governance, political economy, institutional development and economic regulation
India, like the rest of the world, is not yet visibly on the freeway to net zero. Greta Thunberg and others of her persuasion believe this is because young people—future victims of climate change—are not in charge. This could well be true. But consider the recklessly fast-forwarded track for Artificial Intelligence (AI), Fintech, or social […]
Read More On the Freeway to net zeroThere is a 93 percent probability that at least one year between 2022-2026 will dislodge 2016 as the warmest year. More worryingly, the probability of a temporary increase in temperature more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels (1850-1900) which was zero in 2015, has now increased to 48 percent. The warning bell is ringing, and it […]
Read More Energy Transition Under fiscal and Institutional stressIndia is sparingly built. Satellite mapping of urban areas globally shows an average urban built-up area of 170 cubic meters per capita, with significant variation–600 cubic meters in the US versus 20 cubic meters in Bangladesh. The average for the Global South is 108 cubic meters, one-third of the average of 300 cubic meters in […]
Read More Plucking Carbon out of Built StructuresState Electricity Regulatory Commissions (SERCs) constituted under state level legislation in seven states from 1995 and subsequently under the Electricity Regulatory Commissions Act 1998 (since subsumed into the Electricity Act 2003) have failed, to uniformly tackle the twin problems of high operational cost and distorted retail tariff structures not reflective of the cost of supply. […]
Read More Amending the Electricity Act 2003- Getting the regulatory incentives rightFor all the brouhaha around the hydrogen economy at Davos and the competition amongst the Indian ministries to garner a piece of the regulatory action around this future energy business, it is hard to find any authentic, consistent information on the state of play in green hydrogen (GH) from government websites of the concerned ministries. […]
Read More Green Hydrogen -Pie in the sky or Game changerThere is a great deal of unnecessary melancholy around the low real growth outturns for the October to December quarter (Q3) FY 2021-22. The gripe, if any, is that Q3 confirms a downward trend in quarter-on-quarter growth rates, down from 20.1 percent in Q1, 8.4 percent in Q2, and now 5.4 percent in Q3. It […]
Read More Ukraine and slowing growth in India- Back to basicsCarbon free hydrogen, a fuel, a carrier, and a store of energy, is topmost in the global green agenda. It is a substitute for today’s transition fuel—natural gas—which, whilst being cleaner than coal, diesel, or heavy fuel oil, is nevertheless incapable of delivering the sharp reductions envisaged in carbon intensity to limit global warming to […]
Read More Green Hydrogen Policy – Tentative BeginningsIndia bought transition time at Glasgow by committing to net zero carbon emissions only by 2070. Advanced economies have mostly clustered around a nearer time frame of 2050, as befits their culpability, in depleting the global carbon envelop, and their enhanced technological and fiscal resources. China chose emissions peaking “before 2030” but a long transition […]
Read More Institutionalizing Net zeroCarole King, an American songwriter, recorded these lines in 1971: “I feel the earth move beneath my feet, I feel the sky tumbling down…”. King’s emotions were sentimentally human but in retrospect she seems to have been prescient. Back then, environmental activism was nascent. Greenpeace, the activist environmental organisation, was just being founded. Ignore Red […]
Read More Feel the Earth move beneath your feetIn the run up to the COP26 Summit in Glasgow on 31st October, enthusiasm bubbles over. This is as it should be. Preserving the world as we know it requires cutting back on the 34 giga tons (2018) of annual CO2 emissions, 37 percent of which is by the 16 percent of the global population in high-income economies. To […]
Read More Sharing the pain at Glasgow
Opinion India 