You know an electricity policy is bankrupt when its advocates start touting the virtues of carbon capture and storage.

Decades of promoting the technology, also known as CCS — which aims to filter the carbon dioxide from smokestacks and inject the pollution deep underground — have failed to produce more than a handful of operating plants. So plans by India’s government think tank Niti Aayog to capture as much of 70% of the country’s power-sector emissions should be treated as wishful thinking at best, and dangerous shortsightedness at worst. “We have abundant coal and we want to use it, in a sustainable way,” the body’s energy adviser Rajnath Ram told Bloomberg News.