In India many cities joined the Earth Hour on 28th March with much fanfare. The film Actor Aamir Khan and various Media publications created the necessary hype and word of mouth publicity.
I was impressed by an email my colleague Sanjiv Kathuria forwarded me:
The full meaning of Earth Hour – an hour between 8.30 pm and 9.30 pm on March 28th, when all of us are being asked to switch off all our home electric
gadgets – hit me a few days ago, when I was judging a Business Plan competition in a business school.
The room I was sitting in and the entire building, a mammoth structure, was fully airconditioned, despite the fact that it was a wonderful, cloudy day and the large campus, planted up with trees a few years ago, was well insulated from the city’s dust and grime. The room was about a thousand square feet in area, and we were about nine occupants, including a few students, who would move into the room, make their presentation and then exit.
The room had
fifty seven bulbs embedded in the ceiling, all over the room, all switched on.
I counted them twice to make sure I didn’t make a mistake. About an hour earlier, I had requested the coordinator of the program to raise the blinds and switch off the lights. "I can’t," he had replied, "there are only two switches that control all these lights and I need an approval from the head of the facilities group to turn them off." The air conditioning was just as impossible to switch off, since each floor of the building had one control point. Further, the administration department of the building had another interesting rule: if an LCD projector is in use anywhere on a floor, the air-conditioning system for that floor must be on, as the projector generates heat. We sat in the room a whole nine hours, drawing our jackets around us to keep warm, while a beautiful day passed us by.
There were three such sets of presentations going on simultaneously and I attempted to get the coordinator to see the colossal wastage of electrical energy, to little effect. He smiled in a knowing, perhaps benign way, as one would acknowledge a person of weak intellect who stated the obvious with wonderment. This was a reaction that was much, much milder that what I have often seen when talking to others about the issue of energy wastage, reactions that have ranged from don’t-waste-my-time disregard to bellicosity that a third person could actually have the temerity to interfere in a person’s energy consumption pattern, that such a third person could have little regard for the democratic right to senseless use.
None of us would behave with such egregiousness in our own homes, for every month brings a new bill for power consumption; few who squander energy at work know the price paid for it. Yet, even at home, our wasteful behaviour is telling and, more often than not, taken for granted, an excellent example being the many hours that a television set remains switched on when there is no one around, or only perhaps a lone, disinterested, brain dead viewer, watching a repeat show or a much recycled cartoon. Equally telling is the quantity of food – and the associated plastic and aluminium packaging – that is wasted at homes, the daily garbage pile increasing in size as disposable income increases and the criminal wastage of running water, pumped, as it is in Bangalore, from a hundred kilometres away.
Governments struggle to cope with these excesses, state Governments in India being good examples.
Take electricity again: on the
one hand, the peak demand for energy in the dry summer months is way above the supply, particularly since about quarter of the country’s electricity is generated by hydroelectric power, while on the other, any increase, however moderate, in the price of electricity is political hara kiri – a rival political party would make capital use of such a decision. Courageous politicians, riding on post-poll euphoria, have at times attempted to tax farmers on power usage and increase domestic tariffs, only to be frightened by public reaction into retreat and contrition. We cannot, therefore, expect the Government to address this issue.
Surely, therefore, such a shortfall in supply is a business opportunity, isn’t it? I am afraid, the costs to Planet Earth, and therefore to everyone of us, of a new power plant, whether hydel, nuclear or thermal, are prohibitive. Coal (thermal power) is, we all now know, a large contributor to global warming and destroys the lives of those who work in the mines and of those who live by them. Nuclear carries a hidden, mysterious cost, a cost that, if borne, would be heavy enough to destroy large swathes of humanity, despite all that the equipment suppliers would have us believe. Hydel energy is equally damaging, destroying forests and farmlands, displacing millions of humans and animals, annihilating species, causing siltation and carrying with it, the inherent risk of a catastrophic accident in the event of an earthquake. None of us who live in cities see these risks around us; the engines of energy generation are located far away, amongst people who do not carry the power of education and informed opinion, yet they are risks that are, I will emphasise, real and growing, as the installed capacity of electricity generation grows. None of these costs are monetary in a narrow sense, yet their impact is far, far greater than our imagination can behold.
