Climate Change Resists Narrative, Yet the Alphabet Prevails (A to Z): Now L!
African and Asian countries should leapfrog to renewable energy
>> From an Article on Climate Change by Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker Magazine, Nov. 28, 2022
In 1947, the year India gained its independence, telephones were a rarity in the nation; there were fewer than a hundred thousand in the entire country. In the decades that followed, they remained scarce; as late as 1989, India had just four million phones for eight hundred and fifty million people. Three-quarters of rural villages lacked any phone connection at all; the official wait time for a line was almost four years, and, when one was finally installed, service was often dismal.
Then, practically all at once, phones were ringing everywhere. In 1994, the country auctioned off its first round of cellular licenses. The auction process was deemed “a mess”; nevertheless, cell service exploded. By 2010, six hundred million Indians were subscribers. (The country’s 2011 census revealed that more households had phones than had toilets.) In 2015, cell subscriptions hit a billion. India effectively skipped fixed-line phones and went straight to wireless, a process that’s become known as leapfrogging.
Today, India is home to 1.4 billion people. They consume a thousand watts per person, less than one-tenth of what Americans use. Were India to follow the fossil-fuel-slicked development path pursued by China, Europe, and the U.S., the result would be planetary disaster. Yet asking India to forgo prosperity on the ground that prosperous nations have already consumed too much is obviously impossible.
Fewer than half of all households in the country own a refrigerator. Only one in ten owns a computer. And, even though temperatures in Delhi reached a hundred and twenty-one degrees this past spring, just one in four has air-conditioning.
Leapfrogging represents a way — maybe the best way, maybe the only way — out of this dilemma. India is sun-drenched. Instead of building out a grid that relies on coal and natural gas, it could shift to one that relies on solar power and iron-air batteries.
Most Indians have never owned a car, so the country could skip over gas-guzzlers and go straight to E.V.s. Ditto for flying. The vast majority of Indians have never been on a plane; the first one they board could be an electric aircraft like the Alice. The same holds true even for stoves. More than five hundred million people in India still cook with wood or dung; instead of transitioning through gas, they could jump straight to induction. In other words, electrify everything!
“India is in a unique position to pioneer a new model for low-carbon, inclusive growth,” the International Energy Agency recently declared. And what goes for India, the I.E.A. noted, also goes for “a whole group of energy-hungry developing economies.”
India “hasn’t contributed much to the climate problem,” Ashish Gulagi, a researcher at Finland’s Lappeenranta University of Technology, told me. “But it can contribute to the solution.”
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Light Pollution ~ National Geographic Society, World Wide Web, January 2023
People all over the world are living under the nighttime glow of artificial light, and it is causing big problems for humans, wildlife, and the environment. There is a global movement to reduce light pollution, and everyone can help.
https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/light-pollution