2023 is shaping up as a year of abnormal weather – Issue #45
Forest fire in Tamil Nadu, intense rainfall in North and Central India, and a town in MP blanketed in white after a hailstorm that destroyed the rabi crop
News of The Week
The previous instalment of this newsletter had dwelt on the spate of forest fires across India. There is some good news on that front.
The fires in Goa have finally been doused. As of 4 PM on 14 March, all fires in the state had been put out. According to the New Indian Express, the fire has damaged a vast stretch of area in the Mahadayi Wildlife Sanctuary.
Elsewhere in the country, the picture is more muddled. Tamil Nadu reported a forest fire in Kodaikanal. At the same time, though, last week saw another manifestation of freak weather. North and Central India saw intense rainfall. The central Indian town of Khargone, in news last year for communal unrest, was blanketed in white after a hail storm that hammered its rabi crop. The point is unmistakable. “Experts were concerned about a drop in wheat yield due to the heat wave just a few days ago,” wrote Business Standard.
“And on Monday, mercury in several states registered a considerable dip due to continuous rain -- which also poses a threat to mustard, chana, sugarcane, seasonal vegetables and horticulture crops.”
These rains are expected to recede from Tuesday, said the daily, but another rain-carrying weather system might develop by the 24th. One reads these reports and hopes that, if nothing else, the forests are getting a good soaking. In all, 2023 is shaping up as an year of abnormal weather.
Similar reports continued to come from other parts of the world. Argentina is grappling with an unprecedented late-summer heatwave -- causing crops to wither, helping wildfires spread and adding huge pressure to a country already facing an economic crisis, reported CNN. Europe too is far drier than it should be. “Reservoirs in France and northern Italy are about 40 to 50 percent lower than they should be. The longest river in Italy, the Po, is 60 percent below its normal levels. Not only that, there is roughly half the usual snow on the Alps than would be expected for this time of year. That’s a huge problem, because much of Central Europe relies on meltwater from these famous mountains every spring,” reported Wired.
How do people cope? In Assam’s Dhemaji, as Indiaspend reported, farmers are now trying to adapt by shifting their cropping patterns, and cultivating more Rabi (winter) crops, such as mustard, potatoes and peas, that are sown in November, rather than Kharif crops, such as rice, sown in June and July. Others are giving up farming, preferring instead to migrate to nearby cities and towns for jobs.
In essence, climate is adding another layer of precarity to lives and livelihoods – whether humans or other species.
This is a truth that is yet to sink in – be it in Khargone, or in India’s Supreme Court which, having allowed a polluting 3,600 MW power plant to keep functioning, is now thinking of relaxing restrictions in the meagre one-kilometre Eco-Sensitive Zone mandated near protected forests and wildlife sanctuaries, or state governments, or the union government.
We are not the only ecocidal ones, of course. The IPCC released the final part of its assessment report saying if the world continues with their current policies, the remaining carbon budget will be used up before the next IPCC report [due in 2030]. In the same week came the news that the US is now the world’s largest oil producer, the world’s largest gas producer, and the world’s largest LNG exporter.
What else made news? Vultures numbers are still vulnerable. Petronas wants to pick up a 20% stake in NTPC’s green energy arm. Greenko is setting up a pumped storage project in the Neemuch district of Madhya Pradesh. Its daily storage capacity will be 11 GWh, the company said. The Ministry of Power wants pumped storage projects to be supported through concessional climate finance. Sovereign green bonds could be used for these.
As power demand soars, wrote Moneycontrol, the costs of missing solar capacity targets might haunt India this summer. Its report, which starts by talking about the missed targets, makes a very interesting point at the end. As the share of renewables rises, balancing the grid will get harder. And so, India’s discoms are changing their bid structures. “Industry experts say that going forward... there will be more tenders for green power sources that ensure round-the-clock electricity,” it wrote. “Tenders for peak power, round-the-clock power, hybrid power, storage-plus-solar power, among others, will gather momentum in the coming days.”
Elsewhere in the world, the US’s Inflation Reduction Act is sharpening the race to capture the industries of the future. Last week came the news that more than two-thirds of the planned lithium-ion battery production capacity in Europe is at risk of delay, downsizing or cancellation -- due to the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
In response – to both the USA and China – the EU has unveiled its plans to produce clean technologies. It wants to produce at least 40% of its clean-tech needs within EU borders by the end of the decade, reported Bloomberg. Accordingly, it focuses on eight key sectors -- Solar photovoltaic and solar thermal; Onshore and offshore wind; Battery/storage; Heat pumps and geothermal energy; Electrolyzers and fuel cells; Biomethane; Carbon capture and storage; and Grid technologies – with an accompanying measure that seeks to secure supplies of critical raw materials.
As Down To Earth reported, all this comes with large questions for the third world. Breakthroughs in green technologies – as we saw with solar – could net spillover benefits for the rest of the world. At the same time, the third world might again end up importing these technologies from the west. In tandem, as the magazine wrote,
“Domestic subsidies by wealthy nations, coupled with measures like a carbon border tax that the EU also announced late last year, would penalise developing countries with carbon-intensive operations, raise costs for their manufacturers and have adverse implications for their foreign exchange earnings.”
In other news, the pricing power of the “Big 5 companies” in India – Reliance, Tata, Aditya Birla, Adani and Bharti Airtel – is possibly leading to persistent core inflation, former Reserve Bank of India deputy governor Viral Acharya said.
Closer home, the Adani saga continues. It has flip-flopped on the role of Vinod Adani. After telling Hindenburg Vinod Adani is not a part of the group, it responded to a Morning Context report saying that Vinod Adani is very much a part of the group – and that, ergo, it doesn’t matter whether Adani buys those cement assets or Vinod Adani does. It has also suspended work on its Rs34,900 crore petrochemical project. “The unit was to have a poly-vinyl-chloride (PVC) production capacity of 2,000 KTPA (kilo tonne per annum) requiring 3.1 million tonne per annum (MTPA) of coal that was to be imported from Australia, Russia and other countries.”
Jon Stewart interviews Larry Summers
Climate Reads of The Week
‘Everything Living Is Dying’: Environmental Ruin in Modern Iraq. (Undark)
“Why Pramila Devi uses his slippers sparingly,” Livemint on the continuing economic distress in rural India.
What went wrong at Credit Suisse? The Swiss roots of the debacle. (Adam Tooze)
Is 1.5C still realistic? The crumbling consensus over key climate target(FT)
How Ola wilfully endangered lives (Livemint)
Lakshadweep MP's Conviction Should Serve as a Stark Reminder to Democratise Governance in UTs.
How Adivasis in an MP village are being dispossessed: First for ‘development’, now ‘afforestation’ (Scroll)
In India, the future of water-intensive green hydrogen ironically lies in water-scarce regions (Scroll)
Book of The Week
Twenty years have passed since the invasion of Iraq.
As the Undark report listed above says, Iraq has been decimated. In Fuel On The Fire: Oil and Politics in Occupied Iraq, activist Greg Muttitt talks about his nine-year investigation into the war – why was Iraq invaded? Why were the US and UK so unwilling to end their occupation? What happened to Iraq’s oil?
Here is an interview with Muttitt.