Experts fear carbon cuts will hurt growth

Three days before the curtain rises on the international climate meet in Copenhagen, India’s negotiating position for the conference has got mired in confusion and controversy.
As the implications of environment minister Jairam Ramesh’s announcements in Parliament on Thursday sank in, official negotiators and climate change experts expressed concern that he may have paved the way for a shift with serious repercussions for India’s growth and development.

The issue, according to them, is not the declaration per se of a unilateral and voluntary reduction of 20-25% in carbon intensity from 2005 levels by 2020. The fur is flying because of his other statements and, more importantly, what he left unsaid. Experts feel that given the context, the cuts announced on Thursday would be exploited by the developed countries to change the  framework of the Copenhagen talks.

“He seems to have queered the pitch for our negotiators before the conference,” said former Planning Commission member and energy expert Surya Sethi.

The government’s official negotiators refused to be drawn into a war of words with the minister but they admitted privately that they were no longer sure what negotiating brief to carry to Copenhagen.

There are three major points on which the minister has deviated from the established position. One, he indicated that the government is willing to rethink its long-held objections to international scrutiny of domestic mitigation actions to check carbon emissions. If India gives in on this, the developed countries would have won a major battle. An international verification regime for domestic action means they can reject a treaty on legally binding emission cuts, which is what developing nations have been demanding.

Two, he questioned the fundamental basis of India’s negotiating position, which is the concept of per capita emission rates. By virtue of our huge population, India’s per capita carbon emission is among the lowest. But Ramesh dismissed it as “an accident of history” and mocked at the failure to curb population growth.

Three, he made no reference to another tenet, which is the issue of “historical responsibility”. Developing countries want the developed world to make amends for long years of pollution by taking on financial and other commitments to facilitate the shift to green technologies. By omitting the phrase from his speech yesterday, Ramesh has created the impression that the government is ready to junk it.

Government negotiators who have been fighting tooth and nail for an equitable agreement at Copenhagen, are trying to make sense of the minister’s verbal acrobatics in Parliament.

They don’t want to prejudge Ramesh before the Copenhagen meet but there is a fair amount of disquiet among members of the official team on the eve of departure.

Significantly, the BJP, too, lashed out at Ramesh on Friday on these and other points and said that he has ended up weakening India’s negotiating position by announcing concessions on the eve of the Copenhagen meet.

“It is bad strategy on the eve of any multilateral negotiations to announced unilateral stances without waiting for the approach of the developed countries,” said Arun Jaitley who, as commerce minister in the Vajpayee government, is a veteran of WTO negotiations.

While it is now accepted that the Copenhagen conference will not produce a new global climate treaty as hoped, the political document that will be issued at the end of the meet is critical. The document will be the template for post-Copenhagen negotiations on an international roadmap to a cleaner environment.

The developed countries are pushing strongly to blur the distinction between them and the developing nations by insisting that everyone accept internationally binding emission cuts together with an international verification regime to ensure compliance.

According to Sunita Narain, director of Centre for Science and Environment, this completely overturns the principles enshrined in the Kyoto Protocol, the Bali Action Plan and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Sethi warned that the government’s carbon intensity reduction target could seriously impact growth and development. “I want to know the roadmap for the cuts,” he said, adding that the government must explain how the Planning Commission arrived at the figures announced by Ramesh.