A day after I criticised Hindustan Times’ glaring omission of Al Gore’s speech on climate change, the paper carries a bold feature on global warming as if trying to compensate. But is it really informed by climate science?

Hindustan Times ran this extraordinarily bold full page feature in today’s paper

I made the entry on HT’s censorship of Gore’s speech on Sunday evening. It was published at four places online and was sent to a bunch of prominent personalities — Dr. R. K Pachauri, Sunita Narain, Bittu Sehgal, Malini Mehra, Barkha Dutt — as well as HT editor Vir Sanghvi and three HT correspondents.

Today (Tuesday), the paper carried a bold story on global warming.

It’s hard to say that this was in response to my write up but it does seem likely.

• For one, the full-page feature is very loud and bold (see larger version of the above image) with a massive headline and a huge graphic disproportionate to the small content the story carried.
• Second, such an aggressively promoted feature on global warming has not come out in HT since last year when the IPCC report came out and Indian print media woke up to this issue.
• Most important indication is that this is relatively a much smaller story. It was released by the BBC two days ago and Google News has hardly 20-30 mentions of it, none of which are from outside UK. Compare that with 1000+ mentions of the Gore story from all across the world that HT did not publish.

It’s as if they were trying to compensate! (more…)

Learn more about Indian Youth Summit on Climate Change.

P.S: Download higher resolution version of the above poster (3.6 MB PDF) and stick them up in your school, colleges etc or copy this image and the link and email it out to your friends.

The leading national daily keeps the Indian public in the dark about Gore’s historic energy challenge by refusing to make any mention of it.

Despite Al Gore’s Rock Star status, certain media organisations seem to have a thing or two against him. In the U.S. they have Fox News and in India it looks like Hindustan Times is keen to take on that role.

When Gore spoke in Washington on Thursday on the challenge to abandon fossil fuels, New York Times reported that the plan goes beyond even the most audacious ones. Bill McKibbon, journalist and climate activist went a step further when he said Gore deserved “the prize you get once you’ve won the Nobel.” Nasa’s leading climate scientist James Hansen called it “the turning point that is needed.”

So how did Fox News report the challenge? Fox’s reporting focused not on Gore’s call but his personal emissions. Its reporter stood outside the Gore event and counted the number of minutes Gore’s driver left the car on idle with the AC on to keep it cool when Gore and wife Tipper returned (it ran on idle for an earth destroying 20 minutes! The horror!).

Editors at Hindustan Times went a step further by pretending that Gore never spoke.

What Does HT Have Against Informed Public Opinion On Climate Change in India?

This isn’t the first time Hindustan Times has negatively influenced the Indian public on climate change front. I consider deliberate omission of an important global event from its reporting as a negative influence. There are many many examples of omission on this front in the past. But there are also examples of deliberate negative influence. In early April, HT ran two ridiculous stories challenging man made global warming and discrediting the IPCC.

I exposed those stories on my blog and am currently suing the paper in the Press Council of India for publishing them. Its editor and correspondent have been served notices and I can’t wait for the proceedings to begin. Have collected a wealth of evidence to share.

But let’s give them some benefit of doubt and see if this omission was really intentional or caused by some other reason. Maybe it was too late for Friday’s paper. Maybe they didn’t have enough space. Maybe it wasn’t relevant for Indian readers. Let’s look at each of these reasoning.

(more…)

Why Gore’s “Generational Challenge to Repower America” changes everything.

Rock Star Al Gore (formerly a politician but now rivaling a rock star in his popularity), pulled a great performance in Washington DC this week when he got on to the stage and sang “Gimme 100% baby.”

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, Al Gore delivered a landmark speech on Thursday in which he proposed an audacious target of generating 100% U.S. electricity from renewable energy resources by 2018.

Having been frustrated for years over lack of vision on this issue from all of our leaders, the news had an electrifying effect.

Prior to Gore, no one has had the courage to propose such a humongous target. Not the biggest environmentalists, not the doomsday scientists, no journalist, no engineer. The closest someone has come is Lester Brown. In his book Plan B 3.0 he argues for a complete switch to renewables (largely wind power) and an eventual 80% reduction in emissions by 2020.

But even Lester Brown acknowledges that his plan is guided not by political feasibility but the necessity of such a target. Gore’s plan on the other hand is unapologetically bold. He argues that not only is it feasible, it’s also attractive as it will create employment and will pay for itself several times over. Besides, Gore’s target betters Brown’s by two years. Every other plan or proposal talks about 2030 or 2050 targets. Even an organisation as radical as the Greenpeace wouldn’t have thought of proposing anything as audacious as this.

