India To Order Use of Cleaner Fuels Under Push for Net-Zero (bloomberg.com) 26
India plans to order consumers to use cleaner fuels and aims to establish a carbon market under legislation to bolster the country's push to hit net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2070. From a report: The world's third-biggest emitter will seek to mandate the use of a minimum share of non-fossil fuel sources including biomass, ethanol, green hydrogen and ammonia, both for power generation or as a feedstock for manufacturing, according to a document introduced in Parliament on Wednesday. New laws would also penalize industrial operations, vehicles, ships and large buildings for not meeting energy consumption standards.
Changes to the Energy Conservation (Amendment) Bill have a "special focus on the promotion of new and renewable energy" and the country's so-called National Hydrogen Mission, a strategy aimed at establishing India as a key global hub for development of the nascent zero-emissions fuel, according to the legislation. The proposed policy changes come as India chases Prime Minister Narendra Modi's target to cut 1 billion tons of carbon emissions by the end of this decade, and to reach to net-zero by 2070. They also coincide with the country's pledge to cut emissions by 45% from 2005 levels and use non-fossil fuel sources to power half its installed generation capacity by the end of this decade.
Changes to the Energy Conservation (Amendment) Bill have a "special focus on the promotion of new and renewable energy" and the country's so-called National Hydrogen Mission, a strategy aimed at establishing India as a key global hub for development of the nascent zero-emissions fuel, according to the legislation. The proposed policy changes come as India chases Prime Minister Narendra Modi's target to cut 1 billion tons of carbon emissions by the end of this decade, and to reach to net-zero by 2070. They also coincide with the country's pledge to cut emissions by 45% from 2005 levels and use non-fossil fuel sources to power half its installed generation capacity by the end of this decade.
Wait, what? (Score:2)
Wow, that's actually great news!
Oh. Well, too little, too late then. That's like saying you're going to stop drilling holes in the sinking boat in a few hours.
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A simple, straightforward carbon tax at source would more likely be a more effective financial incentive than yet another carbon market, which are clearly just a way to obfuscate who's responsible for CO2 emissions & let big polluters off the hook.
If requiring biomass fuels are unsubsidised, don't replace food crops, & don't use up fertiliser, they could make fossil fuel use more expensive & provide further financial incentive to switch as far as possible to renewables. H
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Freaking out over such things and overreacting is far far worse. A methodical workable long term plan is infinitely superior to skuttering around doing nonsense that doesn't help at all.
The USA should have shifted 40% of corn production to oilcane like years ago... but meh. We can't even act on the solutions we have that are cost effective.
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You have no idea.
Sri Lanka envy (Score:3)
India is envious of Sri Lanka, a trailblazer.
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India is envious of Sri Lanka, a trailblazer.
Sad but true.
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India is envious of Sri Lanka, a trailblazer.
Hardly. Sri Lanka's problems were related to time not to policy. I think giving your country 50 years to adapt will be fine.
With their poverty levels this is lunacy. (Score:2)
With their poverty levels this is lunacy.
Re: With their poverty levels this is lunacy. (Score:1)
Government Mandates = Dilbert Developer-Hell (Score:3)
It's absurd when governments simply decree "by Year X all Widget W must meet Z standard", where Z is any technology that doesn't already exist at scale. It's like holding a vote that results in a law: "By 2070 there will be a human habitation on Mars". You can sit around and pass all the mandates you want, when all the people voting have zero personal responsibility for HOW it will happen, and zero personal culpability for what happens if it fails, or the costs incurred along the way even if the target is reached.
The fact that a group of people sat in a room and agreed to sign a document saying it, is the same as when your Sales team sits in a room with a customer and agrees to sign a document saying the product will fulfill the customer requirements in 14 months, without first finding out from Dev/Engr team if (A) the product will even do that, (B) how long and how much labor it will take to make the product do that, (C) what level of QA can even be done within that time frame.
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I'm not taking this seriously. (Score:2)
If the end goal of any plan a politician makes is beyond their time in office then I have no reason to take them seriously. Why make a plan if someone else can take the credit? If a politician gives a ten year plan then that's just saying it is the next person's problem. If they have an eight year plan then I might take them seriously because that is a time period that a politician could conceivably still be in the same office.
When JFK made his "we choose to go to the moon" speech he used the words "befo
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Bio-diesel is reasonable and available now, but the supply of bio-diesel depends upon the supply of used vegetable oils.
No, it doesn't. There's also waste animal fats from the meat processing chain. Really what you want though is not so much biodiesel, but green diesel, which is made with fractional distillation instead of transesterification. It's a much higher quality product. 5% transesterified biodiesel can be used for lubricity, though. It doesn't matter where the oil comes from, either. It could for example come from algae.
Ethanol is indeed a crap fuel, though.
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Burning food (Score:2)
There is no future for liquid fuels.
Burning food is worse than using fossils.
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it's not an equal land.
PV needs 10-30x less surface.
But it's place is on the roofs first anyway.
Re: Burning food (Score:1)
Also... this os land we are ALREADY dedicating to "green" corn ethanol...aka the worst biofuel....its so bad it may even add extra C02 relative to just birning fossil fuels.
So, they take the coal and clean it... (Score:2)
rvf
"biomass" is a loaded term (Score:3)
I worry about the mention of "biomass." It sounds like an efficient use of agricultural waste, but it also gets used to greenwash obscenities like the Drax Power Station in the UK. Drax cuts down trees in the USA, then ships them across the Atlantic to burn in England. It's fucking crazy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
In India, I can see how "biomass power" could be used by Modi to justify clearcutting forests and burning them.
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Don't blow things out of proportion based on press releases by tree huggers. Biomass gets a bad rep from environmental groups who think that trees are a finite resource that can't be planted in a circular economy. I won't comment on if Drax does this appropriately but biomass plants in the EU (and yes still in the UK) need to prove sustainable / circular sourcing for its raw materials. This stuff grows well in North America so it makes sense to do it there. As for shipping it around the world, that is somet