• Fast breeder nuclear reactors;

• The thorium cycle for nuclear power

Few steps would repay as handsomely as effort by government and industry to harness India’s technological and engineering talent for affecting breakthroughs in products and processes such as these. The pioneering work that Japan’s MITIE did in bringing industrial firms, government laboratories, technological personnel together is the example that India should emulate.

We should be doing each of these things on our own. Yet the civil society, and that includes the media, as well as the international community can take steps that would induce a country like India to act faster than it is otherwise likely to do.

Measures that would induce India to take these steps

First, given the ease with which discourse can be derailed — “The demands to cap our emissions are a conspiracy to cap our growth”; given the weight of inertia, of just going on repeating our oft-stated position, given the comfort that intellectual laziness provides, we must multiply manifold the efforts to inform people of the opportunity that climate remediation presents for India. One aspect, of course, is that as a country that has a vast reservoir of engineering and technical talent, as a country that has developed capacities in these fields, we are well positioned to develop solutions — that we can adopt for our own benefit and also market to others the world over. But there is, in addition, an immediate financial windfall that we can gather. Today, even an alert reader of newspapers is unlikely to know that, once the US also comes on board, the market in carbon trade will rise to almost two trillion dollars, that we can earn billions of this vast amount by adopting green practices. Few would know of the financing that is becoming available for adopting energy saving technologies. Few would know the current moves to craft regimes that would allow green technologies to be transferred with greater ease. Once benefits such as these, benefits that are available here and now, get better known, it would be that much more difficult to scare people away from the course corrections that we would be required to make in the wake of new international agreements.

... contd.