In conversation: Tim Buckley and Bob Carr

Bob Carr: Well, a journalist doesn’t normally give away his or her sources, but I’m happy to do it on this occasion.  I wrote an article for The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, it appeared on 15 May, about a striking development during the month of April.  While the world was focused on the virus, the pandemic, and the economic downturn it was causing, there were a string of decisions by the corporate sector, by investors, by banks, to move out of thermal coal.  The shift against coal was quite striking.  But my best source for the column I wrote was an Australian called Tim Buckley, who had worked for major banks but in the last 15 years had worked on the challenge of energy, climate, and finance.

Tim Buckley is Director of Energy Finance Studies for Australia and South Asia for a body known as the Institute of Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.  In the time I have been moving around this climate and energy space I don’t think I’ve met someone with deeper insights than his.  Tim, welcome to this program, to this discussion.  I want to start by asking you whether you were astonished when you saw how much was happening in the finance sector this year while everyone was looking at the pandemic and its economic consequences, driven by banks and other financial institutions in a decisive move away from coal?

Tim Buckley: I haven’t been surprised, but that’s probably because I’ve been very focused on it since a critical announcement that happened in middle of January.  It was out of left field, it was unexpected, and I think it’s absolutely transformational for global finance and the global economy, and for the entire debate in Australian language, but the acceptance of the science of the Paris Agreement and the science of climate change.  The event I’m talking about is in fact the annual letter by Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock.

BlackRock, up until January of this year, had effectively no climate policy.  They had put out research papers and they had funded thinktanks to analyse the stranded asset risk.  They had accepted Mark Carney, the Bank of England governor’s, decisions about the risks.  But they hadn’t done anything about it.  So out of left field Larry Fink’s annual letter to every CEO of every corporate in the world was titled, The Changing Landscape, or Redefining Landscape, of Finance.  He was totally focused on the Paris Climate Agreement and how that would change everything when it comes to energy finance.

Bob Carr: Would that have had an effect, for example, on something you drew to my attention which was, three big banks in Japan making a decision to implement that policy?  With Japan up till now having been seen as a lagger on climate policy.

Tim Buckley: Very much so.  I would say they’re total inter-related.  The irony of it is that BlackRock’s decision in January actually stemmed from a decision that the Japanese Pension Plan Investment Group, a $1.5 trillion fund, the biggest pension asset owner in the world.  It was the CIO of the Japanese Pension Plan that took a $50 billion mandate off BlackRock in December 2019, and he gave it to Legal and General Investment Management.  Now LGIM is a leader when it comes to environmental, social and governance implementation.

The CIO of the Japanese Pension Plan had spent seven years championing ESG and he had failed to get BlackRock to acknowledge it as a key global financial risk.  So by taking a $50 billion mandate off it was no surprise to me that literally one month later BlackRock’s entire position changed.  When BlackRock moves, the world moves.

Bob Carr: So that is fascinating, to think that BlackRock had missed out on a heap of funds because it was adhering to conventional, or old-fashioned, policies when it comes to climate.

Tim Buckley: Correct.  So ultimately BlackRock is the ultimate pragmatist.  They don’t have a philosophical issue, they have a fiduciary duty.  So a lot of the work I do is about – and Mark Carney I think, the ex-governor of Bank of England, summed it up beautifully, it’s the tragedy of the horizons.  But as Geoff Summerhayes, of APRA in Australia, has pointed out, the horizon is narrowed and now is the time to act.  So fiduciary duty of directors is now.  You must evaluate financial risks relating to climate change.

So I think Geoff Summerhayes really encapsulated that beautifully in some of the speeches he’s been giving to the Australian financial market in the last four years.  All of his lessons come from Mark Carney, the ex-governor of the Bank of England.  Now BlackRock is embracing that.  Now they’re doing it, and if you look at what Larry Fink said in his letter it’s very clear.  He says, we will divest thermal coal globally, debt and equity, and we’ll do it immediately because it’s no longer economically viable.  He says, sure it’s not good for the climate.  But we are ultimately a fiduciary duty manager of other people’s capital.  We have the fiduciary duty as custodians to manage that wisely and to protect the capital.

