With Donald Trump pulling the U.S. out of the the Paris climate accord, China and India will have to shoulder the burden of keeping a lid on global warming. But even if the two most-populous nations are willing to take up the mantle, their ability to pull it off is uncertain.
India's solar industry offers a case study. Thanks to a dramatic decline in prices of Chinese-made solar panels in the past several years, burning coal is now almost 59 percent more expensive than harvesting the sun's energy. About 14 percentage points of that difference comes from the equipment required by a coal-fired power plant to reduce discharges of toxic fumes and particulates, according to calculations based on data from Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
