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In her Budget speech, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman said that India would start borrowing in external markets in external currencies. This is a marked change from the past when India issued government bonds in rupees, and borrowed in foreign exchange only from official lenders like the World Bank. Two possible rationales in the speech are that, first, “India’s sovereign external debt to GDP is among the lowest globally at less than 5%” and, second, this will “have [a] beneficial impact on [the] demand situation for the government securities in domestic market”. The first is not really a rationale. India’s sovereign external debt is low precisely because past policymakers worried about the risks of issuing in foreign currency. Indeed, Arun Jaitley wrote in the finance ministry’s own status paper on public debt published in February 2018 that “Most of the debt is of domestic origin insulating the debt portfolio from currency risk.The limited external debt, almost entirely fro...

In 2010, scientists warned we’d already built enough carbon-dioxide-spewing infrastructure to push global temperatures up 1.3 ˚C, and stressed that the fossil-fuel system would only continue to expand unless “extraordinary efforts are undertaken to develop alternatives.” In a sequel to that paper published in Nature today , researchers found we’re now likely to sail well past 1.5 ˚C of warming, the aspirational limit set by the Paris climate accords, even if we don’t build a single additional power plant, factory, vehicle, or home appliance. Moreover, if these components of the existing energy system operate for as long as they have historically, and we build all the new power facilities already planned, they’ll emit about two thirds of the carbon dioxide necessary to crank up global temperatures by 2 ˚C. If fractions of a degree don’t sound that dramatic, consider that 1.5 ˚C of warming could already be enough to expose 14% of the global population to bouts of severe heat, m...