With the recent events across the globe and the stress on energy that India is facing and will face in the near term of atleast 6 months, this is a good time to push the pieces around green economy at multiple levels.
Specifically this is one instance of a Green economy opportunity and there would be many more such.
Its critical that we come together as a group and pick up pieces that can push this narrative, help formulate the right policies at District / State / Central levels. And create a roadmap for the next 6-12 months.
We are scheduling an online call on this soon and will update this grove post with the meeting link and time.
Kindly share your email ID as a response to this post if interested.
My notes from todays meeting attended by representatives from CEEW, WRI, CEED, Prayas Engery Group, WISE and others
The latest crisis in fossil fuel shipments was used as a forcing condition to understand our push towards resilient climate positive alternatives. The agenda was to see if this incident along with other conflicts in the recent past is the new normal. How are people, having expertise and working, in the domain of energy thinking about these incidents?
The questions were around what are people across state, market & society thinking, is your organisation thinking anything different to leverage this situation, are we collectively able to leverage this to do anything different.
Some thoughts that arose
Political leaders at different levels are indeed asking questions about what are the alternates and how to de-risk.
Reliance on external energy supply needs to be a strategic national security and resilience issue
It’s not just cooking affecting urban areas but also fertiliser and all petrochemical derivatives and consequent products that are impacted.
How do we avoid perverse incentives by the market, which may push unsustainable short term alternatives using this crisis as an excuse?
Demand adjustment across the board to limit excesses
What do corporate mandates look like for the future of large energy consumption
There is weakness in documenting, supporting and enabling startups building fossil fuel alternates.
While there are lots of community led alternates being used in many places, the stories are not surfaced.
Narratives need to be both strategic from op-eds to providing choices at local levels.
How do we avoid going back to business as usual when some kind of normalcy returns.
So the window of opportunity that gives us the ability to speed up some things might reoccur at different frequencies for a while till the international affairs begin to stabilise. The fossil fuel supply chain is fragile right now and for the past few years. Mainstreaming alternatives, community led or organised market led, is weak. What policy gaps and enforcement needs to change? Resilient, climate positive energy alternatives which were seen as good to have are now must have. Can we make it stick? Business as usual is not going to cut it of we cant pull up our socks now.
If you are working in this space and want to do something, think how much percentage of your work is across these layers and what you want to do in the next 12 months.
Government - Political and bureaucratic policies and effectiveness of delivering those on the ground.
Market - Supporting or popularising small businesses or shifting large business towards climate positive resilient local alternatives
Society - Reducing demand intensity and surfacing community led local solutions.
Comment on this thread with your thoughts. Ask us how we can help.