Sunita Narain: For us, climate change is an outcome of development. It’s not something that goes over and above development, and I think that’s what makes us as southern environmentalists — or, coming from India. For me, climate is an issue which is like the cherry on top of a cake or a dynamite on top of a cake. It’s not the cake itself.
Jason Bordoff: Last week President Trump announced plans to double tariffs on Indian goods to 50% as punishment for the country’s continued purchase of Russian oil. This puts India in an untenable position. The US is its top export market, but India is deeply reliant on importing its energy to support the needs of its 1.4 billion people.
As the world’s most populous nation and one of its fastest growing economies. India faces unprecedented energy demands and also pressure to meet that demand with clean energy. Today around 70% of the country’s electricity still comes from coal and air pollution is a major problem in India’s large cities.
So how can India meet its fast growing energy needs while also ensuring energy, affordability, equity and public health? What does an equitable energy transition for a country like India look like? What role should natural gas or even coal play in India’s energy transition? Where is India in making progress toward deploying clean energy and how does India’s relationship with China factor into its decarbonization efforts?
This is Columbia Energy Exchange, a weekly podcast from the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University.
I’m Jason Bordoff today on the show, Sunita Narain.
Just as the geopolitical tensions between the US, India and Russia were intensifying last week, I sat down for this conversation with Sunita, one of India’s leading environmentalists and someone I’ve been fortunate to call a friend for many years.
Sunita is executive director of the Centre for Science and Environment, a research and advocacy center where she has worked since 1982. She was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world in 2016.
We discussed how current geopolitical tensions might impact India’s energy generation and energy transition strategies. We also talked about ways India could confront its near term reliance on coal while reducing coal’s harms, and we explored issues of climate equity and the responsibilities of developed versus developing nations.
I hope you enjoy the conversation.
Sunita Narain, thank you so much for joining us from Delhi on Columbia Energy Exchange. It’s great to see you again virtually following our visit when I was in India about four or six weeks ago and we had a fascinating conversation then and thought a lot of other people might want to listen to a version of it. So appreciate your making time to join us on the podcast.
Sunita Narain: Thank you Jason. Always a pleasure. Always such a pleasure to talk and discuss with you in our turbulent times.
Jason Bordoff: Well, I feel the same. You’re someone I’ve known a long time, have learned a lot from and always enjoy talking to you, and it’s particularly in uncertain times you help explain things. So that’s what we will do right now. But first, just so everyone listening understands who you are, what you have done for several decades as one of the leading environmentalists, not just in India but maybe in the world. I don’t want to convey your age to our listeners, but for around four decades with the Centre for Science and Environment, can you just explain to people what that is and what the work you all do is?
Sunita Narain: So I work at the Centre for Science and Environment. We are fiercely independent. We are not critical, but we are a public interest research organization and for some reason that is a breed of institutions… I mean, the reason we share so much is because I know how strongly you feel about this as well… institutions which are not party affiliated, which are not government affiliated, but really play the role of looking at policy and looking at practice and are constantly looking to learn and our job is to learn. We strongly believe that the world is really a big development laboratory and we are constantly in this massive experiment of trying to get things right and the more we learn, the more we write about it, the more we can influence the way people think. The way policy is made. As a research institution and as a public interest research organization, we feel strongly about the need to communicate our research so we have a very strong effort to amplify the work that we have, the research that we have so that we can build a larger community of practice in our countries.
We have over the years played a role in pushing towards clean air policies in Delhi. For instance, we advocated for the use of compressed natural gas way back in 1998 and then because I was on a committee reporting to the Supreme Court, we could actually push that transition through. So the effort is constantly to stand behind our ideas and keep seeing how those can be implemented, but the basic learning that we’ve had in our lives and our work has been that policy to be sustainable, has to be affordable, has to be inclusive. And so for us, politics of inclusion, politics of development are critical to the question of sustainability. That’s a bit of a long introduction, Jason.
Jason Bordoff: No, it’s a great introduction. As you said, you and I have talked both about environment, climate, energy, the global outlook, India, but also how to build as I’ve been trying to do for the last dozen years, research institutes that have policy impact and how you think about independent evidence-based research, but make sure that research is used by decision makers but still maintains that independence, trust and credibility even though you may have views about the right outcomes in the world. And it sounds like you also engage in advocacy, you have solutions you want policymakers to be implementing and you’re engaging with the policy community all the time toward that work.
Sunita Narain: Absolutely. I think that’s why we share that understanding of needing to move the world.
