India becoming biggest emitter of sulphur dioxide

Darryl D'Monte ,  24.11.17 

http://indiaclimatedialogue.net/2017/11/24/india-biggest-emitter-so2/

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Sulphur dioxide forms a large part of the current air pollution emergencies in Indian cities, including the capital

The coal used in Indian power plants has high sulphur dioxide content (Photo by Vikramdeep Sidhu)

While the world has been preoccupied with reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which is generated by burning fossil fuels, sulphur dioxide (SO₂) emissions have not received the same attention. Produced by burning coal, wood, petrol, diesel or farm stubble, SO₂ forms a large part of the pollution haze enveloping cities in northern India every winter.

Most of the SO₂ in Indian skies is emitted when power plants burn coal to produce electricity. Typically, coal contains 3% of sulphur, but coal from Assam in India is known to have higher content.

Now, a new study by the University of Maryland shows that India has caught up with China as the biggest emitter of sulphur dioxide and is poised to overtake it. It shows that India and China are on “opposite trajectories” so far as these emissions are concerned. Since 2007, emissions in China have declined by three-quarters, while those in India have increased by half.  See: India’s coal sector seeks to avoid emission norms

Sulphur dioxide harms human health, besides causing a haze. When it combines with moisture in the atmosphere, it forms acid rain, which is what caused a major concern in the 1970s regarding the threat to the marble façade of the Taj Mahal in Agra, a fear which persists today.

Emission data

The US researchers collected emission data from inventories of the number of factories, power plants, automobiles and other contributors to SO₂ levels. These findings were then enhanced due to advances in satellite measurements. For SO₂, the researchers have used the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI), which first produced evidence that China had started to reduce emissions in coal-fired power plants by installing flue gas desulphurisation (FGD) devices, along with reductions in such emissions from US plants.

They state: “More recently, a new technique that combines wind and improved SO2 data was employed to develop an OMI-based emission catalogue for nearly 500 sources around the globe. This technique enabled the detection of ~40 sources missing from the conventional bottom-up inventories.”

Satellite images for China and India contrast their 2005 and 2016 positions. In 2005, China has a “vertical column density” of SO₂ in bright crimson and even purple, depicting heavy emissions in eastern regions, while India has tiny swathes of green in eastern and central parts of the country. By 2016, however, the situation has changed, with the same Chinese areas now red-orange, while India’s affected areas have grown and have turned purple-red in density.

In 2005, almost the entire North China plain was affected, with two provinces particularly acute due to several power plants as well as coking and cement industries. Eleven years later, there were virtually no hot spots there, while the two provinces recorded sizeable reductions.

The researchers used the OMI data to extrapolate each country’s total emissions. SO₂ emissions from China peaked at 36.6 million tonnes (Mt) a year in 2007 and have since been generally decreasing. At 8.4 Mt, the level in 2016 is a quarter of that in 2005. “The decrease reflects stricter pollution control measures, coupled with a gradual shift to other, non-coal-based energy sources, and the recent slowdown of the Chinese economy,” say the researchers. “Since the early 2000s, the Chinese government has introduced, for example, policies to reduce SO2 emissions and a new national air quality standard for fine particles. Electricity generation in China grew by more than 100 per cent during 2005–2015, but coal consumption increased by ~50%. The brief period of emission growth in 2009–2011 can probably be attributed to government stimulus in response to the global financial crisis of 2007–2008.”

Emissions growth

By contrast, India’s emissions have steadily growth throughout this period. For 2016, the emissions from India are roughly the same as China’s. “If the current trends continue, India will emit significantly more SO2 than China in the coming years… We arrive at the same conclusion that India is becoming, if it is not already, the world’s top SO2 emitting country,” they estimate.

The study also measured the population exposed to SO₂ levels. In the past 10 years, such loading diminished by a factor of five in China, but it increased by a half in India. In China, over 450 million people were exposed to very harmful levels of SO2 in 2013, but this number decreased to 99 million in 2016. At a lower level, the 190 million in China in 2013 fell to 13 million in 2016, a “remarkable drop” of over 90%.