So it’s the fiduciary argument that, in my view, is what’s driving the financial markets to move.  I mean put morality aside, it’s the legal obligation of directors and trustees to protect capital.  Mark Carney and the Bank of England says, there’s a $20 trillion train wreck coming, you actually have a fiduciary to change.  That’s exactly how APRA has interpreted it.  APRA has been putting huge pressure behind the scenes on transition planning, financial risk analysis.  All of our banks, our insurers and our asset managers now are embracing that.  They have no choice because APRA is telling them they have to.

Bob Carr: Look at the BlackRock decision, that was in January, it would have created an atmosphere where when Royal Dutch Shell was considering its huge announcement on accepting Paris and getting out of carbon, as they did in April.  I suppose they had, what I’m trying to say is, I suppose they had every excuse because of the pandemic, the economic crisis, the turmoil in oil and gas markets, to have delayed that announcement.  But they didn’t.  They must have been encouraged by what BlackRock was saying in January.  How do you rate the importance of the Royal Dutch Shell announcement made only in April?

Tim Buckley: I think that it’s not as pivotal as the BlackRock decision.  It certainly flows from the BlackRock decision.  The one which I think is pivotal was the announcement that BP’s new CEO, Bernhard Looney, made in February.  So to some degree Shell and Total of France are responding to the first mover, and the first mover was BP.  Well, the first global oil and gas major to move from BP.  So Bernard Looney was appointed CEO.  He spent four months preparing to take on the CEO role.  I read an op-ed that he wrote about what influenced him.

He said, he spent four months touring the world looking at what he was going to do as the CEO of one of the most important energy companies in the world.  He said, he had some phenomenally interesting discussions with unusual people.  I’d love to know who those people were because he certainly has – I mean at the end of the day, Bernard Looney was running the upstream oil and gas assets of BP.  So he’s no renewable energy advocate.  He is the CEO of a major company, and yet his maiden speech was all about climate change.

So effectively he’s bet his tenure as CEO on the basis that BP will transform, the leopard will change its spots.  I believe he will actually succeed or he’ll die trying.  I say that because it’s such an unusual thing for a CEO.  Every politician makes a maiden speech and they’re really powerful.  It’s very unusual for a CEO to do that.  But importantly, the CEO made it about one topic, and that was the Paris Climate Agreement.  Adherence and delivery on the Paris Climate Agreement.

So Shell and Total responded to BP.  Maybe BlackRock gave Bernard Looney the opportunity to embrace what Larry Fink said, because his single biggest shareholder had just told him, you have the authority, and in fact the fiduciary duty, to do it.

Bob Carr: Irony abounds, as they say.  In April you had Donald Trump saying, I’m happy to have drilling in the Arctic Circle.  But Citi and Morgan Stanley, great symbols of American capitalism, say, in fact we’re not doing it.  We’re not going there.  Because they too have adopted climate policies.

Tim Buckley: It is rather ironic.  But then I suppose my background in finance is the opposite of yours in politics, and ultimately I might dare say, look, I think finance is more powerful than politics.  Because by definition politics is bounded by limited tenures and getting re-elected.  Whereas in finance it’s just all about the power of money.  It’s a different perspective, it’s my perspective.  But if you think about the energy markets, the energy markets globally involve $2 trillion a year of spending, capital spending in the main.  $2 trillion a year.  So over a decade $20 trillion.

So when the global energy markets move the financial markets are a core partner to that because of the magnitude of money.  It’s the single biggest investment in the world every year in one sector, and that is the energy sector.  So when the financial markets move – I mean at the end of the day, presidents come and go…

Bob Carr: Well, let’s hope so in respect of November this year.  Certainly anyone concerned about climate policy would have to hope for that.  Austria and Sweden in April, again I couldn’t – until I spoke to you I couldn’t grasp how much activity there had been in the month of April on climate.  Coincidentally that was the month that saw Austria and Sweden announce the closure of their last coal-fired power plants.  Joining Belgium as the European countries that have said, in effect when it comes to power, we are coal-free.

Tim Buckley:            It is staggering, I mean there is this global movement which is powering past coal.  That movement is all about trying to drive home the global importance of the Paris Climate Agreement and the fact that it’s  a global problem, like the global pandemic we’re through – we’re going through.  It needs a global response.  So particularly when the president of the most powerful country in the world says, he’s going to walk away from the Paris Agreement, you actually need other actors to step up.

