The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : On a road tour, ‘powered by passion and fuelled by hope’

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Friday, Jan 02, 2009
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Tamil Nadu - Chennai

On a road tour, ‘powered by passion and fuelled by hope’

Vidya Venkat

Members of the International Youth Climate Network to take off from Chennai

— PHOTO: S.R.Raghunathan

Think alternative: IYCN members (clockwise from left) Karthikeya Singh, Alexis Ringwald, Caroline Howe and Anna Da Costa pose with the battery-run car which will be partly powered by solar energy.

CHENNAI: Members of the International Youth Climate Network (IYCN) have chosen Chennai as their destination to begin a four-week long ‘Climate Solutions’ road tour to promote alternative sources of energy for automobiles and other such initiatives that help reduce carbon emissions.

IYCN international coordinator Alexis Ringwald said that they chose Chennai for the tour beginning on Saturday, as the city is the hub of the automobile industry and has witnessed a huge rise in vehicle population in the last few years. “We want people to realise that they are contributing to global warming and are part of the problem. Switching over to environment-friendly vehicles that do not emit carbon is just one way of responding to the issue of climate change,” she said.

The 4,000-km road tour will see a core team of 20 IYCN members travelling to 20 cities across the country, including Bangalore, Pune, Mumbai and Goa, on vehicles fuelled by alternative sources of energy.

They would drive a model of the battery-run Reva car with a solar-panel on top of it, which takes care of about 20 per cent of the car’s energy needs. They have also brought with them a ‘bio-van’ that runs on waste vegetable oil, a pick-up truck that runs on jatropha oil and a jeep with a solar roof for charging it.

According to Karthikeya Singh, Executive Director of Indian Youth Climate Network, the India chapter of IYCN, the tour was “powered by passion and fuelled by hope.”

He said they wanted to show people that switching over to alternative sources of energy was not difficult at all. They had made all possible arrangements to take care of their fuelling needs. Caroline Howe, Director of the Climate Solutions project, which has a tie-up with the IYCN, said that they also intended to interact with young people during the course of their tour on different solutions to deal with the problem of climate change. “We are also looking at promoting green fuel for running public transport, bio-gas for village communities, popularising solar-water heaters and so on,” she said.

The Indian Youth Climate Network was started in March 2008 and has grown in membership from three members to three lakh. “Our aim is to provide a platform to share ideas on climate change and working out solutions for it,” Ms.Howe said.

Ms.Ringwald said they would also be looking forward to meeting students in educational institutions at every destination in order to get them involved in the Network’s activities.

“As part of our leadership training programme in colleges we are promoting solutions to climate change that people can implement at home,” she said. Madras University, IIT Bombay, University of Mumbai, Osmania University in Hyderabad will be some of the institutions where they would stop-over during the tour.

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