Canada and India Signed Climate Agreement

Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault says the new cooperation agreement with India on climate change gives a chance for Canada to export renewable energy technology.

However, the agreement does not include coal power, despite Canada leading the movement to stop coal burning for electricity and India being the second-largest coal producer and consumer in the world.

Both countries have agreed to work together on a variety of issues, including renewable energy, heavy industry decarbonization, and decreasing plastic pollution.

According to Guilbeault, he previously met with Indian Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav at the United Nations climate meetings in Scotland last November.

“When you look at some of the challenges that India has in terms of growing energy demand, growing population, the challenges with poverty alleviation, it would be very difficult for me to point fingers at India,” said Guilbeault.

“But what we can do is work with them to help them accelerate their decarbonization, in terms of helping them increase their renewable energy capacity.”

In 2017, U.K. and Canada launched the International Powering Past Coal Alliance with the intention to eradicate coal power in developed countries by 2030, and the rest of the world by 2050.

Canada’s objective is to shut down all coal-fired power plants by 2030, which means that current plants must close, switch to another fuel like natural gas, or have carbon capture devices installed to collect all emissions and bury them underground.

However, in India, with the soaring population, more than half of India’s power comes from coal, and coal-related emissions have tripled since 2000. Coal accounts for nearly half of India’s carbon footprint.

With a record-breaking heat wave in May, India authorized coal-fired power facilities to produce more electricity to meet the country’s growing demands.

Guilbeault noted that even though coal was not mentioned in this agreement, Canada can and will seek to sell its own renewable energy expertise to India in order to help it transition out of its dependency on coal.

“It’s not just India, frankly, many countries are worried that as they add intermittent renewables to their grid system, how do we ensure that we have a reliable grid,” he said. “Canada has a lot of expertise on grid management, we have one of the most robust electrical grid systems in the world. So we can work with them, we can support them in this transition, and then maybe it becomes easier for India to say, ‘OK, well, we’re ready to accelerate our phase-out of coal-fired electricity.”

Original source material for this article taken from here