Jason Bordoff: And you do that across the board with lots of environmental issues. I think often sitting where I am in New York City and you’re talking about India, it often comes up in the context of climate change as one of the fastest growing emitters and also energy more broadly. Of course it’s been in the news lately, our President seems concerned about where you’re buying your oil from and the role Russia plays in that. We can come to that, but just set the stage for people listening about sort of the breadth of the work you do when you look at the environmental issues that a country like India faces. Its role as a CO2 emitter is certainly high on the list, but there are many others as well. Can you talk about the breadth of issues that are kind of on your priority list right now?
Sunita Narain: Of course Jason, I mean for anyone who knows India, they know that we have difficult choices and one of the choices that we cannot make is to be too specialized because everything is urgent and everything is connected. So CSE works on air pollution, but as we work on air pollution, we also work on mobility transformation because for us, air pollution is about the right to walk, the right to change the way we drive. We work on industrial pollution, we work on circularity, looking at the hard to abate sectors down to the medium and small scale sectors, but then we also look at the issue of solid waste. There’s a huge challenge of garbage in our cities, but the garbage challenge is also about how we can reinvent the way we take waste and not make it waste and how can we as a country understand that we are too poor a country to waste land to dump our solid waste in.
So reinventing that one of CSE’s most important work, something I’m very proud of, Jason was and has been to really look at the way we manage our water systems and way back in the mid 2000s we came up with a report called Dying Wisdom. We documented how did India manage its water system before the British came to India, before the colonial rulers came? And the reason this is important is that India is a water scarce country. It rains only for about a hundred hours in a year in India, but we had an amazing civilization, we had cities, we had caravan routes, we had an amazing ability to be able to urbanize at that time. But so how did we do that with such limited water? And what came out, it was this tremendous, I mean this incredible legacy of traditional water harvesting systems built on the simple principle of rainwater harvesting, which then got destroyed because the state controlled the water system and that meant that community control disappeared and bureaucracies took over.
And today we are doing a lot more work looking at river pollution because for us the whole issue is how do you reinvent the sewage system, the excreta management system of our countries because if we don’t do so and we follow say the New York based system, which is to intercept the sewage of everyone and treat it and clean it before you put it into the Hudson, it’s too capital intensive for us. It is too resource intensive for us. It is dividing our societies and it’s polluting our rivers. And so we are looking at how to reinvent that. We’ve played a major role in being able to advocate for new solutions, a paradigm shift in the way we manage our shit, quite literally. A lot of cities in India today are taking up that new work. Just to give you that sense that in India everything is connected and when climate change happens and we get these intense rainfall events today, cities are going under because of floods, but the answer to the floods is to revive the rainwater harvesting system through the lakes and ponds of our cities.
When we are getting intense heat, the answer is to make sure that you have more water bodies, more green areas, which means that you cannot afford cities to lose land for landfills. So it’s sort of a fascinating issue for me, Jason, because everything we do becomes rooted in the question of development. So for us, climate change is an outcome of development. It’s not something that goes over and above development and I think that’s what makes us as southern environmentalists or environmentalists coming from India. For me, climate is an issue which is like the cherry on top of a cake or a dynamite on top of a cake. Okay? It’s not the cake itself and we need to make sure that we remake the menu of the cake so that we can get the co-benefit of a cleaner environment and also reduce emissions globally.
Jason Bordoff: That’s really interesting, and I don’t know if this is what you meant because you were talking about co-benefits and moving in a cleaner direction, but when you say climate change is an outcome of development, it reminds me of messages one hears including from our current energy secretary in the United States. He wrote a piece in The Economist recently in which I think he talked about how he views climate change not as an existential crisis, but a real physical phenomenon that is a byproduct of progress. The idea is yes, atmospheric CO2 has gone up, but billions of people have been lifted out of poverty. And the idea that the world still needs fossil fuels is often by some, including I think in our new administration in the United States, described as a necessary result of the fact that there are lots of poor people in the world and they need a lot more energy. Is that a false choice in your view, or is there some reality to the tension of how much energy emerging income, emerging economies and developing economies need and the need to decarbonize much faster than we are today?
Sunita Narain: I think it’s a completely false choice. Jason, I agree with your energy secretary that there is a desperate need for energy in our part of the world so that I agree with. Energy poverty is not acceptable and it’s not acceptable for us to agree to a world which divides countries, people between those who have too much energy or enough energy and people who don’t even have light or a fan or clean cooking fuel so that women are forced to use biomass today and they damage their own lungs. I think that’s completely unacceptable. Energy poverty is not acceptable in a civilized world, but his answer to it is not something that I would accept. The reason is very simple. We know that climate change is real. I have absolutely no doubt about that. I mean climate change is real. We are seeing it in our world.
