As the US and BASIC countries struck a deal on climate change, President Barack Obama today lauded India for setting forth "very significant mitigation" efforts and for voluntarily saying that it will reduce carbon emissions relatively.
Obama said India, China, Brazil and South Africa have set forth for the first time some very significant mitigation efforts and "I want to give them credit for that."
"I mean, if you look at a country like India, as I said, they've got hundreds of millions of people who don't have electricity, hundreds of millions of people who, by any standard, are still living in dire poverty.
"For them, even voluntarily to say, we are going to reduce carbon emissions relative to our current ways of doing business by X percent is an important step. And we applaud them for that," he told reporters before he left for Washington.
"On the other hand, from the perspective of the developing countries like China and India, they are saying to themselves, per capita our carbon footprint remains very small, and we have hundreds of millions of people who don't even have electricity yet, so for us to get bound by a set of legal obligations could potentially curtail our ability to develop, and that's not fair," the US President said.
Obama said he thought that there was a "fundamental deadlock" in perspectives between developing and developed countries. "And both sides have legitimate points," Obama said.
"My view was that if we could begin to acknowledge that the emerging countries are going to have some responsibilities, but that those responsibilities are not exactly the same as the developed countries.
"And if we could set up a financing mechanism to help those countries that are most vulnerable, like Bangladesh, then we would be at least starting to reorient ourselves in a way that allows us to be effective in the future," Obama said.