Bombay -- It's fascinating how quickly things are changing here. On the way in from the airport, we notice that Merrill-Lynch has billboards up almost everywhere trumpeting its new investment fund in natural resources and "new energy." The two images flanking the copy are of a wind turbine and of three coal miners. All the forms of energy are viewed as essential here, but it's fascinating that wind has caught up with coal in media imagery if not yet in actual capacity. And the Hindustan Times, one of the major and highly competitive English language papers here, has its own set of billboards trumpeting a new strategy to "Keep Mumbai Clean." The strategy? Use your cell phone to take a picture of anyone littering and then turn them into the authorities!
But the greening goes beyond advertising -- India Today, the local version of TIME -- just held a conference on 21st Century Leadership, and the keynote was delivered by Al Gore on climate change. Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a U.S. Congressional delegation heavily drawn from the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming are here for a few days. At a reception last night hosted by the U.S. Consul, members of the delegation remarked on how differently energy and climate issues play out here. In the U.S. our problems are old habits, vested interests, and resistance to change.
Here in India, the issue is which technology can get you electricity fastest -- almost nothing else matters in a nation with 300,000 villages lacking any power at all. That's a challenge. One of India's top industrial leaders said to me this morning, "Unlike in your country, this is not a political issue. Everyone agrees we should do it right -- not the way you did it. But doing it right is all about execution, and execution is not our national strength." He's right -- green energy is more sustainable, probably cheaper, and more reliable in a nation that lacks its own fossil-fuel and uranium resources except for a modest quantity of relatively poor-quality coal. But it does require more organizational energy to build 1,000 wind turbines than to construct a single coal-fired or nuclear power plant.
The Sierra Club's priority in India is to figure out whether our model of grass-roots advocacy can help overcome that organizational challenge and put India on a high-growth, low-carbon pathway. We still have a lot to learn.
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