Root Privileges

Month: November 2021

  • Is mathematics real?

    I didn’t think to think about the realism of mathematics until I got to high school, and encountered quantum mechanics.

    Mathematics was at first just another subject, before becoming a tool with which to think intelligently about money and, later, with advanced statistical concepts in the picture, to understand the properties of groups of objects that couldn’t be deduced from those of individual ones. But by this time, mathematics – taken here to mean the systematic manipulation of numbers according to a fixed and rigid system of rules – seemed to be a world unto its own, separated cleanly from our physical reality akin to the way “a map is not the territory”.

    Put another and limited way, mathematics seemed to me to be a post facto system of rationalisation that people used to understand forces and outcomes whose physical forms weren’t available for direct observation (through one, some or all of the human senses). For example, (a + b)2 = a2 + b2 + 2ab. To what does this translate in the real world? Perhaps I had 10 rupees in one pocket and 20 rupees in the other, and 29 other people turn up with the same combination of funds in their pockets. We could use this formula to quickly calculate the total amount of money there is in all of our pockets. But other than finding application of this sort, I didn’t think the formulae could have any other purpose – and that, certainly, knowing the formula wouldn’t allow us to predict anything new about the world (ergo post facto).

    I was constantly on the cusp of concluding mathematics was made up, a contrivance fashioned to fit our observations, and not real. But in high school, I came upon a form of mathematics-based reasoning that suggested I should think about it differently, if only for the sake of my own productivity. In class XI, my physics teacher at school introduced Wolfgang Pauli’s exclusion principle.

    The principle itself is simple, at least at the outset. Every particle has a fixed set of quantum numbers. An electron in an atom, for example, has four quantum numbers. Each quantum number can take a range of discrete values. A particular combination of the numbers is called a quantum state (i.e. the combination confers the particle with some possibilities and impossibilities). The principle is that no two particles in the same system can occupy the same quantum state.

    Now, it is Pauli’s principle – a logical relationship between various facts – that animates the idea, and not any mathematical rule or prescription. At the same time, the principle itself is arrived at by solving mathematical problems. Why do electrons in atoms have four quantum numbers? Because historically we started off with one, because we perceived the need for one, and over time we added a second, then a third and finally a fourth – all based on experiments in which the electrons behaved in a certain way, but because direct physical observation was out of the question we invented mathematical relationships between the particles’ parameters in different contexts and ascribed meaning to them.

    It was still ‘only’ empirical: scientists tried different things and those that worked stuck. There may be another way to make sense of the particles’ behaviour with, say, five dim sum (🥟) numbers, and reorganise the rest of quantum mechanics to fit in this paradigm. Even then, only the mathematical features of the topic will have changed – the physical features, or more broadly the specific ways in which particles are real, will have not. But this view of mine changed when I read about experiments that proved Pauli’s principle was real. A mathematical system we set up eventually led to the creation of a fixed set (not more, not less) of quantum numbers, and which Wolfgang Pauli eventually combined into a common principle. If scientists had proved that the principle was true and therefore real, could the mathematics undergirding the principle be true and real as well?

    Not all fundamental particles obey Pauli’s exclusion principle. The four quantum numbers of an electron in an atom are: principal (n), azimuthal (l), magnetic (ml) and spin (s). Of these, the spin quantum number can take two kinds of values: half-integer (1/2, 3/2, …) and integer (0, 1, 2, …). Particles with half-integer spin are called fermions, and the rules describing their behaviour are defined by Fermi-Dirac statistics. They obey Pauli’s exclusion principle. Particles with integer spin are called bosons, and the rules describing their behaviour are defined by Bose-Einstein statistics. They don’t obey Pauli’s exclusion principle.

    When some kinds of heavy stars can no longer continue fusion reactions outside their core, they collapse into a neutron star – an ultra-dense ball of neutrons. Neutrons are fermionic particles – they have half-integer spin – which means they obey Pauli’s exclusion principle, and can’t occupy common quantum states. So the neutrons in a neutron star are tightly packed against each other. Their combined mass generates gravity that tries to pull them even closer together – but at the same time Pauli’s exclusion principle forces them to stay apart and remain stuck in their existing quantum states, creating a counter-force called neutron degeneracy pressure.

