India has been urged to push forward global action on climate change even as President Donald Trump rolls back emissions reduction policies in the US.
“It is not possible for us to wait any longer,” former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in Mumbai, addressing India’s first major national climate conference. “We cannot wait for the political change that I know will come to the United States, because that’s a few years off — we have to do the innovation and build the models here.”
Clinton, who has previously backed a $50 million fund focused on alleviating climate impacts in India, was the flagship speaker at the three-day event in finance hub Mumbai, which gathered investors, policymakers and executives in an effort to tout the nation’s credentials to lead the developing world’s efforts to address global warming.
“The front line of the fight against global climate change is right here in the Global South, and I have full confidence that India can be the innovator, the implementer,” Clinton told the forum Wednesday. “I want to be a cheerleader for the efforts that can come out of India.”
“I don’t see a better time for us to announce ourselves on the world’s stage,” he said on the sidelines of the conference. “You now have a true representative who can lead meaningful deliberations.”
Despite the buzz in Mumbai — with prominent actor Dia Mirza and cricket icon Sachin Tendulkar among 2,000 conference delegates — India’s commitment to accelerate climate action remains uncertain. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government missed a 2025 deadline to submit new emissions-cutting plans to the United Nations, and is still yet to publish a revised strategy. Modi was also among global leaders to skip November’s UN climate talks in Brazil.
Meanwhile, India continues to build new coal-fired power plants. India currently burns about 3 times more coal than the US. That ratio will probably rise in the coming years.
From the link:
Energy analysts have said India’s increased need for electricity, driven by a growing economy, higher demand for air conditioning, and more electrification of industry—along with more people gaining access to electricity— means coal will continue to play a major role in the country’s power generation. Analysts have said that’s also due in part to a slower buildout of cleaner technologies such as battery energy storage, and the need for baseload power to balance the increased use of renewable energy.
Government forecasts have said India plans to increase its coal power capacity by 46% over the next decade, from 210 GW currently operating to 307 GW by 2035. That includes a target of at least 80 GW of new coal-fired generation by 2032.
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The CO2 air concentration will keep rising, currently at 428 ppm.
When the USA elected W instead of Gore, we were electorally giving up on such obvious and crucial steps as taxing gasoline so as to subsidize electric transportation, I knew GCC would NOT BE HANDLED in time to prevent rapidly accelerating FUBAR.
I knew that before the dramatic stuff — like sea level rise and crucial agricultural belts shifting or dying — my family’s beloved Sierra Nevada, my true Alma Mater, would lose its glaciers and such wondrous ecological features as the Giant Sequoias.
India and other developing countries might have cooperated in a display of modest prudence regarding humanity’s future, but not if the biggest richest historical carbon burners were doing nothing but happy talk and mining and drilling and burning.
Or go back to Carter putting solar on the white house roof as a beginning to what he saw as an essential conversation, and Reagan getting rid of them as part of launching an image of a permanently cowboy oil driller.
The moment I knew there was no chance in hell the USA, and so probably humanity, was going to react with that form of wisdom known as prudence, was when Gore sighed (!)(microphones often pick up insubstantial (private) sounds) during his presidential campaign debate with W, signing condescendingly as W showed his allegiance to Petrocarbon interests.
That socio-poitical fact congealed into a major USAian political division.
The OP topic is total GHG (green house gas) emissions not just emissions from coal fired power plants. Making steel is a big contributor to GHG emissions. The pollution from burning petroleum and natural gas results in US emitting more GHG than India.
The ratio may not rise more in the coming years because Trump is demanding more coal burning. India also had a good year in 2025 with GHG emissions declining due to exceptional high quantity of wind, solar, and hydro electricity generated.
History is a bit more complicated. Jimmy Carter wanted to increase coal production in the United States. Nobody talked about CO2 causing climate change back in the 1970s. Carter wasn’t acting out of environmentalism, but rather from an economic incentive, from what he saw as dwindling oil and natural gas resources in the US.
In April of 1977, Jimmy Carter gave an address to a joint session on Congress on the national energy crisis that was happening at the time. Below are a few excerpts.
One of Carter’s national goals for 1985:
to increase our coal production by more than two-thirds, to over a billion tons a year
Also, from the address:
“We must be sure that oil and natural gas are not wasted by industries that could use coal. Our third strategy will be, therefore, conversion from scarce fuels to coal wherever possible.”
“Although coal now provides only 18 percent of our total energy needs, it makes up 90 percent of our energy reserves. Its production and use do create environmental difficulties, but I believe that we can cope with them through strict strip mining and clean air standards.”
“To increase the use of coal by 400 million tons or about 65 percent-we now use about 600 million tons–in industry and utilities by 1985, I propose a sliding scale tax, starting in 1979, on large industrial users of oil and natural gas. Fertilizer manufacturers, crop dryers, and so forth, which must use gas, would be exempt from the tax. Utilities would not be subject to the tax until 1983, because it will simply take them longer to convert to coal.”
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Carter was motivated by economics and in maintaining national prosperity. In the same way, today Narendra Modi in India is also motivated by economics. He wants to make his country prosperous, or at least bring his people out of the poverty that many of them currently endure.
India added record levels of renewable power this year even as fossil fuels still dominate its electricity generation, showing both progress and limits in its energy transition.
India added 30 gigawatts of clean power between April 2024 and April 2025, its highest annual increase, bringing renewable energy to nearly half of the country’s installed capacity. However, coal still generates 75% of electricity output.
Plummeting costs for solar panels and batteries, along with favorable government policies and $81 billion in private and public investments over the last decade, are helping accelerate the shift toward non-fossil energy.
Despite growth, renewables remain underutilized due to challenges in integrating them into the grid and securing land, with actual power generation from renewables lagging behind their installed capacity share.
Key quote:
“Solar power is the cheapest it’s ever been.”
— Ruchita Shah, energy analyst at the climate think-tank Ember
Why this matters:
India’s energy shift matters because the country is the world’s third-largest carbon emitter and is rapidly urbanizing and industrializing. More cars, factories, and air conditioners mean its energy needs will triple by 2050. While India’s clean energy growth is promising, the gap between installed renewable capacity and actual use shows how difficult it is to phase out coal. The choices India makes will echo globally, affecting climate stability, air quality, and public health. Its heavy dependence on coal leads to air pollution that harms millions and fuels climate change with long-term consequences. At the same time, poorly planned renewable growth — especially solar and wind projects that displace communities or damage ecosystems — can also carry environmental and social costs.
