The forest-shaded hills of the Appalachian Mountains near Charleston, WV, may seem an unlikely place for Indian activists to campaign against a destructive coal plant being built 8,000 miles away in Gujarat state in India.  But that is where Soumya Dutta of the People’s Science Forum and Debi Goenka of the Conservation Action Trust are headed this week, to meet with local communities engaged in similar struggles against coal corporations and to build a global coalition to fight back against dirty coal.

Last month Dutta led a team of retired Indian justices and high-level officials on a fact-finding mission to the site of a massive new 4,000 MW coal-fired power station along the shoreline of the Arabian Sea near Mundra, India. The team documented the glaring social and environmental violations being committed by the Tata Power Company which is building the plant. Dutta heard first-hand from local fishing villagers and salt-pan workers how the Mundra plant has contaminated their land and waters and threatened their livelihoods, even forcing some to abandon their ancestral homes.

While The Dirty Picture does not show any graphic nudity, the film had run into controversies even before its theatrical release for its bold portrayal of a struggling starlet making it big as a sex symbol. Last week, a lawyer from the central Indian town of Nagpur filed a court order seeking a ban on the film’s telecast since it “contained obscene shots.” But the High Court cleared SET to go ahead with the screening after the I&B Ministry and the Central Board of Film Certification stated that the film had been re-edited with over 50 cuts.

“Whatever is shown on TV – whether it is a film, a serial or a commercial – has to be as per the program code of the Cable Television Network Regulation Act. As per the code, films that have U/A rating can be shown on TV… Some films have adult themes and the treatment and public perception is such that even after making many cuts the film retains its mature theme,” CBFC CEO Pankaja Thakur told a newspaper defending the government’s directive to reschedule the film after 11 p.m.. But Thakur also added that the incident will force the CBFC “to look at the whole process of cutting an adult film to make it suitable to be watched by children.”

I should note that The Dirty Picture did get theatrical play, and its director, Milan Luthria, has pointed out that it’s ridiculous that an extremely edited version of the movie, which would have aired at night and with significant notices of its rating, can live in theaters but is barred from broadcast. It’s a reminder that what counts as brave and what counts as difficult discussions aren’t the same everywhere. We take for granted a lot of what we can depict and what we can discuss.

I hear the six scripts that made the cut this year are: Chris Mundy‘s Low Winter Sun, an adaptation of the New Zealand Gothic murder mystery series, Craig Silverstein‘s Turn, about George Washington’s spy ring, Richard LaGravenese‘s Philly Lawyer, about a law student, Jake Paltrow & Robbie Kinberg‘s Crystal Pines, about a journalist who gets cloned, Jason Cahill‘s F/V Mean Tide, about a Maine lobster fishing family, and Kerry Williamson‘s Sacred Games, an epic story of crime and punishment in modern Mumbai based on the novel by Vikram Chandra.

Concept-wise, I think Turn, Crystal Pines, F/V Mean Tide, and Sacred Games sound most promising. Turn would be both a new kind of period show and an answer to the dearth of Revolutionary War stories in pop culture, a weird omission I’ve noted before. And Washington’s spies were a fascinating group that included women and Quakers as well as your conventional breed of dudely badass, and they ran operations including my personal favorite, the effort to getting Hessian mercenaries to defect en masse by offering them land and getting them snugly with American women they then felt compelled to marry. Crystal Pines would be an awesome opportunity for a single actor to play two roles. The lobster wars portrayed in F/V Mean Tide are a real thing and would be a rich story engine in a novel setting. And I would love so much for a show set in India that isn’t Outsourced. Mad Men stands out because it’s a highly, highly original concept rather than a riff on an existing one. AMC needs to display that confidence again.

by George Black, excerpted from OnEarth Magazine

Squatting in a dusty field in the village of Rataul, two hours north of Delhi in the state of Uttar Pradesh, a young woman, like uncounted generations of women before her, is shaping a small mountain of cow dung into Frisbee-size cakes that will fire the family’s cookstove. Perhaps she will make a couple of phone calls before preparing dinner, using her new mobile. She’ll get a five-bar signal: barely a hundred yards away, across a patch of waste ground where some water buffalo are nosing around in the dirt, is a tall, slender cell phone tower. The photovoltaic panels that power it glitter in the late-morning sunlight. That strip of waste ground is a bridge between past and future, and hundreds of millions of Indians may now be poised to cross it.

Ask any Indian to name the quintessential symbol of the bad old days, the era of rigid state control of the economy and stultifying bureaucracy, and the answer will often be simple: getting a telephone. You could wait many years for a landline, the only way of speeding things up being whom you knew — and how many rupees you were prepared to slip them under the table. Ask for a symbol of the new India, the thing that most dramatically improves a person’s life prospects, and the answer will be equally straightforward: the cell phone. No further need for insider contacts or bribes; all that counts is the basic law of supply and demand.

India has 1.2 billion people and almost 900 million mobile subscribers, a figure that has more than doubled in the past three years. This growth spurt has gone hand in hand with the country’s economic boom. Which is cause and which is effect is hard to say, but Indian telecom executives like to cite a study by the consulting firm Deloitte, showing that a 10 percentage-point increase in “mobile penetration” corresponds to a 1.2 percent increase in the rate of growth of the gross domestic product.

There’s a hitch, however. The fruits of the boom have not been equitably shared; about a third of the population, most living in villages like Rataul, still have few paths to the economic mainstream because they lack reliable access to electricity. Energy is India’s biggest problem. True, there are utility poles here, and sagging wires, but the juice flows through them for only a few hours each day. Maybe this spurt of power will come in the morning, maybe in the middle of the night. Maybe they’ll tell you those hours in advance, and maybe they won’t. And that’s a huge headache for the cell phone providers as well as for the villagers.

India’s urban market is now saturated, with more phones than people, but only about 35 percent of the rural population have gone mobile. The remaining 65 percent are the next market frontier, but if the industry is to reach these people it needs to keep building towers. Today there are about 350,000 of these towers, where “base transceiver stations” convert electricity into radio waves. Ten percent of them are completely off the grid; 30 percent are in places like Rataul, which have power for less than 12 hours a day. To tap the rural market, the mobile companies plan to add at least 200,000 towers in the next three to five years, and almost all of them will be in areas without a reliable — or any — power supply. So where will the electricity come from? For now, the answer is diesel generators, which are both dirty and expensive. But in the future, the logic (strongly endorsed by the Indian government) lies with solar power and other renewables.

