Consensus on climate change can't be forced

Sunjoy Joshi

17, November 2009
 

If some of the popular writing in the western media is to be believed, India's intransigent approach to climate change is all that stands between apocalypse and a happy global consensus on the biggest problem facing mankind.

Be that as it may, various stratagems have been deployed to make India shun its highly reactive stance. While some try (coquettishly) to get a rise out of India by seducing it with its self-image as an emerging global power, the less charitable accuse it of “hiding behind its poor”. At one end is the seductive charm of India being assigned a seat at the high table; at the other lies the danger of it being relegated to the role of insensitive party spoiler.

As the global community plods on to Copenhagen and beyond, the blame game about who should shoulder the responsibility for failure is already in evidence. The hard facts, however, paint a very different picture from what appears in popular writing.

A recent World Bank study shows that, in the 10 years preceding 2006, India was one of the 20 countries in which CO2 emissions intensity (per unit of GDP on a PPP basis) declined for both halves of this period. Moreover, this decline was more for the latter half than for the first.

This happened despite the fact that the share of both industry and services in the GDP rose at the expense of agriculture. Both industry and services actually reduced energy intensity significantly. While traditional biomass consumption remained more or less the same, increase in use of fossil fuels was accompanied by the decreased carbon intensity of such use for both industry and the services sector.

Now compare this taking the world at large. Increase in CO2 emissions globally has been more in the second half of the decade. Of greater concern is the fact that the carbon emissions intensity of fossil fuels which declined in the first half actually rose in the second.

In this background, it seems that much of the current blame assigned to emerging economies like India stems from the failure of developed nations to square up past responsibilities accepted as part of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. It also signals the uncomfortable yet inadmissible realisation that it is well-nigh impossible for the developed world to meet the stringent and deep emission cuts that would be required if global CO2 emission levels are to be contained below 400 ppm. As Jim Giles pointed out recently in New Scientist, any fair allocation of carbon would literally leave the developed nations with no carbon quotas.

Even as international agencies castigate India's energy subsidies for promoting energy inefficiency, these complex cross-subsidies ensure that industrial consumers in India, on a PPP basis, pay the highest power tariffs anywhere in the world. The same holds true for liquid fuel prices where taxes ensure that prices of transport fuels in India are matched by few other countries. While these subsidies may distort the overall energy market, they do create their own pressures for economy of use (it surprises no one that small cars remain the preferred option in India). At the same time, however ham-handedly, they ensure some measure of distributive justice.

What they can be faulted for is the extremely inefficient way in which they square things up for the poorest of the poor, and skew fuel choices irrationally. Should the need to impose greater carbon costs on energy be the result of global consensus, these subsidies will certainly have to be raised and unaffordably so. We have already seen this happen with the runaway oil prices of 2008 and market forces once again point in the same direction.

Countries like India, whose per capita emissions are below even the most stringent stabilisation targets considered by international bodies, cannot be expected to follow a development path in which their emissions from energy use would decline or even stabilise in the near term. Emissions from such countries will necessarily increase in the foreseeable future even as they decrease the carbon intensity of their growth by greater energy efficiency and by moving towards low-carbon energy sources without inordinately increasing the costs of energy for their poor.

Even if hypothetically India with 17 per cent of the world's people were to freeze its 4 per cent share of the planet's emissions at current levels, its contribution in preventing the apocalypse being foretold would continue to remain insignificant. For the global commons to be protected, the world community has to agree to work on a path that eventually leads to a convergence of societies and lifestyles across the world. Targets foisted within any alternative are bound to fail and lead to conflicts.

Unless development and action on climate change are addressed simultaneously on common accepted principles of global justice and equity, we will continue to be faced with the current dualism resulting in unresolvable conflicts. The only sustainable consensus remains one that has no room for high and low tables, rather than one that serves to insidiously maintain the status quo.

Sunjoy Joshi is Distinguished Fellow of the Observer Research Foundation

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