Regaining the narrative

India needs to start setting the agenda on climate change

Arvind Subramanian made an important point when he wrote on this page last week that India had lost the “narrative” on the climate change issue. As Mr Subramanian pointed out, the worst offenders, when it comes to the emission of greenhouse gases, have adopted a holier-than-thou posture, and have managed to paint India as the villain of the piece—the country that is standing in the way of a global compact on dealing with the climate change issue. That such an absurd “narrative”, which has nothing to do with the reality, can gain currency in many circles should be considered a failure of Indian economic/environmental diplomacy. It is also a case of undisguised duplicity on the part of the developed nations, and it is just as well that Mr Ramesh took on Hillary Clinton during her India visit, and more recently Nicholas Stern, author of the Stern report in Britain. But the very sharpness of Mr Ramesh’s assertion that India will not accept any caps on its carbon emissions has encouraged some in the developed countries to paint him as the new bad boy.

If India is to regain some control of the narrative, it needs to start work immediately, because only four months are left before the Copenhagen summit on climate change gets underway. One way to do this is to emphasise that, irrespective of the negotiating positions India adopts (on the basis of the fairness principle), India is in fact doing quite a lot to control its carbon emissions—a point that is little known. For instance, the energy intensity of India’s GDP has dropped by more than a third in less than a quarter century, from 0.3 kg of oil equivalent per $2,000 (on a purchasing power parity basis) in 1980 to 0.19 kg in 2003. In an international ranking done on the basis of the energy-intensity of GDP, India ranks 48th among 70 countries. In other words, India is not a low emitter of greenhouse gases because it has low per capita income, it is a low emitter per unit of GDP—which is a much stronger claim to make.

This is a good answer to the countries and individuals who argue that they are not responsible for India’s high population growth rate, which allows India to claim low emissions per capita. This is a point made most recently by a scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC, and is also understood to have been made by Mrs Clinton on her India visit. There is of course the demographic argument that India’s population growth rate is a result of the stage of its development (most countries at the same stage have had comparable growth rates for their population), and therefore Indians are not multiplying out of a lack of responsibility. As for the climate change negotiations, if the issue is shifted from population and per capita emission levels to emission per unit of GDP, it might yield a negotiation position that is more nuanced and more acceptable to the high-income countries—which might otherwise feel that the climate change issue threatens their lifestyles.

Adopting such a negotiating position while emphasising that India has a domestic agenda to deal with carbon emissions has more of a chance of working than a straight appeal to fairness on a per capita basis; the fairness argument is a good debating point, and worked at Kyoto 13 years ago; but it has never yielded results in international trade talks, and it does not look as though it will fly at Copenhagen. India needs a new story and a new argument, which are both logical and suit its purposes.