Nepal’s clean energy curse

It is an article of progressive faith, and I timidly count myself among the faithful, that the green transition is necessary for our survival as a species. On this point, reality has been unusually obliging this summer. Canadian forests burn beneath skies the color of an Algonquin School sunset, and now Toronto can smell the smoke. Across the Pacific, atoll states from Tuvalu to Kiribati contemplate whether a nation can retain its sovereignty after the ocean has swallowed its territory. Meanwhile, in the Himalayas — where glaciers feed the Indus, Ganges, and Brahmaputra, and thus, indirectly, the hundreds of millions of South Asian souls — ice accumulated since long before the early Mughals crossed the Khyber is disappearing. And in Nepal this week, the Himalayas appeared to come apart. Ic