GLOBAL WARMING

Envy Yes, Green No

As India strives for wealth, its greenhouse-gas emissions are growing faster than almost any other major nation's. Yet New Delhi resists going green, even though climate change could hit India's poor the hardest.

by Bruce Stokes

Sat. May 3, 2008


How many planets will India require for development?

---Mahatma Gandhi

GURGAON, India--The squat brick-and-glass headquarters of ITC-Welcomgroup, an Indian hotel chain, is dwarfed by the skyscrapers sprouting up around it in this sprawling commercial suburb outside New Delhi. At first glance, nothing would suggest that the four-story structure is one of the country's first "green" office buildings, or that it is part of India's nascent effort to curb its rapidly growing emissions of greenhouse gases.

Only after entering the lobby is it apparent that this office building, which holds the coveted LEED platinum rating from the U.S. Green Building Council, is unlike almost any other commercial structure in India, or even in the United States.

Sunlight bathes each interior room through window glass that lets light in but keeps heat out, an especially important feature during the beastly hot Indian summers. The glass helps cut energy use in the building by half. Rooftop solar collectors heat the building's water, and recycling reduces overall water use by two-fifths. And 40 percent of the construction materials came from within 500 miles of New Delhi, further reducing the building's energy footprint.

GRAPHICWorld Outlook on Greenhouse Gases Five countries -- the U.S., China, Russia, Japan, and India -- produced more than half of the world's carbon dioxide emissions in 2005.

ITC, the hotel chain's parent, reckons that it cost 12 percent more to build the Green Center headquarters than a conventional office, but operating savings will make up the investment in just five years.

"Green is in our DNA," said Niranjan Khatri, ITC-Welcomgroup's general manager for the environment. The company pressures its suppliers to use vehicles that run on low-emission compressed natural gas for all deliveries to its hotels and to harvest rainwater and recycle water in their own facilities. Vendors that don't meet ITC-Welcomgroup's sustainability standards risk losing its business. "If these concepts are scaled up, the community will benefit," Khatri said.

About 150 miles southwest of Gurgaon, such potential benefits are not yet apparent. In Udaipuria, in rural Rajasthan, hotter summers and erratic monsoons combined with the increased water and electricity use that comes with rising affluence have already made coping with global warming a daily struggle--one that many people are losing.

Gulla Ram, the former local headman, complains that the water table under Udaipuria has dropped from 75 feet down to 150 feet in just the past decade. To counter increasingly frequent water shortages, the village has dug four additional wells, but they require more electricity to operate and that means more CO2 belching from India's coal-fired generating plants. Farmers have been forced to shift from traditional flood irrigation to sprinklers, which do save water but also demand more electricity.

Reluctance in New Delhi

Despite the nation's relative poverty, the mushrooming Indian economy is already changing the climate. Next year, India will pass Japan to become the world's fourth-largest emitter of CO2, the principal greenhouse gas that most scientists now think is trapping the Earth's heat in the atmosphere. By 2015, India will surpass Russia to become the third-greatest source of CO2, trailing only China and the United States. "India is on an unsustainable energy path," the International Energy Agency's 2007 World Energy Outlook concluded.

Although the Indian government signed the Kyoto Protocol on climate change in 2002, it is still largely dragging its feet. New Delhi will release a national global-warming plan in June, but officials have already said they will not commit to any overall national emissions targets or do anything that would endanger economic growth. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh argues that the industrial nations--which together account for more than half of the cumulative CO2 emissions in the past century--should act first, not lowly India, which produces just 2 percent of atmospheric greenhouse gases. He couches his argument in a call for "climate justice." In addition, the Indian government contends that rich countries should provide India with the technology it needs to curb emissions.

On equity grounds, the Indian argument is hard to dispute: The West has been belching CO2 into the air since the 19th century. But consider the science: Every additional ton of carbon warms the atmosphere, whether it was released in Pittsburgh decades ago or in Mumbai last month. Forestalling global climate change can be achieved only by capping total emissions from all sources, not by finger-pointing.

Moreover, warned David Wheeler, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Center for Global Development, in a recent blog, "focusing exclusively on the Northern [Hemisphere's] sources of this problem is a dangerous distraction. The South's own emissions have already moved it near the brink of rapid global warming."