    We wouldn’t have neutron stars, or electronic goods or even heavy elements in the periodic table, if Pauli’s exclusion principle didn’t exist.

    Most recently, three separate groups of scientists described a new physical manifestation of the principle, called Pauli blocking. Most atoms are fermions (as a whole); each group first created a gas of such atoms and cooled them to a very low temperature – to ensure that in each gaseous system, all of the lowest available quantum states were occupied. (The higher a particle’s quantum state, the more energy it has.)

    A group at JILA, in Colorado, used strontium-87 atoms. A group from the University of Otago, New Zealand, used potassium-40 atoms. And a group from MIT used lithium-6 atoms. (The last one includes Wolfgang Ketterle, whose work I have discussed before).

    Usually, when a photon and an electron collide, the photon is scattered off into a different direction while the atom absorbs some of the photon’s energy and recoils. The absorbed energy forces the atom into a higher quantum state, with a different combination of the quantum numbers than the one it had before the collision. In an ultra-cold fermionic gas in which the particles have occupied the lowest available quantum states, and are packed tightly together as if in a solid, there is no room for any atom to absorb a small amount of energy imparted by a photon because all of the ‘nearby’ quantum states are taken. So the atoms allow the photons to sail right through, and the gas appears to be transparent.

    This barrier, in the form of the atoms being ‘blocked’ from scattering the photons, is called Pauli blocking. And in the three experiments, its effects were directly observable, without their validity having to be mediated through the use of mathematics.

    My views in high school and through college being what they were, I don’t have any serious position on the matter of whether mathematics is real. In fact, my reasoning could have been flawed in ways that I’m yet to realise but which a philosopher who has seriously studied this question may consider trivial. (Update, December 10, 2024: More than three years later, I can think of one. Both the theoretical description of X and the experimental verification of X — where X is any phenomenon grounded in the exclusion principle, e.g. neutron degeneracy pressure, Pauli blocking, etc. — are founded on a mathematical description of a physical reality, i.e. neither activity/event directly accesses the physical condition of X but deals only with the way we’ve chosen to describe such activity/event mathematically, and thus it’s no surprise that the experimental verification of X holds up the mathematical description of X.)

    This said, having to work my way through different concepts in high-energy, astroparticle and condensed-matter physics (as a science communicator) has forced me to accept not anything about mathematics as much as the importance we place on the distinction between something being real versus non-real, and the consequences of that on what mathematics is and isn’t allowed to tell us about the real world. Ultimately, dwelling on the distinction and its consequences distracted from what I found to be the most worthwhile part of discovery: the discovery itself. Even this post was motivated by an article in Physics World about the three experiments, whose second paragraph (and in fact most of whose second paragraphs) focused on potential, far-in-the-future applications of cold fermionic gases displaying Pauli blocking. I don’t care, and I think that from time to time, no one should.

  • Panicking about omicron

    The new omicron variant of the novel coronavirus has got everyone alarmed – which is darkly ironic. This variant has reportedly racked up more mutations than previous variants of concern, including the delta, with virologists and epidemiologists from South Africa and the UK paying particular attention to real-world data that suggests it could be more transmissible and cause breakthrough infections and that some of the mutations in its RNA correspond to changes on the spike protein that could (speculatively) render the existing crop of WHO-approved COVID-19 vaccines less efficacious.

    Uncertainty about what a new strain of the virus can do, or even uncertainty more broadly, has always been sufficient reason for panic. Nonetheless, the rise of the omicron variant is significant and the response to it more instructive because of its predecessor.

    The delta variant set a new benchmark for how quickly the novel coronavirus could spread, but its effectiveness also prompted some wonderment if the virus may be approaching ‘peak mutation’ – that is, if the delta might represent one of the most transmissible forms of the virus and if future outbreaks happening in a partly vaccinated world may not be so deadly.

