Safe vs. Fair: A Formidable Trade-off in Tackling Climate Change

Global warming requires a response characterized by forward-looking management of atmospheric carbon and respect for ethical principles. Both safety and fairness must be pursued, and there are severe trade-offs as these are intertwined by the limited headroom for additional atmospheric CO2 emissions. This paper provides a simple numerical mapping at the aggregated level of developed vs. developing countries in which safety and fairness are formulated in terms of cumulative emissions and cumulative per capita emissions respectively. It becomes evident that safety and fairness cannot be achieved simultaneously for strict definitions of both. The paper further posits potential global trading in future cumulative emissions budgets in a world where financial transactions compensate for physical emissions: the safe vs. fair trade-off is less severe but remains formidable. Finally, we explore very large deployments of engineered carbon sinks and show that roughly 1000 GtCO2 of cumulative negative emissions over the century are required to have a significant effect, a remarkable scale of deployment. We also identify the unexplored issue of how such sinks might be treated in sub-global carbon accounting.Climate Policy, Burden Sharing, Negative Emissions

Is solar power cheaper than coal?

In the last few years, the cost of gridconnected solar photovoltaic (PV) power has come down drastically. There is strong evidence from international studies that the levelized cost of solar power is on par with coal-fired power plants when the cost of externalities (greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution and ash disposal) is taken into account. A one-day workshop was held recently to explore how far these cost trends of solar and coal-fired power plants are valid in the Indian context. The workshop was targeted at various players in the power sector, such as decision-makers, bureaucrats, think-tanks, power generation and distribution companies, academic institutes and grass-root organizations

Bridging the gap between intentions and contributions requires determined effort

India has been lauded for the ambitious targets she has set for herself in the Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) that the Government of India put forward at the recently concluded Paris COP 21 (Conference of Parties) of the Climate Convention. The relevant voluntary and self-determined targets that India has indicated are: (1) ‘To reduce the emissions intensity of its GDP by 33 to 35 per cent by 2030 from 2005 level.’ Emission intensity is defined as tonnes of CO2 generated per unit of GDP corrected for purchasing power parity. (2) ‘To achieve about 40% cumulative electric power installed capacity from non-fossil fuel based energy resources by 2030 with the help of transfer of technology and low cost international finance including from Green Climate Fund.

Monopole Flux State on the Pyrochlore Lattice

The ground state of a spin 1/2 nearest neighbor quantum Heisenberg antiferromagnet on the pyrochlore lattice is investigated using a large $N$ SU(N) fermionic mean field theory. We find several mean field states, of which the state of lowest energy upon Gutzwiller projection, is a parity and time reversal breaking chiral phase with a unit monopole flux exiting each tetrahedron. This "monopole flux" state has a Fermi surface consisting of 4 lines intersecting at a point. At mean field the low-energy excitations about the Fermi surface are gapless spinons. An analysis using the projective symmetry group of this state suggests that the state is stable to small fluctuations which neither induce a gap, nor alter the unusual Fermi surface

Policy-driven approach to demand management from space cooling and water heating appliances: insights from a primary survey of urban Bengaluru, India

Appliances that provide thermal comfort services like space cooling and water heating have high energy demands and significant seasonal variation in usage. Ownership and usage of these appliances increase rapidly with income. Given the significant impact of these appliances on electricity demand, it is key to analyse their ownership and usage. A well-designed policy and standards framework can help transition households as well as manufacturers towards a higher efficiency ecosystem, and significantly lower electricity demand growth rates. In this study, we analyse ownership and usage patterns of these appliances using data from a primary survey of Bengaluru, India. We suggest some passive demand-side management frameworks based on current policies implemented for these appliance categories

Sharing global CO2 emission reductions among one billion high emitters

We present a framework for allocating a global carbon reduction target among nations, in which the concept of “common but differentiated responsibilities” refers to the emissions of individuals instead of nations. We use the income distribution of a country to estimate how its fossil fuel CO(2) emissions are distributed among its citizens, from which we build up a global CO(2) distribution. We then propose a simple rule to derive a universal cap on global individual emissions and find corresponding limits on national aggregate emissions from this cap. All of the world's high CO(2)-emitting individuals are treated the same, regardless of where they live. Any future global emission goal (target and time frame) can be converted into national reduction targets, which are determined by “Business as Usual” projections of national carbon emissions and in-country income distributions. For example, reducing projected global emissions in 2030 by 13 GtCO(2) would require the engagement of 1.13 billion high emitters, roughly equally distributed in 4 regions: the U.S., the OECD minus the U.S., China, and the non-OECD minus China. We also modify our methodology to place a floor on emissions of the world's lowest CO(2) emitters and demonstrate that climate mitigation and alleviation of extreme poverty are largely decoupled

NIAS Research Ethics Policy 2017

A research ethics statement or protocol is an essential part of every proposal for research involving human and/or animal subjects, and must be submitted to the NIAS Ethics Committee for review and approval. This document contains the Principles and Guidelines on Research Ethics adopted by NIAS

Pinned Branes and New Non Lorentz Invariant Theories

We describe a mechanism for localising branes in ambient space. When a 3-form flux is turned on in a Taub-NUT space, an M5-brane gets an effective potential that pins it to the center of the space. A similar effect occurs for M2-branes and D-branes with appropriate fluxes. In carefully chosen limits of the external parameters, this leads to new theories that are decoupled from gravity and appear to break Lorentz invariance. For example, we predict the existence of a new 5+1D theory that breaks Lorentz invariance at high-energy and has a low-energy description of N tensor multiplets with (1,0) supersymmetry. We also predict a new type of theory that, similarly to the little-string theory decouples from gravity by a dynamical (rather than kinematical) argument.Comment: 29pp LaTeX, formulas in section 7 corrected, ref added, final version to appear in Nucl. Phys.