Before the issue of the historicity of the characters in the Ramayana came along to cloud the issue, much of the public debate hovered around political and environmental issues.
Neither the commercial viability, nor the putative military strategic benefits, were adequately scrutinised.
The commercial case for the project rests on the time and cost saved due […]
The FT has a very illuminating article on the politics of climate change. It is illuminating because it brings a perspective to the debate that has sadly been lacking so far - one of pragmatic international relations. Taking that perspective explains why the US, China and other major polluters have not signed on to any […]
Following my previous post on climate change, Nitin pointed me to a paper in the EPW on mitigating climate change in India (also available at GDNet). The authors analyze the impact of economic instruments such as a carbon tax on carbon emissions to conclude that, “the amount of reduction of carbon emissions is not substantial enough […]
The recent G8 summit did not achieve what Angela Merkel may have hoped for - a new treaty with binding CO2 emissions cuts for the world’s major polluters - USA, China, and India. While both India and China were under considerable pressure to accept such targets, they resisted, promising only to “cooperate”.
India’s position on climate […]
In the posts on a case for a carbon tax we saw a deliberate exclusion of existing power plants from the ambit of a “cleanup”. This made sense for a few reasons. Primarily since the plants are already up and running, it would be economically and politically more difficult to get them to cleanup. Since […]
This is a follow-up post to the “The Case For A Carbon Tax”. There were some very valid points raised in the comments which I will try to address here. The concerns have essentially been clubbed into two points.
Should the carbon tax pinch?
Lets start with the power plants. Lanco recently won the Sasan Ultra Mega […]
If you go to the NASA website, you can see beautiful satellite pictures of the earth at night. If you look carefully where the lights are, it says a lot about where the world economy is today. Europe is probably the most uniformly luminous; but not as bright as the eastern part of the US […]
Ajay Shah alerts us to a draft volume published by the World Bank (free download) titled Dancing with Giants: China, India and the global economy.
Drawing upon the latest research, this volume analyzes the influences on the rapid future development of these two countries and examines how their growth is likely to impinge upon other countries. […]
So plastic bags are clogging up our drains. How do we solve the problem?
One way is to ban plastic bags. That is the typical solution we come up with for many problems. The thinking that informs such decision making is Bush-style “for us or against us”. The only reason why anyone would […]
(Note: I had written this post more than a week back when the High Court had decided to block the development of mangroves. I didn’t post it because the IIPM fracas was consuming the blogosphere. Now that the High Court has gone and blocked the sale of mill lands too, I thought it would be […]