The Hindu Business Line : Global warming: Who foots the bill for West's luxury?

Biofuels offer some hope in the mitigation of global warming, and among these butanol deserves closer scrutiny as it is much more favourable than ethanol.

Mankind's evolution over the millennia has stamped his indelible footprints on time, some remarkable, others less memorable, but none more unequivocal and incontrovertible as his role in damaging global climate. Yet, the onus of its repair and resurrection falls between a defiant though limited set of perpetrators, who continue to wreak havoc with seeming impunity, and a meek coterie of the rest that are in an overwhelming majority but faced with the onerous task of cleanup with scanty wherewithal.

The deep divide between the already polarised denizens caught in this quicksand is anything but conducive to strike at the root of this distraught. Although rich countries have been responsible for this historic build-up, the developing nations haven't wizened in this unholy chasm through their own unabated growing emissions. Worse, in the face of mounting scientific evidence that has established a direct cause and effect relationship between increasing fossil fuel emissions and its growing impact on climate change, receding glaciers, rising sea tides, wild fires, droughts and lowering agricultural production, the rich have not lost their penchant for luxury, continue to burn fossil fuels with reckless abandon, the have-nots are busy playing catching up driven by a developmental agenda that has thrown caution to the winds.

Berlin Mandate

So who bells the cat and how? The Berlin Mandate, brokered in 1995 by parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, urged the developed countries to reduce their emissions first; giving time for developing nations to follow which explains why the Kyoto Protocol imposes emission constraints on the US, the EU and Japan, but spares India and China.

This stance is perhaps ethically right, but hasn't quite panned out as intended. Worse, the Protocol focuses on the short-term, mandating barely a few industrialised nations to reduce their emissions marginally between 2008 and 2012. These reductions are neither deep nor required beyond 2012! A twin pronged strategy would seem better suited to tackle this critical issue on an urgent basis.

The global cleansing envisaged in the Protocol can be achieved only if emissions are reduced substantially and over a long term. For this to happen, existing wrongful practices have to be scrapped and in their stead new technologies researched, developed and disseminated. Industrialised nations have to defray the costs of transitioning developing economies onto a new, low-carbon development path through transfer of know-how, diffusing more efficient technology, subsidising direct costs and footing the bill for Clean Development Mechanisms that help develop carbon sinks.

Simultaneously, enabling agricultural interventions that promote capacity building and harmonising in developing nations must be pursued on a high priority, as these economies are vulnerable to even the slightest fluctuations in farm production that climate changes trigger through floods, droughts and shifts in seasons.

Biofuels offer hope

Biofuels produced from biomass would be a major step in the right direction enshrining the two conjoined imperatives of mitigation and adaptation so long as the push for fuel from crops does not edge out the primordial mandate of crops for food. The two are not fungible.

In this context, biobutanol is a major blip amongst alternatives that merit further investigation and development. Produced similar to ethanol from a variety of farm produce as sugarcane, cassava, corn, wheat, sugar beet or agricultural by-products such as straw butanol packs a punch over ethanol.

Butanol blends well with petrol, has energy content and fuel efficiency similar to petrol and is by far more favourable than ethanol which is a mere 70 per cent as efficient. Butanol tolerates water contamination, is less corrosive than ethanol and therefore better suited for distribution through existing pipelines for petrol.

Chemical and petroleum majors DuPont and BP are already investigating butanol, ratcheting more advantages to it through serious research to plug the leaky environmental dyke.

Indian context

Governmental policy in addressing burning issues relating to climate change has been conspicuous by its absence. A biofuels policy drafted a year ago has been gathering dust. The hastily announced support price of Rs. 21.50 per litre of ethanol is riddled with impracticalities and has no takers. The withdrawal of import duty for biodiesel has met with a tepid reaction from the trade. It is high time the political leadership acknowledged the magnitude of the problem, sought solutions in earnest and implemented them in a time bound manner if future generations are to be vouchsafed a tomorrow.

(The author, an expert in agriculture, can be contacted at greenthumb@vsnl.com)