Green-India

Today, I would like to see how all of you are doing and hope we all
are sound in health and spirit. With Politepreneur (R) president Obama we are seeing many good activities -Biotech-potential (with lifting of Stem-cell research ban), making F/M pay-equal, right to fight, mercury-treaty initiative and Green-energy push.

Speaking of Greentech - I just have come across a reporting by Thomas
Friedman from New Delhi (see below). I get to know him in late 90s
when he was with LATimes and did an article on our Hepatitis-C (a
BioZak/UCLA) project. Anyway, here is the article - Rgds/RYAN

February 15, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Yes, They Could. So They Did.
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

New Delhi

So I am attending the Energy and Resources Institute climate
conference in New Delhi, and during the afternoon session two young
American women — along with one of their mothers — proposition me.

“Hey, Mr. Friedman,” they say, “would you like to take a little spin
around New Delhi in our car?”

Oh, I say, I’ve heard that line before. Ah, they say, but you haven’t
seen this car before. It’s a plug-in electric car that is also powered
by rooftop solar panels — and the two young women, recent Yale grads,
had just driven it all over India in a “climate caravan” to highlight
the solutions to global warming being developed by Indian companies,
communities, campuses and innovators, as well as to inspire others to
take action.

They ask me if I want to drive, but I have visions of being stopped by
the cops and ending up in a New Delhi jail. Not to worry, they tell
me. Indian cops have been stopping them all across India. First, they
ask to see driver’s licenses, then they inquire about how the green
car’s solar roof manages to provide 10 percent of its mileage — and
then they try to buy the car.

We head off down Panchsheel Marg, one of New Delhi’s main streets. The
ladies want to show me something. The U.S. Embassy and the Chinese
Embassy are both located on Panchsheel, directly across from each
other. They asked me to check out the rooftops of each embassy. What
do I notice? Let’s see ... The U.S. Embassy’s roof is loaded with
antennae and listening gear. The Chinese Embassy’s roof is loaded
with ... new Chinese-made solar hot-water heaters.

You couldn’t make this up.

But trying to do something about it was just one of many reasons my
hosts, Caroline Howe, 23, a mechanical engineer on leave from the Yale
School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, and Alexis Ringwald, a
Fulbright scholar in India and now a solar entrepreneur, joined with
Kartikeya Singh, who was starting the Indian Youth Climate Network, or
IYCN, to connect young climate leaders in India, a country coming
under increasing global pressure to manage its carbon footprint.

“India is full of climate innovators, so spread out across this huge
country that many people don’t get to see that these solutions are
working right now,” said Howe. “We wanted to find a way to bring
people together around existing solutions to inspire more action and
more innovation. There’s no time left to just talk about the problem.”

Howe and Ringwald thought the best way to do that might be a climate
solutions road tour, using modified electric cars from India’s Reva
Electric Car Company, whose C.E.O. Ringwald knew. They persuaded him
to donate three of his cars and to retrofit them with longer-life
batteries that could travel 90 miles on a single six-hour charge — and
to lay on a solar roof that would extend them farther.

Between Jan. 1 and Feb. 5, they drove the cars on a 2,100-mile trip
from Chennai to New Delhi, stopping in 15 cities and dozens of
villages, training Indian students to start their own climate action
programs and filming 20 videos of India’s top home-grown energy
innovations. They also brought along a solar-powered band, plus a
luggage truck that ran on plant oil extracted from jatropha and
pongamia, plants locally grown on wasteland. A Bollywood dance group
joined at different stops and a Czech who learned about their trip on
YouTube hopped on with his truck that ran on vegetable-oil waste.

Deepa Gupta, 21, a co-founder of IYCN, told The Hindustan Times that
the trip opened her eyes to just how many indigenous energy solutions
were budding in India — “like organic farming in Andhra Pradesh, or
using neem and garlic as pesticides, or the kind of recycling in
slums, such as Dharavi. We saw things already in place, like the
Gadhia solar plant in Valsad, Gujarat, where steam is used for cooking
and you can feed almost 50,000 people in one go.” (See:
www.indiaclimatesolutions.com.)

At Rajpipla, in Gujarat, when they stopped at a local prince’s palace
to recharge their cars, they discovered that his business was
cultivating worms and selling them as eco-friendly alternatives to
chemical fertilizers.

I met Howe and Ringwald after a tiring day, but I have to admit that
as soon as they started telling me their story it really made me
smile. After a year of watching adults engage in devastating
recklessness in the financial markets and depressing fecklessness in
the global climate talks, it’s refreshing to know that the world keeps
minting idealistic young people who are not waiting for governments to
act, but are starting their own projects and driving innovation.

“Why did this tour happen?” asked Ringwald. “Why this mad, insane plan
to travel across India in a caravan of solar electric cars and
jatropha trucks with solar music, art, dance and a potent message for
climate solutions? Well ... the world needs crazy ideas to change
things, because the conventional way of thinking is not working
anymore.”