We’ve seen that with California.  California is the absolute world leader when it comes to embracing – I mean it’s the irony, Arnold Schwarzenegger was an advocate for renewable energy 15/20 years ago when he was governor of California.  Now they’ve got a zero emissions target for 2045, and they’re 100 per cent on track for it.  So that will be – I mean that’s probably the sixty biggest economy in the world in isolation, just California.  They’re 100 per cent on track.  So when you’ve got a state like California willing to speak up, when you’ve got a state like New York willing to speak up.  When you have countries like Sweden and Belgium and Austria and let’s add Portugal to that.  Because Portugal is going coal-free now.

But then I mean I work in India as my main market, and Delhi is talking about going coal-free.  Now it’s a bit symbolic, because India is the second biggest producer and consumer of coal.  But because of the rampant air pollution in the capital city of the most populous country in the world killing the population, killing the politicians and their children, Delhi is moving decisively to deal with the air pollution issue.  Hence to deal with coal, the biggest source of air pollution.

Bob Carr:  I have been invited to go to a conference to Delhi.  I had to say to my interlocutor, there’s no way I would go there.  I have been in Beijing when the pollution has hung heavy in the air, and you couldn’t see across the street.  Now that’s being cleared up pretty dramatically.  But when you’re told that the pollution in Delhi is four times worse than that in Beijing, I find that a threat to my peace, peace of mind.  I couldn’t be there even in a hotel with treated air and be comfortable.  They’ve got to go it.

If someone had said in the Club of Rome Report in the late-1960s, there will come a day when the air in big capital cities will be this bad, no-one would have believed it.  It would have been worse than – it would have been science fiction.  More fantastical than anything in science fiction.  But we live with that today.  Therefore getting beyond the stuff that we spoke about a month ago, and that I used in this opinion piece, tell us about India?  Because if you can give us good news about India contemplating a future beyond coal, it’s very good news for the planet.

Tim Buckley: I am one of the major optimists in the global energy markets when it comes to India.  In fact over the last four years I’ve actually pivoted our whole focus to, as you mention in the introduction, South Asia.  I don’t do Asia.  So I keep an eye on China and Japan, they’re too important, and Korea, they’re just too important for the world.  But my, majority of my work and my team is actually focused on India.  That is, India is the largest population mass in the world.  It is the second largest electricity market in the world.

It’s overtaken America to be the – sorry the third largest electricity market.  It’s overtaken America to be the second largest producer and consumer of coal.  So it is also the second largest importer of coal in the world.  So it’s absolutely pivotal to the achievement or otherwise of Paris.  Now one of the key issues I come across, and particularly as an Anglo, a foreign Anglo, it’s really obvious when you go to India, you cannot talk about climate as a Westerner in their country.  They can talk about, but at the end of the day Prime Minister Modi is very patriotic, he’s very nationalistic, his country is very proud.

The Paris Agreement is all about common but differentiated responsibilities.  We cause the problem, we want India to fix the problem.  Now Prime Minister Modi will fix the problem, but it’s not up to us to tell him to do it.  Because ultimately we’re not going to fund him doing it.  The agreement was that America and Japan and Australia and China and Europe would fund India to clean up the mess we made, as collectively the developed world, we’ve reneged on that promise.

Bob Carr: But the world’s got the impression that India is industrialising, electrifying, by building coal-fired power from one end of the subcontinent to the other.

Tim Buckley: That was certainly 100 per cent correct a decade ago.  In 2010 India had plans, formal plans, in process to build 600 gigawatts of coal-fired power plants.  Now that is 10 times the size of the Australian electricity market.  At the time India was a relative global minnow.  They’ve subsequently grown by six-and-a-half per cent/seven per cent GDP growth per annum for a decade.  Electricity demand has grown by six per cent annually for a decade.  They’re replicating the Chinese miracle, if you like.  But of those 600 gigawatts of proposed coal-fired power plants, 85 per cent have been cancelled.  So that is great news for the Paris Climate Agreement.  With – if that had not happened, Paris would be impossible.

Bob Carr:  So that came under the Modi government…

Tim Buckley: Yes.

Bob Carr:  …and it came on economic or environmental grounds?

Tim Buckley: One hundred per cent economic grounds.  As we just talked about, the air pollution issue is now an issue.  But seven years ago when Prime Minister Modi was elected they are a developing country, they couldn’t afford to deal with the air pollution.  They wanted to actually grow their economy…

Bob Carr: But for Australians this is crucial.  This is crucial, if India decided, we’ve got a plan for building this coal-fired power plant.  We’re going to junk that plan.  Where’s the robust, firm, to use that Australian adjective that keeps being applied here, reliable all-purpose day and night source of power to substitute for the coal?

