The Goracle’s foreign policy tour on cutting emissions might as well be taking place in a foreign galaxy. The idea of cutting U.S. emissions 80 percent in 40 years (after an 80-percent increase over the past 50 years) is an absurd notion, much less cutting emissions 80 percent globally while nations like China and India are clawing to achieve First World status.
Just how absurd is revealed by the introduction this year of Indian carmaker Tata’s new Nano model – the so-called “Model T of India.”
“The $2,500 Tata Nano is the kind of car upon which empires are built,” writes Detroit Free Press auto writer Mark Phelan this week. “The 122-inch-long Nano could be the first car a few hundred million people in the developing world dream about, and how many of them attain it. The Model T was a car like this. So was the Volkswagen Beetle. Their appeal and affordability put people around the world behind the wheel for the first time.”
In other words, India is on the cusp of an affordable auto revolution the U.S. and Europe experienced over a half century ago. And this in a country with ten times the population of the U.S. when Ford’s revolutionary car was introduced (15 million Model Ts were sold over its 20-year lifetime). Even before the Nano, vehicles in New Delhi – population 16.5 million – have increased five-fold in the last 20 years.
Like Americans before them, Indians are embracing this individual transportation opportunity – and Tata founder Ratan Tata will be lionized as the 21st century Henry Ford who gave it to them.
You think the 20th century saw an explosion in transportation greenhouse emissions? You ain’t seen nothing yet.
The prospect horrifies the Nobel Peace Prize–winning, collectivist IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri who has been publicly critical of Tata for devoting itself to building cheap cars rather than efficient mass transportation (imagine if the IPCC had been around in Ford’s era!). He’s screaming into gale-force market winds.
Slated to hit the market later this year, Tata’s plans for the Nano are expansive. Initial production capacity is 250,000 a year, but “we can go to 450,000 very quickly,” says Managing Director Ravi Kant. A sub-subcompact by U.S. standards, the four-seat Nano will be a family car in India and other developing markets. “It lacks niceties like air bags, antilock brakes and air-conditioning,” writes the Free Press’s Phelan, “but so did the Model T.”
Won’t India’s infrastructure be taxed, critics ask? Taking a page from Henry Ford, Ratan Tata points out that America’s road system improved as more people bought Model Ts.
What about the spiraling cost of oil? The Tata sports a gas-powered, 2-cylinder, 600 cc engine (a pricier diesel engine is also offered) which will put more strain on global oil stocks. Perhaps that will drive production towards electrics (interestingly, Tata Motors’ parent is a major electricity producer), but – just as likely – it will spur technological breakthroughs in oil production that continued to defy predictions that the world is running out of fossil fuels.
Either way, the Nano is a lesson that growing economies demand cheap energy, and – Goracle pipe dreams notwithstanding — the 21st century is on the cusp of an explosion in energy use.