India survives the Copenhagen “ambush”

fear that agreeing to cut an already low emission per capita (India’s is only 1.29 metric tons) would handicap development.

By NOEL G. DE SOUZA

The not-so-secret agenda of the Copenhagen Climate Change conference was to pressurise China and India into binding commitments to reduce carbon emissions; this ignores the fact that China emits only half of what Britain and several European countries do per person whilst India has amongst the smallest per capita emissions compared to any industrial country.

Making the USA commit to a binding treaty would have been a feat because the USA had not ratified the Kyoto Protocol to reduce emissions. Even if all the heads of government at Copenhagen had signed a binding commitment, that would not have been final as legislatures like the US Congress and the Senate have to pass ratifying legislations. The French High Court only recently (January 2010) declared as unconstitutional a law, promoted by President Sarkozy, to reduce emissions.

The developed world has been polluting the atmosphere for over one-and-half centuries. Initially, it was industrialisation but now it is lifestyle which involves the excess use of petrol-driven cars and heavy energy use in households. The developed world emits far more carbon per capita than do China and India. The USA and Australia rank as the worst polluters at around 17 metric tons per capita. Even if this is halved, which is a huge demand, the per capita emissions would be much higher than that of China’s.

The Copenhagen conference revealed the world’s inequities and the impossibility of finding a solution to satisfy all countries.

Major fractures exist within both developed and developing countries. A rift exists between the Europe Union, which adheres to the requirements of the Kyoto Protocol, which the USA which does not.

The developing world is fractured between the emerging nations (the BASIC countries: Brazil, South Africa, India and China), the oil-rich states (particularly Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and Iran) and the LDCs (the 49 Least Developed Countries, 33 in Africa and five in the subcontinent: Afghanistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan and the Maldives and some in the South Pacific).

The emerging nations, which are industrialising and modernising, have been emitting substantial carbon into the atmosphere for about the last thirty years but their per capita emissions are lower to those of the USA and the European Union (5.3 metric tons). Countries like India

The LDCs are amongst the most affected and least able to cope such as with drought in the Sahara, rising sea levels in the Maldives and in Bangladesh and melting glaciers in Nepal. That is why those countries expressed their frustrations and ridiculed the paltry 10 billion US dollars being offered to them. They were somewhat assuaged when, towards the end of the conference, this was raised to ten times that amount.

There is a big gap between the LDCs and BASIC countries. Tuvalu, threatened by rising waters, wanted China and India to be subjected to binding commitments. When the USA, the world’s largest energy user per capita, is not bound by the Kyoto Protocol then how could one make demands on China and India?

The emission rates of the developed countries are so high compared to developing countries, that any uniform rate cut would leave the developed countries forever at an advantage, consigning the developing world to a low standard of living. World Bank figures show that high per capita incomes go together with high carbon emission rates. Two notable exceptions are France and Sweden which have high per capita incomes but medium per capita pollution. Incidentally, France produces a good deal of nuclear power.

The Kyoto Protocol includes a Clean Development Mechanism or CDM scheme. This allows developed countries to finance the development of CDMs in developing countries. For every metric ton of carbon prevented from entering the atmosphere, the host country gets one carbon credit which it can sell to a developed country. Bangladesh’s representative Q. Chowdhury lamented that whist his country has one CDM project, China and India have 1000 each.

The Copenhagen Conference has been characterised by some as a failure but by others as a first step. President Obama rephrased the UNFCCC (The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities” to “common but differentiated responses.”

India, on its own, is using and developing technologies to reduce the use of oil by using energy saving devices and thus reduce its carbon emissions by as much as 25% by 2020 according to its Bureau of Energy Efficiency. Companies investing in energy saving programmes will get credits which can then be traded in an energy exchange market with other companies. A large educational programme for industries and grass roots has been launched. An expansion of India’s nuclear power generation will greatly reduce India’s carbon emissions.