You got 20 years more. To live, or learn.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2008/mar/01/scienceofclimatechange.climatechange

Sounds like paranoid scare-mongering ? His last round of 'predictions' would have too. But its not that tough to imagine, given the collective state of denial our species has adopted! Be it water, or energy, we refuse to challenge and relook at "life as we know it" and every little battle between convenience and effort towards making a change is lost to the former.

While its probably true that the tipping point might have been reached a while ago, but hey, we gotta try something. At the least, it'll help us adapt more to living a different life - where a lot we take for granted will not be available - easy water, boundless fuel, flights over Europe. We are already paying for the mass produced excessive lifestyle invented and marketed by the last couple of generations, and our kids and theirs will pay the most for it.

Enjoy it while you can, to whatever extent you can. Or learn to grow some food, water, and live with erratic weather real quick.

Posted via email from bangalorekaapi

You're Grounded!

There was a recent mail on our apartment mailing list which informed us that about 1/2 of the 2000 borewells in our area have run dry, because of which the water tanker supply was likely to get erratic. We were requested to brace ourselves for water shortages, at least intermittent ones.

At least a couple of weeks a year, BESCOM, anyhow struggling to keep pace with the ever increasing need of a burgeoning city, fails to supply power for hours together. Our apartment's diesel gensets have been known to run overnight. These run at a maximum of 35-40% efficiency, and the entire dependence on huge amounts of fossil fuel directly to keep the lifts etc working is definitely not a very ecologically conscious act.

Vertical living just needs more natural resources and energy. The lack of these is starting to cause minor inconveniences and may give us a taste of major failures in not too distant a future. It'll take very little time for these tall edifices to our conceit and imagined prowess and mastery of the elements to be uninhabitable. Sure, sounds like a doomsday movie, but I'd almost bet that 24 hours of no water supply will be a real, quick trailer in not too distant a future.


Are apartments, as they're designed and built today, sustainable in the long run ? An 'independent' home on the ground level can live off human effort and power, harness enough solar energy, harvest enough rainwater, and redo stuff like plumbing etc more easily as newer, smarter, more efficient solutions are found to reduce our individual footprints. The pressure an individual home exerts on the earth is lower, and can be reduced quite dramatically. Can apartments do it ? Will real estate values start getting tied in to these fundmentals ?

Should I really start thinking about that house ?

The Increasing Autombile Wastelines

Inventing Green « We’ve Got 35 Times More Horsepower in Our Cars Than in Our Power Plants talks about the power generation capacity available through automobiles vs all the rest of them! Interesting way to look at this.

I'm sure that a couple of hundred years from now, folks will both lament and wonder at the stupidity and short sightedness of a few of our generations. Consider a few facts:

• Cars carry mostly their own weight around. Most of their energy is used up in just moving the mass of metal, rubber and glass and plastics that they are!
  
• Cars are getting more and more powerful - and at least in the cities (where most run) going slower and slower!
  
• On board electrical capacity can usually power a host of appliances these days - including mini refrigerators and huge entertainment systems. Mostly goes unused!
• Cars "sit around" for 90%+ of the time, yet a lot of us have one each.

The debate often reduces to personal safety, personal convenience etc. Case in point from the comments in the above article - "I certainly would not want to take my wife & 3 kids camping in a “Tato Nano”, much less worry about what parts of me will still be around for the paramedics to save after an accident." This is a very inward out, narrow way of looking at the problem from its current state alone. The fact is that as a transportation system, its pretty flawed from an efficiency (and even safety) point of view. These arguments often ignore that completely alternative transport systems are possible which consume less on an average, provide more safety overall and are just - well - saner.

But then purging was part of "modern" medical science at some point of time, wasn't it...

Our e-port card so far

Having become more "enlightened" citizens, we've been trying to reduce our footprint as much as possible. Here's a few things achieved, and a few more to go.

+ I cycle to work 90%+ of the time
+ We reuse the "waste" water ejected by the RO filter
+ The automatic dryer is strictly for emergencies - not switched on for ages now
+ Try and aggressively avoid "standby mode" for TV/Home theatre/chargers - still left on 30% of the time tho :(
+ Determined to do fewer kilometers on the car. Working out very well, thank you!
+ Been trying to promote cycling in our circle of influence, and beyond. Decent success.

