Home & Away

The US is becoming energy independent, which might mean a certain level of disengagement from the Middle East. Here are the energy , political and security implications for India and what India can do about it. The demise of oil and gas is greatly exaggerated. As more and more sources of oil and gas are unearthed, and new technologies are coaxing oil out of obscure places like tar sands, the world can relax where oil supplies are concerned. What should we be concerned about? Well, the less important worry is the immediate future of renewable  energy  is bleak. The game changer is that the US, long dependent on Middle East oil with a foreign policy to match, and the chief guarantor of security in this volatile region, is marching towards energy  self-reliance _ and that would change the world. US’ official projections say their oil imports will drop 20 per cent by 2025. Citigroup, in a much-talked about report earlier this year described America as the “new ...

Watching hundreds of protesters braving the sea at Kudankulam battling a tough-minded Tamil Nadu administration, it might seem that India is ploughing a lonely furrow, pushing for nuclear energy when the world is seemingly turning away from it. After Japan’s Fukushima disaster in March 2011, when a tsunami led to a power failure leading to a failure of the cooling system and a meltdown in the nuclear reactor, a resultant tsunami of public opinion blew away a burgeoning nuclear renaissance. Germany, anyway ambivalent about nuclear power, moved swiftly to cut out nuclear power from their energy mix. Norbert Rottgen, environment minister, announced Germany would shut down all its nuclear plants by 2022. Eight reactors were immediately put out of work. Germany decided to go for off-shore wind farms, coal power plants but with carbon sequestration technology, and solar energy. All very green-sounding stuff. An irate Japan, reeling from the effects of the tsunami and the radiation...

Rare earths is the next big thing. Prime minister Manmohan Singh is expected to sign an intergovernmental agreement with Japan if he travels to Tokyo in November. As an umbrella agreement, this is expected to start in earnest joint development of rare earths metals in India. But as a strategic move, it brings Japan even closer to India, becoming what Singh calls a “transformational” relationship. Japan’s internal politics and its election schedules, have, as a result, become a matter of deep interest in the Indian government, because, the only thing that could delay a PM trip is an election in Japan. But notwithstanding frequent political changes in Japan, Singh has insisted on meeting every Japanese leader, because he believes the Japan relationship to be bigger than the current political party. Indian diplomats at the recent ambassador’s conference here in September were given detailed briefings on the DMIC __ an iconic Japanese investment project which could have massive long-...