Energy and Climate Policy

As the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit concludes, world leaders need some outside the box thinking about steps to strengthen their national commitments to shrink their greenhouse gas emissions ahead of the next phase of the Paris Agreement.

Plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions and reach carbon neutrality, to be announced during the 2019 summit, could be an important milestone in the global fight against climate change.

Climate change is increasing the risk of wildfire damage to critical energy infrastructure, according to a new Council on Foreign Relations report that details the physical, financial, and security risks to the U.S. energy system.

It used to be that talking about the weather was platitudinous in the United States. This week, like almost every other subject these days, it has suddenly turned ferociously political. The shift, disturbing as it is, makes some sense. In 2018, six-in-ten Americans said that global climate change was affecting their local community a great deal or some, according to polling by the Pew Research Center. One-in-three said climate change was affecting them personally. The effects of climate change can bring real and dramatic outcomes to the daily lives of many Americans. I know this firsthand because, in recent years, I lived through severe hurricanes, flooding, and power outages together with my neighbors in Houston, and have been stranded on my daily commute by fires in Northern California when I lived there. Talking about weather extremes is not just a theoretical exercise for me, just as it is not for millions of other Americans. The United States is ill-prepared to address the impending national security and financial challenges that are emerging from climate change-related events and trends. We need a more serious, focused effort, and consensus for how to accomplish that is sorely lacking.  Our public dialogue about emergency preparedness is deficient. It is time to elevate the national discussion on this topic. To this end, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) organized a two-day workshop in New York with influencers on the subject. Participants included current and former state and federal government officials and regulators, scientists, financial sector and corporate leaders, entrepreneurs, credit agencies, insurers, nongovernmental organizations, and energy policy experts. A new CFR publication, Impact of Climate Risk on the Energy System summarizes the insights from the workshop and includes contributions from seven expert authors delving into related topics. I encourage you to read it. It is commonplace today to assume energy shortages are a thing of the past in the United States. U.S. oil and gas production is on an upsurge, new advanced automobile technologies offer greater fuel efficiency, and renewable energy supplies are proliferating. In this new age of energy abundance, the United States has attained new international stature as an important energy exporter. But amid this good cheer for American energy resources belies a darker reality. Climate change could affect virtually every aspect of the U.S. energy system and bring with it serious, sporadic energy supply shortages. The U.S. Gulf coast — which is home to 44 percent of total U.S. refining capacity and several major ports — is highly vulnerable to flooding events and dangerous ocean surges during severe storms and hurricanes such as Hurricane Dorian. Besides temporarily cutting off Americans access to vital fuel, climactic events could easily disrupt U.S. crude oil and natural gas exports from the region. U.S. policy makers are busy debating the level of America’s future commitment to protecting oil and gas shipping from the Persian Gulf in light of the United States’ new role as a major energy exporter. Instead, they ought to be considering how climate change will affect America’s ability to be a secure and reliable supplier and what measures need to be taken to mitigate the disruption severe weather and sea level rise will have on American energy export facilities. There are other national security issues as well tied to the energy risks emanating from climate change. The U.S. military depends on fuel and electricity supplies from the wider civilian communities in which they are embedded. Several kinds of risks can affect the stability of these energy services, including the link between water availability and energy and electricity production, as well as the threat of wildfire in important U.S. regions. Northern California utility PG & E has been forced to interrupt electricity services to consumers in particular locations to avoid the risk of fire. Climatic risks to domestic energy and electricity production is as serious a risk to U.S. energy security as potential cutoffs of international supplies. It deserves the same level of attention. As we move forward in our national discussion on energy issues during the upcoming Presidential election cycle, climate risk to the energy system needs more attention. We hope our new publication, Impact of Climate Risk to the Energy System, will make a contribution to that end. To download the electronic version of the essay collection, click here.

