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Please use this thread to post updates on the upcoming conference in Paris.
To kickstart the discussion:http://www.livemint.com/Opinion/vgLlSiNCSfSFcYTeZR4xWI/Hold-your-ground-in-Paris.html
Photo: Getty Images
Paris has dominated international news headlines recently in the aftermath of the horrendous terrorist attacks by Islamic State. It will be in the news again in a week, on 30 November, for the twenty-first session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 21) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which will convene in Le Bourget, a suburb of the French capital.
If the acronyms are bewildering, the aim of the conference is straightforward, ambitious and, in theory, praiseworthy.
It is to craft a universal and legally binding treaty to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) and contribute to mitigating the human component of the complex phenomenon of climate change.
In the run-up to the Paris summit, member countries have put forward their respective national plans to reduce GHGs, known as Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs). India was the last major economy to put forward its INDC in early October.
In theory, India’s plan is ambitious, pledging to reduce the intensity of GHG emissions by up to 35% by 2030, upping the ante on a previous commitment to reduce up to 25% by 2020.
India has also committed to altering its energy mix to ensure up to 40% of electricity is produced from non-fossil fuel sources, again by 2030, and again building on prior domestic commitments. Significantly, unlike China, in its submission, India does not indicate a peaking year for its emissions, just a targeted reduction in the intensity of emissions, which allows emissions to continue growing, so long as they grow by less than the rate of economic growth, so that the ratio of GHG emissions to gross domestic product (GDP) falls.
While the language of all of the major economies, including India, has been conciliatory heading into the conference, we should fully expect that the negotiations that take place behind closed doors, in the proverbially smoke-filled back rooms, will be tough, and we should expect further that the US and other advanced economies, along with China, will seek to extract their pound of flesh from India.
I had warned in this column almost exactly a year ago that, in the wake of a separate, bilateral deal between the US and China, the rhetorical pressure on India to play ball with the big boys and commit to major mitigation efforts—far beyond what would be in India’s national interest—would ratchet up.
My pessimism on this front was warranted, alas, as India has now been largely isolated after China’s clever move to commit to peaking of its emissions. China, of course, is great at manufacturing things, and its government can surely manufacture emissions statistics as well as it allegedly manufactures GDP statistics, and it will not be queried too strenuously by a compliant domestic media and politically disenfranchised population.
It is much harder for democratic India than authoritarian China to commit in a non-credible fashion to aggressive mitigation targets, for it will be held to account in the court of domestic public opinion and in the glare of media scrutiny and assessment and critique by sundry civil society organizations if realized cuts fall short of the mark. That is why, in my judgement, India’s INDC is suitably vague on a roadmap to its intensity reduction target and does not commit to a peaking year.
Yet, in the bare-knuckled negotiations that occur in the back rooms in Paris, India is sure to be pressured, cajoled or badgered into signing up for a rather more specific, and perhaps even more ambitious, plan than we had bargained for.
Having been already outflanked in global trade negotiations by a US-led Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) that India could not, and wisely did not, sign, it yet again risks isolation and being painted by the US and other advanced economies as playing the spoiler if it stands its ground. But stand our ground we must.
As I argued more recently in this space, tying our hands by signing up to excessively stringent mitigation targets—while it would presumably play well with civil society and in the media—would be harmful, if not downright disastrous, for India’s already precarious growth prospects.
The politically incorrect reality is that growth is a dirty business, until future technological discoveries, which at this moment are the stuff of science fiction, make it possible to delink economic activity from human impact on the climate.
Until then, economic growth will be energy-intensive, and India’s GHG emissions will perforce continue to rise, even as intensity falls due to a changing energy mix and incremental technological improvement.
For an economy still one-third the size of China’s, any realistic emissions peaking date for India is decades in the future.
In his laudable zeal to win the approbation of the international community for a resurgent India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi must be watchful and not take his eye off India’s national interest and leave others to worry about theirs. If that involves ruffling a few feathers in Paris later this month, so be it.
Every fortnight, In the Margins explores the intersection of economics, politics and public policy to help cast light on current affairs.
