would have to immediately admit that they have to reduce their emissions to their share of safe global emissions. Countries that have caused problems would have to admit that they have some responsibility to pay for damages and so forth.

So, the significance of seeing this as moral and ethical issue is profound, I believe, okay. And that’s why I want to thank you for organizing this conference. We all need to encourage people to see this in terms of moral and ethical issues. And not talk about it in the abstract. But in terms of concrete justifications of doing something that people are not doing.

Let me just conclude by the following. Bill McKibben, who’s a wonderful writer, about six years ago wrote an op-ed piece in New York Times and he said the following:

I’m sitting here wondering why Americans don’t see climate change as a moral and ethical issue. It makes me think of my parents, who were really good people but did not get civil rights until they saw the dogs on the bridge in Selma, Alabama.

(Police used German Shepherd dogs to quell protesters during the American civil rights movement)

He went on to say, “it’s all of our duties, it’s all of our duties to help people see the moral and ethical dimensions of climate change.” Especially those of us that understand the problem. We have a particular duty, in my view to get people to see the moral and ethical dimensions of this problem.

The challenge is, what are the dogs on the bridge for this problem that we can help get other people to see. Thank you.

References and Links

1. Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth
2. White Paper on the Ethical Dimensions of Climate Change (PDF)
3. Plato’s Phaedo Principle
4. Retributive Justice
5. Climate change is an international emergency

---

This entry was originally made on Orange Hues blog on 1 July 2008.

---

The Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has just unveiled the long-awaited National Action Plan on Climate Change. I’ve split the first 5 sections from the long document that summarise the policy and put it up on my server. You can download it here [10 pages, 2 MB].

The five sections contain: Overview, Principles, Approach, Way Forward: Eight National Missions and Implementation of Missions: Institutional Arrangements.

The complete policy including section #6: Technical Document, which is over 40 page long, is available on PMO website (a large 16 MB PDF with 52 pages).

I haven’t studied it yet but my first impression is that although the initiatives listed are welcome, but…

• without any firm commitment towards a target of emission reductions,
• without setting up any time-frame to achieve those reductions and
• without a commitment to phase out new energy generation from fossil fuels and their subsidies…

it is unlikely to make a significant short term or long-term impact into India’s fast growing carbon emissions.

A longer, more detailed analysis including an official response from my organisation (CSM) will follow in coming days.

UPDATE 3-Jul: ‘Climate Challenge India’ coalition formed by CSM just released an interim assessment (PDF). I had the privilege to be one of the contributors to this report.

---

This entry was originally made on Orange Hues blog on 30 May 2008.

---

I just attended the Delhi Youth Summit on Climate organised by the enterprising folks at Indian Youth Climate Network (IYCN) who put this event together in three weeks!

I made a presentation on Countering the Challenge: Youth and the role of media in social and political transformation in which I talked about the challenge from climate change (its severity, scale and the speed of changes needed), causes of this challenge and how we should counter it.

What I hoped to achieve through the presentation is instill a sense of urgency about the problem and show a path towards solutions. I proposed that a widespread and comprehensive media campaign targeted both at the society and the leadership can bring about the required changes in our attitudes and policies so that we can begin to tackle this problem.

The underlying argument is that personal lifestyle changes although important will not bring about the change needed and that it can be meaningfully addressed only through policy changes. I also argue that technology is not holding us back, rather it’s lack of social awareness (about severity, scale and speed) and lack of political will. I’ve tried to show how we can change this with the help of media.

The presentation contains some video clips so it’s quite large. There are two ways to download.

Download presentation & videos separately and add videos to it later.
Presentation (876 kb zipped)
Videos (32 mb zipped). Also on YouTube.Get entire presentation including the videos.
Available here (36.4 mb zipped).
This method is not recommended but still provided for those who don’t have time and have the bandwidth.

It’s a little crude in its present state (I put it together the night before presenting it). But the message is important and I hope it gets through. I will continue to work on it to refine and make it more compelling. Will update this post as and when I do.

You are free to use this in any way you wish (as long as you don’t call it your own!). If you use the material without changing the intended message, please attribute the source and provide links (you’ll find them on the last page). If you want any help in presenting it, feel free to email