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Comment by aaron695 | Hacker News Reader

Hmmm a lot of comments from rich white people ATM saying let the Indians in big cities continue to die because we want less CO2 in the atmosphere even though we used it for years to get this rich and probably use more CO2 for our lattes per person than this life saving measure might do.

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Why should the rest of us have to deal with it? They caused the problem, and they did it AFTER seeing everything the west went through. They did not have to follow the same way we went down, but they chose to anyway.

Not to mention, it does nothing to address the actual sources of pollution. Fix that first.

You are wrong about facts. India did industrialize ALONG WITH the West and not AFTER it. The pace of industrialization was impeded by British colonialism. Whatever India you see today is actually the impact of industrialization post Independence from British Raj (1947). During that time there was no alternative to non-renewable energy so there was no "they did not have to follow the same way we went down, but they chose to anyway".

USA/Europe have still not migrated to complete clean energy. Emission per capita is 16.5t and 6.7t in comparison to India's 1.8t. That is pretty crazy considering that the population of US is not even 1/3rd of India. If US isn't serious about moving to clean energy why would India be?

Solar energy prices dropped to around parity with coal for the first time this year, hitting 4.34 rupees (about 6 US cents) a kilowatt-hour (kWh), while coal tariffs range usually range in between 3–5 rupees/kWh (about 5–8 US cents). It wasn't possible until April of this year to even consider Solar a viable alternative. With prices dropping (and hopefully continuing to drop until at least 2030) we can now think of installing new power plants backed by solar. But don't think for a second that we will be able to magically replace the coal plants. The infrastructure spending on these coal plants have gone into billions of dollars and retrofitting them isn't as easy or cheap.

So no. India is a energy hungry Nation and we will go ahead with whatever it takes to provide energy to the entire population (be it nuclear/coal/solar/wind etc). If you want us to adopt clean energy entirely then pay up for it. After-all the climate crisis is caused by the first world countries as they ignored (and continue to ignore) pleas to move to clean energy for the past few decades. If you can't pay up then move along. Don't even bother to advice us. You'll only be ridiculed.

Trump has already said that he will withdraw from the Paris Climate Deal on the first day of taking office. So when the West, which is the biggest polluter in the World after China, cannot take this step why should India take the initiative? After-all, even if India did go 100% clean energy (which is highly impractical and an extremely costly affair), it won't have any impact on reversing Climate Change with the West backing out. So it is a lose-lose for India.

> So when the West, which is the biggest polluter in the World after China, cannot take this step why should India take the initiative?

Because climate change affects the entire planet, and you also happen to live here? I understand the US likes to view itself as a role model for developing nations, but just because the US is doing shitty things doesn't mean everyone else has to follow suit. It might not seem "fair", but mass extinctions and catastrophic weather events don't take "fair" into account.

But you don't get the point I made in the previous reply that even if India went 100% clean energy it won't have any impact on fixing/reversing climate change. India's emission per capita is only 1.8t. US and Europe account for 16.5t and 6.7t. You want to fix the planet, fix Western policies. Don't look at developing countries to lead the way.

Third world countries don't have the liberty to make choices based on their perceived good-ness - they can't choose renewable energy sources based purely on the fact that they are better for the environment. They kinda sorta had to go down that road of fossil fuels because economics is crucial. I think that if there were a breakthrough that made renewables vastly cheaper than coal, India would be the first country to adopt the new tech.

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