﻿Good afternoon,
and thank you for joining us today.
We’re happy to be here at MIT.
My name is John Podesta.
I’m the founder of the Center for American
Progress and one of the co-chairs
on this US-India Track II Dialogue
that we’re going talk about.
We’ve been meeting here at MIT
for the last couple of days.
This is a dialogue
that’s been going on.
We call it a Track II,
and I’m going to explain that.
This has been a dialogue
that’s been going
on since 2009 and is
taking place during
the change of administration
in India and a change
of administration in the United States.
Track II is a fancy way of saying, "None
of us serve in government right now."
We all have at one time or another,
either been advisors, formal or informal,
to the governments of the United States,
the governments of India,
and at the subnational level to advisors,
to governors, to mayors, et cetera.
The purpose of having the dialogue
is to be able, in a more candid way,
to discuss the issues that
are in common between our two
countries on climate and energy
and those which separate us
and to try to find a path forward
to give advice to policymakers
both in the executive
branches and in parliament.
It has been our tradition to meet
in Washington DC or to meet in Delhi.
We decided this year that we would meet
in Boston partly
because of the resources
that MIT has and secretary Moniz
and distinguished professor at MIT,
Ernie Moniz hosted us here
for this set of meetings.
We, also, wanted to come
to a place where there was a lot
of action going
on and action in a positive
way to move forward on the trajectory
of a transition
to a clean energy economy.
Last evening,
we heard from Carl Spector,
who’s the commissioner of the environment
for the City of Boston.
We just had a terrific session
with Senator Ed Markey about
his view about what the opportunities
are even in this Congress
and certainly building
towards the next Congress.
The last two years, I’d probably don’t
need to remind the people in this room,
I think you’re probably knowledgeable,
have brought the deadliest hurricane
in a century to the United States,
the heaviest downpours ever recorded,
the worst wildfire season
ever in California.
In Kerala, India saw its worst floods
in a hundred years, that severe,
and we’ve just seen, recently, reports
on the front pages of the US newspapers,
the unhealthy air that is in Delhi
making headlines around the world.
The US and India,
I think have a shared and vital
interest in combating
global climate change.
They were co-operative
in producing the Paris Agreement.
Scientific studies have shown
time and again that our two
countries stand to see some
of the worst economic, environmental,
and social damages as a result
of unmitigated climate change.
We also have some of the best
research institutions
in the world that can begin
to do that kind of deep
research that it’s going
to take to develop
the technologies that can
provide that kind of transition.
Of course, we’re the oldest
and the world’s largest democracy
and at a time of global
authoritarianism.
Our cooperation on the world
stage is more vital than ever.
That was the context in which
we got together here in Boston.
Over these last two days,
we talked about a range of shared
interests and the importance
of trying to tackle problems together
including reducing air pollution,
in reducing short-lived
climate pollutants,
some of which are referred to as super
pollutants like hydrofluorocarbons,
black carbon, methane reductions
and we talked a fair amount about
finding zero-emission
transportation solutions,
and then how do we actually finance
to produce that what many people estimate
as a trillion dollars annual new financing
into clean energy and adaptation.
In the United States, again,
I will reflect my view although
we have a bipartisan group here,
we have something of disfunction.
It’s apparent from the fact that
we can’t even have the government
go to work. In Washington,
DC it’s creating, I think,
serious headwinds
for bilateral cooperation,
as well as multilateral cooperation
on a whole host of issues,
but including these.
As you all know, the Trump
administration announced its intention
to withdraw the US from
the Paris Climate Accords.
I think what’s less well known is that
the administration has
so far declined to send
an important global
agreement that the US
and India had a significant
degree of effort
and cooperation
and produced a multilateral
agreement to phase down super polluting
hydrofluorocarbons
which is referred to as
the Kigali Agreement
to the Montreal Protocol.
That was made, as I said, possible
because of the determined effort by
both governments
at the most senior level,
by President Obama
and Prime Minister Modi.
If its targets are fully realized,
the world could avoid a half a degree
of global warming by mid-century.
Right now that’s stuck because
the administration has chosen
not to send it forward
to the United States Senate where
it actually enjoys bipartisan
support and Senate Republican
leaders have asked the president
to move that forward.
Let me introduce my colleagues,
and then I’m going to just throw
a few questions to them and I’m going
to have plenty of time to open it up
to questions from the audience.
First I want to introduce
my dialogue co-chairs.
In the center of our panel
is Jamshyd Godrej
the chairman of the Ananta
Centre and managing director,
which is a major think-tank in India
that’s dedicated to environmental
solutions and tackling
the problems of climate change.
He’s also the managing director Godrej
& Boyce Manufacturing Company Limited.
Next to him, you will recognize
Bill Riley who served as
the EPA administrator
for President George HW Bush,
had served previously
in Republican administration,
has been a stalwart
champion of the environment
both in the NGO sector
and in the private sector.
Next to me is Dr. Anil Kakodkar.
He’s the president of the National
Academy of Sciences of India
and chairman of the Rajiv Gandhi
Science and Technology Commission.
Next to Jamshyd is Kelly Sims
Gallagher professor of energy
and environmental policy at the Fletcher
School, Tufts University.
Next to Kelly is Arunabha Ghosh,
the CEO of Council on Energy,
Environment and Water,
again, a leading think-tank in India.
Next to him is Andy Karsner
who served as an assistant
secretary of energy
in the Bush administration,
and is now a managing partner
at the Emerson collective.
Jamshyd, I mentioned the Kigali
amendment and the need to come up
with cleaner cooling agents
to be used across the world.
I wonder if you would talk a little
bit about what’s going on in India,
the importance of that issue,
how the Indian government is approaching
trying to deal with the provision
of cooling and the need to do so
in a more environmentally sound way.
-Thank you, John.
Well,
I think you all know that the average
temperature of India is normally
very hot and so the demand
for both refrigeration and air
conditioning is very high.
After 50 years of independence,
the penetration of home
refrigerators is still only
less than 20% of households.
The penetration of air
conditioners for home
cooling is less than 1% of households.
That is a huge potential as
incomes increase in India
for increase in refrigeration
and air conditioning.
I think that the realization that
once the Montreal Protocol was done,
which was basically about,
at that time, Freon, but the HFCs also,
which are the next generation of CFCs,
are extremely bad from a climate
perspective and they do
last a long time.
I think a number of companies,
including my company,
which makes refrigerators
and air conditioners,
have been working on this
problem for a long time.
The government of India actually worked
on an energy star rating program.
We had a lot of support from
Climate Works Foundation and other
organizations at that time who had
the experience of the star rating system.