This guest post is co-authored by Joshua Busby, associate professor of public affairs at the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the LBJ School at the University of Texas at Austin, Sarang Shidore, a visiting scholar at the LBJ School at the University of Texas at Austin, and Morgan Bazilian, director of the Payne Institute and a professor of public policy at the Colorado School of Mines. Increasing interconnection of electricity systems both within and between countries has much promise to help support clean energy power systems of the future. If the sun isn’t shining or wind isn’t blowing in one place, an electricity grid with high voltage transmission lines can move electricity to where it is needed. This shared infrastructure and increased trade can possibly serve as a basis for peace between neighbors in conflict, but it may also serve as a tool of coercion if the electricity can be cut off by one party. Cross-border trade in electricity is currently dominated by Europe – 90% of the $5.6bn electricity trade market happens there, but in the future increased trade in electricity, particularly in Asia, is set to grow dramatically. The boldest proposal comes from the Chinese organization GEIDCO which has, with the backing of the State Grid Corporation of China (which reportedly has over 1 million employees), promoted regional and even global grid integration. On the one hand, such grid integration could foster greater interdependence in conflict zones and facilitate more shared interests. But there is another concern, what we call a strategic denial of service. This would be a form of what Farrell and Newman refer to as “weaponized interdependence,” a situation where one country uses a shared relationship asymmetrically to extract political concessions from another party. Emerging economies China is providing ample financial support for electricity and energy initiatives through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). As much as two thirds of BRI projects, worth some $50 billion, has been invested in the energy sector. Some observers have already raised concerns about what China’s overtures in this space might mean for its neighbors. Phillip Cornell, writing for the Atlantic Council, warned that despite the benefits of grid integration: "Even if local grids are independently operated, deep interconnection means that supply and demand will increasingly be      matched across the super-grid, making them more interdependent. It may be managed by 'international rules and operation code' as Liu [Zhenya, GEIDCO's chairman] insists, but those will be defined by a regional authority where China is bound to have major influence." The scope for cross-border trade in electricity isn’t only Chinese-led. Even as India has been trying to integrate its domestic grid through what it calls green energy corridors, the country is also supplying electricity to some of its neighbors. India already exports some 660MW to Bangladesh, and Indian firms are building power plants which could meet as much as 25% of Bangladesh’s electricity needs. While India is currently supplying power to Nepal, Nepal has the potential capacity to supply hydroelectric power to India. Nepal and Bangladesh are also considering electricity trade through the intermediate Indian network. Hydro plants in the Mekong Delta from Laos already supply electricity to neighboring Thailand, making it its top source of foreign exchange. Other projects include CASA 1000, a proposed power line to link the Kyrgyz Republic and Tajikistan as well as an interconnection linking a hydro power station in Malaysia’s Sarawak to West Kalimantan that should diminish Indonesia’s dependence on imported oil. Can electricity be used coercively? Can a state use electricity as a coercive tool like the way Russia has used natural gas? Is this technically possible? What are the limits? In the case of gas, you have a product that can be physically stored for periods of time, whereas electricity is a much more ephemeral product that, absent viable storage at scale, is lost as waste heat if not transmitted to end users. Though a breakthrough in storage might take away some of the urgency of the threat of service denial, it wouldn’t remove it in the event of a prolonged outage. Technically, the process of denial of electricity service is not all that difficult. Shutting down power service across a transmission system is just a matter of operations control (in the absence of good governance, power markets, contracts, etc. that are all in place to avoid disconnection of service). It can be done virtually instantaneously to disconnect power from any node on the system. Think of “rolling blackouts or brownouts” when different parts of a service area are shut down for various technical or economic reasons. Curtailing electricity to another country is potentially costly for the coercer. Curtailing electricity transmission to a neighbor does mean foregoing payments for the electricity (provided the neighbor was paying their bills). But, it could be one that states will use to generate benefits such as higher rates of payment for electricity or, more broadly, to extract concessions on other matters of political importance. For some energy sources like hydro power, the water has other potential uses. This could enhance the attractiveness of using service denial as a coercive tool since the owner of the hydro could presumably monetize its water in another way. A state might try to insulate its vulnerability to service denial through widespread conservation or building in extra reserve capacity, but in some settings and seasons, demand reduction might not be so easy to achieve. A country might be able to find alternative sources of electricity either from other neighbors or by powering up more expensive domestic sources of generation, though those arrangements could take time or prove much more costly than the existing cross-border arrangement. The flipside of denial of service would be demand curtailment, which a state might pursue if it was attempting to punish a neighboring electricity supplier by reducing its revenues.  