Beneath the Green-Hypes — Budget 2015: Some Questions

Photo Courtesy – V. V. Krishnan 

(http://www.thehindubusinessline.com)

May we put a caption here: 

Towards Bleak Future - Riding with a Myopic Driver!

A wide confusion has spread. In Business Standard we found, “In sync with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s commitment on climate change, the government Saturday ramped up budget allocation a whopping sixteen-fold to boost India's mission to climate change and adaption, even as the overall allocation to the environment ministry was trimmed by four percent.” And several eminent persons started thinking that India, de-facto, has a Carbon Tax, as the budget increased coal-cess from Rs 100 a ton to Rs 200 a ton.

We saw newspapers devoted to Business and Economy writing story with such statements: “The government's commitment to control pollution finds explicit expression in the union budget with Rs.240.30 crore set aside for the cause, which is 148 percent higher... The secretariat-economic services got Rs.58.85 crore - nearly seven crore more than what it got in the previous fiscal... total allocation for environmental protection and monitoring too saw a significant hike of Rs.197.53 crore... ” and only in one place it was mentioned that total allocation for MoEF was slashed by whopping 18%, almost a fifth! Was that an intentional piece of misinformation?

Coal, in India, is cessed like any other minerals and petroleum import is levied almost as other imports. It is not a conscious carbon-tax. Were it a carbon-tax in real sense for curbing emission, there would have been converging attempts in related fields. You cannot dissuade fossil fuel usage by one step and then promote that by another and declare you are fighting pollution and etcetera negative-externalities in a Pigouvian way. If a part of the coal-cess money goes to build roadways which by the way have a high life cycle emission footprint, then it is defeating the purpose. If a little petro-duty is imposed just because there is a sharp fall in import price, which makes the ultimate cost per unit still lower than what it was a year or two back, then can it be said that it was done to discourage pollution?

We can assume what can happen if coal price moves up by 1-2% in an economy where increasing burden of energy input price ultimately gets transferred on the shoulders of the consumers. And if there is a tiny increase in efficiency it gets shadowed by exponential total consumption increase. Is it not demagogy if we carry forward our ‘growth’-mania and simultaneously claim we are greening! 

Incidentally, these days, there are some eminent environmentalists who prefer branding things to attract attention without bothering other probable consequences. Some popular labels are ‘Dirty Diesel’, ‘Dirty Coal’ and etc. What will they say when children interpret this as gasoline or petrol is ‘clean energy’, like solar or wind? And we saw what happened to cities with green coloured auto-rickshaws, green coloured buses with so called green-fuel CNG or LPG. Is it ecologically prudent to let them equate a fossil-fuel with the term ‘green’?   

Out of total budget outlay of Rs 17.77 trillion, Environment, Forest & Climate Change got Rs 16.82 billion, i.e. less than 1%. So the government will spend less than a percent for the health of nature. This the government will do just basing on a small ‘fact’ that number of tigers have increased a little bit, so the forests are ok, even if a lot of doubts were cast on the tiger-count procedure. Moreover, India has about 30% less forest cover than it should have at the least. Citizens and industries and the economy as a whole will spend still lower amount, assuming we agree that maintaining some manicured gardens and lawns and planting a few trees in the apartment enclaves do not contribute to nature-care in any substantial way. 

Finally, it is indeed pleasant to hear that government will promote electric cars. But is India ready to handle still higher amount of Lead and other heavy metals that are there in car-batteries? Already number of cars and consequently heavy-metal usage are increasing at a galloping pace. Will just a few more pollution-measuring instruments suffice? 

Published on April 1, 2015, Business Economics 

You cannot outwit nature, cannot escape climate change with oratory or carbon–nationalism

Playing tough with ‘west’ at summits is one thing, but preparing hard for saving people from impending disasters is another. We cannot and should not expect the armed forces always to bear the burn of natural disasters and save persons while we continue ad-hoc-ism.  Moreover, disasters nowadays are not only some week-long or month-long episodes of sudden natural calamities and after effects. We are sinking ourselves in a slow poisoning environment. Let us see.