We have implemented
a star rating system
for air conditioners and refrigerators
in India, other products also,
but these were the key ones.
The public adoption
of the five-star refrigerator
or the Five Star air
conditioner has been very high.
I think what has happened
over the years is,
this program has been there
for more than five years now,
what has happened is that
there is a public awareness
now about energy efficiency
through that program.
That has driven to a large extent.
One good thing about Indian households
is that they are quite small,
which means that their refrigerators
also have to be quite small,
their conditioners have to be small.
The potential for energy
efficiency is very high because
these small ones then you can
get their efficiency up.
The other thing that we worked
on is the CFC problem.
Many, many years ago,
we worked with the Swiss government,
and the German government
and other multilateral
organizations to work on alternatives.
I’m happy to say that
my company has made more than
20 million appliances using
non-CFC and non-HFC gases.
These are all based on propane
and propane derivatives.
The amazing thing about it is that
you actually get better efficiency from it.
The downside, of course,
is that propane is inflammable material.
The question is, how do you manage it?
There are other
concentrations of propane
so high that it could be a risk or not.
That’s really where the technology
and the usage pattern come in.
The Government of India have
understood this issue quite well, but
governments in the US and India,
there has been this issue
of reciprocity also,
in the sense that we have not
technically signed the Kigali Agreement,
but we have signed it.
From the government’s perspective,
we have signed it.
As it was pointed out,
it’s not on the UN list of- there.
The point is that we are working right
now on a national cooling action plan.
This cooling action plan will take
into account all these things.
It will take into account
installation issues.
It will take into account energy
efficiency, the refrigerant.
The next level that we are
trying to promote is
that we should get away
from compressors completely
and go into-- All
of you should know that there’s
the Peltier Effect of chip that
was discovered many, many- maybe
a century ago, but very little has
been done to make it efficient.
Thermal chips now can be used to make
refrigerators and freezers
up to a particular size.
A lot of work is being done in it.
You will see over the next 4,
5, 10 years,
that there will be a shift
away from compressors
into other types
of cooling opportunities.
The Kigali agreement helps in being
able to not just raise awareness on it,
but also to actually
provide some solutions.
-Just to underscore what Jamshyd said.
The group as a whole,
US and India side,
agreed to go forward with
recommendations to both
encourage the administration
to send up the articles
of ratification to the United
States Senate to encourage
states that are undertaking phase
down efforts of HFCs, including
California and other states that
are well along on that program,
and to encourage the Congress to
develop implementing legislation
to be in compliance with Kigali.
Let’s turn a little bit to politics,
Bill.
You work for two Republican
administrations that has strong
environmental legislation
on a strong bipartisan basis.
At the time, you had strong bipartisan
leadership on the environment.
We, obviously, have seen the Trump
administration pull back from that.
What about Congress?
Is there a chance that we can
see new Republican leadership
emerge to take up the mantle
of environmental protection?
Are you optimistic about that?
-I’m an optimist, but I don’t know
if I’d go that far. I think that-
-[laughs] Particularly
on the issue of climate change.
--the reality with
respect to climate change
is that a large number
of Republican senators,
and as one put it to me,
at least 100 Republican
members of the House,
are fully conversant with
the science of climate change.
They get it. They know that the earth
is changing, our climate is changing,
and that humans have contributed
significantly to this,
as the scientific community
has claimed for 25 years.
They’re fearful, however, that were
they to take a public position,
they would put their seats
at risk to right-wing,
primary science deniers
of whom there are a good many,
particularly in the base,
as it’s called of the Republican Party,
the base which is so
important also to the election
and continued success
of President Trump.
Reality is that there are
ways that one can approach
issues that involve
adapting to climate change
and preparing for it without
necessarily acceding
to or saying that it’s because
of climate change.
We have seen that demonstrated
at the state local level
throughout the United States
in any number of initiatives,
whether it’s required renewable
contribution electrically
in some 30 states.
I was particularly admiring
of Mayor Daley in Chicago in 1996.
Without any attempt to characterize
the causes of climate change,
merely consulted his university professors,
scientific community in Chicago,
and asked what’s the likelihood of a future
that is as warm as the scientists
are predicting the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change and so forth,
they developed a whole
suite of responses.
They planted different trees,
2,200 trees in their parks every year,
permeable pavements,
roofs that reflect and
responses even to the point
of increasing by
threefold their emergency
rooms because of heatstroke,
which was expected to be much
more significant when they have
3 times the number of days above
95 degrees in the summertime.
I thin that things are
happening in the United States,
whether the Congress can get over some
of them and support what, in fact,
is an adaptation in places
where there are Republican
officeholders who are seeing that
their beaches are being eroded,
their houses in then front line,
coastal buildings affected,
and their streets flooding.
That speaks, particularly, of Miami
Beach, about the Carolinas and Virginia,
are certainly right up there,
and so is Alaska.
These people have
Republican representatives
and that they’re going to want to have
some kind of response to these problems
in which the federal
government is engaged.
To that extent at least, I’m
confident that if some kind of modicum
of proposal can come out of the house,
which they could embrace without
abandoning their base or the President,
I think that many of them probably will.
I certainly hope so.
-Dr. Kakodkar,
let me ask you a two-part question.
We’re here at MIT. We heard from
a number of professors at MIT
are working specifically
out of the Tata Energy
and Climate Center on problems
ranging from reducing
agricultural burning
to reducing air pollution,
to mapping ocean currents
in the Indian Ocean.
There are many graduate
students and undergraduate
students who are really interested
in this, tackling this problem.
How would you think about that from
the perspective of Indian
graduate students? [chuckles]
What do you think the state
of collaboration cooperation is between
Indian scientists
and American scientists
at this point on this set of questions?
-First of all, let me say that
as far as India is concerned,
the need for sustainable
sources of energy and the need
for making sure that they are
climate-friendly, actually,
these two demands point out
to the same solution in terms
of the resources that one
can get over Indian landmass.
This,
of course, requires a lot of research.
I think some years back there
was a wonderful Indo-US program
on different aspects of energy but it had
a big research component PACE-R.
It did a lot of work on photovoltaics,
solar thermal,
in which the academia in the US,
academia in India, industry in the US,
industry in India,
they’re all working together.
Unfortunately, that program duration is
over and I don’t see
the continuity of that,
but that experience has
actually showed that there
is a huge opportunity
for joint collaboration.
Even the Tata Center here at MIT,
there is a very similar center, again,
funded by Tata at IIT Bombay
and a few other institutions in India.
They’re all centers devoted
to carrying out research
for driving technology for the local
development, national development.
