Saturday, January 16, 2010

The Electric Car Myth.

It's been known for a very, very long time that energy can neither be
created nor destroyed. It can only be converted from one form to
another. The same goes for matter - we can neither create matter not
make it vanish, no matter what it consists of, pun intended, with what
we know .

In humanity's unending search for convenient solutions, we're being
pushed this idea that electric cars are better than those driven by
fossil fuels. If you want to only look at how much smoke is coming
out of YOUR car, then yes, an electric car would indeed be a good
choice. But if you have any concern for how much less your electric
car might pollute the earth as compared to your petrol or diesel beast
- not much.

The question to ask is - where does the electricity to charge your
electric car come from? If it comes from a hydroelectric or nuclear
power plant, you won't pollute the earth any more by charging your
car. The percentage of the world's electricity generated by nuclear
power and hydroelectric power is small compared to thermal. Thermal
energy accounts for nearly 70% of the world's electric power. That
means - coal or gas is burning to provide the thermal energy.

Nuclear power generation and hydroelectric power generation have
something in common - you can't step up the power output at will. In
fact, hydroelectric power is woefully dependent on rainfall and
natural water flow, and is fast becoming unpopular because of its
unpredictability. Nuclear power on the other hand, is incredibly
clean, very reliable, but has a very long set up time and several
other factors to consider and hurdles to overcome.

Solar and wind power are still too small in contributions to really
make a difference yet. So, we're left with thermal power and its
production is on the increase worldwide. If any new demand is to be
quickly met, chances are, we will be burning more coal or gas. There
goes any chance of buying an electric car to help the planet! In
fact, if you and I buy an electric car today, we have a great chance
of putting that entire demand for extra power on a thermal plant. It
will have to be cranked up and we will be forcing more pollution upon
ourselves!

The good thing about your petrol or diesel beast is that it drinks
fuel only when it has to do some work. The horrible thing about your
electric car is that if you charge it fully and don't drive it, it
will get discharged! That's right. The batteries will simply waste
away all the energy in a useless internal reaction. So, you're more
likely to be charging it even when it is not going to be used - tring,
tring, tring - more electricity consumed and more thermal energy in
some distant plant wasted.

It would be great if you could run your electric car by charging it
with your own windmill, but we're not quite there yet. Or solar
power. Every house could have its own solar panel to charge our
electric cars. We're not there yet. The least we could do is to put
solar panels on our cars to at the very least, keep up with the
natural non-use discharge of the electric car's batteries, and
charging them to some extent when the car's parked in the sun. But we
won't do that anytime soon, because electric cars are already
expensive and solar panels will push their prices up some more.

Moreover, petrol and diesel car engines and body structures are made
of metal - one hundred percent recyclable. Electric cars contain
batteries - NOT one hundred percent recyclable, yet. It costs
electricity to make batteries, and digging up chemicals, like lithium,
is also environmental damage. We don't know to what extent we need to
rape this planet to get some efficiency.

Ah, that's the catchword - efficiency. Our cars weigh anywhere
between 700 kilos and 2000 kilos. That's an awful lot of weight to
move a measly 200 to 400 kilos of human weight. Clearly, we need our
cars to become lighter. Motorcycles are brilliant at this. They
carry a significantly higher weight as a ratio of their own weight.
No wonder some of them turn out astronomical fuel efficiency figures,
even in regular usage.

In terms of fuel mileage, hybrid cars are showing up as the best bets
without having to sacrifice range or performance. Essentially, except
for "plug-in" hybrids, these are driven by entirely by fossil fuel
engines, and really cannot claim to be less impactful on the
environment, especially when they carry such enormous batteries as
well. Hybrid cars also have two technologies built into them - the
internal combustion engine and the electric drive mechanisms, so they
are inherently heavier than their single technology counterparts.

The Reva, India's fully electric midget of a car looks so ugly you'd
have to be masochistic to buy it. The team behind that monstrosity
should be out of their minds. to imagine we would put up with that
level of ugliness. That thing better be cheaper than a bicycle to run
if it looks that bad. It isn't. No respite anywhere!

Now, reality. Every manufacturer in India seems intent on putting out
more and more cars, many of them making bigger and faster,
comfortable, luxurious, even ostentatious. Nobody seems to really
worry about what impact this will eventually have on our environment.
I am always amused when news of a new "launch" comes out. What the
hell is there to launch? And whatever happens to the cars that are
launched into orbit? Plenty of amusement is in store in the year to
come.

