Melting glaciers, changing rivers – Issue #83
Recent reports sound alarms for North India's water security. Scant snowfall in regions like Lahaul, Spiti, and Kashmir, coupled with changing monsoon patterns, paints a grim picture.
The Big Picture
Two reports last week raised large questions about North India’s water security.
The first is from Thirdpole. This winter, Lahaul, Spiti and Kashmir have seen scant snowfall. “By now, we should have had at least four to five feet of snow, but right now, we have nothing,” a vice-president of Save Lahaul Spiti Society told the news website.
This pattern has been building over previous years — see this report from last year — and so, needs to be taken seriously. The broad reasons are well-known enough. As the Western Disturbances range farther and farther south, rainfall distribution over north India is changing — downpours in states like Gujarat, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh and lowered precipitation over the hills.
The local implications barely need to be spelt out. To cope with intensifying water shortages before it gets hot enough for glaciers to melt, the people of Ladakh have begun building artificial glaciers using snow melt. Even that won’t work well this year.
What about wider implications? Not only does snowfall provide water for irrigation and drinking to locals — not to mention add volume to already receding glaciers — it also feeds the rivers of the great Indo-Gangetic plain.
The second report is based on a CEEW study. Most tehsils getting deficient rain are located in the Indo-Gangetic plain, northeast India and upper Himalayas. The study, titled Decoding India's Changing Monsoon Patterns, has to be read. With dropping snowmelt and rainfall, North India’s rivers will rely increasingly on glacier melt. One wonders about their resultant volume and how that will change month by month.
PS: The roof of the world is not, of course, the only place seeing atypical weather. The southern half of the hemisphere is reeling under a heatwave. Temperatures are soaring across Australia, inching towards 50 Celsius in some parts of the country.
India, HDI and Climate Change
A six-minute FT video, where Margaret Atwood talks about how democracy can avoid a slide into authoritarianism as the climate crisis unravels, is worth a watch. “Educate people about hazards; strengthen public institutions; and diminish the possibility for chaos by combatting (among other things) the effects of climate change and enabling a more widespread material prosperity.”
This is one reason why climate change reporting cannot focus merely on energy, climate change effects, adaptation and mitigation. It also has to focus on whether we are becoming a more just society, whether human development indicators are rising, and whether inequality is falling.
With that as a prologue, two reports further highlight India’s loss of social resilience in the face of climate change. The first is economic. One indicator of rural and middle-class India’s economic well-being is Hindustan Lever. Announcing its Q3 results, the company said its premium products sell better than its mass products. In other words, rural consumption continues to be low.
A clutch of other factoids from last year — like low tractor and commuter bike sales, rising numbers of people seeking NREGA work — highlight the same trend.
In its press conference, the company said it is hopeful about growth picking up, and listed better crop realisations and increased government spending as possible catalysts.
Crop realisations, however, are hard to predict. On a more fundamental level, however, rural India is regressing. Its children are more illiterate than before. An ASER study published last week found that “Forty-two per cent of children in the age group of 14 to 18 years in rural India cannot read easy sentences in English, while more than half of them struggle with simple division problems.”
Over the last five years, India has seen the Covid lockdowns, deepening spread of connectivity, and a clutch of new government education schemes (prime among them, the National Education Policy). What has remained unchanged, despite this flux, are learning outcomes. As the report says on page 12: “Levels of basic learning in Std V-VIII have not seen much improvement in the last decade.”
The AQI progress report
Turning to energy and climate, last week was something surprising.
After five years of the National Clean Air Programme, India’s report card is out. And it puzzles.
Of the 131 cities targeted for evaluation, five-year data (from CPCB) is available for just 49 cities. Going by this dataset, on PM 2.5, 27 out of 49 cities showed an improvement. On PM 10, 24 out of 46 cities showed an improvement.
There are questions here. What is happening in the other 82 cities? Also, almost all the cities with a 40% reduction in PM 2.5 levels hail from Uttar Pradesh. What explains this? Is this a byproduct of the state cracking down on polluting activities like leather?
Alternatively, how accurate is the data? Last November, remember, Uttar Pradesh was accused of manipulating its AQI numbers.
In the past, India’s cities have surprised us. One hadn’t expected Delhi to start reviving its lakes, but it is. And so, what is happening in UP on the clean air front?