Tim Buckley: Yeah, it’s a really interesting question, but it’s a very Australian question.  It’s the Australian – we’ve had a decade now of talking about the critical importance of reliability, the critical importance of baseload power.  Now in my view, and we’ve written op-eds about this, baseload power is a concept form last century.  We need to modernise our electricity grid to deal with the current century, not last century’s problem.  The technology landscape has changed phenomenally.

So the idea that you’re going to run a nuclear power plant 90 per cent of the time, or a coal-fired power plant 80 per cent of the time, well, there’s almost no country in the world that’s doing that today.

Bob Carr: Haven’t they all got the challenge of those big demands for power that come when people get home from work, or when people get up in the morning?  Isn’t that…

Tim Buckley:  Absolutely.

Bob Carr: …that requires baseload?  Baseload that you can’t get, we’re told, from solar or wind?

Tim Buckley: You’ve absolutely defined the problem and then you’ve articulated that coal baseload is the answer.  What you actually need is very fast ramping flexible peaking power generation.  You actually, the last thing you want is an inflexible 24:7 baseload power when demand is going to do that at six o’clock at night, which it will very reliably.  We know demand is going to go up just as the sun sets.  So solar is absolutely useless at providing the needs of people getting home from work for the six to eight o’clock hour timeframe.

But so is coal, because coal has to be running in the middle of the day when it’s sunny.  So when you have a huge amount of very cheap solar power, your coal-fired power plant is actually better off turned off.  It can’t turn on and ramp up in time for the six o’clock demand.  You actually need a peaking power plant.  Now that changes everything.  So the idea of nuclear and coal is actually obsolete as a baseload.  I think the whole concept of baseload power is obsolete.  What we need is flexible on-demand fast ramping power generation that actually meets the needs of the consumer rather than meets the needs of the coal company.

Bob Carr: Well, Tim, you’ve won the argument if you can demonstrate that India faced this very challenge and opted to go for renewables and to cancel the earlier commitments for coal-fired power plants.

Tim Buckley: Let me give you an economic reason for why Prime Minister Modi is 100 per cent wedded to this plan.  He talks about it every week, every week, and he’s implementing it.  That is, a couple of numbers, the power price for solar is two-and-a-half to three rupees a kilowatt hour.  So in US dollar terms that’s USD35 to USD40 a megawatt hour.  A coal-fired power plant that is domestic and mine mouth can deliver power at three-and-a-half rupees, so USD50.  Twenty per cent more expensive.  If it’s import, or if it’s non-mine mouth, you’re talking about five rupees.  It’s almost double the price of solar and wind.

Now that economics Prime Minister Modi absolutely understands.  Now what he also understands is energy security.  You’ve run New South Wales, you know the importance of energy security.  Australia, I said a decade ago, Australia would never have an energy security problem.  We are blessed with the best coal, gas, uranium, wind, solar, hydro in the world.  But we’re almost the only country that has that blessing.  If you think about India or China, they are the biggest energy importers in the world, alongside Korea and Japan.  So energy security is absolutely at the forefront of the Prime Minister’s mind.

Now India imports quarter of a trillion dollars a year of fossil fuels.  So when we talk about economics there’s the straight economic argument, solar and wind is now 20 per cent to 50 per cent cheaper than domestic coal power.  It’s 100 per cent cheaper than – sorry, it’s half the price of imported coal-fired power.  It wins the economic argument.  It also delivers on the energy security argument, because energy security is about relying on domestic resources.  India has huge water, hydro, wind, solar and coal assets.

Bob Carr: What sort of solar are they going to be relying on, and what’s their commitment to batteries?  Which is in Australian terms, the indispensable extra element to render South Australia reliable, for example.  What’s the equivalent in India?

Tim Buckley: Looking at the reliability argument, India has got one huge advantage over Australia.  It’s called 1.3 billion people connected by one grid.  So one – fortunately for India, and for Prime Minister Modi and his renewable energy ambitions, he inherited an electricity grid that had actually been unified in the previous decade.  It used to be seven different regional areas.  It became five, it became three, and then became one.  So like…

Bob Carr: Very significant economic reform that India wasn’t being given credit for 10 years’ ago.