When it comes to climate change, China, Europe, and the United States have attracted the public's attention of late. India's emissions, however, are growing at a faster pace than almost any other major country's. At the United Nations' December 2009 international climate change conference in Copenhagen, which is intended to create a regime for controlling greenhouse gases, India will face new pressure to do its part to combat global warming. ITC-Welcomgroup's office building in Gurgaon suggests that India can do more, and that most Indians are willing. And the increasingly desperate situation in rural Udaipuria suggests that such action is in New Delhi's self-interest. But it looks as though the Indian government will have to be pushed.

Pressure on a Vulnerable Society

Climate change is not a problem of India's making, but the country is rapidly becoming one of global warming's victims. The Indian government estimates that dealing with the consequences of global warming is already costing the country more than 2 percent of its gross national product each year. And the average Indian is worried. According to the 2007 Pew Global Attitudes survey, 57 percent of those polled in India said that global warming was a very serious national problem. Only 47 percent of Americans were that concerned.

Climate experts think that the mean annual temperature in India could rise by as much as 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit by the 2020s and by 8.1 degrees by the 2080s. This warming will vary widely depending on the season and region of the country. Hotter days will affect rainfall patterns. Central India, which is already arid, may see as much as 25 percent less precipitation. But as much as 15 percent more rain may fall during the intense monsoon periods. Lacking adequate reservoirs, many parts of the country may not be able to trap this runoff for use in drier months.

The Tibetan glaciers act as a natural water preserve for the Indian subcontinent. Glacier melting, however, threatens to turn the Ganges, Indus, and Brahmaputra rivers that crisscross northern India into seasonal waterways, adversely affecting agriculture, commerce, and daily life.

More-erratic rainfall patterns and the periodic drying up of rivers will only aggravate current shortages caused by falling water tables. Thanks to overpumping to irrigate cropland, the World Bank estimates that three in five Indian aquifers could be critically short of water in less than a generation.

This double hit--climate change plus water shortages--could undermine India's ability to feed itself. The greater the rise in future temperatures, the worse the future harvests. Between 2003 and the 2080s, agricultural output could fall by nearly 29 percent, according to William Cline, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development.

If harvests fail, rural India will be hit hardest because that is where most of the country's poor live. A temperature rise of 6.3 degrees could cause a 25 percent drop in net farm incomes, according to modeling by the United Nations Development Program.

At the same time, India's densely populated, low-lying coastal areas may be particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. A study by the Confederation of Indian Industries estimates that as many as one in four Indians may be exposed to increased risk of cyclones and floods, and one in five people living along the coastline may eventually be forced to migrate.

Not the Culprit, but a Contributor

Indian greenhouse-gas emissions are certainly not to blame for current global climate change. On an annual basis, China generates the most greenhouse gases: the equivalent of 7,484 tons of CO2--largely carbon dioxide, methane, and sulfur dioxide--in 2005. At 7,282 tons, the United States was not far behind. India emitted only 2,380 tons.

But this snapshot belies the more ominous story told by a moving picture. Between 1990 and 2005, U.S. emissions grew by a modest 16 percent, while Indian emissions soared 51 percent. China's emissions clearly pose the greatest threat to the atmosphere. Increasingly, India is a major contributor.

Carbon dioxide is the most significant greenhouse gas among Indian emissions, accounting for 57 percent of the total. It has grown at a rate of nearly 6 percent annually over the past decade and a half.

India's seemingly insatiable demand for electricity--a result of the country's booming economic growth--is driving this release of CO2. Electricity consumption has quadrupled in the past three decades, albeit from a very low base. And to meet projected electrical demand, Indian generating capacity will have to nearly double by 2015. Barely half of Indian households now have access to electricity, and per capita electricity consumption is less than half that in China. So as incomes rise and Indian consumers acquire refrigerators and air conditioners, demand for power will grow exponentially.

India has negligible domestic oil and gas supplies, but it possesses the third-largest coal reserves in the world. More than half of the additional electricity capacity it will need is expected to come from coal-fired generators. The burning of coal releases great quantities of CO2.

About one-third of Indian's energy production goes to factories, which often use it quite inefficiently, emitting far more CO2 than necessary. Indian steel mills and cement plants, on average, require about 50 percent more energy than do Japanese plants to produce the same amount of product, in part because of outdated technology.