In fact, at one stage, these centers
were called frugal engineering centers,
low-cost technologies,
low-cost but technologies
which are, of course, high tech.
There are several areas there
talking in energy sense.
Currently, there is a huge emphasis
in India on deriving biofuels
out of the biomass both
the surplus agricultural residue,
as well as other forms
of biomass-derived
from forests or other sources.
There are as many as
a dozen biorefineries.
They are being set up currently.
That is on the basis of the development
which has taken place.
I think one other technology
has been developed
at the Institute for Chemical
Technology in Mumbai,
which is a very reputed institution
in chemical engineering.
There is another
in development which has
taken place in an industry in India,
Praj.
Both these technologies end up
at the core of these 12 plants.
We had recently a meeting
where we had a lot
of participation and several
US groups were there.
I noticed at least half a dozen,
another set of technologies,
which also can be deployed
because one could get this-
and I think diversity
of technologies is
very crucial in this
area because you need--
It’s not as if any kind
of biomass although
we are talking about technologies
which are biomass agnostics,
but still there are specific features
and you require specific
technologies to handle them.
I think that’s an area
of tremendous potential
where the research
groups in both countries,
the industry in both
countries can come together.
There are many other areas,
for example,
solar thermal,
I would say, is another area.
By the way, the biomass potential,
just the surplus agricultural
residue has been identified as
having enough potential to, in fact,
displace the entire gasoline
that is used in India.
We’re not talking
about small potentials.
You need technologies
to address the problems,
additional problems that maybe there.
You also need technologies to make
them somewhat more price competitive.
At the moment these
technologies are being deployed,
but there is a need
for a degree of subsidy.
There are, I think, several challenges
which can be handled together.
I think that’s an area
of great cooperation.
-Right.
Doctor mentioned the PACE-R
program and I just want to point
out one of our participants
in the Dialogue is our former US
ambassador to India
who is with us today,
Rich Verma and he was very
instrumental in making
sure that program got
going and stayed on track.
I want to thank him for that.
Kelly, let me turn to you.
You were just in Katowice,
Poland for the US Conference of Parties
on the Framework Convention.
Give us a sense of what it means that
the US is there, they’re participating,
but yes,
they’ve said we’re pulling out of Paris.
What was it like there?
What does it mean for the rest
of the world that administrations announced
that even though that won’t be executed
till after the election in 2020,
that they intend to pull out of Paris?
-It’s a bizarre state of affairs
and it is frankly strange to be
at the International Climate negotiations
because the US is still there.
We’re still actually part
of the Paris Agreement.
We’re still parties to the UN
Framework Convention on Climate Change.
The US was actively negotiating,
and in some ways, was very constructive,
helped to negotiate a landing
zone on transparency
for the rulebook that was
agreed upon in Katowice.
On the other hand, there were some
things that were really unconstructive,
like the United States
saying that they didn’t
want to welcome the most
recent IPCC report.
That’s not helpful.
It’s demoralizing for scientists.
I think in general,
my sense is if before Paris
we were all in this
on a bike ride together,
and we were getting kind of excited,
and some countries were
starting to pedal really fast
and compete with each other
to see who could do even better.
There was this virtuous cycle that was
starting to emerge with some
countries saying, "We can do this.
We want to step up and try this.
We can maybe do better than you."
What it feels like now is that
the world has gone into coast.
They’ve stopped pedaling
as fast as they were.
Some countries are steadily pedaling
but the urge, the motivation,
the excitement,
that sort of race and ambition-
the momentum has slowed.
That being said, I think it’s really
important to understand that
the global negotiators did
actually reach agreement on this
rulebook for the Paris Agreement
so we now can operationalize
and begin the very important
task of implementation.
I think one of the things we talked
a lot about in this dialogue was
how important it was to move forward
with just concrete-- Whether or not
the US stays in Paris or not there’s
so much implementation that can
make the US effectively implement
the Paris Agreement and likewise,
India as well.
-We’ll come back to what’s happening
in states and cities on that point.
I also want to note that Kelly
was in the administration
at the Office of Science
and Technology Policy and was extremely
involved with and helped produce
the joint statement that the US
and China did and that really
sparked the momentum towards Paris.
I want to thank you for that.
Arunabha,
I mentioned that we spent a lot
of time talking about
air pollution and the way
US and India could cooperate to deal
with the air pollution problem in India.
Just to put this in context,
the WHO has noted that 11
of the 12 most polluted cities
in the world are now in India.
I don’t think that was
a record to move beyond
China that India saw
but that’s where we are.
I’m wondering, there’s a lot of public
awareness of the air pollution issues,
but what’s it going
to take and what does
India need to move from
awareness to action?
The government recently
put out a program
but how do you see moving
forward the ability of the
Indian authorities to get on top
of the air pollution problem in India?
-Thanks, John.
Let me start answering that
question with a story from China.
In 2013, China hosted the APEC summit
and I happened to be in Beijing
exactly at that time.
When I landed in preparation
for the summit,
the factories and the power
plants around Beijing
and the neighboring
provinces had been shut down.
I took a photograph, a very scientific
experiment of the sky, which was blue.
Then a week later,
the summit had ended,
president Obama had left,
the power plants were
up again and I took
a photograph from the same spot
and the sky was gray. Now that very,
very scientific unscientific experiment
of mine was endorsed by China Daily,
the English newspaper
that I read daily.
They had an editorial, which said, make
#, hashtags were very new at the time,
make #APECblue permanent.
Now, why I say this is
the story around trying
to tackle air pollution
in Beijing and China, in general,
began about a decade ago,
just around the time they were
trying hosting the Olympics.
That first attempt failed.
Then came a second attempt
around 2011 or so, that failed.
Then came this 2013 story.
By that time, the public attitude
around it had completely changed,
and after that China launched
its so-called war on pollution.
This five-year reduction
in air pollution
there is actually a 10-year story.
If I now come to India, I’m one
of the unfortunate souls responsible
for air quality
in the national capital region,
we have to actually think about
this from two perspectives.
One, how do we keep it in the new
cycle right through the year?
Because if everyone adopts my very
unscientific approach looking at the skies,
it drops off the new cycle
because the sky has gone really
bad only after around October
and stay bad till about January.
Then people look up into the sky though,
"Oh, it’s blue.
It should be okay,"
but actually it’s bad all year round.
It’s just a question
of how bad it gets.
How you use information to inform
the public that in one time of the year,
it could be agricultural crop residue
burning, another time of year,
it could be transportation,
the third time of the year,
it could be industrial use, et cetera.
You got to keep it in the new
cycle and make it personal.
