The Road to Kedarnath
Where better to end a climate and energy adventure than the “Abode of the Gods”?
A boulder blocked the road ahead, having crashed down moments earlier from the cliff above. Our car was jammed into a line of traffic that would now have to pass between the rock and the cliffside, where smaller stones were still tumbling down in a muddy landslide caused by the pounding monsoon rain.
For the first time in my nearly six thousand mile journey around India, I was nervous.
We weren’t quite trapped, but the path ahead of us was now narrow. The loose gravel still sliding onto the roadway wasn’t yet an avalanche, but it seemed to be gaining force. We’d been driving past landslides for two days at this point, some of which took road crews hours to clear away with heavy equipment. Others completely tore off long swathes of road, sending broken pieces into the valley below. There was no turning back.
The jeep ahead of us darted through the opening. My driver leaned across the passenger seat and anxiously craned his neck to see uphill. Both hands stayed glued to the wheel, ready.
“Ok,” he announced, a warning not a question. Stepping on the accelerator, his eyes switched from the cliffside to the gap in the roadway, then and back again to the cliffside. I braced in the back seat as we sped through the watery muck. We braked on the other side in a safer, if not exactly safe, place to continue our journey up into the Himalayas. Around one of the next bends a sign beside the road read, “Welcome to the land of Shiva.”
Our climate and energy journey on this blog began at the end of India’s most-famous river, the Ganges, on a climate-stressed island in the Bay of Bengal known as Ghoramara. Now, six months later, I was climbing towards the source of that same river through a region equally under climate duress. During the intervening months I had cut a circular path around the Indian subcontinent by train. This was the last leg of the journey, taking me into the heart and soul of India — or at least a Hindu India that has both elevated and at times troubled this land.
I boarded a sleeper car in the crowded train station of Howrah for the 30-hour ride to Dehradun, in the foothills of the Himalayas.
Two full days of driving followed, up winding switchbacks of the world’s highest mountains made more treacherous by the monsoon rains that loosen the mountainside soil, especially where it’s been degraded by foresting and foraging. That brought me to the footpath for Kedarnath Temple, one of the most popular and revered pilgrimage spots in a country that hosts what has to be the world’s most complicated and well-traveled set of pilgrimage circuits.
Kedarnath Temple was built at least 1,200 years ago by devotees of the Vedic religious sects that dominated the region below. The stone building sits in a gap in the mountains 11,755 feet (3,583 meters) above sea level. It was dedicated to Shiva, the Hindu deity most associated with the Himalayas. Kedarnath attracts hundreds of thousands of pilgrims each year, from holy ascetics to Instagramming teens.
It provides a vantage point — literally, metaphorically, spiritually — to consider India. Physically, the Himalayas tower over the subcontinent from the north. Mythologically, they are where the all-important Ganges, having emerged from the toe of Vishnu and flowed through heavens controlled by Brahma, crash onto the head of Shiva and are safely disbursed by his ample, matted hair to flow on to the Bay of Bengal, where we began this journey . Thus, spiritually, they are associated with mythical Mount Kailash, the “Abode of the Gods.”
Our climate and energy journey loosely followed the Ganges upstream as far as India’s capital, Delhi. From there we crossed the country’s northwest, proceeded down the Arabian sea coast, and cut across the Deccan plateau that sprawls across the interior of the subcontinent. We made our southernmost stop in the city of Rameshwaram, which is also the southernmost of the major pilgrimage sites in the Hindu mythological constellation. Here, the man-god Ram is said to have built a bridge to the island Lanka off the Indian coast to rescue his wife, Siti, from the clutches of the evil Ravana. The whole of India is sometimes referred to — including in the motto of the Geographical Survey of India — as the land “from the Himalayas to the Bridge.”
Kedarnath seemed a good place to look back, take it all in, and then look ahead.
I found: India is making rapid progress installing renewable energy, although still falling short of its most ambitious goals and sometimes tempering them in the face of daunting challenges. The gyrations of international energy markets since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have led to a renewed push for coal, despite the foul air and high carbon emissions they produce, to shore up the country’s energy security. But the shock of skyrocketing global fossil fuel prices has also redoubled India’s determination to grow renewables faster. This month the government announced plans to more than triple the amount of renewable energy capacity commissioned for construction each year, from 15.5 gigawatts last year to 50 gigawatts going forward. At least that much will be needed to reach the government’s target of half the country’s power coming from carbon free sources by 2030. Ultimately, the pace of India’s energy transition will turn on cutting the cost of energy storage systems — batteries, pumped water, air compressors, whatever works — to the point where renewables comprehensively eclipse coal. That juncture, already the state of play in many markets around the world, is only a few years away in India, as well.
At that point India’s renewables rush will be constrained not by affordability, but by the social, political and economic challenges of a fulsome energy transition that we’ve seen so clearly on our journey. This includes the task of vastly expanding energy access. Indians on average use about a quarter the amount of an average Chinese and a tenth of the average American. The transition is already chafing for up-front financing, now dominated by a few mega-conglomerates. The biggest, the Adani Group, has had a rocky run of late. New foreign capital, however, is flowing into the breach. Canadian investor Brookfield Ventures just announced it will pour $1 billion into Indian renewables giant Avaada Energy. But what’s really needed is the overhaul of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and global multilateral lending system now being considered — one that would vastly increase both public and private funding for renewable energy in the developing world.
