The Obama tour — a pinch of green on loads of grey

In the business dailies the hype was over and it happened so rapidly. And after days of euphoria some premonitions started trickling in. Though, the disturbing fact is that the media for mass consumption could not come out from the shadows of pompous excitements and buoyant enticements.

The White House issued a Fact Sheet which declared the achievements of the Obama visit. The highlighted points in that fact sheet were: Enhancing Bilateral Climate Change Cooperation; Cooperating on Hydroflurocarbons (HFCs); Expanding Partnership to Advance Clean Energy Research (PACE-R); Accelerating Clean Energy Finance; Launching Air Quality Cooperation and then five other points on cooperation of technical nature. But every concerned person knows that none of these has something novelty, these points are just formalisation of things already in motion. Though one US Congressman, Senator Tom Carper, a senior member ofthe Senate Environment and Public Works Committee congratulated Obama for some achievement in the Climate front saying, "This agreement with India is significant progress toward the larger goal of a reaching a comprehensive global agreement on climate change in Paris later this year”, it can safely be said Senator Carper was exaggerating, actually no headway could be made, and the western media, a wide range of them from news portal BBC to environmental portal Grist, were quick to point it out. And it was not possible simply because India’s national viewpoint regarding emission still questions the western logic of capping total emission figure without weighing the per capita emission figures.

Incidentally in the last issue of this journal we mentioned that dipping crude price would not cast a shadow on the future of renewable. And it was partly verified by fact ― indeed we heard a big-bang vow regarding renewable energy. Solar energy is becoming cheaper and the subsidy burden is on the decrease. India, which produce less than 3GW of solar power joined hand with the USA, which has some 12GW solar capacity to produce 100GW of solar in India by 2022! But how is that possible? India’s capacity to produce Solar PV is not at all some figure that can act as a launch pad for such an ambitious project! Well, the purported solution is US loans and aids, and then, what BusinessStandard headlined as: “Make in US, sell in India deal for renewable energy”. If this is the green part of the deal then we can say ― it is green here and greenbucks there! US aggressive stance on India’s indigenous Solar PV manufacturing facility was being criticised and contested by Indian manufacturers since as early as 2010-11. The prestigious civil society ecological group Centre of Science and Environment(CSE) in 2012 alleged that US was using their climate-finance to kill Indian solar panel industry. [See “India accuses US of "ruining" domestic PVindustry”, in PV Magazine, 20 Aug 2012]. If at all this Indo-US deal materialises, then only the US, and a few Indian houses attached with US solar business like the Adani group, will of course reap a golden harvest. But it is up to the government of India to decide whether to protect or bury India’s own renewable industry.

If that was the ‘green un-business’ part of Obama-Modi deal, the next part of the achievement can be called ‘un-green business’. And it can overshadow the “100GW Solar by 2022” figure. Because it is government’s plan of having 50% of energy, by 2050, from Nuclear Power and that too perhaps without any comprehensive liability clause binding the suppliers of Nuclear Plants. Till now, most of India’s nuclear power plants are made indigenously. Only in some recent cases India is buying from the Russian farm ROSATOM and the Russians are bound to abide Liabilities in case accident occurs. AREVA, the French company was also eyeing for Indian market and though they might not like the liability clause they did not insist that much to override that. Only farms those were very insistent were the US farms like Westinghouse and General Electric, who want to sell power plants but are not at all willing to accept their liability in case of any accident. That is very worrisome. But now, strictly speaking, there are no US nuclear farms as those all are now Japanese controlled. So, besides Russian and French nuclear plant makers we have three big Japanese companies controlled by the houses of Toshiba, Hitachi and Mitsubishi respectively. So when the US is pressing India to liquidate or soften the liability clause they are actually working on behalf of all global players in this field. But will India succumb to that? Rather we should ask, Does India Need That at all? All developed countries have stopped commissioning any new nuclear plant. One of the most advanced countries in science and technology, Germany, has not only declared no to nuclear power but they have already started their nuclear plant de-commissioning schedule! Moreover, nuclear power is not just a safety nightmare, it is also does not make sense from the viewpoint of economics. [Interested readers may go through a small piece of evidence: “Why The Economics Don't Favor NuclearPower In America”, by Mark Cooper, senior fellow for economic analysis at Vermont Law School’s Institute for Energy and the Environment, in Forbes, 20 Feb 2014.]

So? Looking from an environmental point of view, do we have much to cheer watching the Modi-Obama fanfare?