Two stories from India: creating environmentally sustainable, healthy cities for the post-COVID world and the installation of cheap solar energy signals the end of coal. Plus, Joseph Stiglitz summarises some principles the Australian government should adopt post-COVID, a literary interlude and a summary of carbon capture and storage.
Over half the world’s population now lives in cities and the proportion keeps rising. Cities also generate the majority of the world’s greenhouse gases and other forms of pollution. Developing countries such as India with large and increasing populations (India will soon be the world’s most populous country) face particularly severe urban problems, made worse by high levels of rural poverty prompting migration to cities with millions already living in slums. Fear of the spread of coronavirus within these densely populated cities has brought India’s urban development problems into even clearer relief. So, what’s the best direction for India’s cities?
Should they follow developments in North America and Europe after the second world war: replace inner city slums with shoddy high-rise developments in poorly serviced suburbs? Watch the affluent abandon the city centres for suburban and rural communities (+/- gates and guards)? Combine urban sprawl with squalid, dangerous city centres? Build more cars and freeways that generate more congestion and pollution? It would make more sense for India to build healthier, more environmentally sustainable cities as they undertake post-COVID planning and development: compact ‘smart’ growth; medium/high-density, mixed-use, mixed-income neighbourhoods; more walking and cycling facilities; development centred around affordable, safe public transport routes; plenty of green- and public space. Better for the environment. Better for the prevention of chronic diseases – heart and respiratory diseases, diabetes, arthritis, etc. Better for the prevention of old and new infectious diseases. Better for mental health.
Staying in India, the cost of renewable energy in India is now 20-30% lower than the cost of energy from a new power station that uses domestic coal, and 50% below that of a new power station using imported coal. Not surprising then that the Indian government has awarded a tender worth US$2bn to build, anywhere in India, solar plants collectively generating two gigawatt (GW) of energy at the rock bottom price of US$33/MWh. According to Tim Buckley: ‘Renewables are clearly the low cost, zero inflation, zero emissions source of new domestic electricity supply for India. […] This year is likely to prove the beginning of the end for the thermal coal power industry globally.’
Economics Nobel Prize Laureate Professor Joseph Stiglitz was interviewed with Wayne Swan and Richard Dennis during a webinar organised by The Australia Institute on Thursday morning. The whole hour’s interview, ‘The Economics of a Pandemic’, is worth listening to. However, to whet your appetite, when asked at the very end to summarise in less than one minute the best way forward for the Australian government, Stiglitz said:
‘It’s going to take a very large role of government. Individually we cannot attack something like a pandemic or a problem like climate change. We require collective action. And it’s going to take a lot of collective action and that means that there has to be social solidarity. And that has to reflect a vision of where we want our society to be. That’s going to require progressive taxation. It’s also going to entail a green transition and real hard work to create a more shared prosperity than we had before the pandemic.’ Collective action + Social solidarity + Vision + Progressive taxation + Green transition + Shared prosperity. Thanks, Jo, perfect! Not such a dismal science after all.
Last week coronaviruses sent humans a message. This week it’s the earth’s turn. Haroon Rashid versifies on the changes the little blighters have made to our lives and the world’s advice to us.
We fell asleep in one world, and woke up in another.
Suddenly Disney is out of magic,
Paris is no longer romantic,
New York doesn’t stand up anymore,
the Chinese wall is no longer a fortress, and Mecca is empty.
Hugs & kisses suddenly become weapons, and not visiting parents & friends
becomes an act of love.
Suddenly you realise that power, beauty & money are worthless, and can’t
get you the oxygen you’re fighting for.
The world continues its life and it is beautiful. It only puts humans in
cages. I think it’s sending us a message:
“You are not necessary. The air, earth, water and sky without you are fine.
When you come back, remember that you are my guests. Not my masters.”