In India, 0.7 million people were exposed to the lower level of SO2 in 2013. In just three years, however, this has grown to 3.8 million. The exposure in India is limited because the current hot spots are relatively less-densely populated, though that may change over time as electricity consumption grows and spreads throughout the country.

There is a slight blip in this scenario, however. According to the just-released 2017 Global Carbon Budget, “The most significant factor in the resumption of global emissions growth is the projected 3.5 per cent increase in China’s emissions (which would include some SO₂). This is the result of higher energy demand, particularly from the industrial sector, along with a decline in hydropower use because of below-average rainfall. China’s coal consumption grew by 3%… The 2017 growth may result from economic stimulus from the Chinese government, and may not continue in the years ahead.”

“The causes of continued coal use are clearly the growing energy needs. We are not alone in this. Even Germany is using coal doing despite tall claims of how progressive it is on climate action. Renewables are growing at impressive rates in India and China but both remain the most polluted countries. Already more than a million deaths are counted as premature and attributed to air pollution. What’s going on in Delhi is an example even though it is not directly related to coal burning. But a lack of power to dispose of crop residue in a more benign way and not having enough electrical vehicles are part of the bigger picture of why we continue to rely on coal,” Raghu Murtugudde, also from the University of Maryland, told indiaclimatedialogue.net. “The consequences are that even when rich countries wean themselves off coal, we will be tempted to continue since they will export coal at cheaper rates! The US already did that to Germany under Obama who was also climate-friendly.”

Widespread exposure

“We are on our own when it comes to our air and water quality. We must note the population-weighted emissions increasing, which indicates higher exposure to a larger population. This paper does not get into the circulation changes by season so we may even be getting pollution sweeping in from China during the northeast monsoon,” he said. “The India Meteorological Department and Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology have to get more seriously into modelling and forecasting air pollution, especially remembering that the aerosols (airborne particulates) are already found to be partially responsible for solar dimming, reduced land-ocean thermal contrast and the resultant decrease in mean monsoons. The remote impacts that control the widespread floods and the mean monsoons as well as the potential for injection of pollution from remote locations make it even more important that we stay on top of what we can control — like our own clean energy and environmental regulations and forecasting.”

“The northeast monsoon (or Asian monsoon in general) may transport some pollutants emitted from China to India, but the effects are unlikely to be important for air quality near the surface in India, since the Tibet Plateau will block the near surface air flow. Also, SO₂ is a short-lived pollutant, so what we observed from satellites is mostly related to local emissions,” Can Li, lead author of the study from the University of Maryland and NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre, told indiaclimatedialogue.net. “The transport of air pollution from China mainly affects regions to the east (Korea, Japan, and further downwind including the US, there are hundreds of studies on this subject), and in some cases Southeast Asia.”

More than two-thirds of India’s electricity generation capacity comes from thermal power plants, with about 85% of the country’s thermal power generation being coal-based. The 10 biggest thermal power stations operating in India are all coal-fired, with seven of them owned and operated by state-run NTPC.

Plants which are the biggest offenders in central-eastern India include the Vindhyachal plant in Singrauli district, Madhya Pradesh, the largest in the country with an installed capacity of 4,760MW; Talcher Super Thermal Power Station, Odisha; Sipat Thermal Power Plant, Chhattisgarh; NTPC Ramagundam, Andhra Pradesh; Korba Super Thermal Power Plant, Chhattisgarh and Jharsuguda Thermal Power Plant, Odisha. These six are among the 10 biggest power plants in the country and they are located close to coalmines.

Faustian bargain

“There is a Faustian bargain in that, to avoid catastrophic outcomes, we must cut emissions very rapidly, particularly from coal. However, this removes the aerosols (associated with SO₂), which will lead to a one-off increase in temperature and exacerbate the risk of catastrophic outcomes,” Ian Dunlop of the Climate Change Task Force in Australia and former Chair, Australian Coal Association, told indiaclimatedialogue.net. “But the longer action is delayed, the worse the bargain becomes, so we have to act to cut emissions as rapidly as possible.”