Comments are welcome at [email protected]. To read Vivek Dehejia’s previous columns, go to www.livemint.com/vivekdehejia-
Vivek Dehejia
Topics: Climate changeParis summitCOP 21IndiaChina
To kickstart the discussion:http://www.livemint.com/Opinion/vgLlSiNCSfSFcYTeZR4xWI/Hold-your-ground-in-Paris.html
Photo: Getty Images
Paris has dominated international news headlines recently in the aftermath of the horrendous terrorist attacks by Islamic State. It will be in the news again in a week, on 30 November, for the twenty-first session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 21) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which will convene in Le Bourget, a suburb of the French capital.
If the acronyms are bewildering, the aim of the conference is straightforward, ambitious and, in theory, praiseworthy.
It is to craft a universal and legally binding treaty to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) and contribute to mitigating the human component of the complex phenomenon of climate change.
In the run-up to the Paris summit, member countries have put forward their respective national plans to reduce GHGs, known as Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs). India was the last major economy to put forward its INDC in early October.
In theory, India’s plan is ambitious, pledging to reduce the intensity of GHG emissions by up to 35% by 2030, upping the ante on a previous commitment to reduce up to 25% by 2020.
India has also committed to altering its energy mix to ensure up to 40% of electricity is produced from non-fossil fuel sources, again by 2030, and again building on prior domestic commitments. Significantly, unlike China, in its submission, India does not indicate a peaking year for its emissions, just a targeted reduction in the intensity of emissions, which allows emissions to continue growing, so long as they grow by less than the rate of economic growth, so that the ratio of GHG emissions to gross domestic product (GDP) falls.
While the language of all of the major economies, including India, has been conciliatory heading into the conference, we should fully expect that the negotiations that take place behind closed doors, in the proverbially smoke-filled back rooms, will be tough, and we should expect further that the US and other advanced economies, along with China, will seek to extract their pound of flesh from India.
I had warned in this column almost exactly a year ago that, in the wake of a separate, bilateral deal between the US and China, the rhetorical pressure on India to play ball with the big boys and commit to major mitigation efforts—far beyond what would be in India’s national interest—would ratchet up.
My pessimism on this front was warranted, alas, as India has now been largely isolated after China’s clever move to commit to peaking of its emissions. China, of course, is great at manufacturing things, and its government can surely manufacture emissions statistics as well as it allegedly manufactures GDP statistics, and it will not be queried too strenuously by a compliant domestic media and politically disenfranchised population.
It is much harder for democratic India than authoritarian China to commit in a non-credible fashion to aggressive mitigation targets, for it will be held to account in the court of domestic public opinion and in the glare of media scrutiny and assessment and critique by sundry civil society organizations if realized cuts fall short of the mark. That is why, in my judgement, India’s INDC is suitably vague on a roadmap to its intensity reduction target and does not commit to a peaking year.
Yet, in the bare-knuckled negotiations that occur in the back rooms in Paris, India is sure to be pressured, cajoled or badgered into signing up for a rather more specific, and perhaps even more ambitious, plan than we had bargained for.
Having been already outflanked in global trade negotiations by a US-led Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) that India could not, and wisely did not, sign, it yet again risks isolation and being painted by the US and other advanced economies as playing the spoiler if it stands its ground. But stand our ground we must.
As I argued more recently in this space, tying our hands by signing up to excessively stringent mitigation targets—while it would presumably play well with civil society and in the media—would be harmful, if not downright disastrous, for India’s already precarious growth prospects.
The politically incorrect reality is that growth is a dirty business, until future technological discoveries, which at this moment are the stuff of science fiction, make it possible to delink economic activity from human impact on the climate.
Until then, economic growth will be energy-intensive, and India’s GHG emissions will perforce continue to rise, even as intensity falls due to a changing energy mix and incremental technological improvement.
For an economy still one-third the size of China’s, any realistic emissions peaking date for India is decades in the future.
In his laudable zeal to win the approbation of the international community for a resurgent India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi must be watchful and not take his eye off India’s national interest and leave others to worry about theirs. If that involves ruffling a few feathers in Paris later this month, so be it.
Every fortnight, In the Margins explores the intersection of economics, politics and public policy to help cast light on current affairs.
Comments are welcome at [email protected]. To read Vivek Dehejia’s previous columns, go to www.livemint.com/vivekdehejia-
Vivek Dehejia
Topics: Climate changeParis summitCOP 21IndiaChina