Every day, Raju hops on his bike and reluctantly pedals the world a little closer to climate catastrophe.
Every day, he ties half a dozen sacks of stolen coal from the mines, up to 200 kilograms, or 440 pounds, to the reinforced metal frame of his bicycle. Driving mostly at night to avoid the police and the heat, he hauls the coal 10 miles (16 kilometers) to merchants who pay him $ 2.
Thousands more do the same.
This has been Raju’s life since he arrived in Dhanbad, a city in eastern India in the state of Jharkhand in 2016; annual floods in their home region have decimated traditional agricultural jobs. Coal is all you have.
This is the United Nations conference on climate change in Scotland, known as COP26, against.
The Earth desperately needs people to stop burning coal, the biggest issue source of greenhouse gases, to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of climate change, including the intense floods that have cost agricultural jobs in India. But people depend on coal. It is the largest source of fuel for electric power in the world and many, desperate like Raju, depend on it for their own lives.
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“The poor have nothing but sadness … but so many people have been saved by coal,” Raju said.
Alok Sharma, the conference’s UK chairperson-designate, said in May that he hoped the conference would mark the moment when coal is left “in the past, where it belongs.”
While that may be possible for some developed nations, it is not that simple for developing countries.
They argue that the “carbon space” should be allowed to grow as developed nations have done, by burning cheap fuels like coal, which is used in industrial processes like steelmaking alongside electrical power generation. . On average, the typical American uses 12 times more electricity than the typical Indian. There is more of 27 million people in India who have no electricity at all.
Demand for energy in India is expected to grow faster than anywhere in the world over the next two decades as the economy grows and increasingly extreme heat increases the demand for air conditioning that so much the rest of the world provides. for granted.
Meeting that demand will not fall to people like Raju, but to Coal India, already the world’s largest miner, which aims to increase production to more than 1 billion tons a year by 2024.
DD Ramanandan, secretary of the Indian Trade Union Center in Ranchi, said talks on going beyond coal were only taking place in Paris, Glasgow or New Delhi. They had only just started in the Indian coal belt. “Coal has continued for 100 years. The workers believe that it will continue to do so, ”he said.
The consequences will be felt both globally and locally. Unless the world dramatically reduces greenhouse gas emissions, the planet will experience even more extreme heat waves, erratic rainfall and destructive storms in the coming years, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
And a 2021 Indian government study found that the state of Jharkhand, among the poorest in India and the state with the largest coal reserves in the country, is also the Indian state most vulnerable to climate change.
But there are roughly 300,000 people who work directly with the government-owned coal mines, earning fixed salaries and benefits. And there are nearly 4 million people in India whose livelihoods are directly or indirectly related to coal, said Sandeep Pai, who studies energy security and climate change at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
India’s coal belt is dotted with industries that need the fuel, such as steel and brick making. Indian railways, the country’s largest employers, make half their income from transporting coal, allowing them to subsidize passenger travel.
“Coal is an ecosystem,” Pai said.
For people like Naresh Chauhan, 50, and his wife Rina Devi, 45, India’s economic slowdown as a result of the pandemic it has intensified its dependence on coal.
The two have lived their entire lives in a village on the edge of the Jharia coal basin in Dhanbad. Accidental fires, some of which have been burning for decades, have charred the ground and left it spongy. Smoke hisses from cracks in the surface near his cabin. Fatal sinkholes are common.
The couple earn $ 3 a day selling four baskets of collected charcoal to merchants.
Families who have lived in the middle of coal mines for generations rarely own land they can farm and have nowhere to go. Naresh hopes his son will learn to drive so that he can at least escape. But even that may not be enough. There is less work for taxi drivers in the city. Wedding parties, which in the past reserved cars to transport guests, have been reduced. Fewer travelers come to the city than before.
“There is only coal, stone and fire. Nothing else here. “
That could spell even tougher times for the people of Dhanbad, as the world will finally turn away from coal. Pai says this is already happening as renewable energy becomes cheaper and coal becomes less and less profitable.
India and other countries with regions dependent on coal need to diversify their economies and retrain workers, he said, both to protect workers’ livelihoods and to help accelerate the transition from coal by offering new opportunities.
Otherwise, more will end up like Murti Devi. The 32-year-old single mother of four lost the job she had all her life when the mine she worked for closed four years ago. Nothing came of the resettlement plans promised by the coal company, so she, like so many others, set about collecting coal. On good days, you will earn a dollar. Other days, she depends on the help of the neighbors.
“If there is coal, then we live. If there is no coal, then we do not live, ”he said.
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AP journalists Shonal Ganguly and Altaf Qadri contributed to this report.
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Reference-www.nationalobserver.com