Jason, as I’m talking to you, I have a barrage of phone calls coming from journalists in India who want me to go on TV right now because we’ve had the most horrific, the most horrific tragedy in the hills last night where one cloudburst has meant that an entire town has been washed away. We have found huge loss of human life and property. Now it is true that one cloudburst is not climate change, but the fact is, and this is what we need to understand, that there is a clear trend of intensification, increased frequency of the extreme weather events in our world. We have data on that. Our data shows us that we are talking about literally one extreme weather event a day in India. We don’t have data for the Indian subcontinent but for India now. That’s devastating for the poor in our world.
Let’s be clear. I mean they have no ability to be able to cope with this. So I would respectfully disagree with your energy secretary first to say very clearly that climate change may be the outcome of progress that has happened in one part of the world. But the fact is climate change is real. The victims of climate change are real, and the fact is that we have a finite space in which we know how much carbon dioxide will force temperatures to increase over 1.5 degrees Celsius rise. The question therefore is to share that carbon space. So you cannot tell me that the rich in the world can keep pumping more carbon dioxide because they need more energy for the AI centers and for their growth and for the reshoring of manufacturing that you’re hoping to bring back to the United States and do that in the name of the very poor, who are victims of climate change. What you need to do in the name of the very poor in the world is to promise them energy but clean energy. And that has to be the basis of moving ahead, not telling them that in their name the world will continue to use more fossil fuel.
Jason Bordoff: I just pulled up Chris Wright’s piece in The Economist in which he talks about how yes atmospheric CO2 has gone up, but so has life expectancy, billions of people lifted out of poverty. And he says, I’m willing to make that modest negative trade-off for this legacy of human advancement. I take it the point you disagree with there is that the negative trade-off is modest and you view, which I think I share the view that the impacts of climate change are at risk of being much more severe than that and lower income countries or countries like India may bear some of the worst brunt of that. Can I ask, so what do we do about that? As you said, it doesn’t mean just ignore the impacts of climate change in the name of human progress. Yes. A country like India with the largest population in the world will and needs to use more energy going forward as part of progress and growing prosperity and GDP growth, you have an extraordinarily ambitious goal, say for renewables, right? 500 gigawatts by 2030. I think you have made enormous progress building out particularly solar power in India. And I think if I remember the most recent estimates from the International Energy Agency correctly, even if India’s around 200 gigawatts now. So even if you’re able to get more than a doubling and reach that extraordinarily ambitious goal of 500 gigawatts by 2030, coal use will still be higher than it is today. That’s just how large the numbers are and how much energy it takes to deliver that rapid economic growth to such a large population. So I hear you when you say it’s a false trade-off, we have to do both, but it is hard to make the math of doing both work. So I’m just curious how you think about that. Is this just growing renewables even more exponentially faster? Is it cutting edge technologies and their role for nuclear power or is it also, as you said, maybe we need to think a little differently about who gets to keep emitting, but maybe who has to emit much less because you talked about your view of what’s happening in advanced economies.
Sunita Narain: Jason, that’s the question and that’s the most inconvenient conversation. And I know when I say that I’m at risk of being labeled communist or I don’t know a lefty or whatever words there are, but the fact is that climate change is perhaps the only time that the world has come to realize that we have one planet, we have one atmospheric space, and that what you do in the United States will impinge on a country like India because the emissions that you have had, and it’s quite right that those emissions of burning coal for so many generations has led to the wealth that you have. That’s the natural debt that you have to the world. It’s not a financial debt, but it’s a natural debt that you have to the world because you may have cleaned up your local air pollution, but you have ended up with emitting and contributing to the stock of greenhouse gases, which is in the atmosphere and forcing temperatures to rise today.
So there is absolutely no doubt in my mind, Jason, that when you talk about climate change, you have to talk about responsibility of which country and what do they do? Now, I’m old fashioned at this Jason, so forgive me, but when I was at the Rio conference in 1992 and the framework Convention on Climate Change was agreed upon, it was agreed with a set of principles, which I still think is very solid, very robust even for today, which is that the countries which contributed to the problem are the first movers. They’re not the only movers, Jason, they’re the first movers. And the aim was that they will reduce their emissions so that they can vacate space for the other countries to grow, but so that the other countries do not grow with the same emission intensity. They would be financing and technology transfer so that the rest of the world could grow differently.