    The omicron is thus significant because it dispels this line of thinking, while demonstrating that as bad as the delta was for global society, things can get worse if we let them. Clearly we have. And the world’s panic is ironic because of the particular ways in which we have.

    As far as COVID-19 vaccination coverage is concerned, there are two distinct groups of people: those who have been fully vaccinated and those who have been partly vaccinated or haven’t been vaccinated at all. The corresponding split in India is qualitatively similar to the one worldwide, particularly in that it has come to be aligned almost perfectly with the class divide. This is the first point.

    Second, most – if not all – of the current WHO-approved vaccines haven’t been tested for their ability to directly prevent or reduce the transmission of the novel coronavirus (such as by reducing the amount of viral shedding). So there’s a not insubstantial possibility that even fully vaccinated individuals could get and transmit the virus, while enjoying the vaccine-granted privilege of not falling ill.

    Third, we don’t know if the omicron variant can cause more severe disease, so let’s say that – at least to those of us who aren’t experts – right now the chance of it not being able to cause more severe disease is a reasonable 50%.

    Taken together, the three points suggest that panic is understandable only among those who haven’t received one or both doses of their (two-dose) COVID-19 vaccines, and whose populations may have been ‘incubating’ the same or different variants by allowing them to persist for longer in their bodies, and replicate, in the absence of the vaccines (depending on each vaccine’s time-to-recovery). For these people, the chance of the omicron variant being able to last for longer in the body and cause more severe disease is already higher.

    This is a crucial difference between the vaccinated and those who have been kept from getting vaccinated – a difference fostered by countries that hoarded vaccines, blocked attempts to ease patent protections and transfer technology and money – the same countries that are now blocking travel from parts of the world where their selfishness encouraged the rise of new variants.

    On the other hand, panic verges on the offensive for fully vaccinated individuals – who are also likelier than not both in India and around the world to be able to access and afford good healthcare and antiviral drugs – to freak out about a viral variant that is currently only known to be able to be transmitted more effectively than the delta.

    This shouldn’t bother us very much because most of us seemed to have stopped thinking about transmission even though the vaccines weren’t tested for preventing that, and went easier on masking up and washing hands just because we’d received our two doses, even as the delta variant continued to spread through the population. (Infections stopped surging but that’s not the way only way a virus can continue to circulate.)

    It’s disingenuous to suggest now that the situation on the ground with omicron in play is somehow different (with the 50% disclaimer) even as we’re responding by blocking travel and trade instead of by increasing access to vaccines.

    In fact, apart from whether any instance of panic could be pseudoscientific or offensive, there’s the question of whether it’s warranted. Among the fully vaccinated, it’s simply not. The rise of the omicron variant in a world of vaccine apartheid should in fact be a grim reminder that, again, we can’t afford to let things get worse, because they will. More people will fall ill, more people will die, more healthcare systems will collapse, more people ill with other diseases will be at greater risk of death or disability, and so forth.

    If you’re fully vaccinated, mask up; if not, please go get vaccinated and still mask up. But if you can’t because vaccines are being withheld to your country – you may have reasonable cause for panic.

  • Don’t donate bad food and call it ‘dharma’

    There’s a troubling pattern among some people who give food away to homeless people and beggars.

    I have seen this happen first-hand with my folks, my extended family and their wider group of neighbours and acquaintances. All of them are Brahmins, so I don’t know if this is a Brahmin thing because they’re who my family hangs out with and/or lives around; because Brahmins make up the most part of India’s affluent lot that can afford to give away food on a regular basis, especially of the sort I’m about to describe; and/or because there’s an entrenched tradition of giving away in Hinduism that modern conservative Brahmins’ interpretation has twisted to include a not inconsiderable sense of pity, and the sense of superiority that comes with it. One way or another, it seems safe to assume that this is a Brahmin thing.

