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Delhi’s ‘City of Lakes’ project aims to revive 600 water bodies, and a new heat action plan and energy efficiency efforts further highlight counter-responses to climate change.
News of the Week
Last week came with heartening news. Delhi, usually in the news for pollution and urban dystopia, is silently reviving its water bodies.
“The local government’s ‘City of Lakes’ project seeks to develop about 600 water bodies that will act as natural reservoirs to store excess rainfall and recycled water,” Bloomberg reported last week.
The numbers are interesting. “The loss of freshwater ponds and lakes has left Delhi with a water deficit of 300 million gallons a day — almost a quarter of what the city needs,” wrote Bloomberg. “Delhi, however, produces 500 million gallons of recycled water daily, most of which is currently being wasted... This water will be pumped into the lakes and treated in reverse osmosis plants at some sites before being supplied to households.”
Such a project is sorely needed. At one time, Delhi had about 1,000 lakes. Today, just 600 remain. Much of the city now gets its water from intensive groundwater extraction. The city badly needs to capture rainwater runoff and recycle used water.
Progress has been challenging. Less than 50 lakes have been restored so far. Bloomberg alludes to budgetary constraints, bureaucracy and the pandemic. The success of such projects is crucial for India and could provide the roadmap so badly needed for more efficient management of the urban water budget.
The city made headway on one more climate-related front last week. It released its heat action plan. “Delhi will alter school timings, suspend non-essential water use, provide uninterrupted power supply to health facilities and survey vulnerable locations daily to mitigate the impact of extreme heat on susceptible populations in peak summers,” PTI’s Gaurav Saini wrote in a detailed report. “The Delhi Disaster Management Authority (DDMA), which prepared the plan and submitted it to the Centre last month, also plans a pilot project to paint roofs in identified areas with white colour to help keep the indoors cooler.”
One wonders how this will fare as well. India's environmental protection, over time, has evidently become increasingly toothless. Biodiversity impacts of changes in forest land use are considered to be addressed because of the submission of 'wildlife management plans'. Paper protections.
With heat action plans too, cities have produced glossy plans but continued hacking away at their trees as before. Ahmedabad, for instance, has a Heat Action Plan but is also building a future with green cover over just 3% of its area. See this 2017 report for more.
One more report from last week is worth flagging. At Mongabay, reporter Simrin Sirur dived into India’s efforts to boost the energy efficiency of household appliances – she picked up ceiling fans for a closer look. Here is the first part of her series. The report stands out. It’s a rare look at a deeply consequential (but unspectacular, and therefore under-reported) process through which climate change’s effects can be fought.
We will pause here for a moment. Much talk about climate change is tinged with doom. As these three reports show, a counter-response is underway as well. How fast it grows – and how consequential it is -- lies in our hands.
Can these become the dominant pattern? Or will Mumbai’s ineffectual – but expensive – handling of the Mithi river be the norm?
“It’s been 18 long years since the Mithi river was blamed for Mumbai’s worst flood,” wrote Question Of Cities. “Ten committee reports and thousands of crores later, the authorities have scrambled to deepen and desilt the river besides construct retaining walls on both the sides along its course. However, this patchwork approach to get the Mithi flowing again has yielded limited results.
What the Mithi needs is sustained and wide-ranging work flowing from a comprehensive vision to restore it ecologically. Mithi is critical to Mumbai’s flood management but its ecosystem – including its narrowing floodplain – deserves to be rebuilt anyway.”
Dam(n) Floods
News emerged that, this time around as well, hydel projects had played a role in western himalayan floods. “The flooding of low-lying areas in Punjab and Himachal has been attributed to the release of water from the Pong Dam in Kangra, besides Pandoh and Malana dams,” reported Tribune. “Sources said despite requests by the administration of some districts, the authorities at most of the dams had failed to ensure timely release of excess water.”
As many as 21 of the 23 hydel projects in Himachal, wrote the paper, hadn’t complied with dam safety norms. “What’s more alarming is that the violators include four government projects — Larji on the Beas in Mandi; Jateon on the Giri in Sirmaur; both operated by the HP State Electricity Board; and Sawra Kuddu on the Pabbar in Shimla; and Sainj on the Sainj (a Beas tributary) in Kullu; both under the HP Power Corporation.”
State chief secretary Prabodh Saxena has vowed action against violators. Two weeks ago, the state government had also sent a legal notice to NHAI seeking Rs 658 crore in damages to the Larji hydel project (and lost power generation revenues) due to the latter’s road building activities.
Coal Play
Given all the government orders telling thermal power projects to blend imported coal into their feed, domestic coal-based power plants are now using more imported coal than coal plants designed to use imported coal. “Domestic coal-based power plants... (accounted) for 63.1 percent of the total coal imports,” reported MoneyControl. “This is a steep increase from 2018-19, when these plants... consumed 34.6 percent of (the coal imported for the power sector). The government also said it has not formulated any plan to phase out old coal-based thermal power plants – and that there are no plans to provide viability gap funding for Pumped Hydro Storage Projects.
Shifting gears
Other developments last week. Ola has launched its cheapest scooters (Rs 79,000) till date in India. Can this kickstart rapid growth in India’s electric scooter market? Even as BYD struggles, Foxconn is forging ahead with its plans to make EVs in India. The race for its plant has now boiled down to a contest between Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Gujarat and Karnataka. With both these announcements, one wonders about the knock-on impacts for EV components manufacturing ecosystem in India. As CarbonCopy had written last month, this ecosystem is slowly taking shape in India.