Now, we never did that. We never followed through on those principles. In fact, we did everything to erase and discard that principle. Now, what happens when China joins? The China story is all about the free trade agreement with WTO. China joins in 2001 and the world never looks back because you have this massive emission growth now, not just in the old polluters but in the new polluter, which is China. Because it has become the industrial manufacturing hub of the whole world. The rest of the world did not reduce, but they moved their emissions to China. Now, if you had a rule-based international order, you would simply argue that when China has crossed its threshold of emissions, it moves from being a developing country to the annex one or to the polluter countries and then takes on the responsibility of emission reductions. So we destroyed this entire rule-based system because we found it didn’t work for us.
We wanted the right to be able to pollute and to be able to claim that we have very lofty ideals without doing very much. Now, that to me is really where the question of equity is today and where India stands today, when India has a challenge, let’s be clear, we have to grow our energy system and Mr. Chris Wright is absolutely right about this, that we need more energy, we need to double our energy if not more between now and 2030. However, what the Indian government has stated I think is a very wise and prudent position, which is to say that we cannot replace coal, but we can displace coal. So today, coal power generation, coal power plants generate and supply 75% of India’s electricity. Talking about no coal means it’s just not possible. But what the government has said is that the growth of energy, which is the doubling of energy that we need, will happen on clean power.
So by 2030 the stated plan is to reduce the generation, and I’m talking about generation of electricity from coal to less than 50% or 53% actually is the stated goal. And that the growth will now come from clean power, which is renewable wind, solar plants. I think that is extremely, it’s the way that a country like India needs to go. We can’t get rid of coal, but we should. And that is my other big issue, which we can discuss our recent report on decarbonizing the coal sector itself because if you can’t get rid of it, can you clean that up and on the other hand grow your clean energy system, which India is doing. I mean, let’s be very clear, we have met a 500 gigawatt – we are close to meeting a 500 gigawatt target ahead of schedule. The government is committed to renewable energy, committed to solar power. You know that Jason, there is huge policy investment and huge financial investment in growing the clean energy sector. It has challenges and we can discuss them, but there is no lack of intent and I think that is important for us to begin the conversation.
Jason Bordoff: Just so everyone listening knows, I think in the last 15 or so years, India’s electricity use has more than doubled. Are you saying the projections are to double? Were you talking about total energy use or electricity use and you’re talking about doubling again in five years?
Sunita Narain: Because electricity usage per capita is still very little. I mean you compare it to the rest of the world. I mean I won’t even begin to throw out those figures to your users because it’s one of those obnoxious numbers which just tells you how completely, I mean, and please don’t judge India by some gluttonous sort of middle class Indians. There are many of them, but the rest of India is still poor and it needs energy, electricity to drive its livelihoods.
Jason Bordoff: And around three quarters of that today is coal. So you’re describing a world where coal use remains roughly flat, coal’s share declines because the growth is met with what solar and wind primarily.
Sunita Narain: That’s right. That’s what the government’s stated policy is, and they are very clear and working towards a growth of solar and wind to take care of the new growth of electricity in the country. And I think that’s a very wise and prudent strategy. It didn’t feed the western rhetoric of keep it in the ground, no coal, I mean no coal should be for the United States, no gas should be for the United States because you have overused your share of the global commons. But in a country like India, for us to say, keep it in the ground when we need affordable accessible energy, which has been my conversation about the just energy transition partnership, the JETP partnerships, which are targeting removal of coal based power plants in South Africa, Indonesia, India, and Vietnam, I’ve always believed is impractical. We should be looking at what should be done to incentivize the growth of new energy, renewable energy.
And there, Jason, as you know you worked on this a lot more than anyone else has is that we need enablers because the cost of finance is so high for renewable energy, the cost of risk is high, the cost of finance is high, that we are still not getting clean renewable energy where we need it most. And that has really been one of the biggest issues that the world should confront, not just the issue of coal but the issue of energy. And that’s really where I would hope that the new energy secretary in the US will help us to find that energy security but clean energy security.
Jason Bordoff: You mentioned natural gas and of course that’s a controversial issue in some conversations about climate change, the role gas should play, if any, as part of a multi-decade transition. I’m curious how you view the role of gas in meeting the growth in India’s energy needs.
Sunita Narain: So I have to confess, Jason, I’m one of those diehard natural gas fans. CSE was the one who proposed that Delhi moved to natural gas in 1998. We went to the Supreme Court and said that if Delhi was to clean up its diesel incrementally, it would take us 15 years, but if we just switched fuel and went to natural gas, we could get the same emissions as the cleanest diesel by changing the fuel itself. That was our leapfrog strategy. And in two years in Delhi we managed to get a hundred thousand vehicles moving on natural gas. You’ve been to Delhi, you have seen all the green buses and the green auto rickshaws moving on gas. I definitely believe that for local air pollution, we need gas. The more gas we bring in and displace coal in our thermal power plants, we reduce the emission, the local emissions from coal.