This is leadership.

Exactly What’s Needed

And this is exactly the kind of leadership we need. Every few days a new report or evidence appears raising alarm about the extent of changes to our climate while our politicians are busy sleeping or playing the blame game. When we do hear of solutions and plans, they are piecemeal solutions, half measures and plans that are guided by outdated science.

Not A Technological Challenge

Some reports are calling Gore’s plan unrealistic or outright crazy arguing that it’s impossible. Well, perhaps they should meet executives of Ausra, the Australian company now based in U.S which is building Gigawatt scale solar thermal plants using a new technology that’s cheaper than 2020 cost projections of the current one. Or maybe it’s T Boone Pickens they should be meeting who’s investing a billion dollars to install world’s largest wind farm in Texas.

Perhaps they should pay a visit to Greg Watson of Green and Gold Energy who’s installing hundreds of MW of concentrator photovoltaic solar farms around the world that produce energy at three times the efficiency of traditional solar panels and at less than 40% of the cost. Or maybe they need to learn about Blue Energy which has orders worth thousands of MW of their tidal energy turbine platform for the oceans that also works as a bridge.

Gore did not create this target out of thin air. As he said in the speech, he met with engineers, scientists, and CEOs and had consultations over “solutions summits”. One such expert was Paul Gipe whom Gore met in January this year. When asked about Gore’s target, he said, “Ten years is certainly an aggressive target, but many experts [including himself] who consulted with Gore have said that it is achievable.”

As someone who has been tracking emerging renewable energy solutions around the world, I came to conclude some time back that this is NOT a technological problem. We have all the technology today to take this issue head on. What we lack is the political courage. And this is what Gore has attempted to infuse in the leadership by setting up what others are calling an impossible target.

Great Timing

Before Gore gave the speech, fellow Democrats were complaining that it was poorly timed. They thought the party would be seen as “caring more about polar bears than Americans who have had to pay record prices for gasoline.” Actually, there couldn’t have been a better timing for Gore’s challenge.

As Gore said in his speech, rising price of fossil fuels have made renewables more attractive than ever before. Those of us who care more about the environment than the economy have been watching rising energy prices with much glee. Each Dollar per barrel of oil price rise translates directly into reduced consumption of oil and reduced consumption of everything else that gets expensive.

At the same time it also makes renewable cost competitive as the gap between their prices narrows down. So this is absolutely the right time to make the transition to clean energy. As price of oil gets higher — it’s projected to be $200/barrel before the end of this year — things will only get better.

(more…)

A series of writings that review the National Action Plan on Climate Change.

The country’s most important policy document that will determine how it deals with climate change is here. The National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC) released by Prime Minister Mr. Manmohan Singh a little over two weeks ago is a historic document as it purports to address a challenge that is grappling humanity.

In a series of posts over the next few weeks, I will attempt an in-depth step by step analysis of the NAPCC, covering all its contents: principles and approach, each of the eight missions individually, their implementation, as well as areas that are conspicuously absent from the policy.

In my first entry, I will talk about the history of the plan, its scope & implications and how it was was received in the country and internationally. I will be publishing this over the weekend and will continually update this post with links to subsequent parts.

This entry was also made on Orange Hues blog.

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.

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

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.  (more…)

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. (more…)

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

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-faBHqVu04]

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. (more…)

In case you’re wondering about the flood of new entries here, most of those are posts I made on Orange Hues blog over the last year. I was asked to copy some them here (so I have) and to cross-post any new ones in the future (so I will).

I’ve been blogging for about five years, though not always on climate change. I started out writing about usability and user experience design and then it evolved into writing on innovation, big businesses, design, and strategy. My recent entries have mostly been on climate change.

The transition happened a little over two years ago when I saw a documentary that left me shocked for days, even weeks. Not the Al Gore movie, this was before that. An Inconvenient Truth would seem like sugar candy to anyone who watches BBC’s Global Dimming, a much more grim documentary that gives us a glimpse into the doomsday scenario of expected warming over the coming decades.

The film made me realise the extent of this problem. Since then, I’ve gained a deeper understanding of the science involved; of emerging renewable energy technologies from various parts of the world that can help address this; the political, social & economic aspects, which are much graver; and of geo-engineering solutions that are being proposed by some scientists.

I hope you find the posts useful. Would love to know your thoughts on them. Feel free to leave a comment even if you disagree with something, or to get in touch.