One of the things we’re
trying to do right
now is just- this is school admission
season so trying to inform parents that
depending on where you send
your children over,
depending on what you choose to be
the school for your children,
this is going to be the air quality,
just a few kilometers apart.
The other thing that we have
to do is get more information,
but in a democratic way.
Of course, we need a lot more sensors,
high-quality sensors run by the Central
Pollution Control Board all across
the country, not just in Delhi,
but what we also need are
thousands of reasonably decent,
low-cost air quality monitors
that can drive citizen awareness.
There’s one hooked up outside
of my own balcony in my apartment.
We’ve deployed 54 of them in villages
in Punjab where the crop burning happens.
We are deploying them near
industrial smokestacks.
That democratized approach to information
combined with keeping it in the new
cycle would create that our version
of that key make APECblue permanent.
If that doesn’t happen, the government
will always find an excuse not to act.
-We discussed in the dialogue ways
to support a citizen science movement,
really, in India to take that on,
and talk to Rob Stoner
who’s the head of the Tata
Center and deputy director
of the MIT Energy Initiative about
how MIT might participate in that.
Andy, I mentioned the subnational level.
You live in California.
As part of the Emerson Collective,
you work globally, but you’re based in,
probably, ground zero of attempts
at the subnational level to try
to meet the Paris obligation
that President Obama made.
How would you assess and judge
what’s happening in Massachusetts,
in California, and state
of Washington across the country,
that Reggie states in cities
across the country?
Give us a little sense of how
much action there is and what does
it amount to against federal
government that sort of pulls back?
-Thanks, John.
Thanks for your leadership
and the chair’s leadership
in this dialogue.
Leadership like nature abhors a vacuum.
That vacuum has got to get
filled and so to some degree,
there has been a useful catalysis
of activism from the bottom up
to that has generated in ways
that Americans have found their,
the Tocquevillian muscles,
and really leaned into the idea
of taking action where they are,
who they associate with in whatever
platform or jurisdiction they live in.
I guess I would group that into three
or four ways when we talk
about subnationals.
It’s easiest- subnationals
feels like a very
technical climate
negotiating type term,
but it was really if it’s not
the federal government then who?
Is it the states, the localities?
Is it the business and the NGOs,
universities,
great universities like MIT with
its leading climate action plan?
All of these participants play
a role and I feel like so many
of them have doubled down
on the urgency by giving themselves
time-based metrics and actual
volume metric measurements in ways
that everybody come together
and put it in the pot and says,
"Does that all amount to what
we should be doing as a country?"
We recently had a lot of this
group hosted in San Francisco
at the Global Climate Action
Summit and kind of compiled this.
Mayor Bloomberg has been
an extraordinary leader
in the C40 and they’re
all sort of commendable.
I can think of a few different
examples out of almost every category.
I mean from big things like PlaNYC
or what we heard from Boston last night,
and it’s ambitions to very
small towns like Stockton,
California where Mayor
Tubbs is deeply working
on bringing green cooled
world-class data centers
to revive economic green
opportunity engines
and at the same time measure
the greenhouse gas reductions.
On the state level, we’ve had the opportunity
in California during the hiatus
in Washington to be very aggressive
and very assertive in legislation.
In these last two terms alone,
the president pro tem, Kevin de Leon,
put together a bipartisan coalition,
something you don’t hear
out of Washington at all.
The leader of the House Assembly,
Chad Mayes,
joined him with about
a third of the Republican
caucus to pass what I think is the most
effectively implemented cap-and-trade
and carbon pricing
regime on earth today.
Not only because
it’s operational and it’s working
and it’s gathering billions of dollars,
but because it was designed
in its architecture to reinvest
transparently in communities,
and communities of lower-income,
with the California environment screen
so people begin to feel
the real benefit.
Most importantly, people who have
been left out and who are hit worst
and first by these wildfires
and by these temperature
rises are actually knowing
and feeling the government’s
doing something that
it has legitimacy around.
This last year,
something people didn’t think could be
done at all right as
the summit commenced,
California matched Hawaii’s
10-year headstart in having
an actionable stretch goal
for a zero-emission economy.
Now everybody thought,
"Well, that’s just Hawaii.
It’s in the middle of Pacific.
It’s oil. It’s easy. It’s an Island.
That’s an interesting showcase,
but when the sixth-largest
economy on earth puts together
a technology-neutral clean
energy standard and said,
"We will be zero-emission
by date certain,"
and defines the outcome rather than
the interest groups on the way in,
it’s a consequential model.
That’s now going to be
replicated across many States.
That template begins to proliferate
and take hold, but not from Washington.
I just add on the corporate
side and maybe I have a small
bias towards Apple and Lisa
and the good work there,
but Google and other tech
leaders are 100% procuring green
and demanding efficiency standards
ahead of what the government
would do because it’s good
for business and it’s good
for their stability of operations
and everything else,
so those revolutions are
being led from the ground up.
Then as everybody knows on this campus,
in terms of the universities
in a cutting edge- I mean,
we do a lot with MIT at the nexus
of nature and technology, natural capital.
We’ve got odd coalitions like MIT
and Walmart and Conservation International,
trying to find traceability
and use the blockchain
and digital ledgers and accounting
systems to understand how
they can incorporate
the externalities of coral reefs
and of fish in natural capital
for Walmart’s procurement methods.
Again, we don’t have
an agency set up in Washington
that can move that fast and that
robustly in the research so
there’s been this resurgent
bottom-up feeling about the vacuum,
but I would say that
a thousand beautiful yachts
is not tantamount
to a flagship aircraft carrier.
There is a need for real leadership
and for that vacuum to be filled,
back to Bill’s early commentary.
When I lived in Asia
my favorite annual sports
was once a year of consequence
with dragon boat,
and I was nobody in dragon but I was
one hand on the side of the boat
and try to get it right and enjoyed
the festivals afterwards, et cetera.
The most important person in any
good dragon boat is the drummer.
It’s not anybody with the or,
it’s the drummer.
How much can you get people
coordinated in a common pace,
in a common direction, to a common
destination at the fastest possible pace.
We in this country are
missing the drummer.
We’re looking around
the base for the drummer
and not just on the right,
also on the left.
The thing about a base is, and in this
particular presidency, the base,
the thing about a base is
there’s no glory in the base.
You’re only after stability.
Everybody actually knows that
the glory is at the peak.
It’s not in the base. It’s the ability
to branch out, engage, activate,
have a pinnacle of ideas
and get things done.
We are missing not only ideas,
we’re missing a competition of ideas.
We’re missing a reconciliation,
collaboration of ideas
of the type we’ve had in this
engagement with our Indian friends,
and we need that to be modeled
in Washington so that we can really
take advantage of all the excitement
that’s built from the bottom up.
