Will India and China Join Forces To Get Off Fossil Fuels? Ep226: Dr Arunabha Ghosh

Arunabha Ghosh  

This is the story that India is offering to the world, rapid and massive scale access to energy happening concurrently with a huge injection of clean energy. This twin transition is not something we've seen in other major economies, developed or developing, and that's the story India needs to tell more confidently to the rest of the world.

Bryony Worthington  

Hello, I’m Bryony Worthington and this is Cleaning Up. My guest this week is Dr Arunhaba Ghosh, founder and CEO of the Delhi-based think tank Council on Energy, Environment and Water, and a special envoy for the next climate talks hosted by Brazil. India, like China, is home to over a billion people, and is highly reliant on imported fossil fuels as well as domestic coal. But unlike China, it still has a very rural population and has not yet experienced the rapid rise in per capita energy consumption that accompanied China’s recent development boom. The future path India takes to development is therefore of critical importance. I wanted to ask Arunabha about India’s development of clean energy, its supply chains and what’s driving investment today.  I also wanted to get his view of the significance of the recent meeting between President Modi and President Xi of China in the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, where clean energy collaboration was part of a wider strengthening of relations between the two countries.  We also touched on his expectations for the climate talks in Brazil this year, multilateralism more generally as well adaptation and other measures that can increase resilience to the climate impacts already being experienced in India and around the world. I hope you enjoy the conversation. Please join me in welcoming Arunabha Ghosh to Cleaning Up. 

AG  

Hi, I'm Arunabha Ghosh. I'm the CEO of the Council on Energy, Environment and Water. It's an independent think tank headquartered in India. I'm also serving this year as a Special Envoy for COP30, the climate negotiations in Brazil. And I'm a father of a girl who's going to be nearly a teenager. So that's really the most exciting part of my life, and we ride horses together.

BW  

Oh, how lovely, that's amazing. I've got a teenage son. We don't ride horses together, sadly. Arunabha, you started the Council on Energy, Environment and Water 15 years ago, and I was just interested if you could explain to our audience who CEEW are, and also what was the inspiration for you for founding this think tank?

AG  

CEEW is an independent policy research institution headquartered in New Delhi in India. Our mission is to explain and change the use, reuse and misuse of resources, and in doing so, we apply an interdisciplinary approach. We create and collect a lot of data sets that we make available to the public, and we deploy strong strategic outreach. Now, why did we set up CEEW in August of 2010? It goes back to the Copenhagen climate conference just a few months prior to that. That was my first COP. I actually don't come from the world of climate, I did a PhD on international trade and international relations, and before that, I worked at the United Nations Development Program, looking at conflict and terrorism and extremism and its impact on development. So I really entered the world of climate in a different way, when I was an academic fellow at Oxford and Princeton, examining more complex issues, and climate was clearly more complex, and probably the most complex issue that humanity was facing. It was very evident even in the late 2000s, but the Copenhagen climate conference made it evidently clear that the manner in which we were approaching it was not going to suffice. It was also just a few months or perhaps a year after the global financial crisis had hit. So we had to think about how do we rebuild our economies, restructure our financial systems, invest in the technologies of the future and make sure all of that was consistent with a warming climate. I had been away from India for over a decade, and decided to come back, and we set up CEEW with that express purpose of trying to understand the problem from the ground up, but also analyze the world from the Global South. Not just offer an India perspective, but understand the entirety of the challenge. And in our 15 years, we've published over 500 peer reviewed studies. We've advised 11 ministries of the central government in India, 20 state governments. We've been very intimately involved in helping get the Paris Agreement. The International Solar Alliance was first conceived at CEEW. We did the first modeling on HFCs in India, helping to get us to the Kigali amendment to the Montreal Protocol. We also led the work on the net zero pathways, resulting in the Glasgow announcements, and subsequently, we've also been a strategic partner to India's G20 presidency, at which the announcement for tripling renewables was originally made. It was before the Dubai COP. So we see our role as leveraging our analysis and data to impact sustainable development at scale in an independent manner, offering the global south perspectives, but really trying to address this in a way that is consistent with planetary integrity.

BW  

Of those things you've mentioned, which would you think is your biggest achievement over those 15 years?

AG 

Well, the one I'm most proud of, and particularly for the effort that my colleagues put in, was actually not about international commitments or progress. It's what we did to support the increase in energy access for India. In 2015, in September, when the sustainable development goals were announced, India had the largest number of people without access to electricity. And it was the same month that we released the results of what was then the largest survey of its kind on energy access that we'd conducted anywhere in the world. We had millions of data points, not just at a state level or at a city or village level, but down to households, and not just knowing whether a household had electricity or not, or a wire or not. We knew how much, how many hours of supply. We knew at what voltage the currents were flowing. We knew whether the connections were legitimate or illegal. We knew the prices they were paying or not paying. It's that level of granular information that helped to inform two of India's leading programs, one on household electrification and the other on clean cooking energy. And within a matter of 18 months, between 2017 and 2019, India electrified 28 million additional households. That's 130 million people getting access to electricity for the first time, and upwards of about 400 million people getting access to clean cooking energy. It demonstrated to us to that our theory of change, of investing in data and offering incisive analysis that is actionable down to a household level, can truly impact sustainable development at scale.

