Climate Change and You: The price of comfort in a rapidly warming world
Summary
This issue of Mint's Climate Change and You newsletter asks whether visionary global leadership is critical to both conflict resolution and climate action. It spotlights India’s surging demand for air conditioning, the debut of climate-smart genome-edited rice, and wraps up with a touch of comedy.
Dear Reader,
Last week may have been a distressing time for some of you, particularly if you live in one of India’s border towns. For a friend in Srinagar, it was like dying every night, not knowing if she would wake up alive. Even at a distance, cocooned in the comfort and safety of the national capital, the India-Pakistan conflict and the possibility of a full-blown war took a mental toll on many of us. Thanks to the ceasefire—and hope it isn’t a fragile one—we can catch our breath. And revisit some forgotten wisdom.
Rabindranath Tagore, the poet laureate who penned India’s national anthem, Jana Gana Mana, wrote in a letter to a friend that “patriotism can’t be our final spiritual shelter. I will not buy glass for the price of diamonds and I will never allow patriotism to triumph over humanity as long as I live". Tagore’s views on nationalism, and his differences with Mahatma Gandhi on this issue, are evocatively captured in his 1916 novel Ghare Baire (The Home and the World). Satyajit Ray adapted the book for the screen. Both are worth a look.
Perhaps none of this is relevant to a climate newsletter except for the certitude that the world is in dire need of visionary leaders to guide us through emergency situations, none more so than in climate crisis—among the most pressing challenges of our times. We need global leaders who can ensure a liveable future for our children, leaders who can think beyond narrow self-interest while trying to end a conflict or solve the climate puzzle.
State of the climate
Temperatures are rising after a brief spell of showers in early May. Those of us who can will now lock ourselves indoors, avoid the sun, and crank up the air conditioner. There’s a big climate piece unfolding there, right inside the blissful comfort of our personal spaces.
Room AC sales in India are on steroids. Consumers made a beeline for ACs last year as a gruelling summer fuelled a business driven by discomfort. In the year to March, Indians purchased nearly 14 million ACs—a staggering 30% jump over the previous year. By 2030, annual sales are expected to more than double to 30 million units. By 2050, estimates suggest electricity demand to run ACs will increase ninefold as compared with 2022.
India is already the world’s fastest-growing AC market. In a rapidly warming world, an ever-increasing demand for cooling will jeopardize national climate goals. Can technology provide a solution by making ACs more energy efficient? The short answer is yes, but it may take years.
The interesting part is that we already have the solutions—such as moving to centralized systems like ‘district cooling’, which can slash energy use by at least 30%. In Hong Kong, schools and hospitals use district cooling; in this model, centralized chillers cool spaces using piped chilled water as a refrigerant and not polluting gases that add to global warming. Iconic buildings like the Burj Khalifa in Dubai and The Louvre in Paris also use district cooling.
The news in brief
- Earlier this month, India released the world’s first genome-edited rice varieties, which promise to climate-proof your meal. These designer crops take less time to grow, thus using less water and fertilizers and overall having a lower carbon footprint. Genome-editing (GE) technology, which won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, uses a protein to edit the DNA sequence of a genome—a bit like rewriting the code of life. GE tomatoes that lower blood pressure and improve sleep quality are now sold in Japan.
- Take a look at this Mint Long Story: How Hyderabad tamed its mountain of waste.
- Despite an early onset of heatwaves in April, the first half of May was relatively cool, thanks to occasional showers. Tragically though, 14 people died after heavy rains lashed Gujarat. Meanwhile, an anticipated early landfall of the monsoon has raised hopes of a bountiful harvest and benign food prices.
- A touch of irony here: India’s first hydrogen-powered truck will be used to transport dirty coal.
- Your morning beverages are on a high. An international price gauge comprising cocoa, coffee and tea surged 122% in the two years to March following adverse weather and crippled harvests. In comparison, global food prices turned cheaper by 12%.
Climate Change Tracker
How many disasters will a child face in her lifetime? Exposure to heatwaves, crop failures, floods, droughts, wildfires and tropical cyclones will at least double for a child born in 2020 than one born in 1960. That will be the case if global temperatures rise by 2.7 °C compared to pre-industrial levels (in a business-as-usual scenario), as per a study published in Nature. We can save today’s toddlers a lot of pain as they age if we act now to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees, as per the Paris Accord, the authors say. But who’s listening?
Know Your Jargon
Urban Heat Island
Our cities are replete with impervious surfaces, from cemented pavements and concrete buildings to asphalt roads and vanishing waterbodies. These surfaces absorb and store heat during the day, and release it in the night. In addition, waste heat is released by cars, ACs, and the like, which gets trapped by the dense concrete around it. This makes urban centres much warmer than the rural outskirts, which is why they are now called urban heat islands, or UHIs. We tend to use more ACs and refrigerators—and more energy to run them—as it gets hotter. This worsens the UHI effect in a vicious cycle. Here’s a review of the India situation.
Prime Number
107,000
The number of passenger electric vehicles (EVs) sold in India in 2024-25, compared with 91,607 in the year before. Current penetration is 2.6%, marginally up from 2.3% in FY24. In comparison, 6% of two-wheelers and over 57% of three-wheelers sold last year were electric.
What explains the tepid consumer demand? Buyers see EVs as a second car, not the primary one. They are concerned about range (how many kilometres an EV can run on a single charge), inadequate charging infrastructure, the price premium over regular cars, and the future cost of battery replacement.
Video of the month
To be honest, reading on the climate crisis can be pretty depressing. The chatter can put one off because of all the doomsday-crystal-gazing. So why not listen to some irreverent comedy instead? Here’s a short compilation. Don’t miss Dana Carvey, Straight White Male, 60, on how US President Donald Trump may solve the climate problem if he believed in it (glide to 10:08 if you’re in a rush): “I will be so good with global warming, so, so good with global warming, I will make CO2 pay for it. I promise you that."
That’s all, for now. Bibek will be back with the next issue, in a fortnight.
