The climate change is just one facet of a reality bearing down on India. India's rapid growth comes in an era when cheap, easily available natural resources are gone. This country almost has to follow a different path -- relying on the resource from Sun, above the surface of earth than the one we could get under our feet -- because that's the only resource available in sufficient quantity.
India faces a severe coal shortage. Its existing power plants cannot burn imported coal unless it is mixed with domestic. So the more domestic coal it commits to new plants, the sooner it will have to retire its existing fleet. Already, the increase in the world price of coal is driving up the price of cement. Citizen protests have forced the cancellation of a major coal mine and power project in western India, near Mumbai. Efforts to assemble land parcels for industrial facilities are becoming more contentious, with massive protests building. Increasingly, public opinion is mobilizing against even proposals to allow mining companies access to India's reserves of iron ore and bauxite -- because they are under some of the nation's most important remaining forest habitat, because protecting habitat involves a real tradeoff -- unlike the shift to cleaner energy, which is just good business.
India pays huge sums to import crude oil and then subsidizes kerosene for lighting and cooking, diesel for irrigation pumping, and LPG for cooking -- at enormous cost to the treasury. New proposals are being floated to reduce at least some of these subsidies -- but the idea is enormously controversial because neither the government nor India's poor can afford to rely on oil at today's world market prices.
At the same time, in only a year and a half, this country has shifted into high gear in its engagement on climate. Last year was the hottest on record in India. Rainfall patterns already have been disrupted over the past twenty years. Sea level rise threatens a quarter of the population. The government doesn't want to sit on the sidelines, and its solar energy mission is already far more ambitious.
India is not a "mandate from the top" country. There's a strong democratic dialogue here. That can slow things down -- both good things, like massive investments in solar power, and risky things.
India, which has the greatest unmet need for electricity in the world, have acknowledged that clean energy is an economic necessity and the wave of the future.
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