BW  

Just how did you get hold of that data? Because it's a big country, many states, lots of… I mean, that sounds incredible. Where did the data come from?

AG  

We collected it, we designed a multi-dimensional framework, and applied an approach which took a household from tier zero — no access at all  — to tier 1, 2, 3, 4, where you had these different weightages for whether you had a wire, whether you had regular supply, whether it was at a sufficient voltage, so your appliances did not blow out, or your light, maybe just a single light bulb, didn't blow up. So we then designed this survey and trained enumerators across the country, who then went household by household, collecting that data, of course, with a sample that was representative. But then we upgraded our methodology and did it again in 2019, to show that the housing electrification rates had gone upwards of 98 99%, validating what the government was claiming, but through an independent source, and then post pandemic, released an even more detailed survey, which included urban houses as well. So it's like our elections, every single round of our surveys are larger than the previous one, probably larger than any undertaken anywhere in the world.

BW  

Now, just thinking that, as you were speaking that, this sounds very familiar. The manpower or women power in India is actually quite accessible, right? You can hire the people necessary to oversee these very, very large efforts. It's kind of what helps unite the country, right? But so thinking then about access to energy is improving, but what about the cleanliness of that electricity? Where are we? I know India set some pretty ambitious targets on renewables and on nuclear. How are things going?

AG  

Well, this is the other debate that I am both proud of and excited by. In 2010, when we set up CEEW, it was the same year when the national solar mission began in India. And at that time, a unit of solar power was upwards of 20 rupees. Compare that with a unit of thermal power, which was maybe about five rupees or so. So the question was, how do you get renewable energy capacity deployed? And secondly, how do you increase its share in the energy mix, at least in the electricity mix. And very early on, and at that time I should say that many within the country, including those very invested in combating climate change, were skeptical of the role that renewables could play. At that time, the national electricity policy was estimating that India would need maybe closer to 650 or 700 gigawatts of coal based capacity by 2030-2032. So this was a mammoth task, and what we took upon ourselves was to work with agencies to see, how do you design markets that bring down the prices of renewables, the design of the auctions. The earliest auctions used some of our numbers to set the benchmark tariffs, and then you had reverse auctions. Means each round of bidding went below the benchmark tariff. And India has been able to bring down the cost of solar to about two and a half rupees per kilowatt hour. If you include storage, it's maybe at three and a half or four rupees. Solar plus storage is now turning out to be cheaper than new coal. Now in this time, we've gone from less than 20 megawatts of solar in 2010, to over 100,000 megawatts already, and well over 240,000 megawatts of non-fossil electricity capacity. The ambition is to get to 500,000 megawatts. Now, earlier this year, for the first time, India's electricity capacity from non-fossil crossed 50%. So that was India's starting 2030 target. That has been achieved in 2025. But if you look at the generation share, we are still somewhere just above 20%. We’ve grabbed the low hanging fruit. It wasn't hanging very low, but we've still grabbed it. Now we have to get into the middle hanging fruit, which is making sure that the grid resilience, the grid planning, the storage options and the renewable story play out simultaneously and not sequentially, so that we can actually inject more and more clean energy and clean electricity into the grid. So we think that if India reaches its 500 gigawatt target by 2030 and there is moderate energy demand, then we will not need any additional coal capacity over and above what is currently in the pipeline. But if electricity demand were to grow much faster than the economy, the high growth scenario, say, driven by cooling demand or AI and data centers, etc, then we model the entire power sector, and our results indicate that we will perhaps need about 600 gigawatts of non fossil capacity to eliminate any new coal coal being injected. So the story is still unfolding, but at least for the last five or six years, clean energy capacity has significantly outpaced any deployment of fossil capacity. So this is the story that India is offering to the world: Rapid and massive scale access to energy happening concurrently with a huge injection of clean energy. This twin transition is not something we've seen in other major economies, developed or developing, and that's the story India needs to tell more confidently to the rest of the world.

BW  

But it's interesting that you put it like that, that sort of India telling a confident story, because there are some aspects of this transition that perhaps our audience may be not aware of, the experts will be. But for example, India opened up its grid market, its national transmission system, to private actors, and that massively sped up transmission and interconnection rate using very advanced HVDC cabling at times. So we associate those kinds of infrastructure projects with maybe with China more than we do India. Is there anything else in this transition that perhaps people are not appreciating or perhaps not aware of, that India's demonstrating?