“It is particularly important for India to act as soon as possible, and to avoid the high emission path which China followed, as the world has run out of time if we wish to have any realistic chance of staying below 2 degrees Celsius.(In the 2015 Paris climate agreement, all countries agreed to keep mean global temperature rise within two degrees Celsius from the pre-industrial level). You are of course already seeing exceptionally high temperatures in parts of India during the summer months.”

Climate clarity must begin at home

http://htsyndication.com/htsportal/hindustan-times/article/climate-clarity-must-begin-at-home/24387913

Darryl D'Monte
22 November 2017
(original unedited text)

Every annual UN climate conference of parties (COP, or countries) ends on an identical note. There is an inching towards measures that may reduce the catastrophic consequences of runaway climate change; sometimes, it is one step forward and two steps backwards.

That was what transpired in Bonn last week, where procedural decisions taken at the major conclave in Paris in 2015 were renegotiated. Contentious issues included the steps that industrial countries needed to take before 2020, as they were required to do under a UN protocol. And, how exactly countries would be monitored for their voluntary reductions in carbon dioxide emissions.

There was rhetoric regarding keeping the average global temperatures from rising by 2˚C, if not 1.5˚. However,  even if all the present commitments  are observed, it will not prevent the world from crossing that threshold and experience terrible changes – hot and cold spells, storms, droughts and floods, all of which are already making their presence felt in country after country.

The UN negotiations may appear like countries rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, but they still remain the best chance the world has to save itself. There are two threats to the future of the planet: the first is a nuclear holocaust which, despite a trigger-happy US President, remains in the realm of the possible. The second is irreversible climate change, which – for the first time in human history – affects all countries, rich and poor. This is the Anthropocene, the age when humans risk extinction by their impact on the earth’s environment. Unless the world acts decisively to cut carbon emissions to halt warming, there is no escape from this “unthinkable”.

There are two issues which underpin the negotiations. The first, as in all multilateral agreements, is to follow the money. At what was predicted to be a decisive UN meet in Copenhagen in 2009 but turned out to be a whimper, industrial countries pledged to provide the Green Climate Fund (GCF) $100 billion a year by 2020 for developing countries to cope with climate change. By May this year, only $10.3 billion had been pledged, with only three years left. The EU, Japan, UK, France and Germany have promised over $1 billion each.

President Obama had pledged $3 billion, but the US has committed only a third so far and his successor has cancelled further payments. Trump has scoffed at providing “billions and billions and billions” to poor countries as “another scheme to redistribute wealth out of the US through the so-called Green Climate Fund”. But on a per capita basis, the US ranks 11th among the 45 contributing countries, and as a proportion of GDP, it figures ranks 32^nd. What is more, it is less than the $4.7 billion a year of federal government subsidies to fossil fuel production.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, comprising 35 richest countries) put the cat among the pigeons last year by claiming that the financial flows as aid to developing countries had already reached $66.8 billion a year. This was sleight of hand to include private investments as well, whereas India and China, as “Like-Minded Developing Countries” in the UN parleys, have insisted that contributions to the fund should be new and additional infusions to ongoing development aid and not include flows through capital markets, in particular pension funds and other institutional investors that control trillions of dollars that pass through Wall Street and other financial centres.

The second issue, closely linked to the first, is technology to help poor countries tackle global warming. India, among others, has complained the aid estimates have been massively inflated by items like private loans to buy green technology from developed nations which resemble ordinary commercial transactions rather than foreign assistance. Here lies an opportunity: China is already the world leader in renewables and India has made a bid for its place in the sun by spearheading the International Solar Alliance, which it formed with France in Paris two years ago. It can provide solar technologies to some 120 countries which lie between the two tropics by undercutting western manufacturers. Prices of solar power have dipped to Rs 2.44 a unit in the country.