Has this been done? During the Cold War, the Soviet Union was able to maintain dominance over Eastern and Central Europe by tying their energy supplies to the Soviet energy grid, reducing their scope for independent action. Though privatization in the early years of the break-up of the Soviet Union provided these countries with more independence, Gazprom made a conscious effort to acquire assets back under Russian control, sometimes under commercial conditions that could be construed as coercive, particularly in the natural gas space. Baltic states and Poland remained tethered to the Russian electricity grid. It was not until 2018 that Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland completed an agreement to decouple from Russia and transition to the EU grid by 2025 at the cost of $1.2 billion. Fears of potential Russian service denials helped them overcome remaining obstacles. There have also been some examples in the post-Cold War era of denial of service and other forms of coercion related to integrated grids and interdependence. In July 2018, Iran cut off a portion of power to Iraq over unpaid fees in the midst of a summer a heat wave. While this may have merely been to ensure Iraq paid its balance, other states have employed similar tactics for more expansive purposes. In February 2019, the Trump Administration threatened secondary sanctions on Iraq to discourage its purchase of imported Iranian electricity and natural gas. Here, the service denial is not by the generator but by an influential third-party who has its own political axe to grind with the Iranians. In June 2019, the United States provided Iraq with a temporary four-month sanctions waiver to allow Iraq to get through the summer by importing products from Iran, lest the country experience a wave of unrest as it did in 2018 when Iran cut the power.  In May 2019, the United States and the Maduro government in Venezuela clashed over the rightful ruler of the country. Before and after the departure of Venezuela’s diplomats, left-wing U.S. protesters occupied the Venezuela embassy in Washington, D.C. to prevent supporters of the opposition Juan Guaidó from seizing the embassy. In the midst of the dispute, the power to the embassy was cut off by the electricity provider PEPCO, raising questions about political involvement by the Trump administration. If we think of the embassy as sovereign territory of Venezuela, this would qualify as a case of cross-border service denial and speaks to the potential vulnerability of other such enclaves such as military bases that may depend upon electricity grids of host countries. In July 2016, Turkey temporarily cut power to the major US airbase in Incirlik in the wake of the coup attempt against President Erdoğan, underscoring these concerns about base vulnerability. Cyber-security experts have also raised the prospect of denial of service by hackers who might be able to penetrate an electricity grid and take it off line. Given that communications, transport, and health care infrastructure all rely on electricity, the cascading effects of such an outage could have far-reaching consequences. If carried out by shadowy non-state actors, it might also be harder to attribute responsibility to a state actor. In December 2015, in the first known instance, Russian hackers were able to briefly take off line three Ukrainian distribution companies. Which states might deploy this strategy? We are more likely to see strategic denial of service where markets and contracts give private actors limited legal recourse in the event of supply disruptions. Moreover, strategic denial of service may be more common where there are large power asymmetries between neighbors, particularly but not limited to non-democracies. The more powerful state can use the size of its military apparatus or economy as additional leverage to extract concessions. In our view, we are less likely to see a poorer, smaller country like Nepal or Lesotho try to deny electricity to a more powerful neighbor, given the risks of reprisals. Similarly, in the event of demand curtailment, we might see powerful states use this tactic against neighbors that are highly reliant on electricity export revenue. As Farrell and Newman argue, those that control central nodes are likely to possess asymmetric power at key chokepoints: “Specifically, states with political authority over the central nodes in the international networked structures through which money, goods, and information travel are uniquely positioned to impose costs on others.” In a bilateral sense, a small chokepoint would be the ability for one country to deny service to one downstream power importer, but if a single actor exercises control upstream over the entire transmission network, that would provide them with asymmetric power over a wider group of actors. If no state controls a single node but several states together control electricity exports, that would require the kind of collective action that is less likely to occur in most regions of the world. In the event that the ambitious Desertec project moves forward, a study of the scope for North African countries to use renewable energy denial to Europe concluded that it was unlikely to succeed unless all five exporter countries curtailed service. Authoritarian countries may use this tactic more than democracies. In authoritarian