A cap for India?
Tuesday, February 10th, 2009
Photo credit: Daniel Bachhuber
There is a new change of tone in the already tense negotiations on climate change, if we look at the recent comments the European Commission has directed at India and China. The EC is now pitching for emission caps for both these countries. This is an approach that the Indian government has long said is off the table. Chidambaram has spoken before of India’s ‘right to development’ - that since India is still a developing country and has to address the critical issues of poverty and growth, it has to postpone any commitments to reduce emissions.
Whether the EC’s tone gets sharper or not, depends on the US position on developing country emissions. I believe though, that India has a chance to set the tone of the emissions debate. So far, we have been backbenchers when it comes to global negotiations on climate change, responding only when we are forced to. But India as an emerging economy, has some precious flexibility when it comes to growth and emissions that both the US and Europe lack.
As developed nations, both the US and Europe have high emission infrastructure in place as well as ‘high-emission habits’ - in terms of car ownership, consumption, polluting industries and agriculture approaches - that will be difficult to break or change. India on the other hand, still does not have its infrastructure fully in place. Car ownership is still extremely low, and the high consumption economy is still not in place here. We consequently have a chance to carve a development path that is environmentally safer than the ones that developed nations have pursued. Such an approach ought to be pursued for its own sake, rather than because of external pressures.
The big mistake of the developed world was in ignoring the impact on the environment during their high growth phase. For writers such as Charles Dickens, the smog of 19th century London- created by coal-burning in the city - was a consant theme in his novels about urban decay. Much of the West never considered that use of the environment ought to be ‘priced’ the same way other resources are. This however, was something that Indian environmentalists such as Anil Agarwal suggested as early as the 1980s, when they noted that GNP ought to be about ‘gross natural product’ rather than ‘gross national product’. With an approach that prices environmental resources, industries would have to pay for dumping untreated waste into our rivers; open coal mines could no longer pollute the surrounding land, turning our soil into unusable sludge. Razing down forests and building a coal-fired plant would have to be ‘compensated’ for, by funding a green project elsewhere.
Who could such an approach benefit? And how much would it hurt us in our growth numbers? I have some thoughts on this, that I’ll follow up on in a second post.