A hope-filled instalment, this time around - Issue #28
News of the Week
Exciting news came in from Brazil as this newsletter was being written.
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has defeated Jair Bolsonaro and will again be country's president. A far-right authoritarian leader in the same mould as Orban, Erdogan, Duterte, and so many others, Bolsonaro leaves a legacy filled with controversy, including dismissing concerns about Covid-19, deepening divides in Brazil, and charges of running a corrupt administration. Backed by powerful agri-business groups, he also disregarded the rights of Brazil’s indigenous people and weakened the country’s environmental protections. Under him, the pace of deforestation surged to a fifteen-year high, prompting alarm that the forest, a crucial stabilising influence on global weather patterns, might be reaching a point of no return.
There is cause for cautious optimism now. Shortly after his victory was confirmed, as The Guardian reported, Lula vowed to wage war on hunger, and racism and to combat environmental destruction, which has soared under Bolsonaro. “We will fight for zero deforestation in the Amazon … Brazil, and the planet need the Amazon alive.” In his earlier stint as president, Lula had dramatically reduced deforestation rates – gains subsequently undone by Bolsonaro.
Lula’s victory, incidentally, means progressive politics continues to gain in Latin America after the progressive Left claimed victories in Peru, Chile and Honduras. Lula’s win - a narrow one in a badly divided country, is a win nonetheless.
When it started, last week hadn’t quite so hopeful on climate front. The week started with two grim warnings – the first from the UN, and the second from the IEA. Combined pledges made by countries to fight the climate crisis remains insufficient to meet the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to below 2°C, said the United Nations report. The IEA’s report dwelt on the ongoing energy shock, saying the number of people living in households spending at least 10 per cent of their income on energy used in the home increased by 160 million between 2019 and 2022.
Given the Ukraine war, it said, as many as 70 million people might not be able to afford electricity; as many as 100 million may no longer be able to cook with clean fuels.
We have been seeing these processes for a while now. In India, too, trapped between low incomes and expensive LPG cylinders, households are falling back on firewood and dung cakes for cooking. Even big companies, like Germany’s BASF, are struggling.
In the middle of all this suffering, however, there are silver linings. Putin is losing the energy war he started. Spooked by high energy prices, the world is pivoting faster to renewables. As Scientific American reported this week, global carbon dioxide emissions associated with energy use are on track to increase 1% this year -- significantly lower than what many observers projected earlier this year. Russia’s oil and coal exports are also slowing.
Last week also saw more chatter about the world stepping away from globalisation towards one of the trade blocs. One where the current “Chimerica” model is replaced by, as Noah Smith wrote, “a largely but not completely bifurcated global system of production and trade, with two technologically advanced high-output blocs competing head to head”. Will this work? Trade blocs, as things stand, are a fallback to the structure of the world during the cold war. Tim Sahay wrote some weeks ago that a clutch of countries are unwilling to be corraled into either bloc.
In the news back home, things have been predictable. North India’s air quality is worsening again. Firecrackers were burst, notwithstanding a ban, on Diwali. Attempts to
control stubble burning
have not yielded fruit either.
Work on hydel projects continues – Kishtwar in J&K is emerging as one hotbed for hydel projects. The NYT has a profile of Gautam Adani. And Greenko has inked a contract to ship green hydrogen to Singapore.
This agreement is reportedly for an annual supply of 250,000 tonnes from 2025-26 and will be a part of Greenko's plan to produce 3 million tonnes of green ammonia. We know Reliance promised to produce green hydrogen at $1 a kilo. One wonders what Greenko’s cost of production is – given solar costs are rising in India. Globally, rates are expected to fall lower yet.
Climate Breakthrough
Scientists working on dye-sensitized solar cells have achieved a new efficiency record, said news reports.
What does that mean? These cells are transparent, which makes them suitable for use in windows, greenhouses and glass facades as well as in the screens of portable electronic devices. This is another step towards ubiquity.
A team from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland made the breakthrough.