governments, private actors may have less arms-length relationships with the government and thus be susceptible to pressure to cut off service to foreign countries. However, powerful democratic countries may also use this tactic against adversaries and non-democracies. Outside the electricity space, we have even seen the United States try to use its control of SWIFT banking system to coerce other democracies to avoid trade with Iran. In the electricity arena, it is less clear when democracies might use denial of electricity as a tactic. That said, if the U.S. government did in fact have a role behind the scenes in cutting off power to the Venezuelan embassy, this would be an example. As countries seek to balance their electricity needs to have the cheapest, greenest source of power when they need it, they may become both importers and exporters of energy. This may reduce the temptation for a state to unilaterally cut off electricity to its neighbor, lest the whole cooperative relationship fall apart. However, in a world of increasing concerns about sovereignty, we may see fewer of these interconnections to start with, absent confidence building measures and institutions. Can this tactic be prevented? To reduce the risks of coercive actions in cross border electricity trade, regional governance treaties and related multinational institutions should be created to oversee the implementation of agreements for the grid's operation. This could be akin to a neutral regional grid operator that has representation from all countries. ASEAN, for example, is helping develop the regulatory framework as the ASEAN Power Grid is built and knits countries together. OLADE -- the Organización de Energia Latinoamerica – is seeking to play a similar role in Latin America. Ideally, markets, contracts, and legal forms of dispute resolution would also help ensure that politically motivated service denials do not happen, but market mechanisms on their own are unlikely to establish confidence in grid integration across borders. Regional institutions remain an important means of regulating the trade, along the lines of transborder water governance that Lucia De Stefano and collaborators write about in terms of institutions to apportion water, deal with shocks, and carry out dispute resolution. Chinese acquisition of electricity assets in Portugal, Greece, and Italy have led Europeans to raise questions about whether existing forums for transmission operators such as ENTSO-E ought to be elevated to a regulatory body. Other regions are likely to be even less coordinated in terms of regulatory oversight. As Cornell points out, the vision for GEIDCO from the founder is one of decentralized, technical administration like the internet, without central control, but that actually betrays how the internet is subject to national level suppression as we have seen in countries like China with the Great Firewall. Other new Chinese-led institutions like the AIIB are subject to multilateral oversight, suggesting a governance model that might attenuate some of these concerns. In the absence of institutions to guard against politically motivated service denials, countries will remain disconnected or even seek to decouple their systems from neighbors deemed too risky. In much of the electricity space where the potential is largely untapped, it would mean foregoing many of the benefits associated with integrated grids. Poorer, weaker countries needing power might have few options and accept the Faustian bargain that puts them at the mercies of more powerful neighbors. At a moment when our collective emissions of greenhouse gases already have tied us together in mutual vulnerability to climate change, it would be a shame if joint efforts to address the problem got caught up in the return of great power politics.  

Failing to study and develop geoengineering methods to help prevent the severe effects of climate change would be irresponsible. Failing to govern them properly would be even more so.

The wind industry is approaching the end of its federal financial support. Political leaders around the country are debating the best ways to continue supporting the wind industry.

Dealing with Central American migrants, rising crime and faltering energy supplies will require more U.S. help.

As the need for U.S. federal government engagement on climate change becomes more pressing, various leaders and agencies are stepping into the void. This week, the U.S. Government Accountability Office, a legislative branch government agency that provides evaluation and investigation services for the U.S. Congress, issued a report critical of the U.S. Department of Defense’s practice of basing responses to extreme weather events and climate change effects based on past experience and called on the Secretary of Defense to issue guidance on “incorporating climate projections into installation master planning” as well as facility project designs. The guidance should cover how to integrate multiple future scenarios, what scientific projections to use, and what future time frames to consider, the GAO suggested. Recently, the Council on Foreign Relations program on Energy Security and Climate Change convened a workshop on related issues. The program entitled “Climate Risks to the Energy System: Examining the Financial, Security, and Technological Dimensions” concluded that U.S. energy infrastructure is increasingly at risk to climactic changes and that the United States is ill prepared to address those risks, which are a serious matter of national security. In the report from the CFR workshop it was recommended that Congress require the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to update risk assessments to include detailed analysis by