 "At Rwanda, India to help seal global climate deal on refrigeration gases")
On Monday, another round of Montreal Protocol talks will kick off in Kigali, Rwanda, with 191 countries negotiating a global deal to replace heat-trapping refrigerant gases with climate-friendly alternatives. India, one of the most rapidly growing markets for refrigeration and air-conditioning, enters the talks with an early gambit, hoping to get a better bargain to protect the interests of its growing refrigeration industry and keeping the cost of technology transition as low as possible for its citizens.
India has demanded that the US and other rich countries reduce their climate harming refrigerant gases far faster than the transition speed offered by them so far. India has proposed that they freeze the levels of use of these damaging gases by 2016 and cut down their use by 70 per cent below this level by 2026-27 instead of the proposed 2030-31. In return, India will offer a quicker leapfrog, too, freezing the use of the dirty refrigerant gases in the country at 2026 levels instead of 2032.
When talks begin officially on Monday, India would have taken lead in offering a fresh compromise to reach a deal it has already promised the US it would sign on within the year.
A study conducted by the Council for Energy, Environment and Water and endorsed by the Indian government, estimates that the cost of transition for Indian economy could range between $13.4 billion and $38.1 billion between now and 2050.
The Montreal Protocol was originally intended to get countries to stop using refrigerant gases that were causing a hole in the ozone layer. It has been credited for being effective in making countries move to better alternatives and helping the ozone layer heal. At the same time, it has been lambasted by groups such as the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) for also working like a chemical treadmill, mandating countries to periodically adopt one patented technology after another each time chemical multinationals develop cleaner but synthetic and costly options instead of helping options based on patent free hydrocarbons.
This time around, the transition being sought is to refrigeration gases that are not only friendly to the ozone layer but also do not trap heat to cause climate change. Last time, the world decided to shift to a family of gases called hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs). Evidence later emerged that these gases had high global warming potential — they heat up atmosphere quite high though they do not last long in the atmosphere.
Production and consumption of HFCs in India continue to be only 2.32 per cent and 1.89 per cent of world production and consumption. But, the use of HFCs is expected to grow exponentially in India, as the housing stock builds up and the transport sector expand adding to the demand of cooling in China. Rich countries, which are already using these gases, have been pushing for a while for a transition out of HFCs for themselves and a leapfrog to cleaner options by developing countries. Confirming that the proposal for the leapfrog is also in tune with commercial interests, CSE reviewed to find that alternatives to HFCs have been created by select multinational and patented for their manufacture and application in large markets such as India. The Indian government assessed in 2014 that some of these alternatives were 20 times as costly as the existing options.
At that time, India argued that instead of making costlier and deeper cuts on existing carbon dioxide emissions themselves, rich countries were asking for action by developing countries on future potential emissions of these short-lived refrigerant gases with greater global warming potential. This, it assessed, would reduce pressure on rich countries to act hastily, permitting them to alter their carbon economies more slowly and at reduced costs.
India sought to delay the change of refrigeration gases and attendant technologies hoping the costs of alternatives would come down as these cleaner technologies get tested and adopted more widely in the North.
But, in 2015, India ceded ground to the US and agreed to make climate-saving technological shift under the Montreal Protocol instead of the Paris Agreement (then still in the works). The former has an existing mechanism to provide incremental costs of transition developing countries and the latter had the mandate to ensure full costs of technology changes for developing countries, at least on paper.
India presented an alternative roadmap of how to do it — a longer transition period for developing countries in the hope that technology costs would reduce as rich nations make the shift early.
Before it could get traction for the proposal from other countries in June 2016, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and US President Barack Obama jointly agreed that deal would be finalised by the end of the year.
At Kigali, the Indian team will seek to strike a bargain with its negotiating space hemmed in by these previous political decisions.
“We are here to get an ambitious deal to reduce the climate forcing gases with India helping to find the way ahead. We expect developed countries such as the US to show greater ambition and agree to a quicker phase down of HFCs than they wish for right now. This shall bring down the costs for us to also transit faster,” said Manoj Kumar Singh, joint secretary in the environment ministry and one of the lead negotiators already in attendance at Kigali.
Against this enhanced ambition from developed countries such as the US, India is likely to agree to a faster introduction of cleaner refrigerants – by 2025-27 instead of 2030-31. The Indian delegation indicated its flexibility with its official release from Kigali saying, “We are willing to be flexible in order to reach a just and equitable HFC amendment that balances climate ambitions with the development and economic imperatives of our people.”
Other sources among the Indian negotiating team said this would help India find more allies at the Kigali meeting. China hosted an informal meeting of countries on the Montreal Protocol where the compromise on the base and freeze year for transition were discussed. China, the largest producer of refrigerant gases in the world, also favours 2025 as the year of transition.
