Two consonent views on the 123 Agreement

The American administration sent a letter to the Congress clarifying what the 123 Agreement with India entails for the US. The letter was leaked recently. There’s nothing in the letter which should come as a surprise because its contents are consistent with what the Americans have been saying all along. What the letter strongly suggests is that either that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is lying or it is clearly delusional.

Here’s the view of a former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, PK Iyengar, expressed in an article in The Pioneer. He says that India’s freedom to test will be curtailed. This is, in his opinion, undesirable as testing is essential for India to maintain a credible nuclear deterrence.

Arun Shourie makes the case that the Americans are bound by their Atomic Energy Act of 1954 and the Hyde Act, and that the 123 Agreement does not in any way invalidate them. (I don’t have a link to Shourie’s article, and so I will post his article below the fold until such time that I have a link.)

My view is that India should not sign the agreement. I find the arguments by Iyengar and Shourie persuasive. Just for argument’s sake, let’s assume that it is a bad agreement and India pays dearly for it down the line. What is the penalty that those who pushed India into such a bad deal face? None at all. Mr Singh and boss will never have the pay for the follies, just as their predecessors whose gross stupidity has caused untold misery on hundreds of millions of Indians got away with no penalty (and indeed they are celebrated as great visionaries and leaders.)

I think that the prime minister is not a deluded fool and knows fully well what the 123 Agreement will do to India. That forces me to conclude that he is dishonest in his insistence that it is good for India. But then it is not the least surprising to find dishonest politicians in India. That’s Indian democracy for you — and therein lies the only consolation for me: the people choose unwisely and it is they who will suffer the consequences of their choices.

It’s all karma, neh?

Solar energy is advancing

Solar energy, whether you like it or not, will be the future. As I have said before, the age of fossil fuels was a very short interlude in the history of humanity. Nuclear–fission now and perhaps in a few decades fusion–will have a significant share but for the long haul it will be solar.

The PickensPlan

You’ve got to hand it to the Americans — they think big. Thinking big is the first step to doing big things. There too they are no slouches. Both in terms of good and bad, they do think and do big things. The modern world you and I inhabit (and it is important to remember that not everybody lives in the modern world — a couple of billion of our contemporaries live in a world that is decidedly primitive) has been shaped by Americans to an extent that is hard to overstate. Love it or hate it, you cannot ignore the US.

About the Nuclear Energy Deal

One has to defer to experts when it comes to matters that one does not know much about. I don’t know what the deal is with the nuclear agreement with the US is and over which the UPA government is possibly going to fail tomorrow.

In the mail today was a piece by a retired chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. It is reasonable to suppose that he knows what he is talking about. So here’s what he calls “Ten misconceptions about the nuclear deal” by P. K. Iyengar below the fold.

India’s Energy Challenge

I have a piece in today’s livemint.com on India’s Energy Challenge. The money quote is this:

The advanced industrialized economies were lucky to have had their development fuelled by cheap fossil energy. Today’s developing economies have a much tougher challenge. It was a very short window of opportunity which opened just about 150 years ago and is likely to close in the next 40 years, by when the known reserves will be depleted at current levels of consumption.

All told, 200 years is a very brief interlude considering thousands of years of human civilization and hopefully hundreds of thousands of years yet to come. At some time in the distant future, they will look back and remark that the age of fossil fuel was a short inflection point, a point at which humanity passed through the bottleneck of dependency on oil from the ground. Before that point, humanity’s primary source of energy was the sun, and so it will be after that point.

The full article is below the fold.

Solar or Nuclear: Which is the better option for India?

It is easy to argue that energy is the binding constraint that faces all of humanity, not just the developing economies. Of course, given the projected increase in demand and the decline in the supply of fossil fuel energy, the price of energy will continue to move up–with predictable adverse effects on the growth prospects of the emerging economies.

The “dot-corn” Bubble

The April 7th cover story of TIME, “The Clean Energy Scam,” claims that by pushing corn-derived ethanol in the US as an additive to oil, politicians and Big Business are making a bad situation worse. It is causing food prices to rise globally, contributing to global warming, and stealing money out of the public purse.

To some this is old hat. For a while people have been arguing against corn-based ethanol. Mother Jones magazine did a story on it in November 2007 (where I had come across the term “dot corn”). The graphic below from there succinctly makes the case against corn-based ethanol.

Solar Power

Solar Power Investment — Followup

In the earlier post on Public Investment for Solar Power I had advocated that the government of India should spend a huge deal of money in research and development of the technology for using solar power.

This is a brief response to a couple of comments to that post. First, let’s recognize that the current state of the art does not allow the harnessing of solar energy on a scale that will make conventional fuels obsolete or even make a significant dent in their demand. That is precisely why more research and development is required. If doing the R&D were cheap and easy, we would not be having this discussion because it would have been done by some enterprising corporation already. The reason I put the figure around US$100 billion is because it is going to be a hard problem — you have to solve all sorts of related issues, from storage technology to fabrication of photo-voltaic devices to the mass manufacture of associated equipment.

Second, public investment does not mean that a bunch of government entities will be doing the R&D. Funding is public but the actual work can be entirely in the private sector. The hard problem is to create the mechanism which would allocate the funds to the most productive teams. One way would be to create an independent authority or an institution along the lines of the National Science Foundation or NASA of the US.

Technology does not spontaneously arise out of thin air. Someone somewhere at some time has to have the will to make the effort to develop it. So far for all practical purposes all the modern technologies are developed in the West, particularly in the US. It is time for us to pause and wonder why it never happens in India. Are Indians incapable of developing technology? Surely they are not dumber than any other large aggregate of people. Are they lacking resources? Not really, because India is a large country, even though it is poor in per capita income and wealth. So what is the missing ingredient? I think it is a lack of vision, a lack of national pride. Sometimes in a dark mood I think that Indians are a nation of followers, not leaders.

Public Investment in Solar Power

All processes in our universe, from the sub-atomic to the super-galactic, involve the use of energy. The fundamental laws of thermodynamics attest to that. So it should come as no surprise that energy rests at the core of all human advancement and economic growth. The story of human civilization is principally that of an increasing ability to find and exploit energy sources. Until relatively recently in human history, animals and humans were the principle sources of energy. Slavery was an unfortunate consequence of that need for energy. Coal later powered the industrial revolution. The discovery of petroleum oil about 150 years ago literally fueled such phenomenal growth that it increased human population six-fold to its present over 6 billion.