Changing Mind on Climate Change

Changing Mind on Climate Change
Praful Bidwai
Inter Press Service, 16 December 2005

After welcoming the Montreal Action Plan on climate control, adopted last weekend at a landmark meeting, India is now dithering over commitments to reduce its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. It is the world's fifth biggest producer of GHGs.

At the Montreal conference held under the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), India, like China and Brazil, managed to avoid being pinned down to specific targets for emission cuts.

Under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol too, all "developing countries" were exempted from emission-cut quotas. But 36 industrialised countries had committed themselves to reducing GHG emissions by 5.2 percent (on 1990 levels) by 2008-2012. They have now agreed to negotiate further cuts beyond 2012.

China and India are among the world's fastest growing economies whose GHG emissions are outpacing their national incomes. Both burn huge and rising quantities of oil, gas and coal, and are furiously acquiring rights to hydrocarbon reserves the world over.

Of the two, India's position is more contradictory. ''India has tried to take the moral high ground in global environmental negotiations right since the first international conference on the issue, at Stockholm in 1972", says Kamal Mitra Chenoy of the School of International Studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in India's capital. ''But it has little to show for this on the ground".

In fact, India is now exploring ways of evading climate control regulation and teaming up with countries like the United States and Australia which have kept away from Kyoto and strongly rebuffed proposals for emission cuts.

Recent scientific studies estimate that India's GHG emissions will triple by 2050. The country's climate will become warmer by three to four degrees celsius in the next 30 or 40 years, says an Indo-British analysis released in September.

Already, wayward weather, attributable to global warming, has affected crop yields. Two years ago, say scientists at the Indian Council for Agricultural Research, wheat yields in India declined by 20-40 percent, pulse yields by 25-30 percent and mustard by 50-70 percent.

Forecasts are that with rising temperatures in the future, Northern and Northeastern India will suffer from droughts while eastern, central and peninsular India will face heavy rainfall and flooding.

The gravest threat to the Indian subcontinent comes from a rapid melting of the icecaps on the Tibetan plateau and a receding of Himalayan glaciers-at an alarming rate of 10 to 15 metres annually.

The Tibetan plateau is the source of seven of Asia's largest rivers- the, Ganges, Indus, Brahmaputra, Salween, Mekong, Yangtse and the Huang Ho. The first three are among India's lifelines.

Yet, the Indian government strongly refuses GHG emission cuts. In an interview in Montreal last week, India's environment minister A. Raja said: ''India, as a developing country-with large number of people living in poverty-cannot give a firm commitment to reduce GHG emissions."

The official argument is that India's per capita GHG emissions are low (1.1 tonnes a year), well below the global average of 4.1 tonnes, leave alone the industrialised Northern countries' 12.4 tonnes and the U.S.'s 20 tonnes. Some 300 million Indians do not have electricity and 650 million do not have access to modern cooking fuels.

These arguments are utterly hypocritical. The low averages hide yawning gaps in consumption (and hence contributions to emissions) between the rich and the poor. The vast majority of Indians consume very little energy.

However, India's burgeoning middle classes, comprising some 80 million people, have increasingly adopted Northern lifestyles. They buy a million cars a year, as well as six million two-wheelers, and even more airconditioners and refrigerators -numbers which are three to five times higher than five or seven years ago.

The Indian government resists emission cuts primarily to protect the interests of this consumerist elite, but cites the poverty of the mass of its population as its excuse. It asserts India's right to "development" through the freedom to consume more energy and materials -to ''catch up" with the North. Environmentalists are enraged by this reasoning.

In July, India and five other major polluting countries signed a ôsecret" agreement called "Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate Change" in Laos. (The others are the U.S., Japan, China, South Korea and Australia. The first two are renegades from the Kyoto protocol.)

The deal has already been described as "dirty" and ôdangerous" by the New Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment, a respected Indian non-governmental organisation, which deals with policy issues.

According to Sunita Narain director of CSE, there should be a regime of equal per capita entitlements to the global atmosphere. "A sharing the global commons will provide incentives to countries that are under-utilising their quota of atmospheric emissions to invest in clean development," she said.

The Asia-Pacific agreement imposes no legally binding commitments on the signatories, who together account for 50 percent of global GHG emissions. It is designed to bypass, if not undermine, the Kyoto process. It merely promises to develop energy technologies suited to the "resource endowments" of the signatories.

What shape the Asia-Pacific grouping will assume will be known after a meeting in January scheduled Jan. 11-12 which is expected to be attended by foreign, energy and environment ministers from the six nations.

Areas for "collaboration" chalked out include nuclear power (a highly controversial and environmentally questionable route to electricity generation, which produces radioactive wastes lasting thousands of years), coal, natural gas, carbon and methane capture, hydropower, and others.

India is thus torn between the potentially "tough" option represented by the UNFCCC process and the "soft" option offered by the U.S.-led "Asia-Pacific Partnership". "Over time, the Indian government will tend to take the soft option", says Mitra Chenoy. "That would be in keeping with its elitist and consumerist oriented policy".

It would also mesh with the growing obsession among Indian policy makers with nuclear power.

India recently signed a civilian nuclear cooperation agreement with the U.S., which says nuclear power is important for "energy security". If the deal is ratified by the U.S. Congress, India hopes to import nuclear materials from all over the world.

The composition of the Asia-Pacific Partnership's six members also reflects this preference. Two (U.S. and Australia) are potential suppliers of uranium and nuclear reactors; and the other four are potentially large nuclear power consumers.

Vis-à-vis the two processes, India will try to adopt a "best of both worlds" approach, just as it did under the Kyoto protocol. It accepted no emission cuts targets under Kyoto but is vigorously exploiting the protocol's great weakness in sponsoring and encouraging "carbon credits" trading.

Under this system, polluting Northern corporations can buy carbon credits to (theoretically) offset their GHG emissions, by investing in clean development mechanisms (CDM) projects in the South. In reality, the corporations will take no steps to reduce their huge GHG emissions, and will pay the South a fraction of what it would cost them to reduce emissions.

India has recently developed over 100 CDM projects such as co- generation, and electricity from burning municipal wastes. Indian companies stand to gain millions of dollars from these. They are expected to corner at least 10 percent of the global market in the initial years. According to industry estimates, they can generate at least 8.5 billion dollars in income.

The CDMs's contribution to reducing global warming will probably be minuscule. A Dutch study estimates that CDMs will reduce emissions by only 0.1 percent against Kyoto's 5.2 percent. The world needs to cut emissions by 80 percent over the next 30 to 40 years. India, with its present policies, is unlikely to contribute to the process.

Copyright 2005 Inter Press Service