-The Indian Express   India's rentier capitalism is an inset in the big picture drawn by Thomas Piketty   French economist Thomas Piketty has written a scholarly tome with the humdrum title, Capital in the 21st Century. The book has become an overnight sensation because Piketty documents an inherent tendency for ever-increasing inequality of income and wealth in capitalist economic systems. It is not an accident, he says, that many will be left behind...

-Live Mint   The cost of pollution will determine effective implementation of standards It has long been suspected but never established as a comparable fact. New Delhi is a city with one of the poorest air quality in the world. New data released by the World Health Organization (WHO) show that in 2013 the city had a very high concentration of particulate matter of size 2.5 microns (153 micrograms/cubic metre). Thirteen of the...

-The Business Standard Impact on farm output to depend on distribution of rains The southwest monsoon is likely to be below normal in 2014 because of the evolving El Niño, a warming of the Pacific Ocean that upsets weather patterns across the globe, according to a forecast issued on Tuesday by a leading private meteorological agency, Skymet. The official monsoon forecast by the India Meteorological Department (IMD) is due on April 25. Rain during...

-The Telegraph   New Delhi: An international panel today warned that the world hadn't done enough to curb greenhouse gas emissions but said that changes in lifestyles and energy technologies could yet help avert the most devastating impacts of global warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in a report released in Berlin, said greenhouse gas emissions had climbed to unprecedented levels over the past decade despite emission-curbing policies and actions by...

-Reuters OSLO: World powers are running out of time to slash their use of high-polluting fossil fuels and stay below agreed limits on global warming, a draft UN study to be approved this week shows. Government officials and top climate scientists will meet in Berlin from April 7-12 to review the 29-page draft that also estimates the needed shift to low-carbon energies would cost between two and six percent of world...