A micro-energy plan for India

Last week’s article highlighted the macro trends in energy use, the overarching consequences, and the macro-level responses we need to consider as a country. We must focus on national policy and international positioning — what kind of role India and China have and should play in the worldwide efforts to conserve energy and preserve the environment? A close look at the types of rules and activities that the Government should revise, remove, or create to encourage industries’ and nations’ fuel use is part of this process. We need to look at the way policies shape individual decisions — to buy a diesel car, for example, for which fuel is comparatively cheap.

The approach matches most of the dialogue about energy and conservation: predictions about energy use and its consequences are generally delivered in the aggregate. But behind these predictions lie everyday activities and decisions and everyday living experiences. This week, I look at a different kind of approach to sustainability, one that looks more closely at individuals.

India needs a micro-energy plan as much as a macro-strategy. It has to focus on averting climate change on two emissions fronts: not just carbon dioxide, but also particulate matter and smog. Both contribute to global warming. But it also has to focus on two decision-making fronts: polity-wide and individual-level.

The individual problem comes down to unwillingness as well as inability. Policy can shift both to change decisions.

Consider the unwillingness to choose the most efficient/ least-damaging technology. This is understandable in many ways. Environmental damage is an externality. People choose to buy diesel cars, and people suffer the increasingly thick smog blanketing Delhi. Do they suffer the smog and decide to buy a CNG rather than a diesel car? No — why would they? The smog is public — an externality from others’ decisions — and the benefits of lower-cost transport are private. There is no reason to be the first to give up the diesel when everybody else would share the benefits.

So the question is how to internalise this externality? This goes beyond reducing subsidies for more-polluting fuels, as I mentioned last time, to actually increasing the costs of fuel use in proportion to its contribution to pollution. There are also rewards for emissions reduction as in the clean development mechanism. India should actively support the implementation of the CDM by making the certification process streamlined while remaining credible.

Creating awareness and peer pressure can also help. Websites like Carbon Monitoring for Action (www.carma.org ) are a step toward publicising power plants’ contribution to global warming, for example, and have spurred greater attention to conservation and more efficient generation. Websites alone are not the answer in a country with continuing digital divides such as India, nor is the focus on power plants alone necessarily the answer. But these kinds of initiatives are a start in revealing information that enables a little more scrutiny. Closer to home, pollution monitoring and transparent reporting could be as important a tool in changing willingness to use efficient/less polluting solutions as any law.

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