But some companies, such as ITC, have begun to chart a more energy-efficient course. ITC already generates more fresh water than it consumes in its cigarette and food factories. The conglomerate's goal is to become carbon positive, planting trees to eliminate more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than its activities emit, and, through recycling, to generate zero solid waste.

Transportation

So far, transportation has not been a major source of India's CO2 emissions, but that may soon change. In 2004, 68 million vehicles--mostly motorcycles--traversed Indian roads, in a nation of 1.1 billion people. By 2030, at least 295 million vehicles are expected to clog Indian highways--more than in the United States. As a result, Indian energy demand for transportation is expected to grow 6.1 percent annually over the next two decades, triple its recent rate.

Agriculture accounts for nearly a quarter of India's greenhouse gases, with methane the principal emission. The gas is generated by the country's rapidly growing livestock population and by decomposing organic matter in flooded rice paddies, which are the most extensive in Asia. But such emissions have been growing quite slowly, barely 1 percent yearly between 1990 and 2005.

The industrialized world actually encourages India's emissions through its purchases of carbon-intensive Indian products, such as steel, aluminum, paper, cement, and basic chemicals. India is a relatively minor exporter of these goods, selling only $9.7 billion worth to other countries in 2006, one-fifth that sold by China. However, the carbon intensity of Indian exports--as measured by the percentage of such goods among all products that Indians sell abroad--is nearly twice that of Chinese exports, according to Trevor Houser, Rob Bradley, and Britt Childs in their book Leveling the Carbon Playing Field, soon to be published by the Peterson Institute and the World Resources Institute.

In 2006, for example, the United States bought $1.36 billion worth of Indian-made, carbon-intensive industrial products. Almost all of that was steel. Unfortunately, Indian steel is among the most carbon-polluting in the world. So, as America's appetite for Indian steel grows--U.S. imports of Indian iron and steel have doubled in the past five years--the country's contribution to India's CO2 emissions will only increase.

Reliance on Coal

Indians have already begun the difficult job of curbing their carbon emissions. But it is just that--a beginning.

Between 1990 and 2004, the carbon intensity of India's economy--as measured by the number of tons of CO2 equivalent emitted for every million dollars of economic expansion--fell by 1 percent annually, according to estimates by the World Resources Institute in Washington. The United States--with greater access to financing and technology--slowed its carbon intensity by only 1.7 percent yearly. China, meanwhile, decarbonized its economy by 4.3 percent annually.

To have any hope of matching China's performance, India must either close or retrofit its 642 coal-fired generating plants, which are among the most inefficient and dirtiest in the world. More than 90 percent of these facilities use outdated technology. India hopes to more than double its coal-fired generating capacity by 2030. Already, about 60 percent of the capacity slated to come on line by 2013 will use efficient coal-combustion technology, but that decision has been driven more by rising coal prices than by concern for the environment. The government's long-range goal is to have three-quarters of new generating capacity use the most-efficient technology.

"The best thing we can do for India is to help them implement that plan," a World Bank official said. To that end, in April, the International Finance Corp. approved a $450 million loan for a 4-gigawatt (a gigawatt is 1 billion watts) multiunit coal-fired power plant in Gujarat that will use the most-efficient coal-burning technology in the country.

However, even the cleanest technology is still dirty. The Gujarat facility will emit at least 23 million tons of CO2 per year for the next quarter-century.

Renewable-energy sources are an option, and they already provide India with about 20 percent of its electricity, principally from hydroelectric power. The country also has the world's fourth-largest installed wind-power capacity, trailing only Germany, the United States, and Spain. A World Bank study estimates that clean-energy sources could one day deliver power equal to 90 percent of India's current energy production.

But renewables have their limits. Citizen opposition to flooding valleys to build dams for hydroelectric power is stiffening. The Indian government hopes to rely more on smaller dams, but achieving that goal will depend on the water flow in streams and rivers that are already drying up.

Potential for Renewable Energy

Nuclear power is another carbon-free energy source with potential. India was the first developing country to have such power plants, beginning in the 1960s, and nuclear power now accounts for about 2.5 percent of its electricity generation. The Indian government hopes to have 20 gigawatts of nuclear-generating capacity by 2020, nearly a sevenfold increase from 2005.