The Toyota Prius hybrid is priced at Rs. 27 lakhs. Most certainly,
Indian money of that size should not be locked up in one car, no
matter how great. Luckily, not many of us will want to spend so much
on just one car. One of the most successful car models in the world,
the Prius, is about to realize its first marketplace mistake. While
it is priced at close to or just higher than the average car prices in
other countries, it is priced way above most cars in our market. If
you have 27 lakhs, buy a lovely car for 7 lakhs, drop 20 lakhs in a
fixed deposit, get ten percent a year or two lakh rupees a year in
interest, and you will have about 8,000 rupees a month that you can
burn 200 litres of petrol with! At the end of a few years, you will
have almost your entire investment left! How could the Japanese have
missed this simple equation?

If we get more nuclear, wind and solar power, we will actually clean
up the air, but we must also do away with batteries. We simply
haven't figured out how to do that, and in fact, we will be digging up
the earth for all its lithium soon enough. No matter what we do, we
will impact the planet. Breathing included. However, we can turn
vegetarian and help enormously, since one acre of land can support 20
vegetarians but only 1.5 non vegetarians. No wonder livestock farming
is much more damaging to the planet than all the planes, cars, and
ships put together. This would demand a change in lifestyle for a lot
of people, and the food industry is definitely not going to discourage
meat consumption anytime soon. There are no products to be sold by
industries to a renewed interest in being vegetarian. It is also
cheaper to be vegetarian.

So, what can you and I do practically, to show our concern for the
environment? Simple - just do whatever gives us the most value for
money spent. Per person, buses are cheaper than cars only because so
many of us travel in a single bus. It is also the most
environmentally sensible thing to do - take public transport whenever
possible. Anytime we're willing to drag along a thousand kilos of
metal and rubber to transport ourselves, we're killing the
environment. It is really that simple. It is the same with
vegetarianism - it is the more efficient AND economically sensible
choice.

But our lifestyles demand much more from us than to be ecologically
sensitive. We'd really not benefit from slowing our lives down to
protect the environment. But there's a natural order to even this
mayhem. It is commerce that is driving new technologies, not some
fear of disaster. So, even when electric cars eventually get to make
sense to us, they will first have to make economic sense. For now,
let's not get conned into any consciousness or activism that our
wallets don't agree with.

BSK.

Friday, January 8, 2010

The Copenhagen Copout.

All the world's leaders showed up in Copenhagen, agreed on all the problems, disagreed on all the solutions, and left. Let's forget for the moment the complete unnecessity of these summits where nothing gets done, and let's forgive for the moment the stupendously bad example of polluting the earth for summits like this, when all communications and negotiations could have been held via satellite and even allowed for an innovative interactive round the clock worldwide television debate that could have brought the peoples of the world together in an epochal electronic gathering. It could have been amazing. Sponsors would have flocked to be part of this mega television event, and money made from the program could have been earmarked for a symbollic investment in carbon footprint reduction.

Copenhagen, instead, turned out to be a bureaucratic bungle, a diplomatic dilemma, and a circus of clowns who got nothing done. In fact, there was a spectacular amount of nothing that came out of it. It was aptly called COP, and sure enough, everyone copped out. None of the issues were new, none of the arguments came as a surprise, and none of the failures were so difficult to foresee. The intent was to take a chance on this summit, and we can appreciate that, but for the
leaders of all the countries to have to put on such a poor show when the fiasco was completely avoidable puts us in a bigger quandary - "Can the decisions on climate change wait for the world to come to agreement?".

While we ponder upon the solutions to the gravest problems to our existence and survival as a race, and allow for Mother Nature to play her own hand in many ways, we really should take an amused look at the clearest specifics.

The USA is the world's biggest polluter. People in the USA have finally taken to driving smaller cars, but more driven by high fuel prices than any real concern for global warming. It also helped that their economy was on the squeeze. However, the biggest pollution they cause is from electricity generation and that hasn't changed dramatically, althought there is plenty of incentive now under Obama, to change their ways. God bless their optimism, and trust them for being enterprising. Obama is headed in the right direction when he says that the next big economic boom could come out of building environmentally important industries while coming out of dependence on oil. Great! But they're not going nuclear anytime soon, and the country is so big in every perspective that when you consider 4% of the world's population hogging 25% of the world's energy, any change the USA makes will be significant but slow. Let's wish them well, but
not expect too much to happen very soon.