While holding rich countries accountable for causing climate change, India has to put its own house in order, as the air pollution crisis in north India reminds us. For decades, it hasn’t tacked indoor pollution caused by smoky chulhas, which expose women and children to respiratory illnesses and carcinogens right in their very homes. We have both the resources and technologies to set this crisis right; only the political will to do so remains. (ends)

The World according to Fritjof Capra

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/interview/fritjof-capra-talks-about-his-journey-towards-balancing-science-and-spirituality/article20550307.ece

Fritjof Capra, a 78-year-old physicist who is now Director of the Centre for Ecoliteracy in Berkeley, California, is best known after his first book, The Tao of Physics: An Expl0ration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism (1975), which has sold over 1 million copies worldwide. He had his epiphany while he was sitting by the ocean one afternoon and felt the cascading waves and sand forming a cosmic dance which he intuitively likened to the Dance of Shiva, which he had been reading about. This started a long inquiry into Eastern religions and more particularly Hinduism and Zen Buddhism. In 1972, he drew the parallel between Shiva’s dance and the dance of subatomic particles in an article titled “The Dance of Shiva: The Hindu View of Matter in the Light of Modern Physics.” This cosmic dance then became a central metaphor in his international bestseller which is still in print in 40 editions worldwide. In 2004, the Indian government donated a large statue of the Shiva Nataraj to the European Centre for Research in Particle Physics (CERN) in Geneva, which formalised this connection between Indian spirituality and the most cutting-edge physics research. In 2015, a Tamil scholar Neelakandan wrote an article titled “Fritjof Capra and the Dharmic Worldview”, in the new online Sutra Journal. As Capra says, “It spans the entire arc of my work from the Dance of Shiva to Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.’

Darryl D’Monte interviewed him on the sidelines of a recent meeting of the Greenaccord international environmental journalists in Florence, Italy.

How did you, as a practising physicist, get interested in Hindu philosophy?

It started actually in my childhood. My mother was poet and my father a lawyer, but an amateur philosopher, so in my family there was a lot of talk about art and philosophy, very wide-ranging dinner-table conversations. My father had a very well-known German translation of the Upanishads. I had also heard about Buddhism from my father. I really got interested in Indian philosophy in the 1960s; it came through the artists – the beat poets in San Francisco like Ferlinghetti, Kerouac and Ginsberg.

If you want to be very precise, the very first contact was through Lawrence Ferlinghetti. My mother was a poet and she read international poets very widely. She gave me a copy of Ferlinghetti’s Coney Island of the Mind. This book interested me in the Beat poets and through these poets in Indian philosophy, which I started to read about. Ferlinghetti is still alive, at 98, and he lives above his bookstore in San Francisco. I met him several times and I wrote to him recently because I realised that it was his book that introduced me to Indian thought.

In the 1960s, I became part of the counter-culture. I began to practise yoga and Zen meditation, before finally settling on Taoist tai-chi, which I still practise till today. I also experimented with psychedelics, which exposed me to alternative visions of reality through books, through classical texts. The Bhagvad Gita was an eye-opener for me, a profound experience. This was the first original source that I read and it was and is the best. Then I read a lot of books about Buddhism by D.T. Suzuki.

In 1969, I met Krishnamurthi who became a big influence on my thinking. I was never a devotee, but he was a very interesting independent thinker. He gave a lecture at the University of California, where I was teaching and doing physics research. I had read his books before and one of his collections of writings is known as Freedom from the Known. I was very puzzled by it: I was a young post-doc physicist, just beginning a career: here was this Indian sage telling me that I must forget about knowledge, about language, I must free myself from all that. I managed to have an audience with him through various machinations. He was very impressive at that time; he had that impeccably coiffed hair, immaculate clothes; his whole demeanour was sage-like. I had read the writing of Carlos Castaneda about Don Juan: here was a Don Juan right before my eyes!

As soon as we sat down, I asked him: ‘How do I free myself from the known as a budding physicist embarking on a career?’ He immediately responded: ‘First you are a human being. Only then are you a physicist. You have to liberate yourself as a human being and that you cannot do through thinking; you can only do through meditation. Once you have achieved that liberation, then go back and do physics. I love science.’ He showed me that you can combine different states of consciousness and use them when they are appropriate. For me, this was very important, at the beginning of my career as a scientist who was interested in different spiritual traditions.