-Very well said. I’m going to open this
up actually, let you ask questions,
but I’m going to put my panelists
on notice that before we end,
I’m going to ask them to give me one
idea they’re most excited about to
basically solve the climate crisis
so you should be thinking about that.
Let me open it up. Just please raise
your hand. Gentleman in the back.
Why don’t you use the mic?
-Hi, there.
Hi, I’m with the MIT Energy Initiative.
We have a study called
the Mobility of the Future study.
As a transportation engineer,
I have a question for the Indian
members of the panel.
What can India do to prepare
for a rise in GDP per capita,
which will result of rise
in rate of motorization in India?
The problem with transportation
is that as more people use it,
things get worse in terms
of quality of service for everyone.
-Yes, I think you’re absolutely
right that as the GDP grows,
we see today
the motorization in the major
cities has really grown tremendously.
I think the approach that
we’re trying to take now is
to change the dialogue
in terms of public transport.
I think we know that,
for instance, in India,
a very large amount
of transport even in cities is
done by walking and by cycling
but three-wheelers, for instance,
and wherever they are
available in the major cities
is also a big form of transport
for the common people, and trains.
If you take Bombay,
the mainstay has been trains.
In Bombay,
if you know the geography of Bombay,
its north-south and the trains run
north-south, more or less one East one West,
and the majority of commuter
traffic has been managed
by trains which have been
electric since forever.
I think what has happened is that because,
as you say, income levels increase,
there’s been greater demand for private
transportation and the main reason
for that is because
the quality of public
transport has not been
able to keep pace.
Most people going to an office, et
cetera, will not use the public transport.
The amazing thing in Bombay is that
we had a very very good bus system,
the BST, and the BST bus system over
a 10-year period
their ridership has halved,
only because the quality
of the ride has been so poor
not because of affordability
or cost or anything.
I think the issue of private
transport is coming.
I think what we are going to push more
and more is the internet-based
cab services.
I think those are going
to be the big drivers because
the traditional taxi in Bombay
and in other parts never kept up.
The quality of the vehicles
were very poor.
Many of them were 30-year-old vehicles.
We used to make something
called a Premier Padmini,
if you’ve ever heard of that,
but these are now 30 years old,
and if you sit in the backseat
of that you can
actually see the road
through the floor.
The quality has to change
there and it can
only change through public transport.
I think that, as we were also
talking about electrification,
my personal view is
that we must move faster
in public transport on electrification
because that’s where
you will get the maximum
number of passenger miles travelled,
and get the private
vehicles essentially
to move to the next
level of fuel efficiency,
which India has announced that
we will skip one generation and go
to BS-VI for the tailpipe pollution
within the next couple of years.
All the vehicle manufacturers
have to re-engineer
their vehicle so that will help
in air quality, but at the same time,
I think what we have to do is,
the only way we’re going
to reduce private transport,
is by making better public
transport available.
-Anil, do you want to add to that?
-I entirely agree with
everything that Jamshyd said,
but there is something which
requires a fundamental correction.
You mentioned about
the most polluted cities
in the world are
maximum number in India.
If you look at the growth,
the mid-sized cities and the rate
of growth of these mid-sized cities,
this apparently is fastest
for Indian mid-sized cities.
Now, that urbanization would take place,
that you cannot overdo it, it’s given,
and then we must prepare for that,
but I don’t think India has to have
the distinction
of the fastest-growing cities.
I think we need to concentrate
also on the rural side.
There are needs demands
on the rural side and that
also has to get into
the planning process.
I think even there the improvement
in the transport is very important.
In fact,
I mentioned this in the meeting,
I was involved in a technology vision
report that we prepared for India.
In the transportation segment,
we have put targets like,
anybody should be able to reach district
capital in less than two to three
hours, anybody should be able to reach
state capital in less than five hours,
anybody should be able to reach national
capital in less than eight hours.
In cities,
one should be able to go from place a
to place B in less than
one hour and design
the entire transportation system whether
it is cities or villages or whatever,
to meet such a requirement and I think
that should make some difference.
-The one point I wanted
to make because we need
to become mobility engineers
rather than just sort
of transport system
engineers and the problem
we have is that our last
mile connectivity is poor.
We’ve got 10 cities in India
right now with Metro Railway,
15 other cities are building Metro
railway, and many more will come on stream.
The point is those are
great modern carriages,
they’ll be better than the T here,
but once you get to a station,
from there the last two kilometers
in a hot country, you don’t want to walk.
That last two kilometers,
if you don’t fix it,
what you’re doing is you’re nudging
that same commuter to a private vehicle
for the entire 15-kilometer journey
because you’re not fixing two kilometers.
That’s the design problem.
-Yes, the mic.
-I came a bit late so I apologize
if you already discussed this.
The global carbon project reported
a few months ago that India’s greenhouse
gas emissions have gone up 6.7%
in the previous year more than China,
more than the US.
I was curious to get
your insights on what
can be done to bend that
curve and from the US
perspective or the lessons
that are helpful
for India from our experience
both good and bad.
-Arunabha.
-We are just over two
gigatonnes of emissions
so significantly lower than US or China,
and per capita terms, very low,
but I don’t want to make that argument.
Let’s look at the wedges.
Number one, decarbonization has
to happen in the power sector, where,
unlike China, which waited
till it built out 900 gigawatts
of coal and then got
on the renewable story,
we decided to put our target of 175
gigawatts of renewables when the--
At that time, the entire electricity
system was just 300 gigawatts.
It’s a massive push.
What we are trying to do in 7 to 10 years,
took Germany two decades to achieve.
At the margin,
renewables is beating coal already.
What’s going to be the next big wedge?
That’s partially my answer
also to John’s question,
answers his exam question,
is industrial heat.
How do we make steel using
the cleanest fuels possible?
Because you can’t put
a solar panel on top
of a steel factory or a cement plant.
What you need is alternative
fuels which are lower carbon.
Refuse-derived fuels, for instance,
can substitute for coal
in the cement sector.
The Indian cement sector’s already
the world’s most energy-efficient,
but it is an urbanizing
country so we’re
going to keep making
more and more cement.
Can we substitute
a refuse-derived fuel for coal?
Can we split water
using renewables and use
the hydrogen as a substitute
for coal in making steel?
That’s going to be the next big wedge.
Then comes transportation.
What happens is,
in climate negotiations,
we keep thinking about
when is our peaking year.
Whereas I would ask the question,
alternatively,
what is an alternative
way to grow which does
not compromise my industrial
growth strategy?
Does not compromise my job story.
