The politics of climate numbers

Even as global warming and its adverse repercussions are becoming more evident, the blame game over who is responsible has intensified. So it should not surprise that the US-based database Carbon Monitoring for Action (CARMA) has singled out India and China as being home to some of the most polluting firms on the planet. While the Indian power producer, the National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC), has been ranked as the world's third-biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, China's Huaneng Power has been placed at No. 1. Two other Chinese companies (China Huadian and China Power Investment Corp) have also been included among the top five polluters. As for countries, the US has predictably been ranked as the foremost polluter, followed by China, Russia and India in that order.

Assuming that these rankings have a factual basis, it is nevertheless important to point out that nation-based rankings ignore the per capita basis for measuring pollution. It goes without saying that a country with a billion and more people will have more carbon emissions than a relatively small European country with 50 million people, so the population factor has to be kept in mind when doing such rankings if they are to have operational meaning. The CARMA report is mum on the environment-unfriendly emissions from China, but the figure is bound to be substantially higher than India's assessed emission level of 583 million tonnes. US emissions are five times that "" at a whopping 2,790 million tonnes. Adjusted for population size, the per capita emissions in the United States are about 20 times India's.

As for the two most populous countries, China and India, it is tempting to link them together, as many commentators do when it comes to rising levels of energy consumption and other facets of the pollution debate. But the fact is that China is well ahead of India in its consumption of power and raw materials, simply because its per capita income is more than twice India's. So the two countries are quite far apart when it comes to carbon emissions. It also happens to be the case that the awareness of environmental dangers is far higher in India than in China, and also when compared to many other countries outside the European Union. India has an exclusive ministry for environment and forests and has made environmental clearance mandatory for all major industrial projects. These may not achieve all that is intended, but they do testify to awareness and intent. It is also a fact to be reckoned with that substantial reliance on coal for power generation is going to continue for the foreseeable future, so emissions by both China and India will continue to increase and there is virtually nothing that can be done to prevent this.

In some ways, though, that will increase the pressure on both countries to show progress in other areas, and indeed they should do so for their own very selfish reasons, even if there were no external pressure. Everyone knows that environmental changes impact the poor far more than the rich (in a reversal of the well-known principle, it is the non-polluter who pays!). To the extent that India and China have the largest number of people who will suffer the most because of environmental degradation, the people who live in the Himalayas and in the Sunderbans (to take but two examples) are in the front line of this war, whether they like it or not. What India and China would expect of the rest of the world, therefore, is not hypocritical talk about poor countries shortchanging themselves on economic development so as to control emissions, but real and substantial help in the transfer of clean technologies that facilitate development and the improvement of living standards, while minimising its environmental costs.