In this column last month I quoted Indian Environmental Minister Jairam Ramesh to represent India’s intention to not agree to any legally binding emissions targets at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in December. That conference will start formal negotiations of a follow-on agreement to the Kyoto Protocol. A number of readers wrote to say that they believe India and China, despite their protestations to the contrary, will cave to international pressure and at the end of the day agree to some binding carbon emissions limits. I disagree.
It’s All About the Economy
India, in third place for annual carbon emissions, recently released multiple reports that collectively stated that the country’s carbon emissions will increase from about 1.2 billion tonnes today to between 4 billion and 7.3 billion tonnes in 2030, depending on the assumptions. The carbon emissions of China and the U.S. are estimated to be 6.8 and 6.4 million tonnes per year (depending on your source), respectively, so India is in a distant third place but is rapidly closing the gap. These three countries account for half of the world’s carbon emissions today. Both China and India have stated that it is their official policy to not commit to cuts in carbon emissions unless developed nations also promise to make significant cuts in their emissions.
| Singh... said that social development is his first priority and that "the developing world cannot accept a freeze on global inequity." |
Ramesh released these projections, prepared by five Indian independent institutions, during a September 2 press conference to show how serious India is about climate change. Ramesh reiterated Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s promise that India’s per capita emissions would never exceed those of developed nations. Singh, in his January 2007 inaugural address, said that social development is his first priority and that "the developing world cannot accept a freeze on global inequity," meaning that the measures taken by the global community to deal with climate change must be evenly distributed, and keeping a billion or more of India’s citizens in poverty is unacceptable.
Ramesh described India’s carbon emission increases as "quite moderate" on an annual basis. (My calculation found an annual growth rate of 6.5% to 9% given the numbers above.) And he pledged that India’s emissions would always be lower than those of developed countries on a per capita basis: 1.2 tonnes per year today, rising to between 2.77 tonnes and 5.00 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year in 2030. By comparison, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the carbon footprint of each resident in 2006 in the U.S. was 19.8 tonnes; in Germany, 10.4 tonnes; in Russia, 12 tonnes; and in Japan, 9.78 tonnes.
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I agree with your analysis of India's approach to global warming. I was there for a month in 2005, mostly in rural India where infrastructure (other than roads) is primitive. The country has a large and growing middle class, but it's not located in the rural parts of the country, which dominate the economy.
The key to the country's development is electricity. Electricity means lighting, telecommunication (including cell phones) and, most important, access to drinking and irrigation water.
That means coal, and, perhaps, nuclear (the up-front cost is very high, compared to coal).
India is a rational, and vibrant, democracy and it will choose policies that advance the interests of its citizens against those that push for some sort of pie-in-the-sky worldwide climate objective.
Ken Maize