The Hindu Business Line : Nature cure for an ailing planet

It has been proved time and again that nature’s mechanism quickly nurses back planet earth if its complex healing forces are allowed to act with least interference from humans.

Pankaj Narayan Pandit

It is 37 year since the UN christened June 5 as World Environment Day. Today it is fashionable to “turn green”, at least in rhetoric.

After many years of denial, developed countries have at last acknowledged the link between global warming and the human activity of releasing GHGs (greenhouse gases). Clear evidence of global warming — such as retreating ice glaciers, stronger hurricanes, milder winters, hotter summers, thinner polar bears, catastrophic rains causing floods, viral diseases and vanishing species — have proved that planet earth needs healing.

Reducing emissions

Under the Kyoto Protocol, 38 industrialised countries are required to reduce by 2012 their GHG emissions by 5.2 per cent below the 1990 levels. Such reductions in carbon emissions are to be achieved through caps on trading emission permits, trade and purchase of emission reduction credits (carbon credits) from developing countries for CDM (clean development methodology) and joint investment projects.

Today, while the carbon trading market is valued at $64 billion, the volume of carbon traded is a mere 6 per cent of total GHG emissions.

Deforestation, power generation and transportation account for 55 per cent of total global warming.

Hence, focusing on lifestyle changes, technological innovations, and economic subsidies from carbon credits can achieve maximum ROI (return on investment) for ecology.

Halting global warming

Each of the following measures, if followed in the next 50 years, has the potential to halt global warming.

End-user efficiency and conservation: a) increase the efficiency of cars from 30 MPG (miles per gallon) to 60 MPG; b) drive less — not 10,000 miles a year, but 5,000; c) cut power use in homes, offices, stores by 25 per cent by simple remedies such as switching off appliances when not in use; d) use solar water heating wherever feasible.

Power generation efficiency, reducing transmission losses: a) raise efficiency of coal-fired plants from 40 per cent to 60 per cent; b) replace large coal-fired plants with gas-fired ones; and c) manage peak load requirements with awareness campaigns.

Alternative energy sources: a) step up the use of wind and solar power; b) use waste to run power plants and, thereby, displace coal

Agriculture and forestry: a) do not permit export-oriented industries in developing countries that indulge in deforestation ; b) plant more tress through social forestry schemes.

Reduce release of methane from human waste: a) composting organic household garbage to make bio-fertiliser; and b) treating all sewage water before releasing into oceans and rivers.

Strategies to reverse carbon must have positive economic payoff. Not everything that is packaged as “green” is good for the world. However, in the long term, whatever is good for ecology has to be good for the economy, too.

From the ecology-economy matrix, it can be seen that the ‘Green box’ has projects that are good for both ecology and the economy. In the ‘Yellow box’, current technology does not have a clear economic ROI (return on investment). However, with generous subsidies in the form of carbon credits and technological innovations, such projects can become economically viable in emerging countries, and move to the ‘Green box’.

Similarly, projects in the ‘Blue box’ can become economically viable with innovative technological developments as well as carbon credits from developed countries. However, in the ‘Red box, vested interests lobby with the government to subsidise projects ’, which make neither economic nor ecological sense. Making ethyl alcohol from corn, carbon sequestering, or carbon storage is a case in point.

Nature’s principle

Entropy is defined as the non-usable part of energy. Globally, entropy is increasing by the day, as fossil fuels are consumed and excess carbon discharged into the air.

However, nature works on the principle of negative entropy, creating value from anything that appears as waste.

In nature’s complex ways, nothing is useless. Unfortunately, the rhetoric on global warming has so far been limited to human technology, science, engineering, when nothing can ever match nature’s system in terms of cost effectiveness.

Carbon is the most abundant and essential building block of life, and energy. Human life on earth is made possible by the primary process of photosynthesis, wherein extra carbon in the environment is captured (or sequestered to use a modern term) by plants which breath out oxygen to nourish life.

Vasudeva Kutumbakam (‘The whole world is one family’), says an ancient Indian text. Mottainai is a Japanese way of life that reduces all waste. There are similar philosophies in many eastern cultures too.

These civilisations thrived before the Industrial Revolution, in a sustainable way. They allowed nature adequate time to turn waste back into wealth. Such a philosophy is the antithesis of dirty carbon-devouring demon economies that promote consumerism, consumption, convenience, all leading to high wastage. Today, the world has acknowledged the need to save its planet.

The danger now is industrial lobbies may embrace “supposedly green” technologies of questionable ecological benefits, subsidised by taxpayers’ money.

All living beings, even the most primitive ones like bees, ants and termites, display high collective intelligence, borne out of an evolutionary survival instinct. Unfortunately, the most intelligent species, human beings, driven by greed, are ruining the planet. It has been proved time and again that nature’s mechanism quickly nurses back planet earth if its complex healing forces are allowed to act with least interference fromhumans. Let’s tap nature’s mechanism, honed over millions of years, to heal our planet.

(The author is managing trustee of SLK Foundation, a registered charitable trust. blfeedback@thehindu.co.in)