Such facilities will help the atmosphere. David Victor of the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations estimates that by 2020, India's use of nuclear power could cut its CO2 emissions by 145 million tons a year. That would be nearly as much as the 25 nations of the European Union have committed to reduce theirs under the Kyoto Protocol.

Nevertheless, because of rising power consumption, nuclear plants will satisfy only a small portion of electricity demand. And India will be hard-pressed to meet its nuclear-generating goals. Plant construction has been slowed by high building costs and India's exclusion from international trade in nuclear-generating equipment and materials because of its past nuclear weapons tests. A recent nuclear agreement with the United States would ease those constraints, but it is stalled in both the Indian Parliament and the U.S. Congress.

Industry also offers opportunities for curbing emissions. The Confederation of Indian Industries estimates that national energy use and the related release of CO2 can be cut by as much as 25 percent in key industrial sectors. Progress has been slow on this front, too.

The ITC-Welcomgroup's Green Center demonstrates the potential carbon emissions savings from climate-sensitive design of commercial offices. Office construction is one of the fastest-growing sectors of the Indian economy. Nearly 100 office buildings now meet India's 2007 energy conservation building code, and compliance has been incorporated into the environmental impact assessments that builders of large structures must file. Green design has yet to really catch on in India, however. ITC's Khatri acknowledges that not a single office builder in rapidly growing Gurgaon has chosen to follow his company's lead.

In the transportation realm, 80 percent of the vehicles on Indian streets are two-wheelers. Emission standards for these motorbikes are tougher than in the European Union. A recent shift from two-stroke to four-stroke engines will slowly improve the energy efficiency and reduce the exhaust emissions of the entire fleet. New Delhi now requires taxis, buses, and the ubiquitous three-wheeled auto-rickshaws to run on compressed natural gas, a relatively clean fuel. Other Indian cities are slowly following the capital's lead, but India still lacks the mandatory fuel-efficiency standards that even China has introduced.

Stop Subsidizing Energy

The success of India's efforts depends on having enough funding, a willingness to make policy changes, and sufficient access to new technologies.

The New Delhi-headquartered Tata Energy Research Institute estimates that India needs to invest an additional $5 billion annually for at least five years to make a rapid transition to low-carbon energy generation.

Some of this money will come from the Clean Development Mechanism, an arrangement under the Kyoto Protocol that enables richer, industrial economies that need to cut greenhouse gases to invest in projects that reduce emissions in poorer, developing countries. So far, 29 percent of all such initiatives--such as building biomass generation facilities--are in India.

India, however, will need additional international capital. The World Bank is planning a Clean Technology Fund to provide below-market interest rates and loan guarantees to transfer and adapt green technologies to developing-world needs. Some of that money would come out of the $2 billion that the Bush administration has promised for clean projects in developing economies. But the Indian government wants the United Nations rather than the World Bank to control the fund, because New Delhi sees the latter as a pawn of Washington.

Efforts to attract private venture capital have not borne much fruit, thanks to India's subsidization of energy prices. Low-cost energy encourages inefficient uses of power and provides no incentive for industry to invest in cleaner technologies. That results in even greater CO2 emissions.

Residential electricity costs about 7 cents per kilowatt hour in India, half the average in industrial countries. The cost of electricity used for rural irrigation pumps is often zero, according to the International Energy Agency. In 2006, the International Monetary Fund estimated that Indian petroleum and petroleum product prices were as much as 45 percent lower than they would be if a free market had set them.

Underpriced energy creates perverse outcomes. Money-losing power plants tend to provide erratic service. Because farmers never know when power will be available, they run their water pumps constantly, depleting the water table unnecessarily. Many industrial and residential consumers have backup generators, which are often highly inefficient.

Indian development activists and the government argue that higher energy costs would hurt the poor disproportionately. To be sure, the price of kerosene and LNG--the fuels that the poor rely on--would jump the most if India's energy markets were deregulated. But studies have shown that low-cost rural electricity primarily benefits large landowners, not subsistence farmers. The International Energy Agency estimates that if farmers were forced to pay as much for electricity as industrial users pay, many would install power- and water-saving devices because they would pay for themselves in only 12 months.

Moreover, despite its rhetoric about protecting the poor, the Indian government has already raised some energy prices without suffering a politically debilitating backlash. The cost of electricity for manufacturers in India is slightly more than the average in industrial nations, and Indian drivers pay a per-liter gas tax that is five times the levy in China.