geography, infrastructure type, and detail of potential specific climate hazards to better identify future climate-related vulnerabilities. This is important for the U.S. energy system generally and to energy supplies to U.S. military bases and operations specifically. Such regional and local assessments should be shared with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and FEMA as a basis for planning capital expenditures for adaptation and evacuation. The release of the GAO report release came around the same time as hearings at the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) on June 12 where Rostin Behnam, a CFTC regulator, told the New York Times that “It’s abundantly clear that climate change poses financial risk to the stability of the financial system.” Behnam’s comments echo similar concerns raised recently by the Bank of Canada and the European Central Bank. Democratic Presidential candidates are also joining the mix. Washington Governor Jay Inslee has made climate change his signature issue. Former Vice President Joe Biden has also publicly put forward a climate change plan and responded positively to calls for a Democratic televised debate on the topic. Climate change affects virtually every aspect of the U.S. energy system. U.S. infrastructure for electricity, fuel, and information are highly interdependent, meaning that a failure in one part of the system can have cascading effects on other critical parts of the U.S. economy. Climatic disruptions to domestic energy supply could be large, entailing huge economic losses and potentially requiring sizable military mobilizations. California faces particularly difficult questions about how to resolve the bankruptcy of its major electric utility PG&E whose faulty equipment caused several costly wildfires last year and has raised the possibility of market failure in local private insurance markets. Texas is debating a multibillion dollar publicly funded program to build a seawall to protect its storm-vulnerable coastal refineries responsible for about 27 percent of U.S. military grade jet fuel and 13 percent of the nation’s gasoline production. CFR workshop participants expressed concern that the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) is not doing an adequate job ensuring that disclosure of material risks related to climate change are accurate and sufficiently detailed. This year, the SEC received an active slate of shareholder proposals related to climate change but so far has dragged its feet on initiating any new disclosure guidelines on the subject. The SEC needs to establish permanent disclosure standards for climate change related risks to publicly-traded energy companies and utilities, the CFR workshop concluded. To explore best practices towards possible improved disclosure rules, workshop participants recommended that the SEC participate actively in fact finding forums to gather feedback from institutional investors, energy firms, financial analysts, and other relevant market participants.

The United States keeps signaling that it has hard power. Most recently, the United States made known that it was deploying additional ships, the USS Abraham Lincoln and USS Arlington, to the Middle East. The USS Abraham Lincoln is now said to be in the Red Sea. This deployment follows a similar U.S. movement in the South China Sea. There appears to be a lot of hard power on display these days since China and Russia have also been moving military assets around the globe in a similarly transparent, public manner. You would think that all this bravado of big military hardware would be minimizing risky actions by small players. But, ironically, all this symbolism isn’t achieving much where oil security is concerned. That’s because state and non-state actors alike have learned that “sabotage” is hard to react to. But just because these acts of sabotage to date have seemed minor, it doesn’t mean that they are not geopolitically significant. Taken en masse, they are a symptom of an increasingly unstable setting at a time when spare oil production capacity in and outside OPEC is quite limited. The point is that as tensions rise among large and mid-size global powers, the list of recent and unusual oil sabotage acts is growing, and they could eventually add up to a major problem for oil markets. First, there was the mysterious contamination of Russia crude shipments to Belarus. That “sabotage,” now reportedly under investigation by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), will reduce the availability of the physical storage tanks for some refineries along the Druzhba pipeline since removing the tainted oil by slowly diluting it in small amounts into clean oil will take months. The explanation of corruption should give little comfort. If the Kremlin cannot control its local corruption problems, or if it so wanted to teach a lesson to Belarus that it was willing to disrupt the reputation of its own oil exports, or if some technical production and collection problem was hard to solve, it’s not good news for European oil consumers. The Russian problem was followed by this week’s “sabotage” in the Persian Gulf which seemed to traders similarly penny-ante. First, a handful of ships near the port of Fujairah appeared to be bashed in with a sharp object like a limpet mine or ramming by another vessel or weapon on Sunday. Oil traders joked on twitter that the attack was not aimed to be serious since it is hard to move oil prices on a Sunday. Still, the location of the attack was significant because the United Arab Emirates has been investing to capitalize on the port’s location outside the Strait of Hormuz to expand crude oil storage facilities. Fujairah is also the location Arab countries held floating storage of over 70 million barrels of crude oil back in the mid-2010s as a precaution against oil disruptions following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Iranian statements threatening to close the Strait of Hormuz. The head of Iran’s Parliament’s national security committee tweeted that that “explosions” of Fujairah showed that the security of the south of the Persian Gulf is “like glass.”  