How to save the Earth? — Issue #15
The (Very) Big Picture
The previous instalment of this newsletter featured Neom.
The idea of Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman, this futuristic Saudi mega-city will be 170 kilometres long, extend 500 metres into the sky, but will be (just) 200 metres wide. With a surface area of just 34 square kilometres, say the Saudis, The Line (as it is called) will be home to 50 million people.
Apart from running on hydrogen and AI, the city will also have its own founding law.
One wonders what Mike Davis or JG Ballard would have made of this announcement. Even as The Line is being developed, the world is deep in trouble.
In 2019, when Bloomberg undertook a two-week journey down the legendary Zambezi, it found its basin in deep trouble. “Water on the upper reaches is near its lowest level in a half-century because of drought, resulting in crop failures, a collapse in fish stocks, and a sharp drop in power from dams that provide Zambia with 80% of its electricity.” In Mozambique, the newswire had added, “flooding from a pair of vicious cyclones has killed hundreds and caused billions of dollars in damage.”
More recently, as The Line was being unveiled, Alaska was afire. After an early snow-melt and a largely rain-free June, the province’s duff layer – “the band of decaying moss and grasses that blankets the floors of boreal forests and the tundra,” in Bloomberg’s words – had dried out. All it needed was a spark, be it from lightning or careless humans, to go up in flames.
These starkly dissimilar realities – climate chaos, counterbalanced by notions like Neom – draw disaster flick 2012 to mind. The world is about to end, and so world leaders build nine arks, each capable of carrying 100,000 people to safety. To fund the construction, tickets are sold to the rich for $1 billion per person. While billions perish, they survive.
In a blog post published last week, journalist Chris Hedges said the world’s ruling class had forfeited its legitimacy. “It must be replaced,” he writes. “This will require sustained mass civil disobedience... to drive the global rulers from power.”
His post, most rhetoric, needs to be read in conjunction with The Wire’s interview with activist Sudha Bhardwaj. Unjustly imprisoned for three years without trial, she used that time to read more. One of the books she read? Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything.
Says Bhardwaj: “I felt that the people I had been engaging with for the past decade and more – farmers and Adivasis in Korba, Surguja, Raipur, Rajnandgaon and Kanker, fighting their big and small battles under a loose anti-displacement umbrella front Chhattisgarh Bachao Andolan – needed to make ‘friends’ with those I had made while reading Klein’s book – ‘friends’ from Greece, Canada, Ogoniland, Ecuador, China, Turkey, Texas. To learn from their tactics, their resilience, and their alliances. And also because, despite all the differences, the common spirit and struggle of Indigenous people all over the world seemed so familiar and inspiring.”
What will save the world? A new energy architecture is necessary but not sufficient – that road might lead to affluent islands like Neom. As Bhardwaj says, we also need wider solidarities. Not to mention a values-based vision of the world we need to build.
News of the Week
Given that backdrop, how did India’s energy sector fare in the week gone by?
The country’s gas consumption dropped as, given soaring gas prices, refiners, power plants and petrochemical plants either switched to alternative fuels or just consumed less.
One reads such reports and feels grateful for the incompetencies of the State machinery. The Indian government had ambitious plans for Natural Gas – it wanted Gas to account for 15% of the country’s energy mix. Had those plans been fructified, India would have been in a similar mess as Pakistan.
The government seems unaware of the bullet it has dodged. Even as Gas prices soar – and private sector investments in the sector collapse -- it is still holding onto its target for Gas.
In other hydrocarbon news, the Chhattisgarh assembly wants coal mining to be halted in the Hasdeo Arand forests. Eight PSUs have returned 11 coal blocks to the government. “The delays were due to reasons beyond the control of allottees,” said Economic Times, like: “law and order issues; enhancement in the area of forest from what was declared earlier; the resistance of land-holders against land acquisition; geological surprises in terms of availability of coal resources.”
The government wants to auction these blocks. This has to be watched. Will the government help private bidders resolve these issues? If so, why didn’t it just help the PSUs?
From Coal to Oil. The Cabinet has approved an additional investment of $1.6 billion by Bharat Petro Resources into Brazil’s BM Seal-11 oilfield. India has also started buying Russian oil from international traders like Coral Energy, Everest Energy, Wellbred and Montfort. These traders, as Economic Times reported, are offering Russian Urals crude at discounts of about $8 a barrel.
Much of this reiterates what a UBS report said last week: “India’s primary energy demand is likely to nearly double by 2070, with renewables share rising to 72 per cent by 2070, from just 1 per cent in 2019, and 9 per cent of energy from bioenergy and 9 per cent from green hydrogen.” In the short- to medium term, however, the country’s “ dependence on fossil fuels will rise, peaking around 2040, further complicating the dynamics of the global energy transition.”
Turning to renewables, Lithium made headlines a few times last week. China has a chokehold on most EV components, as we know. And so, as India strives for atmanirbharta in battery storage, it is scouting for Lithium reserves. It might allow private miners to prospect for Lithium inside the country. State-owned Khanij Bidesh India Ltd (KABIL), a joint venture of three central public sector enterprises under the Ministry of Mines, has also signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding with three state-owned organisations of Argentina to share information on prospective mineral acreages of lithium. “Non-binding” and “purpose of information-sharing”, the MoU’s wording is underwhelming.
Even as we seek Lithium, the world might also face iridium shortages -- it’s needed for electrolysers.
Elsewhere in renewables, we have the Indian government’s decision to do away with e-reverse auctions for wind RE projects. The news had been welcomed at first – saying the format was resulting in artificially-lowered tariffs. This notion has now been challenged. According to energy consultancy Bridge to India, the industry view that the auction stage puts undue pressure on them is not credible. “Auctions actually allow bidders to go in with conservative bid levels in the first stage and then finesse their bids in the second stage. With the auction stage removed, the bidders will have only one shot at success, making desperate bids more likely.”
Climate Reads of the Week
“European countries agreed to sweeping cuts to natural-gas consumption, prompted by the threat of a Russian supply cutoff, opting for a controlled dose of economic pain now in the hope of avoiding a much deeper contraction later. The deal calls for countries to voluntarily reduce their gas use by 15% from August and marks a major intervention in European Union gas markets.”How this deal came about (WSJ).
Last week, Democrat senator Joe Manchin (pleasantly) shocked everyone with his last-minute energy deal (NYT). If that is paywalled, see this report on the deal. After the hot-takes, some of the nuances emerged. Like this one: The bill essentially locks the government into permitting new oil and gas leases for the next decade; any time the Interior Department wants to allow new wind and solar rights on federal lands, the bill mandates that the agency will have to hold oil and gas lease sales first.
And then, there is the ongoing energy shock. Things are likely to get worse for South Asia.
Polish thinker Zygmunt Bauman once made the powerful argument that a modern city could be regarded as an entity for producing waste. Read this report about the landfills in South Asia (Bloomberg).
Book of the Week
James Lovelock passed away last week.
And so, our first book recco this week is his magnificent Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth
– where he likens the earth to a self-regulating organism, saying it’s kept conducive for life by all the organisms living on it. Here is a Nature assessment of his work. And here is an obit (Guardian).
PS: Talking of oil traders, check out this book by Bloomberg reporters Javier Blas and Jack Farchy. The World For Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter The Earth’s Resources.