Could China’s GHG emissions peak this year? – Issue #87
China's strides in renewable energy contrast with India's reliance on oil and gas. Amid EV market shifts and Tesla's interest in Indian rooftop solar, climate impacts hit Kashmir's saffron crop
Climate news of the week
Last year, China’s aggressive embrace of renewables created some wonderment.
Factoids like the country adding more solar panels in 2023 (217 GW) than the entire installed solar capacity of the United States had done the rounds. In wind too, the country had added more capacity (76 GW) than the rest of the world put together.
The results are starting to show. “The low-carbon capacity additions, which also included hydropower and nuclear, were for the last time large enough that their power output could cover the entire annual increase in Chinese electricity demand,” reported WSJ. While the country is still building coal-plants, it says these will replace older, more polluting peers and be used, in any case, mostly to offset intermittency from renewables.
With that, says a new study by IEA and Lauri Myllyvirta’s Centre for Energy and Clean Air, China’s GHG emissions might peak as early as this year — 6 years before 2030, as promised by Xi Jinping.
At this time, China is a case study on how to profit from decarbonisation. Not only does the country dominate renewable technology and manufacturing globally, investments in renewables have become a major driver of the Chinese economy.
India, in contrast, stands at an inflection point. As CarbonCopy has been reporting, a clutch of oil and gas majors see India as their last big market. Accordingly, a series of blandishments and geopolitical pressures have followed as they seek to sign long-term supply deals. It doesn’t help that several of these majors have tied up with powerful local business groups — see this report on Adani Total Gas betting big on LNG. Between these lures and pressures, the country is undertaking to consume more imported gas and oil than before.
As our report on US shale gas exporter Tellurian showed last week, such deals can all too easily become white elephants, not to mention divert precious resources from renewables; while releasing further emissions the earth cannot afford.
News of the week
The week gone by wasn’t marked by dramatic headlines on the energy/climate front. The announcements we saw, instead, were muted but substantive.
Take the first development. Much has been made of India’s ambitious EV targets. The government has said, several times so far, that 80% of all 2-wheelers, all 3-wheelers and a third of all four-wheelers in the country will be electric by 2030. Last week, more realistic numbers came from industry.
“A recent presentation made by ICRA in January to SIAM has cut this (target) drastically to half,” reported Business Standard. “12-15 per cent for passenger vehicles and only 25 per cent for electric two-wheelers.” Consequently, said the paper, "EV players need to invest around ₹ 28,000 to ₹ 30,000 crore to set up the desired capacity – not the ₹ 70,000 crore anticipated earlier.”
The EV market, that said, is hotting up. Last week, following in the footsteps of Ather and Ola, Tata Motors cut its electric car prices by as much as Rs 1.2 lakh. So did MG Motors, slashing the price of its dainty Comet from Rs 8 lakh to Rs 7 lakh. With this, as Times of India reported, buyers will recover the additional cost of an EV within one year of driving. This is a trend to watch. EVs have been premium products so far, with car-makers launching both EV and ICE models of the same car. Is that about to change?
While on decarbonisation, there is news from Tesla as well. Even as its car plans for India remain undecided, the company is scouting for local partners to make rooftop solar panels in India. “The selected partner will help with the manufacturing and installation, while Tesla will provide technology and sales expertise,” reported Mint.
From EVs to King Coal. As Bloomberg columnist David Fickling had written two weeks ago, India is amping up on coal and — to simultaneously reduce carbon emissions by a billion tons by 2030 — banking on Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCUS).
Last week came news that a policy framework is almost ready. After talking to Dastur Energy’s Atanu Mukherjee, Business Standard wrote that the “policy may be structured like a production linked incentive scheme, similar to the ones announced by the Centre for green hydrogen in June 2023, and coal gasification last month.” The policy will help companies in the steel, cement and power sectors, Mukherjee told the newspaper.
This will be worth watching. What scale will this scheme create? And what will it mean for the economics of these units? Will it be, for instance, cheaper than hydrogen? It also makes one think of this article in The Nation.
Podcast
BBC The Conversation: Women documenting climate change in pictures
Other news. The Adani Group continues to climb. It cinched a Rs 30,000 crore land project in Bandra, Mumbai. Moody’s upgraded four group companies, including Adani Green, from ‘negative’ to ‘stable’. Adani Green, it also emerged, wants to raise $500 million next month through dollar bonds. “The spreads for Adani Group's dollar bonds have definitely come down from last year, so the deal should get reasonably priced," a banker told Reuters. This, more than anything else, shows that the group is now back to normal.
As The Wire had written last year, Adani had been relying on international bonds to fund its expansion. After Hindenburg, that source of cash seemed likely to dry up or, at the very least, become costlier. That risk now seems to have passed. Fresh complaints, however, continue to dog the group. Finally, a JV in which Adani has a controlling stake is shipping military drones to Israel. These, as The Wire reported, are “being extensively used in the Israeli Defence Forces’ military campaign in Gaza, which have resulted in the death of over 28,000 people, including more than 10,000 children”.