We in the organization, I mean because I was also a member of the Supreme Court committee and we were advocating these solutions. We actually worked towards closing the last coal based power plant in the city of Delhi. We banned the use of coal in Delhi and now in the radius around Delhi for local air pollution. And the idea was to move to gas and there are new gas plants that have come up in Delhi. The problem is really for India, the cost of gas, and that’s always been the defeating problem. Part of it is generated by us because we tax gas too much, I believe. We don’t tax coal. We tax gas. And that’s something that we have been constantly writing to the government saying that our policy has to be to tax the dirty fuel and not the clean fuel. In this case, gas is the one that has double taxation, which needs to go. But it’s also true that we do need more affordable gas. And I believe that gas is a clean fuel for deep for hotspot polluted areas of India. That’s our transitional fuel. It is a fuel out of coal to gas, but it is not a transitional fuel for the rest of the world. So for people who lecture us about keeping coal in the ground and then move to gas, which has half the CO2 emissions and double the methane emissions is really the height of hypocrisy.
Jason Bordoff: So yeah, I was going to ask you sort of your response to people who are concerned, even gas emits CO2 and certainly there are methane leak concerns with gas as well. And it sounds not to put words in your mouth, the response would be something like, give me a break. We have rapidly growing energy needs and as you, I think the phrase you used was other parts of the world, advanced economies like the US have overused their share of the global commons. So your view is gas has a role to play displacing coal, displacing diesel, dealing with local air pollution, and if we need to think about the global carbon budget, wealthier countries need to move a lot faster than they are and give India a break and a little bit of space. Am I capturing your sentiment correctly?
Sunita Narain: Perfect.
Jason Bordoff: So that is all understandable. Given where you sit and given the history of this problem, I will share with you that it makes me pessimistic about how we make progress. Because the question is even if what you are saying is correct, what is the likelihood that advanced economies with levels of debt at World War II levels, significant concerns, not just in the US but Europe and elsewhere about fiscal imbalances are going to finance the transition in middle and lower income countries and then move even faster to reduce their own emissions in a world where most of those countries are not on track. And by the way, if Kamala Harris had won, this would still be the case in the US. Are not on track for the climate commitments that people had previously made internationally. And what you’re saying is, well those weren’t enough and you need to go two or three times as fast and if there’s some 2050 or mid-century target that’s got to be 2060 or 70 for some places and has to be 2035 or so for you. And of course we’re nowhere close to being anywhere near taking targets like that seriously at this point. So I’m struggling to find reason for optimism about how we move forward given the view you’ve expressed about what makes sense for a country like India.
Sunita Narain: So I think there are two reasons for optimism, Jason, both inconvenient, but firstly I think we should be very clear that we cannot hide the truth just because it is inconvenient. I think that is important for people like us. I know it’s not practical. I know it’s not feasible. I know the world is against such ideas and it seems almost impossible, but that doesn’t make the facts go away. It’s not as if you can fire your labor secretary and change the statistics on employment. Okay, you can’t do that.
Jason Bordoff: You’re following US news much closer than I think many people here are following news in India.
Sunita Narain: Well unfortunately you matter a lot to the rest of the world. So I mean the fact is that’s really how most politicians and most of us, we are human. We’d like to avoid the hard questions, the inconvenient questions. We’d like to keep some win-win optimistic view going. And that’s really been in some senses I believe Jason, that at least my generation, people like me, we have failed because we have failed to make sure that we could keep the sense of reality, the sense of urgency, but also the sense that we needed to do things much more. We got into this very sort of, it’s all about win-win and it’s all going to work out and that one technology will come and everything will sort out. And I think we need to make sure that we don’t stop speaking the hard words only because they are unpalatable today.
But that said, I still think there is place for optimism. And I think there are two spaces for optimism. One in countries like India where we are not denying the crisis of climate change, where we are embracing the need for clean energy, we are embracing the need for decarbonization, but we are doing that within the context of development. So for us, climate is not the driver for action. For us, clean air is the driver for action. For us, the issue of circularity, resource consumption is the driver for action. So I think it’s an important time in the world where we can take more ownership over the solutions and the approaches that we take moving forward where it’s not renewable energy that we are working on, but we are working towards access of clean power to large numbers of people because if it’s dirty power, it hurts their lungs and they need access to power.