That’s where, again, technology and design
comes in very much front and center.
We of course need some policy signals.
We need more innovative financing,
but those are where I would look.
Those are the new, interesting,
exciting spaces beyond solar and wind.
-Kelly,
you want to take a crack at the American
experience to be able
to help guide this?
-Well, sure. I’ll pick up
right where Arunabha left off.
You can look
at the American experience.
You can look at the Chinese experience.
In many ways, we went through this
traditional growth model where we decided
we were going to develop first
and then clean up our act afterwards.
What’s really exciting about
what’s happening in India and now
happening in China is trying
to find a new growth model.
We shouldn’t expect that
this is going to be easy.
This is our fundamental challenge.
How are we going to find ways
to grow and create good, significant,
real jobs for people in a way that
does not ruin the environment?
India is just going up right now.
It’s just starting up this really,
what could be a very
significant growth path.
The challenge here is
to figure out ways to produce
economic growth without
causing the environmental harm.
In the United States, we have
been trending this way for a long
time but it’s been slow and gradual.
We have been moving
towards lighter industry.
Same thing in China.
China’s been much less gradual.
Just this last year, their tertiary
sector exceeded their secondary sector.
Services exceeded manufacturing
for the first time.
We are in this pathway and the challenge,
which is pretty exciting, John,
is how do we accelerate the good
stuff and slow down the bad stuff,
and manage that transition
for workers in industry.
-I’m going to give one other additional
answer from the US perspective,
which is the President Obama’s
decision to commit to paper,
a climate action plan.
Then have a mechanism
to both engage the private
sector and drive
the whole of government,
was critical to the success
that he achieved.
I think that the Indian government
is used to and good at planning.
Then the question is, do they have
the right mechanisms to implement
those plans and to drive
those plans forward?
In the back.
-First,
thanks very much for the comments.
My name is Tom Hayzlett.
I’m curious, in your deliberations
the spark of citizen
scientists is really interesting.
In the financing side
of the conversations,
have you considered or explored
the possibilities of leveraging what
I presume is a small landholding
structure for the agrarian sector,
together with the banking system?
Which is from my perspective,
pretty heavily overdeveloped
to serve the rural communities.
India stands as a watershed country
with respect to microfinance.
I’m just curious if you’ve considered
what I’m going to call the small
unit size financing for some
of the innovation and the ideation
that you’ve talked about.
-How much right is that but anybody
want to take that from the Indian side?
-Sure. Let me give
you an example from a Southern
state in India called Andhra Pradesh.
About three-and-a-half years ago,
they decided to start experimenting with
a program called Zero
Budget Natural Farming.
The natural farming part is eliminating
chemical pesticides, and fertilizers.
They’re using natural
inoculants to treat the soil,
increase aeration of the soil,
as well as treat the seeds.
The zero budget part was, can I do
this at about one-tenth the normal
input cost for the small
marginal farmer?
In the last three,
three-and-a-half years,
what they managed to do
is scale it out to about
350,000 farmers across all
districts in Andhra Pradesh.
Last June,
the chief minister of the state
stood in front of 8,000
farmers and said,
"By 2024,
all 6 million farmers in the state
will shift to zero
budget natural farming.
This is the world’s largest
experiment at that scale.
Now why am I using this as an example
is because of the financing story here.
There’s state government funding
coming in terms of training
the what I call the master
farmers in each block.
A block is a group of villages.
In each block,
there are master farmers being trained,
who then go and train
farmers in the villages,
as well as providing some
of the initial capital
for moving the farmer
towards these new inoculants.
There is private capital coming
in in the form of BNP Paribas and others,
up to about $2.5 billion dollars
investment that they’ve committed,
that they think that they can
co-finance with the state government.
The third part here, which goes
back to the microfinance example,
Andhra Pradesh has a very
long history of women-led
self-help groups
and microfinance institutions.
Now on the back of that experience,
men started forming
their own self-help groups.
In the summer, when I was with
the chief minister in the villages,
it was very interesting. In a small
hall like this in the village,
the women would be making
a PowerPoint presentation on a wall.
There’s no screen.
Then the men would start projecting
their presentation on the other side.
They realized that leveraging
the social capital of what you already
have experienced on the microfinancing
for other purposes,
could now bring in the men who
are the owners of the land.
Even though the women are tilling,
unfortunately, the men own the land.
They say, "We are going to form
our own self-help groups."
That then creates a new suction or demand
for new finance being generated.
Government capital, private capital,
large institutional investment,
and microfinance coming together
for a big experiment at scale.
Even if it fails, it’ll yield some
results for us, lessons for us.
-Grab the mic.
-My name is Russell Sydes.
I go back to the epoch in which
it was necessary for Republicans
to persuade Ronald Reagan
to embrace the Montreal Protocol.
Since then, we’ve all witnessed
an increasing polarization
of perceptions of climate science,
to the degree that the subject is
anathema amongst the Republican base,
as much as it is an object of advocacy
by the Center for American Progress.
Now Bill Riley can testify
that there was a time in which
bipartisan science policy
was regarded as normative,
in which you could find
people to talk to at OSTP
or the AAAS regardless
of what party you belonged to.
Unfortunately, that is no longer
so conspicuously the case.
Climate policy doesn’t
happen in a vacuum.
I find it impossible to engage
my Republican brethren on the subject,
not just because the climate
deniers have been vilifying climate
science but because some of John’s
people have been making--
-Vilifying the Republicans.
-Making me and other climate-focused
scientists the objects
of opposition research.
Now I don’t mind being called--
-Well, not you personally.
-No, but I don’t mind being
called the [?] but it happened.
When we get to the international level,
the question in my mind arises,
how are we going to do this for the next
two years, roughly speaking?
In the policy vacuum created by
the anathemization of science
by the Republicans,
when the Democrats won’t
talk to them either.
That said, I’m very intrigued
by what’s been said about India,
both in terms
of the utilitarian emphasis
on the fact that the air conditioning’s
going to happen to cause climate changes
happening regardless of the rate.
In that context,
what is India doing about
the less well-popularized
aspects of the problem,
specifically the urban
heating effects that are
exacerbating the demand
for air conditioning?
Since John mentioned
carbon black as a low
profile villain in radiative forcing,
by the lack of attention to the human
albedo footprint, both urban and rural.
We make our roofs brighter,
which makes our cities cooler,
but carbon black settles
over land and water alike.
I don’t see anything
being done to engage
on the issue of the human
albedo footprint.
-[crosstalk] I can play
with the Republican piece,
and Bill is in a fair
position to correct me,
but I consider George
Shultz amongst my mentors
and I don’t think
George’s characterization
of taking the Montreal
Protocol to Reagan
with whom he had the backing
to negotiate it, it was a big lift.
