Global Storming

It’s getting hot in here. If India changes its tune on global warming, there could be a lot more heat.

By all accounts, Jairam Ramesh is an intelligent man. He is known to read and think before he speaks. Ergo, his startling turnaround on India’s stance on global warming has left his friends at a loss for words. It has also left the ruling Congress party’s various spokespersons tightlipped, which is an achievement of sorts in itself.

The Union environment minister’s subsequent backtracking has only compounded the confusion. It’s as if Jairam Ramesh was kite-flying someone else’s ideas, and has hurriedly reeled himself back to the original position once the kite ran into a highly charged storm.

At the centre of this debate is the now famous letter that he reportedly wrote to Prime Minster Manmohan Singh, asking for ‘flexibility’ on India’s part vis-à-vis global warming. In effect, this would have meant giving up India’s resolute position on the issue. Specifically, the minister had suggested that India should abandon the Kyoto Protocol on dealing with greenhouse gas dangers, and adopt targets for emission cuts, as developed countries are required to (but the US would rather have others do as well).

Critics in India smelt something foul in the air, hinting that the letter reads as if it’s written by the US Ambassador rather than an Indian Cabinet member. After all, it would be a radical shift—a bit like a defence minister coming up with the idea that India sign the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty. “Why pay for others’ misbehaviour?” ask critics, “If rich countries caused the pollution, they must bear the burden of reversing the damage to the planet, not poor countries.”

Now that Jairam Ramesh has clarified that India is not willing to erase the distinction between the obligations of ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries, and that India will not accept international legal impositions that require the reduction of carbon emissions to specified levels (let alone external verification of the same), nerves ought to have settled. But they haven’t, and here is why: India’s own negotiating team is confused and India’s allies are furious. If anybody is pleased at the end of it, it ought to be the US. Its argument that emission-cutting burdens should be shared in proportion to future pollution, not past, certainly seems to have impressed quite a few influential people in New Delhi. The very term ‘flexibility’ has made gains at the expense of Kyoto, and Washington DC knows it.

As any climate negotiator will tell you, dumping the Kyoto Protocol at this stage makes little sense. The US stayed out of it, but it is still a valid international agreement linked to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. It sets binding targets for 37 industrialised countries and the European Union for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. These amount to an average of 5 per cent against 1990 levels over the period 2008-2012. For India to make unilateral commitments on reductions would amount to a travesty of the solidarity shown by developing countries (the so-called G-77 bloc) in pressing the world’s big polluters to take action without poorer countries paying a price by way of development costs. Electricity generation alone turns much more expensive if done the green way, and this could act as a drag on economic growth, poverty alleviation and other goals. These are India’s vital interests, and the global warming debate has a direct bearing on them.

Till recently, Jairam Ramesh was seen as a minister committed to Kyoto. He had told visiting Hillary Clinton, America’s top diplomat, that no compromise would be made on verifiable emissions. But his adherence to the spirit, if not letter, of this position was cast in doubt in late September, when the minister volunteered a yearly audit to the United Nations on India’s emissions. When no other country has made such a commitment, why was India suddenly so keen? The minister has no answer, it seems. Your correspondent tried contacting him several times without success.

The minister’s letter is alarming in its other implications too. Diplomacy is not within the purview of the Ministry of Environment. Yet, the minister has sought to shift India’s position on an issue that is a matter of international negotiation, risking other relationships in the process. China and Brazil, for example, have steadfastly demanded that polluters must clean up the atmosphere. India has been a steady ally on this, and the solidarity extends beyond the global warming agenda to positions adopted at the World Trade Organisation as well. For India’s food security, for instance, the country would like to retain the right to take measures aimed at keeping its own farms busy growing food, at least so long as other countries are doing the same. Opening up agri-markets to imports while overseas farmers are state-subsidised amounts to putting local farmers at the mercy of unfair competition. Other poor countries have the same view.

Global warming, likewise, is a debate that has been framed by the G-77 as an issue of sovereign rights and policy independence. With the Copenhagen Summit on climate change due this December, the timing of Jairam Ramesh’s letter has aroused heightened suspicion. “The timing is suspect,” says a consultant who advises firms on Kyoto-based carbon credits, “And it can throw the bureaucracy off balance, since where you stand is from where you negotiate. This [shift] can sap the crucial confidence needed for negotiations.”

Ministry insiders are also worried. “If India vacillates now, it will send all the wrong signals to assiduously built partnerships over the years,” says a senior source at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “It will look as if we are abdicating our role in the camp, and moving over to the other side just before the biggest battle on climate change.”

Several analysts worry that the ‘Indo-US partnership’ is turning progressively lopsided. They say that India might eventually have to reduce emissions in some form or another; the question is the bargain it strikes with rich countries in the process. Access to sophisticated green technologies on the cheap, for example, could possibly be sought—but this can only be achieved from a strong initial posture, not a supine one. Succumbing to American pressure on the issue of global warming, these analysts add, is not the best way to maximise the value of India’s partnership with the world’s sole superpower.

At the end, even if India makes the concessions demanded by the US, whether it is a hard or soft bargain, there is also another point of practical consideration. In all this cacophony, it is easy to forget how hard it will be for the squishy Indian State to obtain compliance on any anti-pollution norms from the vast, rambunctious industrial landscape that has already littered urban skylines with smokestacks, and worse. Can lakhs of tiny power generators really be smothered?

And what exactly is how clean? Natural gas, a hydrocarbon, is touted in the media as a ‘green’ energy source now that a big industrial powerhouse is sitting on some $40 billion of undersea reserves (owned by the State, as the Centre now tells us). And splitting atoms for energy, of course, is now the ‘cleanest’ of them all.

Maybe. Mess up, and maybe we’ll all go back to flying electric kites a la Benjamin Franklin.

climate changeG-77Kyoto Protocol