Bad American Ideas Are Worse in India

Indian malls are symbols of what the two countries say they want less of in general — Americans exporting their lifestyle and habits to India without considering how different India is, and Indians taking up our finer American lifestyles and habits without considering how different the U.S. is.

"You really can't, sort of, parachute a technology from one place to another," says Rajendra Pachauri, the director-general of The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), a think tank in Delhi.  "There has to be some local customization, some local modification that suits conditions in that country."

Pachauri brought up the mad logic of Indian malls during a session at this week's U.S.-India Energy Summit in Washington, which TERI hosts annually with Yale University.  (He is also chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the authoritative body that will publish its latest state-of-the-science compendium at the end of this month.)

"In the U.S. setting, shopping malls probably — the way they were designed — made some economic sense," Pachauri said.  In India, not so much.  "Given our prices and our costs, we could have come up with something totally different."  TERI's training complex on the outskirts of Delhi, he said, draws no power from the grid.  The buildings are efficient, requiring just a third of a conventional structure's energy.  What they need comes from solar, biomass and geothermal sources.

When Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Obama met this week, they signed off on agreements that may help make questionable resource decisions — such as the mass construction of mid-20th-century suburban American retail cocoons in dense, energy-poor Indian 21st-century cities — less wasteful.

Modi and Obama agreed in principle to free up U.S. funds to finance carbon-free energy, so that, for example, air conditioning in India's hot malls needn't be powered by burning coal. They agreed on the importance of controlling refrigerant gases, which are climate super-pollutants that nations are trying to negotiate limits to.  They set forth initiatives on air quality, deforestation, climate adaptation and energy security.

The work builds on agreements reached in 2009 that have already brought into India $2.4 billion in public and private renewable energy finance and energy-efficient technologies that the State Department says may obviate the need for more than 75 large power plants.

Bad American Ideas Are Worse in India