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Comment by ashray | Hacker News Reader

From a climate change perspective, yes. But from just a general air pollution perspective, a lot of effective regulation needs to happen for industries to stop pumping noxious gases into the atmosphere. There are hardly any limits on industries and they can pump whatever they feel like into the air. Catalytic convertors for factories ? Almost non-existent!

I know that the discussion of general air pollution is slightly off topic here, but it really is very bad in New Delhi, and eventually does reach the subject of climate change.

Another perspective: If India doesn't care about air pollution within India which affects it's own population, it's unlikely they will care about some glaciers melting far away sometime in the future and affecting people in far away countries.

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Actually India is going to be hard-hit by climate change on several fronts. Firstly, many parts of southern India are low-lying and will be affected by rising sea levels. Then there's the effect that India is in the tropical zone - they've already experienced devastating monsoons and this is only predicted to get worse (see Typhoon Yolanda) as time goes by. Lastly, those glaciers aren't far away, they're right there in the Himalayas - India can expect to have major problems with drinking water supplies as those glaciers melt.

I'm not up with Indian politics, but I rather suspect that the current refusal to deal with emissions is more about climate change denialism mixed in with a sense of anti-colonial defiance than anything else. Don't forget that it's actually easier, politically speaking, for a developing country such as India to adopt renewable energy than it is for the developed world, goodness knows they have the engineers to make it happen! We need baseload power, our society has been constructed expecting it to exist, but as Indian populations get electricity, it's not going to be a major drama if electricity supply is intermittent - that's still way better than no electricity at all.

Stop with your preaching already, India has blocked the talks because developed countries have gone back on many of the promises they have agreed to keep including funding, technology transfer and their own commitments to reducing their emissions.

Preaching? Hardly. My first paragraph was all about how India is going to be one if the countries hit the hardest by climate change. Once you understand that, you have to try and come up for an explanation as to why they are acting against their own interest. India needs more developed countries to stop polluting, and I really don't see how throwing a spanner in the works does not seem to me to be a winning strategy for convincing the big polluters to stop. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe they have a really cunning plan, but we're talking about a country that got into a nuclear arms race with its neighbour, so I'm thinking that we're not talking about diplomatic geniuses playing a game if geopolitical chess. I would be happy to be wrong, but in the mean time my money is on the Indian government doing stupid things for base political considerations.

Catalytic converters operate at high temperatures, (600 C,) which is much higher than the exhaust temperature of most factory exhausts; thus they would not be compatible. In addition, most emissions from factories are not un-combusted fuels (which CCs process), for a couple of reasons including the simple fact that most industrial processes which emit exhausts are run at steady state, and have been optimized to the point where nearly all the fuel is utilized. Particulate emissions are a real issue, as are dangerous vapors, but these are eliminated by various other remedies (such as filters and other sequestrations).

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