No Commitments please, we're Indian!

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One of our policy roadmaps, and indeed a lot of international pressure on India in the coming days, will revolve around our course of action on climate change.

Climate change; that word & its doomsday implications that still draw skeptical guffaws in our newsroom. Going green may sound hip but its not easy to sit everyone down and explain that global surface temperatures are infact rising at unparalleled levels, must faster than they did in the previous inter-glacial period. That the total carbon in the atmosphere 650 thousand years ago was under 300 parts per million, today its crossed 380, & that's not exactly nature going through its usual cycle. That rising fuel prices, water scarcity, farmer suicides, cyclones in Bangladesh, floods in Bihar, and wildfires in California are really part of a larger pattern that are likely to become more frequent & more dire, wreaking havoc on millions of people in the future.

And its not possible to prove to everyone that many of the climate change nay-sayers so far, especially in the west, have been scientists funded by big oil companies.

But lets leave the science of it. Even if you're sceptical of the phenomenon you cannot ignore the geo-political developments

And the pressure on India is already mounting- UNDP, Angela Merkel, Ban Ki Moon and most recently Gordon Brown, all have 'sound' advice for India and what it should be saying/committing/ proposing during the Bali climate talks 2 weeks from now. 189 countries will be there, and the conference is seen as a crucial 1st step to charting an alternative to Kyoto protocol, which lapses in 2012. The target is to keep global average temperatures from going over 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels.

In all this, India is seen as the 4th largest Green house gas emitter but one that has stuck to its 2 decade old refrain: no commitments please, we're developing!

But this time around it looks like we're preparing. For starters the climate change committee has drafted a technical paper, which will be made into a climate change action report. What's more, some of these climate change measures will also make it to the 11th five year plan, a first for the country.

But all said and done, there seems to be no climate consensus within the country! A leading environmentalist told me the other day that what's being suggested by the likes of Shyam Saran, the PM or the Ministry of Environment & Forests is quite different.

And one would think that green agencies -who've been fighting hard to get their stand included in India's external policy- would be united in their proposals to the climate change committee. Wishful thinking! Everyone is there for one purpose, but seem to be mounting their own agendas based on research, interests, policy stands and (can we rule out funding?)

Lets see now-

1) Action Aid, TERI and WWF think we should not commit to any binding measures, but Greenpeace believes voluntary measures are not adequate, we may need binding sectoral targets.

2) The MOEF says that the costs of green house gas mitigation in India will be an astronomical figure. Some in TERI think the amount too prohibitive for it to be viable for us to taken on, yet others in TERI say even if the money is in trillions we need to spend it!

3) And while some of these agencies swear by the Stern report others are questioning its credibility! (Nicholas stern has shown that economic costs of green house gas mitigations work out cheaper in the long run than the loss to GDP as a result of global warming)

& these are only a handful... dig deeper and chances are, you'll find more chinks on the strategy front.

So what this means is that we may be going into Bali on an uneven keel. You need to give-some to get-some, but we're divided on what we're willing to give. Where does that put us? certainly not in any position of strength to negotiate!

That's more fuel to the US- the world's largest emitter. With a government that's more concerned about its energy security than global warming, that has been unwilling to commit to binding targets as long as countries like India and China are kept out of the binding loop.

Bali will see many nations participate, but they need to go into these discussions with better arsenal. We cannot afford another Kyoto.

The Biggest emitter not signing up, and big ones that do -glaringly missing their emission targets. A flawed carbon market that ends up funding companies that are infact big emitters. And sceptics screaming that the 6 billion dollars that have been put behind Kyoto in its present state, will only delay climate change by 5 days!