Politics of “Power”- The dirty little secrets of Clean Energy

Power and Politics are often intertwined in conversations as two sides of the same coin, but not in the way we shall discuss today. The power I am talking about is not the abstract constitutional/unconstitutional socio-political tiara but the very real scientific phenomena supplying the energy which is currently running the world.

What kind of power is more important today is for the philosophers to ridicule, but it should be said right at the beginning that the world as it stands in the 21st century is energy consuming, energy centric and energy driven.

Energy is a very fundamental aspect of universal life, without it there would simply be no life, possibly no Earth, no sun nothing. Climate Change is only happening cause man is not able to meet his energy needs without excavating the entire planet to fuel his expansion and we are simply unable to stop despite the threat being existential to us.

Today power and fuel consumption continue to make up for almost 70% of worldwide emissions.

That’s how much we are addicted to power.

However, even though all of us need energy not all are blessed with the same kind of bounty when it comes to producing it.

Oil and the few countries that have it have wielded a much greater share of the global “power” by virtue of their geographical history. The wars waged in the last few decades are a testament to this fact.

Security policies world-wide are elaborately constructed balances to keep the oil supply going for your region. Oil prices today dominate any and every aspect of the economy- in fact as the Organization of Oil Producing Countries (OPEC or OPEC+) would point out to you, such is the demand neigh the need for their product that a slight reduction in supply can push millions of people worldwide under poverty in a matter of days.

Therefore, the most Machiavellian thing one could do in this decade is securing one’s country’s energy streams from any foreign dependence. In fact, Machiavelli would give you an uncharacteristic pat on the back if you are able to go a step further and cultivate others’ dependence on your energy sources.

This is precisely why clean energy has had such a resounding success in the last few decades.

It is easy to lose perspective in the drowning noise of climate concerns. Looking at the world today it seems that everything anyone is doing anywhere is only for the planet. Whether someone is selling oil or selling toothpaste- all of it is green.

But, that’s just the marketing of it, the real reason for it to be even partially green (might take a while to unpack this term, so you can make your own inferences here) is simply because its good for business. It separates you from your competitors and makes it easier for “woke” audiences to identify with your brand.

It’s the same story when it gets to clean energy- the one sector of environmental action which has exceeded expectations and all because unlike a project for planting trees or cleaning the ocean, this one never saw a paucity of funds.

The only metric that seems to matter in the 21st century is the “rate of return” and the world businesses and governments knew what kind of returns they could get if this is one works.

Looking at the history of the development of this industry should give contemporary policy makers quite a bit of clarity on what actually works in this wild wild west of a world and what’s merely rhetoric.

The world in the 70s understood the need for energy independence when wars in the Middle East made living in Europe and USA extremely expensive and difficult.

In fact, one of the first major grants (1 Billion USD) ever given to the cause was under the title of Energy Independence and was given by the US government to harness the “power of the sun” and develop affordable solar panels to run the country.

Even though the Regan government pulled back the grant later on, the energy crisis created from a disturbed oil supply incentivized other governments worldwide to invest and develop this technology and make it accessible to its population.

Policies from Japan, Germany and China completely changed the game and have far reaching global impacts even today by virtue of making the right kind of investment decades ago.

At the beginning, the cost of producing solar energy outweighed the cost of using fossil fuels by more than double digit factors, today in some countries it is cheaper to produce solar power than burning coal.

The entire burden of my argument is simply that this remarkable journey had nothing to do with climate impact and only national interests governed this transition and will mostly continue to do so.

Now one may question at this point of time, that how does this even matter- whether you do it for your own national interest or the collective global interest, both are the means to the same end.

The simple answer is- I don’t agree.

Firstly, in the case of any country holding oil reserves (and take a peek at the climate champion Canada’s keystone oil pipeline), these interests are generally conflicting and if we don’t call a spade a spade at this point in time, we will have very little left for the future.

National interest is simply a far more affective tool than climate change in moving the mechanics of any of our current institutions of power.

For example, climate change is currently not under the mandate of the UN Security Council and they refuse to discuss it despite some strong permanent members lobbying for it. However, a war for oil can compel the council to meet in the middle of the night if necessary.

