Energy: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly
Three visits provide three reminders of the high stakes when it comes to such an essential part of our world.
Readers of an energy and climate blog may not need reminding, but I beg your indulgence to use this post to do it anyway: the stakes of the decisions we’re collectively making on these issues could not be higher these days.
This hit home for me in triplicate during a stop in India’s northeastern state of Manipur. I stayed in the main city, Imphal, making excursions into the surrounding countryside. Each made a deep impression.
The first outing underscored the ways electricity, even a little bit of it, can change the lives of the poor and energy deprived. This is the heart of the energy challenge for economically developing countries like India, and many even-poorer countries across Asia, Africa and Latin America.
I bumped and bounced for five hours in the back seat of a jeep, winding deep into the hills beyond Imphal to visit the tiny village of Leisang. Leisang happens to be the final village in India to officially be electrified, back in 2018. Electricity arrived as part of a government drive to grid connect all of India — a country that, when I visited for the first time back in 2004, had hundreds of millions of people with no electricity at all.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi made rural electrification a priority when he came to power in 2014. His government gave itself a big pat on the back when Leisang connected, hosting a high-profile press conference to get the word out.
The 40 or so villagers of Leisang, a clan from a tribal group known as the Kuki, were of course also thrilled. Chief Tongsat Haokip told me how he hosted all the adults and many of their children for the big event at his home. The switch was flipped, a light went on and the villagers cheered and danced for hours. They were surprised by the flood of national press that suddenly showed up when the government made its announcement, without letting the villagers know in advance.
From the moment that bulb lit up, they no longer had to simply dream — of their children being able to study after dark, of not having to cook by open wood fire inside their home (a terrible health hazard), of televisions and of not having to travel a half mile down the mountain to charge their mobile phones.
Much of that has come to pass.
“We’re used to the electricity now. Everybody is happy when it’s on,” Meena Rai, a 36-year-old mother of five told me as she showed off her electric burner.
The operative phrase there is, “when it’s on,” of course. As her caveat implies, the reality of electrification still hasn’t met the hype, to be sure. When I visited, the power had been out for several days, a common problem for Leisang and, frankly, just about every Indian in a country still unable to deliver consistent power. This spring and summer have been especially bad for power outages, amid soaring demand, tight supplies and tangled transportion lines.
Yet even inconsistent access to electricity is changing the lives of these villagers, who scrape out an existence growing potatoes and yams in the hillsides surrounding their roughly 20 dirt-floored homes.
Chief Tongsat invested in a television first. Recently, he purchased an electric clothes washing machine. This has drastically cut down the number of hours his daughters in law spend pounding clothes by hand out back of the home to clean them. He paid a local car and driver service to cart the machine up the steep slope to the village and into his home, an interesting example of how the arrival of electricity can spur local economic activity even beyond those who directly use it.
Nearby, Rai now uses an electrical convection burner to cook for her five children, although she concedes she sometimes must revert to a wood fire when the power fails. She is grateful her kids can to complete their homework most evenings.
The lives of Leisang villagers have not been wholly transformed. They been magically empowered. Many of the villagers are still too poor to afford much more than a mobile phone. Yet they still felt they had been given a ticket to the modern world, even if it was only for the cheap seats. This made them hope for more — improved local health care, a school nearer by, better roads.
Those things won’t come any easier than electricity. But every villager I talked to felt their lives had improved, and would continue to do so. This is what energy can do.
Another day, I visited Loktak Lake, part of a vast freshwater wetland that was once an incredibly diverse, globally unique ecosystem.
I visited a village here, too, this one much poorer than Leisang. No electricity at all here, just a few families that have lived for generations literally floating upon the water. Their homes are built on wooden rafts. They spend their days fishing and collecting the water plants they live off of and sell.
Their existential problem is for us a reminder that even in solving our carbon emissions challenges we can easily create new headaches: The delicate wetland has been all but ruined by a hydroelectric dam that came on line in 1983.