How is India faring? Continuing with EVs, India’s union government announced a $7 billion plan to buy 10,000 electric buses. The number puzzled observers. $7 billion works out to Rs 58,000 crore, or Rs 5.8 crore per electric bus. Google the price of an electric bus, however, and you will find they cost anywhere between Rs 1 crore- Rs 2.2 crore per bus.
An accompanying statement in the same report, that India will invest $12 billion for 50,000 buses, seems closer to market prices.
In tandem, India wants to ban the export of four critical minerals -- lithium, beryllium, niobium and tantalum. In its report, Business Standard also says the government wants to conclude auctions for the 5.9 million tonnes (mt) of lithium reserves discovered in the Reasi district of Jammu & Kashmir by the end of this year.
In all this, the rest of the world isn’t standing still. Chinese battery giant CATL has launched a fast-charging lithium iron phosphate or LFP battery capable of running 400 km on a 10-minute charge. In the US too, the Inflation Reduction Act is kickstarting clean energy investments. “At least $224bn in cleantech and semiconductor manufacturing projects have been announced in the US since the passage of the IRA and the Chips Act. In total, they promise to create 100,000 jobs.”
These are the yardsticks against which PLI has to be compared.
In other news
Coal India is not the only hydrocarbon PSU mulling a makeover. So is ONGC. It wants to move into renewables, green hydrogen, green ammonia and other derivatives of green hydrogen.
The Adani Group – imagine a tired sigh here – made headlines as well. It made another acquisition – after Sanghi Cements – buying out a transmission project from Megha Engineering. It sold more shares to GQG Partners – which also picked up shares in JSW Energy. Adani also took a bunch of bond brokers on a Gujarat trip to instill confidence in the group. The firm flagged in Deloitte’s resignation letter – it quit as auditor of Adani Ports – might be PMC Projects.
Apart from these, a sense of Adani’s changing equation with Ambani came from Bloomberg columnist Andy Mukherjee. “The strongest evidence that two of Asia’s richest men are headed for at least a détente came from the most recent post-earnings conference call of Adani Enterprises Ltd., the group’s beachhead for getting into new areas,” he wrote. “The chief financial officer gave a breakdown of this year’s capital expenditure plan: $1.7 billion into roads; $1.1 billion for airports; $300 million for green hydrogen; $200 million for data centres; $200 million to complete a new copper smelter, and just under $100 million for water.”
Question of the Week
What is happening in China? WSJ has a big read saying China’s 40-Year Boom Is Over. What Comes Next?
Also see this. China’s property sector is on the brink of disaster – again.
Ecological Warning of the Week
From Fossils Buried in LA Tar Pit Show Why Saber-Toothed Cats Blinked Out of Existence (Scientific American), this bit is striking.
“The researchers were particularly struck by a 300-year-long period of high charcoal accumulation from wildfires in the lake that began about 13,200 years ago—right around when the megafauna went missing from the tar pits... Next the scientists used a computer model to figure out how fires, climate change, species loss and human arrival in the area fit together. And the result is a much more complicated picture of the extinction than that depicted by previous theories, which often blame the extinctions on just one culprit, such as human hunting or climate change. Instead, O’Keefe says, humans likely pushed the ecosystem over the brink by killing off herbivores, which allowed the vegetation that served as wildfire fuel to proliferate just as the climate was drying out anyway and left carnivores without prey.
“It’s not necessarily like massive wildfires drove an extinction of megafauna,” says Allison Karp, a Paleoecologist at Yale University, who was not involved in the new research. “It’s that human dynamics changed the fire regime; this interacted with a climate that is arid and at a higher temperature; and this, combined with decreases in herbivore densities, really pushed the system in a nonlinear way and shifted it to another state—a state that included a lot less herbivores and a very different vegetation community and a much higher fire regime than had been seen previously.”
Climate Long-reads of the Week
The race to make india’s first e-tractor (The Ken)
Why a Banyan Tree Damaged in the Maui Wildfire Was So Beloved(Scientific American)
India's no.2 tycoon may avoid stepping on rival's toes (The Mint) "Adani has given a signal to Ambani that he’s no longer keen on direct confrontation. This time last year, it looked like the two tycoons were set to compete in everything from petrochemicals and renewable energy to telecom, media, consumer staples and finance. That threat is receding."
Dead trees around the world are shocking scientists (Knowable)
Something strange is happening in the Pacific and we must find out why. (New Scientist)
China’s Abandoned, Obsolete Electric Cars Are Piling Up in Cities(Bloomberg). This is a beautifully produced story, as is this one on India’s gangetic plains.
Hockey Sticks and Crosses: Images that define the globalization debate(PhenomenalWorld).
Race to Control Electric-Vehicle Supply Chains Leads to Africa (WSJ).
The Ghost Crop of Goa (Orion)
Book of the Week
For a while now, watching extreme weather events across the world, we have been wondering about how planetary wind systems are changing. And so, Adam Sobel’s Storm Surge: Hurricane Sandy, our Changing Climate, and Extreme Weather of the Past and Future. This newsletter’s team is yet to read the book but, like Jeff Goodell’s book on heat, this very much looks like a book to be read instantly.
Here is a review.