Initial rumors that Saudi oil tankers were on fire or that the Fujairah port was on fire turned out to be fake news. A day later on Monday, Saudi Arabia confirmed that a drone attack had damaged two pumping stations on its East-West pipeline that carries oil from large eastern Saudi oil fields to the kingdom’s west coast where it can be exported to circumvent the Strait of Hormuz. Saudi Arabia also has export-oriented refineries on its west coast that typically serve Europe and utilize crude oil shipments from the East-West pipeline. Saudi Aramco had recently announced plans to expand the East-West pipeline and keeps chemical drag reduction agents on hand at the pipeline that mean the pipeline could handle up to 6.5 million barrels per day (b/d) of exports of crude oil via the Red Sea in an emergency, thereby bypassing the Strait of Hormuz. Last year, over 2 million b/d of oil were sent along the pipeline as part of normal logistical operations. To date, the oil market has reacted with a relative yawn to all these various sabotage reports. But the breakdown in norms across the globe – whether those norms are the free and clear operations of sea lanes, respected guarantees of oil quality, or most importantly, the safety and security of citizens, workers and vital energy infrastructure inside national borders-- is bad news for an internationally traded commodity like oil. A typical trader response is that the U.S. trade war with China takes precedence over these small sabotage events, given that trade conflict’s long run potential to harm global economic growth. However, analysts say China may be willing to add to its stimulus plans at least for now and so far, few are predicting a U.S. recession any time soon. By contrast, oil analysts from Wall Street firms such as Cornerstone Macro and Citi caution that the number of recent geopolitical events with implications for oil markets are running unusually high. The idea that U.S. production exists as a safety net seems equally spurious, even under the best of circumstances. U.S. output growth in any given month faces real limitations. Optimistic predictions for the Permian Basin that it could someday reach 8 million b/d might be possible, but for now, U.S. crude oil production is less than 15 percent of total global supply. Trump administration officials hint that Washington is prepared to use the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) and Washington-watchers figure the White House might ultimately be slow to turn any screws intended to stop China from buying Iranian oil. But as internal pressures on a wide variety of petro-regimes from around the world mounts, it might become harder and harder to stave off an upward march for oil prices this summer as small scale “sabotage” takes its toll on oil facilities in multiple locations at the same time internal conflicts continue to loom in major producing countries like Venezuela and Libya. The White House shouldn’t take great comfort in the fact that oil traders are relaxed. They (and their algorithms) could be simply wrong.

General elections for India’s lower house of parliament began on April 11 and will last through May 19, with all ballots counted on May 23. This is the world’s largest democratic exercise. I had the chance to ask Dr. Jessica Seddon, director of integrated urban strategy at the World Resources Institute’s WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities and non-resident fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, about infrastructure, the environment, sustainability, and the role that nongovernmental policy ideas play in India. Our exchange, the third of a series of Q & As on the Indian elections, appears below. The first is here, the second here, and the fourth here. You have advised state and national development initiatives in India. One of the policy areas you have written about is the new role of nongovernmental policy coalitions in pressing for specific development improvements. To what extent do you see nongovernment policy advice making its way into the public debate in India and affecting election priorities? Think tanks are still a relatively small sector in India, for example.  Election priorities are shaped as much by citizens’ experiences and aspirations as anything else. I would not say that nongovernment policy coalitions are setting that agenda. They are, however, contributing to election offerings – the response to these priorities. I wrote earlier about the role of nongovernment policy coalitions in developing solutions to the kinds of urban problems that show up as election and political priorities. The emphasis then was on the “Do” part of DIY, or the fact that nongovernment organizations were not just writing up recommendations and blueprints (the think tank model) but actually working with governments to see them through to implementation. This approach remains influential in urban policy, and seems poised to grow as platforms like World Resources Institute’s CityFix Labs, Tata Trusts’ Quest for Urban Livability, and IIT Madras’s Centre on Urbanisation, Buildings, and the Environment enable more formal partnerships between city officials and entrepreneurs, academics, and civic groups who can help address key infrastructure and service gaps. Some of the solutions that come from these local engagements are also