I want to take you right to the present, where you must know that in India we have moved from Hinduism to Hindutva, with all kinds of ultra right-wing Hindu ideologies taking root with the present government. There are throwbacks to claims of Indian possessing scientific knowledge like, for instance, the god Ganesha with his elephant head being a case of Indians knowing about plastic surgery. Does it disappoint you to learn that we in India have turned our backs on our own spiritual traditions?

It does disappoint me as an example of religion taking over from spirituality. In my 2014 book The Systems View of Life, which is a synthesis of my work, my co-author  Pier Luigi Luisi  and I have a chapter on science and spirituality. We make the strong point of the distinction. Spirituality is a perception of reality in a special state of consciousness and the characteristics of this experience of belonging to a larger whole, connected with everything, are independent of historical and cultural context. But then, spiritual teachers who have this experience are eager to share with others – like the Buddha sitting under the Bodhi tree. When he had his enlightenment, he went to Varanasi and started teaching in a park – typically, spiritual teachers want to share their knowledge. The organised expression of spirituality is religion, which always depends on cultural and historical context. Unfortunately, religion often ossifies and the teachings are expressed as dogma; experience is replaced by faith.  You have to believe; you don’t have to experience. These religions, all over the world, also align themselves with politics and very often with right-wing politics. In America, it is the same with the Protestant ethic and preachers like televangelists.

Do you see a global connection between all these developments?

Yes, I do. I work a lot in Brazil. I have been there many times. It was originally a Catholic country but now there is this new breed of Protestant churches which first offer very valuable services to very poor communities. But then, they exploit them and say: ‘We can help you get out of poverty but you have to pray and you have to give us money.’ They absolutely destroy them; it’s a huge business.

I first went to India in 1980, after The Tao of Physics had been published five years earlier; I was a fringe author in the US and Europe. Quantum physics and Zen Buddhism weren’t things that people would easily accept. The book was very successful but it wasn’t taken seriously by the establishment. I was asked to give a series of lectures at the University of Bombay; I was received by the University Vice-Chancellor, I met leading politicians, including Indira Gandhi whom I met in Delhi. My work was totally embraced by the Indian establishment. I was very puzzled but then I realised that the mystical core of Hinduism was part of the establishment, not the fringe.

As you know Shiva, whose Dance informed the connection you made with the collision of sub-particle physics, has been appropriated by ultra right-wing groups in my city Mumbai. Even Hindus would today hesitate to own up to their faith because it has been used by reactionary political parties.

Hinduism has always been known as a very tolerant religion; it can embrace everything. Well, the world is in a sad state now.

Are you disappointed that the idealism of the ‘sixties and ‘seventies on economic and ecological issues has been negated today? The prime example is the US.

I see this as a cycle, which is very consistent with Indian thinking. Let me take you through my personal experience from the ‘sixties to the ‘nineties. In the ‘sixties, as part of the counter-culture, we were protesting against the conventional way of life with ideas of community, spirituality, sensuality, of a different ethic and so on. And we didn’t have an alternative. In the ‘seventies, two movements emerged which were the two pillars of an alternative: ecology and feminism. The feminist movement wasn’t new but there was a new wave of feminism. In the ‘eighties, these movements coalesced into a political manifestation: the Green parties. The first was in Germany, which was a coalition of young Socialists, a revolutionary movement within the Social Democratic Party. There were people with a spiritual background, followers of Rudolf Steiner, who promoted grassroots democracy. Then there was the peace movement. The Greens had four pillars of democratic politics: ecology, social justice, grassroots democracy and non-violence.

The Green movement became international and by the end of the ‘eighties, there were many parties, in parliaments. By this time, ten years after I published my second book, The Turning Point, I really believed that we were now at this turning point. What happened then was something that no one foresaw: that was the information technology revolution. With the rise of computing power and telecommunications, the rise of e-mails and the Internet, this operated against the alternative view of the world and brought in a new materialism.

In theory, it would suggest just the opposite: the surge in communications should have made us more interdependent?

