India received $500 million in funding for solar panels to ratify the United Nations’ Paris agreement on global warming, according to an anonymous lender who spoke to United Press International (UPI).
India’s new cash infusion came from the Asian Development Bank, but it wasn’t exactly unexpected. Under the terms of the agreement, wealthier nations like America are expected to help finance the development of solar power in poor developing nations like India.
India increased solar subsidies by a factor of eight last year, raising the amount spent from $92 million to $770 million annually. India has a long history of raking in cash from Western governments and banks to finance its solar spending. The country got a series of loans worth $1.5 billion in January from international financial institutions for rooftop solar power. In January, The World Bank granted India another $750 million in rooftop solar loans. Before either of these, India already received substantial assistance from Western countries, equivalent to $2.5 trillion over the next 15 years in direct aid, grants, and cheap financing for green energy.
Despite these vast investments, India gets a mere 2 percent of its electricity from solar panels, while coal plants provide 67 percent of the nation’s power. India is currently building 87,122 megawatts of coal power capacity. As a result, in 2014 Indian carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from energy use increased by 8.1 percent, making it the world’s fastest-growing producer of CO2. India and the rest of the developing world are projected to produce 68 percent of future CO2 emissions, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
India’s government is also currently wasting huge amounts of solar power because the panels are too expensive to operate, according to a letter from the country’s green energy ministry. The waste is caused due to the inherently inefficient nature of solar power, which doesn’t coincide with times of day when power is most needed. This poses an enormous safety challenge to grid operators and makes power grids vastly more fragile.
India’s power grid is already extremely fragile, as the country is spending quite a bit supporting solar power.
Cutting rising CO2 emissions from India and China is critical to the goal of slowing global warming, yet neither country has made a serious commitment to spending $90 trillion — the International Energy Agency says must be spent by both countries to curb global warming.
This article originally appeared in The Daily Caller
We are off our heads, not sure of India but China has a better standard of life then many I know in the U.K. Food is cheap and even poorer folk eat out, energy is inexpensive and the infrastructure outstrips the U.K. And Italy.
If it took half a billion for India to sign a stupid accord it must mean they don’t really believe CO2 is a problem. Guess what? They are right!!
The Paris Agreement is a treaty that is not a treaty. To call it treaty in the U.S. would mean that it would be subject to Senate ratification, where it would never pass. To call it just an agreement in other countries would reduce its credibility to nothing. The agreement/treaty commits countries to accept an “aspirational goal” of keeping the rise in average global temperatures from going above 1.5 degrees C. from preindustrial levels. It says nothing about emissions limits either at the global or individual country levels. So, the only thing countries are individually committed to do is to submit “plans” as to which measures they are taking and to update these plans every five years. If, as many believe, there is no truth to the claim that rising CO2 levels are causing global warming, there will be no way to tell what impact, if any, national plans and measures are having on global temperatures. If, instead, the global warming alarmists are right, the path of emissions growth that the world is now on due to economic growth in the developing countries is virtually certain to move the world past the 1.5 degree target. By the way, there is no scientific basis for the 1.5 degree target; it is purely political. Ratification of this treaty/agreement simply gives the radical environmentalists another political victory and confuses the media of the world further.