ADDRESS OF SHRI HAMID ANSARI, FORMER VICE-PRESIDENT OF INDIA AT THE RELEASE OF THE BOOK ‘DAWN OF THE SOLAR AGE: AN END TO GLOBAL WARMING AND TO FEAR’ AUTHORED BY SHRI PREM SHANKER JHA ON APRIL 19, 2018, AT 6.00 PM, AT IIC, NEW DELHI


Solar Age

This is a book on futurology, but in the realm of the doable. It is about climate change, about the threat of global warming, about the warning of ‘limits of growth’ given by the Club of Rome in 1972 and all the attendant disasters it predicted relating to carbon emissions. Above all, it is about the possibility of another world involving a shift from dependence on fossil fuels.

The author invites the reader to consider the possibility of the Sun being the source of energy for humankind, the same cosmic entity that down the ages we have praised, worshipped, considered absolutely essential for existence. The critical prerequisites for this change, he suggests, are technology and investments.

The book’s approach is simple yet enticing. If the dawn of civilization happened some 7000 years back, it took the humans 4000 years to harness animal power. This was possible through the invention of the wheel and the axle and all its attendant results in mobility and warfare. Another 2000 years hence, wind and water became critical sources. A few centuries later, coal provided the impetus for the industrial revolution. The next great discovery was oil and gas. Each of these discoveries, and attendant innovations, brought in their wake far reaching changes geo-politics and in the global distribution of wealth and power.

Prem Sahkar Jha draws upon the thesis of the futurologist James Lovelock that living and non-living parts of the earth are a complex interacting system that can be considered as a single organism and that this biosphere has a regulatory effect on the earth’s environment that sustains life. It is this regulatory system that is now threatened by global warming in its different manifestations.

Our author’s suggestion is that the remedy lies in a shift to the sun and biomass as future sources of energy. This would result, firstly, in the desired reduction in carbon emissions and, secondly, in redressing the geopolitical power imbalance since both the sun and the biomass are available in abundance in the countries of the South. A principal impediment to it market forces and the greater part of the book is devoted to a persuasive argument relating to the manner in which this has worked.

This book is embedded in realism, in what is doable in terms of our known levels of knowledge and capacities. Many others have speculated on wider possibilities in the context of our ever increasing demand for energy. Some decades earlier, the Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev had developed a scale based on a civilization’s technological advancement on its access to available energy, and concluded that a Type 1 civilization harnesses all the energy available on its own planet, Type 2 can harvest all the power of its sun, and Type 3 all the power from its galaxy. On this basis he and some other futurologists have estimated that our earth can only be given a Type 0.7 grading.

So we have a long way to go if we wish to survive and progress and should therefore pay serious attention to making better use of solar energy.

Jai Hind.