The next biggest polluter is China. China is power hungry at the moment, and who can blame a giant who has just woken up. The problem with China, however, is that its pollution is on an increase! All its new power plants are coal fired thermal power generation units, and they are all massive. Could they have opted for nuclear power? Sure, but they didn't. China needs power today, and it is not likely to hamper the speed of its progress for any environmental goodwill.
China has never been too bothered about brownie points. So, they cannot be stopped.

Now, in terms of solutions, there is no way we can allow the rainforests of Brazil to vanish. It is the biggest heat sink in the world, and we are pretty much doomed without that. A lot of poor
Brazilians are dependent on these forests and they are depleting rather fast. Vanishing, really. So, just as unimaginatively as this COP summit was held, President Obama has suggested the band aid to solve this problem - Let's pay the poorest people money so they don't cut their forests. In other words, if your forest gives you two cents for cutting a tree, we will give you three for not cutting it. Okay, great!

For some reason, this sounds too good to be true, and sure enough it is. Obama is unwittingly shining a bright light on his ignorance of the other factors. Whenever money changes hands, some work has to get done. It is one of the most basic tenets of economies. Getting paid to NOT
do something is not going to be sustainable. If a farmer gets money for NOT farming, he will stop producing whatever he produces. An entire economic subculture that is currently dependent on wood, gum, rubber and a myriad other products coming out of these rainforests
cannot be stopped because America and China would like to piss away their carbon into the leaves of Brazil. Imagine what a black market in carbon credits this will open up under the auspices of controlled laziness!

This isn't that far away from our own reality, right here in Tamilnadu, in the wake of Chief Minister Karunanidhi's Re.1/kg rice scheme. Nobody asked for this rice, and nobody wanted it. Now, what is happening is that an entire black market has opened up for this rice, which is bought, polished and sold at higher prices by the people who are eligible for it. Now that they are finding a way to make money without doing much, our agricultural lands have no labourers. We have a new culture of laziness that has brought decay to our well established system of working for money.

We are seeing a whole generation of poor people suddenly incentivized to be lazy, to seek easy money working for minimum wages doing light physical work like digging for local road projects for a few hours and getting paid a lot more than agricultural wages paid them for generations. The big difference is that agriculture sustained them for generations, while a whole generation with no skills that is coming out of myopic government programs won't be able to sustain
anything but the vote banks. Farmers in Tamilnadu have to depend on migrant labour from Bihar to rescue their crops, and with agriculture becoming less and less worth it, why do we wonder why grain prices are going through the roof? Yet another bubble waiting to burst.

Artificial injections of money to change cultures, lifestyles, and mindsets have never worked. It isn't that hard to see poor Brazilians losing all their forest dependent skills, becoming lazy and
unproductive, taking to illicit trades to boost their incomes, and frittering their lives away. There is simply no cause for optimism when an entire populace is given incentive to be lazy. No subculture of laziness has ever gone unpunished. We are about to witness chaos in Brazil unfold over the next decade, if this monkey of a scheme finds its way out of the cage.

Let's see if we can actually fix the problem with this logic. How about giving Australia its twelve billion dollars a year instead of having to export its coal to China? That would put the world out of its misery from China's coal burning power plants, the Australians would be happy to get money for not mining, and China would... wait a minute! That's not going to work too well for the Chinese! They would go to war to get their coal, and since they hold the world's greatest reserves of the US dollar, nobody wants to piss them off just yet.

So, if every country in the world could get endless amounts of money for NOT exploiting something they have, we would put an end to global warming, but we would also put an end to all commerce as we know it. In any case, what is the world going to buy if nothing gets made
anywhere? The money we pay for people to laze around will eventually become meaningless, since there won't be anything to buy with it! Every currency being printed is roughly equivalent to the GDP of the country or region, but this is where the US dollar has been playing the monkey. It isn't based on the USA's GDP! It isn't based on its gold reserves either! It is based on this grand assumption that a great deal of the world's very important resource reserves are pegged
to the US dollar and that the world will continue to grow infinitely in abundant hunger for the same currency in order to buy from the same resource reserves of - mostly oil! It is also based on the assumption that the USA will be around as the world's most robust economy for a very long time.

Question the stupidity of these assumptions, promoted by and subscribed by people that graduated from the best business schools in the world, and question the connection between California real estate loan defaulters and people losing jobs in Chennai, and what we can do
to really save the world, and all economists will tell you in many complicated ways what we already know - we don't know what the heck to do! But it's all clearly suddenly less important than global warming? Why? Because the game is up and a great deal of the US dollar's strength is going to depend heavily on new technologies coming out of the USA! That's why!

