by Avrel Seale
One of the big worries about climate change is that, as the massive emerging economies of China and India race to attain the West’s standard of living, they’ll recapitulate all of the West’s dirtiest industrial stages, and in doing so, doom the planet by the sheer size of their populations.
But news out of India gives us hope that, ironically, the scale of their ambition might just have a salvation built in.
More than half of India’s 1.1 billion citizens don’t have electricity. (I’ll let that sink in for a minute.) At the same time, India has a stated goal of growing its economy by 9 percent a year to 2025, according to Smrithi Talwar, an Indian member of the International Union for Conservation of Nature who spoke recently at the “Climate Change Law and Policy after Copenhagen” colloquium at The University of Texas. For those of you without your slide rule handy, that means growing the economy of the world’s second-most populous country by 364 percent in the next 15 years. And that will use a lot of energy. But there’s one problem: at that rate of growth, coal runs out before 2025. And even if it didn’t, you wouldn’t want to live in a country that burned that much.
With those numbers in mind, India is investing big-time in nuclear and solar energy to bridge the gap. Specifically, India’s National Solar Mission plans to invest $2.2 billion to get the subcontinent from near-zero solar power today to 20 gigawatts in 2020. (A gigawatt is enough to power 5,000 homes for a year.)
This technological leapfrogging has parallels. In the past decade, millions in China who had never owned telephones simply skipped the land-line stage of phone service and went from no phone to a cell phone, obviating the need to build out the land- and labor-intensive telephone infrastructure that has evolved in the West over the past century.
This suggests that similar shortcuts are possible in developing economies, like going straight from donkey carts to methane-powered or even electric cars instead of tracing the footsteps of first-world economies through traditional (and dirty) combustion engines. If India can go from campfires directly to solar arrays, it gives hope that indigenous people around the world might be able to skip the coal age — filthy, dangerous, and land-scarring.
Necessity is the mother of invention. So let’s hope that, when it comes to energy and climate change, the invention is as great as the need.
