Electricity in India | Before the Flood

About 30% of households in India are yet to have access to electricity. If you want to provide electricity to everybody, we have to ensure that our electricity is affordable. India has a vast reservoir of coal; we are probably the third or fourth largest reservoir of coal in the world. Coal is cheap, whether you and I like it or not.

You have to think about this from this point of view: if you created the problem in the past, we will create it in the future. We have 700 million households who are using biomass today—700 million households! If those households move to coal, you have that much more use of fossil fuel than the entire world is fried.

If anyone gives you this very cute stuff and tells you, "Oh, the world's poor should move to solar," and "Why do they have to make the mistakes that we have made?" I hear this all the time from Americans, and I'm like, "Wow, you know, I mean, if it was that easy, I would have really liked the U.S. to move toward solar, but you haven't."

Let's put our money where our mouth is. We have to practice what we preach, absolutely. I'm sorry to say this; I know you're an American, and please don't take this amiss, but your consumption is going to really put a hole in the planet. And I think that's the conversation we need to have.