    The troubling pattern is really a lack of common sense: these people give away food they’re not going to consume because eating it gave them indigestion or something like that, to other people who are typically already in very poor health, in the name of dharma. But this can’t be dharma: it is selfish and cruel. When our own better-fed, better-attended bodies can’t handle these foods, I don’t understand the Ariadne’s thread that leads to the conclusion that people who desperately want for food, or every next meal, will be okay with it – perhaps based simply on the assumption that food of any form or kind will do.

    This morning I had a quarrel with my neighbours about giving away a bag of Kellogg’s Chocos to beggars near a temple they were going to visit; their defence was peppered with the word ‘paavam‘, Tamil for ‘pitiable’ (roughly). Chocos has maida and is loaded with sugar, and leads to constipation, at least without also consuming lots of water and fibrous foods. By giving ill-fed people Chocos, we burden them with the responsibility of finding these other foods as well, or living with the pain, discomfort and the prospect of falling very sick later.

    I’m additionally concerned that:

    • As we valourise acts of ‘giving away’ as part of efforts to circularise our economies,
    • As the makers of junk foods push harder (p. 5) into developing countries,
    • As “food that is considered to be unhealthy from a biomedical perspective is often cheaper, more easily available and aggressively promoted by the processed-foods industry” (source), and
    • As inequities in the global food system keep the price of unhealthy foods lower than that of healthy foods,
    • As people with lower levels of literacy have fewer or less efficacious protections against suggestive advertising, from bodies regulating advertisements or food-safety standards and compliance – or both…

    … we – especially common-sense-challenged Brahmins – will give away more illness in the name of dharma. This isn’t really a novel concern either: I recently saw an ad in which wealthier people leave a bag of food – from one of those burger + fries + soda type fast-food chains – near unsuspecting homeless people, and when the people discover the bag, the food inside and then smile, the camera makes sure to get that up close. They’re smiling because it’s food and they’re hungry, but giving them food that has been widely documented as contributors to poor heart health and diabetes is to exploit their glee in order to feel better about yourself.

    I also believe the same thing goes for many of the same people who live in gated apartment complexes or high-rise apartment buildings, and feed pigeons and (especially) free-ranging street dogs in the name of dharma, but are really fostering a nuisance – deadly in the case of dogs – and doing nothing to be part of the solution (buy what you need, dispose your organic trash properly, don’t feed dogs, help the city neuter/shelter/adopt them instead). As for people: please donate food, but do apply what you’ve learnt in school, what your doctors tell you, whatever your salary (or giving-ability more broadly) is and the general health condition of the person you’re donating to to determine the most nutritious kind of food you can give, and give that.

    If you’ve determined that the answer is Chocos or cheeseburger + fries + Coca Cola, however, I hope you can see what that says about your intelligence, your assessment of your privileges and your attitude towards your wealth.

  • The toxic affair between Covaxin and The Lancet

    That Covaxin has been leading a ceaselessly beleaguered life is no mystery – but The Lancet journal may not know that it has been pressed into the questionable service of saving the vaccine’s reputation on at least three occasions. In the latest one, for example, Bharat Biotech, some clueless media outlets and their hordes of followers, assisted ably by the aptly named bhakts of India’s ruling party, have been hollering from rooftops high and low that The Lancet ‘has said’ Covaxin is 77.8% efficacious. Background: The Lancet medical journal has published the paper describing Covaxin’s phase 3 trial results. But to Covaxin’s misfortune, these people appear to be assuming, as they have many times before, that a journal publishing a paper is by all means synonymous to the journal itself speaking for, even endorsing, the paper’s contents.

    If you didn’t know better, you’d think The Lancet had pooled together all the evidence, comments and documents pertaining to Covaxin and pronounced its own verdict about the shot’s reputation. But because you know better, you know that a journal’s editors, and peer-reviewers if they were involved, only checked if the submitted paper’s data is consistent with the submitted paper’s statements and conclusions, and that it was free of research misconduct (although I’m wholly pessimistic about the latter).