The IT revolution was critical for establishing global capitalism. These networks of financial flows didn’t happen from one day to another: there were many stops and starts, with people trying to impose economic restrictions. There was Reagonomics in the US and Thatcherism in the UK. Finally, what emerged was this global network of financial flows which dominated society, destroyed communities. It is very powerful and was designed explicitly without any ethics. So when you invest your money, you have machines which do it for you; you have a computerised network of  investment consultants and so on and they only apply one rule: what makes the most money. They don’t ask about the environment or health and so on. It could have been built into the system but they aren’t. When that happens in the ‘nineties, this new kind of materialism emerged – a fascination with gadgets, with buying things online and so on. But the counter-culture continued to muster its forces: they reached a critical point in the 1999 Seattle meeting of the World Trade Organisation where a global civil society was formed.

I often tell people that this global civil society has its roots in the ‘sixties and ‘seventies: networking wasn’t invented with the Internet. We were networking long before the Internet. I have been friends, to take an Indian example, with Vandana Shiva for decade, and with [Gandhian] Satish Kumar. We wouldn’t write to each other too much but we would meet occasionally at conferences or we would visit each other, so there was this network of scholars and activists. When the Internet came along, we had better communication, with websites, social media, but we still maintained the personal contacts. So I still see Vandana and Satish every now and then.

Despite the global community you mention, hasn’t the rise of financial capitalism smothered it?

Yes it has. But we are also very strong because of our numbers. With the Internet, you see demonstrations. See the current struggle in Spain with Catalonia: they can get a hundred thousand people in the street in two days because communication is so fast. We have had demonstrations against Monsanto, for instance; there have been various causes that bring masses of people on to the streets. We have our scholars, our institutes of research and it is global.

What we have been writing about for decades is now happening: climate change, for instance. I wrote about global warming in 1989. For decades, no one listened and made fun of us, but were now in the midst of a climate catastrophe. Now I think the situation is changing because businesses which don’t have ideologies – they want to invest money, to flourish –are turning away from fossil fuels. If they had listened to us then, we would have had a different world today.  It’s almost too late, hopefully not.

Just yesterday I read in Der Spiegel that Siemens, one of the biggest German companies, has urged politicians to get out of fossil fuels, saying: ‘This isn’t the future, the future is renewables.’ In the US we have this situation where business as usual and the old way of doing things have reached their extreme with Trump. So when Trump says he wants to get out of the Paris climate accord, and end the war on coal, it doesn’t matter what he says because coal power plants have been closed. The US will adhere to the Paris agreement in practice whether or not Trump is part of it. So in that sense, it’s very positive. It may be too late but, still, things are moving now.

In India, progressives feel that the forces against them are so strong that it’s difficult to counter them.

But doesn’t your Prime Minister talk about solar energy and renewables?

He talks about it. There’s a business angle to it. In Paris in 2015 he and President Sarkozy of France launched the International Solar Alliance, with its headquarters in India. This is to include the 120-odd countries between the two tropics who need solar energy, which Indian companies may be able to provide at costs lower than that of Western companies. But to come back to the forces of international finance capitalism: these forces are so strong, how can one counter them? 

We have to build alternative communities and do things that don’t depend on global capitalism. In the energy field, we can have independent solar power: in California, for instance, I don’t pay for electricity because I have solar panels on the roof and California in such a way that I don’t need batteries to store electricity. The energy I produce is sold to the grid.

To come to the global political situation, everywhere you hear of Brexit, Catalonia and Italy’s two northernmost and richest regions, Piedmont and Lombardy, wanting to secede from their countries. Would ecologists of the ‘sixties and ‘seventies welcome this as a sign that people are becoming more self-reliant?

Actually the Greens in the 1980s had a very good concept – A Europe of the Regions. So Catalonia, the two parts of Belgium, they said, should loosen their connections with the states they are in, strengthen their connections with the regions they are in and have joint projects between regions. This has been happening, of course. Regions and cities in Europe interact with one another directly. The solution in Europe is to grant these regions more autonomy, to embed them in a European context and once that is done, it becomes less important what they relate to as part of a nation.

