It is not a national cap, but where is the equity angle?
News reports have raised the question whether India gave away more than it should have in the discussions on climate change, at the recent meeting in Italy of the G-8 and G-5. It has been said that in agreeing to work towards a cap on how much the temperature of the earth should be allowed to change (2 degrees Celsius), the government has de facto agreed to accept quantifiable limits on India’s own emission of greenhouse gases, something that its negotiators have refused to accept from the days of the Kyoto protocol in the mid-1990s. The government seems to be suggesting that no quantifiable goals have been agreed to, but has conceded that India and China are under tremendous pressure to do so.
In purely technical terms, accepting that the earth’s temperature should not be allowed to rise beyond a limit does not amount to accepting any national targets for increases in carbon emissions. But it is also clear that India has yielded ground by not insisting hard enough in Italy on the equity angle in such a global cap. After all, this has been at the heart of the position of the developing countries, whose per capita carbon emissions are only a quarter of those in the developed economies. The US has unilaterally offered a 17 per cent rollback of its emissions, which is well short of Europe’s commitment to a 30 per cent rollback, even though per capita emissions by the US are multiples of what they are in Europe. Japan too has hardly moved forward from what was committed in Kyoto. Indeed, all the countries that accepted targets at Kyoto have failed to meet them so far. Logically, they should be on the defensive about this record, but India seems to have not forced the issue.
It does not help that the developed economies are willing to accept stiffer targets for the distant future (2050) but unwilling to translate these into matching medium-term goals for 2020. Indeed, the gambit of accepting long-term goals that are beyond the horizon, and using these to pressure India and China to accept national limits, is being too clever by half. To then try to turn the screw by extending the issue into the area of trade sanctions (which would violate global trading rules) is for the culprit to turn judge.
Everyone accepts that the UN-sponsored Copenhagen summit on climate change, scheduled for December, needs to succeed by working towards common goals on the basis of equity and fairness. India has stepped up to the plate by emphasising that it has a national action plan, and Manmohan Singh told an earlier meeting of the G-8 that Indian emissions would not cross the levels of the rich countries. This is an equitable cap and puts the onus on the worst polluters to lower their levels—for that would automatically lower India’s cap too. Any further concessions by India should be made only if the developed economies show that they are willing to offer much more than they have done so far.
