Saturday, 25 November 2006

smoking kills

It has been proved again and again that smoking kills. I wondered whether smokers consider their addiction above their (and others') lives. Then I realized that most of the urban people smoke at least two times a day - once leaving home and once returning. This form of smoking is found to be more injurious passively than actively.














Two immediate solutions thought are electric vehicles and hydrogen. Elecric vehicles on 2, 3 and 4 wheels are already available (in indian market itself). Albeit, I rarely see these on road premierly due to shortcomings such as low acceleration, high charging time and limited life of batteries. Hyddrogen as fuel (directly or as fuel cell) is yet to come up with viable economic designs.

The real question unanswered here is does it stop pollution? Unfortunately right now, most of our electricity production relies on non-renewable fossil fuels. Even if we turn to nuclear fuels to solve our energy crisis, safety and disposal of wastes become a major issue. Any more dam construction will only invite more propaganda and politics. Other renewable sources such as solar energy, tidal energy and wind energy are yet to make it big.
So that leaves us back to energy sources which cause pollution of some sort.

When electric vehicles were introduced in US, they didn't succeed. See about documentary "who killed the electric car?". Apparently there are more political interests in sustaining fossil fuel business than to think about well being of the globe (What else should I have expected from politicians). Here is a trailer.


I started with "smoking kills". Now the subject also touches energy crisis, politics and imperialism. Is all in despair?

We will have to wait for another technology revolution to answer that.

update:
call me a hypocrite, but I have decided to buy a (petrol-based) bike to survive the long distances in Bangalore. And if you see a blank space instead of a video, wait till youtube finishes trying out new formulae.... Somebody has a good sense of humour describing youtube's architecture in layman's terms

1 comment:

Daneshia said...

hey u've got a cool blog here Kartik! :)
do visit my profile and u can find links to my blogs, the one u'd want to vsit is Diary of Dan.