Coal Will Go Eventually

Can India completely shut down its coal power plants and move to renewable energy? The answer is yes. Should it do so? The answer is yes. Is a cheap alternative available? The answer is yes. RE + battery storage is now only slightly more expensive than coal power (depending upon who does the estimate it may even be cheaper.) The problem, however, is where to get the hundreds of billions of dollars required to fund such a shift. Through its actions, the west has already refused to pay for this shift. We can’t even begin to decipher the macro-economic impacts of diverting such massive funds from other uses to renewable energy. However, the realist in me believes that it is only a matter of a few years before this problem is solved. Coal power is on its way out.

Plastic pollution is causing all-round irreversible damage to land and water. Some believe that plant-derived plastics are a good alternative. That, however, is not true. Many plant-based plastics can be equally, or even more toxic than petroleum-derived ones (currently 99 percent of plastics reportedly are petro-derived). Recycling or reusing plastics only delays the problem a bit, it does not solve the plastic problem. For that, we need non-toxic rapidly decomposing materials, whether plant or petro based. Someone needs to be investing big time in developing non-toxic bio-degradable materials.

I have often wondered what my carbon footprint was. This timely initiative (see lowsoot.com) helps individuals calculate their carbon footprint and also identify ways to lead more sustainable lives. Though there is much scope for improvement, this shows what life could be like. If we could all estimate our carbon footprint, we could be taxed or subsidized on that basis too. What if we were all taxed or subsidized as per how much more or less our consumption is from the average carbon footprint? Most poor people would get subsidies (as their carbon footprint is very low) and most affluent would need to pay seriously high taxes. Someone else would have thought of this too, but I like this one!

The US is devising plans on how to adapt to climate change, and this story on dealing with extreme heat reveals one such step. Indeed, many countries are devising their climate change plans. This is good, because irrespective of global talks, climate change is here to stay, and we need to devise ways of addressing changes in consumption, production, health, safety, and security that will necessarily accompany climate change. In India there is no ministry with the bandwidth to do all this, perhaps it’s time for the Niti Aayog to get into the act.

This was perhaps the most important environment story of the week. Researchers found that under continued exposure to sunlight, plastics can break down into thousands of compounds with very different chemical characteristics from the original plastic. If that is so, there is an avenue to design new types of plastics that break down easily into other non-toxic compounds in the presence of sunlight. This would be a far cheaper, environmentally benign, and doable solution than segregating, burning, or recycling plastic. Of course, these are early days. But we all live on hope.

Climate change means monogamous albatross couples need to fly longer to find food, and higher temperatures also increase stress levels. Any couple knows the stress caused by hunger and rising temperatures. In the case of albatross, this is leading to greater extra-marital activity and also divorce. In the case of dragonflies, male wings are becoming shorter reducing attractiveness for females, no one can argue with that I suppose. If you are smiling, all this could be happening to humans too, who knows what researchers will find next. The best solution is to migrate to the developed world where food access and temperatures are both better. For those of us in warmer climates, it’s going to be tough I guess.

Public Lecture by Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta, Cambridge University on Sustainable Development and Inclusive Wealth: Problematics

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