AG 

All markets need the right institutional framework and market design. So you're absolutely right. And India's power market reforms began more than two decades ago, around 2003-2004 when our Electricity Act was amended. And first of all, it unbundled the electricity sector. So generation was separated from transmission, was separated from distribution, a challenge that we still see in many other large emerging economies, and that triggered private sector investment on the generation side. The renewable story is almost entirely private sector driven, whereas historically, the thermal power story was historically a much more state led effort. And then, as you say, private sector investment in the grid, and of course, in some places, private sector investment in the distribution sector as well. So all this is market reform. But one of the challenges that keeps coming up when we look at investment in power capacity or clean power capacity in emerging markets, is risk. Some of it is real and a lot of it is perceived. But how do you reduce real or perceived risk in investing in these markets where demand is growing but you're worried about currency and policy fluctuations and political turmoil and so forth. India designed its reverse auctions, as I said. It stayed away from the fiscally more expensive route of feed in tariffs. A lot of that was attempted in Europe, and then when countries ran out of money, renewable energy crawled to a halt. We avoided that landmine. But we also set up something called the Solar Energy Corporation of India. And I think that institutional design, institutional innovation, was extremely important, because it separated the power generator from the power buyer, the utility. So the utilities balance sheet, if it was not very good, would have given pause to the power generator whether they wanted to deploy that capacity. Bringing in an intermediary institution that signed a power purchase contract with one end and a separately a past sales contract with the other end meant that you could get more and more renewables deployed very quickly. It also therefore lowered the cost of finance. Secondly, in many cases, certain state governments offered a double guarantee. So the central government was bringing in the Solar Energy Corporation, states offered a double guarantee, which then further reduced the cost of finance. Now this is extremely important, because across the developing world, we see the cost of finance is the largest share of a renewable energy tariff, upwards of 70-80% in some places. Even in India, it was upwards of 65-70% a decade ago. We've been able to bring that down by bringing in these kinds of measures. A third thing that was needed was after the pandemic, or even during the pandemic, renewables was actually prioritized. So India introduced policy signals like round the clock power. It means your auctions were designed to encourage solar plus wind or solar plus storage, etc. But they also brought in what is called ‘must run’ status, which means that if you had a choice between renewables and coal or other sources, renewables would get priority. They must run. So these are all different kinds of signals, combined with market design, combined with institutional design, which creates the ecosystem of investing in clean energy. It's not going to come just by an international announcement. You've got to put in the building blocks at home to make it all happen.

BW  

And reducing that cost of capital, as you said, was absolutely critical. And how much of that investment, then, was domestically generated, from within India itself? Or was it able to attract international investment? I think people have a perception of India's markets being relatively closed. So I'm kind of interested whether this tech, this green energy transition, has been open? Or mostly domestically financed?

AG  

Well, India has been open for business when it comes to its clean energy sector right through. Of course, if you were an institutional investor or an international investor thinking about investing in the renewable energy sector, you'd perhaps be assessing those same risks. So what we have seen is that the bulk of the international investment has come in the form of investments in what are called solar parks. And this is the other sort of market design play that India innovated with. Often, land acquisition takes a long time, and that slows down. And time is money. And therefore an international investor not familiar with the domestic landscape does not want to get into the business, at least that was the assumption. So what India did, in many cases, was create these land banks, solar parks. So the state took it upon itself to procure the land in a contiguous manner and then offer a plug and play model. So you come, set up your solar plant, and then the evacuation of that power, the state would build out the transmission capacity. In some cases, the private developer would have to take it from the solar park to the main transmission line, and sometimes it was extended. This varied from state to state, but the bulk of the international investment has come in those kinds of more easy plug and play models. Last year overall, India invested about $50 billion domestic and international financing. But more and more assessments are suggesting that a bulk of the financing still has to come from the domestic sector, because there's a macroeconomic issue of if you have too much of an injection of foreign capital, the exchange rate gets appreciated, then it impacts your export competitiveness in other sectors. So it is a balance, but certainly India has been open for business, both in the electric side, but increasingly in clean transport, as well as in hard to abate sectors.

BW  

Can I switch the focus to the manufacturing and the supply chain? Because that's also a critical part of this. I'm guessing that India is racing now to catch up with manufacturing capacity for some of these components that go into the clean energy transition.

AG  

You know, this has been the perennial debate. Should countries make clean energy products at home, or should they prioritize deployment? I have believed, at least, when we needed to kick start the markets 15 years ago, that we had to tap into the lowest cost products that were available. And that's what India did, and we've benefited from that. That being said, there is a challenge. And the challenge is twofold. One is that this is no longer an environmental play anymore. It is very much part of energy security. India has 300 days of sunshine on average. If it needs to leverage the solar resource that it has, and in many places, the wind resources that it has, and if that is the shift of the energy mix itself, then it becomes about energy security. Put it in context, we've deployed over 240 gigawatts of renewables. For net zero, we will need about 7,000 gigawatts of renewables or non-fossil capacity right now. It's going to be very hard to sell the narrative to any policy maker anywhere in the world that you're going to have 7,000 gigawatts of non-fossil capacity, and nearly 6,800 gigawatts of that is going to come from somewhere else. That's the mental shift that policy makers within India, but also interlocutors outside India, need to understand. This is not about protectionism. This is about energy security and balance. And currently over 90% of its solar panels are being imported, often from a single country, China, or lithium ion batteries or wind turbines. It does give pause to whether there is over dependence happening. In fact, our renewable energy imports are even more concentrated than our crude oil imports, for instance. The second challenge is that where there is an ill-thought push of industrial policy in other countries, then you end up with over capacity. And when you end up with over capacity, you end up with explicit or hidden dumping of products, which further undermines the market development at home, but also creates worries about whether there is good quality stuff or not. Therefore, what's the way out of this? The way out of this is what, at CEEW, we believe is a component-wise green comparative advantage game, rather than a product-wise competition. What do we mean by this? You open up a solar panel, there are lots of components. You open up a wind turbine, there are lots of components. Which ones is India having a comparative advantage in, which ones does China have one? Which ones does Europe want? If we did that, then domestic industrial policy can be very much consistent with global, interdependent supply chains. This is not what is happening currently in green industrial policy anywhere in major economies. But we really have to rethink this approach, because this can give you some confidence that you're investing in your domestic capacity. Give you some confidence that there'll be diversification from an energy security perspective, and yet not close down the markets to other providers.