The Ithai Hydropower Dam was conceived and constructed with little environmental review or consideration for how it would affect the villagers and the local ecosystem. It flooded some 83,000 hectares of farmland and pasture — an area the size of New York City. Over time, this has caused what was essentially a very wide and shallow meandering river to stall and silt up.
Invasive species have out-competed the native plants and animals in this new habitat, choking off the oxygen in the water that supports the fish and plant life villagers survive on.
The poverty in the floating collection of homes — still reachable only by boat — was stark, even if the villagers were welcoming and sharing. They spoke of their difficulties and challenges getting the local government to address their concerns.
They’ve been fighting for decades to have the dam removed, with virtually no success. The state government isn’t listening. Indeed it’s planning a large-scale tourism push, including building hotels and running boats full of tourists on the lake. It is also planning more hydroelectric dams in the area, one way India is adding carbon-free energy, while also creating serious environmental concerns.
For me, this was a lesson in how important a considered and careful energy transition must be, even as it accelerates. We face many difficult tradeoffs as the pace picks up. Assuring a just transition means not only helping those dependent on the fossil fuels being phased out, but also on causing as few new problems as possible while quickening the pace. No small challenge.
Finally, I visited a World War II cemetery in Imphal and several battlefields outside the city. History has long focused on the two main theaters of WWII — Europe and the Pacific. But the war was fought here, too, as Japan pursued what was known as the Burma campaign, an almost insane attempt to fight their way across British-controlled Burma and into British-controlled India that nearly worked.
Between March and July of 1944, the hills around Imphal and the plain approaching the city were the scene of some of the most awful fighting in the long, brutal war, which is saying something. The battles of Imphal and nearby Kohima, a hilltop city now in the neighboring Indian state of Nagaland, became an underappreciated turning point in the war in Asia.
I visited Kohima a few years ago and walked through its WWII cemetery. The graveyard sits next to where one of the most grueling battles between the Japanese and Western Allies took place, the Battle of the Tennis Court. This is where the Japanese advance into India was stopped. The total cost for the Allies at Imphal was 12,500 casualties with another 4,000 casualties at Kohima. Some 54,000 Japanese troops died, 13,300 or so killed in fighting. Most of the rest simply starved in the rainy, junglely hills at the fag end of their broken supply lines.
The Imphal cemetery, like Kohima’s, is the final resting place of thousands of young men — or really mostly boys, some of them teenagers. They came from the English countryside, Scotland and Wales. Nepali Ghurkhas fought and died, as well, and Africans from British colonies there. The Indians who died — and through a cruel twist of history Indians fought on both sides — came from parts of the British empire so far from where they were killed that they must have felt themselves to be in an equally distant and foreign land.
Even more sobering was my visit a battlefield with a group of visiting British and Americans, guided by Yumnan Rajeshwor Singh, an Imphal local who has organized tours like these, built a museum and even helps try to recover remains and personal items for familes on all sides of the conflict. We peered into still-existing Allied foxholes, looked out across the plain toward where Japanese soldiers poured out of the hills. We tried to imagine what that must have been like. Even stranger is to imagine what the local tribal peoples indigenous to the area experienced. They had their own history of violent clashes with each other, but this wasn’t their fight and it must have dumbfounded them as to why it was raging with such intensity here.
World War II wasn’t started for energy in 1939 when Hitler invaded Poland, though Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 was in part motivated by Tokyo’s fear of being denied access to critical industrial commodities in Asia.
Yet energy — where to obtain it, how to effectively deploy it — shaped the greatest conflagration the world had ever known, right to the blinding conclusion in the skies over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It was not possible to imagine 1944’s battles in Burma from the vantage point of Pearl Harbor three years earlier. The atomic bombs of 1945 could not be foreseen more than a year earlier at the close of the bloody episode in Burma.
As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine moves into a sixth month, its reverberations are still rippling out across the world in ways that are profoundly altering global energy use — where we obtain it, how we deploy it.
I am not predicting another world war here. But I wonder what we are not able now to imagine in our future.
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