To go back to India, you have worked with Schumacher, who wrote Small is Beautiful. As an economist, he was invited by Prime Minister Nehru to advise the newly-set up Planning Commission. It was then that he visited Burma, which affected him and he proposed “Buddhist Economics” as a gentler way of advancing economically. However, one of the ironies of life is that Aung San Suu Kyi, a leader whom we have admired so much, is now guilty of genocide in evicting the Rohingyas from her country. But tell us more about Schumacher.

When I wrote about physics, I lived in London. I was preparing myself with all kinds of research in books about Indian and Chinese philosophy,  when I came across a book review in the Guardian of Small is Beautiful. The review was titled “Buddhist Economics”. I bought the book and thought that this was something I should get into at a later stage. In the late ‘seventies, I started to write The Turning Point, and realised that I wanted to write about the changing paradigms not only in physics but also in biology, economics, psychology. I couldn’t do it alone, because I didn’t know enough about these subjects. I was looking for advisers, so I contact Schumacher and visited him.

Do you think that that is another movement  to which we have turned our back?

Yes. I said before we have to build local communities. The other connection to Schumacher was Satish Kumar of Schumacher College in the UK. He published the journal Resurgence for which Schumacher wrote several articles. When he founded the college, I gave some 20 courses there from the early ‘nineties.

Is there some way we creatively have to find to bring these small communities back into the mainstream?

Schumacher College is at the centre for transformative learning. When people go there, they learn together, they live together, they cook together – like an ashram, which came naturally to Satish as a Gandhian. We need to scale these up, many centres of this kind, but that isn’t easy: it has to be small-scale.

In the US people are trying to, even within universities, to form programmes in which are taught in different ways. It’s a difficult process. But there are quite a few; I know them because they invite me to teach there.

So you have hope for the future?

There are two major problems, among many others: climate change and economic inequality. Violence and war also exist but are derived from inequality. What has happened from my personal experience is that I now teach online in what I call “Capracourse” three years ago – its capracourse.net. I’m now running the fourth course, two per year. I have between 150 and 200 participants from 50 countries, many from India too. You get one lecture per week, every Wednesday; you can access the previous lectures but not the future ones. I spend 30 minutes every day answering questions and comments. People are very enthusiastic, but are confused about certain aspects: I can give a scientific basis to bolster certain values like ecological sustainability and human dignity. I don’t go the headquarters of the Republican Party to convince them – not that they would invite me anyway! I address people who are already convinced but confused about certain details. This is a very positive and hopeful development.  (ends)

  

Crisis is in the air

http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/delhi-air-pollution-smog-arvind-kejriwal-odd-even-scheme-air-quality-index-4934552/

Delhi has become world’s air pollution outcaste. Its decision-makers haven’t understood the consequences.

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Written by Darryl D’Monte | Updated: November 13, 2017 

Thick smog in New Delhi on Tuesday (Express File Photo by Prem Nath Pandey)

The first thing that the Central and Delhi governments should own up to regarding the air pollution crisis is that everyone was forewarned and cannot pretend to be taken unawares. This “winter of our discontent” is the season when, as temperatures dip, pollutants hover around the surface of the city and do not waft upwards. Things will only get more acute towards January. To make matters worse, smoke from burning farm waste descends on the capital from surrounding states at this time, which is a far more intractable problem.

Three years ago, the writing on the wall was the revelation by the World Health Organisation (WHO) that Delhi was the most polluted city in the world, and 13 out of the 20 worst impacted were in north India. The tell-tale parameter is the smallest measurable particulate matter — PM of less than 2.5 microns — which was an annual average of 153 micrograms per cubic metre that year, well above the WHO limit of 35. Beijing, which was previously the black sheep of the world’s urban air contamination, recorded 53 micrograms.

Last year, Delhi lost this dubious distinction to Zabol in Iran and fell to 11th place on the world map. However, north India continued to fare among the worst on the globe, with Gwalior second, Allahabad third, Patna sixth and Raipur seventh. While Delhi continues to get all the attention on this score, one should pay heed to children and senior citizens in these other beleaguered cities. These residents can’t afford air purifiers like many of the capital’s well-to-do and diplomats, not to mention the bizarre measure of installing huge vacuum cleaners on its roads.

