The outcome of the Copenhagen climate conference has been seen by many analysts as signifying a major shift in the global distribution of power. There is clearly some merit in this assessment. This is the first time that the Western bloc led by the United States split so completely on a non-military issue of great global significance.
The European Union was totally bypassed as the US sealed the so-called Copenhagen Accord with a new grouping of fast-growing developing countries — BASIC (Brazil, South Africa, India and China). Close US allies like Japan, Canada and Australia, and G-8 member Russia, played no role in shaping this collusive deal agreed behind the backs of most of the 193 countries engaged in negotiations under the UN Framework
Convention on Climate Change.
The BASIC countries’ importance as the single-largest — and steadily increasing — source of greenhouse emissions among all groupings is undeniable. They will critically determine the future level of atmospheric greenhouse concentrations. But within the US+BASIC, power is unevenly distributed. China and the US, the world’s two highest emitters, each accounting for more than 20% of the global total, can single-handedly undo whatever good the world sets out to do. Contrariwise, they can help decisively combat climate change by drastically reducing their emissions and promoting low-carbon development.
At Copenhagen, the US and China, followed by India, decided they didn’t want an ambitious, strong, effective and equitable agreement which would sharply reduce emissions. Such an agreement would limit global warming to 1.5 to 2° C over pre-industrial levels by ensuring that global emissions plateau by 2020 and fall by 50% by 2050. Under the Copenhagen Accord, temperatures are likely to rise by nearly 4° C, aggravating climate change, wiping out small island countries and reducing billions of people to an insecure existence as sea levels inexorably rise, wind patterns abruptly change and glaciers rapidly melt, increasing hunger, displacement and devastation.
Copenhagen, then, represents a power shift of a negative, undesirable, retrograde kind. The emerging economies exercised their growing clout to promote their elites’ short-term interests in ways that will hurt a majority of their own peoples. Make no mistake. Exacerbated climate change will greatly increase the disproportionate burden which the world’s poor — 40 per cent of whom are Indians — already bear.
By signing the Copenhagen Accord with the US, BASIC — India, in particular — has betrayed the survival-related basic interests of its underprivileged people and facilitated a transition to a much hotter planet. Although the Accord isn’t a binding document and contains no targets or quantitative goals it will form the basis for whatever emerges as the global climate order.
US lawmakers seem set against domestic emissions cuts beyond 4 to 7% — in place of the necessary 40 to 45%t. But the Indian public needs an ambitious deal. Yet, Indian leaders tailed the US. BASIC made concessions to Washington on reducing the emissions-intensity of GDP (by 20 to 25% and 40 to 45% in India and China) and on international verification. This wasn’t reciprocated.
This doesn’t bode well for India’s foreign policy or general international relations approach. India’s power to influence the world has grown dramatically — witness its inclusion in the G-20 and Major Economies Forum, its leverage in World Trade Organisation negotiations and the exceptional nuclear arrangement it swung for itself. India is the world’s only non-signatory to any nuclear restraint or non-proliferation agreement which possesses nuclear weapons. Yet it has been accepted as a legitimate civilian nuclear-trade partner. That signifies power. But Indian policy-makers aren’t asking what purposes their power should serve, and whether/how it can help make the world less unequal, unjust and violent.
Rather, Manmohan Singh is aligning India unthinkingly with the US — without exploring how much expanded autonomy India can get. This is true of other international issues too, including Iraq, Afghanistan-Pakistan and Iran. Instead of counselling restraint on the US, India has tailed Washington, including on an increasingly unwinnable war in Afghanistan.
India has voted three times against Iran at the International Atomic Energy Agency at America’s behest — and against its own considered assessment that Iran is in no substantive breach of its NPT/IAEA obligations. In the process, India has lost much of the goodwill it commands in Iran. India has all but killed the gas pipeline through Pakistan, with its great potential for subcontinental peace and energy security.
These are serious errors of strategy and lack of vision. Indian policy-makers are acting as if the unipolar moment after the USSR’s collapse still continues — when it is long past.
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