I’m going to tell a story of judicial overreach in India, preceded by a story of environmentalist overreach in Europe. It starts with the categorisation of diesel as an environmentally friendly alternative to petrol back in the 1990s. The argument went that diesel engines were more efficient, and therefore produced less carbon dioxide, and were therefore better for the earth. European nations worried about climate change passed a series of measures to encourage diesels over petrol cars.
In the early 1990s, diesels accounted for about 10% of the total number of vehicles in Europe as well as in Japan. By 2010, driven by tax incentives and individual environmental consciousness, nearly 60% of new vehicles registered in Europe ran on diesel. In Japan, meanwhile, diesel cars actually fell in popularity.
As Europeans bought ever more diesels, the efficiency of petrol engines increased at a rapid rate. Diesel car owners also tended to go for large vehicles, cancelling out any benefit to the environment that accrued from their choice of fuel. Gradually, scientists shifted their attention to pollutants other than carbon dioxide, and found that diesels produced particulate matter, black carbon, ozone and nitrogen dioxide in enormous quantities. Not only was the favoured fuel of European environmentalists no longer less carbon intensive than petrol, it was far more toxic.
Nitrogen dioxide levels on London’s Oxford Street are now the highest in the world, averaging 135 micrograms per cubic metre, and peaking at 463, blowing past the mean annual limit set by the European Union at 40 micrograms per cubic metre. In comparison, the average NO2 level for Delhi, India’s most polluted city and the one with the most cars, is a modest 67 micrograms per cubic metre with the permissible level set in India at 80 micrograms per cubic metre.
A U-turn
European governments are now reversing hastily from a 20-year false turn, with Paris’s mayor Anne Hidalgo going so far as to say she wants to phase out diesels entirely from the French capital in addition to pedestrianising large parts of its historic centre. Paris happens to be the city that pioneered the use of alternate day vehicle use in periods of high pollution, a solution copied by Delhi early in 2016.
The difference was that Paris offered inconvenienced commuters free rides in electric vehicles, while Delhi’s Aam Aadmi Party government threw up its hands saying Delhi’s public transport was grossly inadequate but odd-even was going ahead anyway. Since the capital city’s pollution problem was so acute, it seemed a worthy effort despite the inconvenience it caused. Surprisingly, the odd-even experiment failed in its stated aim of radically improving air quality, but that didn’t stop Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal from repeating it last month.
Just before the first bout of odd-even, the Supreme Court made an intervention of its own to tackle Delhi’s pollution crisis, by mandating that all taxis would have to convert to compressed natural gas by April 2016. It’s unsurprising that this patently legislative decision came from the judiciary rather than the government. Our courts have been happy to decide on all kinds of issues that would seem at face value to be outside their purview, from banning sun-blocking films on car windows, to mandating auctions for national resources, to shifting cricket matches from one region reeling from drought to another region reeling from drought.
Some problems
But propriety aside, what sense does it make to force such a sweeping switch to CNG? I find a number of things amiss about the ruling. First, petrol-powered taxis, most of which comply with stringent pollution norms, have been included alongside diesel ones without any rationale being provided. Second, the court has failed to recognise that a large number of Delhi’s private taxis regularly ferry passengers to neighbouring states, none of which have CNG facilities. Third, the ruling discriminates against commercial vehicles by allowing existing personal cars to continue running on petrol and diesel, only curbing the future licensing of the largest diesel models. Wouldn’t it have been preferable to mandate CNG only for future taxi licenses?
When the matter came up for hearing last week, the court could have taken the lessons of odd-even on board. Instead it stuck dogmatically to its earlier prescription, prompting taxi drivers to protest in the favoured Indian mode of blocking streets and inconveniencing commuters. The Delhi government will somehow have to sort out the mess created by the Supreme Court, which has adopted a can’t-make-an-omelette-without-breaking-eggs posture. What’s certain is that Delhi’s private taxi owners and drivers will have to endure increased costs and other hardships for a while to come.
Perhaps the entire exercise will eventually provide enough benefits to justify the cost although, since petrol powered vehicles are getting cleaner every year, the advantage of switching a percentage of Delhi’s vehicles to CNG are going to be hard to evaluate. What I’m apprehensive about is that CNG will follow diesel’s trajectory from hero to villain. At the moment, it seems like a great advance over petrol, far cleaner and cheaper. But India’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research has already found nanocarbon emissions from CNG powered cars, and who knows what dangers lurk in the shadows, waiting to supply future generations with the line we now use about Europe’s 20-year love affair with diesel: How could they have been so stupid?