The message from Montreal is that the world must move far beyond the Kyoto Protocol in reversing climate change. Will India heed the message and lead the Global South in setting emission-reduction targets? Or will our rulers hide behind the people's poverty to defend our elite's consumerist greed?
THE forces of conservatism have pushed so many global agendas so far to the Right that ordinarily decent, public-spirited citizens are often confronted with absurd options. Not only are we asked to choose the "lesser of two evils"; we are increasingly called upon to declare that one evil does not exist. On the defensive, we are forced into alliances with hostile interest-groups - just to contain temporarily other, even more inimical, forces.
Take the Kyoto Protocol, signed under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC), and virulently opposed by the globe's biggest polluter, the United States , but secured at the just-concluded Montreal climate conference. Kyoto is an extraordinarily modest, indeed meagre, agreement that only asks 36 industrialised countries to cut their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 5.2 per cent by 2012 (from 1990 levels) - in place of the 25 to 30 per cent needed to prevent the globe's descent into a situation of no return. In fact, so horribly inadequate is the Protocol that it will take 30 Kyotos just to stabilise GHG concentrations at twice their level at the time of the Industrial Revolution.
That apart, Kyoto is acutely flawed in the way it permits the North to "achieve" the reductions. This can be done either actually, through measurable reductions in emissions, or notionally, through trading in "carbon credits" determined by assigning arbitrary, often fictitious, values to different activities (or their avoidance). Northern corporations can buy credits from the South by supporting "Clean Development Mechanism" projects - and not reduce the poisons and heat they are pumping into the atmosphere. So flawed are some of these CDM projects that if implemented, estimates a Dutch study, they will reduce global emissions by less than 0.1 per cent, not even a respectable fraction of Kyoto's paltry target.
Yet, confronted with the conservative Right's ferocious attack on Kyoto, many environmentalists have felt compelled to defend it - warts and all, including carbon trading and hopelessly unsound CDM projects. Even the simple movement from the Protocol's signature to its entry-into-force this past February took eight years. This, after the best of the world's climate scientists and its most far-sighted environmental activists had struggled for a quarter century to establish the pivotal importance of reversing global warming. Mercifully, the Montreal conference agreed to launch talks for emission cuts beyond 2012. But it did not emphasis their urgency nearly enough.
The global anti-environment Right, led by energy-and-petrochemicals conglomerates, first denied, and then, minimised the causal links between rising GHG emissions and the relatively rapid recent change in earth's ambient temperature, and the potentially catastrophic consequences of global warming. Environmental activists had to acquire scientific expertise and master facts and theories to counter them every step of the way. This exercise was productive and established a pretty solid scientific consensus. But the result was hardly commensurate with the effort. Thirteen years after the Rio de Janeiro FCCC, the world is still getting warmer by the month. The current concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) is 380 parts per million (ppm) - 36 per cent higher than before the Industrial Revolution, and rising by 20 ppm or more every decade.
Not just the northern countries, but fast-growing economies of the south, are pumping out huge amounts of GHGs. At the beginning of this century, the world was about 1 Celsius warmer than 200 years ago. This change has been enough to disrupt the delicate balances between the complex subsystems that make up the world's climate, including different streams and winds, hot and cold marine currents and circulations, and rainfall patterns. It has accelerated the melting of the polar icecaps (which reduces the heat reflected back from planet earth).
These are now melting at a historically unprecedented rate. In September, scientists recorded the smallest area of Arctic sea-ice ever, 1.28 million square kilometres, or 9 per cent smaller than the historic average. Already, shorelines have eroded, ice has thinned, and polar bears are declining in number. The Arctic North could become ice-free by the end of the century, possibly even by 2050.
EPICA (European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica) has been studying the composition of Antarctic ice by drilling holes to varying depths. Scientists have recovered an ice core which contains hundreds of thousands of years worth of atmospheric air samples within small bubbles trapped in the ice. They have reconstructed changes in CO2 concentrations for the past 650,000 years. Today's levels are the highest in the series, 27 per cent greater than the second-highest recorded number - and probably the greatest in 2 million years.
