By improving our ability to deal with temperature changes, yoga reduces our dependence on artificial airconditioning and helps cut back harmful refrigerant-based emissions
At the United Nations General Assembly, Prime Minister Narendra Modi called for the adoption of yoga, globally, as a means to harmonise with nature our changing lifestyle so as to deal with climate change. Mr Modi’s remark, though an unconventional remedy in the eyes of climate change community, does call for a deeper examination. Yoga is connected to our stamina to withstand variations in cold and heat during winters and summers respectively. In this context, yoga has the potential to reduce climate change impact, at almost zero cost to the economies worldwide, and it can also help India lead a climate initiative, as it prepares its strategy for the COP21 negotiations in Paris next year
First, as income levels have grown in India and also globally, our comfort temperature inside our homes and offices have also varied accordingly, becoming cooler during summers and warmer during winters. This has been made possible by the rapid advancement of more efficient and yet cheaper air-conditioning technologies. For example, two decades back, people in north India were comfortable with 30 degree room temperature during the summer season. But with the advent of air conditioners, that comfort level has come down to 22 degrees approximately. On one hand, this has promoted congested and box-type building development in urban areas, where people care less about ventilation because of the availability of air conditioners, and more about the prices of the real estate. On the other hand, the rise in electricity use from the highly power-consuming air conditioners has lead to even more dependence on fossil fuel-based electricity generation — coal in India and China, natural gas in the US and Europe — demand for which cannot be met by smaller and distributed renewables.
Second, the use of millions of high power airconditioners connected to grids creates issues of peak demand management and further, requirement of fossil fuel-based power plants to manage that peak. Additionally, airconditioners themselves are one of the biggest contributors to refrigerant-based emissions such as hydrofluorocarbons whose global warming potential is several times more than that of carbon dioxide. Mr Guus Velders of the Netherlands' National Institute for Public Health and the Environment and his colleagues forecast that refrigerants, majorly HFCs, that will accumulate in the atmosphere between now and 2050, will contribute another 14 to 27 per cent to the increased warming caused by all human-generated carbon dioxide emissions.
This issue has been recognised globally as a lifestyle issue. For example, the UK Government’s 2050 calculator initiative mentions that in the do-nothing scenario, winter comfort temperature inside homes in the UK is set to increase from the present level of 17.5 degrees to 20 degrees by 2050. If this is maintained at 16.5 degree, with UK citizens using airconditioners minimally throughout the day and, using woolen clothes instead, the British economy will save almost 45 per cent of its present energy demand and almost 10 per cent of its present day carbon emissions.
On similar lines, almost all the economic powers have recognised the potential contribution of our lifestyle changes in saving the planet and have tried to incorporate these in their national sustainability policies. In 1992, Mr Gwyn Prins, a Cambridge University professor, called “physical addiction” to cooled air America's “most pervasive and least noticed epidemic”. Thus, the responsibility of saving the planet should not entirely be left to technological innovations that tend to make our life sustainable but makes behavioural changes as well.
