Skip to main content

India and Climate Change



If you watched Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s top-billed speech at the United Nations Climate Action Summit on September 23, you might be inclined to say the South Asian leader is very serious about climate change.  I mean, we'll keep him to the sidelines!

A recent Worldwatch Institute study showed that climate change is the most serious threat India faces. As if that isn't enough, a recent  Worldwatch Institute‏ study showed that climate change remains "the biggest threat India faces today."

According to a recent Worldwatch Institute‏ report, in 2015, 2.3 billion people, or 15 percent of the world's population, will live in regions where climate change affects their land and their economy.
So, in fact, you might think that the Worldwatch Institute and India's Department of Atomic Energy are actually on the same page when it comes to making sure India is prepared for climate change.  You're wrong.

The Indian government seems determined to keep the U.S. out of the  Paris Accord , which is the centerpiece of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.

Modi knew that all eyes would be on him. As the need for sweeping climate action grows more urgent, the world has been desperately following what India will do next.  The first thing he should do, if he is serious about addressing the problem, is to pull his country out of the Paris agreement . I do not think that this is feasible.  The Paris agreement is an international treaty that is essentially binding and cannot be renegotiated.  Unless India is prepared to commit to withdraw its capitation scheme - which is a key part of the entire Paris agreement - then there is no possibility of renegotiating it on the international stage.  But that is a long term issue (indeed, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi knows well, India has a lot of ground to win back, especially its industrial base ) and will require a concerted decision by the government to get up and running again. The second aspect that Modi need to address is the question of carbon-capture and storage technology.

But anyone who’s looked closely at the past half-decade of energy policy in India should realize that Modi’s grandiose statements — and India’s place as a global climate leader — warrant some skepticism. ’When we’re talking about climate change, India is a major player, and it can do a lot to improve the situation," says Rajan Zed, director of the Energy and Resources Institute in New Delhi. "But in the meantime, what is not right with the politics is that the Indian public is still completely in the dark about the impact of climate change."

In the last 10 years, India has reduced carbon emissions by an estimated 24 million metric tons. The Indian government has long argued that it is responsible for an enormous share of that reduction thanks to its pioneering efforts in renewable energy generation, but many Indians still doubt the government's credentials. "It does not tell the truth that it has put in over 50 gigawatts of capacity," says Sushil Pandey of the Centre for Science and Environment. "But of course, the government would never do something that is not in the name of the country.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Photovoltaics: Band Diagram

In the previous post we discussed silicon, which is the most used material in photovoltaics. In this post, we introduce the band diagram, for which we will use silicon as an example. We will start our discussion of the band diagram with the Bohr model of the silicon atom. In semiconductor materials the outer shell of the atom, which is called the valence shell, is not completely filled. The outer shell of silicon contains 4 out of the possible 8 electrons, which we call valence electrons. As we discussed in the previous post, each silicon atom in a crystalline structure is bonded to four other silicon atoms. The bonds between the silicon atoms are called covalent bonds. These bonds actually consist of two valence electrons that are shared by two silicon atoms. All valence electrons are fixed in the lattice, forming covalent bonds, and are therefore immobile. However, at a temperature above absolute zero, thermal energy is supplied to these miconductor and some of the vale...
Post a Comment
Read more

Watching videos on the Internet also harms the environment

Surprisingly, even the videos we watch on the Internet have an impact on the environment. A new report indicates that the internet is one of the top "villains" in the digital sector's carbon footprint, which now accounts for 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions. This share could double by 2025, leaving the digital sector on a par with road transport, as energy consumption in this sector is increasing at the rate of 9% per year. Published by the French research website The Shift Project, the report "Climate Crisis: The Unsustainable Use of Online Video" quantifies the impact of Internet video (VoD, "tubes", pornography, social networks and others) on the environment and the global climate. The study shows that, within all Internet data, online videos account for about 60 percent of the stream, or the largest volume of greenhouse gas emissions in the industry, with about 300 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e). Of this total emission,...
Post a Comment
Read more

Photovoltaics: Silicon

Welcome to this new post about semiconductor physics. Before we delve into all the important topics of semiconductor physics that are relevant to solar cells, we need to talk about silicon. Silicon is one of the most important materials when it comes to solar cells and we will be using it throughout this post series as an example for all the semiconductor concepts we will be going into. This will only be a short introduction to silicon, and there will be an extensive post series on silicon-based solar cells in the following course, Photovoltaic Technologies. Let’s start our discussion by looking at the reasons why silicon is the most used material for fabricating solar cells. The first successful silicon solar cell was fabricated in the Bell Laboratories in US in 1954. At present, the photovoltaic industry is dominated by silicon-based solar cells with 90%share of the market. Silicon is the most widespread material used for solar cells. But why is it that silicon is used so much?...
Post a Comment
Read more