Saturday Sep 21, 2024
Saturday Sep 21, 2024
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The hurricane Sandy of November 2012 in New York and cyclone Katrina in New Orleans washed almost all the levees built there in an earlier generation to keep the ocean waters away. The USA may be able to afford to do this, but could other developing countries?
Building walls to keep ocean waters away is an adaptation strategy and it implies that developed countries want to get into this adaptation phase quickly. Business enterprises in developed countries are eagerly waiting to make maximum profits from the technology and international organisations are playing their roles to entice developing nations by doling out funds.
Unless we work on mitigating factors, there will be no end to these adaptations. Levees built in Louisiana to keep ocean waters away in an earlier generation were grossly inadequate to face Katrina.
Precipitation-related disasters
Climate change is basically change in the three characteristics; surface temperature, precipitation and wind. The increase in surface temperature affects the other two variables. In any given year many people die due to precipitation-related disasters. More than 4,000 people died in India during the first six months of this year – far more than those who die due to increased temperature. Both the increased temperatures and increased precipitation contribute to devastations in national economies. The loss to the American economy due to Hurricane Sandy was estimated at US$ 50 billion.
Increased precipitation takes place due to increased amounts of water vapour entering the atmosphere which cannot be sustained throughout the year. Atmosphere retains enough water vapour to maintain constant relative humidity. According to classical thermodynamical explanation of the atmosphere, one such factor which contributes to more water vapour entering the atmosphere is increased surface – atmospheric temperature and this increase in 
temperature may be due to natural causes like increase in solar radiation entering the atmosphere or due to man-made reasons like greenhouse effect.
The current thinking is that increased precipitation is merely due to increased evaporation of water vapour mainly from water bodies in the world. Increased concentration of greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and water vapour in the atmosphere increases temperature that helps evaporation of water bodies. Fortunately carbon dioxide can never precipitate. The whole world is working towards reducing carbon dioxide generation from different sectors even promoting solutions which increase the generation of water vapour. One very good example is promotion of the hydrogen fuel cell vehicle.
Water vapour
We overlook the amount of water vapour generated per year due to the combustion of fossil fuels. According to the International Energy Agency’s latest document ‘Redrawing Energy – Climate Change Map’ of June 2013, we have generated 10.4 GT and5.6 Gt of CO2 from the combustion of oil and gas respectively in 2011. If we assume that oil used was gasolene, which has 10% hydrogen (diesel has 14% hydrogen and would yield more water vapour) and gas is methane which has 25% hydrogen, then along with this total of 16.0 GT of CO2 another 7.3 GT of water vapour would also have got into the atmosphere.
It would not have needed the greenhouse effect of CO2 to prompt the evaporation of this amount of water vapour and this water vapour would have entered the atmosphere along with the CO2. What would have happened to this water vapour? Would it have come down instantaneously at the same places where it was generated? The answer is no. It would have accumulated over space due to different air circulation patterns (like Hadley or Walker circulations) prevailing in the atmosphere. It would have accumulated over time till it becomes cooler to come down.
Another important thing to remember is that this water vapour also takes with it heat energy. Carbon dioxide will take that amount of energy due to its high temperature only and cannot give any latent heat to the atmosphere because it does not precipitate. But water vapour has latent heat as well which is several times more than what carbon dioxide would give as it cools from its exit temperature from the heat generating unit to atmospheric temperature. And then this water vapour which was newly formed – this is not some water which was in the earth’s water cycle but newly formed due to the combination of hydrogen in a fossil fuel and oxygen from the atmosphere – comes down at the selected locations at selected points of time leading to disasters.
Although there are many ways in which this water vapour contributes to water related disasters – say like hurricanes – due to lower wind shear forces in the atmosphere and warmer ocean waters, which are been currently experienced.
What can we do?
Now that we know one man-made factor which contributes to water related disasters, is there anything we could do and how could we set about doing it? Yes, we can implement a mitigation action which would have the highest impact for a given investment through a technically feasible and financially viable solution.
When trying to develop a solution we looked at the industrial sector which contributes the most to climate change for a unit of energy actually used. Vehicle transportation sector contributes the most to climate change due to two reasons: (1) currently used Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) powered vehicles waste 80% of the energy and (2) the fuel used is liquid fossil fuels which has more intrinsic hydrogen.