    The problem is that the number of people who know better appears to be vanishingly small – so small, in fact, that it didn’t strike me until earlier this year that both clinical trials and scientific publishing involve the sort of specialised education that most people, including (seemingly) all engineers and exponents of many other fields of science, peeled away from many decades ago (depending on how old they are). Even what constitutes publishing or the qualitative differences between good and great papers varies from one specialisation to the next.

    As a result, when Bharat Biotech’s people cheer that The Lancet has ‘held up’ their findings, there’s both very few people to call out their bullshit – the journal published their paper, and didn’t wave a flag for them – and they’re met more often than you’d think with resistance from both Bharat Biotech’s and other scientists, typically because of vested interests. In fact, vested interest, singular: by publishing a paper in a journal, many scientists seek to partake of the journal’s prestige. Call this a nuanced take, but it has significant real-world effects, as we’re seeing with the strange but certainly myopic ways in which Bharat Biotech has sought to defend Covaxin (including, in the latest instance, by undermining the WHO’s approval for it).

    Of course, The Lancet itself, together with some other journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association and Cell, has actively cultivated this notion of ‘prestige’ to pad its pockets as well as to passively silence questions about the many problematic papers it has published. Journals engaging in such practices together with the scientists who fall for them have thus contributed in a significant way to the idea that ‘prestige journals’ are in effect ‘prestige conferrers’, so perhaps The Lancet deserves its fate. But the many less- or entirely ill-informed people out there don’t, especially when they start to believe, “The Lancet has said Covaxin is safe, so it must be safe.”

    Medical journals, including The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine, have expressed opposition to the idea of releasing medical research papers as preprints, contending that unlike potentially incomplete papers on other topics, the ones they receive could cost lives if they’re published without independent checks first. An entirely reasonable argument. So what happens when The Lancet or the New England Journal of Medicine publish good papers about a vaccine that’s flawed in other ways, and whose authors then piggyback on the journals’ self-proclaimed superiority to toot their own horns, even as the journals all know that they’ve only checked the papers, not anything else? Apart from all the other problems with the notion of a journal’s isolated excellence, it’s ridiculous that journals accrue it the same way they’ve been accruing their profits: with no socially meaningful contribution of their own.

  • The names of our dragons

    The first piece of very-popular epic fantasy fiction I read was J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth saga, which, among many things, reminded me how much the American and British writers of ‘high fantasy’ owed the ancient mythologies of the people of Northern Europe and, to a lesser extent, east and central Asia. I read many other books of the same genre after until I was introduced to Steven Erikson’s grand Malazan Book of the Fallen series. The 10 books of the main series have hundreds of protagonists and more than a thousand named characters (including non-humanoid life-forms and excluding inanimate things like deserts and valleys) overall – and reading about them, I thought I had finally found one writer whose work allowed me to escape the mythological thrall of Norse and Asian mythologies.

    But it wasn’t to be. Many years after I’d finished the series (and declared it to be my new all-time favourite), I discovered that Babylonian mythology has a dragon goddess named Tiamat, a “deification of the primordial sea” (source). The Malazan series makes repeated references to an Elder goddess and the mother of all dragons named T’iam, and who, the series’s characters hint every now and then, came into their shared realm from a different, unknown one many eons ago. (A prequel trilogy, centered on the city of Kharkanas, also describes the formation of a “poisonous” sea called the ‘Vitr’, from which a new primordial being emerges; she is later named the ‘Queen of Dreams’.)

    To be sure, it is just a name, but only if you also ignored the economics of symbolism. The authors of the Malazan series, mainly Steven Erikson but with some help from his friend Ian C. Esslemont, went to great lengths to name an incredible array of characters. Every one of them is far from contrived, with close attention paid to the sounds and common arrangements of letters in other words of the same language the name-bearer’s people spoke. Tolkien did this also, by loading dwarven names with Ds, Gs, Rs and Ns, and elven names with Ls, Ss, Ns and Os. The point is – why to go so much trouble for so many names, but include T’iam ‘as is’, considering its nominal proximity to Tiamat?

