Climate heartburn

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton charmed Indians this past week, telling them that she is hooked on the subcontinent's famously spicy cuisine.  But even if she did "eat way too much of the food," as she told a town hall meeting in New Delhi, that would not explain the heartburn that scorched her delegation during her visit.

Rather, that feeling of acid reflux was triggered by Indian's environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, who very publicly confronted her on what is arguably President Obama's highest global priority, a rigorous climate change agreement. India cannot and will not "take any legally binding emissions reductions" as part of a worldwide effort to halt global warming, he declared. 

To cheers from India's ever prickly nationalist press, Ramesh added, "There is simply no case for the pressure that we, who have been among the lowest emitters per capita, face to actually reduce emissions."

Certainly Mrs. Clinton did not need Ramesh's rant to spoil what was supposed to be the upbeat headlines about a visit celebrating America's new love affair with India.  But perhaps the center-left government of Manmohan Singh did need a contrived confrontation on climate change to fend off critics in India who accuse him of caving in to the West.  

The spark for their latest fiery charges arose from the seemingly commitment-free declarations that issued from the conjoined summit meetings earlier this month of "major economies" and the Group of 8 leading industrialized countries in L'Aquila, Italy.  The summits' Italian hosts drew on their own legendary resources of food and wine to create an atmosphere inspiring agreement rather than acido, and the summiteers duly agreed on a goal of holding down the increase in global temperature to under two degrees (Centigrade) by 2050.  

This was rightly seen as a great leap forward.  First and foremost, the G-8 countries themselves at last agreed on a target.  The Bush era of denial was past; no longer were Washington conservatives aggressively blocking any G-8 acknowledgment of the threat of global warming.  Equally importantly, leaders of the major economies rapidly emerging from the poverty of the developing world--China, India, Brazil, Indonesia--signed onto the global goal as well.

To be sure, these leaders made headlines insisting that developing countries were assuming no obligations to cap their own emissions.  Repeating their familiar (and quite justified) refrain, Brazil's president Ignácio "Lula" DaSilva observed, "A country that started its industrialization process 150 years ago has more responsibility than one starting yesterday; the United States has more responsibility than China, and Europe more than South America or Africa."  

Even the chairman of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has been sounding the tocsin on global climate change for the world's near-unanimous and increasingly desperate scientific community, weighed in, telling the Indian newspaper The Hindu that "there is no case for pressure on India till those who were supposed to have taken action" -- the Americans and Europeans -- "show their commitment to actually doing so."

This did not spare Singh's government scorching attacks from his right-wing critics for sacrificing India's national interest in unimpeded industrialization on an altar of Western environmentalism.  They pretend not to know that global warming will devastate developing countries like India -- and not just the coastal and island states doomed to submersion.  They are savaging Singh simply for acknowledging the problem is urgent.  Their hysteria leaves no room for a subtle strategy of doing just enough to box the West into doing the heavy lifting.

Their ideological compadres in Washington had already done their dirty work watering down what was supposed to be the Congress's landmark reversal of Bush-era denial, the Waxman-Markey bill that squeaked through the House of Representatives on the eve of the L'Aquila summit.  Scientists despair that, as passed, it will scarcely take us back to the emissions levels of 1990, much less make the one-third reductions from those levels by 2020 they say are essential to forestall an inexorable rise in temperatures.  It is, they say, like sending the Polish cavalry out to turn back the Nazi Panzers.  And they fear the Senate is poised to take away even the cavalry's sabers.          

Indeed, it was the G-8's failure to commit themselves to sharp reductions by 2020 that plunged scientists and environmental advocates into their post-L'Aquila depression, not the developing countries' disavowal of responsibility for solving global warming.  Canada's government -- the last redoubt of Bush-style conservatism in the G-8 -- even dismissed the 2050 temperature goal as merely "aspirational."  If the West will not act, how can they hope to bring the big emerging economies on board?

And parsing environment minister Ramesh's words carefully, one can in fact detect a path to a North-South agreement -- assuming the North is ready to act resolutely.  He was adamant that India could not, would not, "actually reduce emissions."  He did not rule out limits on emissions growth, which is a far more reasonable ask from the industrialized world to traditionally impoverished countries.  Presumably those caps on growth could be adjusted to Western countries' actual delivery (as opposed to promises) of "clean" energy technologies.

Secretary Clinton pointed to precisely such markers despite being blind-sided by Ramesh's "clear line" in the sand (as the Indian press put it).  The United States "will not do anything that will limit India's economic progress," she said.  "But we also believe that there is a way to eradicate poverty and develop sustainably that will lower significantly the carbon footprint of the energy that is produced and consumed to fuel that growth."

Ramesh's reply to Clinton raised a related concern, one that should sober up his nationalist opposition too.  Pointing to a provision added to the Waxman-Markey bill on the House floor for U.S. tariffs against countries that do not limit their emissions, he said, "we also face the threat of carbon tariffs on our exports to countries such as yours." 

This is precisely the enforcement hammer that will be needed to prompt countries to opt into the global warming treaty due to emerge from Copenhagen negotiations:  trade penalties on countries that would circumvent a tough emissions regime.  This bracing prospect that Western countries would agree to impose such penalties in a G-8-style pact if there is no broader North-South deal should encourage agreement  on a global, inclusive pact that will prove more digestible for all.

Comments

[Ruth Thomas]

I think we should start negotiating about cooperative research with emerging industrial nations, such as India, to deal with CO2 problems, including smokestacks and automobiles, but also animal emissions and the bubbling depths of some areas of the oceans. Seriously. Obama and company's international lecturing on climate change is a bit much, I think. We Americans aren't doing that much ourselves, and we can't even agree on what will work or what we're willing to pay for or sacrifice in convenience.

[Shazia Rafi]

this is as if the newly obese among the industrializing developing countries were to say, we won't start healthy eating because you in the USA have had more years to stuff yourselves. I find that legislators are able to have a more common perspective not when we are threatening them with global disaster but when we can point out the positive and more immediate effects in their own communities [and voting constituencies] of environmentally sustainable policies.

[Jeffrey Laurenti]

Cooperative research, as Ruth advocates, is of course needed -- that's what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been pursuing for the past decade, in fact. But it can't be a substitute for immediate and far-reaching action. Ruth is right that in the just-ended Era of Denial, Washington didn't do diddly-squat to control emissions -- so egregious was the abdication that a number of American states and local governments stepped forward to act, explicitly to counter global warming, while Washington lay frozen in the rigor-mortis of a conservative stranglehold. But in the first half-year of an Obama presidency and enlarged progressive-minded majorities in Congress, we have already seen movement on fuel efficiency standards and the Waxman-Markey global warming bill. Yes, it will need to be tightened up after Copenhagen--but the change is real.

Shazia's observations about legislative behavior ring true, but I wouldn't shy away from amplifying the alarms that scientists worldwide are sounding. Both established interests and established comforts are likely to be far more immovable if the argument for change is simply one for positive effects of environmentally sustainable policies when THEY will be most aware of THEIR belt-tightening.