I think he actually got
direction from Reagan to execute.
It wasn’t how do you compel or convince
a conservative to do the right thing
on science, it was a question I think,
as you say, of a different
era when people were competing
for the best ideas
of how to problem-solve.
Now I would go on to say that a lot
of what you just said could have
easily been said when I was
the climate negotiator for George W.
Bush, and everybody’d say, "Look,
this guy hates the earth
and hates its children.
He’s horrible and we’ll
never do anything again
because he doesn’t want
the Kyoto Protocol.
Of course,
that means he’s anti-climate."
I think generally today, there’s a bit
of a consensus that we all needed
to get beyond the Kyoto
Protocol to get to Paris.
As my mentor George Shultz would say,
that probably Bush didn’t need
to reject it with such flourish.
In that environment, we were competing
for ideas, for better or for worse,
but there was always a constant
and chronic dialogue about best efforts,
irrespective,
and ideology was not the driver.
The difference-- and I think just
on the stage representing the past
five administrations of experience
across Republican and Democrat,
the difference is that we now
have a president who I don’t
even think has a scientist
in the White House or an OSTP.
-He’s got one.
-It just happened.
-Can’t wait to hear who that is.
-Actually a respected meteorologist.
Tough job too.
-Okay, one for the good guys.
I mean just that, we’re two years
into it without a scientist,
we have no science complex,
so we’ve abdicated rationalism
is what’s happened.
This has nothing to do with core
political competition of ideas,
this is an abdication of rational.
How stupid can we be to celebrate
it in search of a base?
That’s, I think you’re pointing to,
is an unusual thing.
I don’t actually attribute
that at all to GOP politics.
I think there is another
thing going on in the body
politic that is undermining
our parties in general,
and the GOP is the first to suffer this
massive implosion from
these terrible problems.
Trump is as much a symptom
as a cause in those things.
I don’t also know whether the current
construct will return to that,
but I do know that thinking
people and universities,
and epicenters and exchanges
of knowledge have to be vigilant,
because irrespective of what party
is in power at any given time,
we will lose our democracy
if we are not educating
on a baseline and celebrating
truth and knowledge.
That’s what this
administration has undermined.
-I would just add one or two points.
One is the sclerosis
of respect for science
and understanding
and appreciation of it,
really took its most serious
turn with the Gingrich Congress,
who so unlike the present Congress
which seems by default to support
the president no matter where he goes--
even the former trade representative,
Senator Portman voted
against the Trans-Pacific
Partnership-- they support
their president.
That was not true when
Gingrich got to the House.
He did not really
support President Bush.
Fuel tax, he didn’t support gas tax,
he didn’t support the budget agreement.
At any rate, that changed and it was
essentially an ideological appeal that
worked for Gingrich and worked
for getting the majority in the House,
and seemed to be something
that was worth doing.
I have had the experience
and I brought it up
recently in an article
in a Jesuit magazine,
of going to church and never
hearing words mentioned,
but it seems to me
it might be-- The Catholic
Church has a very good
record on immigration.
You don’t hear about it from the pulpit,
you don’t hear about climate,
you don’t hear about the environment.
The Pope has written an encyclical
on this very subject,
and so I’ve asked several pastors,
why is it?
They’ve been quite frank to say, "If
you mention any one of those three words,
half your congregation looks up
and thinks, oh, you’re one of those guys.
You’re with them."
That’s where the country is.
Just to take the point that Andy made,
that it’s a larger problem
than the political one,
but I was looking for a way
to inject some hopeful
note in this otherwise
depressing conversation.
I’ll tell you what it is.
It’s that the United States
did behave at the COP, [?].
The United States did issue
the report on the state
of climate and its future
impacts on the United States.
If you look at the difference
between the budget
proposals which would have gutted EPA,
both in terms of staffing
and also in terms of budget,
the Congress quietly crossed them out,
actually didn’t do it.
Substantial funding has continued
to causes and to activities that
otherwise one might have expected
this administration to have killed.
It may sound like small beer,
but it’s very important that
that has been happening.
There are forces in the Congress
with whom we disagree on climate,
who nevertheless are part
of an effort to protect
the integrity of certain
of our institutions and activities.
-If I could just add real quick,
I think one of the most
hopeful things has been,
there has been steady bipartisan support
for energy technology innovation.
In fact, the Congress has completely
rejected Trump’s budget requests
which would have completely
gutted the US energy RD&D budget.
That’s actually really good news.
We should be increasing
it a lot more than we are.
-Lamar Alexander, who’s leaving
the Senate had a lot to do with that,
but that’s right.
-I’ll give you one more piece
of good news and notwithstanding
the fact that California
has replaced Massachusetts
as the weirdest state
in the country from the perspective
of people particularly
living in red states.
I saw a little bit of Marty
Walsh’s State of the City,
and after talking at the front end
about the challenge of climate change,
towards the back end he said,
"I’m going to Washington,"
after talking about its dysfunctionality,
"I’m going with Charlie Baker,
and we’re going
to present a united front
in Congress to what needs to happen
to make our state and our city great."
I think modeling more of that
kind of behavior is actually
quite a good thing to do.
We’ll take one last question,
then the quiz question.
-Hi, my name is Abhijit.
I work in the cleantech space here.
Prior to this, I was working
in India in a power company
so I’ve seen good
and bad of both worlds.
My question is really, are
we overemphasizing the importance of Delhi
and Washington DC in the whole climate,
bilateral work and discussion?
It’s not the first time
we’ve had a policy vacuum.
The US never ratified the Kyoto,
a lot of clean energy projects
still did happen in India.
Even post-Kyoto most
of the private sector that came
in was basically between
private sector participation,
the GE or the First Solar
and the Indian companies.
I think I have
a two-pronged question here.
One is, you also see in 2018, 2019,
a larger role of the private sector,
both from finance as
well as technology side,
in penetrating and helping India become
cleaner, A, from the US standpoint.
Secondly, do you also see
an environment for the next
possible two to five years where
we can still do as much clean green
stuff without absolutely
any involvement?
Because the US is going to get
into elections this year,
we never know what’s
going to happen there.
We’ve had a good last four, five years.
I’m just putting it out
to the audience more
on a generic basis of the private
sector participation.
-Anil and Jamshyd have
reacted a little bit.
-I think if you look
at the Indian scenario,
particularly in the context of energy,
it’s a problem of a much
higher dimension,
simply because it’s not just a question
of decarbonizing
the existing energy system.
Our energy system may have
to go maybe four times,
five times bigger than what
it is to cater to the needs.
