What is Green Technology?

Green tech­nolo­gies, sim­ply defined are those tech­nolo­gies that are envi­ron­men­tally friendly and are at the same time used for com­mer­cial gain.

This is an essay I wrote for Honda Yes 2009. I didn’t get selected, but I still liked the essay, and decided to share it.

The devel­oped coun­tries – those that make use of the max­i­mum resources 1 – are not will­ing to cut down on their usage and lifestyle, which is under­stand­able. Devel­op­ing coun­tries are not ready to stop growth just for the sake of com­pen­sat­ing for the pol­lu­tion caused by oth­ers – which is even more under­stand­able. The only obvi­ous way out – new tech­nolo­gies which aim at sus­tain­able, envi­ron­men­tally friendly development.

Ideal green tech­nolo­gies are those that at one and the same time are envi­ron­men­tally friendly, finan­cially viable and socially equi­table. Achiev­ing all three at the same time is a daunt­ing task, indeed, most envi­ron­men­tally friendly tech­nol­ogy is found to be finan­cially pro­hib­i­tive, but the only way we can keep devel­op­ing and ful­fill­ing the needs of the 6.787 bil­lion 2 (and count­ing) peo­ple inhab­it­ing this planet.

Ben­e­fits and Problems

For the environment …

The ben­e­fits of using green tech­nol­ogy are many – start­ing with the all impor­tant energy sec­tor (over which wars are insti­gated and car­ried out). The first point we must real­ize is that mov­ing away from Fos­sil Fuels is not nec­es­sary only because of their lim­ited avail­abil­ity but also because of the exces­sive harm that they do to the envi­ron­ment. The US Energy Infor­ma­tion Admin­is­tra­tion has put the peak oil pro­duc­tion in May 2005 and July 20063 – dates we have already passed. The emis­sions of car­bon diox­ide have been grad­u­ally increas­ing through the years.

By switch­ing from fos­sil fuels to less pol­lut­ing sources of energy, we might be able to at the same time avert the impend­ing energy cri­sis and also reduce the effects of global warm­ing. Pos­si­ble alter­na­tives pro­vided by green tech­nol­ogy are solid fuel cells, nuclear power (a bit con­tro­ver­sial as it does gen­er­ate waste prod­ucts), solar energy and wind energy.

The down­side is that the amount of effort and invest­ment required to switch to green energy sources is mas­sive. Hydro­gen based fuel cells are cur­rently not suit­able as han­dling hydro­gen is very dan­ger­ous and a mas­sive net­work will be required for dis­tri­b­u­tion, etc. Nuclear energy pro­duces extremely toxic waste prod­ucts which must be spe­cially stored sep­a­rately. The biggest fac­tor that makes switch­ing to Green, rather, any alter­na­tive tech­nol­ogy so dif­fi­cult is the mas­sive iner­tia caused by the world’s depen­dence on the stan­dard fos­sil fuels.

… and the companies

Switch­ing to green tech­nol­ogy for com­pa­nies also greatly increases their CSR value and even dri­ves busi­ness to the com­pany – green tech­nol­ogy is eco­nom­i­cally viable and the fact that a com­pany is using envi­ron­men­tally friendly tech­niques dri­ves cus­tomers to that company.

As an exam­ple, con­sider GE Eco­mag­i­na­tion:  a pro­gram started by Gen­eral Elec­tric to reduce energy con­sump­tion and increase effi­ciency, while at the same time cut­ting costs – which is highly impor­tant in today’s reces­sion. In the some note, they also aim at increas­ing R&D to $1.5 bil­lion by 2010 4.  As of today, they are work­ing on reduc­ing emis­sions, water con­sump­tion, reduc­ing waste gen­er­ated, work­ing on improved wind-energy gen­er­a­tion, etc.