There is simply an in-built hierarchy of priorities which govern funding, policy and even influence when it comes to such macro-level transitions and while climate change has been resonating with the occidental consciousness in the last few years, it is fleeting and incomplete.

The US can simply join and leave the Paris Agreement as per its whims, the same EU lecturing India for burning coal to produce power can also restart their own coal plants as soon as Russian supplies get threatened. What all of this tells us is that as difficult as it is to accept, the reality is that there are more immediate concerns than climate at least in the minds of people running the world right now. And identifying clean energy from a purely climate point of view actually only slows down its deployment.

Therefore, interlinking of “clean energy” and “energy independence” would fetch us far better results.

A majority of our emissions are originating from fossil fuels and the sad fact of the matter is lowering our dependence on fossil fuels will change our geo-strategy much before it changes the climate. It seems astounding that this aspect of clean energy has greatly been missing in conversations around it especially these days.

Another interesting impact can be gauged from juxtaposing the OPEC+ with the about to be born Global Biofuels Alliance. In a future where biofuels are able to replace even 25% of fossil fuels, the influence of OPEC+ countries in the most critical of aspects of global policy would be greatly reduced. The composition and self-interests of OPEC+ countries which are majorly the Middle East and Russia are very different from those of the GBA which have USA, Brazil and India at the centre. No longer will the world prices be governed just by the whims of OPEC+ supply policy but these “tantrums” would easily become an opportunity for someone else to substitute the “power” OPEC currently wields. This will have an enormous implication beyond the climate domain and really needs much deeper and public evaluation.

Secondly, just look at India’s own energy matrix today, almost three quarters of our energy needs are fed by fossil imports, this number is rapidly shrinking today because of the development in India’s internal capacity to produce clean energy.

Now this umbrella term actually has a lot of dimensions which are actually competing amongst themselves. We have of course the classics like Hydro, wind and solar, but we are also taking great leaps in producing alternate forms of energy like bioenergy, green hydrogen, Lithium based mobility etc.

Now an energy policy governed by climate considerations would always ask us to adopt the lowest carbon pathway as the easy solution to this problem of choice. Of course, cost of production, deployability and scalability would be the other concerns and yet I argue that national interests should be the deciding factor (not the only factor) in any of these deliberations.

Look at how China made a success story out of solar. The country has solar power in abundance and anyway a development of solar energy infrastructure would have greatly benefited China but the genius invention of cheap solar panels enabled China to open new, significantly wealthy and evergreen channels of trade with multiple countries who required these cheap solar panels for their own energy needs. These countries were providing incentives- monetary and otherwise to their population to generate solar power and China greatly leveraged all of this to create a market for itself. This wasn’t some god given bounty of oil reserves that no one can do anything about, this was purely crafted by man and could be replicated anywhere.

The latest trend of nationalization of natural resources like Lithium, Cobalt etc. in South East Asia or Latin America is also trailing in the same direction. The underlying objective is to once again safeguard the national interests of the nation. And our own consideration of the energy matrix needs to have a similar overview.

While EVs may seem to be a great solution from many points of views but if the whole infrastructure remains dependent on foreign Lithium imports that are no longer governed by business sense but national interests of different countries then it might be a better idea to build bio-mobility infrastructure in the country which would be consuming the waste or crops produced within the country’s own economy and can be regulated as per your own needs and capabilities.

It is also possible that this route would take care of many other challenges of the country including managing of its vast waste reservoirs and even poverty alleviation of its farmers, ragpickers and other marginalized communities within its socio-economic complex.

So not only should clean energy be pushed from a national interest perspective but even the multiple facets of clean energy should be linked to national goals and reviewed in that context.

The simple and final point is that we have a window to reimagine one of the most fundamental supply chains for human existence in the 21st Century and for once we are not completely helpless as we were in the case of oil.

We have a number of choices, a number of pros and cons to consider- climate is one of the major ones, but this transition is not happening because of climate change, the fundamental factor underlying all of this is energy security for nation states and will be well in interest of India as well as her environment to be mindful of this fact while making policy decisions and actually leverage the once in a century opportunity that lies in front of us to get the Machiavellian pat on the back and actually strive to become an energy exporter to the world.?