India must set example in climate crisis fight: Gates
NEW DELHI : Bill Gates, one of the richest men in the world, is focused on changing it. While the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation contributes significantly to funding medical breakthroughs, education, and poverty alleviation, Gates’s new book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, has an even larger purpose – to provide a plan to tackle climate change.
“Because India’s going to suffer from climate change, it’s very important to set an example. It’s great that Modi came to the Paris event (Mission Innovation 2015). I hope he’s going to come to this big meeting in November in Glasgow, the COP26 (2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference),” Gates said in a video interview.
He believes that though India might not be the first to reduce emissions, it can still push richer countries to meet their commitments. “When most people think about climate, they think about making electricity and about passenger cars mostly. They aren’t aware that there are many other sources of CO2 emissions. Electricity, transport, food, buildings and manufacturing are the biggest areas of emissions,” he said, stressing the need for “great innovators, great research, great policies” that will radically change all five of those areas in order to get to the ambitious goal of zero emissions that will stop the temperature from continuing to rise.
The Microsoft founder believes innovations are required, especially in areas like the development of better seeds that need less water. “There’s a huge lack of investment in that.
The latest Indian budget did increase the government’s R&D {research and development} capacities quite a bit and I see that in things like new seeds or health innovations or some climate related things,” he said, pointing out that climate change means that the south of India will suffer as the number of hot days increase.
“Humans don’t thrive in very hot environments. And so India is just going to have to build a lot of air conditioning, which is going to use a lot of electricity, which, if we’re not careful, creates more emissions,” he said. “For the world to be at zero, it means that by 2050, when India’s building new buildings, it’s using green cement and green steel. If the rich countries don’t innovate down this green premium very dramatically then India has a right to say, ‘Hey we’re going to keep providing shelter and electricity and the rich world has to subsidise this if you want it to be green, but if that price is too high then it just won’t happen.’”
How will the country battle the endemic corruption that has led to the loss of green cover, and in some areas to consequent annual flooding?
“One of the areas that India is leading is in digitizing a lot of activities. Over time, some of these government expenditures will be more visible. Now I do have some hope for that,” said Gates, who believes rich countries will ban the sale of gasoline-fuelled cars within the next 15 years.
“You know China’s pushing these things partly because they don’t like local pollution. It did a good job in cleaning up the air in its cities. Now, it’s India’s turn. India and Pakistan have some of the most polluted air of any cities in the world. If you would look at the ranking, there are a few African cities in there but there are a lot of Indian cities,” he said, highlighting polluting coal plants.
“It’s another reason you want to move cars to electric and you want to move power generation away from coal. Coal has a lot of health effects. Coal kills a lot of people. Not just in mining accidents. And yet, India has a lot of domestic coal,” he said, admitting that the necessary transition will be fraught as there are a “lot of jobs in coal”.
Still, Gates is certain India will pass more environmental regulations around local pollution.
“India starts at a very tough situation in terms of its rivers and the amount of so-called faecal sludge management. But the government’s put a lot of energy in that, a lot of budget into things like ‘OK, how long will it take to clean up the Ganges?’ That’s how the government slowly but surely generally does things better. Now in the case of climate change, if slowly means a hundred years, we’ve got a problem,” he said.