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In the shadow of a retired coal-fired power plant in India’s capital, Meena Devi tries to make her family home – four brick walls with a tin roof – a safe place to breathe.
Although the factory’s smokestacks have been inactive for years by court order, there is no shortage of hazards in its air, from vehicle exhaust to construction dust to ash from stubble burning in neighboring states.
Emissions from the dozen or so coal-fired power plants still operating in the New Delhi region feed the toxic smog that hangs over the city every winter, endangering people of all backgrounds. Sometimes Mrs. Devi is adding smoke with the wood fires she burns when her husband, a painter, is out of work and the family doesn’t have the cash to fill the gas bottle for cooking.
While the central government gives poor families a small subsidy for cooking gas as a cleaner alternative to firewood, the main energy subsidies go to consumers of gasoline and diesel, mostly to benefit the middle class, and to producers, transporters and processors of coal, as well as utilities that burn coal.
“My throat burns and the children can’t breathe when I light the chulha,” said Ms. Devi, using the Hindi term for a wood stove. “What can I do? We are not the only ones contributing to pollution.”
Ms. Devi is at the crossroads of a global challenge: how to empower the world’s poor while combating climate change.
In India as in many other countries, political and economic considerations have led to an energy strategy of simultaneously seeking clean energy and burning fossil fuels, an approach that ultimately puts security ahead of climate.
Despite pledges at climate conferences to lead the world’s transition to green energy, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government is in full expansion mode on the fossil fuel front. Priority is given to cheap, reliable electricity and gasoline prices.
India’s fossil fuel subsidies were nine times higher than clean energy subsidies in 2021, according to the International Institute for Sustainable Development.
The investment has baffled green energy advocates, but officials say India’s ambitious economic growth goals — reaching an annual gross domestic product of $5 trillion before the end of the decade, up from $3.2 trillion in 2021 — can only be met by a sharp increase in dirtier and cleaner . energy sources equally.
“Energy security is my first priority,” India’s Energy Minister RK Singh said at a recent forum, explaining the government’s commitment to burning more coal.
“I will not compromise on the availability of power for the development of this country,” he added.
India will soon have the largest population of any country, so its choices will be critical not only for the health of its citizens, but also for the prospect of limiting global warming to sustainable levels.
“India is critical to the future of global energy and climate policy,” said Amy Myers Jaffe, an energy and climate expert at New York University’s School of Professional Studies. “Their emissions trajectory will be material to whether global emissions can reach net zero by mid-century.”
India’s environmental record is mixed at best. That has reduced the cost of renewable energy to some of the world’s cheapest rates, which should mean less smoggy skies over New Delhi and other cities in India rated as having the worst air in the world.
Renewable energy in India grew to 163 gigawatts in August from a few megawatts in 2010, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a research group in Cleveland. Furthermore, renewable energy sources make up 40 percent of the country’s installed electricity generation capacity and aim to grow to 61 percent by 2030.
Yet coal is the foundation of India’s power system and the most persistent source of urban air pollution. The average coal-fired power plant in India is 14 years old, compared to the global average of 20. Coal-fired plants normally operate for 30 to 50 years.
India’s pledge to achieve carbon neutrality by 2070 leaves plenty of room to increase coal-fired generation even as cleaner energy sources gradually take a larger share of the energy mix. And a widespread lack of regulation could mean far higher emissions before coal power peaks.
In 2015, India’s coal-fired power plants were ordered to reduce emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides. Adoption of technology to capture these pollutants has been limited, and companies have been given repeated extensions to comply. Around Delhi, only two out of a dozen coal-fired power plants comply with the rules.
Still, Mr. Modi’s government has offered to fund a new coal-fired power station near the capital, part of an extensive pipeline of new coal infrastructure. It subsidizes India’s publicly traded coal to the tune of $2 billion a year.
“The way coal is priced, the subsidies lead to more air pollution from emissions from power plants,” said Sunil Dahiya, an analyst at the Center for Energy and Clean Air Research.
“The whole world knows that Delhi is a critically polluted region,” added Dahiya. “On the contrary, they are trying to add another plant,” he continued, referring to the Modi government. “It defies all logic.”
As with many countries, the war in Ukraine has made India wary of its dependence on foreign energy sources, especially oil. It imports about 85 percent of the five million barrels it consumes per day. The government has opened nearly a million square miles of territory, including pristine coastal areas and offshore waters, to natural gas and oil drilling, attracting the attention of Exxon Mobil, Total and Chevron.
Investment in fossil fuels challenges the increasingly compelling economics of renewable energy in India.
After more than a decade of public and private investment, solar energy is abundant in India and is as cheap as any other energy source. An aggressive biofuels policy that led to a 10 percent ethanol blend saves the government $5 billion a year on oil imports. India is taking foreign direct investment in green hydrogen, so called because it is produced from renewable energy sources.
India’s national oil company, ONGC, is adding renewable energy to its portfolio, and Coal India has proposed setting up solar parks in reclaimed mining areas. Reliance, the giant Indian refiner, is trying to sell assets to Saudi Aramco to raise capital to expand solar panel production and set up green hydrogen infrastructure. Reliance and Adani, India’s largest coal supplier, have net zero targets and have pledged tens of billions of dollars for green energy projects.
Since India is the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases, its adoption of cleaner fuels could help the world avert climate catastrophe. However, India’s projected energy needs include an astronomical increase in oil, gas and coal consumption. It suggests that India’s dangerous air quality problem – and the tens of thousands of premature deaths it claims each year – could get worse before it gets better.
“We went into transition, green, sustainability with a degree of passion that was almost religious fervor,” Hardeep Singh Puri, India’s petroleum and natural gas minister, said in an interview.
“But you have to survive the present to be able to make a realistic transition,” he said.
India has used deeply discounted supplies of crude oil from Moscow — which now supplies about a quarter of its daily needs — to protect India’s state-owned refiners from losses. Cheaper oil has also allowed New Delhi to protect its people from inflation by keeping pump prices low.
The government has cut excise duty on petrol and diesel twice in the past year, urging states controlled by Mr Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party to also cut taxes. The move likely helped the government avoid political unrest over high gas prices and gas shortages seen in neighboring Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal.
“More than inflation, we have protected our population from chaos,” Puri said. “If you didn’t have gas,” he added, “hell would have broken out.”
Half of the emissions in Delhi, which ranks as the world’s most polluted capital, come from vehicular traffic, but there is little incentive to drive less. About 60 million people in India refuel every day.
Yet many millions more in a country of nearly 1.4 billion people get bad air with little benefit.
In Subhash Camp, the Delhi slum where Ms. Devi lives, women gather in a narrow alley strung with electric wire and decorative marigold threads. They describe respiratory illnesses their children were born with or soon developed, requiring expensive hospital treatment.
They also explain how free cooking gas canisters and subsidized gas in recent years have helped them in a small way to control the environment for their children, as well as the consequences of not having money for gas.
“My kids say, ‘Please, mom, don’t turn on the chula — I can’t breathe,'” said Reshma, a construction worker and mother of three who goes by one name. “I think about pollution, but I have to make food.”
After pledging billions of dollars for oil and gas exploration and coal expansion, Modi’s government says it plans to move away from energy subsidies — but starting with cooking gas, the subsidy that most helps the poor.
Karan Deep Singh contributed reporting.
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