By: Chandu Visweswariah On this Earth Day, with all the wonderful Earth Day festivals and activities and speeches that have united and invigorated us, the only thing that actually counts is reduction of greenhouse gases to stabilize our climate system. If you want to get straight to the action part and bypass the scientific rationale, skip forward to this symbol…
By: Chandu Visweswariah The recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) AR6 (Assessment Report 6) Synthesis Report states that we have a remaining carbon budget of 500 gigatons or 500 billion metric tons of CO2 equivalent. What does this mean in practical terms? A carbon budget at an instant of time means that the cumulative emissions from that instant until…
By: Chandu Visweswariah Climate change is the existential challenge of our lifetimes. Like me, you are probably frustrated at the lack of real progress. Despite all the headlines and all the environmental events and all the climate pledges, carbon in the atmosphere continues to climb instead of declining. Let me restate that: Carbon in the atmosphere continues to climb instead…
By: Chandu Visweswariah Money makes the world go around. Put your money where your mouth is. While we’ve all heard these sayings, I recently had the satisfaction of using them to advance environmental goals. Many of us have some money in the form of bank accounts, or investments (like stocks, bonds or mutual funds) or retirement assets (like 401(k) accounts)….
By: Chandu Visweswariah Look in the mirror and ask yourself, “Am I an arsonist?” The honest answer may shock you. Over the years, the United Nations has ratcheted up the urgency and stridency of its statements accompanying Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports. Back in 2018, the verbiage was “We will need rapid, unprecedented and far-reaching changes in all…
By: Chandu Visweswariah Words matter. I once received a letter from the Carter Center in which former President Jimmy Carter urged me to donate money so that he could “wage peace” all over the world. I remember thinking at the time that the wording was clever. It indicated to me that President Carter was proposing a proactive and vigorous effort…
By: Chandu Visweswariah Did he who made the Lamb make thee? In the old days, humans threatened animal species by rapaciously hunting them for meat, skin, fur and ivory. Now we have found more efficient ways of wiping out not just individual creatures but entire species. The unthinkable has happened! The last living members of 34 different species died without…
By: Chandu Visweswariah In 1982, I registered for a class called “Communications Circuits” on the leafy campus of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chennai, India. The instructor was Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala (picture on the left and bio here and here). Fast forward almost 40 years since then, and Prof. Jhunjhunwala (who I’ll call Prof. J. in the rest…
By: Chandu Visweswariah Calling all meat eaters! Would your meat cravings ever be satisfied by plant-based substitutes (like ‘Beyond Burgers’ or ‘Impossible Burgers’)? How about meat that is grown in the laboratory by a process called cellular agriculture? Never, you say? Maybe not so fast… These meat substitutes go by the unappetizing name of Precision Fermentation and Cellular Agriculture (PFCA…
By: Chandu Visweswariah The recent United Nations IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) 6th Assessment Report has set off a frenzy of “after-market analysis” in the environmental community to help the public make sense of the scientific jargon in the report. There is no ambiguity that we must reduce emissions to a level that can be absorbed by natural systems;…