- Cannot seem to reduce geyser usage. Love warm water, and attempts at minimizing time switched on have failed.
- Have not revived attempts towards en-mass adoption of solar heating in our apartment complex
- Have failed in attempt towards getting apartment to optimize usage of diesel for backup gensets
- The Standby Switchoff is only a partial success - needs more work
- Plastic usage is still not low. There's so much that comes packaged in plastic from the stores :(

Overall, pleased - but there's scope for improvement.

Lets make Bangalore Hotter

There's a power cut right now. I'm at home, and last year we'd taken a call to not start the gensets between 10am-5pm if the electricity was out.

Its in the lower 30s right now - and thats out in the sun. This being Bangalore, the breeze is still pleasant, and its perfectly tolerable indoors, unless you've grown up in the Upper Himalayas or the Arctic or at least Canada. But there are mails about the unbearable heat, asking for backup power to be restored immediately. The power cuts are shorter these days, and surely we can afford this!

Can we ? Our apartment complex uses 2x180KWh generators to keep the backup power going. At peak loads, utilization has rarely exceeded 40%. During the day its worse - with most people at office. Can we really afford to keep making Bangalore hotter, and crib about the heat, and keep running gensets longer as we strain the power supply with a larger and larger demand for energy to keep our airconditioners running perpetually?

Yes, we've got so used to keeping airconditioning running all the time at work, in the cars, that the lack of it makes it unbearable? (Honest, its in no way hot as I type this. My daughter's here too, and not even close to complaining about the heat).

What can we do ? There's been talk of trying to connect both gensets and try and reduce the diesel consumption to a minimum. But the action's been slow, and I fear will die out once the gensets are back on fulltime. There's also the aspect of redefining what "need" is and the things we "cannot live without" as a society.

We in the middle class blame the government a lot for most stuff. Lack of roads, lack of electricity supply, lack of public transport, and everything else. Often rightly so. But my observation in the recent past also leads me to believe that we're quite insensitive and focused on our short term needs, even at a huge cost to our long term benefits. The craz.y salary spiral, the real estate bubble, the growing use of cars even for basic grocery shopping, the string of excuses for not using public transport, etc - these are all symptoms of a common malaise -"let me solve that little bit of an issue and who the hell cares if the cost is huge - I didn't create the problem after all". We keep giving in too easily, to too many "necessities", at too large a cost. I really have nothing against convenience, but we could start showing some level of sensitivity towards ensuring the footprint these cause is reduced as much as possible. Monetarily, we can surely afford that.

Fair enough. Sure, I'm probably over-reacting and hyper-ventilating, but then I'm also despairing.

Edit : just noticed the Google Ads on the side for this page - both hilarious and depressing. Commerce, ah.

The Standard of Living Problem

This was sent on the Bangalore Bikers' Club group. Someone also noticed the mention that in the 70s, 71% of passenger trips were made on bicycles! He also commented that "It was better than Copenhagen."

So Bangalore, and in fact most of the country, did have a bike culture - ? Except it was hardly a culture - but more of a lack of choice. Our species is so governed by defined and accepted "standards" that we soon got hit by technology, and all that. And as affordability/incomes improved, there was only one path that spelled "progress" and we took to our Vespas and Lambrettas like there was no tomorrow, licence raj notwithstanding.

And so on and so forth. The used Ambys, Padminis, the landscape changing 800 and Gypsy for the braver souls, and in more recent part the plethora of options with more and more features becoming 'standard' and airconditioning becoming the only visible way to battle the noxiousness this progress brought into our lives.

The argument given, usually, is that this is the "price" of development and economic progress.

Really ? Are we so dumb that there's only the whole of one of two or three models to be picked from ? Nah, we just never bothered to define our own report card and terms of progress.

So its someone else's "standards" we're trying to catch up with - consumption of electricity, fuel, goods leading the march. Upsizing, a "standby" mode for everything at home, western WCs, zippy long expressways to merely get to work - all are symptoms of this affliction.

These "standards" have started to interfere with the "living" in a big way. Gotta evolve beyond the aping we've gotten into. Gotta be smarter than the species has been in the last 30-40 years or so.