Acknowledging India’s growth imperatives involving massive energy inputs, President Barack Obama has called upon both India and China to take to the use of clean coal in thermal power plants as part of the efforts to deal with climate change.
“I want India and China to know how to use clean coal because they’re going to be building coal plants anyway. And if we’ve got technology that can help make sure that it’s not emitting huge amount of carbon, all the better,” Obama said while speaking to the bipartisan National Governors Association here on Monday.
Noting that countries like India need massive amounts of power to fuel growth, he commented: “If we aren’t giving them options, if the only message we have for them is, stay poor, we’re not going to solve the problem. So this is not an either/or issue. We got to grow the economy, which means we’ve got to produce energy. And we’ve got to deal with climate change.”
With use of fossil fuels set to continue “for our lifetime”, the need of the hour is to make those fuels cleaner, Obama said, adding the good news is technology and research and development are accelerating rapidly. Against the backdrop of the Paris agreement concluded last December, he expected more private sector investment to accelerate progress in this vital area.
Faced with a continuing domestic challenge with Republican leaders just not agreeing with his world view on climate change, let alone a national energy policy, Obama warned against deferring action as the problem is “going to get worse in the lifetime of our children and our grandchildren”.
“Since I’ve come into office, we have invested in technologies to capture carbon from coal-fired plants,” he said, noting the technologies are there already, but they are expensive right now and will need further investments to bring the costs down.
He also spoke of plans to invest in research to reduce methane generation from the extraction of oil and gas, adding his goal was to increase overall research and development dollars in the energy sector.