‘In India’s interest to find a new path’

Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, one of the oldest grassroots environmental organisations in the US, tells DNA how India and the West can break the impasse over who should act first.
 
Suppose India was an enterprise, with a managing director. How would it approach the issue of climate change? The MD would say: ‘We’ve got a billion-plus people, no oil, very little natural gas and some low-quality coal. But what we do have, is lots of sunshine, wind and degraded land for biomass use, a tradition of entrepreneurial innovation and a huge scientific and engineering base. That’s what we should leverage!’ India is better positioned, than most other countries, to pitch for a low-carbon energy future. So if you were a businessman, you would choose the low-carbon path. But governments tend to copy each other. That’s why India is torn between clean energy innovation, and an implicit assumption that the upfront cost for low-carbon pathways is higher and the country is too poor to afford it. I hope that by the time we reach [the next climate change conference in] Copenhagen, we will be able to turn the situation.

India needs to say it can take the initiative towards a low-carbon future provided it gets the right kind of technology and financing regime to build a huge amount of solar, wind and biomass energy. The US, Europe, Japan and Canada have to, in turn, say they’re willing to treble financial assistance for alternative energy development as long as its all clean energy. Indonesia recently said that if the world wants to use its rainforests as a carbon sink, they should be willing to rent them.

If India makes degraded land available for the same purpose, you should charge too. Because frankly, adopting caps does not solve the problem, as Europe has shown; alternative energy does. We in the West have to get rid of the infrastructure we now have, to go clean and, and this is much harder. But India still has the choice of what it builds and should keep clean energy in mind when it does.