And so we are looking at rooftop power systems, rooftop energy systems, we are looking at reinventing the energy wheel so that for the challenges we have, we are not looking at electric cars, we are looking at electric buses. There’s a complete paradigm, there’s a difference in the approach because for us, mobility is important, not just transport and emissions. And I think that’s where the space for optimism that I have, that if countries like India, vast parts of Africa can own the agenda moving forward and drive the agenda from their own imperatives, which is development, affordable, inclusive, and clean. That I think is one. The other is a very inconvenient question, Jason, and something that I hesitate to talk about often, but I will dare to do it with you is the China question.
The fact is China today has an interest in decarbonization and green transition. It has an interest because it has invested in electric vehicles, it has invested in the resources, the raw materials it takes for the green transition. And the question really is, and I think that’s the toughest question because in a world today where everybody is looking, every country is looking for self-interest and it’s hard for us to come together as a community of nations, but the question really is that will China be able to drive the green transition and in what condition? What are our conditions for China so that China can still be a driver of the green transition but not monopolistic, not exploitative, and not one that creates more insecurity in the world. I’m not sure what those conditions are. I’m not sure if it’s possible, but I can tell you Jason, that in the neighboring country of India, which is a small Himalayan country, Nepal, okay, today 75% of the new vehicles bought in Nepal are electric. And that’s because there is huge technology that they are getting from their neighbor, which is China. Now I think we have to understand there is that driver. Now whether we deny that country and for right reasons, I know the Indian government and rightly so would like to own the technology supply chain, would like to own the manufacturing so that we can generate jobs. And those are very important reasons for countries. But what then does that do? Are there conditions in which we can work with China?
Jason Bordoff: Yeah, I’d love if you have thoughts about that. When I was there and we visited together, met with lots of experts, people who run the big energy think tanks, government officials and it was a very consistent message as it is if you’re in Washington DC but in some ways almost stronger there that as you said, India is deeply committed to expanding renewable energy, solar panels, electrification, batteries, but enormous concern — and maybe even geographically given where you sit with Pakistan on one side and China on the other — enormous concern with being dependent on China. And I’m wondering if you view that as, that seems like a very large, not a small headwind to what you described a moment ago, which is the pace at which India needs to roll out more solar, more wind, more battery storage to deal with intermittency. You can’t do that without technology made in China. We’re nowhere close. It takes a very long time to rebuild or replicate those supply chains. How big a challenge is that for this world of geopolitical competition, how big a challenge is that for the energy transition strategy you described a moment ago?
Sunita Narain: It’s hard to say Jason. I think we are trying very hard to domesticate a lot of the manufacturing. We have a deep commitment in the government and for right reasons. China is our neighbor and we need to keep friendly relationships, but we also have to make sure that India is a secure country. India is a self-reliant country and India is able to face the challenges that an aggressor country could have. I mean, and I think the government of India is trying very hard to find that balance and what concerns me not just as India but the world Jason, because the more we are dividing the world between China and the rest, we are really dividing the green transition between China and the rest. I mean if you look at Europe today, Europe is clearly struggling to compete with Chinese car companies which are today making electric cars of as good or maybe superior quality and at much affordable rates, much cheaper rates.
And what does that do to the European car industry, which is also important for Europe because Europe wants manufacturing, wants employment. So I think the world is getting, I think this question Jason is too big a question for us to avoid. It’s like that elephant in the room that we never want to talk about, but I think it’s time we at least had some conversation about what does it mean, are there any conditions in which we could see a green transition led by China happen without countries like India or the European countries or the United States denying it because they are fearful of the supply chain and are fearful of the fact that when you talk about electrification of the car fleet, you’re talking about Chinese technology. That is now really to me a big question in the green transition and we are not finding solutions to it.
Jason Bordoff: We’re kind of in a moment where issues of energy security and affordability seem to be in many parts of the world rising higher on the agenda. This has been in the works for a couple of years, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, cutting off the supply to Europe, rising energy prices in different parts of the world. India of course has always had more of a focus on affordability, on expanding energy use for the reasons we’ve talked about already. But do you see that same increased focus on the urgency of issues like energy security and is that a tailwind to help support a move to cleaner sources of energy or is it an argument to use as much coal as possible? It’s a domestic resource. It creates a lot of economic activity domestically and it’s cheap. So which way does that energy security argument cut these days?
Sunita Narain: Very good question, Jason. I mean when the Ukraine war happened, and that was the first time we really saw a weaponization of energy and one of the big questions came out then to say, would Europe now invest more in renewable energy so that it has to wean itself out of the dependency on Russian oil and gas today.
