Week 9 - Energy and World Change

This week we had an interesting session on Energy and World Change. We discussed the rising energy crisis where the scarce fossil fuel reserves are facing the ever-increasing desire of our insatiable economies. We talked about the adverse ramifications of the use of fossil fuels such as global warming; and the need for sustainability and renewability in our future energy utilization, without which, the planet will become far less habitable for generations to come.

The very Mother Nature who has given us life is being betrayed and tortured by us – careless and ungrateful humans who speak of integrity and love but continue to ravage her of her valuable resources and ability to provide such a delicate ecosystem for us.

History has shown that the opportunity cost of greater economic success is the burning of greater amounts of fuel. Countries like India and China face a scary dilemma. Should they continue to use greater and greater resources to realize their economic potential and the dream of having the standard of living of the West? Or should they forget about those dreams as they are not green and will further destroy the sustainability of this planet? The answer that satisfies both questions is Green Innovation which will allow India and China to flourish with efficiency and, at the same time, not destroy this planet.

It is great to know that China is the world’s largest investor in green technology. India clearly needs to do more in this field and seems like an ideal candidate to develop cheap green solutions as it has been successful in providing inexpensive technologies in the past such as the world’s cheapest car – Tata Nano. In addition, Brazil’s superb adoption of sugar-cane based alcohol as a mainstream fuel shows that necessity is truly the mother of invention. 

Singapore would do well to take a leaf out of Germany’s book; it should install solar panels throughout and should capitalize on it’s location on the Equator. It is surprising that Germany, which receives much less sunlight than Singapore, has been successful in capitalizing on solar technology whilst Singapore is dismally ineffective in this area.

I’d give this session a 9.