Thread by @ShellenbergerMD

Already rich nations are blaming India for the failure of UN climate talks but there are 300+ million Indians who live on $1/day & it's unfair for the US, UK, Germany to demand India not burn coal before they become developed enough to afford natural gas & nuclear

https://twitter.com/samirsaran/status/1459613352720846861

It's especially hypocritical for the USA, UK, & Germany to demand India agree to quit coal at the *very same moment* that all three nations are *returning* to coal

The return to coal by the US, UK, and Germany is likely to be temporary, but all three nations became rich burning huge quantities of coal in the past, and so it's unethical that they demand that India, where 500M people will still use wood/dung in 2030, immediately phase it out

What nobody talks about is that the main reason the US reduced emissions 22% below 2005 levels, and the EU reduced emissions 26% below 1990 levels, because of cheap natural gas, not because of UN agreements or any climate policies

unherd.com/2021/11/climat…

And the irony of ironies is that the reason the world has temporarily moved back to coal is, in part, because of under-investment in oil and gas production due to... you got it, climate change shareholder activism

michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/how-climate-…

If rich nations really cared about climate change they would have had UN talks focused on expanding nuclear energy, the only scalable substitute for fossil fuels, instead of seeking to make energy expensive, and development harder, for poor nations

Correction: the number of Indians who live on $2 or less per day in 2021 is 134M

This is the best most recent data I could find. Please reply with better data if you have it. 🙏🏻

pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021…

Coal has been a major driver of its poverty decline

If India had access to cheap nat gas like Europe & the US it would use much more of it.

Yes, India has nuclear, but it has, for reasons @samirsaran can explain, failed to scale it up. Hopefully that will change, but we should not hold India to a different standard in mean time.

One of the problems with India’s big solar expansion, as I learned upon visiting in 2016, is lack of natural gas and hydro to manage intermittency. Coal, plants, like nuclear plants, do not ramp up and down well.

The $2/day number is in PPP