Has any decision-maker in the capital understood the full consequences of declaring its air a “national emergency”? Visitors — whether on business or diplomats — will think three times before visiting Delhi this winter. One has only to recall that it was estimated that when President Obama visited for the Republic Day parade in 2015 he may have lost six hours of his life by spending three days in the capital. The US Embassy imported 1,800 air purifiers for his entourage. Children can’t attend school or play outside, and this has made Delhi the air pollution pariah of the world.

This could put paid to the prime minister’s “Make in India” campaign. Indeed, if a good economist could calculate the financial losses on days missed at work, avoiding the outdoors at certain times of the day and the bills for respiratory diseases, it would reveal a huge bill borne mostly by individuals, and prompt the authorities to take all measures possible to curb this public health menace.

Delhi Smog: Masks Go Viral In The Capital

 

Certain causes, like the burning of farm residue require a carrot and stick approach to encourage farmers to recycle crop waste rather than burn it. But other causes like the pollutants from thermal power stations in and around the capital and the dust from construction can be more easily tackled by stiff penalties.

The sources which can be tackled head-on are the pollutants from vehicles. Delhi’s AAP government has done well to experiment with an odd-and-even number plate scheme, which ought to be extended through the winter. Last March, the capital had 8.8 million vehicles, followed by Bengaluru with 6.1 million. Chennai, Kolkata and Mumbai have far fewer — 4.8 million, 3.9 and only 2.7 respectively. The reasons are not far to seek: Mumbai has an excellent public transport system, with its lifeline — the two local railways — carrying 3.7 million passengers a day, despite atrocious travelling conditions, which manifested in the foot overbridge accident this September. The once-renowned BEST bus service, now being bled to death by the city’s municipal corporation, still carries 2.9 million passengers (a sharp fall from 4.4 million seven years previously).

It is a no-brainer that the pollution caused by private vehicles, whether they are four- or two-wheelers, can be curbed by restricting their numbers, as Beijing and other Chinese cities have done successfully even as public transport is greatly increased. Shanghai, for instance, has emulated Singapore’s example of setting a limit on the number of cars permitted on its roads; Singapore allows market forces to decide the price of such a licence, which can exceed the cost of a car sometimes. Parking fees ought to be drastically increased, and payable even at night time. And, following London’s example, the proceeds should be ploughed back into bettering the bus service.

It is a no-brainer that the pollution caused by private vehicles, whether they are four- or two-wheelers, can be curbed by restricting their numbers, as Beijing and other Chinese cities have done successfully even as public transport is greatly increased.

With India going on a transport infrastructure spree, including in cities, there ought to be a clear discouragement of private motorised transport in favour of public transport. Mumbai’s reckless city fathers are doing precisely the reverse by building an Rs 15,000-crore coast road only for cars. If Mumbai has been spared the ignominy of Delhi when it comes to air pollution, one reason is that the sea breezes waft pollutants away. Once this road is built, all that will change since the prevailing winds are in a south-west direction. Indeed, a rule of thumb for any transport infrastructure scheme, whether in cities or outside them, should be that they can be permitted only if half the users constitute the public.

All cities are making the mistake of prescribing metros as the solution for local transport. Although far superior to adding roads, these are expensive. In Delhi, and to a smaller extent in Mumbai, any raising of fares sparks off a controversy. In Delhi, the 200-km-plus Metro network doesn’t seem to have reduced the number of cars appreciably, only two-wheelers. Mumbai is going in for a slew of such projects at a high cost, even parallel to the existing express highways, which is inexplicable. The fact that its standalone 11-km Metro sees 3.5 lakh users a day, while Delhi has only 28 lakh or around nine times as many, demonstrates that the Metro won’t prove the ideal mode of mass public transport.

That distinction should go to buses, which can run both long distances in cities, as well as provide last-mile connectivity to and from metros and local railway stations. And, dare one even state it, reserved bus lanes are the most cost-efficient and egalitarian means of city transport, which penalise the polluters — cars and two-wheelers — and carry commuters comfortably and cleanly. What’s more, it’s virtually a no-cost solution.

The writer is chairman emeritus, Forum of Environmental Journalists in India (FEJI).