Coal India looks to lithium
Coal India made headlines on two occasions. First came the news that it will begin investing in thermal power projects. In the first tranche, it will put Rs 5,607 crore into two TPPs, one in MP and the other in Odisha. “The move shows India has enough money to fund coal-based generation capacity despite major global lenders turning their back on fossil fuel projects,” commented the Economic Times.
Also, news came that the coal miner is considering a foray into domestic lithium mining. Both these developments show that Coal India’s plans to recast itself are progressively — if somewhat different from what had been outlined for the PSU two years ago. At that time, the company wanted to produce cheap pithead power and foray into manufacturing of energy intensive raw materials like polysilicon.
Continuing with lithium, India has picked up 5 lithium brine blocks in Argentina. Interestingly, India has acquired — via state-owned KABIL — exploration and development rights for these mines. This is different from how ONGC Videsh has operated, picking up minority stakes in global oilfields. This will be interesting to track.
India inks LNG deal with Qatar
The long trend of fossil fuel-rich countries trying to establish long-term supply contracts with India continues. CarbonCopy had written about this back in 2020. The latest of these deals now comes with Qatar for Natural Gas. “The contract offering destination-flexible cargoes and lower pricing would run until at least 2050, possibly longer,” reported the Economic Times.
Talking of Gas, interesting things are afoot and need to be understood. In the US, a clutch of policymakers are trying to get the country to rein in its LNG exports. In tandem, M&A activity has resumed in the US shale gas sector. Chesapeake Energy and Southwestern Energy want to combine forces, creating the world’s biggest natural gas producer. Why?
Pumping up energy storage
Elsewhere, India’s pumped storage push continues. The MoEFCC has approved eight projects with a collective capacity of 11.98 GW, with an investment of Rs 81,981 crore.
Some of these projects are very large. One in particular, Greenko’s project in UP’s Sonbhadra district, is a 3.66 GW project. One wonders about its economics.
On 100% renewable grids
In its series on India’s ill-considered push for nuclear power, CarbonCopy had spoken about intelligent grids that try to match power demand to supply. In that vein, read this report from WSJ: Octopus Energy Has Texas-Size Ambitions.
“Current power systems are like an old-fashioned taxi dispatch where people turn a small number of very large power stations on and off to meet customers’ relatively predictable demand, said Greg Jackson, founder and chief executive of Octopus.
In contrast, a renewable system has numerous, widely dispersed solar and wind farms, grid-scale storage, inter-regional connections and millions of electric vehicles (and their batteries). “You can’t manage that [renewable system] centrally with a bunch of guys doing dispatch…you need…a great big database matching supply and demand at a time and a place, via a price,” Jackson said.
Adani stays under the scanner
Adani, one of the biggest players in India's emergent energy economy, continues to attract scrutiny. Here is one more expose on the group's finances.
Long reads of the week
1. China’s Solar Dominance Faces New Rival: An Ultrathin Film (WSJ)
2. The Rare Earths Mine That Won’t Need a Single Shovel (WSJ)
3. The Multibillion-Dollar Clean Energy Bet Gone Wrong. WSJ (again) on why offshore wind is struggling.
4. Oil-rich Guyana tries to tap another source of cash: carbon credits (FT)
5. How Biden’s climate law spurred a tax credit revolution (FT)
6. Talking of climate change and justice, read these two reports. One, Millions of India’s Women Brick Kiln Workers Find Health Care Elusive. Two, Inside the hellfires of India’s brick industry.
7. Urgent Message from WCS as the Avian Influenza Virus Threatens Wildlife Across the Globe
8. And then, sigh, there is Neom aka the Line. On which this report, from which this line: "The magnitude of The Line may pose a novel threat to the eastern populations of the estimated 2.1 billion migratory birds of more than 100 species that migrate from Europe to Africa in autumn each year, for which this area forms a bottleneck with downstream ecological consequences.”
9. You Switched the Lights On. Traders Made Billions of Dollars: A new breed of traders is upending Europe's energy markets. (Bloomberg)
Book of the week
Bloomberg’s Akshat Rathi is out with a book — Climate Capitalism.
It looks at how markets are responding to climate change, seeing it as a moment of green creative destruction. Here is an interview with him.