Before driving out to Rataul, I’d gone to see Rajiv Bawa, the energetic chief representative officer for the Telenor group in India, at his office in Gurgaon, the smog-choked boomtown on the outskirts of Delhi where many of the country’s telecom companies have their headquarters. Telenor, based in Norway, is one of the world’s largest mobile providers, although Uninor, a joint venture in which it holds a majority share, entered the crowded Indian cell phone market only two years ago. “We already have 35 million subscribers,” Bawa told me, “but that’s still quite small. In India, everything has to have at least seven zeros.” Uninor’s target audience, he said, is “the common man” — and even more than that, given the gender gap in mobile ownership here, the common woman. There will be no bells and whistles, no endorsements from Bollywood stars, no data plans or smart phone apps, just basic voice and text services. “We want to be the Southwest Airlines of the mobile industry,” he said.

Bawa, a native of Delhi, worked in the United States for 16 years, much of that time for IBM, before returning home. “In an emerging economy like India’s, environmental issues arise immediately; it’s the nature of the beast,” he said. The most urgent of these, he added, was the industry’s dependence on diesel. “As a Scandinavian company,” he went on, “we have particular standards about how we do business, in terms of the environment, emissions, and CO₂ targets.” Yet even without this corporate ethic, in a brutally competitive marketplace where profit margins are razor-thin, there are potent economic arguments for phasing out diesel.

The telecom sector is the second-largest consumer of diesel in India, Bawa told me; only the railways use more. “It’s an unbelievable amount on our balance sheets,” he said — energy accounts for up to a third of the industry’s operating costs. The price of diesel has almost tripled since 2000, although the true cost is still masked by government subsidies. But those won’t last forever. In the meantime, the price of photovoltaics, like the array of 21 panels on the Rataul tower, has come down by half in the past three years and continues to fall. The initial capital expense is higher, but after that solar is an almost free ride: the technology is proven, maintenance is minimal, there’s no fuel to truck in, and, best of all, for most of the year India bakes under a tropical sun.

Even here, of course, the sun doesn’t shine around the clock. As I strolled around the Rataul tower site with a bevy of Bawa’s technical experts, they explained that it’s actually a solar-diesel hybrid. But instead of running 16 hours a day or more, the generator kicks in for only a brief spell at night. Uninor is experimenting with a whole menu of other techniques and technologies to reduce energy use. The main draw on power is air-conditioning the enclosed shelters that house the generator and other equipment; the company’s alternative is “free cooling,” pulling in the naturally colder air from outside (cold being a relative term in India), while also using heat exchangers to draw up even colder air from belowground. Add fuel catalysts that make the diesel-combustion process more efficient and smart technologies that automatically shut off the power when there’s no phone traffic, and you can slash energy use by up to 30 percent, one of the engineers said. Radical cost-cutting, a smaller carbon footprint, and an entry point into the coveted rural market: where these three motives converge, the mobile revolution may also be the catalyst for a revolution in clean energy and social equity.

In the cow belt

Once the towers have leapfrogged over the power outages and people hold a phone in their hands — usually just an entry-level Nokia or Samsung, with airtime at about one cent a minute, the lowest rate in the world — the possibilities are limitless. To see a few of them, I spent a week in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.

U.P., as it is commonly known, is the heart of what is variously called the Cow Belt or the Hindi Belt — although almost one in five inhabitants is a Muslim and several of U.P.’s celebrated cities, like Agra, Allahabad, and the state capital, Lucknow, are former strongholds of the Mughal Empire, which swept through the Hindu lands from Central Asia in the 1500s and controlled most of the subcontinent for the next two centuries. More technically, U.P. is the heart of the Indo-Gangetic Plain, the vast, fertile floodplain of the Ganges, the Yamuna, and other rivers both great and sacred.

Much of the state is a monotonous, unbroken carpet of wheat fields and rice paddies. But the fertility is deceptive. With 200 million people — almost as many as Brazil, but compacted into 3 percent of the land area — Uttar Pradesh encompasses the full range of India’s problems. Other Indians call it backward — a word they use without apology or embarrassment. Most of the population struggles to get by on less than two dollars a day. Official corruption is off the charts. The gender gap is a yawning gulf. As a result, U.P. has become a laboratory for all manner of social experiments — government projects, NGO pilot studies, renewable energy schemes, and private-sector initiatives from the likes of Uninor. If you can fix a problem here, the thinking goes, you can fix it anywhere.

The gender gap in cell phone use is much larger in South Asia than in any other region of the world, and U.P.’s deep cultural conservatism is manifest in a sometimes ferocious backlash against women who want to go mobile. In November 2010, in the village of Lank, an hour or so north of Rataul, the local elected council, the panchayat, issued an edict banning the use of phones by unmarried girls; boys would be allowed to make calls, but only under adult supervision. The village elders feared flirtation, romance, violation of the strictures of home, family, and arranged marriage — offenses that can carry the gravest of sanctions. Honor killings are often thought of as a mark of conservative Islam, but they are common in Hindu villages too. In the month leading up to the episode in Lank, local police said, eight young people from the surrounding district had been killed after eloping. Three were girls beheaded by male relatives.

Uninor responded to these events by creating Mera Mobile, Mera Saathi (My Mobile, My Companion), a program that sent voice messages to rural subscribers on health, education, and personal safety. To avoid a hostile reaction from conservatives, the wording was carefully uncontentious: Rekha’s child is sick; she used her phone to get him medical attention. The phone is Rekha’s friend; is it yours?

Farther east, in the villages around Gorakhpur, a typically chaotic, ramshackle city of 700,000 close to the border of U.P. and the equally impoverished state of Bihar, Uninor has embarked on the pilot phase of Aditi Urja Vikas (roughly translatable as Boundless Energy and Development). Here the environmental dimension is more explicit, a slow, patient build-out in which one effort to bring the rural poor into the economic mainstream nourishes another. In this case, mobile phones meet solar lighting.

The Achilles’ heel of the cell phone is the need to keep it charged, not an easy thing if you live in a village like Arazibanshi Jaiswal. You can hook it up to the battery of your tractor (assuming you’re one of the handful of villagers prosperous enough to own one). You can hope that the need for a charge coincides with the odd hours when the grid is cooperating. Or you can catch an autorickshaw into Gorakhpur, 10 miles away, and pay a shopkeeper 10 or 15 rupees for the privilege — 20 or 30 cents, no small amount for an Uttar Pradeshi.

