Should India do more to match China's ambitious energy efficiency targets announced recently? Discuss here
Environment minister Jairam Ramesh left for Beijing on Thursday night as China — the world’s biggest carbon emitter — revealed its first energy-efficiency targets ahead of the Copenhagen climate summit on December 7.
Ramesh will meet Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao on Friday, a day after Beijing announced a “voluntary” and “binding” national goal of a 40-45 per cent cut in carbon intensity below 2005 levels by 2020. Carbon intensity is the amount of carbon dioxide emitted per unit of economic growth or GDP.
“China has given a wake-up call to us,” Ramesh told Hindustan Times before leaving for Beijing. “We’ve to think hard about our climate strategy now and look for flexibility, as I’ve been saying for the past two months, to avoid being isolated at the Copenhagen conference. The flexibility can be achieved without taking binding emission cuts.”
Source: Hindustan Times
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India will continue to face external pressure to demonstrate its commitment towards climate change at the Copenhagen summit. Its also clear that Ramesh desperately wants to present some form of a quantitatively defined blueprint to the world to prevent being isolated, as Kamalnath found himself during his previous term as Commerce Minister while negotiating at WTO. Obviously, the domestic lobby has created enormous pressure to prevent India committing to anything at Copenhagen. That earlier Brazil and now China have committed some form of quantitative goals, Ramesh is feeling the heat! In simple terms, for Govt. of India's global leadership and development aspirations - its more important that it plays a significant role as part of the G20 club - rather than showing itself to be part of the 3rd world!! Reading Ramesh's comments, I have a feeling of deja vu, having observed the way the nuclear deal with US was negotiated and was ratified in the Parliament in not so distant past. Govt. will continue to manage both internal and external constituencies till the summit and the follow up negotiations without clearly taking one transparent well chartered course (democratic politics and diplomacy is always a balancing act, isn't it!!).
To mitigate climate change however, everybody - US, China and India inclusive would have to do a lot lot lot more to achieve the UN IPCC goals, without getting stuck to 'its their responsibility, not mine' mode. As one of recent the cartoons in the Economist showed, it however looks like that in 2040, the world reduced to a small island around Mount Everest may eventually come to a consensus!!
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To mitigate climate change however, everybody - US, China and India inclusive would have to do a lot lot lot more to achieve the UN IPCC goals, without getting stuck to 'its their responsibility, not mine' mode. As one of recent the cartoons in the Economist showed, it however looks like that in 2040, the world reduced to a small island around Mount Everest may eventually come to a consensus!!