Nevertheless, Indian politicians consistently try to turn the current international debate about climate change into an argument over global equity. They contend that any precipitous Indian action on global warming would only worsen the plight of the nearly 400 million Indians who live on less than $1 a day. Indian officials argue that Europe and the United States built industrial economies over two centuries without restraints on carbon emissions and that India has the same right. Citing Indians' low per capita carbon emissions--one-twentieth the pollution generated by the average American--Prime Minister Singh argues that industrial economies must first reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions before expecting Indians to cut back. The counter to that, of course, is that the world will become a hothouse if 1.1 billion Indians come anywhere close to Western per capita CO2 emissions.

A Call for Help

The environmental group Greenpeace contends that the Indian government is hiding behind the poor to avoid acknowledging its role in global warming. Greenpeace calculates that the carbon footprint of Indians making more than 30,000 rupees per month (about $750)--a small but growing portion of the population--is at the world average. "If the upper and the middle class [in India] do not manage to check their CO2 emissions, they will not only contribute to global warming, they will also deny the hundreds of millions of poor in the country, those who will be the most severely impacted by climate change, access to development," Greenpeace India said in a recent statement.

Indeed, the strongest case for India's taking action against climate change is the already drought-burned fields and falling water tables in such places as rural Rajasthan.

"It's like trade liberalization," said Tom Burke, a British global-warming expert, noting that India has benefited greatly from unilaterally opening its markets over the past decade. "You do it because it is in your own self-interest."

For its part, India says unequivocally that it will need help if it is to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. "We in the developing world desperately need access to environment-friendly technologies," Singh said at a summit on climate change in New Delhi in February. "It is in the interests of people living in developed countries to facilitate such transfer."

Indian generating plants, for instance, need more-efficient boilers. Eventually India will also need access to the carbon-sequestration technology now under development, which would capture CO2 emissions and pump them into underground caverns. India has the capacity to store the equivalent of 24 years' worth of its current production of CO2, according to the International Energy Agency. New Delhi wants to be able to exploit that sequestration potential if and when the technology becomes viable.

A recent proposal by the United States and the European Union to eliminate all worldwide tariffs on imports of climate-friendly goods and services--such as wind turbines and solar collectors--has met with resistance in New Delhi. Ujal Singh Bhatia, the Indian ambassador to the World Trade Organization, labeled the proposal "a disguised effort at getting market access through other means." India would probably accept trade liberalization for a narrow list of green technologies but would no doubt balk at including consumer goods or consulting services, such as green-building design.

A more important confrontation looms over the intellectual-property rights to climate-friendly technologies. Before the 2007 G-7 summit, the Indian Ministry of External Affairs issued a paper calling for compulsory licensing of green technologies, which would be similar to the international deal that gave developing countries greater access to patented pharmaceuticals for epidemic diseases. Now, it is hard to argue that saving the planet is less important than combating AIDS. But Western governments worry that if such licenses are granted to Indian firms, pirated copies of clean technologies will soon appear around the world.

To date, New Delhi's demand on the intellectual-property front appears mainly to be political posturing, intended to forestall Indian commitments on reducing carbon emissions. In fact, some Indian companies are becoming important green-energy players. Suzlon, based in the Indian state of Maharashtra, is one of the world's leading wind-turbine manufacturers; Tata BP Solar is a major Indian-British joint venture involving renewable-energy technologies.

"There do not seem to be significant intellectual-property barriers hindering the world from benefiting from reduced carbon emissions in developing countries," John Barton, a professor emeritus at Stanford University Law School, concluded in a recent paper.

Such disputes seem far removed from a green office building outside New Delhi. But if India is to cope with climate change, it must soon make some hard choices about energy pricing while ensuring that it has greater access to more-efficient technologies and the money to pay for them. If the world is going to help India with that, New Delhi may have to commit to begin cutting greenhouse-gas emissions now, not some time in the future.

The sari-clad women endlessly working their hand water pumps in Rajasthan hope that happens soon.

The author, a staff correspondent for National Journal, is also a trans-Atlantic fellow with the German Marshall Fund of the United States, which supported research for this article. He can be reached at bstokes@nationaljournal.com.

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