If we look at the 2011 situation we mentioned earlier, it could be seen that in 2011, we have generated 6.6 GTof CO2 due to the usage of liquid fuels in the transportation sector. This implies that 1.8 GT of water vapour and 70 EJ of waste energy would have resulted from the sector. Vehicle transportation contributes the most to excessive precipitation per unit of energy actually used.
Battery Electric Vehicle
Out of all the combinations of alternative fuel and vehicles to use those alternative fuels quoted in literature, Battery Electric Vehicle (BEV) is considered to be the most promising. Even Prof. Henry Lee of Harvard Kennedy School, after rigorous mathematical modelling, endorsed this conclusion. So our solution is based on this or in other words convert road vehicular transportation to battery electric vehicles from currently used ICE powered ones.
Wouldn’t we be getting the electrical energy required for the BEVs from a fossil fuel? Our solution is based on obtaining this electrical energy from Photovoltaic Solar Panels installed above and along the roadways and taking the electrical energy generated to battery charging stations where batteries of BEVs would be charged either in situ or by swapping.
The installation on the roadways is preferred as (i) we do not need to sacrifice virgin land, (ii) roadways make the biggest contribution to climate change per unit foot print out of all man-made structures, (iii) energy is needed there and would lead to minimal transmission costs and losses, (iv) roadways are centrally owned and (v) they would lead to the fastest implementation. We call this highway solarisation.
If the USA spent the US$ 20 billion that they spend to build those walls on this solution, they could provide energy to four million BEVs each doing 15,000 kms per year. One may ask, where are four million BEVs? There aren’t even one million today. The point is that the moment motorists know that energy for charging is available on the highway, they would start buying more and more BEVs. 
Four million new vehicles would be less than 10% global new vehicle sales. At the same rate of 15,000 kms per year it would eliminate 17 Mt of CO2 and 4.5Mt of new water vapour entering the atmosphere. In fact when British Petroleum agreed to pay about $20 billion to the US Government as damages in the aftermath of Deepwater Horizon in mid 2010, I wrote to Dr. Steven Chu, then Secretary of Energy in USA suggesting that the US Government matches that US$ 20 billion with another equal amount of its own money and get BP to implement this highway solarisation so that the oil companies would retain their supreme role of powering global mobility. (My mail was acknowledged and replied by Dr. Robert Marley, then Deputy Director of Climate Change Policy.)
If they did that: (i) they could have converted eight million light duty vehicles to be BEVs and (ii) prevented more than 34Mt. of CO2 and 10 Mt of water vapour entering the atmosphere up to November 2012 and who knows whether Hurricane Sandy may not have ever happened or it could have been much less disastrous.
South Asia
In spite of what USA and other developed countries are doing to adapt themselves to climate change, we in South Asia need to look at what we could and should be doing to mitigate climate change. On one hand they – e.g. International Strategy for Risk Reduction – say that 75% of the increased risk of water related disasters is applicable to countries like India, etc., which has monsoons. While I have been writing about this for the last two years, what happened in India earlier this year bears testimony to the accuracy of this assessment.
On the other hand, we can ill afford to spend the amounts of money – in spite of insignificant funding from international agencies – to go in for adaptation technologies which would seldom have an economic justification outside of been an adaptation mechanism for climate change.
This goes to emphasise that we in South Asia need to work on mitigation strategies which are technically feasible and financially viable.
Highway solarisation
Highway solarisation is probably the most promising mitigation action as it:
(a) reduces the highest amounts of CO2 and water vapour for a given investment
(b) reduces the highest amount of solar radiation absorption per unit foot print of any man-made structure for a given investment
(c) beats every other mitigation action in respect of speed of implementation
(d) eliminates many other economic woes like escalating oil bills, trade deficits, external debt, etc. in the process and
(e) will lead to a new world economic order where energy will be available in the same ratio as the land area a country would occupy.
The choice is entirely ours. We decide whether we be blind to the travails of climate change, water related disasters and wait till climate change comes and knocks on our door and then build the walls around Colombo, Hambantota, Oluvil and Trincomalee and live in man-made prisons or start implementing highway solarisation now and set an example to other nations around us in terms of this globally appropriate – definitely regionally appropriate – mitigation action for climate change from transportation.
Action/inaction today will determine what the future will hold for us.
(The writer is Managing Director of Somaratna Consultants Ltd.)