BW  

I mean, you mentioned there the concentration of reliance and the supply chain in solar compared to oil. But I guess one of the arguments you can play back in terms of energy security is that you buy a solar panel once, and it generates power. You buy the oil, you buy the barrel of oil, you've got to buy the same thing again the next day, right? It's ultimately not an investment in infrastructure, it's a commodity. So I guess to go back to the beginning of your statement, why at the beginning it's okay to import is because you're importing manufactured goods that are going to give you electrons, rather than a commodity that makes you dependent on keeping buying. And I wondered if, given that India, a bit like China, is very, very dependent on imported oil, I think nine out of 10 barrels of oil come from overseas. That must also then be pushing you into electrification of transport? And certainly I've seen some pretty astounding figures in terms of two and three wheeler vehicles increasing, and that's something you also work on.

AG  

Yes, absolutely. So let me answer that latter point. First, you're absolutely right. India's energy system is primarily dependent on molecules rather than electrons. So for net zero, we have to electrify the economy and then also make sure that every new electron is cleaner than the last one. And that means you go beyond the power sector. It means you go to industry. Especially 40% of our industrial base is small to medium enterprises, so they can be electrified. And then even large plants’ heavy industrial processes can also be electrified. And then you have a residual 20% that you deal with in other ways. And it also applies to transport. So India, for instance, last financial year, sold 1.9 million electric vehicles. Not a single one of them was a Tesla. Now, 94% of those were two wheelers and three wheelers. A majority of the remainder were buses. So India's approach towards electrified and sustainable transport is actually about transport for the vast majority of our population, 60% of urban Indians, even today, their primary source of transport are their two legs. And this is from an urban transport survey that we did at CEEW. So we are trying to build a transport system that is equitable and clean and in order. To do that, there has to be additional electrification that drives it. So that is the approach that we need to take, sector by sector. But then that raises the question: is it secure energy as long as we get the panel? The point is this, as I said: this is no longer about just a margin play — 2% to 3%. When you're upwards of 20-30% of generation, 40% of generation, that's what we are targeting, even if there's no target. But if you keep injecting this amount of renewables, you end up in those kinds of numbers, then there is no scope for lower efficiency panels that are claiming to be a certain quality, but they're not delivering. This is what I meant by the dumping problem, right? Because there is this kind of massive over capacity, and it's very hard to judge what is good, what is not, et cetera. Equally, when you're building out energy infrastructure in a high growth economy, unlike economies where energy demand is flat, you do not have the luxury of time at all. So for every delay, even if it's for a few months of panels not being delivered, of rare earths not being delivered, of turbines not being delivered, of copper not being delivered, of wires and transmission lines not being delivered. Basically, the flip is, the power system operators would say, ‘Okay, let's just continue building fossil fuel.’ Because you've got to make sure that there is no downtime for industry or for households when you're running a power sector that's the fourth largest or third largest in the world. So this is why I've heard this argument before, but for a growing energy economy like India's, I don't think that works. It works if you've got a flat line demand curve, and then you have the luxury of switching it whenever the panels show up. But at the same time, as I was saying, it's not about making all panels at home. Interdependent value chains actually give everyone a stake in each other's energy security. And what I've argued elsewhere is that 50 years or more since the first oil crisis, we have an energy security architecture for the fuels of the past, but none for the fuels of the future.

Michael Liebreich  

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BW  

You didn't mention batteries. And I'm just wondering, Is that another race that India is about to take on to try to diversify? Because wherever you go in the world, really, if you're looking at mass scale cheap batteries, you are looking at China as the source. But as India is diversifying in its solar mission, is it going to do the same with batteries?

AG  

Yes. I mean, India has already been looking at alternative battery chemistries, whether it's sodium ion, whether it's… not cherry picking a technology. So for instance, in a lot of the tenders, often the bids are coming not in terms of solar plus battery, but solar plus pumped hydro storage, where that might be the more feasible option, depending on the geography. So there is certainly going to be a continued push for battery giga factories also to be built in India. But it's not necessarily going to be always the same battery chemistry. I would argue that again, it goes back to the earlier point we were discussing about market design. As long as our price signals are right, as long as the markets are competitive, the actual technology stacks will evolve with time. And it would be dangerous to just pick one or two winners and go that way. Because again, then you will end up with over-capacity. The other point is recycling. Actually, India has to aim to be a hub of minerals recycling and battery recycling and appropriate disposal of end of life batteries. And our critical minerals mission, which was approved by the cabinet earlier this year, has a big component on the circular economy of minerals.