increasingly percolating up into national policy agendas as leaders at that level search for ready examples of “better” urbanization. The Smart Cities Mission has also been somewhat of a conduit for the migration of nongovernment-origin ideas across cities. The current government and contenders have also relied heavily on nongovernment sources of data and analysis of priorities. It’s one thing for a government to contract a private provider to collect a dataset or do a report – many do – but it’s another for a nongovernment organization to frame the question and gather the data that defines a good part of the reality policymakers respond to. India has a number of large-scale nongovernment initiatives that do just that. Some of these are quite public: Skymet’s weather service and monsoon forecasts, which run in parallel to and in some ways compete with the Indian Meteorological Department; ASER’s survey of educational attainment; and CEEW’s Access Survey on household energy use and gaps, for example. Sometime these influences are acknowledged; as part of its description of the urban agenda, the Ministry of Finance’s 2017 Economic Survey included analysis of “actual” urbanization based on remote sensing of built-up areas in addition to the official census figures. More often they’re not as openly mentioned.  Finally, on think tanks. Yes, this is a small sector, but I think increasingly influential for the same reasons that nongovernmental policy coalitions have been a force in cities. Policymakers need well-grounded solutions, and there is not as much of an infrastructure within the government to produce the analyses that help take an idea to an implementable stage. The Niti Aayog has not yet grown into its intended role as the nation’s strategic think-tank. The top level of experienced civil servants includes some brilliant individuals, but is stretched thin by today’s pressing problems.  You’ve also done a lot of work on environmental policy, specifically on air quality. At a time when India’s deteriorating air quality has become a subject of increased awareness and demand for change, how much do you see this priority reflected in the general election?   I don’t see air pollution as a headline issue in the general election. It is on peoples’ minds, but has neither risen to the level of, say, jobs, infrastructure, or services in terms of demand, nor has it in any way trumped national pride, group loyalty, or party affiliation as a motivator to vote one way or another.  But to be fair, it’s not really an election-type issue. The visible part of the problem – the haze people can see, the sickness they might attribute to pollution – is small relative to the empirical size of the problem. Air pollution reduces crop yields, changes local and global climate, limits solar power production, and probably affects the monsoon. The crop yield loss numbers are astounding: annual pollution-related losses in India could feed 94 million people. And Indian varieties of staple crops may be more vulnerable than previously assumed: a more detailed study in Mohali found that yield losses were double those of American and European crop varieties. But these impacts are not so visible in an everyday sense.  Still, it is on peoples’ minds. A 2017 survey of people in 11 cities around India commissioned by Shakti Sustainable Energy Foundation found that 30-40% (and more than half in Delhi) were “aware” of air pollution and thought it a problem. About 40% of respondents didn’t think that the air quality was acceptable. This proportion seems to be growing. Forty-four percent of adults surveyed in the Spring 2018 Pew Global Attitudes Survey thought that air pollution was a “very big problem” even though the time period wasn’t peak (visible) pollution season. More than half of respondents though the air was getting worse. Even in smaller towns and rural areas, the smoke during burning season and in the winter is something people generally recognize as related to childrens’ coughs, etc. So it’s an issue – but still, not at the level of jobs, which 76% of respondents in the same Pew Survey rated as a “very big problem.” Air quality has also appeared in party manifestos, which is a change from 2014. The proposals are a little haphazard – tightening standards, moving deadlines forward, doubling down on electric vehicles, setting up new and overarching authorities. But they are there, and the proposals cover both sectoral action and governance changes, which is great.  So we’ll see. Some thoughtful proposals on strengthening regulators, improving monitoring, and thinking through sector emission reduction are circulating within the various Ministries and Finance Commission, and it would be great if some of these could see the light of day.  Every Indian government says it prioritizes infrastructure, but some are able to implement better than others. What do you see as the major infrastructure hurdles for the five years ahead, and are we seeing a realistic discussion about those challenges in this year’s campaigning?  Implementation. Implementation. Implementation. This has always been the challenge: getting from a will to a way. To be honest, I haven’t seen too much variation in the rate of implementation across the administrations I’ve been watching or working with since the Vajpayee years. Nor do I think that a political change, whether at the state or national level, would fundamentally change the pace at which projects can be rolled out, since so much of the challenge has to do with the administrative structure of too many agencies, too little data for advance planning and risk mitigation, and not enough clarity or consistency in the various frameworks for approvals of everything from environmental permissions to land allocations. Even when the policy seems clear, the details of its application are often vague enough to give all parties enough confidence to test their own interpretation – and end up in court. My husband is an infrastructure lawyer in Delhi and sees a lot of this end of the implementation friction. Someday I’ll figure out how to tally the anecdotes more systematically.  