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.

Tata Indica 1

Kentaro Toyama:

When you rent a car in India, the car comes with a driver, partly because their wages — as low as $2-3 a day — are negligible compared to the cost of the rental. I traveled a lot within India, so I met a lot of drivers.

I saw an episode of No Reservations once where Anthony Bourdain was eating some super-cheap street food and went off on some thing about how much better it was in India where you had these hand-prepared meals instead of Burger King. And for a western tourist, that does sound nice, just as it must be nice to rent a car that comes with a driver. But in both cases what you’re looking at is low living standards in action. Average productivity in the US is much higher than average productivity in India, so wages are much higher in the US. But American drivers are no more productive than Indian ones, so chauffeurs are unaffordable here and affordable prepared food needs to economize on labor with fast food techniques.

This is a reminder that if I ran American foreign policy, I’d be constantly asking “what can the United States do to help poor people in India?” That’s an area where the potential humanitarian gains are gigantic and where there’s strategic value in reenforcing cultural and political affinities with India. Somewhere at the nexus of interests and ideals is the fact that India vs China in economic performance is kind of a proving ground for liberal democracy.

I like to complain about undue regulatory restrictions on dense development in the United States, but as Lydia Polgreen explains in the New York Times the situation is much worse in India:

A recent report by the McKinsey Global Institute estimated that by 2030, 70 percent of India’s jobs would be created in cities, and about 590 million Indians would live in them. To provide enough housing and commercial space, it said, India must build the equivalent of the city of Chicago every year. [...]

Like those of many Indian cities, Delhi’s building codes and zoning laws were written for a much smaller city in a different time, with policies that actively discourage growth.

The number of floors in most neighborhoods is capped at five stories, and in many areas fewer. The government largely controls land, and government approval for new development is difficult to obtain, even to house the wealthy and middle class, never mind the poor.

Continued urbanization is India’s best hope for economic growth and lifting more of its people out of poverty. But to organize in an economically optimal way, a poor country of over a billion people needs to be able to put some tall apartment buildings together. And that’s to say nothing of the ecological issues at stake in deciding whether metropolitan India will be characterized by massive sprawl or efficient use of land.

Jon Chait had a good post this morning about how there’s no contradiction between Barack Obama praising the liberalization of the Indian economy and also being a liberal in the US political context. Indeed, one hint might be that the letter-string “l-i-b-e-r-a-l” occurs in both terms.

There’s a commonly held view that modern day American liberals aren’t “really” liberals and that the “real” heirs of the classical liberal tradition of Hume, Smith, and Mill are conservatives or libertarians. I think that’s honestly nonsense. There’s just nothing in the liberal tradition to suggest that there’s anything wrong with the welfare state, social insurance, redistributive taxation, or environmental regulation. There’s plenty in the liberal tradition to suggest that peace and social tolerance are important. And there’s no systematic difference between the left and right in America about things like taxi medallions or yacht broker licensing. All major political figures in the contemporary United States are pretty liberal in the scheme of things, but I’d say that mainstream liberals like Barack Obama are, indeed, the most liberal of the bunch.

The weird thing, as Chait says, is the fanatical extremism of the contemporary American right. If comprehensive economic planning is bad, then firms should have an unlimited right to engage in air pollution? Why would that be?

I’m glad to see Barack Obama announce support for giving India a Security Council seat. Reform of the UN Security Council is something of a doomed endeavor, but in my view that’s all the more reason for the United States to play the role of good guy rather than protector of the status quo. India and Japan should have permanent Security Council seats. Brazil too. We should work something out with Africa. The EU should have some kind of consolidate seat instead of separate ones for France and the UK. There shouldn’t be unilateral vetos of UNSC resolutions. The “Forging a World of Liberty Under Law” report from John Ikenberry and Anne-Marie Slaughter (currently at the State Department) had a lot of good ideas along these lines.

Will it happen? Not in the short-term, that’s for sure. But let China and France be the spoilers here.

Over the long run, either these structures will shift or else they’ll become decreasingly relevant. The former would be clearly preferable to the latter, but in either case it makes sense for the United States to try to get ahead of the curve.

I don’t share Joshua Foust’s semi-personal level of animus toward Zalmay Khalilzad but I think Foust’s critique of Khalilzad’s latest offering makes some extremely valuable general points. Khalilzad starts out with a banal point masquerading as insight derived from on-the-ground experience:

When I visited Kabul a few weeks ago, President Hamid Karzai told me that the United States has yet to offer a credible strategy for how to resolve a critical issue: Pakistan’s role in the war in Afghanistan.

But of course everyone knows this and the problem is that it’s hard! The rest of the piece doesn’t really offer any particularly compelling ideas.

Foust:

Most of Khalilzad’s ideas are not ideas at all, but rather an advocacy for the continuation of the status quo. That is not in and of itself a bad thing, but his ideas for “tweaking” the current state of affairs–more unilateral strikes on Pakistani territory, a general tone of “forcing” Pakistan to do something that is clearly against its interests, and so on–simply don’t make any sense. The last nine years of U.S.-Pakistani relations have been variations on that same theme: forcing Pakistan to do things it is not otherwise inclined to do. The result is a strained relationship and deep, perhaps permanent opposition to the U.S. in domestic Pakistani politics. We are worse off because of it.

It seems to me that oftentimes it’s useful to just go look at a map. Afghanistan is right there next to Pakistan. And it always will be. The United States of America is way over on a different continent. And it always will be. Then there’s India on the other side of Pakistan. So Pakistan is always going to care more about the details of what’s happening in Afghanistan than America does. And Pakistan is always going to care more about India than it does about the United States. We’re not impotent to shape Pakistan’s dealings with all this, but it’s foolish to think we can somehow play a dominant role in determining what the Pakistani government wants to do in the immediate vicinity of Pakistan.

What I think we need to think harder about is what do we care about. It seems kind of perverse to me to look at this whole region and decide to make Afghanistan the pivot around which all our priorities turn. It’s one thing to have a short-term region-wide (indeed, global) focus on Afghanistan for the purposes of a “get Osama” mission. But does anyone think that in 2060 America’s relationship with Afghanistan will be more important than our relationship with India? That Pakistan’s relationship with Afghanistan will be the centerpiece of the US-Pakistan bilateral relationship?