Now you can also visit Vidyawati Chaudhary. I found Chaudhary on the front porch of her home in Arazibanshi Jaiswal, a shy but good-natured 24-year-old, dressed in a black sari with silver horizontal stripes and Rajasthani-style mirrored embroidery. In a storeroom behind her, tucked in among barrels of cooking oil, pots and pans, and sacks of animal feed, was a shelf of bright yellow solar lanterns. In the living room, next to a collection of lurid portraits and statues of the Hindu deity Shiva and his wife, Parvati, and the elephant-headed god Ganesh, was a large battery that drew its power from a bank of photovoltaic panels on the roof. What was more natural than to use that same power to recharge both lanterns and cell phones? This simple logic led Uninor into a partnership with the Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), a think tank-cum-scientific research center in New Delhi that specializes in off-the-grid renewable energy technologies and is headed by Rajendra Pachauri, who happens also to be the chairman of the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Arazibanshi Jaiswal is one of 150 villages in U.P. and Bihar where TERI’s Lighting a Billion Lives program (see “India, Enlightened,” OnEarth, Summer 2009) and Uninor’s Aditi Urja Vikas project intend to collaborate. Everything will be run by local women. Chaudhary told me that her charging station and lantern business had been up and running for three months. Business was the key word here, both for her and for Uninor, and Chaudhary herself was the entrepreneur — a word that is a kind of magical incantation in India today. She had rented out 32 lanterns the previous evening, she said, at two rupees apiece. A good night. Phone charging costs five rupees, and for a tiny commission she’ll also add more minutes to a Uninor subscriber’s account electronically. If she gets someone to sign up for the company’s service and fills out their paperwork, that brings another small commission of eight rupees. It takes about two hours a day to run the business, seven days a week, and it brings in about 500 rupees a week — $10, enough for a few small luxuries.

Such as? I asked. Jewelry and clothes, she answered, but also schoolbooks. She was the first girl in her family to go to school, and now she was studying English literature at the local college in Gorakhpur. You had to know English to get ahead in India these days, she said. Her ambition was to join the U.P. police force.

I asked what kind of literature she liked best. She covered her eyes with a hand and giggled. “Love stories,” she said.

Then she straightened up, looking abashed. “It isn’t a lot of money,” she said, “but it seems to be changing the way people think. Our neighbors have two daughters. One of them was at school with me, but they took her out after grade eight. The younger girl is in sixth now, but they’ve decided to let her stay on. Because they’ve seen what I’m doing.”

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At first, leaving a city like Gorakhpur, you may take the brown haze that hangs over the land as the drifting residue of urban smog. But then you realize that it goes on and on, blanketing the rural hinterlands too. Flying over the Himalayas, which border Uttar Pradesh to the north, you can see it edging over the mountains like an approaching storm front.

Some years ago, Veerabhadran (V.) Ramanathan, a renowned Indian-born climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, dubbed this the Asian Brown Cloud. Over time, the name evolved to Atmospheric Brown Clouds, because the phenomenon is not limited to Asia. In either case, ABC. Peaking in the dry winter months from November to March, much of the haze over U.P. is created by smoke from the dung and firewood that people burn in their primitive mud cookstoves.

The main constituent is particulate matter like black carbon, with smaller amounts of carbon monoxide and the so-called precursor gases that react with solar radiation to create ozone. Black carbon is not a greenhouse gas as such — it’s made up of airborne particles of soot that absorb sunlight and heat the air — but as a “climate forcer,” its impact on atmospheric warming is much the same. As it spreads northward, the soot darkens the snow and ice of the Himalayas, warming them in the process. It’s responsible, in fact, for as much as half of the loss of the glaciers that feed the Ganges and the other great rivers of the plain. And there’s another perverse effect: by dimming sunlight, the brown haze lowers ground temperatures. So less warm air rises, which means fewer clouds and reduced rainfall, on which U.P.’s wheat and rice harvests depend. Ozone, a ground-level pollutant, adds to the misery, causing billions of dollars a year in crop losses.

Four years ago, having established himself as an authority on black carbon, Ramanathan approached Rajendra Pachauri at TERI to see if they might work together. Pachauri told him about the high-efficiency cookstoves that the organization was developing to cut black carbon emissions and introduced him to Ibrahim Hafeez Rehman, the director of TERI’s division of social transformation (see “The Brown Cloud,” OnEarth, Spring 2012). Ramanathan was obviously a world-class climate scientist, Rehman told me, “but what really appealed to me was his sincerity and genuineness about making a difference at the grassroots level.”

But what did all this have to do with mobile phones? To answer that question, I had to travel deeper into U.P., to a cluster of villages just off the road to Lucknow. In Gorakhpur, women were making modest, incremental change. Here, potentially, they were changing the world, one meal and one mobile at a time.

This is an excerpt from a feature in On Earth Magazine. You can finish the article here. George Black is the Executive Editor of OnEarth Magazine.

A new plan to tackle short-lived pollutants may help bridge the gap between current emission reduction pledges and what is actually needed by 2020 to keep global temperatures from rising more than 2° Celsius.

At the State Department this morning, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced a six-country initiative designed to reduce pollutants like methane, black carbon (soot), and hydroflurocarbons (HFCs) that help speed up global warming. These pollutants are often called “climate forcers” because they push temperatures up much more quickly than carbon dioxide.

Methane, a shorter-living greenhouse gas 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide over 100-year period — and 100 more potent over a 20-year period — has contributed to roughly 50% of tropospheric ozone helping warm the planet.  Soot from burning biomass and coal travels around the world and lands on ice caps and glaciers, increasing melting and preventing the reflection of sunlight. HFCs, a common refrigerant, are thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide.

These pollutants come from inefficiently burning biomass and coal, improperly handling waste water or municipal solid waste, and poor vehicle emissions standards, among many other sources. Along with having a major impact on climate, they are also a major cause of premature deaths and crop failures.

The countries working to reduce climate forcers include Bangladesh, Canada, Ghana, Mexico, Sweden and the U.S. American officials say they will commit $10 million to the initiative, which will be run by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP).

The initiative will follow guidelines set forward by UNEP in a report on climate forcers last November.

While the plan to reduce these pollutants is only a short-term fix, it could put the world on a path toward faster temperature reductions and provide a needed cushion as countries grapple with slow-moving international negotiations on reducing greenhouse gas emissions like carbon dioxide.

In January, Drew Shindell, a researcher with NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, found that a strong international effort to address these pollutants could slow the rise of global temperatures by a half degree celsius by 2050, prevent 4.7 million deaths per year, and improve global crop yields by 135 million metric tons per season.

“We’ve shown that implementing specific practical emissions reductions chosen to maximize climate benefits would also have important ‘win-win’ benefits for human health and agriculture,” said Shindell, when he released his findings.

This is not the first time that countries have attempted to reduce these pollutants. The U.S, Canada and Mexico agreed to reduce ozone-causing HFCs under the 2006 Montreal Protocol; however, those efforts were blocked by developing countries like China, Brazil and India.