If present trends continue, CO2 concentrations could reach 500 ppm by 2050. When a similar level existed (probably some 20 to 40 million years ago), sea levels were about 100 metres higher than today. That the phenomenon might repeat itself is an altogether horrifying thought. Entire countries will vanish forever. The worst affected will be the island-nations of the Indian and Pacific Oceans.
The effects of global warming are already visible through changes in weather patterns and breeding cycles of disease-causing microbes and insects. Recent years have seen many extreme weather events (for example, the heat wave of 2003, which killed 35,000 in Western Europe, or last winter's snowfall in Dubai), and increased ferocity of hurricanes and cyclones (whose intensity has doubled over 30 years).
The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that climate change accounts for at least five million cases of illness and more than 150,000 deaths annually. Another study says that some of the world's poorest countries, with the lowest GHG emissions, will be the worst affected and face a doubling of deaths from malaria, diarrhoeal diseases and malnutrition by 2030. In some Latin American countries, a 1C temperature rise has caused an 8 per cent rise in diarrhoeal diseases.
Recent reports, based on data collected by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and U.S. government laboratories, suggest that 2005 might be the world's worst-ever year for extreme weather, "with the hottest temperatures, most Arctic melting, worst Atlantic hurricane season and warmest Caribbean waters". The number of hurricanes has exceeded the predicted numbers so much that it exhausted the Roman alphabet. The year recorded several wayward weather episodes including extremely high rainfall - for example, Mumbai in July, 944 mm on a single day - , and increased occurrence of cyclones in the Bay of Bengal. The United Nations Environment Programme estimates that in 2005 global warming has caused damage equivalent to $200 billion - the highest-ever figure.
India has experienced some of these ill-effects too. Scientists at the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) say that wayward temperatures were responsible for a drop in India's wheat output in 2002-03 and 2003-04. In 2002-03, wheat yields fell by 20-40 per cent, those of gram by 25-30 per cent, and mustard by 50-70 per cent.
An official Indo-British scientific study, released in September, forecasts that India's GHG emissions will triple by 2050. In 30 to 40 years, temperatures are likely to rise by 3 to 4C - or three or four times the 1C rise that has already produced havoc. The rise will be unevenly distributed. Northern, western and central India will be worse affected than the south. There are likely to be severe and frequent droughts in the northern and northeastern regions, and floods in the Ganga, Godavari and Krishna basins. These weather patterns will see mosquito-breeding and malaria grow in States like Jammu and Kashmir, which have been relatively free of the disease.
The most alarming scenario for India is one that is already under way: the accelerated melting of the ice caps on the Tibetan plateau. The Himalayan glaciers are receding at an alarming rate: 10 to 15 metres annually. The plateau is the source of seven of Asia's largest rivers - the Ganga, the Indus, the Brahmaputra, the Salween, the Mekong, the Yangtse and the Huang Ho. The first three are among India's most important rivers. The prospect, including floods owing to rapidly melting snows, followed by droughts, is just too horrifying to contemplate.
This calls for urgent correction. Such action cannot be limited to the industrialised countries alone, although they must take the first step (or rather, a long jump). It is absolutely imperative that southern countries with large fast-growing economies, such as China, India, South-East Asia, Brazil, Mexico and Argentina, come on board. Currently, they have a deeply contradictory attitude to reversing climate change. They accept, unlike the U.S. and Australian governments, that climate change poses serious threats and that, globally, emission cuts are imperative. But they are not prepared to undertake definite cuts with well-defined targets or quotas - at least, not yet.
More egregiously, these southern States hope to make gains from CDM projects. Hundreds of such projects are now being readied for carbon trading. (India alone has approved over 100, including tree plantations, wind and solar energy generation, biomass production and urban waste incineration to generate electricity). Some projects are of dubious value - for example, monoculture tree planting - and are based on specious assumptions about "carbon offsetting". The assumptions assign an extremely high value to industrial tree plantations, based on "market-driven" but misleading or imaginary, figures. But scientists believe that the carbon stored in trees is not equivalent to that stored in the form of unused and unmined fossil fuels. Similarly, high credit is assigned to waste incineration projects, although these are ultra-hazardous owing to their potential for release of dioxins and oxides of nitrogen and sulphur.
