Population, Air and Energy

In one line

A larger population needs more energy, and whether that makes it a large polluter depends entirely on whether you count in total or per person.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: population affects air and energy through aggregate demand, which rises with numbers, and through consumption per person, which rises with income. India's total emissions are among the largest in the world because its population is very large, while its emissions per capita are well below the world average, and the choice between the two measures is the substance of the equity argument reflected in article 3(1) of the Framework Convention and article 2(2) of the Paris Agreement.

Energy demand

Three drivers, and they are not the same.

Numbers. More households need lighting, cooking, cooling and mobility.

Income. As income rises the household adds appliances, cooling, a vehicle and processed goods, so demand per household rises faster than the number of households.

Access. A very large number of Indian households have moved from no electricity to electricity and from solid fuel to gas within a generation, which is a rise in demand that is entirely a gain in welfare.

That third driver is the one an answer should insist on. Energy demand growth in India is principally the consequence of people getting things they did not have, and treating it as a problem to be suppressed misdescribes it. The Paris and Convention provisions on development and poverty eradication as the first and overriding priorities of developing country parties exist for exactly this reason.

Air

The sources are not exotic, and the chapter on degradation lists them: vehicles, industry, thermal power, construction dust, waste burning, crop residue burning and domestic solid fuel.

Population contributes to each, but through concentration rather than through numbers alone. The same number of people dispersed and the same number concentrated in a plain that traps emissions in winter produce different air quality, which is why the problem is regional rather than national.

And indoor air is the part that is forgotten. Combustion of solid fuel inside a dwelling produces exposure far above any ambient standard, and it falls on women and young children. A clean cooking fuel programme is therefore simultaneously a health measure, an air quality measure and, because it reduces fuelwood collection, a forest measure. That is the rare instrument that serves three of this module's problems at once.

Per capita against total

The central argument of this chapter, and it belongs in any answer on climate or on international obligation.

Total emissions measure a country's contribution to the stock of gases in the atmosphere and to the annual flow. On that measure India is a very large emitter.