If the Government is unable to price energy sensibly to curtail wastage and if additional generation carries a cost that is very hard to bear, we are left with the most feasible option, viz., to regulate ourselves in our consumption pattern, to bring morality into devourment, to practice Mahatma Gandhi’s aphorism – Mother Earth has enough for Man’s need, but not for Man’s greed. While I take our consumption of electrical energy as an example, the principle of conservation is applicable to the way we now lead other facets of our lives as well – in our usage of cars and two-wheelers, in the distasteful media celebration of consumption, in the availability, across the World, of fruits and vegetables from other parts of the Planet,
in the chartered flights that brings groups of geriatric tourists to sordid beaches that offer ephemeral pleasure and in the frivolous manner in which we use, abuse and discard electronic gadgets such as mobile phones, laptops and games.
The biggest mistake any one of us could do now is to compare ourselves to some other part of the World, to another country that is marked higher than us on an economic indices map and draw satisfaction at our prudence, when compared to their excesses. Most of us look for such solace to the United States, which is, no doubt, a country of excesses and one where the ‘science’ of wastage and its economic rationale was honed to a fine art form. Yet, such a comparison would leave our Earth a poorer place and our future lives in greater jeopardy. The immediate need is to measure our own consumption and to set an absolute, stretch target for energy reduction in our daily lives. I speak, not as a theorist, but as someone who has explored many options, and succeeded in some, achieving today a thirty percent reduction in energy consumption over the same period three years ago (which in turn, was three-quarters of the consumption in the same period five years ago). Most of us who work in the corporate sector are used to working towards such stretch goals; indeed we are encouraged to set them. Yet, the payoffs when you achieve these goals are temporary, a mere blip in the radar of what you could do for the Planet, if you helped reduce your power bill, with creative implementation of ideas that you can evolve leading to achievement.
We now have substantial technological support, to help us on our way Compact flourescent lamps, LED lighting, power efficient electrical appliances are all around us and all we need to do is to recognise the need to use them. This involves additional capital outlay, when compared to conventional power guzzling devices such as incandescent bulbs, but such an outlay has an excellent payback period, both financially and in the environmental sense. All that is now needed is the will to make it happen, both at your workplace and in your home. It might mean having to debate the financial costs with other stakeholders at work, or convince an architect to evolve flexible and efficient lighting design, incorporating natural light, LEDs and a number of switches,
yet there has never been a cause
more compelling than this that you could possibly champion. This is a war – no less – that must have only one result: a victory for the Planet.
The Earth Hour is a first step to that achievement. If you switch off for an hour on Saturday, you would have made a statement of support as well, for a movement whose time has come. This is not just a worldwide effort to save the Planet from calamitous climate change, but one that seeks to redefine consumption values and bring them in line with sustainability. We must accept that there is no resource availability in abundance for six billion people on Earth and the only way we can live in harmony is to live frugally, despite our income levels. From those of us who belong to the higher income strata of society, the need for frugality is more, since abstinence requires courage. It is a courage that the Earth mirrors as well. Time and again, when all has seemed lost, when a large patch of land has been ravaged by Man’s shortsightedness or a natural calamity, the Earth, when given a chance, has rebounded within a few years, a time frame measurable by the standards of human evolution.
The Earth Hour is not a symbolic gesture alone; it involves a voluntary offer of support to a cause needing it more than any other. Just as a vote – one solitary, measly vote – has defined the course of a Nation’s history in the past, our vote against the excesses
in the consumption patterns of our time, has the power to put us on a path to sustainability again.
The choice is ours. MAKES US THINK. AIN'T IT?
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