Unlike long-lasting carbon dioxide, potent short-lived pollutants like HFCs are measured on a “real time” scale. Under an emissions reduction plan for HFCs based on historical output, developing countries would bear far more responsibility than they would under an equivalent system for carbon dioxide.

However, speaking at a meeting yesterday on the progress of international climate negotiations, Sweden’s Environmental Minister, Lena Ek, said she believed it was possible to bring China and India on board by pushing the myriad health and agricultural benefits from reducing short-lived pollutants.

“The chances of getting India and China on board are pretty good actually,” said Ek. “You are talking about saving millions of lives and improving agricultural yields by 20%. When we discussed this with India, they saw this as low hanging fruit to solve many problems at one time. They certainly seemed interested.”

Getting India and China on board to this recent agreement would be another major development in international climate negotiations. At the Durban climate talks last December, India and China finally came around in the final hour and agreed to begin new talks on an international framework with “legal force” after 2015.

But in the meantime, there’s a major gap in pledged emissions reductions that needs to be filled between 2015 and 2020. The United Nations Environment Program reports that, even if countries meet their 2020 voluntary targets agreed to in Copenhagen, the global community will still be 6 and 11 gigatons of carbon dioxide short of keeping temperature rise at 2° Celsius.

This renewed effort to reduce short-lived pollutants — emissions that contribute to more than 30% of global warming — may help partially bridge that gap.

Some environmental groups criticize the focus on short-lived pollutants, saying it provides a false sense of security and allows countries more time to build out carbon-intensive infrastructure. But if implemented alongside aggressive targets for reduce carbon dioxide emissions, this initiative could play a major part in preventing catastrophic warming.

“This is not a replacement at all for reducing carbon emissions,” said Andrew Light, a senior fellow and expert on international climate policy at the Center for American Progress. “But it delays peaking and pushes the gap a few years out. This is only effective as part of a broader carbon reduction strategy.”

Watch the video below learn more about how climate forcers work:

It was New York Times columnist Tom Friedman who made Bangalore famous. This city of seven million is the Silicon Valley of India, its technology parks and outsourcing services the driving force behind the country’s remarkable recent boom. For Friedman, Bangalore was the key to understanding the new global economy, and he came up with a snappy catchphrase to describe it, which in turn became the title of a best-selling book: The World is Flat. In this flat new world, India’s “knowledge economy” would rescue millions from rural poverty and usher them into a world of eight percent growth rates and abundant clean energy.

I came to Bangalore last month in search of this new energy economy, whose success or failure will be critical in determining the fate of the planet. But what I found was very different from what Friedman had in mind. In many ways it was more exciting; but it was also much more challenging. There’s no doubting India’s sincerity about shifting, over time, to a low-carbon future, but the vision of that future that I found in Bangalore will demand a radical change in the mindset of the government and of those who have done most to create Friedman’s Flat World.

Arriving here, as I did, from the teeming chaos of Uttar Pradesh, one of India’s most impoverished states, is an extreme form of culture shock. From the gleaming airport, my cab whisked me into the city along a divided highway (soon to be an expressway), flanked by tall concrete pillars (soon to be the metro to the airport). There was hardly a rickshaw or a sari in sight. Instead there were giant billboards advertising financial services, skiing vacations in Switzerland, and luxury prestige residences with golf course views. Were we really in India?

My illusions about the Flat World lasted about 12 hours — until the next morning, to be precise, when I sat down to talk to Ananth Aravamudan.

On the face of it, Aravamudan’s involvement in renewable energy is the embodiment of Friedman’s ideal. A native of the neighboring state of Tamil Nadu, he has lived in Bangalore for 20 years. His first job in the software business was with WIPRO, which provides information technology services for 150 Fortune 500 companies. In 1999 he left WIPRO to become one of the founders of MindTree, which has since become an important IT and outsourcing company in its own right. But in 2009, he told me, he decided he wanted to do “something more meaningful,” and joined SELCO, the Solar Electric Light Company, becoming the senior technical manager for its newly established research lab. Since its foundation in 1995, SELCO has illuminated some 140,000 households — about 700,000 people — almost all of them in the state of Karnataka, of which Bangalore is the capital. Those numbers make SELCO one of the world’s leading providers of solar photovoltaic panels.

I found that Aravamudan was deeply skeptical about both the Bangalore boom and its relevance to India’s most pressing energy needs. The boom is actually a bubble, he said, based on offering the world’s cheapest software development services to the world market — “but this won’t remain true for very long, as other newcomer nations will price their services more aggressively. Also, the growth of Bangalore and the IT sector has only benefited a small percentage of people, while alienating a whole lot of others.” It was true that most of SELCO’s technical experts were graduates of the Bangalore high-tech sector, but they were isolated outriders. “Almost no one here is looking at the problems right under their noses,” he said — the most urgent of these being to find ways of providing affordable, clean energy to the 400 million Indians who, without it, will never be able to enter the economic mainstream. The problem with a Flat World, you might say, is that a lot of people fall off the edge.

SELCO’s success has made its founder and managing director, Harish Hande, something of an international celebrity. Last year he was one of a dozen entrepreneurs chosen to meet with President Obama during his visit to India, as well as an invitee to the annual meeting of movers and shakers at the World Economic Forum in Davos. But Hande has used these elite platforms shrewdly to advance the vision of social equity that brought him into the renewable energy business in the first place. You might expect someone who has devoted his life to solar energy to praise the Indian government’s ambitious National Solar Mission, which aims to generate 22,000 megawatts of clean power in the next decade, the equivalent of more than 60 average-size coal-fired power plants. But the most Hande would say, in a World Economic Forum blog, was to damn the initiative with faint praise as “extremely well-intentioned.”

The main problem, he wrote, was that more than nine out of every ten solar megawatts would be used to feed the central power grid, which could never expand fast enough to meet the country’s rising hunger for energy. The government continued to believe that size is everything, whether that took the form of coal-fired power plants, nuclear reactors, massive hydropower schemes, or the huge thermal solar arrays that it now dreams of building in the scorching deserts of India’s northwestern states. There’s nothing wrong with these solar arrays per se, of course, especially if they lessen India’s reliance on fossil fuels. The problem, Hande said, was that the government was ignoring the wisdom that had been acquired over the past two decades about the potential for solar power in places the grid can never reach. “For those of us who have day in and day out worked hard to create sustainable businesses in the rural areas,” he wrote, “the solar mission feels like a hangman’s noose.”

The fact that SELCO is a business is important to keep in mind. “We use the word company very consciously,” Aravamudan told me. “We’re not an NGO.” The SELCO model is based on the belief that providing clean energy to those who most need it requires a sound and sustainable business model, even if the company’s major shareholders are foundations and private equity funds that are more interested in social impact than the magnitude of profits.

