1 Energy solutions. Huge number of people waiting to sell their food fraction to buy energy. How are we going to deal with this? The market will rise. We can either militarily kill the demand (why will any capitalist or ethical democratic government do that?) or embrace the economic opportunity.
If you want to know how there is the possibility that people below poverty lines who are not getting sufficient daily meals will demand energy then I would like to quote these lines from Poor Economics by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo:
“We asked Ouch Mbarbk, a man we met in a remote village in Morocco, what he would do if he had more money. He said he would buy more food…We were starting to feel very bad for him and his family, when we noticed a television, a parabolic antenna, and a DVD player in the room where we were sitting. We asked him why he had bought all these things if he felt the family did not have enough to eat. He laughed, and said, “Oh, but television is more important than food!”
2 Transport. “Use public transport” is believed to be the key to save expenditure, promote savings, reduce emissions and do our part in halting climate change.
But only big Indian metros have reliable public transport which, in turn, is extremely cranky and suffocating during office hours. Okay, even Paris metro has the same problem but what about traveling on late running train rooftops for an hour in Mumbai? In my home town, Bhubaneswar, a million+ populated city, had no public transport system until two years back.
Then we got other cities which are yet to propose, plan and build the systems. But they will take at least a decade. Mumbai metro system will not be completed till 2018 since it started in 2010. Till then private transport system is the only option for middle class. It would be shocking that on an average 15-20% of the monthly household budget is spent on transport fuels and no matter how much tax you burden them with they will not inch out from consumption. Because there is no goddamn alternative.
3 Microeconomic collaboration. Heard of car pooling, community freezers/grillers, waste-to-energy systems? Great! Indians already have great incentives to adopt them. But somehow these are seldom happening. May be a bit more traffic congestion and harsh civic rules can help.
What we should know about Climate Change 