India rejects carbon reduction plans

According to the Financial Times : ” India on Sunday night rebuffed an appeal (…) to embrace a low-carbon future in which the two countries would work together to devise new ways of consuming and producing energy. “

This puzzles me as I am sure the world’s largest democracy could with the proper government incentives become the biggest player in the cleantech sector as it already did in IT for the past 20 years.

I am currently reading Nandan Nilekani’s book Imagining India and the least I can write is that this book finishes to convince me that India could soon well become a major economic power.

We have seen many countries are banking on green growth and cleantech to spur sustainable economic growth and low carbon energy.

Indeed, China recently increased its climate change mitigation efforts by multiplying the efforts on renewables and nuclear energy. My guess is that it is only the beginning.

The United States of America are also stepping up to the competition with large plans on high speed trains and low carbon energy sources.

But these two countries aren’t alone as we have seen on numerous occasions here : Spain is banking heavily on solar energy and high speed rail, South Korea is putting billions on the table for a green New Deal… I could go on, but the competition is due to be so fierce as it looks like an arms race.

Does India want to miss THE economic competition that will be at the center of this part of the century ? Does it want to rely heavily on oil which is due to cost soon $100 again ? I don’t think so. The opportunities are too big to be ignored.

I can’t imagine what the Indian ingenuity could do if it gave some attention to cleantech. Here is a quote from Nilekani’s book I would like to share with you to conclude this article :

“In just a few years, we built the IT and operational infrastructure that had taken US companies decades to put in place, and by the late 1990s we were competing in operational  excellence and scale not just with one another but also with  Western firms.”

page 100
Imagining India
Nandan Nilekani

Go on India ! Do the same with clean tech !

Note: many thanks to my readers from India. You are each month more and more and your country is already the fourth country of origin of my readers. If you have any comment, please don’t hesitate as I would gladly start discussing with you.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

Related posts:

1. India to build more nuclear plants
2. India goes deeper into climate change mitigation
3. India announces its first climate change mitigation plan
4. On July 31st, ten millions of trees were planted in India
5. Cleantech investments quadrupled since 2004

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