As Goes Covid, So Goes Climate...
Why Should We Who Aren’t Indian Care?
The Covid crisis in India continues unabated. Should we care?
That’s a callous question, put baldly for a reason. It’s the same question I keep asking myself as I tackle this project on climate change and energy transition in India. Should we, those of us who are not Indian and lead our lives outside India, care about climate change impacts and energy transition all the way over “there”?
My answer: Yes, a lot. But why, exactly? And must we do something about it?
It’s worth thinking through.
What’s a little weird is those questions don’t seem so brutally insensitive when it comes to climate and energy. Afterall…I often remind myself in pondering how to convince those of you with no India connections to stay with my Substack outpourings…India is a long ways away and at least theoretically capable of addressing its own climate and energy challenges. We have climate challenges of our own to focus on.
And yet, can we really distance ourselves? That’s the trouble: We can’t, any more than we can afford to not care about India’s Covid catastrophe.
The reasons why we must care start with the mushy, but irrefutable, notion of a common humanity. Deaths in India from the massive second wave of coronavirus infections will almost certainly keep rising from record highs in the coming weeks, with daily death counts on a country basis now surpassing the U.S. to be the worst since the global pandemic began. Those figures reflect a mere fraction of the actual fatalities in India, which are happening at a pace faster than authorities can track them.
Other than that graph, I won’t try to capture the immensity of the tragedy unfolding in the world’s second-most-populous country. Many other journalists, better placed than I, are working incredibly hard at that task. Just to outpoint a few whom I have personally worked both alongside and in friendly competition with, there’s the remarkable Joanna Slater at The Washington Post and irrepressible Karan Deep Singh (along with, in that linked story, his indefatigable new colleague Emily Schmall) at The New York Times. To be on the ground reporting this story in India right now, even as they struggle to protect their own families and loved ones, is one of the toughest journalistic assignments imaginable.
Yet whether it’s Covid or climate, the hard-nosed (opposite of mushy) answer to the why-care question is much the same: What happens in India matters to us directly, concretely.
With Covid, the concern is that virus variants could emerge from India that are capable of evading the vaccines now bringing the pandemic under control in America, Europe and elsewhere. Variants that emerge in India won’t stay there, just as some of the variants causing India’s outbreak came from somewhere else. They are not just sickening and killing Indians, but also wreaking havoc with the country that is supposed to be a critical supplier of vaccines to the rest of the developing world. India’s pivot to dealing almost solely with its own problems could leave the coronavirus unchecked in those places. That would create more fertile breeding grounds for potential vaccine-evading, border-jumping variants.
Likewise, when it comes to climate, what happens in India also matters immensely to all of us. Here’s the reason in a nutshell:
— India is likely to be the fastest growing user of energy on the planet in the coming decades, doubling or even tripling its demand as a remarkably young population grows, moves from the countryside into cities and becomes wealthier.
— India, already the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, has an energy system dominated by fossil fuels, including about three-quarters of its electricity generated by the most greenhouse gas-producing fuel of them all, coal.
— India is emerging as a renewable energy powerhouse, possessing some of the best solar and wind resources on the planet and a determination to exploit them.
— India can’t make this transition alone, not fully and as quickly as the world needs, any more than it has the necessary resources to battle the fallout of a coronavirus spread that has thoroughly overwhelmed its health care system.
The rest of the world has a huge stake in the decarbonization of India’s energy system. If its energy transition isn’t sharply accelerated, India could see emissions grow by half by 2040, more than any other country, according to the International Energy Agency.
One step is helping India rapidly push coal from its energy mix in ways that don’t impede economic development, which virtually requires growing energy demand. India needs hundreds of billions of dollars in investment to build out its new energy system, and major global investors are increasingly interested in sinking hundreds of billions of dollars (and more!) into infrastructure like that. They can work together to break impasses slowing this flow of funds, with governments helping pave the way. Just now, Indians are seeing their health care system — which has suffered from gross under-investment for time immemorial — collapse around them. Rebuilding it better will be a colossal undertaking. If phasing out coal is a global priority, the governments of the U.S. and India might be attracted to an idea like this one from the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington D.C., an aid plan to help ameliorate the social costs of a coal phase out. That would help the world, and allow India to invest more in health care without putting energy transition on the back burner.
Next will come India’s nascent transportation market, starting with two- and three-wheelers and expanding to cars as the country’s middle class grows. We non-Indians can help there too while helping ourselves. Over time…and, again, with cooperation between the Indian authorities and foreign investors…India could become one of the biggest and fastest growing markets for electric vehicles. That would help reduce the country’s dependence on foreign oil, imported mostly from the Persian Gulf, and head off a worsening of the air pollution problems plaguing the country.
Finally, or better yet firstly, even bigger emitters — the U.S. and China — can radically step up their own climate and energy game. That would be helping themselves while helping India most of all, since India is especially vulnerable to climate risks from floods to droughts and everything in between, as my last post explored.
There are other ways to help. But when it comes to both Covid and climate, the what is less important than the why. And the why is this: The less we help, the worse they do. The worse they do, the more at risk we are. For those of us outside India watching its current catastrophe play out, that pretty much sums it up.