The entry-level package offered by SELCO consists of a single 25-watt solar panel and four lights — two LEDs and two CFL bulbs — for which it charges 7,500 rupees, about $150. That may not sound much, but in rural India it’s a small fortune. So SELCO set out to debunk a couple of tenacious myths: that the rural poor couldn’t afford renewable energy, and that a social enterprise couldn’t be commercially viable. The genius of its approach was not to lower prices (which would have meant a corresponding drop in quality), but to work out a financing model that would make high-quality technology affordable.

The biggest obstacle for potential buyers, who could usually offer no collateral, was scraping together the cash for the down payment on a bank loan (Indian banking regulations require “margin money” of 15 percent or more). The idea of a “solar loan” was unknown when SELCO started, but over time the company found creative ways of helping buyers with their initial payments, enlisting a persuasive network of supporters that included international organizations such as the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership, based in Vienna, as well as local farmers’ cooperatives, microfinance institutions, even local branches of the Rotary Club. The result: 90 percent of SELCO’s customers repay their loans on time, and the reluctance of local banks has largely evaporated.

Which is not to say that SELCO’s path has always been easy. The company didn’t turn a profit until 2001, and six years later the surging global demand for photovoltaics — spurred in large part by Germany’s introduction of lavish subsidies for solar power — almost put it out of business. Supply couldn’t keep up with demand, and prices rose by almost 50 percent, imperiling SELCO’s core commitment to affordability. The World Bank’s International Finance Corporation helped SELCO over the hump, but the company also decided that its future depended on more than selling off-the-shelf solar panels and lighting systems. It needed to diversify, to develop a range of new, affordable renewable technologies. So SELCO set up an R&D lab, financing it through a new not-for-profit rather than drawing the working capital from the company, which was operating on razor-thin profit margins. “That gave us the the freedom to explore projects that aren’t necessarily commercially viable yet,” Aravamudan said.

***

The lab is based 200 miles west of Bangalore, in the small town of Ujire, which is nestled in the Western Ghats, a range of misty, forested mountains dense with coconut and areca palms, coffee and rubber plantations, and scented groves of cardamom, cloves, and peppercorns. At intervals we passed through small towns with soaring, technicolor-painted temples, and crossed bridges over rushing streams. There was some potential for small-scale hydropower in this part of India, Aravamudan said, and for energy from the winds that blow off the Arabian Sea. But rivers are seasonal, and winds are fickle, and together they could barely make a dent in Karnataka’s perpetual energy crisis. Most of the power in the state comes from the giant Raichur coal-fired power plant, he told me, but India cannot dig or import coal quickly enough to keep the turbines spinning. Even booming Bangalore has to endure rolling blackouts.

The SELCO lab is run by Anand Narayan, a chemical engineer whose career path has been, to put it mildly, unorthodox: back and forth to the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he got his PhD, bracketing a spell at the elite Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and another as a disciple of the Japanese writer Masanobu Fukuoka, whose book One Straw Revolution promotes a Zen vision of “natural farming.” However, Narayan told me drily, “I found that my intellectual interest in farming wasn’t matched by my enthusiasm for the actual work.” So back he went back to Colorado, where he worked for seven years at a cell phone startup in Denver, before finally returning to Karnataka to take charge of the new lab.

The set-up in Ujire is as idiosyncratic as Narayan’s career path, and as smartly conceived as SELCO’s business model. The lab occupies a large, airy space in the SDM Institute of Technology — SDM standing for Shri Dharmasthala Manjunatheshwara, a renowned Hindu temple and pilgrimage site in the nearby town of Dharmasthala. Through donations from pilgrims, the Dharmasthala Trust has become a financial and political powerhouse in Karnataka, opening more than a dozen of these technology institutes around the state.

The lab had something of the mad inventor’s workshop, large concepts executed not only with PV panels and circuit boards but with hammer, nails, and screwdriver. Narayan’s desk was littered with half a dozen different models of solar lamps and lanterns. On the floor nearby was a selection of improved cookstoves, designed to burn firewood and cow dung more efficiently and with lower carbon emissions. SELCO had experimented with solar-powered electric fences, Narayan said, to keep animals from trampling crops and vegetable gardens, but they were too expensive for most people, costing 10,000 rupees — $200 — to fence in an acre of land. Scattered around the lab were solar dehydrators for preserving fruits and vegetables and machines to dehusk and grind grains. At one end of the room, an intern from the University of Strathclyde in Scotland was scratching his head over a miniature wind turbine, painted bright yellow, which sat on the floor like some oversize spider from the imagination of Dr. Seuss.

“Maybe we’re doing too much,” Narayan said with a grin. “But we’ll try all sorts of things to see what works.” Nine out of ten experiments would probably come to nothing, but the devices that made it through the testing process would use renewable energy in a way that was customized to local needs, and nothing would go to market until SELCO was satisfied that it was supported by a cast-iron business plan.

A few miles away in Dharmasthala, SELCO’s newly opened “energy center” was gearing up to greet the floods of pilgrims — 100,000 were expected — who would be arriving the next day for the Laksha Deepotswava, the Festival of Lights. Energy center sounds grandiose, but it was actually a modest affair: a converted 20-foot shipping container with a dozen PV panels on the roof and shelves of solar lanterns for rent beneath a smiling portrait of the temple administrator. Eighteen people had stopped by already today to charge their cell phones, and the solar-powered water purifier had dispensed more than 1,500 gallons of clean drinking water to thirsty pilgrims. The festival would bring a steady stream of customers and give SELCO a huge captive audience for its products and services. The plan now is to replicate the center at other pilgrimage sites around the country.

Again, it was hard not to be impressed by the company’s ingenuity. There are scores of clean energy initiatives in India, and while SELCO may be the best known, most share the same core philosophy: think from the ground up rather than from the grid down. Solar power may indeed be a key to India’s future, but not perhaps as the government imagines. The solutions may come from humbler places, like here among the pilgrims in Dharmasthala, where glittering solar arrays in the deserts of Rajasthan and the Flat World of Bangalore feel like visions from an alternate and more distant reality.

George Black is executive director of OnEarth, a print and online magazine published by the Natural Resources Defense Council. This is part one in a two-part series published at OnEarth.

Even for someone who believes firmly in interrogating the trivial, the actual details of the plot by a nuclear megalomaniac to bring about world peace through the shock of a nuclear attack are rather silly (for one thing, he doesn’t think blowing up much of the Kremlin might do it?). But there’s enough enjoyment to be gained from just going with it that it’s worth not bogging yourself down in the details. And it gets a larger point correct: in a post-Cold War, the risk may not be that superpowers will go to war on their own, but that non-state actors can cause a great deal of trouble by aggravating them. The more villains we get like Kurt Hendricks, the freelance scientist and nuclear terrorist in this movie, or Le Chiffre, the terrorist financier in Casino Royale, the closer our movies will be to understanding the new world order. It’s not a matter of who’s got the launch codes now: it’s who can goad that person into making poor use of them.