I think that regional climate change is a big, often ignored issue for infrastructure. Regional environmental change – temperature increases, new precipitation patterns, more severe storms, higher sea levels and storm surges, and other new normals – is altering both the need for infrastructure and the nature of risk and requirements for project viability. This may not be as much of an issue for a five year horizon as it is for a 10 year or more view, but it is certainly worthy of more attention than it’s getting. The infrastructure built today is expected to contribute to development well into the future, but it may not do so unless the nature of the next few decades is considered more systematically. We are already seeing signs of stress. Ninety percent of India’s thermal power plants – which provide the country with most of its electricity – rely on freshwater for cooling, and 40 percent already experience high water stress. This will only increase. The environment for near-coastal infrastructure from roads to tunnels to ports is changing quickly, yet few projects are working with updated projections for sea levels and their implications for drainage requirements. India’s wind power ambitions may not be realistic in light of future wind levels – where’s the electricity that will still be needed going to come from?  I’m not seeing a realistic discussion in campaigning about the need to build infrastructure for a future that will be different than today. That’s not so surprising, though. Election season is a time when the operative word is “more.” I would love to see (or hear about, if it’s happening) mo re of a conversation about how infrastructure planning and procurement could be updated to account for the need to buy redundancy, to accommodate what might seem like overbuilding today, and to allocate climate-related risk between all parties. This shift to resilience-thinking rather than efficiency-focus is hard, though. It’s not just India.  The growing awareness of India’s urban needs is one of the most interesting policy developments in India. The UPA government had its national urban mission; the BJP created the Smart Cities Mission, and this year the Congress Party’s manifesto promised governance reforms at the urban level. What would you assess are the top development issues for the next Indian government as India increasingly urbanizes?  I would say that the top urbanization issue is just to recognize it. All of it. India’s census says that the country is 31% urban, but this is a well-known underestimate of the amount of territory with an urban-like built environment, the number of local governments that are under pressure to meet the needs of urban-size populations, and the percentage of people who live at urban-like density. India’s official definition of “urban” has an odd quirk of being related to the nature of adult employment (75% nonagricultural) in addition to population size and density, and its system for declaring a local government “urban” rather than “rural” (they have different powers) lags behind reality. This is well known and even sort of officially recognized – see the Economic Survey 2017. It’s just not actually built into public investment planning or the version of reality that shapes urban strategy.  The fact that India is probably about half or more urban right now creates both new opportunities and challenges. On the challenges side, there’s the fact that higher density populations need different and more extensive infrastructure than low density. Pit latrines or even septic systems don’t work; you need to do drainage and sewage treatment. Low-capacity distribution transformers meant for a village are not going to power a town, much less a town that has more gadgets, electric stoves that operate in unison, and (hopefully) increasing productive use. You could do the same analysis across a number of sectors – and it should be done. On the opportunities side, there’s a real chance to invest in emerging population centers to make them more attractive and productive – places where people want to stay rather than migrate to the already-straining and growing metropolitan regions. Strategic investment to create conditions for a more uniform distribution of population could be a game-changer for India.    What will you be watching most closely during India’s 2019 general election?  The numbers, like everybody else! Well, I’m waiting for the numbers; it’s actually excruciating to see the voting unfold in slow motion over this month. I’ll be particularly curious to see what happens in Tamil Nadu, because it was home for so long and hopefully will be again. I’m also watching Odisha, because it’s such a pitched fight between a long-standing regional party and the BJP. I think the period right after the election will really be the part to watch because of the role regional parties will probably play in the configuration that emerges. I’ve always been fascinated by the elusive “third front” in Indian politics, and it seems like we may see a kind of “intrapreneurial” version of one emerge later this year.   My book about India’s rise on the world stage, Our Time Has Come: How India Is Making Its Place in the World, was published by Oxford University Press in January 2018. Follow me on Twitter: @AyresAlyssa. Or like me on Facebook (fb.me/ayresalyssa) or Instagram (instagr.am/ayresalyssa).