Ten things I learned at the IIMB Climate Summit 2026
Two days, one campus, and a world running out of time
I spent May 28 and 29 at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore for their Climate Summit — a dense, energising, occasionally alarming two-day gathering of policy-makers, industry leaders, scientists, lawyers, and one actual astronaut. My notebook is now full of circled facts and underlined questions. Here, distilled, are ten things that genuinely shifted my thinking.
Manoj Kumar Singh, CEO of Net Zero Think, opened the summit with what sounded like a provocation but turned out to be a thesis backed by data: by 2030, the world will have more energy generation capacity than it knows what to do with — if we invest correctly. The bottleneck is not physics. It is politics, vested interests, and inertia. His phrase "Energy Surplus World by 2030" deserves to be on more people's desks.
SpaceX-level launch economics have made Low Earth Orbit solar collection a plausible near-term proposition. The conference noted that 15,000 LEO satellites could harvest solar energy in space — uninterrupted by night, clouds, or seasons — and beam it down. The question is no longer whether the physics works. It is whether the political will and the capital will arrive in time.
India's Energy Conservation Building Code (ECBC) remains largely voluntary. Speakers were blunt: compliance is the exception, not the rule. Embedded carbon in construction — from cement to steel — is a massive and systematically under-reported source of emissions. Green certifications like LEED Platinum to Silver benchmarks for new buildings coming up is a real blessing. The gap is enormous. And we are building at an unprecedented pace.
This one stopped me cold. Singh's argument: solving energy scarcity is not just a climate intervention, it is a peace intervention. Historically, half of all global armed conflicts have had energy access — oil, gas, coal, water — at their root. An energy-abundant world is, structurally, a more peaceful world. Climate action as conflict prevention: it is an argument that deserves far more airtime in geopolitics discussions.
Only 25% of India's sewage sludge is treated. The rest is dumped — into land, into water, into the future. But the PKC Box / CAMBT session showed that this is also an enormous missed opportunity. The pathway of Sludge → Biogas → Biofertiliser could simultaneously address waste management, energy generation, and agricultural inputs. Toyota is already piloting bio-methane at scale. The technology exists. The will — and the infrastructure — lags.
At India's mortality scale, cremation using firewood destroys approximately two trees per person who dies. Multiplied across a billion-plus population, this is a significant and rarely discussed driver of deforestation. Bamboo and compressed briquettes are viable alternatives — cheaper, cleaner, and available. Yet cultural habit has kept firewood dominant. This is the kind of problem that policy alone cannot solve.
60% of Karnataka's agriculture is rain-fed. Not irrigated. Not buffered. Rain-fed — meaning it is directly, nakedly dependent on monsoon patterns that are growing increasingly erratic. Speakers discussed precision agriculture, automation, and drought-resistant crops as mitigations, but the structural vulnerability is stark. For a state that is simultaneously India's tech capital and a major agricultural producer, this tension is going to define the next decade.
274 GW installed today. 500 GW targeted by 2030. Solar costs ₹3–6 per unit — genuinely cheap. But solar-plus-storage — the dispatchable, 24-hour clean power that actually replaces coal — costs ₹20–30 per unit. That gap is the central unsolved equation of India's energy transition. Until storage economics improve dramatically, we will keep reaching for coal when the sun goes down.
A Supreme Court advocate made a compelling case that the deliberate, large-scale destruction of ecosystems should be codified as Ecocide — a crime against the Earth, prosecutable under international law. The concept has been gaining ground in global legal forums for years. In a country where forests, rivers, and coastlines are routinely sacrificed to "development," placing Ecocide in the same moral category as genocide would be genuinely transformative.
The summit did not let AI off the hook. Yes, intelligent systems could reduce India's industrial energy intensity by approximately 40% — a significant and achievable gain. But the same automation wave will eliminate millions of "decent jobs," in the summit's own phrasing. The transition cannot be celebrated without also planning for the people it displaces. Energy efficiency and employment justice are not separate problems.
Two days, one notebook, and more questions than answers — which is, I suspect, exactly the point of a good conference. The climate crisis is not waiting for us to be ready. It is asking only whether we are paying attention. I am trying to.
— George, Bengaluru, May 2026
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