The next big climate-change battle starts in India

Some climate activists worry that Donald Trump’s presidential election will be the death knell for the global environment.
 
That’s almost certainly untrue. Whatever Trump’s attitude toward climate science and energy policy, two big outside factors will be much more important — technological progress and policy in developing nations.
 
First, the good news. Renewable energy technology is already unstoppable. No longer does solar power depend on government subsidies for survival — it’s increasingly beating fossil fuels on pure raw economics. A new report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance lays out the numbers. Solar is getting so cheap, so fast, that it will quickly come to represent the lion’s share of new electric-power generation
   

Assuming battery technology continues to improve, BNEF predicts that a decade from now, solar will start to replace some fossil-fuel plants.
 
In other words, in many places it will be cheaper to simply scrap coal plants and build new solar plants in their place.
 
All of this is great news for the climate. It means that we don’t have to halt economic growth or radically change the way that capitalism works in order to save the planet, as some more climate activists had assumed. Once again, human ingenuity will let us escape the trap of natural limitations.
 
But here’s the bad news: Technology will only get us part of the way there. BNEF predicts that even with solar racing ahead, carbon emissions will continue at or slightly above current levels for the next three decades. That’s new carbon that’s getting pumped into the air every year, to add to the giant stockpile that already exists. Since averting climate change requires dramatic reductions in emissions, this means more needs to be done. In the short term, technology’s amazing progress is getting canceled out by rapid emissions increases in developing countries.
 
China is the problem everyone knows about. The country already releases about twice as much carbon as the US each year.
 
Recently, however, China has made a dramatic effort to reduce emissions, and it seems to be working. Much more needs to be done, but the leadership in that country is taking the problem seriously — possibly more seriously than the US
 
More worrying is India. This country, almost as big as China in terms of population, is still desperately poor and is understandably determined to develop. The easiest way to get richer is to industrialise and dig up a bunch of coal and burn it — and India is endowed with a very large coal deposits.