    (By the way, Dungeons & Dragons lore has a big bad dragon named Tiamat, and Erikson and Esslemont both used the game to develop their books. If Erikson borrowed T’iam from D&D’s Tiamat – or if both share a common ancestor –, and not directly from ancient Babylonian mythology, the problem still stands. I’m only leading with Malazan here because I know more about it.)

    Second, if T’iam was rooted in Babylonian legends’ Tiamat, what else did Erikson and Esslemont borrow from this and other mythologies? (Note here that there can be no dispute for primacy between an author writing in the 20th or 21st centuries and those who wrote their stories thousands of years ago. Note also that wherever the Babylonians and the people of other civilisations adapted their symbols from, the emergence of written communication – including drawings and paintings – in their time precluded modern historians from deducing much about the people who lived earlier, except if their stories survived in written records of some sort.) The answer to what else the duo borrowed won’t change the fantastic stories of the Malazan series; instead, it would impinge on the genre more broadly. That is, it would ask: has any popular work of epic fantasy completely transcended the symbols first created by, and preserved in, people’s ancient tales?

    Whatever the answer isn’t, it can’t be Marvel Comics either, which coopted Thor, Odin, Freyja, Loki and a host of other Nordic characters and Americanised them. More fundamentally, and perhaps also more forgivably, while the writers and illustrators of Marvel produced big hits with the mass market, I doubt they set out to redefine the elements of epic fantasy through their work for this production house, and in hindsight may have contributed more towards justifying the US’s socio-cultural pursuits in each era, as exemplified by the rise of ‘Captain America’ in the post-war period. (This is speculation; I could be horribly wrong, and also beside the point.)

    The Marvel Cinematic Universe has further entrenched this process of Americanisation, including through its latest offering: The Eternals, which features a supreme antagonist, from the PoV of the film’s narrative, named Tiamut the Communicator. In Marvel’s canon, Tiamut is known as the ‘Dreaming Celestial’, a being of extreme power and, later, thoughtfulness, which starts off with a mandate to annihilate Earth. (Its title is reminiscent of Erikson’s ‘Queen of Dreams’, which suggests a deeper connection with ‘dreaming’ in Babylonian lore.) American comic-book artist Jack Kirby first introduced Tiamut in 1977 (Tiamut’s last appearance, so far, was in 2013).

    As with ‘T’iam’ in the Malazan series (and ‘Eru Iluvatar’, etc. in The Silmarillion versus Odin All-father, etc. in Norse mythology), is the act of reusing a name, with some modifications trivial enough to maintain the similarity, a tribute? Tiamut in the comics bore no other similarity to Tiamat – although Tiamut goes from being an antagonist of sorts to a protagonist whereas Tiamat in Babylonian lore goes from being creator to destroyer. Or is it an admission that the writer is adapting an old trope in order to stave off ridicule; an attempt to evoke preconceived impressions of dragon-like power; or, ultimately, a complete failure of the imagination?

  • Dirty power

    Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced at the COP26 summit in Glasgow that India will install 500 GW of non-fossil-fuel energy generation capacity by 2030. In his analysis of Modi’s speech for The Wire Science, Kabir Agarwal wrote that the phrasing evokes a contrast with Modi’s announcement at the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit on New York, where he said India would install 450 GW of renewable energy capacity by 2030.

    Apparently, “non-fossil-fuel energy” is not the same as “renewable energy”, and that the biggest difference between them is hydroelectric power production.

    As much as drastic climate action is warranted, it must also ensure we don’t privilege the ends at the cost of the means. For example, decarbonisation must happen such that the inevitable wealth loss, current and prospective, is distributed justly in society – such that the super-rich lose the most and the poor lose the least – and climate deals (both international and sub-national) should account for the corresponding mechanisms in their terms. Saving the planet by destroying the poor would be a meaningless triumph.

    Such incrementalism demands that we consider our problems one step at a time. For example, first we must all agree to phase out fossil fuels and replace them with renewable sources of energy. Then we can get on to figuring out ways to incentivise manufacturing and installation, and then to energy storage, distribution and grid parity.

