First thing you need to understand about India — it's not the same as everybody else. The country is unique unlike any other country in the world. What works in other places might not work there.
> elect politicians who build renewable power instead of electing politician who build coal plants.
I think politicians across party lines want to switch to renewable.
Please understand that this switch to renewables can't be done overnight. And there's a huge population who can't be kept in the dark during the transition period.
Also, India is the 3rd largest producer of renewable energy (and 3rd largest consumer) in the world, behind USA and China [1]. They're making an effort.
Roughly 5 Billion people, or more, rely on the Haber process to turn hydrocarbons in nitrogen fertiliser so they can eat.
Carrying capacity of the earth before this mass manufacture of artificial fertiliser was maxxed out at around 1.5B, maybe with better plant strains that could be edged up, but not by 500% you would think.
We are still a fair way off from green steel, we are going to need metallurgical coal for some time, unless you like driving a wooden car pulled by a horse.
And alumina and lithium are both gas heavy in refining at the front end, needing calcination at 1000 DegC, plus or minus.
Then there is plastic, from lighter fractions of liquid hydrocarbons in many cases (condensate) - I can't believe you are still allowed to buy water in a plastic bottle or food in a plastic container that's a once use, that's crazy.
Hydrocarbons aren't going to become non-existent parts of the industrial landscape if any kind of life as we know it is to continue - we just need to start by stopping stupid waste in transient use cases like once use water bottles and food containers, decorative wrapping, short lived non repairable consumer appliances and goods, and synthetic fabrics that are made into clothes that could last for years or even decades, but get disposed of after 10 or 20 wears because of "fashion" or poor manufacture renders them useless in this time.
Growing up in New Zealand in the 70's, if someone had tried to warn that in the future you would be paying for drinking water (any water actually), by the half litre and more expensive than petrol in some cases, and you would get a free bottle that you immediately discarded when you finished drinking from it, you would have been ignored as a fringe lunatic at best, and may well have been taken in for some kind of assessment. And yet some decades later, here we are.
