Great minds in business and government assembled in Washington this week to explore every way—financial, technological, legal, political—to meet US and Indian energy challenges.

And to complain about shopping malls.

They rose like corn, in the 1950s, to serve Americans with new cars, cheap energy and land, and disposable income.

Today they’re monuments to sprawl, and make little sense when outdoor and walkable town centres, big box stores, and internet commerce offer either more pleasant or more efficient alternatives.

Malls make even less sense in India, where cities are crowded and hot. They create dead space exactly where land is precious and energy is expensive, with designs that were perfect for, say, Minnesota half a century ago. And yet, shopping palaces are all over the place, from Andhra Pradesh to West Bengal, exceeding maybe four square miles of leasable retail floor space in total, according to an estimate based on this sketchy source.

It takes a lot of coal-burning to cool four sub-tropical square miles of stores. Energy eats up a much bigger percentage of Indians’ per capita income than Americans’. Glassy retail palaces designed originally for temperate North America trap and concentrate heat. Cooling the air down drives up energy bills and consequently the cost of goods.

Indian malls are symbols of what the two countries say they want less of in general — Americans exporting their lifestyle and habits to India without considering how different India is, and Indians taking up our finer American lifestyles and habits without considering how different the US is.

“You really can’t, sort of, parachute a technology from one place to another," says Rajendra Pachauri, the director-general of The Energy and Resources Institute (Teri), a think tank in Delhi. “There has to be some local customization, some local modification that suits conditions in that country."

Pachauri brought up the mad logic of Indian malls during a session at this week’s US-India Energy Summit in Washington, which Teri hosts annually with Yale University. (He is also chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the authoritative body that will publish its latest state-of-the-science compendium at the end of this month.)

“In the US setting, shopping malls probably — the way they were designed — made some economic sense," Pachauri said. In India, not so much. “Given our prices and our costs, we could have come up with something totally different." TERI’s training complex on the outskirts of Delhi, he said, draws no power from the grid. The buildings are efficient, requiring just a third of a conventional structure’s energy. What they need comes from solar, biomass and geothermal sources.

When Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Barack Obama met this week, they signed off on agreements that may help make questionable resource decisions — such as the mass construction of mid-20th-century suburban American retail cocoons in dense, energy-poor Indian 21st-century cities — less wasteful.

Modi and Obama agreed in principle to free up US funds to finance carbon-free energy, so that, for example, air conditioning in India’s hot malls needn’t be powered by burning coal.

They agreed on the importance of controlling refrigerant gases, which are climate super-pollutants that nations are trying to negotiate limits to. They set forth initiatives on air quality, deforestation, climate adaptation and energy security.

The work builds on agreements reached in 2009 that have already brought into India $2.4 billion in public and private renewable energy finance and energy-efficient technologies that the state department says may obviate the need for more than 75 large power plants.

Reaching these agreements is harder work than a simple fact sheet reveals. Even harder is the work ahead. Reinventing shopping malls in a nation of 1.2 billion people is an upper-class sideshow to the most shocking fact about modern India: There are more Indians who have no access to modern energy than there are Americans, full stop. Bloomberg

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