US President George Bush, who has been under attack for being in a prolonged state of denial on climate change and global warming, has done an about-turn by announcing his intention to thrash out a new international framework to address this issue. He now wants to prod some 15 countries, including India, China and Russia, to agree by the end of 2008 to cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by fixed, albeit non-binding, targets. This initiative has evoked ready support from Australia, which is the only other major country apart from the US to refuse to accept the 1996 Kyoto protocol on climate change. But the move has been criticised in Europe as being too little too late, and probably designed to by-pass the United Nations. Coming as it does on the eve of the G-8 summit in Germany this week, where leading developing countries like India and China have been invited, the US announcement is seen as putting a spanner in the works of what had already been planned for the summit. Germany, the host, had already declared that climate change is going to be the key issue at the summit and its proposal is aimed at working out a more effective successor to the Kyoto protocol, which expires in 2012. | |
| What is certain is that India and China, which had escaped binding GHG reduction targets in Kyoto, will come under pressure from the developed countries to take on such commitments, on the grounds that much of the additional emission of GHGs will be by these two countries. The standard tactic used by the developed economies is to focus on future changes in emissions, ignoring the existing reality""which is that the US with 5 per cent of the world's population accounts for a quarter of GHG emissions. There is reluctant acceptance of the Indian and Chinese argument that poor countries that are struggling to provide the basic necessities to their people cannot be stopped in their tracks merely because the rich countries want to be free-riders. But such acceptance of an obvious fact has not so far been reflected in the negotiating stance of the developed countries. |
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| Manmohan Singh, who is attending this summit, will have to resist pressure without appearing to be uncooperative on a vital global issue. The way to achieve this would be to do what has been done in the context of trade liberalisation""take corrective action because it is in the country's interest (India will after all be a major victim of global warming), but refuse to accept any binding international obligations because of the injustice of any such demand. China has already taken a pre-emptive step by announcing its first-ever national plan for climate change, mooting reduction in energy use by a fifth before 2010, but it has not budged from its traditional stand that this cannot be done at the expense of economic development. And it is not that India has no case to present. It is already spending 2.17 per cent of its gross domestic product on addressing climate change issues, and the fact that the share of renewable energy in the total primary energy is already as high as 34 per cent should come in handy to articulate the Indian stand. What India should press for in Berlin is its plea for the collaborative development of clean technologies and immediate transfer of existing environment-friendly technologies to the developing countries on concessional terms. |
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