At the same time, as we’ve also seen, the impacts of climate change are proliferating everywhere in India, from the tea fields of Darjeeling to the deserts of Rajasthan to the mango farms on the Arabian Sea coast. These include a massive flood and landslide at Kedarnath itself, in 2013. High above the temple, a glacial lake formed by melting ice, swollen by unprecedented rains, burst. As many as 20,000-30,000 pilgrims and local residents were killed in the subsequent deluge. Still, no one knows exactly how many. The temple survived thanks to a massive boulder sitting on its uphill side that broke the force of the waters rushing through the valley. Landslides and flooding have been part of the geology of the Himalayas since they were formed by the upward thrust of continental plates colliding 50 million years ago. Specific weather events cannot be definitively pinned on climate change, but it’s clear catastrophes such as these happen more often when temperatures rise. The pace of change here, in what’s sometimes called the world’s “third pole” is gaining speed.
This sort of climate fallout presents costly adaptation challenges that will sap money and initiative from the energy transition. India’s leaders focus, quite rightly, on the injustice of their vulnerability to a problem they’ve done little to cause. The U.S. and Europe emitted most of the greenhouse gasses causing the climate to change. They should clean-up and pay for the damage, Indians argue. They’ve obviously got a point and they should continue to make it. Yet renewables also have now become cheap enough that India can — indeed is — taking steps that both reduce future greenhouse gas emissions and boost India’s economy and development. Wind and solar growth, hydrogen investments, efficiency gains like India’s world-leading adoption of high-efficiency light bulbs all reduce global emissions and spur economic growth. They’re all upside for India going forward. Remediation of and compensation for past emissions can be a separate discussion.
India’s climate negotiators have made even bolder proposals — floating the idea of phasing out of all fossil fuels at last year’s preeminant United Nation’s climate conference. They should re-up the idea this year, seizing global leadership on climate, and try to unlock a flood of foreign funding, I argue.
What could throw India off track? Many things, from its sclerotic legal system to its lackluster schools to its cumbersome manufacturing environment. And one more thing: The rising sectarian chauvinism encouraged by the Hindu-nationalist BJP government risks the sort of social and political upheaval that could derail the economy and drive off desperately needed foreign investment.
The ten mile hike to the temple remained. I slept in the village of Gauri Kund at the bottom of the stone path to the temple and set out at 4 am the next morning in the dark and drizzling rain. A few hundred yards into my climb I met Hariharan Krishna, a pilgrim from the city of Madurai, where I had stopped briefly a few weeks before.
Hari had built a construction business in Dubai that failed during Covid. He returned to India and was embarked on a series of pilgrimages. A decade younger than my 60 years, he was climbing at the same steady pace up the winding, often steep incline. We agreed to walk together.
The path was clogged with hikers and a parade of mules carrying supplies of food, construction materials and pilgrims. Elderly pilgrims and those unfit to walk or ride were carried aloft in litters on the shoulders of young men. Soon there were two processions, one up one down, moving along a path cut into the side of cliffs.
The views were vertiginous, like nothing I’d ever experienced.
The rain and snow melting above sent cascades of water tumbling down on all sides. Torrents ran down the path, soaking our shoes. The peaks around us sported lush vegetation interspersed with exposed rock. At our feet the diluted excrement of mules flowed with the runoff.
We walked, and walked more, past tea stalls and hawkers of religious trinkets. We stopped for samosas to keep us going, then some cucumber with lemon and a spicy sauce. We walked again. My legs throbbed. Hari urged me to think smaller, focus on each step alone.
“Small is big,” he said, a management aphorism he’d heard and applied to his own life and business. Enough small change leads to big things. One step at a time. By this time I took every encouragement I could get.
We pushed on for 12 hours, arriving at the temple before sunset.
The temple, a stocky doorstop of a building, was a hive of activity. Along the steps leading up to it, splayed across the wide courtyard in front, were vendors and merchants. Across the plaza were Sannyasis and Sadhus — holy men — offering blessings and consultations, their faces smeared white and yellow and orange and black with paste. Pilgrims snapped selfies and posed photos. Hari, after bathing and changing, was thrilled to ring the ceremonial bell to mark his arrival.
Vedic legend has it that after the greatest and most horrible war between two interrelated clans, the winning Pandava family wanted Shiva to cleanse them of their sins in battle. They found him hiding in the Himalayas, but Shiva became a bull and burrowed into the earth to conceal himself. The rocky outcropping of Kedarnath remains as the hump of his back. The Pandavas are carved into Kedarnath’s walls. Shiva is present in the landscape itself, not only here but throughout the Himalayas.
I slept in a bare-bones hotel a short walk from the temple — sharing space with a family of mice — and returned to Kedarnath before sunrise. Pilgrims were already lined up in the damp, incense filled air. A priest poured ghee, the clarified butter Hindus use for many rituals, on the statue of Nandi, Shiva’s bull-deity sidekick and main means of transport, guarding the temple door. Awaiting them in the heart of the temple was the holy Linga, the smooth obelisk that embodies Shiva.
Accompanying Shiva is Shakti, representing the primordial energy of the universe, what brings the elements of the universe encompassed by Shiva to life. No better place to conclude an energy and climate journey.
Before leaving, I circled behind the temple to see the great rock that sheltered it from the awful torrent and landslide in 2013. The Chorabari Glacier still sits more than 1,000 feet above Kedarnath but has retreated considerably as temperatures in the Himalayas rise.
On my way down from Kedarnath, I passed a group of young pilgrims batting a volleyball around to entertain themselves. I thought about their future.
The path ahead is narrow. With climate change and the energy transition gaining force, we have to move fast. There’s no turning back. Hold on to your seat.
It’s an adventure.
The Road to Kedarnath
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