Jason Bordoff: And energy efficiency too, I would argue.
Sunita Narain: And energy efficiency absolutely. Reduce the need for energy and move towards alternate sources of energy. Today if that question gets more complicated, it gets complicated to say, well, there’s cheaper LNG available from the United States, and that’s an ally and not a threat. And there is the other issue of solar and wind technology is owned by the Chinese, so we should not invest in it. Now the only reason I think India is not reversing and going backwards is because for us, the energy security question is both in terms of the access to energy but also the question of pollution. And so for us, the imperative is both access, but also making sure that we do not have polluting sources of energy, which is why where the coal question as we’ve discussed before, will not go away. There is definite desire to displace coal if not to replace coal for the pollution aspect.
And there is another aspect that we want to have more efficient energy systems. Our big issue is today, can we build our buildings so that because we have large numbers of people who need thermal comfort, can we build our buildings in a way that we don’t need to use air conditioners? Can we have better materials? Can we have better shading? Can we have better ventilation so that we can reduce the need for energy? So for us, the cost of energy, the need for clean energy is part of the challenge of development. So we are not looking at this only from a point of view of just climate, and I think that’s why India is not reversing gears. India is very much focused on how we will take the next step forward to move towards displacing coal and moving towards a clean energy future.
Jason Bordoff: You said displacing coal, you mentioned a moment ago a new report from your center about decarbonizing coal. Is that the same thing or are those different things?
Sunita Narain: That’s right. No. So we have argued that as you’ll never be able to replace coal, at least not in the near future in India, you can’t run away from cleaning up or decarbonizing coal itself. I know it’s inconvenient because you don’t want to talk about decarbonizing coal because the argument is it’s a dinosaur, let it go, keep it in the ground. But the fact is a country like India will have coal based generation in the near future, even as we move towards clean fuel. So we’ve done a report looking at how we, what is the roadmap for decarbonizing the current coal-based thermal power fleet of India and the potential is enormous. Jason, what we are really showing is that if you were to do this both from an efficiency point of view as well as co-firing coal with biomass, which means displacing coal by 20% is what our plan is, you would be able to reduce emissions from the coal base sector, which are equivalent to the current emissions of both iron and steel as well as cement sector in India. That’s massive. So I think we need to discuss that in the Indian context. Again, I’m not asking you to invest in clean coal, please don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that the US should move towards clean coal, but I’m saying in the Indian context, we need to do so and we need to own that agenda.
Jason Bordoff: Can you say a word about, obviously Trump withdrawing from the Paris agreement and the international climate negotiations is important, but even leaving that aside, imagine Kamala Harris had won, for example. How do you think about the role, the global climate negotiation process, is it still fit for purpose? Does it address issues like climate equity and justice that you’ve spent so many decades championing? Or do we need to move in a different direction and need a different approach to address these global commons processes?
Sunita Narain: Tough questions. Again, the question is, I wrestle with this question a lot because at one level, UNFCCC process is clearly not working. Let’s be very clear, it’s become a circus. I have argued, and you’ve heard me rant and rant about this when we have met, is that if you go to these COPs, they just, they’re like an exposition. I have been to COPs forever and I,
Jason Bordoff: It’s an exposition. There are climate negotiators in back rooms doing work.
Sunita Narain: But those negotiators don’t have the spotlight on them. I mean when we went to the COPs in the past, you were addressing the negotiators, the focus was on the COPs and the negotiations and you were pushing for negotiations to be better and holding them accountable, holding their feet to the fire. Today, most of the COPs are inside events where we all go and we talk to the same community of people that we meet anywhere else in small little rooms and we come back thinking that we have changed the world. I think those COP processes need to get rid of the side events. They need to, these are not networking meetings, these are negotiations. The spotlight has to be on the negotiations and what is it that we will achieve out of them. So on one hand, UNFCCC is not working. On the other hand, I do believe that climate change requires a multilateral process.
You cannot get out of this to say, let India and China decide and the world will be happy tomorrow. It’s not going to work. You’re going to need a multilateral process. Now how do you invigorate the multilateral process in such a fragmented discordant world that we have? This is not a world order. This is a world in disorder right now. And I think that for us is the big question that can you really have climate negotiations in a world which is so divided, so polarized, so fragmented, and every country today is looking at what’s my self-interest? We need to rise above self-interest to talk about common interests and I hope that day will come back. It was there. Jason, I’m old enough to tell you we did have that age and I hope it’ll come back because the crisis of climate change is not going to go away.
