Average maximum temperatures
As hundreds of gigantic cruise ships belch their way around the planet, people in India struggle to survive a heat wave.
Thousands of Indians have turned to umbrellas, fruits and swimming pools as they try to cope with a brutal heatwave that has hit the country.
Average maximum temperatures in March and April in northern and central India were the highest since the country’s weather office started keeping records 122 years ago.
The heat has sparked an increase in demand for electricity, leading to outages in many states and fears of a coal shortage.
That’s the Catch 22. When it gets hotter we use more power to cool ourselves, so it gets even hotter. Repeat until only the reptiles survive.
While summer temperatures have always been high in many Indian states, experts say India is now recording more intense, frequent heatwaves that are also longer in duration. The “root cause”, says climate scientist Roxy Mathew Koll, is global warming.
But it’s worth it for the cruise ships, right?
‘ The “root cause”, says climate scientist Roxy Mathew Koll, is global warming.’.
Correction: The root cause is Ecological Overshoot.
Why the fixation on cruise ships? While no one is going to deny that they are wasteful, they account for a tiny percentage of transportation emissions.
As per Our World In Data, 75 percent of emission from transportation is from road transport, around 11 percent from aviation and only around 10 percent from shipping – and most of that is from cargo ships.
Raghu Mani@2:
That is true; what is also true is that they are the tip of the spear, as it were: an obviously indulgent, wasteful luxury. Were we humans to be serious about addressing the problem, they’d be the first thing to go, but they’re still there, plying to and fro between ports every summer day (and right under Ophelia’s nose from where she sits and writes and sees them).
Perhaps because the reality is that we cannot remove all fossil fuel use overnight, but we can start with eliminating the least necessary parts. If there were no cruise ships, people would still be able to holiday. If we removed all diesel-fuelled road freight instantly, people would starve.
Cruise ships could be converted to run on alternative fuels, say hydrogen, and return to the seas.
James Garnett – SNAP!
Of course, all is not well with Hydrogen, either.
One of Australia’s wealthiest mining magnates, Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest is a big investor in green hydrogen.
Perhaps his irony metre is broken, as the reduced pollution from a hydrogen-powered truck is more than outweighed by the coal in each load it carries.
Small steps. Small steps.
Interestingly, India’s reliance on fossil fuels is lower than I expected at %59.1.
#2 Raghu
Probably because cruise ships stand out as an especially frivolous reason to burn fuel.
Raghu Mani – yes, what they said. Because cruise ships are so completely optional, non-essential, a luxury. If we can’t even stop building yet more non-essential fossil fuel users then what hope is there?
However it is also the case that as James says I’m constantly reminded of them because I can literally see them going in and out of the port from where I’m typing right now. (I can also hear them on hot afternoons, because they play festive music in the hours between boarding and departure.) They’re my King Charles’s head.
See also Ophelia’s post about Christmas lights. Nobody dies if we don’t turn them on, though plenty will because we do.
How much of the process that mkes the hydrogen that goes into the truck is “zero emission?” If it’s only the bit that gets burned in the vehicle that’s “green,” then that’s not quite the solution it claims to be. As Mike B. pointed out above, the real problem is ecological overshoot. Even if we were to change all our energy use to renewables, we’d still be fucked, beacuse we’d still be overconsuming. Energy conversion without energy use reduction (amongst many other things), just puts us on a slightly greener road to hell.
The overall global response to the pandemic gives a very slight cause for hope. If the current ecological/biodiversity/energy crises could be seen and acted upon in a similar manner, with equivalent speed and robustness, we could make more progress than we are currently. Unfortunately, we need to do a good deal more than wear masks and keep farther apart. We would have to reinvent our economies, learn to live with less, and reduce wealth disparities. There is little that we do that would not be touched by the need to restructure and scale back our economies. Ophelia has pointed out a number of times that no government promising to do what needs to be done would ever be elected, and that those inclined to dictatorship would probably accelerate in the opposite direction. Countries have found the will to make sacrifices in times of war, but this time the war we are fighting is against our very way of life. The greatest threat to our way of life is our way of life. We have met the enemy and he is us.
To undertake the transformations required would be painful and expensive; failure to do so will result in even greater pain and expense, on an unimagineable scale, greater than all previous human conflicts combined. It could be slow and gradual, or it could involve massive, abrupt changes to previously reliable, stable systems and processes. Most likely it will be a combination of both. By refusing to choose the lesser of two evils, we ensure the inevitable manifestation of the greater.
We are in uncharted territory, leaving the envelope of conditions within which our civilization arose, and upon which it is based. We are travelling at great speed without a clue as to where we are heading. Cultural inertia makes changing direction on a global scale slow and akward, if not impossible. There are powerful forces actively working to block any change at all. We are running out of water; we are running out of food. If you think things are bad now, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
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I’m not much in favour of hydrogen since batteries are significantly more efficient but I don’t see the problem with the FFI truckassuming it’s run on genuinely green Hydrogen. BTW the F in FFI stands for Fortescue. Fortescue is an iron ore miner. I don’t think there’s any secret coal industry agenda there.
@Francis Boyle, yes, my error in overshooting the remark. However, until Sanjeep Gupta et al get their green hydrogen-powered steel making going, the smelting of iron ore into steel still requires coal.