No doubt that what the government of India has been saying for years – the developed countries became developed by certain path that also led to environmental degradation. When they saw things going out of control they jumped on to make some hasty deal, as they tried in Kyoto and afterwards: reduce emission to 1990 level and then further down, a thing which they could not yet achieve. Anyway, from applying carrying–capacity concept only for humans, they landed, reluctantly, in a situation to admit that there is carrying capacity of consumptions too! For the developed west the emission target is not unreachable – they now have technologies and fund that permit alternate energy harvest without as much emission as may happen in case of fossil-fuel use. These are precisely things that the developing countries lack. So, for the ‘developing’ countries, the Kyoto order is equivalent to “go back to 1990” – the ‘End of History’ – a situation when China, India, Brazil were nowhere near ‘topmost’ in any list other than ‘list of countries by population’; and powers were all concentrated in a unipolar ‘western’ command. That is unthinkable by the would-be powers, naturally, except Russia, which was already a superpower, at least militarily. Things in question were economics and politics, not environmental sciences or public health.

In the consequent drama of reducing ‘dirty’ carbon, twofold ‘dirty’ scenes emerged – a trade in carbon or buying and selling of ‘right to pollute’ and a vociferous carbon-nationalism or ‘we too have right to grow’ (aka right to pollute). So, at these summits what happen are diplomatic bargains. All these go naturally under the cover of saving nature, and also properties and people (these being parts of nature). So, when we read in The Hindu: “If the developed world walks the talk, then we can certainly achieve the targets that we have set ourselves collectively,” Mr. Javadekar – we can only say that government of India is continuing the same climate policy, nothing more. Or when we see Indian PM ‘bunking’ the summit we do not infer that Government of India is not sincere about climate change. 

But what is unpleasant: our leaders are behaving in such a way so as to prove themselves climate-deniers. On the Teachers Day the PM spoke to millions of future citizens and said: climate has not changed, we have. It is interesting to see that our PIL-loving gentry did not jump at this opportunity to file some serious litigation against government for confusing or misleading young minds. Mr Javadekar praised India’s and Gujarat’s environmental performance at the summit when actually we should be ashamed of our lacklustre and disgraceful performance! Indian government is pursuing their 100 smart cities goal by making treaty for 1 smart city (Banaras) in Japan and 3 in USA (Allahabad, Ajmer and Visakhapatnam). Possibly, at this pace, they will complete their target within 30-40 such visits; while 100 or more existing cities will be dying pitifully.

Why should we compete with China or for the matter with the USA to make places unliveable for a large section of populace? In this 2014, 40% of surface water-bodies in the USA are ‘unswimmable and unfishable’ as the EPA confesses; at least 33% of US people still live in areas that are Non Attainment Areas with air quality below standard. Mr Modi and Mr Javadekar surely in their school days did read about Hoang Ho – the River of Sorrow of China, famous for flood. Now China could manage to dry it, almost! Yangtze is also dying with pollution. 

How is China managing its cities? They are among the most polluted in the world. India may cheer because we are not far behind. Beijing Smog has ‘defeated’ Los Angeles smog. Perhaps Delhi will be able to beat Beijing in near future! One of the 6 most common air-pollutants is called PM10, particles that can directly enter human lungs. We can see a graphical picture of presence of this pollutant in big cities of the world:

PM may teach our kids that there is no climate change. But any ‘uneducated’ Maharashtra fisherman or Punjab farmer or monk who stays high up in the Himalayas will say how the climate has changed to the worse during last 30-40 years. Many of our cities including Mumbai and Kolkata are in threshold of climate-change related extreme-weather calamities and rise of sea level. Mumbai, New York, Shanghai, Kolkata feature in all lists showing top 7 or 10 cities of the world that may get inundated due to climate change. Maplecroft, a well known UK based risk analyst and advisor has issued their 2014 vulnerability index for climate change related events and a caption there says: “Most at risk cities Dhaka, Mumbai, Manila, Kolkata, Bangkok – lowest risk in London, Paris”. They have presented a world map of vulnerability too where Gujarat and India as a whole do not look promising at all. 

Anybody concerned with news as regards climate change knew about warning relating to Kolkata and Mumbai since almost a decade. But when New York is already on the way of executing some plan to save that city we are busy with media-covered gatherings, ‘events’, token gestures and at maximum some adhoc short term measures, while hard labour of scientists gathered dusts.

Leaders love claps. But when thunderclaps come, applauses get eclipsed. Ecologists can be jeered as ‘doomsayers’; well, but you cannot shrug off climate change warnings given by famous business houses and their risk analysts, not only Maplecroft, but also Allianz, Lloyds, Deutsche Bank or BNP-Paribas; they mean business. Neither can you wish away climate change by demagogy. 

 published in Business Economics, October 1-15, 2014

the author is a chemical engineer and environmentalist