That’s actually an issue of investment.
We need to have a strategy where
a very fast and very large growth is
placed alongside the greener objective.
I think apart from finance,
there are also issues as
to how the money is deployed.
It’s not as if a single strategy
will work for the whole country.
You need to look at this problem
in a somewhat disaggregated way.
That’s how I look at it.
-Jamshyd?
-Yes, I’ll give you an example.
Basically, nobody in India knew
very much about green buildings.
10 years ago,
we started this program based on the US
experience of how to go
about building certified
green buildings and how
to encourage the building
industry to actually
move in that direction.
Over these last 10 years,
what we’ve achieved from that is
that we have the second-largest
stock of certified green buildings
in the world after the US.
I think the thing is
if you pick on a particular
area-- and green buildings
have multiple benefits,
not just for raw materials but also
for the people who work in it and all that.
You’ve got to find these type of projects
that are good for the economy,
good for the people from
the business point of view,
and really will make
a shift in the narrative
in the way that development is done.
-Okay, lightning round.
What are you most excited
about for the next few years?
-I’m most excited about nanomanufacturing.
Wow, that’s off left base.
We’ve exited the industrial age,
we still have climate negotiations,
policies and discussions. We’re in it,
we’re in the information age.
That’s about an era where every device,
every appliance in our physical world,
it’s not just an iPhone
but our toaster or our thermostat
or our cars are going to be
WiFi-connected and IP addressable,
and either consuming,
producing or storing energy.
That means at the heart of that,
how are we managing that energy
in a connected ubiquitous
Internet of Things.
That means we need
to understand at the nano level,
how we can design thermal efficiency
and the fastest-growing source
of energy consumption, data consumption,
and it means that we can use
nanomanufacturing to design a 10x improvement
in battery storage so that we can
get off of carbon and fossil fuels.
-That’s good. Good start. Arunabha?
-Just three agricultural activities,
pesticide spraying, rice transplanting,
harvesting, using clean energy is
a $40 billion opportunity in India.
14 non-farm activities
in the rural economy using
clean energy is a $13
billion opportunity in India.
What I’m really excited
about is if we can use
the most advanced clean
energy technologies,
and use it for income-generating
activities in the rural economy,
then you are really changing
the narrative altogether
of what will drive
the next phase of growth.
-Kelly?
-Well, I’m a policy geek.
I am really excited about
policy implementation.
The reason is there’s actually a huge
amount of policy experimentation
that’s happening all over the world
on climate change right now.
Our Climate Policy Lab
at Fletcher is working on trying
to understand which of these climate
policies work, which don’t and why.
There’s just a lot to do,
and there’s no reason to wait.
I’m excited to work on getting
stuff done right now.
-Well, actually, one of the things
that I mentioned earlier was,
I’m really excited about the future
of microprocessors for cooling.
I think that these thermo chips,
there’s not much scientific work,
development and real
interest in materials
and everything that goes
into making them efficient.
My ambition is to make
them more efficient
than a compressor-based cooling system.
From whatever I’ve seen,
I think that’s entirely possible,
based on the science on it, and I hope
that that can then revolutionize
cooling and heating
throughout the world.
-Bill?
-I think a really great
cause of hope to me is
the activation and energizing
of millennials.
There are many in this audience here,
and there are some 12 million
millennials who have never voted.
They say they voted, they believe
probably that they have voted. [laughs]
They believe it is a civic obligation
to vote but the record shows,
and these are public records,
that they never have.
Pew has done an analysis
of attitudes in different cohorts,
and will actually show you what the top
issues of concern to people are.
For the country,
the environment is distressingly low,
it’s in the lower 8, 9 or 10 or so.
People don’t vote the environment
basically, your climate.
However, the polls show that a very
significant number of those 12
million rank environment
or climate number 1 or number 2,
so there is a group called
the Environmental Voter Project,
which targets those voters.
They already know that
the people they’re talking
to have listed climate
or the environment in the top two.
They touch them five times,
they talk to them,
they have conversations
where they probably
get them to promise
to make a commitment,
a signed commitment to vote
in the next election,
even if it’s for the school board.
Just to get in the habit so
that they do learn how to do it.
They get in touch with him before
registration, and they ask them,
have you registered
and here’s how you register.
Then finally,
they don’t take a position.
They don’t endorse anybody
in these elections.
Their research,
some of which was done in this state,
shows that they can increase
by 2% to 4% turnout,
and the turnout at that level,
as you know,
in so many close elections in the United
States, is a very big deal.
I think it could change the complexion
of politics in the United States,
and change the approach
to some of these issues.
One of the interesting
things about it is even
if they do not succeed
in affecting the election,
they do something that from a political
point of view is very important.
Politicians see that
people are not interested
in these issues
in their constituencies,
and so they don’t talk about
them and they don’t think
they have to have positions
that respond to them.
Once they see that people have
registered and those are the issues
of concern, because they’ll be polling
them, they will decide next time,
"I’ve got to have answers,
they’re part of my constituency
that does vote these issues,
cares and is watching what I’m doing."
I think this is a very
promising development.
It’s something that how millennials
can really use a lot of the energy,
and I think we owe some
of it to Trump as someone said today.
Well,
more power to him in that respect.
Let’s help him mobilize the rest of it.
-It’s called praising
with faint damnation.
[laughter]
Anil?
-India, even today, around two-thirds
of population lives in villages.
The larger segment of Indians
would be in villages,
at least for a few more decades.
Average household income
in villages is roughly half
of average in urban income,
so there is a huge divide.
For me, carrying out or promoting
rural development which leverages
today’s knowledge-- because
it’s only by leveraging today’s
knowledge that you can bridge
this gap and also take villages
beyond the classical agriculture
or agro produce value-addition.
I see no reason why villages
cannot participate in manufacture,
why they can’t participate
in service sector.
The gap there is, we have
to make them knowledge-empowered.
That to my mind is something
which the new era
actually enables us to do.
It’s an opportunity and sooner
we bridge the gap, better it would be.
Otherwise I see problems.
-Okay, I will close it out with a couple
of points and what I’m excited about,
which is that 2 of the top 10
interventions that could bend the curve
on climate change and get us
going below 2.0 and down to 1.5,
are universal access
to family planning and full
implementation of the gender
equity SDG challenge.
What I’m optimistic about,
is after the 2018 elections,
we actually have some policy makers who
might actually understand that point.
Thank you all for coming
out and hanging out with us.
I hope you take an interest both in not
just the climate and energy dialogue,
but the US-India relationship
and look to India as
a source of inspiration
for action in the future.
Thank you all for being here.
[applause]
