Electricity use needs transformation

The question we must ask as the environmental crisis — pollution in cities or land degradation and water pollution — reaches a dangerous peak is: “Can countries like India, cities like Delhi, ever clean up their air or water and live without its toxic nightmares, without re-inventing the method of environmental management? Can countries like India achieve sustainability, without affordable and inclusive growth? Is our current way, of first polluting and then cleaning up, viable? Can we neuter the politics of development — national and global — in our quest for sustainability?”

What will be the politics of change that will drive action?

First, the politics of inclusive growth — the fact is air pollution is a great societal leveller. Even if the rich in Delhi and other cities install air purifiers, they will have to breathe air sometimes. Also, the nature of pollutants is mutating so fast that the air purifiers in homes cannot keep pace with deadly poisons. So, it is everybody’s business — the airshed is common. If poor women continue to burn biomass in inefficient and highly polluting stoves, the emissions will spread to this common airshed. If farmers have no option but to burn crop residue, then the pollution will make its way to our airshed. There are no boundaries here. We need solutions that will work for all.

Second, the driver for change is the concern for health — this connection of pollution and environmental triggers builds societal change. For instance, today, in Delhi there is outrage about the pollution in the air. This is because the public health emergency in 2016 and 2007 — when pollution levels spiralled out of control —brought about a clear understanding of the link between toxins and our bodies.

Take the energy poverty; today one of the world’s most wicked problems is that large numbers of women cook using biomass fuel and are exposed to deadly toxins. It is now well established that this exposure is the primary cause of morbidity and mortality in vast parts of the world. There is a definite correlation between wealth, availability, and methods of cooking. The NSSO (National Sample Survey Organisation) data shows that only in the highest (9th and 10th) class of monthly per capita expenditure does the household make the transition to liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) in rural India. In urban India, in contrast, even households in the lower level of monthly per capita expenditure use LPG. This is what the government’s important programme for providing LPG to women is finding — it needs to break the barrier of poverty. Even a subsidised cylinder is too expensive for households to buy. It condemns women to shocking levels of pollution.

The question is: What is the local and global link of this energy poverty? What are its solutions?

We need to distinguish between the “survival” emission — of poor people with no alternative but to walk long distances to collect firewood, sweep the forest floor for leaves and twigs, and do backbreaking work to collect and dry cow-dung, all for some “oil” to cook their food — and the “luxury” emissions of those who drive to work and live in air-conditioned comfort.

This distinction is necessary, for policy and action. Otherwise, an important opportunity — provided to us by the poorest in the world — to reduce emissions in the future would be lost — lost, once again, to the ignorance of the international community regarding how the other half lives and the arrogance of powerful polluters. Let us be clear: The poorest of the world, who use polluting cookstoves because they cannot afford commercial fossil fuel, provide us the only real space today to avert climate change.

The energy trajectory is such that these families, when they move out of poverty, will also move out of cooking on this biomass stove. They will walk up the fossil fuel stairway to LPG. Every time they move away, as they must, one less family will be using renewable energy; one more family will begin polluting with long-life greenhouse gas emissions. The difference is black soot pollutes locally — it literally kills the women who cook — but has a relatively short life in the atmosphere. So, unlike carbon dioxide, it disappears in a few weeks.

The poorest, therefore, provide the world the perfect opportunity to leapfrog — they can move from using renewable energy, currently polluting, to using more renewable energy, but which is clean for them and the world. It is this objective that must drive our efforts, not a plan to pick on the poorest so we can continue to pollute. But this means putting money — serious money into energy transformation. Let’s be clear this will not come cheap or easy. This is where the real nub is.

This is why we need a different approach to cleaning up our air; it has to be based on a transformation of our use of electricity and this electricity must be generated using cleaner fuels — from gas to renewables. It is electricity that should fuel our vehicles, industries, homes, and cookstoves. It can be based on centralised and grid-based sources or decentralised sources. This has to be the way ahead. Nothing less will work.