Mark Blyth is the William R. Rhodes '57 Professor of International Economics at Brown University. Speaking with Srijana Mitra Das in ET Evoke, he outlines fossil fuel heft — and how economies can resist this:
A. Let’s think about the northern provinces of India, for example, where regular temperatures get to 40 degrees Celsius. Let’s imagine that becomes 42-43 degrees routinely. This requires access to air conditioning, which is predicated on more electricity production, which, at present, is powered by coal — that means you’re actually adding more carbon to the atmosphere and warming further.
This creates a spiral where eventually, those areas will become simply too hot to easily support agriculture and life. It becomes harder to grow crops there — all those goods will become inflationary. When you consider that on a global scale, this will be far more disruptive to world order than any number of tariffs.
Q. The COP30 summit is now ongoing in Brazil, also amidst criticism of the COPs for a heavy presence of fossil fuel lobbies there. How do you analyse these meetings?
A. These summits are good to remind people of the fact that while we may wish it away, we are undertaking processes that are altering the chemistry of the planet — this is leading to global warming and all its harmful impacts.
The presence of oil companies there can be constructive if they’re willing to engage — or destructive, which is usually the case as decarbonisation basically means the end of these industries. Given how they’re highly profitable, they don’t want that to happen.
Now, with their champion in the White House, who refers to decarbonisation as ‘the green scam’ and wants to double down on coal and oil, they’re on the front foot rather than the back foot, as they were over the last decade. However, it doesn’t matter because global warming is ultimately simple physics — if we keep using fossil fuels, we are essentially hastening our own demise.
Q. You also write how ‘carbon dominance’ defines American foreign and economic policy — what role do you see the United States then playing in this scenario?
A. The US essentially is decarbonising, even with the current administration’s anti-climate goals, simply because it’s already deindustrialised to a large extent. Countries like India, which are beginning that growth journey, are using much more carbon, as China also did. Now, China has bent the curve by deciding it will invest heavily in renewables. So, it’s flooding itself and the rest of the world with renewable tech.
There is a fantastic example of this technology leaking into Pakistan. When the Russia-Ukraine war broke out, Europe lost its gas supply. It turned to Qatar and said, ‘We’d like your gas.’ Europe was able to outbid the Global South, particularly countries like Pakistan, which suddenly didn’t have enough imports to run its grid, one that was notoriously ineffective anyway and very unpopular. But its people then found solar panels from China were incredibly cheap — they started to use these and now, over 20% of electricity generated in Pakistan is off the grid. Apparently, the government is telling people to come back to the grid, which many are refusing to do as it was expensive and unreliable and they now have free electricity anyway.
It’s easy to imagine a future in which those Chinese exports become indispensable elements of growth globally. If so, America’s bet on carbon is not very good.
Q. Yet, economies like India face pressure from the United States to import more fossil fuels from it or be taxed — doesn’t that put the Global South in an unfair position?
A. That’s absolutely correct. This is somewhat the signature of the trade deal that you get only 15% tariffs now by promising to import more gas and oil. At the same time, consider another Chinese example. We have this impression that China is dependent on the American market — it’s not. It’s pivoted away and just around 3.5% of GDP for China is now tied into the United States in any shape or form. There is no reason why India can’t do this as well. Indian firms at the micro level, if tariffed, can say, ‘Alright, I don’t want that market, where else can I go?’
As the Global South develops and gets richer, there is no reason India can’t sell somewhere else. This is what always happens with tariffs. In the 14th century, the Mamluk empire ran the Middle East. The Mamluks started to make large-scale architectural extravaganzas and wanted to finance many through trade tariffs. At first, it was 20%. Then, it became 50%, which was painful. Eventually, it became 200% with a monopoly on the pepper trade. Now, given how
tasteless European food was then, black pepper was essentially the Nvidia chips of the day. So, this caused innovation in competitors — it made the Portuguese and Spanish build bigger ships to find new trade routes and bust the Mamluk empire. The tariffs thus led to the demise of the Mamluks themselves — and opened the doors to European colonialism. When you have a hegemonic power trying to exploit people in its empire, eventually, the empire strikes back.
Q. How do you define a truly disruptive technology today?
A. I’ve written about this with Daniel Driscoll. New technologies which we’re quite used to now don’t seem impressive in isolation —but think about the mobile phone. It is tremendously impressive when you see its use in India to distribute welfare benefits or do financial transfers. Take drones as well — at
first, the idea was that companies would be delivering your pizza or orders by drone. Then, in Ukraine, we found a swarm of drones that cost $1,00,000 to put together can be more effective than a battleship that costs millions and millions.
When you think about emerging technologies, like the app level of AI and things people actually use, like DeepSeek or ChatGPT being integrated this into work processes, suddenly, we’re in a very different economy. This opens up growth possibilities for the Global South. In the Indian context, one of Delhi’s pressure points has always been oil. The 1991 foreign exchange crisis shook the old Nehru-ist model of growth, driving India in a much more liberal direction.
But India’s neuralgia has always been the price of oil. Now, India has the ability to import or build its own wind and solar technology — when you do that at scale, you import less oil. Lower fossil fuel imports mean more foreign exchange. That brings the price of your debt down. Essentially, just by plugging these technologies in, you get more financial and credit freedom. Why wouldn’t Global South countries do this?
Source Name : Economic Times