I always wondered why we never go in for the natural resources that is available in plenty. Sunlight and wind power are just two of them.
Last week I read in the papers that a housing complex in Pune installed windmills in their complex. One windmill each on top of every building. A novel idea to reduce the monthly electricity bill.
I agree with what Achim Steiner (Executive Director of UNEP) had to say “If you cannot produce enough electricity for a building on the equator, where on earth would you do it?”
This was in response to the objection that the people had in installing solar panels in Kenya “you know you can’t do this in Africa, these technologies are too complicated. They are expensive, it is all wrong, we are on the equator”
Achim continued “I still have a dream that in Kenya twenty years from now with the photo voltaic and solar revolution what we will actually see is the rural areas of the country generating the electricity and selling it to the cities”
We enforce emission norms for vehicles and make them more and more stringent (Euro-IV, Euro-V. . . . . .)
But what about other sources by which unwanted emissions take place.
Saw a short movie which says that 2.5 million people die prematurely as a result of breathing in the emissions from the stoves, known as black carbon, commonly called soot.
Gisele Bundchen, UNEP Goodwill Ambassador said, “the slow burning cooking stove is one such solution for rural areas because it reduces up to seventy percent of the smoke in the houses and also uses 50 percent less firewood for it to work”
