India may pose biggest challenge to curbing global climate change

New York Times : To power its burgeoning economy, India has been pushing to harvest its vast stores of domestic coal. The country has the fifth-largest coal reserves in the world and very little oil or natural gas. However, the coal is twice as polluting as that from Western nations because of its high ash content, and 90% of it comes from strip mines, which are laying waste to the land, water, and air. As a result, smog levels in India have become worse than China’s. Yet the country’s power minister, Piyush Goyal, has pledged to double the use of domestic coal by 2019. Nevertheless, one promising alternative is being pursued by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is working to take advantage of another of India’s natural resources: sunlight. Modi is currently pushing for arrays of solar power stations, one of which has already been built by Welspun Energy and is the largest so far in Asia. Whether solar power will keep India from pushing the world past the brink of irreversible climate change remains to be seen.