A country like Canada, on the other hand, actually benefits from global warming. With a one degree C rise in average temperatures, it stands to get a substantially higher portion of its land more agriculturally productive, a fair amount of it to come under new agriculture, and what better way for Canada than to hold a bigger stake in the USA's food consumption while the USA edges towards becoming a bigger desert? A country with a 30 million population feeding a giant in the neighbourhood with a 300 million population that eats too much. Brilliant economic sense. They have enough land mass to not worry about a few islands of theirs vanishing either. So we will never hear anything about global warming coming out of Canada, anytime soon.

It's still about timing, and while the rest of the world sweats for survival, for no fault other than teaming up with speculative American financial shenanigans dressed as geniuses, many countries will still look with bated breath at economic recovery of that same country! Quite simply because it isn't easy to build another 330 million behemoth that can provide so much - yo guessed it, consumption. The bad news is, when the USA's current band aid of building infrastructure to spur local economic growth runs out, it will wonder how to refinance its $2trillion debt.

The rest of the world, including China, will not want to buy any more into the USA's debt trap, since it hasn't repaid anything substantial debt for a long, long time. It is no longer a manufacturing powerhouse and while still the innovation leader, it cannot expect to make a booming global business out of technologies that can take people to Mars, for instance, just yet. There won't be so much betting on the next real estate bubble either. Automatically, interest rates will rise and Americans will be choking on their wake up calls. The US Dollar is going to decline and one can expect that countries like India, that have substantial US Dollar reserves will
diversify, further accelerating the panic.

A country like Australia that is building its economic reserves on the export of billions of dollars worth of coal to power China's powerplants, will hope that nothing comes in the way of their growth. With the drop of the US Dollar in value, all of a sudden, Australia might have to quickly rethink the currency they want to have. It won't take long for a few OPEC countries to peg their oil reserves to the Euro, since the Euro is at the very least backed by gold. The US Dollar is not backed by anything that has everlasting value.

In the middle of this mess, small countries are likely to be submerged by rising waters and their refugee populations will rush to the nearest safe havens. By virtue of its distance from many vulnerable islands, the USA is not in the greatest danger of receiving many of these environmental refugees, but by moral responsibility, it should pay for causing so much damage over the years. The other side of the argument is that the USA spurred economic growth around the world for so long, so where is the gratitude?

Money may not be a solution to many problems we face today. It is important to realize the big mistake the USA for example, commits often, in thinking the world would be a "better place" if the rest of the world lived and thought like it! What could be further from the truth? It is this perception that has led the USA to "throw money" at every problem, and hope that a solution will magically arrive. It is one of the reasons the War On Terror isn't going anywhere.

A lot of solutions will come from investing human capital, in actions that show our will to be involved, our readiness to give ourselves to the need at hand. We may continue to get hit by Katrinas and Ailas and earthquakes and fires, but now we're faced with the spectre of entire countries being submerged, gone forever! We can't really throw money to aliens to give us the technology to clean up our planet. We can, however, get out of our myopic, hoarding oriented mindsets and examine the virtues of an unspeculative present, our immediate availability to tell the truth, and our collective intent to take sincere action.

Put simply, it is time to stop thinking about PROFIT at any cost. It isn't about philanthropy either, but it is about working without expecting a proportionate reward. All for one, and one for all. Resources must be set aside from wherever possible, in whichever form possible, to reverse global warming. The results and findings of all scientific studies can and will actually deliver a phenomenal amount of business opportunity. If there is one thing we can learn from history, it is that our greatest progress and prosperity came from periods when we were industrious. It is simply time to go to work again, not try to buy laziness.

The doors are opening for a more holistic understanding of the earth as OUR planet, and doesn't matter what we do or don't, we're in this together. It might be the time to give the spiritually evolved voices of united humanity a bigger stage, for the political expertise exercises haven't got us very far as a race. We're running out of some resources, but that doesn't mean we need to run out of ideas as well. After all, we didn't come out of the stone age because we ran
out of stones. We survived without the wheel, and we did quite okay even before we found oil. We must believe the best of us lies ahead, because we have no choice! We better come up with our best performance yet, this time just to survive! We simply cannot waste time looking back. We don't have any examples from our past that can save us now! We need to figure out in the present how to have some kind of a future. What fun!

Yes, it is a fact that livestock farming has a greater environmental negative impact than all the cars, planes, and ships put together. Anybody turning vegetarian because of this? Did anybody in Copenhagen even talk about this? We still haven't learned how to make it our business to think beyond business, have we?