It’s going to get worse. We are going to have to learn to live together. Today we talk about immigration and migration as the hottest hot potato for politics in the Western world, and it is definitely driving politics towards a certain direction. And I do agree that illegal migration does not work at the scale that it’s happening. But the point is why are people leaving their homelands? It’s also because of not just the bright lights, but also because they are driven out. We see that in India. We are seeing more and more internal migration happen where cities have more and more people coming from all over the rural areas because of the intense frequency of extreme weather events breaking the backs of the very poor. So we are going to have to join these dots and understand that we will have to learn to live together.
Jason Bordoff: I’m curious your assessment of how things are going in India, the Modi government has been criticized at least by some for its approach to climate and some view environmental concerns as being diminished in importance. What’s your assessment of the Modi government on these issues?
Sunita Narain: I think as good or bad as the past governments, Jason, I have absolutely no doubt, and I’m not saying this for any, I mean we looked at the UPA government’s track record in the diversion of the dilution of the environmental clearance processes and the diversion of forest land or the number of clearances given, they were huge. So all governments in our part of the world try and do this sort of balancing act between environment and development. I mean, I’m very clear that the Modi government has been strong on its intention towards climate change, towards energy access, towards decarbonization, towards the issue of forestry for development. And there are weaknesses. But I believe that it’s not just the weakness of an individual government. That is the weakness of us not having approaches which can marry, which can bring together the challenges of both development and environment together.
How do we clean our rivers? The Modi government has a very ambitious plan to clean our rivers, to clean our cities, but we are still drowning. Our rivers are still drowning in excreta. Now that is not because of the Modi government’s lack of intention or the lack of programs. It is because our approach towards cleaning rivers needs to be revoked, keeping in mind the reality of India. So I think it’s a work in progress and I have no doubt that the Modi government is as good and as bad as any previous government. I always say we are in permanent opposition. We don’t belong to any government. We’re permanent opposition, but we’re in creative opposition. We are looking for solutions and we are looking for approaches that will work in our world.
Jason Bordoff: You’ve been very generous with your time. I think I’ve kept you through dinner in the time zone you’re in, but just finally, I’m curious, you’re clearly acutely aware of the conversation here in the US so much you’re paying close attention to things like the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which I think most Americans were unaware of until the last few days and Trump’s firing of the head of it. So given that, I’m curious if you could bring this to a close for people listening to this who are sitting in the US, what should they understand about the issues of energy and climate in India, perhaps differently or better than they do? What do you think is sort of most misunderstood when you listen to the conversation, when you come over here?
Sunita Narain: So I think the most important issue for people in the US is not to brand a country like India as a naysayer when it comes to climate change. We need development, we need energy, we need more. People in the US need to understand that equity is not a luxury. It is an imperative, and I believe people do. I mean, every time I talk to people in the US, they do because they’re good people and they understand the moral dilemma as much as they understand the real need, the development needs of countries. I think it has been the narrative which is spun more by the mainstream media in this case. I do agree that the mainstream media is the problem in branding countries like India as being anti-climate change. We need to find a path ahead in which we can have the development, we can have the energy, but we know we need it to be clean energy.
We need it to be affordable. We need it to be accessible. We know that that is our imperative. And I think what we should be doing is to understand each other better. And that’s why I value our friendships so much, Jason, because you go out of your way to try and listen to those voices to understand that yes, there are differences, but ultimately we need to find a narrative in which we can understand each other even if you can’t agree. But the beginning is to have a conversation and a dialogue, not of the deaf and the dumb, but really of a dialogue of people who are willing to share and even a belief that we will find a different way ahead.
Jason Bordoff: That’s great words to end on, and I appreciate your comments about our work here and our friendship and the approach I’ve tried to take to these issues and appreciate you and all the work you do and the center there does. So Sunita Narain, thank you for making time to be with us and explaining all these issues to everyone listening, it’s great to see you.
Sunita Narain: Thank you, Jason.
Jason Bordoff: Thanks again, Sunita Narain and thanks to all of you for listening to this week’s episode of Columbia Energy Exchange. The show is brought to you by the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. The show is hosted by me, Jason Bordoff and by Bill Loveless. The show is produced by Mary Catherine O’Connor. Additional support from Caroline Pitman, Shayak Sengupta, and Kyu Lee. Gregg Vilfranc engineered the show. For more information about the podcast or the center on Global energy policy, visit us online at energypolicy.columbia.edu or follow us on social media at Columbia U Energy. And please, if you feel inclined, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts, it really helps us out. Thanks again for listening. We’ll see you next week.