In that vein, I thought the movie was wise to pull in industry actors as well as state ones. Anil Kapoor’s Indian media mogul is on screen for all too little time — some day his mugging may be irritating, but we have not yet reached that moment. But as access to media, to energy, to food, to water, to resources of all kinds become more critical, and given the ongoing role of markets in guaranteeing or undermining the stability of regimes, economic actors should be the supervillains of today and tomorrow. The Bond movies, until Casino Royale, tended to go rather over the top, focusing on bushy eyebrows and arcane plots rather than the actual drama of business, but there’s a lot of room to do better.

And while we’re focusing on the individual, is there a more appealing action star than Simon Pegg working right now? That might seem an odd question to ask about an actor whose resume includes playing a hideously obnoxious journalist and a star turn in a movie called Run, Fatboy, Run, and who often appears in action movies as a geek pressganged into a situation above his pay grade. But he’s a marvelous audience surrogate, alive to the true wonder of any situation. As Scotty in J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek reboot, he declared of the Enterprise, “I like this ship! You know, it’s exciting!” By the end of Hot Fuzz, he’s got sunglasses, Point Break moves, and has finally nailed the bad jokes his office specializes in. And in Mission Impossible 4, he carries forth one of the franchise’s most noble traditions, asking at one point in the leadup to an action setpiece in a Dubai hotel, “Are you sure I shouldn’t wear a mask? Because I’m not exactly Omar Sharif. I’ll play it French.” It’s all well and good for Tom Cruise to slug it out to the point of insensibility with the Russians, but gosh, someone ought to enjoy these international jaunts, sharp suits, and snazzy toys.

And it’s nice that Jeremy Renner shares some of that self-aware humor without winking too broadly at the audience. “Next time,” he grumbles after a hairy jaunt into a satellite room, “I get to seduce the rich guy.” A new world needs new spies, willing to do new things.

In the absence of photography, painting played a critical role in documenting everything from gift-giving rituals to assessing military positioning. Surveyor Robert Mabon made jewel-like portraits of the presents that were part of diplomatic exchanges like the one to the right here and of techniques for saddling horses complete with painstakingly detailed notes. Warren Hastings, the British governor of Bengal, commissioned William Hodges to paint the fortresses controlled by Raja Chait Singh so he could assess the strength of the forces behind a rebellion — the results included both military useful information and an impressionistic sense of Indian landscapes. And art even became part of British and Indian diplomatic traditions. To both meet the requirements of their budgeteers and to avoid the perception that they were being corrupted by establishing the lavish, jeweled gifts that were traditionally exchanged in the Mughal court, British diplomats created a new tradition of exchanging portraits, creating a new Indian market for British painters.

And even when they weren’t creating art for the purpose of cultural exchange in Indian, British artists constantly wrote themselves into the images of India — and some of those portraits may have been more revealing than they were intended to be. In Thomas Danielle’s painting of Sir Charles Ware signing a treaty in 1770 with the Maratha Empire, British officers are seated on the floor of a palace in the style of their hosts, displaying attitudes that range from ease, to extreme dignity, to wondrous excitement at the circumstances. Painter James Wales wrote that Charles Warre Malet told him of his 40-day journey to see the Taj Mahal that “at first sight how well his journey was justified.” It makes sense that the British would want to see their efforts, even a more than a month-long site-seeing schlep, as worth the work, no matter how strenuous. Bathazar Solvyns, a Belgian who wrote a dubious anthropological survey of India, revealed as much about himself and his gaze as he did about his subjects when he wrote of dancing girls he observed that “their movements are confined, being either extremely rapid or solemnly slow, and their attitudes or gestures, which are sometimes graceful, are almost always indecent, there therefore disgusting; their general object is to excite desire, and where they succeed, there are not to be found much to envy.” In Arthur William Devis’ “Portrait of a Gentleman,” lawyer William Hickey both smokes a hookah and handles a letter of business — has he corrupted himself by going native? Or are the temptations of India no match for England’s energy in commerce?

And in Samuel Howitt’s 1807 “The Tiger at Bay,” British men load, aim, and fire at a tiger, while Indian men control the elephants that let the British get close to their quarry, an interesting if unintentional foreshadowing of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, made possible in part by tensions in the military forces made up of Indian soldiers and commanded by British officers. There was only so much that British self-portraits in India, especially those sponsored by British government and commercial organizations, could capture — and only so much that they could see into the future.

But analysts now see the Asia Pacific solar market as the Next Big Thing, driven largely by growing domestic demand in China. For the first time this year, China may surpass the U.S. market, according to analysis from NDP Solarbuzz. Historically, that country has been a supplier of solar technologies, not an installer. But that trend is shifting.

Most of the growth — particularly in the second half of 2011 — is being driven by China and India. These countries hold the most promise due to their sheer size. But they are also very immature markets, with major regulatory hurdles and a limited downstream installation network, explains SolarBuzz:

“As the European markets no longer present certain growth, the Asia Pacific markets are increasingly the focus of international companies looking to expand. Companies seeking to take a share of this growth still face significant hurdles to define strategies to successfully access the downstream value chain,” said NPD Solarbuzz analyst Christopher Sunsong. “These challenges, though, are unlikely to deter their determination to participate given the potential of this new regional market opportunity.”

This comes as Ernst and Young has issued its latest Country Attractiveness Indices report, which tracks the top countries for clean energy investors. China came in number one, with the U.S. coming in at number two. While many developed countries will continue to lead, Ernst and Young calls attention to the rapidly tipping scales:

Gil Forer, Ernst & Young’s Global Cleantech Leader, explains, “the mature renewable energy markets of Western Europe and the US have been hit by a perfect storm of reduced government incentives, restricted access to capital, and increased competition from abroad.

“At the same time we are seeing growing support for renewable energy in emerging markets. Such countries, with a strongly growing energy demand, are seizing this opportunity to leap-frog fossil fuel generation to secure a low carbon and resource efficient future in renewable energy, with 15 emerging markets being added to the CAI in the past two years.”

In the Asia Pacific region, the solar market is expected to grow around 130% this year, with China representing 45% of total demand.

The Indian activists are visiting West Virginia to observe and learn the tactics used by American environmental activists and unite around the cause of saving the environment, as Vaishali Patil, a member of the delegation told InterPress Service:

“There is tremendous unrest,” Patil said, referring to the impact of the projects on her community. [...]