    On this path, hydroelectric power seems to have been relegated to the “non-fossil-fuel” side sooner than other renewable sources – so much so that invoking it requires a careful shift in the language used to talk about it at multilateral fora.

    But while the syntactic choice shouldn’t surprise us, it should remind us that the differences between hydroelectric power and solar and wind power are often very small.

    An important one is the perception that hydroelectric power is dirty – but so are solar and wind today, albeit in more circuitous ways. The shift from fossil fuels to so-called ‘green energy’ is fundamentally a shift from extracting hydrocarbons to extracting minerals and metals instead. It doesn’t spell the end of extractive capitalism, or change the fact that mining is bad for the land, its life, the air above and the local micro-climate, or that solar and wind installations are not as pleasant as they sound.

    Some of the world’s largest extant reserves of the specific metals, especially lithium and the lanthanides, and minerals required for the systems of the futuristic ‘green world’ – electric vehicles, wind turbines, solar panels, renewable-energy batteries and in fact everything ‘smart’ that promises to increase energy efficiency by adjusting demand according to supply in real-time – are located in Africa, South Asia and South America. These regions also host most of the world’s low- and middle-income countries, and are often the sites of extreme wealth inequality, unstable local governments and poor representation in high-level climate deliberations.

    It is not unheard of, as in Bolivia, for governments to be erected on or trip over who gets the profits from mining these materials – the locals or privately owned conglomerates. An Oxfam review of the Africa Mining Vision in 2017, eight years after it was introduced, found that contrary to the vision’s goal to have mining on the continent benefit the people there, lax implementation and economic inequality were forcing countries to enter into deals with companies that were profitable in the shorter term but hurt later.

    In addition, solar and wind power generation require substantial quantities of steel, plastic and concrete, most of which the world still produces using fossil fuels, and whose production releases significant quantities of carbon into the environment.

    Taken together, solar and wind power are dirty as well, but perhaps just less dirtier than hydroelectric. Put another way, Modi’s new announcement roping hydroelectric power into the task of ‘greenifying’ India’s power generation mix only makes the mix dirtier than it already was.

    Perhaps we’re giving hydroelectric short shrift because its turbine is located much closer to the ground its chassis has gouged out than ‘solar farms’ are to the sand removed from distant rivers or wind turbines are to the bauxite mined from a remote peninsula. And then there is the inundation that dams bring. The ‘dirtiness’ of hydroelectric power is much more in your face, whereas those of solar and wind are often hidden away as negative externalities.

    A spate of accidents in Uttarakhand has only reinforced the awful reputation of hydroelectric power – and the recklessness of the people, including Prime Minister Modi, who make the decisions to build them the way they do.

    Second, Modi must realise that solar and wind power need ‘cleaning up’, too.

    The problem areas aren’t hard to find. In Gujarat, wind turbines are being installed on forest land and solar power plants have been flagged for “procedural” irregularities. In Karnataka, farmers and cattle-breeders have spoken out against the concrete foundations for solar farms that change soil-water interactions.

    In Tamil Nadu, villagers had to mount a noisy protest to keep an Adani-built ‘solar park’ from guzzling water from a nearby river. In the Western Ghats, wind turbines have affected the diversity of predatory birds and the livelihoods of an indigenous population. In Assam, proponents of a solar power plant didn’t have patience for stakeholder consultation or the proper approvals before starting construction.

    Incrementalism, especially if it’s quicker, is essential to ensure we make a just transition away from fossil fuels – while also committing to the possibility that things that are bad for the planet today needn’t always be so, through a combination of technological innovation and the value chain reshaping itself according to new incentives and sanctions.

    If hydroelectric power is not “renewable”, perhaps this is an admission from the most powerful individual in India that it deserves to be discarded, not replicated. But equally importantly, Modi’s statement also visibilises the problems with solar and wind power, and reminds us that the cleanliness of our energy is fundamentally political. India, and other countries, need solar panels and wind turbines, but if our leaders in government don’t adopt them in sustainable, democratic and socially just ways, it will be just another meaningless triumph.