India’s position on climate change … for comparison’s sake
In the last post, we took a look at China’s diplomatic position on climate change, which is confrontational toward the West and developed countries generally … Well what about India, its soon-to-be-even-more-populous next door neighbor? Let’s analyze comparatively.
I haven’t located a definitive government white paper, but this recent report from the UK paper The Telegraph quotes former environment minister Pradipto Ghosh summing it up quite concisely:
- “The goals of addressing climate change cannot supersede our goals of maintaining our current rates of GDP growth and poverty alleviation programs, as was agreed by everyone at Kyoto,” the newspaper quoted Ghosh, who still serves as special advisor on climate change to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, as saying.
“The prime minister has said that while pursuing our policies of development and poverty alleviation, we will ensure that our per capita emissions will never exceed developing countries,” Mr Ghosh added. “This is our challenge to the West. ‘You do the best you can, and we’ll match it’.”
India’s basic stance that climate change must take lower priority to economic development is consistent with China’s, as is the interest in placing the onus for the global warming crisis on the developed countries of the West.
This is understandable. When the bulk of your country’s population — hundreds of millions of people — are trying to claw their way out of poverty, your no. 1 priority as a leader is securing the energy necessary to drive this economic expansion affordably. Your no. 2 priority is making sure that the energy type used doesn’t ruin the country’s environment. The fate of polar ice caps and coastal communities facing rising oceanic levels are abstract concerns by comparison.
The emphasis on per-capita greenhouse gas emissions is an exceedingly clever way to frame the issue … as India has massive emissions as a country but a huge population.
However, the reality is that Ghosh’s challenge is a fairly disingenuous political remark.
Under the 20th-century model, per-capita consumption of energy was a pretty accurate measure of the success and power of a national economy. The more energy you were burning up, the more productive you were (running industrial machinery) and the richer the style of life of your people … i.e. driving cars, using electrical appliances, etc. Unfortunately, this whole model was based on cheap fossil fuels, so the good life was unsustainably energy-intensive — and had a by-product of massive emissions per capita.
In the 21st century, countries (especially developing countries) must aspire to an entirely different, more sustainable kind of “developed” status. They will need to effectively decouple productivity from energy consumption through more efficient technologies and wealth from emissions levels, through cleaner energy sources. It’s a whole new vision and definition of what it means to be rich.
New Delhi and Beijing both know that when their per-capita GDP reaches developed-world levels in the future, their per-capita energy consumption and emissions will both have to be much lower than those seen the West today — otherwise massive energy costs will weigh down their economic strength, and pollution will devastate their citizens’ quality of life.
Those in charge of India and China’s long-term policies take this as a given. Rhetoric for getting the better of today’s diplomatic battles is another issue, though.
Stay tuned for future posts on the potential for China and India to work together, based on the common viewpoints above, to negotiate the successor to Kyoto as a voting bloc representing 2.4 billion people — that’s nearly 40% of the people on Earth!
(flag image courtesy of www.indiaflirt.com)