Con­sid­er­ing the rev­enues of the com­pany in 2008 – the con­sol­i­dated rev­enue reached $183 bil­lion while the green-house gas emis­sions have reduced from 7.50 (2004) to 6.49 (2008) mil­lion met­ric ton CO2 equiv­a­lents, oper­a­tional GHG inten­sity from 60.58 to 35.58 (met­ric tonnes per $ mil­lion rev­enue), oper­a­tional Energy Inten­sity from 496.69 to 312.75 (MMBTu per $ mil­lion rev­enue) and energy use has reduced from 61.50 to 57.0 $ mil­lion MMBTu – an ideal appli­ca­tion of green technology.

On the flip side GE has a his­tory of large-scale air and water pol­lu­tion; based on year 2000 data it has been listed as the fourth largest cor­po­rate pro­ducer of air pol­lu­tion in the United States apart from being impli­cated in the cre­ation of toxic wastes; so, at one level Eco­mag­i­na­tion can be con­sid­ered as prof­itable CSR as well as rid­ing the cur­rent “Go Green” wave all over the world – Green Tech­nol­ogy def­i­nitely makes a lot of busi­ness sense.

But what about the people?

What we can­not for­get, in all the cur­rent enthu­si­asm about green tech­nol­ogy with the buzz­words of “sus­tain­able devel­op­ment”, “business-sense”, etc. that right at this moment a quar­ter of this world’s pop­u­la­tion is below the poverty line, too many peo­ple do not have access to drink­ing water nor food. And I would rather not com­ment on the per­cent­age of peo­ple liv­ing in war-torn areas.

There is always the urgency of div­ing in, using what­ever resources we have at hand to help. To be able to look at our­selves in the mir­ror, we must. One fact that must be clear to the world at large and the elite in spe­cific is that only we, with access to all the resources that we have at our dis­posal can be expected to cut down. You can­not steal from peo­ple who have nothing.

Our enthu­si­asm for ‘sav­ing the world’ can­not reach the extent that we deny devel­op­ment in order to reduce envi­ron­men­tal degra­da­tion. Every­one must be brought to a com­mon, sus­tain­able base­line – what is too often ignored by media and peo­ple in gen­eral is that this involves bring­ing the resource uti­liza­tion by cer­tain sec­tions of the world up rather than down.

Such a strat­egy, I believe, in the long run will pay for itself – when we reach the peak of civ­i­liza­tion with the world at 100% lit­er­acy and aware­ness, and the basic neces­si­ties of life sat­is­fied for all, sus­tain­able devel­op­ment will be a way of life and not a goal.

As a cit­i­zen of the Earth,

I will rec­om­mend that we use Green Tech­nol­ogy as far as pos­si­ble, even if the short term costs are on the high side in terms of research required and money invested – for oth­er­wise, we will never be able to pay the debt incurred by mis­man­ag­ing our nat­ural resources.

All of us must real­ize for a fact that our resources will, at best allow us to main­tain our cur­rent rate of devel­op­ment for a few decades – at worst, for a few years. We have already seen exam­ples of ris­ing polit­i­cal ten­sion over energy sources; what we may not have yet real­ized is that if the sit­u­a­tion wors­ens we may even be fac­ing wars over resources like fresh water.

The threat of global warm­ing has been hang­ing over our heads for years but has not been really been addressed yet; par­tic­u­larly by cer­tain devel­oped nations. The very con­cept behind Car­bon Cred­its is sym­bolic of why we have not been able to con­trol Car­bon Diox­ide emis­sion to any worth­while extent today – very few coun­tries are will­ing to give up their way of life for goals span­ning many life­times, and not sim­ply those of the cur­rent generations.

Instead of expect­ing or brib­ing other coun­tries to reduce emis­sions (and thus reduc­ing their own guilt) every coun­try must work towards the com­mon goal of reduc­ing resource exploita­tion, over­pop­u­la­tion and exces­sive reliance on fos­sil fuels; to look at the really big pic­ture – the one beyond bound­aries, lan­guages and even species.

The onus of improve­ment does not lie solely with the gov­ern­ments and large cor­po­ra­tions of the world; rather every sin­gle per­son must par­tic­i­pate in every way he can. Every small effort, when con­sol­i­dated over 6 bil­lion peo­ple, has a mas­sive effect.