BW  

That's the other great thing about this electro-tech revolution, really. Whereas fossil fuels, you burn them once you've got to do it, you've got to find another ton to replace it, many of these components once you've got these metals and rare earths out of the ground that have very high recycling rates, this lends itself to a circular economy. And because of all of these inherent advantages, would you say that this is being done probably for energy security reasons, growth reasons, speed reasons? As you said, if solar plus batteries is faster than building anything else and you've got a growing demand, you're going to do it. I'm guessing that climate and it benefits climate and clean air, maybe those are the secondary reasons for doing this in an Indian context.

AG  

Well, the drivers have varied over time. In 2008, India published the national action plan on climate change, one of the missions in which was the solar mission, which began in 2010 at that time. It was done more with a focus on climate and emissions mitigation, even as the assumption was coal would be the dominant mix. So at that time, the driver was environmental. But very quickly, as I said, our own domestic market design and institutional design, as well as falling technology costs elsewhere, made it the most obvious option. Now I would say it's a bit of a staggered curve. In terms of, we managed to bring down the time it takes to put in a large scale solar plant from about 18 months to less than a year, about eight, nine months. Extending the grid to those regions takes a little longer. So you kind of have a little bit of a staggered story, which is why the central electricity authority, the planner, is looking at much larger deployment of renewables and trying to plan for a grid that meets that. Increasingly, it is about energy security. You mentioned crude oil imports earlier. There's a big push towards biofuels. India has met its 20% ethanol blending target right now, just a few weeks ago, again, five years before it intended to meet that target. So now it's increasing that target as well. So reducing import costs that are spent on hydrocarbons is very much an energy security and a macroeconomic consideration, but it is also very much also linked with state industrial policies there are. The advantage of a large economy like India is that you can have Rajasthan in the west producing solar, and Tamil Nadu in the south east producing wind, and someone else in the middle saying, we'll be a battery hub and somewhere else, saying we want to build green hydrogen valleys. So this kind of competitive federalism in a different way, in the pursuit of a green economy, also opens up a lot more opportunities and localized drivers, which changes the local political economy for what a green transition could look like.

BW  

Let's move then to talking about your role in international affairs, and the recent Special Envoy role that you've been given by the Brazilian government ahead of Belem COP later this year. What can we expect? What are you expecting to be actually achieved in Belem when we gather later this year?

AG  

My expectations are in line with what the Brazilian COP30 presidency has outlined as its core priorities. One, a reinforcement of the multilateral process, but thinking about multilateralism beyond just the state, the role of corporations, of cities, of citizens, the global community. I think we do need to resuscitate and rejuvenate our faith in global cooperation. I worry that we have made our COP processes a little bit of, despite all the angst and the jousting in the negotiation chambers, it's become a bit of a mutual admiration society. Because you admire anyone who announces a bigger goal, but you never really shine a spotlight on whether they achieve those goals or not. And you could maybe trust somebody when they make a promise to you, but you will trust them more when they deliver on that promise. And that promise could be emissions mitigation, or it could be finance. It could be technology co-development, it could be investment in resilience. But if you don't deliver promises, you degrade and devalue the currency. I've written about this before. I think the UNFCCC should start imagining itself as a bank of actions, rather than a bank of commitments. So I think that is why the implementation focus is so critical, and that the stories and the lessons don't only emerge from the global north, they emerge a lot from the global south. But it's not about a north versus south story. I have consistently argued for years that we have to find mechanisms to build bridges. I think that the last thing I would argue is that on the issue of finance, there will be a lot of angst, and yet we need to think about where do we deploy climate finance versus how do we attract climate investment? And these are two different things. And I think regardless of whether you give $300 billion or $1.3 trillion we know that the actual requirements are much larger and at the same time, overall, you're not talking more than 2 or 3% of global GDP, or more than 1% of global assets under management. So how do we make sure that whatever is the roadmap on climate finance is actually designed in a way that much larger volumes of climate investment flows to emerging markets and developing economies. That would be sort of the benchmark against which I would judge whatever we take in the kind of post rule book phase, the implementation phase, of the Paris agreement.

BW  

I have been an observer of COPs over the years. And I have lots of thoughts about the process itself. But at a kind of macro level, I wonder if there's anything really actually being negotiated anymore. And the reason I say that is because post-Paris, it has become quite a place of commitments, not regulation. The legal negotiations are now pretty moribund, and what we have is a sort of side show of commitments and pledges and targets which are much more specific than the total emissions targets that are now voluntary. And they tend to be sectoral or specific to countries, but that isn't a negotiation. That's just people turning up and using the platform to announce. And I wonder, is there a need for negotiations anymore? Sorry, it's a long question, but I'm also slightly concerned that environment ministers talking about finance isn't necessarily the best place for it. And I always think that when we got into finance, precisely as you say: often, what you really want is investment, and that's not the same as aid or putting money into a big pooled pot, which is, by its nature, going to be limited. The actual financial flows in the world are going to be far greater, because it's about normal commercial investments and replacement of assets, or growth in demand being met by new investments. And environment ministers are not the people who are having those conversations. So I'm a bit of a skeptic, I think, at the moment, as to how valuable the COPs really are beyond signaling and communications, which I can see a role for.

