Continued from the previous article...
Let me start with a small story…
A few days back I was… not exactly cooking, but you can say working with chilli powder. And then all of a sudden I was having this hot and burning sensation in my hands. As for how everyone usually does, I went to wash my hands; the important thing here is that the burning sensation was not too hot that I was acting impulsively, I was making conscious decisions. What the mistake I did here was that Chilli gives this burning sensation because of the presence of a chemical called “capsaicin”, and water can do nothing better than spreading the capsaicin – Water will not mitigate hot sensation caused by Chilli. You have to use Dairy products (like milk or curd) to wash the capsaicin away. The problem here is that I was aware of this fact for years, and despite that, I made a conscious decision to follow the conventional wisdom- to use water.
What does this story have to do with the topic I was supposed to write about? In fact, a lot. What I am trying to establish here is our brain’s consciousness and working memory (which controls our actions) is has not much to do with our knowledge. Awareness doesn’t mean much, the same way it didn’t mean a lot for me when I had chilli powder in my hands (At least not immediately). This is especially true when we are working on a problem of an enormous scale like The Climate change problem and when you have self-interests and other self-serving institutions are at play against you acting smart and green.
I presume that everyone, who has a decent education, is aware of the phenomenon called Global Warming and Climate change. In fact, you couldn’t have possibly escaped from this knowledge even if you actively tried to do so. Still, no one proactively does anything for the sake of Global warming and Climate change. You might switch off lights and fans, when not in use, to save money. You might reduce travel by car because of increasing petrol prices. People in Chennai, usually don’t waste water, because we have lived through all sorts of water-crisis. But none was done with the motive of working on the Climate change or the Global warming problem.
But if we are not actively working on this, and embedding Carbon-saving habits into our daily life, we are not even going to come close to mitigating the crisis. We can blame the governments and the corporate companies for this crisis, but we are equally culpable. But, let’s not talk about what we have done before. What we need to talk about is, what we can do? The first step towards change is not to resort to this un-educated mindset of “large problems need large solutions, and could be done only by Governments and Corporate companies.” The truth is “we can do a lot more than what we think we can”.
For this, we need to understand Carbon…
To talk about this, I will give an abstracted explanation, and you can ask multiple “how questions” to dig deep about the sources of carbon emissions. It is as simple as “to produce heat, we need oxygen and carbon, it produces CO2”. The only exception to this abstracted explanation is when the heat is produced by Nuclear reactions or the Sun. The most important thing to understand is the proper interpretation of the word “heat”. Heat, in this abstracted form, is used to mean everything like fire produced by burning wood, or heat which drives huge turbines at Neyveli Lignite corporation, or the heat which is produced inside cylinders firing the cylinders in an engine. You get the idea here.
I will explain one example. Let’s say you are going to a shop and buying a mobile phone. Let’s see some of the carbon emissions here. Starting with the obvious, you will be going to the shop in a motorcycle or a car, so heat required to run the car will be emitting some carbon. Then you go to the shop and shop is probably Air-conditioned and has powerful studio-like lightings, so a proportion of the carbon emissions because of the energy use (Heat use to produce energy) is on you (based on the number of customers). And there is the phone itself, which is probably manufactured in China or Korea, so there are multiple logistics here- like ship cargo and last-mile logistics- so has commensurate carbon footprint. And the manufacturing of the phone itself – raw material extractions, parts manufacturing energy usage, assembly energy usage, and multiple interim logistics – has significant carbon emissions. That’s not perhaps it, even a proportion of carbon emissions from the employees (in the mobile shop, in manufacturing and logistics) travel from their home to work is on that particular phone.
The main point here is every phone-related carbon emission is “ON YOU”, and not on the company- because they won’t be manufacturing or serving it if you weren’t there to buy it.
Like this mobile phone example, you can drill down on all your everyday activities and discover its carbon footprint, few will be straight forward, few are a bit more complicated. But you can determine it, there are multiple tools online that help you to calculate your carbon footprint to a decent accuracy (I have attached a link for one good calculator). If you take some time to think about carbon-footprint, you can easily find out that you can do a lot to do your part.
Our consumerist lifestyle has great costs on the environment. This is overwhelming first, you might even reach an impasse, stuck not knowing what to do, the complexity of this problem has a knack for it. You might even think ‘What I do will not have any effect if everyone else is living the same indifferent lifestyle?’ But that’s not what we should be thinking about.
Because it is better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness…
There is a lot we can do for a start…
We can all start by switching off the fan, when not use… (Maybe it’s more for me)
Being not Anti-Nuclear will be helpful. Instead of going to the grocery shop by motorcycle, go by walk or a bicycle and taking your own bag. Instead of replacing your phones every two years, have it for four years. Using public transport more than cars and motorcycles. Deferring purchase of motorcycles or cars, until we have sufficiently tried and tested Electric vehicles. Not glorifying V8s and V12s would be nice. Instead of using single-use products, use robust and multi-usable products... Even consider going Vegan -I am never ever going to. Yes, it is true that going vegan is greener.
In today’s world, we don’t need to compromise our creature comforts to be green. You don’t need to forgo using your Air-conditioner to be green, you can install a solar panel on your roof and use whatever gadgets you want without thinking about carbon. You don’t need to travel in shitty slow vehicles like Reva’s and Ampere’s of the past to be green, you have vehicles like Hyundai Kona, Ather 450…. So why be dirty, when you can be green without losing anything. And above all Green is the new black, the new cool, the new sexy...
Carbon-footprint Calculator
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