“I am looking forward to seeing what the civil society advocacy strategies are here,” Patil told IPS. “I want to learn from them, to share our struggle for community rights, for the right to natural resources, to save the land and sea – we feel this struggle is for our survival.”

As India’s economic growth continues, its reliance on coal has boomed. According to the Sierra Club, India authorized 150 coal-burning power plants in 2010 and plans to increase that number by 600 percent over the next 20 years. Though Indians consume much less energy per person than Americans, they are beginning to feel similar effects from coal-related pollution felt in West Virginia, where mountaintop removal mining in particular has destroyed mountains, contaminated water supplies, and caused health problems, including birth defects and cancer, in an untold number of local residents.

American activists have pushed back even as Republicans and anti-environment Democrats continue their attempts to make environmental destruction easier for coal and energy companies. Protesters temporarily blocked a mountaintop removal project in West Virginia by staging a week-long tree-sit, while other movements and stricter EPA rules have led to the closures of coal-fired power plants in West Virginia, Kentucky, and other coal states. The Indian activists will get a first-hand look at West Virginia activists in action, as they will attend a Moving Planet Day rally there on Sept. 24, before further events take place in India.

Under a business-as-usual climate science deniers’ fantasy scenario, the EIA projects that global carbon dioxide emissions will rise some 40% from 2008 to 2035:

Such an emissions path would all but ensure multiple, simultaneous, ever worsening catastrophes for the nation and the world — widespread Dust-Bowlification; multi-feet sea level rise followed by SLR of 6 to 12+ inches a decade until the planet is ice free; massive species loss; the ocean turning into large, hot acidified dead zones; and ever-strengthening superstorms.

The EIA assumes virtually no new climate and clean energy policies in their “reference” case.  That’s why it is best called climate science deniers’ fantasy scenario.  America and the world just keep listening to the fossil fuel industry’s siren song of “do-nothing.”

Of course, EIA’s forecasting ability is notoriously poor, much as yours would be if you always assumed that the future would be like the past.  For instance, the EIA all but ignores the obvious evidence that oil production is peaking and projects, “the price reaches $108 per barrel in 2020 and $125 per barrel in 2035 in the IEO2011 Reference case.”  Does anybody in the energy industry believe that?

Because they forecast with eyes wide shut, EIA projects global energy demand will grow by 53% with most of that demand being met by fossil resources:

Most of the global increase in consumption will come from (surprise!) China and India. According to the EIA, in 2008, China and India represented about 21% of global demand. In 2035, both countries will represent 31% of global demand.

And while the renewable energy sectors in China and India are booming, EIA projects those countries will join the rich countries in taking no action to avert catastrophes that will probably harm them more than the rich countries:

World coal consumption increased by a total of 30 percent from 2003 and 2008, largely because of China’s fast-growing energy demand. In China alone, coal consumption increased by 71 percent over the 5-year period. Although the global recession had a negative impact on coal use in almost every other part of the world in 2009, coal consumption continued to increase in China. In the absence of policies or legislation that would limit the growth of coal use, China and, to a lesser extent, India and the other nations of non-OECD Asia consume coal in place of more expensive fuels in the outlook.

All that fossil fuel use causes the dramatic increase in carbon dioxide, mostly in emerging economies.  By 2027, China’s CO2 emissions are double ours!  The global recession that hit developed countries hardest appears to have done what no diplomat could do — keep emissions growth relatively low for the next decade. But the slow-down in Co2 emissions in OECD countries will be counteracted by the high-growth economies of Asia, which will represent 74% of new emissions.

World energy-related carbon dioxide emissions increase at an average annual rate of 1.3 percent from 2008 to 2035 in the IEO2011 reference case. OECD emissions increase by only 0.2 percent per year on average, but non-OECD emissions increase at 10 times that rate. OECD emissions fell in 2008 and in 2009—primarily because of the global recession and high oil prices in 2008. In the IEO2011 Reference case, OECD carbon dioxide emissions do not return to 2008 levels until after 2020.

While the EIA does make it seem like our grim future is due to non-OECD countries, they do at least include one graph that shows who is to blame for most cumulative emissions — the source of the overwhelming majority of warming now and in the near future:

The bottom line is that the EIA scenario is a poorly imagined, do-nothing case.  The study makes projections about energy consumption and emissions growth based upon assumptions about very limited policy action and very modest technology advance in clean energy.  So, theoretically, there’s still a chance to change this course.

The key word, however, is “theoretically.”  For now, the deniers can pop the champagne.

SOUTH KOREA: Deadly floods are striking the Korean peninsula with increasing fury, devastating not only South Korea but its impoverished and isolated neighbor, North Korea. South Korea’s government is making a massive investment in renewable energy.

CHINA: China is undergoing an almost unimaginable degree of economic transformation while epic floods and droughts brought on by global warming add to the pressures on the most populous nation on earth. China is home to both extreme pollution and is also becoming a world leader in renewable technology, with investments in clean R&D that far outstrip the United States. The government is racheting up restrictions on carbon pollution while trying to maintain rapid economic growth, an exciting and dangerous balance.

INDONESIA: Home to vast rain forests and underwater forests of coral that are being destroyed at a frightening rate, Indonesia is acutely vulnerable to sea level rise, with most of its population at or below sea level. Efforts to save its forests are key to keeping the rise in global carbon pollution in check.

INDIA: The vast subcontinent of India is fighting unprecedented droughts, floods, and heat waves. The Himalayan glaciers that water the nation are receding, even as sea level rise and unpredictable monsoons are engulfing lowlands. The government of India has set ambitious renewable energy targets and commitments to carbon pollution reductions as it struggles to ensure its poor do not starve.

PAKISTAN: For the third year in a row, Pakistan is facing devastating floods, though 2010 remains the most extreme. The fragile nuclear nation is struggling to rebuild from the extraordinary flooding of last year.

Watch it (6 am-11 am EDT):

In just half a year, the global auto fleet expanded by around 35 million vehicles. That’s the second-biggest increase ever.

The U.S. is still has the biggest population of cars and trucks – one for every 1.3 people in the country. But the American fleet is not growing much, only about 1% a year. The explosion in automobile deployments is coming from China, where registrations grew by 27.5%, bringing the country’s vehicle population to 78 million. That increase was more than half of the total global expansion, according to Ward’s.

The leap in registrations gave China the world’s second-largest vehicle population, pushing it ahead of Japan, with 73.9 million units, for the first time.

India’s vehicle population underwent the second-largest growth rate, up 8.9% to 20.8 million units, compared with 19.1 million in 2009.

