UNESCO Article

I recently submitted an entry for an essay writing competition organized by UNESCO. Here is that entry, would love to have feedback from you people. The topic of the essay was

"The Role of Science in Building a Better World"

I will come back shortly to wrap up the cap and trade topic and introduce further climate change topics here.
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"Towards an Energy Revolution"
Science has catalyzed humanity’s quest to unleash its full potential. From being nomadic tribes, making a living out of hunting and gathering, science made man use his brainpower to complex challenges in life, making the impossible possible. It heralded an explosive land productivity to feed the teeming population, the green revolution, through the synthetic manufacture of ammonia and fertilizers to the tenfold increase in labor productivity in the industrial revolution. The abundance of time that science brought forth fueled hegemonic aspirations in man, resulting in historic wars, which brought about a military revolution and pushed the frontiers of science to newer areas, from nuclear power to an aviation revolution. The revolution in computing speed hit us next that is still unfolding. A year has become a long time in the cycle of science and its pursuit has brought man a long way from the early days.

The fixation of bigger, faster and better systems led to a consumption centric approach in man. The more one consumed, the more one wanted to consume. Corporations thrived on this spirit of wanton consumerism and grew at an astronomical pace by goading such behaviour in people. Intricate models were developed to assess economic profitability using the quintessential cost benefit framework but environmental protection was hardly considered as a variable in these models. Environment was conveniently assumed to be a perpetual waste bin, where all waste from our profligate consumption could recklessly be dumped. This issue is the concept of externality, where we price a good without taking into account its entire manufacturing cost.

This makes the global price structures extremely skewed. Coal and oil are dirt cheap as we do not include the cost of their emissions into their market price, inducing us to depend on these carbonaceous fuels for 81% of our energy needs. The world has taken note of this lately and is rallying together to correct the anomaly. However, it is not easy to overhaul the existing global energy infrastructure radically; it has to be done in small, seamless steps. There has to be a two-pronged approach here, first to reduce the environmental impact of these fuels either through improving the process efficiencies or by sucking up the carbon emitted, naturally or industrially. The second deals with the development of technologies and policies related to renewable fuels. My research is focused on the former, of reducing the carbon impact of the non-renewable resources and mobilizing the people towards a low carbon future. It is estimated that the carbon productivity will have to increase tenfold in the next 40 years to achieve this, something we managed in labor productivity during the industrial revolution, but the time horizon allowed is 1/3rd of that available earlier.

I am pursuing a Masters program in Energy at MIT and my research with the MIT Energy Initiative deals with a concept called Air Capture, which stands for sucking CO2 directly out of the air and storing it underground. This technology has recently gained publicity owing to the ease of mitigation of emission from the distributed sources, viz. automobiles, home heating, air transportation etc, which are responsible for more than 55% of the total emissions, and growing. The best part about these systems is their location flexibility, as they can be set up at the sequestration sites and allows skipping building the intricate piping infrastructure to transport the captured liquid CO2, otherwise required. The cost of this process is prohibitive at the moment, in the range of $500-$1500 per ton of CO2, because of the huge energy requirement of the solvent regeneration step, but a global research effort is underway to achieve a technical breakthrough in solvent characteristics. This technology is also ideal from the perspective of technology diffusion to developing nations, where the next wave of emissions will happen.

The other part of my work deals with spreading awareness among common people. I believe, unlike the Manhattan project, this transition to a low, clean energy economy is a complex social problem, which cannot be achieved by the scientific community alone. It will require the help of common people as well. I maintain a blog to share insights and also make it a point to talk to as many people as I can. In my next home visit to India, I have scheduled a series of such talks at all the major Indian universities, for the power of youth can overcome this enormous challenge, even at one of the important countries in this fight against climate change.

Science is about to undergo a metamorphosis; the flaw in our models will spur the next revolution, the Energy Revolution! The hitherto ignored parameter of environmental protection is about to trigger the next level of scientific evolution and the world is quickly getting ready for the challenge.

Article about India in the New York Times

Here's something I found quite interesting in the New York Times today. Would like you to read this and think it over.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/weekinreview/05giridharadas.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=farewell%20to%20an%20india%20i%20hardly%20knew&st=cse

More on global climate change coming up soon!