Supporting Sustainable Energy is pretty much motherhood and apple pie these days: it sounds good on the hustings, as Rishi Sunak found out to his cost, so nobody’s going to campaign against it anytime soon, but being in favour of renewable resources isn’t the same thing as doing something about it. Almost every major economy signed up to the Paris Climate Accords back in 2015 (the United States liked it so much they signed up twice), but still, we’re facing a tsunami of oil and gas production over the coming year (www.iisd.org). Indeed, before the year’s out, a staggering 12 Billion tonnes of emissions are likely to be generated by leading economies across the globe (including the US and the UK). Despite the chastening experience of heatwaves, wildfires, hurricanes and droughts in the year just gone, 2024 will still see the highest emission levels since 2018.
As the grandly but improbably named Oliver Bois von Kursk of the International Institute for Sustainable Development put it succinctly, “…it is deeply concerning that fossil fuel exploration activity has not just continued since the Cop28 agreement, but increased. Rich countries with relatively low dependence on fossil fuel revenues should be the first to stop issuing licences. We’re not seeing that in the data.” OBvK is a man with his finger on the pulse.
Even though President Biden signed up to the Climate Accords (again) in 2020, since taking office, he’s also handed out no less than 1,453 new oil and gas exploration licences in North America (20% more than Donald Trump ever did), while over in the UK, Rishi Sunak (past) and Keir Starmer (present) seem to be struggling to achieve the same accolade.
In short, it’s starting to sound a bit like the infamous soccer match between Nigeria’s Akurba FC and the Plateau United Feeders, which the Feeders won 79 to nil, scoring a goal every thirty-seven seconds in a mind-boggling display of deceit and hypocrisy: a day that will live in infamy, as surely as any bran tub politics will today and a match which even the Nigerian Football Association (no less) described as a “mind-boggling show of shame”. All players involved were banned for life, but what about the bran tub US and UK politicians and their current rule-dodging partners? Should we be thinking about lifetime bans for them too?
Well, perhaps that’s a question best left to the individual conscience of the politicians in question…at least for the time being.
At least one country isn’t shamefully skulking into the lifetime ban corner, and that’s India.
The Subcontinent is currently the third largest consumer of energy in the world, with the biggest population on the Planet, so you’d be forgiven for thinking it had every incentive to bend and break sustainability rules, just like the US and the UK are doing…but not a bit of it.
India is the fourth biggest producer of renewable energy capacity on the Planet, fourth in wind power and fifth in solar capacity (www.ren21.net/gsr-2024). This year, it upped its game again by pledging to meet an enhanced COP28 Target of 500 GW of non-fossil fuel-based energy by 2030. That’s the world’s biggest renewable energy expansion plan. Over the last eight years, India has increased its non-fossil fuel capacity by a staggering 396%, with 45.5% of its total energy capacity now secured from sustainable resources.
So here’s the simple lesson: Joe Biden may be out of the race, but it’s not too late for Kamela Harris (or, less likely, Donald Trump), and even perhaps Kier Starmer, to draw some useful lessons from India’s sustainability success story.
India has been at the heart of Red Ribbon Asset Management (www.redribbon.co) for more than a decade. It has shaped its successful investment strategies in conjunction with an unparalleled knowledge of the Subcontinent’s markets, delivering higher-than-average investor returns and looking after the Planet and People in the process.
Sustainable energy is a game of two halves: India and the rest of the world, and it’s high time for the West to up its game.
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