Beyond electric vehicles : The energy reality we ignore

ELECTRIC vehicle producers have objected to the Indian government ‘diluting’ vehicle emission norms by providing incentives to producers of hybrid cars and higher incentives for producers of smaller cars.

Their case is that these concessions reduce their incentives to make capital investments to produce pure electric vehicles, which, they claim, is the best technology for reducing vehicular emissions. Their case does not hold up if one considers the transport system emission in its entirety.

The wealthy want to maintain their lifestyles while complaining about environmental pollution. They want the government to do something about the pollution that is driving them away from Delhi for holidays in the hills and on the beaches.

The government’s preference for smaller cars is justified because smaller cars consume less fuel and produce fewer emissions per person transported than the larger ones. Producers of large, luxury, electric and hybrid vehicles will be disadvantaged, no doubt, and their wealthy customers will have to pay more taxes than ordinary citizens who can only afford small cars.

Global aspirations for the lifestyles of US citizens are the root cause of the global climate crisis. By 2010, mankind’s global footprint — which is the pressure economic growth puts on the natural environment — had already reached 130 per cent of the earth’s capacity to renew itself. The US’s footprint on the earth’s resources was as heavy as 9.7 hectares per person.

Europe and Japan’s footprints were 4.7 hectares per person — half of that of the US. China was one-sixth of the US — 1.6 hectares — and India’s only 0.8 hectares per person. An Indian consumes one-twelfth of the earth’s resources compared to an American.

Scientists have predicted that if the citizens of India and China were to have a global footprint even half of that of the US, then these two countries’ economies alone would require another whole planet to sustain them.

There is only one earth to share amongst everyone. India has the least amount of land per capita compared to the US, China and other advanced countries. Equity between rich and poor countries while advocating policies to reduce global emissions and promotion of new technologies is a major sticking point in global climate policies.

Equity in emission solutions matters even more within India, where inequities between the rich and poor are amongst the highest in the world.

Vaclav Smil, a Czech-Canadian environmental scientist, has calculated the total energy consumption of transportation and food production systems, which are basic human needs. He explains, in his book ‘How the World Really Works’, that while electric cars consume less non-renewable energy when they run, large amounts of non-renewable energy, plastic materials and rare minerals are used to produce them.

Re-charging of the cars in operation also requires electricity, which is mostly supplied by producers using non-renewable energy. Thus, the cars themselves may be ‘green’ but the entire system for producing and running them is not.

Smil explains that global food systems are even larger consumers of non-renewable energy and materials than transportation systems. They consume large amounts of fertiliser for improving the productivity of farms and plastics and non-renewable energy for refrigeration and transportation across long supply chains. The gases produced by animals on farms are a tiny part of the overall pollution caused by modern food systems.

He calculates that the total systems’ needs of non-renewable energy and the pollution caused by global, large-scale food supply systems is much more than the energy requirements and pollution caused by local food production systems, with smaller farms growing a diversity of crops and using fertilisers produced organically from the farms’ own wastes.

Global-scale food production systems with large farms use less human labour as they can be more efficiently mechanised and fertilised and their crops harvested, too. In these systems, agriculture is more ‘productive’ in terms of the numbers of humans employed on the farm.

Small farms, with more ‘scope’ in what they produce (a variety of crops) rather than the ‘scale’ of any one crop, require more human effort and are less productive per capita. However, they are more productive in terms of food output per unit of non-renewable energy and materials consumed and in the financial capital required for each unit of nutrition produced.

Smil suggests that the solution for the high, non-renewable-energy-consuming footprint of agriculture and food systems, and the future of humankind too, may lie in humans returning to work in smaller farms in local food webs.

Artificial intelligence ostensibly saves humans the burden of solving their own problems. It is the new trillion-dollar industry. Massive server farms on the ground, with hardly a human in them, for enabling computations in the cloud, consume as much energy as cities with millions of people.

Technology cannot violate a fundamental law of physics. Material and energy are an integral system. Energy is produced from materials. The conversion ratio is constant: E=MC2. More energy cannot be produced without more materials. (Even the human brain requires a body to support it and be fed).

Humanity’s progress is being driven by a suicidal view of human flourishing: with refinement in lifestyles by reducing human effort; and improvement of the ‘productivity’ of economy by reducing the employment of human labour and human intelligence in the economy. This is neither sustainable for the environment nor for the economy.

The virtual economy has become untethered from ground realities. Machines and AI are replacing humans in agriculture, manufacturing and services at the same time and even in creative industries. If humans cannot do any work to earn money, who will pay for the products and services produced by investors in new-tech enterprises with trillion-dollar valuations in stock markets?

So far, advertisers are propping up these enterprises with advertisements tempting humans (who are provided free services on their platforms) to buy some real products and services. When they do not have enough money to buy them, the entire virtual economy will collapse.

In the final analysis, the only way to save humanity from committing humanicide (collective suicide) is: (1) take a total systems view of energy use while promoting new energy-saving gadgets; and (2) discourage further use of non-human energy to displace human labour at home and work, and the replacement of human intelligence with artificial intelligence.

Comments