Continuing the literary line, if you are looking for a book on climate change, The New York Times has compiled a list of 21 fiction and non-fiction titles. NYT readers have added their own comments and recommendations, sometimes complimentary but often served with New Yorkers’ stereotypical outrage and acerbity. I might as well have my say. I’d recommend Klein’s ‘This changes everything’ and Wallace-Wells’s ‘The uninhabitable earth’ (both mentioned in the NYT comments) and also ‘Facing the Anthropocene’ by Ian Angus.
Confused about how carbon capture and storage (CCS) works? The figure below provides a simple explanation. Before P&I readers vent their spleens, let me reassure you that I am not promoting the adoption of CCS, merely knowledge about how it works (in theory at least). Even if it rapidly became effective at scale and economically competitive, it most certainly would not change the urgent need for a rapid reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to net zero.
Peter Sainsbury is a retired public health worker with a long interest in social policy, particularly social justice, and now focusing on climate change and environmental sustainability. He is extremely pessimistic about the world avoiding catastrophic global warming.
Comments
4 responses to “PETER SAINSBURY. Sunday environmental round up, 3 May 2020”
Peter,
I found Haroon Rashid’s poem really sums it up. The Earth can do with out us. It will continue long after we disappear. I certainly believe that the COVID-19 is a massive wake up call for humans . Abuse the Earth and it will fight back! Our hubris is mind blowing!!
This is a very good analysis of what should be happening when the COVID-19 virus crisis is over. We will still be confronted by the massive pollution that is causing climate change and a huge variety of pollution-related diseases that are causing headaches for health systems around the world.
It seems to me that our political leaders should have used the current lockdown to provide work for unemployed workers in the clean and sustainable energy and production industries. Some examples include programs to decontaminate the environment, extensive tree planting, establishment of dumps to effectively store toxic waste chemicals, establishing plants to manufacture electric cars, tram and rail carriages, more solar panels, wind generator propellers and other socially useful products.
PM Morrison – who wants to “snap back” to the usual neo-liberal way of doing things after the COVID-19 crisis is over – has shown that he lacks the economic creativity to take such bold economic steps that would provide work and contribute to the cleaning up of the environment. It also shows who he really represents and these are the very rich and powerful Australians and the executives in the large corporations.
The lock down also provided us with an opportunity to cut back our reliance on coal and other fossil fuels eg halting the irresponsible Adani coal mining venture in Queensland’s Galilee Basin. At the beginning of his article, Peter Sainsbury outlines the environmental problems that India is facing – especially in the big cities.
A few years ago, my wife and I visited India and saw first hand the incredible pollution around the larger cities. We told several Indians about the Adani project and that our politicians were telling those of us who opposed it were selfish because we were opposing development in India and China. They were adamant that they did not want fossil fuels because the pollution is killing many Indians and making huge numbers very sick. Instead, they wanted help to establish clean, cheap and renewable fuel sources.
It was also very pertinent that Peter quoted Professor Joseph Stiglitz’s advice about the need for collective action, social solidarity, progressive taxation, a green transition and shared prosperity. Instead of snapping back to the same old ways, we need to be springing forward to adopting these strategies to build a fairer society and a healthier, safer and more peaceful world for the viability of future generations.
I think I prefer the promise of hydrogen to replace coal and other fossil fuels to negate the need for CCS.
“Mitsubishi Hitachi Power Systems recently was awarded a contract for two natural-gas fired turbines that by 2025 will run on a mixture of 30% hydrogen and 70% gas before systematically increasing to 100% renewable hydrogen by 2045. The turbines will be installed at the coal-fired Intermountain Power Plant in Delta, Utah that is being transitioned to gas, then renewable hydrogen with an 840-MW capacity.”
(https://www.spglobal.com/platts/en/market-insights/latest-news/electric-power/031020-plan-advances-to-convert-utah-coal-fired-power-plant-to-run-on-100-hydrogen-with-storage)
One doesn’t necessary exclude the other. Why not get both processes going, at least for some time and make a good start?