The Hindu Business Line : Is your battery full?

Just yesterday, the papers carried a report of the Japanese carmaker Honda introducing to the world its latest “fuel cell car” which, effectively, will say goodbye to the query “Is your tank full?” This is because the new car will run on newly-developed technology which will make locomotion dependent on a lithium-ion battery which, when “full”, will enable coverage of a distance of 620 km at a top speed of 160 kmph.

To be sure, there is nothing very new about the technology because, as far as one can remember, such battery-driven cars have been in the news for the past 20 years or more. In fact, some of them, on an extremely small scale though, have even been running in some places, mainly in the Southern region of the country, ultimately losing out to competition, as they must, because of the “problems” involved in getting used to anything new. However, the fact that big international car-manufacturers have now taken to the idea of battery-operated cars seriously indeed — as indicated by the Honda launch — clearly suggests that the future of locomotion is firmly geared to the use of power not dependent on fossil fuel.

Revolutionary Shift

If one takes a global view of the phenomenon of fossil fuel technology being replaced with the fuel cell variant, what this represents is a revolutionary shift of the public-locomotion economy from a stage reminiscent of the primitive days of human civilisation to one which would truly be the harbinger of the future as captured in science fiction. The enormity of this change in the gradual evolution of human civilization on our planet will of course have to be appreciated first and foremost if the significance of Honda’s decision to launch a new breed of cars is to be understood properly.

The shift is not just a further jump in automobile technology but represents the efforts of a highly-intelligent species of life to keep pace with the evolving physical properties of planet Earth. Without the presence of human life, the planet would have evolved differently. This is not to suggest that global warming would not have taken place. Given the expanding sun, the process of warming cannot be avoided, but it would have happened differently and followed a different time path. Human activity, in the broadest sense of the term, has resulted in higher carbon emissions into the atmosphere, upsetting, perhaps prematurely, the finely balanced planetary eco-system.

Premature disturbance

Since the consequences of this premature disturbance have already been mapped (the conclusions being not too happy for the future of mankind), Man has been left with no alternative but to rework the entire energy-generation system which would maintain the pace of technological progress and, at the same time, minimise the impact on the planet’s life-sustaining physical properties.

At one level, this is what Honda’s new car amounts to. But the development is also something that will not be replicated easily because such quantum progress means sizable investment in research and development, a type of resource which is not abundantly available all over the world. This means that only a serious, intrinsically “global effort” can halt the march towards the premature end of human civilisation on planet earth, a level of cooperation which is still facing what may be described as “teething problems”.

To have recourse to an old theme, many years ago the concept of “Spaceship Earth” was floated to underscore the indispensability of acting together to save the world’s economy and environment, the operating principle being that mankind either survives as a whole or perishes the same way. There is no half-way house where the arbiters of human life can be selective. The problem is that, very often, the wood is missed for the trees.

RANABIR RAY CHOUDHURY

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