I just spent a week at the 15th Annual Delhi Sustainable Development Summit in India, a four-day eco-extravaganza for hundreds of participants from government, business, academics, and community organizations. India, the world's third largest emitter of greenhouse gases, may hold the key to a global climate change deal in Paris later this year (China and the U.S., the world's two biggest emitters of greenhouse gases or "GHGs," have already made bilateral commitments). It was therefore a fitting location for a global reality check on whether economic growth for 9.6 billion people worldwide by 2050 can be "sustainable." The takeaways were both sobering and exciting. First, as a backdrop to this Summit, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has set forth a distinctly mixed agenda for sustainability in his first nine months in office. On the one hand, based on his visionary track record as Chief Minister of the state of Gujarat (where he championed solar power and energy efficiency) he has set out a national goal of 100,000 megawatts of solar energy by 2022. Make no mistake, that's a lot of clean energy (a typical nuclear power plant is 1,000-2,000 megawatts). On the other hand, India gets almost 70% of its power today from fossil fuels and he has loosened rules for exploitation of domestic coal and made deals with Australia for importing still more.

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