vii
When I was 11, I lived in the river plains of northern India, a region
poorer than sub-Saharan Africa (Alkire and Santos 2014). It was before
the turn of the millennium, and while the mercury routinely went past
45 °C, my household struggled to cope with frequent power cuts totalling
a dozen hours a day. We had the relative luxury of a diesel generator and
an inverter, cooked using gas cylinders and a parabolic solar cooker, used
electric water heaters, and the nightwatchman burnt charcoal to stay warm
on winter nights and cooked his morning meals on a woodstove.
When I was 21, I lived on an elite university campus where the government ensured round-the-clock power supply so the lights never went out.
Months before Copenhagen hosted the United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of Parties (CoP)
15, I was an invited student delegate at a global sustainable development
summit. Midway through, during a plenary session with the then-head of
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and a leading
British Broadcasting Corporation news anchor, I posed a question in the
limelight. In two days of discussions on how to address the climate change
challenge, why had nobody discussed the role of the United States of
America (Christoff 2010), since our prospects looked bleak without its
geopolitical backing and political economic will?
Now 31 years old, I live in Norway, one of the richest countries in the
world with a fortune built on oil, with hydropower its predominant
domestic energy source. My home runs almost entirely on electricity, from
heating to cooking to hot water. Our transport systems are increasingly
electric, except air travel which continues to be carbon emissions intensive
Prologue
When I was 11, I lived in the river plains of northern India, a region
poorer than sub-Saharan Africa (Alkire and Santos 2014). It was before
the turn of the millennium, and while the mercury routinely went past
45 °C, my household struggled to cope with frequent power cuts totalling
a dozen hours a day. We had the relative luxury of a diesel generator and
an inverter, cooked using gas cylinders and a parabolic solar cooker, used
electric water heaters, and the nightwatchman burnt charcoal to stay warm
on winter nights and cooked his morning meals on a woodstove.
When I was 21, I lived on an elite university campus where the government ensured round-the-clock power supply so the lights never went out.
Months before Copenhagen hosted the United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of Parties (CoP)
15, I was an invited student delegate at a global sustainable development
summit. Midway through, during a plenary session with the then-head of
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and a leading
British Broadcasting Corporation news anchor, I posed a question in the
limelight. In two days of discussions on how to address the climate change
challenge, why had nobody discussed the role of the United States of
America (Christoff 2010), since our prospects looked bleak without its
geopolitical backing and political economic will?
Now 31 years old, I live in Norway, one of the richest countries in the
world with a fortune built on oil, with hydropower its predominant
domestic energy source. My home runs almost entirely on electricity, from
heating to cooking to hot water. Our transport systems are increasingly
electric, except air travel which continues to be carbon emissions intensive
Prologue