Tim Buckley: Absolutely, and the IEA drew my attention – the International Energy Agency drew my attention to this, they have actually spent $10 billion or $20 billion a year building out their grid up until this decade.  So therefore when Prime Minister Modi comes in and says, we’re going to build 450 gigawatts of renewables in the coming decade, he’s actually got a grid that can handle it.  That was probably best proven in an event we talked about in April when Prime Minister Modi announced a national locked, and they locked it down.  Electricity demand dropped 28 per cent in the month of April.

After nine days of national lockdown Prime Minister Modi in a show of national unity he said, let’s, at nine o’clock at night, let’s have a nine minute silence and sing the national anthem at night.  But before you do, please turn off every electronic item so that there is no light in your house, no TV, no computers, no light.  India is a very patriotic country, they did it.  Now that created a huge stress on the grid.  So what you had was every light and every TV, and virtually every computer in the country got turned off in the 10 minutes up until nine o’clock at night.  Then 10 minutes later they all turned back on.  That’s a grid operator’s worst nightmare.  It’s an unprecedented event globally.

India’s grid operator managed to reduce demand by 32,000 megawatts in a 10 minute interval.  Nine minutes later they then had to ramp electricity demand – supply up 32,000 megawatts in literally another 10 minutes.  So it’s the biggest demand spike in world history, probably.  I might be taking a bit of licence, but I doubt anyone could prove that statement wrong.  Over a 30 minute period we went down flat and then back up, and the grid didn’t fall over.  They were only given a week’s notice.  So they called on every hydroelectricity asset they had, they called on their coal, flexible coal, they called on their gas, they called on their batteries.  They called on everything and they managed to keep the grid stable.

Because the problem, as we saw in South Australia, is if you have – oh, South Australia the federal minister has blamed wind as being South Australia’s problem, it caused a blackout.  Now it was wind, it was actually a one in 100 year extreme weather event that knocked the grid over, it knocked 20 pylons over.  So the wind knocked the grid over.  It took weeks for the South Australian grid to recover from that.  A grid can’t go black and then restart.  India avoided going black.  They had no blackouts, they had no consequences, which means their grid is phenomenally robust and they have that flexible power capacity and mindset.  It’s very much about mindset.  It’s about, we don’t do baseload power, we actually have variable power production to meet variable power demand.

Bob Carr: That’s a very powerful case story because people who are resisting climate action will say, we could do this, but what difference would it make if Australia did all the right things because India’s off there building all this coal-fired power.  I think you need to speak up on that Indian case study.  Because I doubt if there are any participants in this debate in Australia who would be aware that India, this huge story of India cancelling commitment to build coal-fired power plants.

Tim Buckley: Yes, literally cancelling 85 per cent of plans to build the second biggest coal-fired power plant build out in world history, and it actually never happened.  The coal industry went from saying, oh China is going to be the saviour of the coal industry for the world.  Then, oh, China peaked on coal in 2013.  Oh, India is going to be the great white elephant of the coal industry, and that didn’t happen.  Now they’re saying, it’s going to be Asia is going to be the saviour of the Australian coal industry.

Because we are the world’s biggest exporter of coal, it’s critical for our industry, our coal miners, our coal mining companies should I say.  The coal miners are going to get it in the neck, they’re just going to be automated out of existence regardless.  The product will cease to be used as well.  So what, part of why I think you’re right, what India is doing – and I’ve certainly devoted my energy career to studying India – because I noticed what India was doing was effectively replicating the amazing transformation that China’s gone through in the last decade to become the world leader in energy in the last decade.

So let’s go through it.  China is the world’s biggest builder of hydro, right.  They’ve built every river – they’ve dammed every river in their own country, now they’re damming all the rivers around the world.  They’re the biggest builder of hydro, they have 50 per cent global market share.  They’re the only country, other than Russia, that is still building nuclear anywhere in the world.  Everyone will go, well, what about Westinghouse?  Well, Westinghouse went bankrupt.  Westinghouse got bailed out by Toshiba of Japan, and then Toshiba virtually…

Bob Carr: Yeah, the nuclear renaissance died in the United States.

