{"id":1746,"date":"2015-02-09T09:00:42","date_gmt":"2015-02-09T08:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/?p=1746"},"modified":"2015-03-17T11:12:51","modified_gmt":"2015-03-17T10:12:51","slug":"who-gets-to-grow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/2015\/02\/09\/who-gets-to-grow\/","title":{"rendered":"Who gets to Grow?"},"content":{"rendered":"

After the landmark agreement between China and the United States<\/strong> back in November, I\u00a0wrote a post<\/a> which quoted\u00a0Sunita Narain, from India’s Centre of\u00a0Science and Environment<\/a>, who has eloquently\u00a0argued that if both China an the US emit 12-14 tons of CO2 per person per year then the rest of the world will not be able to emit very much at all!<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"http:\/\/www.globalcarbonatlas.org\/\"<\/a>
http:\/\/www.globalcarbonatlas.org\/<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

India is currently the world’s third largest emitter of CO2 but its emissions are half of the United States’ and a quarter of China’s<\/strong>. \u00a0Looking at the issue on a per capita basis India is at 1.9 tons of CO2 per person per year compared to 16 for the U.S. and 7.9 for China today!<\/p>\n

Approximately 300 million Indians lack access to electricity and in much of the country supplies are intermittent and unreliable. Despite the fact that India’s prime Minister, Narendra Modi has committed to bringing 100 GW of solar power on line by 2012, most analysts\u00a0believe that coal, which India\u00a0has in abundance, is the country’s best bet for electrification<\/strong> and continued economic development.<\/p>\n

Environmental Kuznets Curve<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Writing about inequality and wealth, economist Simon Kuznets<\/strong> found that the relationship had an upside down U shape and that both poor societies and rich societies were more equal than societies in the middle where inequality was higher<\/strong>. In the 1990s a number of researchers such as Grossman<\/strong> and Krueger<\/strong> (1991) and Panayotou<\/strong> (1993) found a similar pattern in the relationship between economic wealth and environmental performance and this is often called an environmental Kuznets curve<\/strong>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Environmental<\/a>
Environmental Kuznets Curve<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Poor countries produce little environmental damage as their lives tend to be closer to nature and use little energy. As a country gets richer its people tend to use more energy and produce more CO2<\/strong> and other pollutants. This process continues until the environmental costs becomes significant and wealthier people are able to focus more on their surroundings, implement political controls and adopt cleaner technologies<\/strong>. While the idea is simple\u00a0in theory and holds true in many applications, the details are different in different places and for different measures of environmental sustainability<\/strong> such as air and water pollution, carbon emissions, etc.<\/span><\/p>\n

India is an interesting example as it had made important advances in air pollution<\/strong> even though its income levels are normally below the threshold beyond\u00a0which one would expect things to improve. \u00a0Water pollution continues to be a problem although Prime Minister\u00a0Narenda Modi has launched a new effort to save the ganges<\/strong> as discussed in another post<\/a> back in October.<\/p>\n

Et tu Greenpeace?<\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/h3>\n
\"The<\/a>
The Hindu<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Perhaps the most interesting twist to the story in India are reports<\/a> that\u00a0the Modi government is restricting\u00a0the travel and finances of western environmental groups<\/strong> active in the country such as Greenpeace<\/strong>, 360.org<\/strong> and The Sierra Club<\/strong>. Reporting for the Los Angeles Times<\/em>, Shashank Bengali<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0quotes a spokesman of\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span>Modi\u2019s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party,\u00a0saying that environmentalists who are against India burning coal are\u00a0“acting as foreign propagandists and foreign agents.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meanwhile the Modi government is working hard to make it easier for foreign firms to do business in India<\/strong> and potentially will create a\u00a0booming market for energy, water, and other needed infrastructure.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While the U.S. and China have agreed to limit CO2 emissions, India is under pressure because of its drive to bring quality electricity to its population by using coal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":788,"featured_media":1759,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419,40367],"tags":[40381,182,76589,183,1433],"class_list":["post-1746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-climate-change","category-strategy-sustainability","tag-carbon-footprint","tag-china","tag-co2","tag-india","tag-united-states","megacategoria-mc-strategy"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/788"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1746"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1746\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1763,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1746\/revisions\/1763"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1759"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}