Climate Long-Reads
1. Did India Get Its Math Wrong About How Many Cheetahs Can Fit In Kuno? (The Wire)
2. Mike Davis has passed away. From his last essay: “We are living through the nightmare edition of ‘Great Men Make History’. Unlike the high Cold War when politburos, parliaments, presidential cabinets and general staffs to some extent countervailed megalomania at the top, there are few safety switches between today’s maximum leaders and Armageddon. Never has so much fused economic, mediatic and military power been put into so few hands.”
3. “When nomad Mohammed Rabbani and his family left the soaring April heat of their hometown to start their annual trek into the hills of Kashmir to graze their livestock, they took 400 sheep and goats with them. But only about 200 animals will make the 260 km (186-mile) trip back to Rabbani’s home in Rajouri, in the west of the Jammu and Kashmir region. Heavy rains, flooding, and unseasonal snowstorms killed half the family’s livestock during their time in the hills.” Harsher storms and sudden floods are disrupting centuries of migratory tradition, battering nomadic communities and forcing many families to consider giving up their herding culture.
4. Given the spreading economic stagnation, can mankind find the resources to fight climate change? It cannot, argues academic Jack Copley. “Yet the stagnation doesn’t actually show that decarbonisation is impossible, but rather that it will be difficult to do so by capitalist means. For this reason, it is important to take seriously radical visions of decarbonisation that involve using collective ownership and democratic economic planning to expand renewable infrastructure rapidly. Faced with an unprecedented environmental catastrophe and the inertia of private markets, why should key industries like steel or solar be run according to the principle of profit maximisation instead of climate stability?” Much of today’s newsletter talks about Lula. Here is one more reason why the factors driving the rise of leaders like him might save the earth.
5. This is not quite about energy. But Businessweek has just dedicated an entire issue – cover to cover -- to Crypto. As its editor explained: “There was a moment not so long ago when I thought, “What if I’ve had this crypto thing all wrong?” If I’m being honest, I'm doubting the normie who hasn’t always understood this alternate universe that’s been percolating and expanding for more than a decade now. If you’re a disciple, this new dimension is the future. If you’re a sceptic, this upside-down world is just a modern Ponzi scheme that will end badly—and the recent “crypto winter” is evidence of its long-overdue ending. But crypto has dug itself into finance, technology, and our heads. And if crypto isn’t going away, we’d better attempt to understand it. This is why we asked the finest finance writer around, Matt Levine of Bloomberg Opinion, to write a cover-to-cover issue of Bloomberg Businessweek, something a single author has done only one other time in the magazine’s 93-year history (“What Is Code?” by Paul Ford). What follows is his brilliant explanation of what this maddening, often absurd, and always fascinating technology means and where it might go. —Joel Weber, Editor, Bloomberg Businessweek.”
6. The Triumph and Terror of Wang Huning. “A member of the CCP’s seven-man Politburo Standing Committee, he is China’s top ideological theorist, quietly credited as being the “ideas man” behind each of Xi’s signature political concepts, including the “China Dream,” the anti-corruption campaign, the Belt and Road Initiative, a more assertive foreign policy, and even “Xi Jinping Thought.” Scrutinize any photograph of Xi on an important trip or at a key meeting and one is likely to spot Wang there in the background, never far from the leader’s side.”
7. Megalopolis: how coastal west Africa will shape the coming century. “It is a stretch of coastal west Africa that begins in the west with Abidjan, the economic capital of Ivory Coast, and extends 600 miles east – passing through the countries of Ghana, Togo and Benin – before finally arriving at Lagos. Recently, this has come to be seen by many experts as the world’s most rapidly urbanising region, a “megalopolis” in the making – that is, a large and densely clustered group of metropolitan centres.” (The Guardian)
8. "The window of possible climate futures is narrowing, and as a result, we are getting a clearer sense of what’s to come." David Wallace-Wells writes for NYT.
Climate Book of the Week
At the Feet of Living Things: Twenty-Five years of Wildlife Research and Conservation in India
Written by scientists working at Mysore’s Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF), this new book describes the triumphs, struggles and realities of wildlife conservation and research in India. This is important stuff. Biodiversity loss is one of the most pressing battles of our time. Here is a review of this beautifully written and illustrated book. And here is an excerpt.