Until
recently, China and India have been cast as obstacles, at the very
least reluctant conscripts, in the battle against climate change. That
reputation looks very much out-of-date now that both countries have
greatly accelerated their investments in cost-effective renewable energy
sources — and reduced their reliance on fossil fuels. It’s America —
Donald Trump’s America — that now looks like the laggard.
According to research released last week
at a United Nations climate meeting in Germany, China and India should
easily exceed the targets they set for themselves in the 2015 Paris
Agreement signed by more than 190 countries. China’s emissions of carbon
dioxide appear to have peaked more than 10 years sooner than its government had said they would. And India is now expected to obtain 40 percent of its electricity from non-fossil fuel sources by 2022, eight years ahead of schedule.
Every
one of the Paris signatories will have to reduce emissions to ward off
the worst consequences of global warming — devastating droughts, melting
glaciers and unstoppable sea level rise. But the tangible progress by
the world’s number one producer of greenhouse gases (China) and its number three (India) are astonishing nonetheless, and worth celebrating.
There
is also a lesson here for the United States. Piece by piece, agency by
agency, the Trump administration seems determined to destroy or
undermine every initiative on which President Obama based his pledge in
Paris to substantially reduce America’s greenhouse gases: his plan to
close old, coal-fired power plants, his proposals to reduce methane
emissions from oil and gas wells, his mandates for more fuel-efficient
vehicles. The excuse given in every case is that these rules would cost
jobs and damage the economy — the same bogus argument once used by Vice
President Dick Cheney to persuade President George W. Bush to renege on
his campaign promise to combat global warming.
China
and India are finding that doing right by the planet need not carry a
big economic cost and can actually be beneficial. By investing heavily
in solar and wind, they and others like Germany have helped drive down
the cost of those technologies to a point where, in many places,
renewable sources can generate electricity more cheaply than dirtier
sources of energy like coal. In a recent auction in India, developers of
solar farms offered to sell electricity to the grid for 2.44 rupees per
kilowatt-hour (or 3.79 cents). That is about 50 percent less than what solar farms bid a year earlier and about 24 percent less than the average price for energy generated by coal-fired power plants.
The
shift from fossil fuels has thus been much faster and more pronounced
than most experts expected. China has reduced coal use for three years
in a row and recently scrapped plans to build more than 100 coal power
plants. Indian officials have estimated that country might no longer
need to build new coal plants beyond those that are already under
construction. One other heartening fact: Electric vehicle sales in China
jumped 70 percent last year, thanks in large part to generous government incentives. India is much further behind in this area, but the country’s minister of power said last month that all cars sold in the country should be electric by 2030.
China
and India’s enthusiasm for cleaner energy arises in part from a wish to
reduce the terrible air pollution that afflicts cities like Beijing and
New Delhi; any move away from coal would make a big difference in
public health. Investments in cutting-edge energy and transportation
technologies would also bolster the economy as a whole.
There
are, of course, formidable challenges, not least developing batteries
to store the excess electricity generated by solar farms on sunny days
and wind farms on windy days. And there are emissions from industry and
agriculture to worry about. Still, Beijing and New Delhi — not,
embarrassingly enough, Washington — are showing the way forward.
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