Elsewhere, consolidation in the US Shale continues. Read this explainer from Bloomberg. Incredibly enough, ten years down the line, the CBI is still plodding through its coal scam investigations. It has just filed a chargesheet on Monnet Ispat, a firm that no longer exists — it was acquired by JSW through India’s bankruptcy auctions. The memories of its past misdemeanours, however, live on. Kerala, surprising everyone, has emerged as a surprisingly strong market for electric cars. And India has initiated a probe into solar glass dumping by China and Vietnam.
And now, climate impacts.
The costs of low snowfall over the Himalayas are making themselves felt.
In Kashmir, the saffron crop has collapsed. Abdul Gani Reshi, who cultivates saffron on an acre and a half of land, told Mint that during the first half of the season he managed to harvest just 12 gm of saffron. “Three decades back,” as he told the paper, “We would get around 2 kg of produce in a day, and during the whole season, the yield was more than a quintal.”
It’s the same old story. “Saffron… requires intermittent rains between mid August and mid September for a good flush of flowers during the harvest season. Last year, however, the prolonged dry spell delayed the harvest.” Farmers blamed weak irrigation facilities for the crisis. They are right but this is where complexity enters the picture. In Punjab, militancy had annihilated state capacity. In Kashmir too, between militancy and India’s subsequent attempts to control the erstwhile state, it’s hard to imagine any administrative capacity for adaptation and mitigation.
Complicating matters further, there is only so far adaptation and mitigation can go. As the report says, Srinagar received 244 mm of snowfall and rain in December 1990. This fell to 20.9 mm in December 2021 and 6.9 mm in December 2022. Systemic problems cannot be addressed locally. For now, farmers are contemplating changes in what they grow.
Saffron, of course, tells a larger story. Other crops such as apples, cherry, plum and strawberries, have been affected as well.
Given low rains, the AP State Energy Department has shut its hydel power generation unit at Upper Sileru in the Eastern Ghats bordering Odisha.
While on adaptation and mitigation, read this Wire report on carbon credits in India.
In other news, the union government says it wants to revamp the current approach to groundwater management. “The government aims to expand the network of monitoring wells to 90,000, including through 40,000 digital water level recorders (DWLRs) across the country,” reported Mint.
India, at present, has 26,000 monitoring stations and 67,000 monitored wells across the country. “It also has about 6,000-8,000 piezometers (used to measure underground water pressure), but none of them have digital water level recorders,” wrote the paper.
These recorders, said the paper, will enhance data quality and the frequency of groundwater analysis as it shifts to a more efficient six-hour data capture cycle. This is deeply welcome. As Mint writes, groundwater accounts for 40% of India’s water supply and has been depleting faster and faster. Data gathering, however, is the easy part. How that translates into policy — which will involve asking people to curb groundwater use — remains to be seen. In the past, states like Tamil Nadu have faltered there.
In 2003, the state had passed the Tamil Nadu Groundwater (Development and Management) Act. It was meant to protect the state's groundwater resources, to guard against over-exploitation and ensure planned development and management. But it was never implemented. And then, in 2013, the state passed an ordinance repealing it. Among other things, the ordinance said: “If the Act in the present form was implemented and groundwater was not allowed to be tapped, it would have led to a public outcry.”
Long-reads of the week
The six months that short-circuited the electric vehicle revolution (Mint)
Forest dwellers struggle amid depleting forest resources (Mongabay)
Pulled from the deep: Scientists found a ‘lost’ deep-sea mining site off the SC coast. What secrets does it hold? (Post and Courier)
‘Like the flip of a switch, it’s gone’: has the ecosystem of the UK’s largest lake collapsed? (Guardian)
I Saw the Future of Climate Technology—and Its Big-Oil Investors (The Nation)
Bedevilled Barak: DTE reconstructs what went wrong in Katigorah during 2022 Assam floods (Down To Earth)
This Species Is Slowly Becoming Nocturnal For a Very Disturbing Reason (Nature)
How farming fish in Europe undermines food security and livelihoods in West Africa (FEEDBACK EU)
The farmers’ demand for an MSP law is linked to an environmental crisis. Here’s how (Scroll)
What will Spain look like when it runs out of water? Barcelona is giving us a glimpse (Guardian)
The $245M bid to pull clean hydrogen straight from the earth (Canary Media)
Book of the week
Our book of the week is Fire Weather: A true story from a hotter world.
We know that heat waves will become more common as the earth warms up. We know too about wet bulb temperatures. What this newsletter didn’t know was that the build-up of carbon in the air is not just making the earth more flammable, it’s changing the nature of wildfires as well. In Fire Weather, John Vaillant tells the tale of the 2016 Fort McMurray, Canada, fire. Here is a review.