New Delhi: For Delhi, extreme heat and air pollution are no longer distant climate concerns. They are realities that increasingly shape daily life, public health and economic productivity. But how large are those costs, and who bears them most?
Because we don’t pay those costs when we turn on the lights doesn’t mean they don’t exist, just. “The way ahead is to… convert pollution into money so that when polluters are emitting, they face a monetary penalty for that. Because they do not pay for the damage they cause,” he says, polluting energy sources are effectively subsidised.
I don’t think so,” he says. “We need to think about the full cost of energy. There is the private cost of producing electricity. But there are also the health costs of air pollution and the costs associated with climate change. Is the Indian public best served by ignoring the health costs of coal? He argues that pollution needs a price, while pointing to emissions markets, including experiments in Gujarat and Maharashtra. Currently the playing field is not level.
His research estimates that around 95% of the damage from additional greenhouse-gas emissions is projected to occur outside OECD countries.
TOI spoke to Michael Greenstone , Milton Friedman Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago and co-director of the Climate Impact Lab, whose latest analysis projects 15,800 additional heat-related deaths in India between Sept 2026 and Feb 2027 amid the current “Super” El Niño. “The places where the damages are going to be the largest are the places that have contributed the least to causing climate change,” he says. India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and much of sub-Saharan Africa therefore lie, as he puts it, in the “bullseye” of climate change.
That disparity is one of the central findings of Greenstone’s work.
Greenstone describes the current Super El Niño as a “postcard from the future”, offering a glimpse of the kinds of heat extremes that could become more common.