AMOC Slowdown and India's Gas Buildup – Issue #86
January showed alarming climate signs: snowless Himalayas and Chile fires. And now, with record heat and Atlantic circulation warnings, the urgency grows.
Climate news of the week
For climate watchers, last week has been terrifying.
January had supplied a few signs of climate breakdown. India’s northern Himalayas had seen barely any snowfall. Then came those devastating forest fires in Chile. The following week, the first of the atmospheric rivers hit California, leaving it flooded. Then came the news that sea surface temperatures are the highest ever recorded.
Then came last week. Even as it belatedly snowed in Kashmir and elsewhere, grim news came in from other parts of the world. Central Africa is facing heatwaves, floods and forest fires. Italy is seeing a drought. The Atlantic is warming earlier than usual. Closer home, even Bangalore was much hotter than usual.
Then came unnerving news. Between February 2023 and January 2024, the global mean temperature was 1.52°C above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial average. That, as BBC reported, is the world’s first year-long breach of the 1.5°C warming limit.
Then came even more unnerving news. Given current trends, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, might shut down by the middle of this century. “Warm water that is extra salty due to evaporation flows north from the tropics along the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, keeping Europe much warmer than it would otherwise be,” explained New Scientist. “As this water cools, it sinks because its high salinity increases its density. It then flows back to the tropics and into the southern hemisphere along the ocean bottom.”
A recent study found that melting ice caps can slow - or even shut down - AMOC. “If lots of fresh water enters the North Atlantic,” wrote New Scientist, “It reduces the salinity and thus density of surface water, meaning less of it sinks.”
The consequences are dire. Amongst them, lower heat delivery to Europe, which will come with its own fallouts.
News of the week
Little of this impending peril has dawned on India’s policy-makers.
As fossil fuel majors court India, the country continues to amplify the role of oil and natural gas in its energy mix.
As this newsletter mentioned in January, the QatarEnergy-Petronet LNG deal has been formalised. Read this report for a blow-by-blow account of how the deal came about. And also this report.
This is a dangerous game. India looks set to be the last big market for fossil fuel majors — a turn of events that policymakers are trying to leverage in diverse ways. The cost, however, is that India gets locked into expensive hydrocarbon purchases. These, as CarbonCopy has written earlier, might not be competitive against rival fuels. Even more consequentially, the Earth is no longer in a position to handle rising emissions from natural gas. In a saner world, we would put this money into renewable power.
This point was made by Bloomberg’s David Fickling last week as he marvelled about India’s relative disregard for renewables but great bullishness towards carbon capture and sequestration. As things stand, India’s solar installations have slowed.
In the meantime, though, both state players like Petronet and Oil India and private players like Adani are drawing up expansion plans. Here is Petronet, thinking of setting up a petrochemical plant as it firms up gas supplies. And here is Adani, tying up with Inox. And here is Oil India, firming up oil exploration plans in the Andamans.
Continuing with this ecocidal pattern, the country has okayed one more coal mine (belonging to Adani) despite local water stresses. Astonishingly enough, this underground coal block is sited in drought-prone Vidarbha — and has no less than eight water bodies in and around the coal-block.
This is an area where wells have dried up, leaving locals at the mercy of groundwater. Now comes the underground mine — and assurances from Adani that it will not mine below these water bodies. As expected, the EIA has not gone into questions about the impact of mining on groundwater aquifers.
The Group has also received a go-ahead to build three pumped storage projects in the ecologically-sensitive western ghats of Maharashtra — including in some areas housing the last undisturbed forests of the ghats.“The Patgaon project in Kolhapur district would lead to “loss of forest habitat and most importantly, it will likely break the tiger/wildlife corridor to Radhanagari Wildlife Sanctuary”, Girish Punjabi, a conservation biologist with the Wildlife Conservation Trust, told Article-14. The other two projects are no different.
Gautam Adani, however, continues to soar. His net worth has crossed $100 billion yet again. India now has two centi-billionaires — him and Mukesh Ambani.
Other major developments last week? The government’s PLI scheme continued to make headlines. First came the news that India was hiking allocations for some sectors. Then came the news that offtake had been lowered than expected — and that ₹41,000 crore lay unspent. Investment growth is “significantly slow” for textiles, IT hardware and speciality steel. Even the PLI for batteries is not doing very well.
