Climate Change enters Pakistani party manifestos - Issue #85
From Political Manifestos to Climate Catastrophes: Navigating the Complex Landscape of Global Warming, Government Actions, and Renewable Energy Shifts
The Big Picture
Heatwaves, uncontrolled air pollution, melting glaciers, GLOFs, forest fires, cyclones, and the great flood of 2022 have resulted in Pakistan’s political parties finally seeing the writing on the wall.
As the country heads into polls this week, two leading parties — Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz (PMLN) and Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) — have brought climate change into their manifestos.
Amongst the promises from the PMLN, clear air. Its manifesto lists, as the PTI report says, “various steps to be taken for good air quality, including transboundary cooperation between India and Pakistan to reduce the impact of crop burning”; speaks of a ‘Green Pakistan Programme’; promises to ban plastics; talks about proper waste management; and promises to create a ‘resilient Pakistan’ by 2029.
As for the PPP, it talks about extreme weather, adaptation and mitigation. Its manifesto, as PTI noted, has a whole chapter titled ‘Green New Deal: Climate Resilient Futures’.
The third prominent party — Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek e Insaf — hadn’t released its manifesto at the time PTI filed its copy. However, the newswire wrote, “Given (PPP’s) track record of implementing ‘Billion Tree Tsunami’ as part of the party’s ‘Green Growth Initiative,’ it is known that climate change is part of their discourse.”
For more, read this report in Third Pole: How green are Pakistan’s political manifestoes?
This is an interesting moment. Yes, manifesto promises all too often remain on paper. And yes, as Yifei Li and Elizabeth Economy showed in China Goes Green, poorly democratic countries can go wrong even after diagnosing the problem correctly. For instance, chasing carbon neutrality, China extensively planted non-native species. And yet, it’s heartening to see climate change claw its way into political parties’ consciousness.
One wonders where this moment will lead.
Climate news of the week
On the climate front, the week gone by has been unnerving.
2024 is just starting, and the southern hemisphere is boiling. As this newsletter gets written, as many as 165 fires are raging across Chile. At least 112 people have been killed. The videos show unbelievable destruction.
Next week is not looking very calm either. An intense, long-lasting atmospheric river is moving across California — bringing widespread power outages and the potential for mudslides and life-threatening flooding as it dumps heavy rain and snow, imperilling millions.
Talking of “not looking very calm”, Sea Surface Temperatures are the highest ever recorded right now.
Brace for more cyclones, too. Closer home, though, there was some relief for people in the Himalayas. After a dry winter, it finally snowed.
News of the week
The week has gone by relatively calm in India.
The BJP-led NDA government presented its final budget before national polls last week.
Given it was a vote on account — the next government will present a full-fledged budget — this one was a relatively quiet affair. Even so, a central contradiction stands out. The budget was, as CarbonCopy noted, good for climate investments. Amongst other things, it extends viability gap funding to offshore wind projects.
At the same time, the budget does nothing to boost people’s capacity before a changing climate. Despite the rising need for adaptation and mitigation, the budget for the MoEFCC — the designated ministry for climate adaptation — has barely budged. Just as egregiously, the budget has slashed allocations for social sector schemes like NREGA, midday meals, ICDS, etc. These programmes, it barely needs to be said, help the most vulnerable people in India — children, widows, pregnant women, the elderly, and rural workers.
Compounding matters, the budget slashes these allocations at a time when rural India is struggling. That hyperlink leads to an excellently reported Reuters dispatch from rural India. Read it if you have not yet. Also, read economist — and blunt truth-teller — Jayati Ghosh on the budget.
Last week, more details emerged about the government’s new rooftop solar push as well. It is… interesting. The scheme, as Business Standard reported, will be implemented by public sector utilities of the power ministry — and focus on lower and lower middle-class households in urban areas.
The details are intriguing. As Business Standard says: “The subsidy under PMSY would be 60% of the total project cost and the balance would be loan.” The loan will be taken by the PSUs implementing the project. They will set up the project and provide free solar electricity to the house (as much as needed). Any surplus electricity will be sold to the respective power distribution company and proceeds from this sale would be used to pay off the loan. Consumers will own the solar rooftop system once the loan is repaid. At that point, revenues from the sale of electricity will flow to them.
At first glance, the economics here look unconvincing. How much surplus power will a rooftop unit produce? What will discoms, cash-strapped most of the time, pay for this rooftop power? How do these numbers square up against the investment and running costs? We will come back to these questions.
Last week, more details surfaced as well about India’s critical mineral auctions. According to auction documents, the 20 blocks up for auction cover 7,182 hectares of land. Of that, about 1,233 ha is forestland.
Talking of auctions, the ninth round of commercial coal block auctions are underway as well. As things stand, two new coal mines began producing in January. Needless to say, this buildup is not restricted to coal alone. There is also oil and gas. India is fast emerging as the last big market for oil and gas majors. “The International Energy Agency estimates that India will add 1 million barrels a day of capacity over the six years to 2028, taking processing to 6.2 million barrels a day — a 19% increase to total refining,” reported Bloomberg. Its report, The world’s last wave of oil refining bets is all about India, is worth a read. While on this topic, also see this CarbonCopy report from 2020, on how global oil and gas majors are making a beeline for India’s downstream markets — and why India’s GHG emissions will keep rising as a result.
Podcast of the week
“Perovskites are cheap, abundant photovoltaic materials that some have hailed as the future of green energy.
Around the world, companies are layering perovskites on top of traditional silicon to develop so-called tandem solar cells that some think could deliver at least 20% more power than a silicon cell alone. However, there remain multiple issues to overcome before these products are ready for widespread uptake in the notoriously competitive solar-power market.” (Nature)
Longreads of the week
Adani, a Year Later: Investors Are Embracing India’s Humbled Champion (WSJ)
Elon Musk’s Neuralink brain chip: what scientists think of first human trial (Nature). Also see this Scientific American report on Neuralink.
Politics and the environment collide in Brazil: Lula’s first year back in office. (Nature)
A giant fund for climate disasters will soon open. Who should be paid first? (Nature)
Inside the Crime Rings Trafficking Sand (Scientific American)
A prerequisite for a more just world is reform of the multilateral development organisations. Read these two links on the World Bank. The first, Can the IMF and the World Bank really be changed? by Jayati Ghosh. The second, World Bank reform will remain elusive until this is understood, by Matt Kenner and Claire Provost.
As norms are ignored, Uttarakhand faces tunnelling disasters (ThirdPole)
The Perverse Policies That Fuel Wildfires (New Yorker)
India’s ‘New Era’ and Western Imperialism in 2023. Part 5: The Adani Group and International Capital (Rupe India blog). The whole five-part series is worth a read, folks.
Book/movie of the week
This week, we have a book that looks at the early days of the oil industry in the USA.
This is David Grain’s Killers of The Flower Moon. American Indians were being chased off their land by the settlers, being sequestered in smaller and smaller patches of land they could claim as their own. One of these tribes being chased off their land was the Osage. The land they were settled in, however, turned out to house oil reserves. The fallout? Selling concessions for oil drilling, the Osage got very rich. And then, they began to get killed off. In Killers of The Flower Moon, as Grann paints a picture of the investigation that followed, what one sees is a picture of the US during the great oil boom.
It’s a story that has been told before. By Upton Sinclair in Oil, which painted a picture of the early days of the oil industry in southern California, and by journalist Ida Tarbell, who wrote the first investigative report in modern times, into the abuses of monopoly power by the Standard Oil Company.
Like Oil, Killers of the Flower Moon too has been made into a movie. Here is its trailer.