By: Chandu Visweswariah Dear human race, Congratulations on centuries of progress and triumph (albeit bumpy at times). Your intellectual, artistic, medical and scientific progress in the last few centuries has been impressive. You have also made incremental progress on injustice, bigotry, discrimination and exploitation of all kinds, be it slavery, racism, colonialism or elitism. Failure However, it pains me to…
By: Chandu Visweswariah Summary With each passing year of under-achievement in reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, our planet’s carbon budget is dwindling. To avoid truly catastrophic and irreversible damage from climate change, this blog argues that the world now has to achieve net zero by 2034, if not sooner. What is a Carbon Budget? A carbon budget is an amount…
By: Chandu Visweswariah I’ve been asked by multiple friends and relatives what it’s like to drive an EV in frigid weather. I usually reply that the combination of a heavier car, low center of gravity, high torque at slow speeds, and four-wheel drive is an unbeatable combination in snowy and icy conditions. In fact, given that our driveway is steep,…
By: Akhila Golla†, Yuting Hu†, Vishnu Sai Teja Kondamudi†, Chandu Visweswariah‡, Sai Subhash Reddy Yarram†, Venkata Subrahmanyam Upputuri† and Jinjun Xiong††State University of New York, Buffalo‡CURE100.org According to the National Academy of Engineering, electrification and the electric grid constituted the top U.S. engineering achievement of the 20th century. But now it is already time to reinvent that same engineering marvel…
By: Chandu Visweswariah The two biggest sources of carbon emissions in our part of the country in the Northeast are transportation and building heating. Most homes and buildings are heated with a fossil fuel furnace, burning fuel oil, gas or propane to produce heat. To decarbonize rapidly, we urgently need all new construction to incorporate heat pumps, and all existing…
By: Chandu Visweswariah August 16 was the one-year anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the most significant piece of climate legislation ever passed anywhere in the world. And New York State just announced incentives and subsidies from the Environmental Bond Act (EBA) that all of us helped to pass in November 2022. This financial assistance is additive to Federal…
By: Chandu Visweswariah A timely solution to our climate crisis can only be achieved by a rapid global phase-out of fossil fuels. Therefore, we urgently need international agreement on a timetable. Mankind has historically dealt with dangerous poisons like leaded gasoline, freon, carcinogens like PCBs, asbestos, and now it is time to firmly and permanently close the spigot on fossil…
By: Chandu Visweswariah [Author’s note: this blog is adapted from CURE100’s August newsletter’s “opening banter.”] Sitting here in New York, it’s easy to think of climate change as a “faraway” phenomenon. Hurricane Sandy filled our subway stations with water in 2012, and there was much talk of building sea walls and reducing emissions. We did neither and Sandy slowly faded…
By: Chandu Visweswariah Every Town and Village has a potpourri of governmental environmental organizations like a Sustainability Committee, a Conservation Advisory Council and a Climate Smart Community. There’s even a NY State Association of Conservation Commissions. There’s also typically a grab bag of local and national environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs). With all this fervor and well-meaning effort, you would think…
By: Chandu Visweswariah The fossil fuel industry has defiantly projected that we will need their products till the end of this century or beyond. They are wrong. And if there’s any chance we will burn fossil fuels for another eight decades, God help our children, grandchildren and generations to come who will inhabit the planet at the turn of the…
