Moonrise over south central Mumbai - the financial capital of India.
For more than a century, the world has told itself a simple story about how nations become rich: first they burn wood and biomass, then coal, then oil and gas, and only much later, after the factories are built, the cities are crowded, the skies are polluted and the economy is locked into fossil infrastructure, do they begin the long and expensive process of cleaning it all up.
That was the Western path. It was also China’s path, compressed into one of the most extraordinary industrial transformations in history.
But a new analysis from Ember, written by Kingsmill Bond and Sumant Sinha, suggests that India may be showing the world something different: a route to modernity that does not first require a deep fossil fuel dependency, and that may therefore rewrite one of the oldest assumptions in economic development.
Kingsmill Bond is an energy strategist focused on the global transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy. He previously worked at the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) and Carbon Tracker, and is now part of Ember, where he leads analysis on the “electrotech revolution” and the rapid rise of clean energy technologies. Before entering climate and energy, he spent more than two decades as a financial market strategist at firms including Deutsche Bank and Citibank.
