Copyright © HT Digital Streams Limit all rights reserved. A woman with her granddaughter, temporarily displaced from their home, at a Gurudwara in Jammu on May 13, 2025. (Photo: AFP) Summary This issue of Mint’s climate change and asks your newsletter whether visionary world leadership is critical for conflict resolution and climate action. It highlights India’s increasing air conditioning demand, the debut of climate-smart genome-edited rice and picks up a touch of comedy. Best reader, last week was perhaps a disturbing time for some of you, especially if you live in one of India’s border towns. For a friend in Srinagar, it was like dying every night, not knowing if she would wake up alive. Even at a distance, cooked in the comfort and safety of the national capital, the India-Pakistan conflict and the possibility of a full-fledged war took a spiritual toll on many of us. Thanks to the ceasefire – and hope it is not a fragile – we can breathe. And look again at a forgotten wisdom. Rabindranath Tagore, the poet winner who wrote India’s national anthem, Jana Gana Mana, wrote in a letter to a friend that “Patriotism cannot be our final spiritual shelter. I will not buy glass for the prize of diamonds and I will never allow patriotism to overcome humanity as long as I live as long as I live”. Tagore’s views on nationalism, and his differences with Mahatma Gandhi on this issue, are evocatively captured in his novel Ghare Baire (The Home and the World) in 1916. Satyajit Ray adapted the book for the screen. Both are worth watching. Perhaps none of this is relevant to a climate news letter, except for the cultivation that the world has a serious need for visionary leaders to lead us through emergency situations, and no more than in the climate crisis – among the most urgent challenges of our time. We need world leaders who can ensure a lively future for our children, leaders who can think beyond the narrow interest as they try to end a conflict or solve the climate puzzle. The condition of the climate temperatures rises to a short showers in early May. Those of us who can now close us indoors, avoid the sun and renovate the air conditioner. There is a large climate piece that unfolds there, directly within the blissful ease of our personal spaces. Watching Full Image India is the world’s fastest growing air conditioning market. (Photo: Reuters) Room -Ac -Sales in India are on steroids. Consumers made a linel line for ACS last year as a grueling summer that fueled a business driven by discomfort. In the year to March, Indians bought nearly 14 million ACS – a staggering 30% jump over the previous year. By 2030, annual sales are expected to double more than 30 million units. By 2050, the estimates indicate that the demand for electricity to run ACS will increase nine-fold compared to 2022. India is already the world’s fast-growing AC market. In a rapidly warming world, an increasing demand for cooling will jeopardize the national climate goals. Can technology offer a solution by making ACS more energy efficient? The short answer is yes, but it can take years. The interesting part is that we already have the solutions – such as moving to centralized systems such as ‘District Cooling’, which can reduce energy consumption by at least 30%. In Hong Kong, schools and hospitals use district cooling; In this model, cool centralized radiators cool spaces with pipe -cooled water as a refrigerant and not polluting gases that contribute to global warming. Iconic buildings such as the Burj Khalifa in Dubai and the Louvre in Paris also use district cooling. The news in short view of the full image genuine is similar to rewriting the Code of Life. (Illustration: The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences) Earlier this month, India released the world’s first genome-edited rice varieties, which promises to promise your meal. These designer crops take less time to grow, so use less water and fertilizers and have a lower carbon footprint. Genome Reditation (GE) technology, which won the 2020 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, uses a protein to change the DNA sequence of a genome-a bit like rewriting the Code of Life. Tamatly that lowers blood pressure and improves sleep quality is now sold in Japan. Look at this long story: How Hyderabad tamed his mountain of waste. Despite an early start of heat waves in April, the first half of May was relatively cool, thanks to occasional showers. Tragically, 14 people died after heavy rain struck Gujarat. Meanwhile, an expected early landfall of the monsoon raised the hope of an abundant harvest and benign food prices. Here is a touch of irony: India’s first hydrogen -powered truck will be used to transport dirty coal. Your morning drinks are at a peak. An international pricing gauge consisting of cocoa, coffee and tea, rose 122% in the two years after March to unfavorable weather and the crops. In comparison, global food prices became 12%cheaper. Climate change Tracker How many disasters will a child face in her lifetime? Exposure to heat waves, crop errors, floods, droughts, wildfires and tropical cyclones will at least double for a child born in 2020 as one born in 1960. This will be the case if world temperatures rise by 2.7 ° C compared to a pre-industrial levels (in a business-as-use scenario), as per study published in the nature. We can save the toddlers of today a lot of pain as they get older as we act to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees, according to the Paris agreement, the writers say. But who is listening? Do you know Jargon Urban Heat Island Our cities are full of impenetrable surfaces, from cement trails and concrete buildings to asphalt roads and disappearing water bodies. These surfaces absorb and store heat during the day and leave them at night. In addition, waste heat is released by cars, acs and the like, which are trapped by the dense concrete around it. This makes urban centers much warmer than the rural outskirts, which is why they are now called urban heat islands, or you. We tend to use more ACs and refrigerators – and more energy to manage them – because it gets hotter. This exacerbates the UHI effect in an evil cycle. Here is an overview of the Indian situation. Prime Number 107,000 The number of passenger electric vehicles (EVs) sold in India in 2024-25 compared to 91,607 in the year before. The current penetration is 2.6%, slightly higher than 2.3% in FY24. In comparison, 6% of the two-wheelers and more than 57% of the three-wheelers sold last year were electrical. What does the clumsy consumer question explain? Buyers see EVs as a second car, not the primary. They are concerned about the range (how many kilometers an EV can work at a single cost), insufficient track infrastructure, the price premium over ordinary cars and the future cost of battery replacement. Video of the Month View Full Image Cover of the New Yorker March 2019 issue by Barry Blitt, with President Trump and his top priority, despite the storm around. To be honest, reading the climate crisis can be quite depressing. The chatter can deter one because of all the Doomsday Crystal Gazing. Why then not listen to a disrespectful comedy? Here is a short composition. Don’t miss Dana Carvey, Straight White Male, 60, about how US President Donald Trump can solve the climate problem if he doesn’t believe in it (slipping until 10:08 if you are in a hurry): “I’ll be so good with global warming, so, so good with global warming, I will pay CO2 for it.” That’s all, for now. Bibek is back with the next issue within two weeks. Catch all the business news, market news, news reports and latest news updates on Live Mint. Download the Mint News app to get daily market updates. More Topics #Climate Change #india Mint Specials
Climate change and u: the price of comfort in a rapidly warming world