Then came news that, instead of ridding India of dependence on China, PLI is entrenching India’s dependence on the middle kingdom. “Of the 12 winners of the PLI scheme for high efficiency solar photovoltaic modules, 11 have listed supply chain partners and service providers from China, with some mentioning more than 20 Chinese vendors,” reported Business Standard. This includes even market leaders like Reliance New Energy Solar, Tata Power, ReNew Solar, Waaree Energies and Avaada Electro. All have, said the paper, listed vendors from China as major suppliers.
The implications are interesting. By importing components, Indian firms make it possible for China to access markets which are closed to them. Such a development surfaced last week. “India’s largest solar producer, Waaree Energies Ltd., has sent millions of panels to the US with components from a Chinese company whose products were repeatedly denied entry to the US market over concerns about forced labour,” reported Bloomberg. “Those components, solar cells produced by China’s Longi Green Energy Technology Co. at plants in Malaysia and Vietnam, are used in Waaree panels blanketing solar farms in Texas and other states.”
Alternately, if firms toggle from importing components to building their own supply lines in India using Chinese inputs, that marks a deepening of dependance on the middle kingdom.
On other fronts, too, this was an eventful week. As this newsletter gets written, Israel is bombing Rafah. Some of the drones being used have been supplied by Adani. Tucker Carlson interviewed Putin. India saw the NDA government blast the UPA for economic mismanagement — and get blasted back in turn. Climate scientist Michael Mann won $1 million in damages in a defamation lawsuit. Here is Nature on what this means for scientists. News came that, seeking to escape heat, tigers are moving uphill.
Beyond doom and gloom, how to stimulate climate action
“To help figure out the precise impact of climate doomerism, we recently completed one of the largest experiments ever conducted on climate change behaviour. Together with an international team of 255 other behavioural scientists and climate change experts, we tested the effects of the 11 top psychological messages meant to boost climate awareness and action. This allowed us to test the impact of doom and gloom messaging against the other top climate change messages.”
This is an interesting article. To see the whole paper, head here.
Trump’s plans for the environment
“The prized target for Trump’s Republican allies, should the former president defeat Joe Biden in November’s election, will be the Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark $370 billion bill laden with support for clean energy projects and electric vehicles…. He would, his allies say, also scrap government considerations of the damage caused by carbon emissions; compel a diminished EPA to squash pollution rules for cars, trucks, and power plants; and symbolically nullify the Paris climate agreement by not only withdrawing the US again but sending it to the Senate for ratification as a treaty, knowing it would fail.”
From ‘In a word, horrific’: Trump’s extreme anti-environment blueprint, in the Guardian.
The insurance crisis is here
“The insurance crisis probably started over a decade ago without anyone noticing (except a few actuaries). But in the past several years, it has become increasingly obvious, as insurers jack up rates or stop writing policies altogether in states with increasing climate risks such as Florida and California.”
A glimpse of a future world, here.
Non-climate longreads
Is the media prepared for an extinction-level event? (New Yorker).
Namonomics vs Manmohanomics: Modi or Singh, who has done better on economy? (BS)
A Tale Of 2 Mega Airports: Navi Mumbai (Fortune)
Climate longreads
Who profits from the green energy rush? (TNI). This essay is part of a larger set on Energy, Power and Transition. They look very promising. Do check them out.
‘It was total panic – with black smoke, falling fireballs and tongues of flame’: the terror of Chile’s wildfires (The Guardian)
Is climate change an election issue in India? (The Hindu)
Life Inside India’s Auroville, ‘The City the Earth Needs’ (Atoms.Earth)
A non-bank drops the ball on EV subsidies for Ola, Ather, and others (The Ken)
Has Uttar Pradesh’s economy surpassed Tamil Nadu? (Frontline)
One year ago, journalist Shashikant Warishe was killed in a village in Ratnagiri, Maharashtra. Forbidden Stories and The Indian Express pursued his work on suspicious land dealings. Documents connect Warishe’s accused killer, Pandharinath Amberkar, to Ratnagiri Refinery And Petrochemicals Limited, the refinery coming up as a JV between Indian state oil companies, with Saudi Aramco and ADNOC interested in partnership.
Book of the week
Given the news about the AMOC, our book of the week is The Great Ocean Conveyor: Discovering the Trigger for Abrupt Climate Change. Here is a brief introduction to the book. God knows it is high time we understood these atmospheric and oceanic foundations of life on our planet.
PS: Also see this review of The Bill Gates Problem in Nature.