Tim Buckley: It died in Europe as well.  So that’s why it’ll never happen, it’s a red herring in the Australian debate; it’s just never going to happen.  But China is also the world’s biggest builder of electric vehicles.  Our stunning figure that I got from Bloomberg New Energy Finance this week is that China is building and selling 18 million electric scooters every year.  China is an enormous country, you know that better than me.  But 18 million electric two-wheel motorbikes.  In fact there is no internal combustion engine motorbike in China anymore.  That’s how quickly they’re moving.  Meanwhile we’re debate, oh, should we do electric vehicles at some point in the coming decades?

Well, there’s no debate in China.  They’ve already made the decision a decade ago.  They are the world’s biggest producer of electric vehicles, they’re the world’s biggest producer of batteries.  They’re the biggest rare earth processor.  They’re the biggest miner of lithium iron in the world.  So we debate, oh, Australia’s blessed with natural resources.  We are totally blessed.  But while we allow Chinese investment they’ve come in and bought all of our lithium iron deposits, and they’ve bought all of our rare earth deposits.  They take all the product back to China and process it up there.  So I mean take your hat off to their strategic insights.  They’re very clever thinkers, they’re very strategic thinkers, you know that.

But – sorry, that’s a bit of a ramble about China.  But what I got really impressed with, I was studying China, and then all of a sudden I watched Modi come along and he started replicating what China is doing.  He’s replicating it but with one key point of difference.  The price of solar has dropped by 90 per cent since China first embarked on this program of reform of energy disruption.  So Prime Minister Modi has come along and said, well, this is actually the economically sensible thing.

Let me give you one number, people go, oh, solar has had its heyday, it’s reached commercial viability.  It does not stop.  Solar prices, the solar module price has dropped 20 per cent in the last 12 months.  So you might be aware, the solar price has come down 10 per cent annually for a decade.  Well, solar module prices are down 20 per cent in the last 12 months, right.  It’s just, that is a gamechanger.  Because the price of solar is going to go to virtually zero.  So the idea you’re going to run a baseload coal-fired power plant against a competitor that has a zero marginal cost and virtually zero full cost, you cannot compete with it.  It’s an unfair fight, and that’s what BlackRock’s finally understood.

BlackRock’s understand that this fight is so unfair it’s obvious it’s terminal for thermal coal.

Bob Carr:  Tim, that’s been a terrific bit of analysis.  Thank you very much.  I appreciate your Asian perspective here, the insight into India and to China as well.  It’s something you don’t read about, something you just don’t read about in the Australian press.

Tim Buckley: I would say, Murdoch is a key problem here.  The – and he’s seeing the consequences of that with the lay-offs that his company is now incurring.  Because they have dominated the debate in the mainstream media, and for whatever reason I see the Murdoch press as being climate deniers.

So if you look about it in the Australian context, there is also incumbency is a huge powerful industry.  If you think about the incumbent issues of the coal industry, the coke and coal industry, we’re he world’s biggest exporter of coke and coal.  We’re the world’s second biggest exporter of thermal coal.  We’re the world’s biggest exporter of gas.  We export $120 billion a year as a nation of fossil fuels.  Incumbency says, we will be a global laggard.  Because that industry is not going to go away quietly.  They’re not just going to roll over and let the world move and deliver on Paris and destroy their core business.

They will fight the whole way, delay-delay-delay.  Now that’s their mentality.  But at the end of the day, that’s why I look at a country like India who is the recipient of all of their exports and China, and China and India and Japan don’t want to be beholden on Australian fossil fuel imports for the next 50 years.  The Paris Agreement says they can’t be, but for energy security reasons they don’t want to.  Now economics says they don’t want to either.  So why would they do it?  They’re not going to do it out of friendship for Australia.  They’re going to do what is in their own national interest for economic reasons, for environmental reasons, and for energy security reasons.  To grab the investment and technology and employment opportunities that brings.

So Prime Minister Modi, you mentioned electrification, he talks about electrification all the time.  He talks about 450 gigawatts of renewables by 2030 all the time.  He also talks about making India.  He has 20 million young Indians entering the workforce every year.  If he does not grow the economy dramatically every year he won’t be in office, because he’ll have 20 million unemployed Indians every year demanding jobs.  So he’s got to grow the economy.  He’s got to drive manufacturing, he’s got to drive the economic growth there.  That’s part of why I say, look, the Delhi pollution problem is really problematic.  But dealing with 20 million new jobs every year as a base requirement, that’s Modi’s number one objective.

Bob Carr: Tim Buckley, thank you very much.

Tim Buckley: Thank you.