AG  

I think it's a little bit more than signaling and communication. And I wouldn't say that's an either or, but I do agree with you that a lot of the work will have to happen outside of the COP process. And I've written about this very recently. I mean, the world we are in in 2025 is very different from the world we were in 2015 when the Paris Agreement was signed. It's different. Meteorologically is different. Geopolitically it’s different, economically, and it’s different socially. And yet atmospheric physics is not stopping its own dynamics. So what do we do? Number one, we have to have our own internal transformations in our own markets. This is what I was trying to describe with things that India has done. And a lot more continues to be done and needs to be done, whether it's in setting domestic targets, whether it's legislation, whether it's in market design, whether it's in what the securities board demands of companies and so forth. That is the fundamental building block to attract investment, to demonstrate that not only do developing countries and emerging markets need the power and the energy capacity, but that they're also creating the markets that would give investors confidence. But there are other things to be done. And I call it strategic bilateralism, and this is what I mean by building bridges. While at a COP, countries, depending on which annex they fall in, might be seated at different ends of the table. We can still collaborate on developing the technologies, or even the financial engineering and the market design, with other countries that might be more advanced or might be less advanced. We have to become laboratories for that kind of development. And those could be sectoral plays. It could be on steel, it could be on cement, it could be in sustainable aviation fuels and so forth. And then we need plurilateral platforms where a group of countries are able to come together and demonstrate action. I think all of this then needs to feed back. But the negotiations… look, any international regime doesn't only negotiate, it implements. It monitors and enforces, depending on how a regime is designed. We do need to shine a spotlight on who is delivering on their promises and who is not. How will that be enforced? That's a different question. But at least shining the spotlight is not just advocacy. I think it's a necessary, moral and instrumental imperative.

BW  

So a couple of things occurred to me there. One, when you spoke about the bilateral agreements, I couldn't agree more. And a lot of those are going to be south to south, and they're going to be happening for reasons outside of climate, as we've discussed. And I just wondered, if you had any thoughts on what is being described as quite a big shift, of President Modi meeting with President Xi in the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit recently. And it made me think, in a way, multilateralism might be having a moment of not progressing. But that, let's be honest, is largely an effect of the USA shifting towards an America First, quite an isolationist policy. And that's having an effect of forcing the rest of the world to think more about cooperation. So it's kind of a reaction, there's a reaction. And I wondered if you saw significance in that? It’s the first time, I think, for seven years that Modi visited China. Is there a rapprochement happening?

AG  

Well, there's a broader rapprochement that has been happening for the last few weeks, actually, the last few months, at different stages. And you know that will continue, and there'll be confidence building measures on both sides on a range of different issues, perhaps even including investments in clean energy and mutual deployment of manufacturing capacity. Or maybe even co-development of new technologies. Who knows? But I don't think it's new in the sense that we've done ourselves a disservice by assuming that climate leadership is a crown that's worn only on one head. And it is that reason why we have not paid attention to what other countries, especially in the global south, have already done. China, of course, it's in a category of its own, but India, as I've described, and it's a story that is mostly not known, let alone appreciated, of the scale of deployment, but also the manner of deployment. But there are other emerging economies: whether it's Vietnam, it's one of the largest economies in Southeast Asia, it has the largest deployment of renewables in Southeast Asia. Whether it's in Uruguay in South America, whether it's Namibia. We are seeing a different approach, and it's important to recognize that. But back to the core. I think the core here again is not just an India-China story or an India-Brazil story. It's about that smart plurilateralism, who are the right actors for the problem you're trying to solve, right? And that could be any constellation. I would call it a multi-variable geometry that we should be experimenting with if we are serious about climate action and not just announcements.

BW  

So here's a thought experiment. You mentioned sustainable aviation fuel and particularly that India's increasing its domestic production of ethanol. I was just looking at some numbers. And Brazil's production of ethanol that's going into its domestic transport market at the moment is more than enough to cover all of China's demand for aviation fuel. And it just struck me that if you're a provider of electric vehicles to the world, you know, you sign a deal with Brazil, we'll electrify your transport, that ethanol then gets freed up and you can buy that back as fuel for our aviation sector. Now, those sorts of transactions, I think, will be advanced by everyone meeting in regular meetings, and as you say, COP is one of them. But there may be other plurilateral fora that are created for these specific sectoral shifts. And I think there's this freeing up that electrification gives you. Firstly, it's a more efficient way of driving energy, so it's deflationary, you know, it's got all those advantages. But then you think about what it frees up in terms of infrastructure and how we're currently doing things. There may well be a lot of molecules, clean molecules, hopefully, that get freed up for use in other sectors. So just as climate change has got these compounding cascading effects, there's also cascading effects in the positive sense.

AG 

You're absolutely right. We need many more moments to have these discussions. And that to me, is the other way in which 2025 is different from 2015. I worry that climate change is no longer high politics. That is the real challenge that we are faced with. And yet it is a more severe crisis in 2025 than it was in 2015. And I think it is again the same emerging economies which are building their infrastructure, and they need that infrastructure to be resilient against a storm, against a flood, etc, that will find it of strategic interest to discuss climate, even outside of a COP process, because it is what will maintain and drive their economic dynamics.

BW  

I did want to ask you about the physics of climate change. As you say, it is unrelenting, even if our politics is not going in our favor. And India is a country which experiences extreme weather. How is that impacting politics and what can be done to protect India? India is developing, there's more wealth that will make India more resilient. Getting people out of poverty makes for a more resilient society. But there's maybe a timing mismatch here, where it will take a few more years and decades, maybe to get to that end point. And in the meantime, extreme weather is making that so much harder.

