Guest Lecture by Prof. Jesse Scott Lady Shri Ram College, New Delhi | 12 March 2026
Prof. Jesse Scott of the Hertie School visited Lady Shri Ram College on 12 March 2026 to speak on climate change, clean energy transition, and the EU–India relationship. Her central argument was that Europe has the capital, India has the population and the emissions, and the world cannot reach net zero without getting those two things to work together.
A significant part of the lecture focused on the EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, which places a carbon price on certain goods entering the EU. Prof. Scott described it as both a climate innovation and an imperfect, somewhat self-assured policy that assumes European standards can simply be exported to the world. For India, she identified three real pressure points: the tariff costs, the compliance burden on smaller exporters, and a principled objection to climate rules being set outside the UN process.
Prof. Scott closed by sharing a short dialogue in which a student asks a professor how to make sense of the world. The answer was to listen to both the noise and the wisdom, not just one or the other. It was a good note to end on because it captured something true about where the EU-India climate relationship actually stands. The CBAM is real, the compliance burdens on Indian exporters are real, and India’s objections to climate unilateralism are legitimate. But so is the investment momentum, the shared interest in clean energy, and the logic of two large economies finding ways to work together. She laid out the problems, pointed to practical ways forward, and provided an honest picture of what cooperation between Europe and India would actually require and look like in the future.