Brazil experienced the second largest volume increase after China, with 2.5 million additional vehicle registrations in 2010.

China put 16.8 million vehicles on the road in 2010. Industry analysts were forecasting another 15% jump in sales in 2011, but the market slumped after the government stopped providing subsidies for car buyers in order to temper the market. Even so, China’s vehicle population could surpass America’s in just a few years.

According to the International Transport Forum, the global vehicle fleet could reach 2.5 billion by 2050. No doubt that those cars and trucks will be much more efficient than today’s vehicles, especially with China and America setting tighter fuel standards.  And many of them will be electric-drive vehicles.  But another doubling of the global market — even with an increase in efficiency — means massive increases in greenhouse gas emissions.

Auto industry executives everywhere are giddy with joy; meanwhile, those concerned about climate change wonder if we have the wisdom to take our foot off the fossil-fuel accelerator.

There’s a good chance you haven’t heard of the major transition taking place on the international climate negotiation scene – but it has major implications for the future of the world’s second-biggest country, India.

In a reshuffling of his cabinet earlier this month, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh named Jayanthi Natarajan (pictured right) as his new Environment Minister. Experts are scrutinizing Singh’s choice, wondering how it may chance the country’s approach to climate negotiations.

Natarajan will replace Jairam Ramesh, who is one of the most influential climate change negotiators the world has ever seen. Ramesh was a major player in both the Copenhagen and Cancun UNFCCC negotiations. In Cancun, he brokered a deal by bringing developed and developing nations together on green technology and emissions monitoring.

Ramesh was highly lauded for his work in international climate change negotiations. He showed a willingness to break with the obstructionist policies of the past, upending the division between developing and developed countries that has hindered progress on a binding global treaty to reduce emissions. Ramesh moved India forward on domestic climate change policy as well, committing his country to reaching 20% renewable energy by 2020, the same goal held by the European Union.

Ramesh was not afraid of controversy during his tenure as Environment Minister. He is known for challenging the growth-over-all paradigm in India by putting multi-billion dollar industrial projects on hold to ensure environmental protection. As a result, some speculate that Prime Minister Singh strategically promoted Ramesh out of his position, to the cabinet-level position of Minister of Rural Development, in a nod to industry amidst concerns of a sluggish economy and decreased foreign direct investment.

There is little hard evidence to make such speculations. There is equally little evidence to predict whether or not Jayanthi Natarajan will continue the policies of her predecessor. Natarajan’s resume, which includes Member of Parliament, leadership positions in several committees, and Spokeswoman for her party, does not indicate a particular expertise in environmental policy. Reports in the Indian media demonstrate the uncertainty as to what Natarajan will do with her new position.

One article cites Belinda Wright of the Wildlife Protection Society of India, who says of Natarajan: “I think she would give a fair representation to the country’s environment needs like her predecessor.”

Another story quotes an Indian political analyst, who claims that the cabinet change was a “positive sign for business leaders who thought [Ramesh] was becoming a major impediment to their projects.”

Only time will tell how Natarajan will balance India’s need to protect the environment, along with the people that depend on it, with industry’s desire for unregulated access to natural resources.

Natarajan has made two recent speeches (here and here) that indicate how her stance on climate policy may differ from that of Ramesh. Her rhetoric reveals that she may not take the same kind of conciliatory approach. She emphasizes the theory of “common but differentiated responsibilities” and blames developed countries for historic emissions rather than articulating a need for action by all. According to Natarajan:

“In other words, those who were responsible for creating the problem in the first place, those rich and developed countries that ruined the environment for all these years — will in all equity have to contribute more significantly than less developed countries who never really polluted the atmosphere, and whose growth and development have lagged behind… it would become incumbent upon known polluters, historical polluters and developed nations to agree to as much as 40 per cent cuts in their CO2 emissions. Even with those cuts, they would be emitting far more and using up far more energy per capita than a developing country like India.”

“There is something fundamentally unfair about countries that have used up all the natural resources and reserves on our planet, turning around and preaching to us about reducing our carbon footprint when with our billion-plus population, we are not even a blip on the radar of carbon emission. Western countries who preach the most have absolutely no intention of cutting their own carbon emission or to rethink about their wasteful economies…”

Jairam Ramesh has left a legacy in India. He brought environmental concerns into mainstream Indian politics by defending the environment in the face of intense pressure from industry. He stepped up as a leader in the effort to reach a global binding deal to combat climate change. He showed a willingness to find compromise and take initiative to reduce emissions domestically, despite the overwhelming prevalence of finger pointing in international climate negotiations.

Natarajan has big shoes to fill. Will she continue the legacy of Ramesh by leading internationally on climate change? Or will she abandon the policies of her predecessor and revert to a position of obstructionism in multilateral climate negotiations, as her rhetoric suggests? The answer to this question may determine if the international community will be able to commit to the kind of action necessary to avoid the catastrophic results of unabated greenhouse gas emissions.

— Tripp Brockway, international climate intern at American Progress

Midnight’s Children, which takes place in both India and Pakistan, definitely has a current-events hook for American audiences who want to understand the region better, though its perspective on the two countries’ troubled relationship, the State of Emergency, and pushes for state lines based on language, among many other issues, aren’t defined by American strategic interests. That may mean fewer people in the States end up seeing it, which would be too bad.

Midnight’s Children may not have the galaxy-spanning reach of something like Thor, or the immediate post-September 11 emotional gratification of the Spider-Man movies, but in its own way, it’s much more consequential. “If he and India were to be paired, I would need to tell the story of both twins,” Rushdie writes in his introduction to the book. “Then Saleem, ever a striver for meaning, suggested to me that the whole of modern Indian history happened as it did because of him; that history, the life of his nation-twin, was somehow all his fault.” There’s something a little sterile about watching Spider-Man brawl his way through New York, about watching a trainful of New Yorkers carry his battered body aloft as if he’s Christ, replicating the collective decency of the city in the wake of its worst catastrophe. We’re safe reliving both the damage sustained in the movie, feeling warmed by the depictions of compassion, because the wreckage isn’t real, and the neither is the need to care for a wounded hero. In Midnight’s Children, the outcomes are real and our fictional superheroes help us work our way up to confronting those realities. It’s as if The Dark Knight was an alternate history of the Bush administration’s surveillance programs, instead of just a metaphor for them.

India spends 2 percent of its GDP treating diarrhea, according to TERI, one of the country’s most prestigious scientific research institutes [...] Not one of the 35 largest cities in India has water service more than an hour or two a day–including the name-brand cities we’ve all heard of: Hyderabad, Mumbai, Bangalore, and Delhi.

I think doing what we can to assist India’s economic development and public health ought to be a substantially higher priority for American foreign policy.