AG  

Well, extreme weather certainly is a big challenge. Already at CEEW, we are developing the first high-resolution climate resilience atlas for India at a district level. And in some cases for precipitation, we've already mapped this out at a sub district level. We've got 700-odd districts with 4,500 plus sub-districts. So we know how three quarters of our districts are hotspots for extreme climate events. We know already that 40% of our districts are showing a swapping trend from being flood prone to drought prone, or vice versa. We know that there's been an increase in the intensity of rainfall, but in shorter durations. And this summer, we've seen huge amounts of flooding and water logging in our cities. All this is already evident. We have to keep investing in the evidence base to get those hyper local assessments, whether it's of floods or droughts or heat stress. How is this impacting? I would say it's impacting in at least two, if not three ways. One is we are still an economy where a majority of the population lives in rural areas and is engaged in agriculture. And the impact on agriculture and farm output is something that no government at a central level or a state level can ignore. So you can give a farmers compensation — a farmer insurance — in a single year. Maybe you can do it the second year. But if you're going to do this every year, then you have a severe fiscal crisis or fiscal challenge at hand. The second way is in terms of built infrastructure in cities. And the inundation of the cities then slows down economic activity, and it's not just the loss of infrastructure and the asset loss on the balance sheet, but also the flow of economic activity. When it slows down, you have a severe problem that you're dealing with. You might have to revise growth forecasts and so forth. And the third is actually the broader macroeconomic conditions you're dealing with. And when it comes to the impact of public health, worker productivity and this general kind of quality of life that is impacted by climate change, which then gives you a lot of concern.

BW  

As you were talking, I was just thinking, it's hard to ignore what's happening in the US at the moment, in terms of the rolling back of work on climate at a federal level. And one of the saddest things, I think, is the undermining of science and this defunding of education broadly. And I've always been struck that both China and India are producing such high quality educational products and facilities. And I think it's probably missed and misrepresented in many places, that India's investment in science, in foundational science and education, is incredible. And perhaps that's a contributing factor to this. Perhaps this new confidence of talking about transition and risk is underpinned by science that India continues to invest in.

AG 

Yes, and it does translate into how new policies and programs are emerging. India produces the second largest number of engineers annually. But this is not about engineers. This is about understanding that this is a nature and engineering and engineering and an economy story. I'll give you an example: during the pandemic, I was asked by the government to co-chair the energy and climate track for the science, technology and innovation policy. It was only the fifth time since independence that India was drafting such a policy. And one of the things we identified was that there are technologies that were already ready to deploy. The problem was, how do you scale that up? And I'm talking about five years ago. So even between then and now, there's been a huge uptake in renewables investment, et cetera. But then we also looked at transitional technologies and other foundational technologies that apply across different sectors. So it's not about an energy play, but material science, chemical, alternative chemistry, etc., which then changes industrial processes across sectors, which changes building materials across sectors, etc. So that was the next category. And then we talked about breakthrough technologies, the over the horizon technologies that were nowhere near maturity five years ago. Whether it's green hydrogen, India now has the world's largest public finance allocations for green hydrogen. But also whether it's aviation — sustainable aviation fuels — or whether it is carbon removal. The point is, we have to deploy our capacities in targeted ways, and we do that through missions.

BW  

We're almost out of time, and to get onto green hydrogen at this point in the interview might not be a good idea. But what I was really asking, I suppose, was more the investment in the foundational science of climate risk. Because the latest understandings are that the models, the predictions of where we would be today, we're not in the average position. We're out in an outlier position, where the observable impacts, and the observable buildup of heat is actually one of the extremes. It's a worst case scenario at the moment. And there's a lot of discussion about what's behind that. And it might well be that we've misunderstood the reflectivity component of that heat experience. I’m sure you're aware of this, but the sort of the watts-per-meter-squared is a function of greenhouse gas concentrations, but also how much sunlight we reflect back to space. And that reflectivity is waning, the world's getting darker for a number of reasons, and so we're getting this double hit of increasing concentrations plus less reflectivity, meaning that the actual experience of temperatures and impacts might well be much higher than we hoped. So in that context, this conversation about risk and understanding of the foundations of climate science, it needs champions. It needs the UK to stand up, it needs China, it needs India. It needs people who've got the capacity to invest in this and keep this going to step up. because the US is moving in exactly the opposite direction, unfortunately, right now.

AG  

I could not agree more. And I have long argued that we need an international program that focuses on understanding climate risks in a hyper-local way. Especially in the global south, because without that, you get large regions as kind of one big pixel. And that's insufficient both from understanding the dynamics you're describing, or in designing policy administrative responses that can save lives or rejuvenate livelihoods. So there is no question that large economies, whether they are advanced or emerging, need to collaborate a lot more. And this is what I meant by climate change being high or low politics. This is not about COP negotiations. This is really about recognizing the real threats coming our way in maintaining the economic dynamism that is needed in our economies. We can see that where there is slowdown in economic growth, you have social disruptions, dislocation, internal and cross border. So we have to understand that it is not an environment versus economy debate, but very much something about accelerating the growth agenda that we have. It is in our own interest to keep investing in the science base, in the hyper-local risk assessment base, but also incorporating maybe through smart plurilateralism for even risk assessments and risk mitigation.

