India's need for fossil fuel encouraging heatwaves that will cripple it

By David Fickling

India might have hoped that its punishing 2022 heatwave season, which pushed the mercury as high as 49.2 degrees Celsius (121 degrees Fahrenheit) in the capital Delhi, would be followed by a breather. It’s not looking that way.

Most of the country outside the southernmost states is forecast to suffer more heatwave days during the most intense April-June season, the India Meteorological Department said at the weekend. A swathe of land from the Ganges valley to the coast of the Bay of Bengal — home to more than 350 million people — will endure 10 more days of heatwave than in a typical year, according to the department’s latest outlook. 

There’s a great injustice in the disproportionate damage being inflicted on India and its neighbors as the climate warms. The average American, Canadian or Australian is responsible for about eight times more emissions than the average Indian. The climate damage that richer nations wrought on their path to wealth is being visited on the country with the largest population of poor people, before it gets its own chance to struggle up the development ladder.

Despite that, as it grows, India is increasingly becoming the author of its own misfortunes. Already by some estimates the world’s biggest country by population, it’s also the biggest source of demand growth for fossil fuels over the coming decade. Rich countries have cut their emissions by about 16% since 2007 and China’s are set to peak before 2030. India’s emissions are already on the brink of overtaking those from the European Union. By 2030, they’ll account for more pollution than Europe and Japan put together.

Whatever happened in the past, the country’s leaders can’t absolve themselves of responsibility for the consequences of their own actions over the coming decade.

That’s particularly the case because in sector after sector, low-emissions technologies are already undercutting dirtier conventional ones. Electric rickshaws and three-wheelers won a two-thirds market share of sales last year, according to BloombergNEF, thanks to running costs that are drastically lower than those for conventional diesel models. Power from new onshore wind and solar generators costs about three-quarters that from new coal plants. Switching to the less polluting option should give more people access to modern energy.

It’s troubling, then, that this isn’t happening. Back in 2015, Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised the country would install 175 gigawatts of wind, solar, and small-scale hydro power by the end of last year. In practice, the country fell roughly 31% short.

Some 15.77 gigawatts of wind and solar was installed in 2022, less than half what’s needed annually to hit a fresh government goal of 500 GW by 2030. Renewables tenders issued by utilities fell to just 28 GW from 40 GW in 2022 according to consultancy JMK Research. Those levels put 500 GW far beyond reach. 

One factor in the shortfall has been the way that the energy transition is being asked to bear the costs of government trade barriers and industrial policy.

Tariffs as high as 40% on imported solar components introduced last April have left local developers unable to finish projects because of costs that are now drastically higher than when contracts were signed. In the vehicle sector, the government has suspended subsidy programs for electric vehicles and investigated automakers over claims that they didn’t have a sufficient share of local content. The entire automotive electrification subsidy program may be abandoned next year after hitting its modest targets, the Economic Times reported last month, citing officials it didn’t name.

Such counterproductive protectionism is increasingly rife across the world, from the US and EU to South Africa and Morocco. It might seem harsh to single out India for doing the same thing that many other countries are doing. And yet it’s not people who are singling India out, but the climate itself: its loss of long-run gross domestic product from three degrees Celsius of warming would be 10.4%, the highest of any Group of 20 economy after Indonesia, according to one 2018 study.

The complaint of Indian governments for five decades has always been that poverty itself is a form of pollution. A nation cannot clean up its economy until it has first grown affluent. If that means powering its early development with fossil fuels, then so be it, the argument goes. As renewables have undercut the costs of conventional alternatives, however, growth and efficiency is no longer the rhetoric that’s used. Instead the talk is of the power of incumbency: How hard it will be to dethrone coal, for instance, when its inefficient supply chain is bound up with regional economies, rail freight, and the underwater investments of well-connected billionaires and state-owned utilities.

That’s not an egalitarian argument about the necessity of growth. It’s an insistence that the mass of India’s population must pay with their health, their wealth and their futures to support core interest groups, even when a cleaner path is at hand. That will be a hard sell to people laboring under crippling heatwaves over the coming months. Indian politicians shouldn’t assume voters will continue to buy it.

Disclaimer: This is a Bloomberg Opinion piece, and these are the personal opinions of the writer. They do not reflect the views of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper