With India facing deadly air pollution, high healthcare costs and growing disaster threats from global warming, the head of the United Nations warned the country’s leaders Friday that investing more in coal was “bad economics”.
India, the world’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, has been ramping up its use of renewable energy – but coal remains its dominant fuel for power production.
“India must end its reliance on polluting, financially volatile and costly fossil fuels,” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a virtual address to the New Delhi-based environment think-tank The Energy and Resources Institute.
“Investing in fossil fuels means more deaths and illness and rising healthcare costs. It is, simply put, a human disaster and bad economics.”
