COP 30: Why India must shift perspective on climate action from moral obligation to industrial revolution

At COP 30 this week, the world’s most powerful leaders are once again bargaining over degrees and decades: how much warming to allow, how long developing countries can keep burning coal, how much money will flow south. India’s delegation is pressing, as always, for climate equity. On paper, they’re right: our per-capita emissions remain a fraction of the West’s. But the longer I listen, the hollower the argument sounds. We are the nation with the most to lose - and the most to gain - if we treat climate action not as moral obligation but as our next multi-trillion-dollar industrial revolution.

This summer, I was back home in Uttarakhand. When the monsoon reaches the Himalayas, the rain is always heavy. Add climate change and a fragile mountain ecosystem, and you get a watery graveyard. In a visit that lasted 60 days, we lost over 250 lives. I wish I could say this was new. Every rainy season so far has brought a new tragedy: landslides, cloudbursts and the smell of wet earth and rubble that never left my clothes. In my lifetime, Uttarakhand has lost over 10,000 people to climate-related disasters - and I turned 27 last week. Himachal, J&K and Punjab tell the same story.




On the other side of the world, sitting in classrooms at Stanford, I see the other face of the climate divide. In Silicon Valley, trillion-dollar companies are being built on conviction that decarbonisation is the defining economic race of our time. The wealth of the world’s richest man rests on electrifying cars and reusing rockets. Meanwhile, the world’s seventh-most climate-vulnerable nation (Economic Survey of India, 2024-25) still frames climate action as sacrifice, not strategy. China does not. While still demanding concessions as a developing country, China has systematically invested in wind and solar for decades. Today, their clean energy sector is worth 10 times India’s. And they’re doubling down on their bet: the Chinese invested a trillion dollars into the sector in 2024, more than 40 times our investment.

India cannot afford to watch the second clean-tech revolution from the sidelines.

Vinod Khosla, arguably India’s most famous export to Silicon Valley, said that just “a dozen extraordinary entrepreneurs will make all the difference in the fight against climate change.” I believe India should produce at least half of them. We sit at the intersection of crisis and capability - a nation with the most pressing environmental challenges and a generation of engineers capable of solving them.

But to get there, we must face an uncomfortable truth: the world that created India’s IT boom is disappearing. Artificial intelligence is taking over the very software and back-office jobs our education system was designed to mass-produce. This disruption can turn India’s much-talked-about demographic dividend into a liability. But it also offers an extraordinary chance for reinvention. What if we reorient our academic engine from programming for outsourcing contracts to designing for sustainability? The analytical rigor that once wrote code for American banks can now write the blueprints for India’s green manufacturing surge.

This shift will require courage and focus. At IIT Bombay, I wanted to study environmental engineering, but it wasn’t as ‘sexy’ as robotics or as cool as AI, so I put it off for Stanford. 2.5 million Indians graduate with STEM degrees each year, but less than 2500 join climate-related industries. If we succeed in making climate-tech aspirational for generations raised on IIT-JEE and package rankings, India can move from being the world’s back office to its climate Silicon Valley.

We must bet boldly, not broadly. Choose a few sectors where we have a natural right to win and go deep. That means building manufacturing platforms for hydrogen, geothermal, and biofuels: industries that match our resource base, talent pool, and domestic demand. It also means re-skilling millions of workers displaced by the AI wave to join this transition.

Our choice is not between development and decarbonization. It is between thriving or suffering. The climate technologies that will define this choice are being built now. Where they are built will determine what I can call home on my 50th birthday.

When it comes to climate change, India doesn’t need more time. It needs more builders.

Shubhankar studies engineering and business at Stanford. He is a resident of Uttarakhand and a climate-tech entrepreneur.
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