India contributed insignificantly to climate change but has a significant dependence on fossil fuels

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 22:32:45 +0100

India is now estimated to have a population of over 1.45 billion humans. That’s over 17% of the 8.3 billion humans inhabiting the Earth. (Estimated, because the last census was in 2011(!)). However, historically, India has contributed only about 3% to the climate crisis. This is in contrast to the 20% by USA and 11% by China.

Even today, in terms of climate change contribution per person, India ranks a distant 124th, compared to USA which ranks 16th, China 25th, and Qatar 2nd.

In other words, if climate change is to be prevented from getting worse (let alone reverse), there is a huge burden of responsibility on countries other than India. And while India should not reach USA-esque per-capita-emissions, there are more pressing problems (health and sanitation, education and employment, work-life balance, and more) India needs to deal with. If anything, the 99.2% electrification by Indian railways exceeds that of China and Japan, while US stands at a measly 1%. India also added 48GW of renewable energy generation infrastructure in 2025 alone. Despite all the popular news coverage of USA moving towards coal, USA still added a comparable 53GW. China added a whopping 430GW in 2025 alone. (That’s indeed more than rest of the world combined(!))

So, India seems like a reasonably green country. Not to mention its 30% vegetarian population that vastly exceeds even the 2.5% of Netherlands. USA stands at 4.2%.

Unfortunately, however, as the ongoing Iran war shows, India has lots of hidden dependencies on fossil fuels.

Let’s start with food, the importance of which does not require any justification at all. But wait a second, fossil fuels and food? What’s the connection even? That too in a country that is largely vegetarian? This is a nice article.

A first dependence is on diesel irrigation pumps. Roughly 30% of the irrigation pumps are diesel pumps.
A second on fertilizers.. Consider the plant macronutrients nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium. (See first half of the video by Zerodha.)
- Nitrogen comes from urea, which comes from ammonia, which comes from natural gas.
- Phosphorus comes from urea, and sulfuric acid, which too is obtained from oil and gas.
- Potassium reserves are lacking in India.
Indeed, these can be manufactured in a greener manner, besides the shift to organic fertilizers.
Besides farming itself, cooking too depends on fossil fuels. Less than 10% households own any form of electric cooking appliance. About 70% rely on liquid petroleum gas (LPG) or petroleum natural gas (PNG). The rest even use stoves known to emit harmful particulates such as PM2.5 and PM10.

On a sidenote, PM2.5 and PM10 are significant contributors of the winter smog over north India. Apparantly, winter smog was not a problem for north India up until the 1970s. Since the 1970s, agriculture picked up pace in India in an effort to make India self-sufficient in terms of food. However, as a side-effect, stubble burning was used as a means to get rid of the residue. Since then, industry and vehicular emissions have added to the problem. (The Great Smog of India seems like a nice book that dives into it.)
Finally but not the least, not limited to farming, freight transport by road accounts for 71% of the total, in contrast to 19% by railway. In fact, freight transport by trucks accounts for more than 50% of the petrol and diesel consumption in the country (see preface).

Overall, then, one expects food prices to rise if the Iran war continues, along with other commodities that need to be transported. Shifting to electric cooking appliances and electric vehicles would seem like a reasonable solution.

However, even with the current demand, 74% of the electricity is generated using fossil fuels. In other words, India needs to quadruple its renewable energy even ignoring any rise in electricity demand. But electricity is only one form of energy. As the Energy Statistics 2025 highlights (chapter 6), only 3% of the energy consumed in India is from renewable sources of electricity. The rest 97%(!) is from various forms of fossil fuels, including coal, crude oil, natural gas, and lignite. Some of the fossil fuels are used for further electricity production, and the rest are used for other activities which are too many to list.

To summarize, even if India (i) shares a minimal responsibility in reducing climate emissions (ii) is already doing a lot of work towards renewable energy, there is still a mindbogglingly huge infrastructure related to energy generation, use, and sustainable manufacturing (including products as basic as fertilizers) that needs to be set up before India can become fully self-sufficient and sustainable.

India on digikar's microblog

India contributed insignificantly to climate change but has a significant dependence on fossil fuels