As a sin­gle per­son, I can con­sciously reduce my energy con­sump­tion, per­haps research bet­ter tech­nolo­gies; spread the word to my neigh­bours. As 6 bil­lion peo­ple, I can vote out envi­ron­men­tally indif­fer­ent gov­ern­ments, dis­miss resource hun­gry com­pa­nies, change the course of his­tory by choos­ing the right lead­ers and mak­ing my voice heard.

Of course, that means I must iden­tify myself as more than a Del­hite, an IIT­ian or an Indian. I must real­ize that I’m an earth­ling – and more impor­tantly, so is every­one else.

You must real­ize that at no place have I spec­i­fied that it is the Youth’s pre­rog­a­tive to achieve tar­get X, or that Y must do what they can. I believe this to be one of the great­est draw­backs in today’s approach to devel­op­ment – at no stage should there be any dis­tinc­tion on sav­ing the world. Every­one can be a super­man in his own way, and do his own bit to save the world. (Or super­woman; and her, as appropriate.)

As an Engineer,

I must and will push towards a rad­i­cal change in the cur­rent design beliefs – we must do away with planned obso­les­cence. Every­thing from the ultra-sophisticated cell-phone to the plas­tic water bot­tle must be made to last. We can­not expect to keep har­vest­ing resources indef­i­nitely and expect no reper­cus­sions; con­sider the words (and work) of Mechan­i­cal Engi­neer Saul Grif­fith – “The busi­ness plan for the next cen­tury should be to take every object you sell and fig­ure out how to give the ser­vice of that object to the con­sumer with one-tenth of that power.”

Spe­cial­iz­ing in Struc­tural Civil Engi­neer­ing, there is a lot of scope where work can be made more envi­ron­ment friendly. Waste mate­r­ial (plas­tic) is being exten­sively used in mak­ing roads, reduc­ing land­fills, etc. Build­ings should be designed and con­structed on lines sim­i­lar to those spec­i­fied by the U.S. Green Build­ing Coun­cil, Lead­er­ship in Energy and Envi­ron­ment design LEED (an inter­na­tional green build­ing cer­ti­fi­ca­tion sys­tem) 5.

The fun­da­men­tals behind LEED, and rather, any such sys­tem are sus­tain­abil­ity – the design must respect the com­mu­nity and cul­ture behind the build­ing, con­sid­er­ing all socioe­co­nomic lev­els; inclu­sive­ness – involve the com­mu­nity in the design; progress – the impact of the build­ing on the envi­ron­ment, com­mu­nity and econ­omy must be quan­tifi­able; con­nect­ed­ness – rec­og­nize the rela­tion­ship between man and nature and give empha­sis to it.

From var­i­ous stud­ies car­ried out in Amer­ica, where LEED is being grad­u­ally intro­duced into the stan­dard codes, it has been shown that – as with almost all other green tech­nol­ogy – the ini­tial cost might appear pro­hib­i­tive, but in fact, the pay­back in the long run more than cov­ers up for them 6.

Bet­ter, more effi­cient meth­ods devel­oped across the world must be open – while intel­lec­tual prop­erty rights must be main­tained and there must be suf­fi­cient stim­uli, mon­e­tary and oth­er­wise for peo­ple to inno­vate – research and results must be open and shared. A sin­gle com­pany or coun­try dis­cov­er­ing an alter­na­tive source of energy and then hid­ing it/not shar­ing it with the rest of the world is sim­ply a waste.

The urgency and impor­tance of the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion requires open col­lab­o­ra­tion between coun­tries – with the devel­oped help­ing the devel­op­ing in imple­ment­ing these. Mak­ing costs of green tech­nol­ogy more pro­hib­i­tive than they must me is the height of foolishness.

In con­clu­sion,

I end by sim­ply reit­er­at­ing the theme that has been present through­out this essay – we must work together, as peo­ple, as coun­tries, as cor­po­ra­tions to meet the com­ing chal­lenges and short­ages caused by our own exploita­tion of avail­able resources. We can­not face them alone, but we might sur­vive together.