India Plans To Spend $21 Trillion On Climate Action. Will It Be Too Little, Too Late? – CleanTechnica

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In a post earlier today, we reported on a joint study by Climate Central and World Weather Attribution that finds the actions taken by the nations of the world in the ten years since the Paris Climate Accords have helped to limit global heating by the end of this century to 2.6º C. In the absence of any climate mitigation strategies, the world would likely have warmed by 4º C at the turn of the next century, so less heating is welcome news.

But don’t break out your party hats quite yet. 2.6º C still means many of the world’s major population centers will experience many more super-hot days each year and get hammered by extreme rains and extreme drought along the way to the next century. Of course, the polar ice caps will continue to melt during that time, so a few island nations will probably disappear by then — along with most of the East Coast of the United States — but that is a small price to pay for energy security, right?

Depending on who you ask, India is either the most populous nation on Earth or soon will be. At its current growth rate, by 2070 the total footprint of India’s built environment would double, the number of vehicles on its roads would shoot up to 190 cars per 1,000 people compared with just  32 per 1000 people today, and its energy needs would increase from 870 million tons of oil equivalent (MTOE) today to 2250 MTOE.

India Announces A Climate Plan

This week, the government of India said it is planning to reach net zero by 2070 while growing its economy to match the growth in its population, which will be quite a trick if it can pull that off. On October 17, 2025, Bloomberg Green reporters Lou Del Bello and Akshat Rathi wrote that India is planning to invest a whopping $21 trillion to make it happen.

They report that the plan calls for reaching peak emissions in 2045 — a full decade earlier than the current trajectory. But the need to mitigate emissions that promote a hotter environment has historically been at odds with India’s priorities for  economic growth and energy security. The country still leans heavily on coal as the source of its electricity.

The new plan has India striving to achieve climate and economic development goals simultaneously, which is a little like trying to ride two horses going in different directions. Of concern to CleanTechnica readers is that a lot of its plans to embrace low carbon options depend on technologies that are still unproven and infrastructure that is yet to be built. “There’s many a slip ‘tween the cup and the lip,” my old Irish grandmother liked to say.

Renewables & Nuclear

The government now sees renewables supplying 65 percent of its total energy mix by 2070, with nuclear accounting for 11 percent and coal providing just 4 percent — a steep drop from 49 percent in 2020. If the country was to stay on its current trajectory, coal would still make up close to 30 percent of the overall mix, while renewables would account for roughly a third in 2070. And that, gentle readers, is just not good enough.

Much of the planned progress in decarbonizing India’s economy relies on technologies that are still under development, and whose viability in India remains uncertain, Bloomberg Green suggests. India will need 300 GW of electricity from nuclear power plants by 2070, up from just 9 GW today. “The cost of power from nuclear plants is still unknown, but I don’t expect regulators to approve plants with high price tariffs,” said Neshwin Rodrigues, senior Asia energy analyst at Ember. Regardless of climate targets, the country is expected to build out a huge amount of solar and wind power, alongside batteries. “India will rely heavily on electrification,” he said.

“The draft plan also assumes the widespread use of carbon capture technology, something that is yet to be tested in the country and has had limited success globally,” Del Bello and Rathi suggest. My colleague Michael Barnard has written extensively about carbon capture and its discontents.

An Ode To Carbon Capture

An author I hold in the highest regard wrote recently, “Carbon capture — oh, how rapturously its advocates sing its praises. Just build carbon capture facilities and — Shazam! — humans can use all the coal, oil, and methane they want forever and a day! The glaciers will refreeze, ocean levels will recede, drought stricken areas will flourish, and we can all get back to life the way it was 100 years ago. It’s a kind of magic realism that is very appealing — and very wrong.”

Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, wrote in a research paper published February 9, 2025, in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, “If you spend $1.00 on carbon capture instead of on wind, water, and solar, you are increasing CO2, air pollution, energy requirements, energy costs, pipelines, and total social costs.”

This holds true even if zero-emission energy systems power the technology deployed to extract carbon dioxide. “It’s always an opportunity cost to use clean, renewable energy for direct air capture instead of replacing a fossil fuel CO2 source, just like it’s an opportunity cost to use it for AI or bitcoin mining. You’re preventing renewables from replacing fossil fuel sources because you’re creating more demand for those renewables,” he said.

Climate policies that promote expansion of renewables as well as carbon capture and direct air capture to deal with emissions from fossil fuels and biomass “do not distinguish between good and poor solutions,” Jacobson and his colleagues said. Any policy promoting carbon capture and direct air capture “should be abandoned. The only way to eliminate all air pollutant and climate warming gases and particles from energy is to eliminate combustion.” (Emphasis added.)

Renewables Are A Better Investment

The Mark Jacobson study said, “For most countries around the world, sourcing energy entirely from wind, solar, geothermal, and hydro power by 2050 would reduce their energy needs and costs, improve air quality, and help slow climate change.” Josie Garthwaite of Stanford University observed, “These benefits, the authors say, could be realized at a fraction of the cost of implementing technologies that remove carbon dioxide from the air [emphasis added] and capture it from stationary emitters like industrial smokestacks.”

That prompted Zachary Shahan to write, “Just shut down the fossil fuel plants and don’t waste power on nonsense, so that more solar and wind power plants can be used to replace fossil fuel power plants. Sometimes simple logic and explanations are best because there’s nothing that beats them.” Right on, Zach!

The upshot of all this is that India is emulating the mindset of J. Wellington Wimpy, the character in Popeye cartoons who is fond of saying, “I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a cheeseburger today.” India is doing much the same thing by backloading most of its carbon reduction plans to a time in the far future while planning to massively increase its emissions in the near term.

The nations of the world promised wondrous things in Paris ten years ago, but the only one that has largely met its ambitions is China. Assessing this latest climate plan from India leaves us thinking it is mostly pie in the sky with little substance. Is India taking this global warming thing seriously enough?

We asked our resident Zen master, who lives in the turret at the top of CleanTechnica’s galactic headquarters, whether India is really putting its shoulder to the wheel to tame its emissions or just blowing sunshine up our skirts. “We’ll see,” he said, as he closed the door.