BW  

And on that last point of risk mitigation, I noticed that you are on the oversight committee of the UK's funding of cooling research into whether there are cooling interventions we could make, funded by ARIA, our Advanced Research and Innovation Agency. What led to that appointment? And what made you curious about these cooling interventions, sometimes called geoengineering or solar radiation modification? This is something the UK has taken a stance on, and I think it's done so bravely. What's been your experience and how did you get involved in that?

AG  

Well, I have written about and researched the governance of climate altering technologies for over 15 years. I co-chaired the international governance working group of the Royal Society's solar radiation management governance initiative. And while completely recognizing the embedded risks, what I have consistently argued for is that if any of this research is to happen, it should happen in a transparent manner. It should happen in a manner that has clear thresholds, a much greater oversight on research activities before they get to any kind of field testing, let alone deployment. And ideally, in an internationally collaborative manner, precisely because the risks are… I mean, if you were developing technologies or even experimenting with them that have planetary scale impact, how can you have only national level jurisdiction over them? Or sometimes not even that — university scale jurisdiction over them? So when ARIA reached out, I agreed on the condition that this would be something that would give me a chance to observe what kinds of research proposals were coming from across the world, that it would be open to collaborations across the world. And I'm not selecting the projects, but it's good to see that there is a focus on transparency, a focus on not having restrictive intellectual property, and many of the principles I have listed in my other writings of how these technologies should be researched and tested.

BW  

For people who've read The Ministry For The Future, Kim Stanley Robinson's book, it opens with this absolutely, almost breathtakingly awful scenario in India, where a very long, sustained heat wave leads to a really severe impact on a community that's not yet wealthy enough to be resilient. And for me, I worry that the pace of this potential increase of temperature and our ability to build our resilience is just not aligned. We need to buy ourselves more time. And I guess the worry is if, if we get to the point where it does become a big political topic, because these impacts are accelerating, there will be calls for an intervention. There'll be political pressure to do something and do something fast, and that's why studying it now, researching it now, before we get to that potential point, makes a lot of sense to me. And I feel like I'm always in favor of… Trying to hold research back doesn't usually end well. Humanity's inquisitive nature and its agency and and inventiveness probably needs to be harnessed, and it will be kind of immoral not to explore, it feels to me. But I hear you about the governance and the need for transparency, which is why I'm kind of glad the UK as a government has stepped up, because it's far better if this is done by governments and done well.

AG 

I agree. And when you are deploying public money, there's going to be oversight through a committee to Parliament and that's a better model than leaving it to scientists to regulate themselves. And I agree that the nature of the research needs to involve countries and communities that are likely to be the most impacted, which is why I've called for international research programs in this area. But just maybe to conclude on this theme of heat stress, even before we come up with the plan Bs and the plan CS. Again, this is why hyper-local assessments of risk are so critical. And my own organization has already developed heat action plans for 50 cities in India. Our aim is to do it for 300 over the next two more years. But these are not just at the city level. This is at a neighborhood by neighborhood level, which brings in the equity lens, the gender lens, because only then can you even begin to design the administrative and community responses that are just. At the end of the day, if we just reduce climate risk to a number, X, number of lives lost due to heat stress, or Y, number of lives lost, we will inure ourselves and desensitize ourselves to the real challenge we are faced with. And again, I said it at the outset as well. It starts with internal, domestic transformation, and that's what we are trying to do.

BW  

Well, I'm delighted to have had this conversation, Arunabha, thank you so much. We've covered a lot of ground. Thank you for your time, and I know you've got a busy few weeks ahead of you, and then you'll be out to Brazil for Belem at the end of the year. So thank you again, and I hope our paths will cross in the not too distant future.

AG  

Thank you, Bryony, it was a great conversation. A lot more questions that you raised in my mind that I now need to ponder about.

BW  

Great, thank you so much. See you again. 

BW

So that was Arunanbha Gosh, Founder and CEO of the Council on Energy, Environment and Water - which is celebrating it’s 15th anniversary this year - and special envoy to the next climate talks hosted by Brazil. As always we’ll put links to further information in the show notes. My thanks to Oscar Boyd, our producer, Jamie Oliver, our video editor and to the rest of the Cleaning Up Team and wonderful leadership circle members who make the Cleaning Up podcast possible. We hope you enjoyed the conversation and please join us at the same time next week for another episode of Cleaning Up! 

ML  

Cleaning Up is supported by its Leadership Circle. The members are Actis, Alcazar Energy, Arup, Cygnum Capital, Davidson Kempner, EcoPragma Capital, EDP of Portugal, Eurelectric, the Gilardini Foundation, KKR, National Grid, Octopus Energy, Quadrature Climate Foundation, SDCL and Wärtsilä. For more information on the Leadership Circle, please visit cleaningup.live. If you've enjoyed this episode, please hit like, leave a comment, and also recommend it to friends, family, colleagues and absolutely everyone. To browse the archive of over 200 past episodes, and also to subscribe to our free newsletter, visit cleaningup.live.