It is bad enough that carbon trading allows northern corporations to pollute as heavily as ever (and sell excess credits to other emitters). It is worse that the credits are calculated and verified by agencies firmly embedded in the corporate world and devoted to it. The credits are based on imaginary or speculative estimates of the difference between what the emission levels might have been had a certain CDM project not been undertaken, and the level following the project's completion. Powerful southern governments and companies are exploiting carbon trading to make profits, but accept no obligation to cut emissions.
The Indian government is particularly cynical in this regard. It champions Kyoto and more, but makes no commitment to emission cuts. Environment Minister A. Raja told The Times of India as much from Montreal (December 13): "India as a developing country - with [a] large number of people living in poverty - cannot give a firm commitment to reduce GHG emissions."
Raja justified this thus: "India's per capita emissions are well below the global average. We have projected a GDP [gross domestic product] growth rate of 8 per cent to help reduce poverty levels ... [W]e cannot compromise there. Any commitment to reduce GHG emissions would be [a] stumbling block to poverty alleviation." A more sophisticated version is that some 300 million Indians have no electricity and 650 million have no access to modern cooking fuels.
This argument is egregiously disingenuous. For one, the global per capita GHG average is itself unacceptably high (4.1 tonnes of CO2). Some southern countries are fast approaching it - for example, China (2.8 tonnes), Brazil (1.8) and India (1.1) - although they are well below the U.S.' criminal level of 20 tonnes, or the northern average of 12.4 tonnes.
And for another, the Indian averages hide vast differences between the survival-level consumption (and extremely low GHG emissions) of the masses, and the high, northern-style greed-driven consumption of the elite, roughly one-tenth of the population. It is this minuscule upper crust that buys the one million cars now being annually made, compared to just half-a-million in 2001-02 and less than a quarter-million 10 years ago. It also furnishes the market for high-energy luxury goods like air-conditioners and washing machines, whose sales have tripled over five to seven years.
The elite has a gargantuan appetite for acquisition and consumption. It is as guilty as the north in adding to global warming and must be held accountable in the same degree and manner - by being forced to reduce consumption through higher taxation, physical controls (for example, on car parking) and other measures.
However, the greatest perversity is that the government mollycoddles this very elite by citing the poverty of the masses. This is nauseating. No less repulsive is India's signature of a "secret" agreement called "Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate Change" in Laos in July with five of the world's biggest polluters - U.S., China, Japan, South Korea and Australia. This deplorable pact seeks to undermine Kyoto while promoting dubious notions like energy "efficiency", and "cleaner" conventional technologies, including hydropower, oil, gas, coal and nuclear power.
The deal has been described as "dirty" and "dangerous" by environmentalists. Its emphasis is on high-technology fixes, not on changing life-styles and reducing consumption. It makes no commitment to cutting emissions. It is a safe bet that India will try to play both sides of the street - the multilateral and inherently more democratic FCCC process, and the "Asia-Pacific Partnership", dominated by the U.S. and others which refuse enforceable obligations.
This duplicity has to stop. India owes it to its people, to the Gandhian tradition of austerity, and to its past role in supporting worthy multilateral causes, to take an honest approach to climate change which accepts Spartan consumption as adequate, indeed imperative. The government must change its stance and halt the elite's rising greed-driven consumption, while shifting to non-fossil, renewable and environmentally sound energy technologies. It must discourage private transport, promote low-energy agriculture, and conserve water.
A part of this agenda should be to ban Sport Utility Vehicles (SUVs) - with their truck-level emissions - heavily tax luxury goods, penalise excessive fossil-fuel use, and vigorously promote renewable energy. This is indispensable to the global and national agendas for survival.
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