India Environment Portal

Two monopolies. One private and the other public; one in gas and one in coal. Both equally disastrous for the environment. I speak here of Reliance Industries Ltd and Coal India Ltd.

Karno GuhathakurtaIt was a trade exhibition abuzz with the restrained chatter of busy suited executives at company stalls making contacts and finalising deals. Nothing out of place except that this trade was about renewable energy technologies, which have unconventional reasons for growth. First, these technologies are seen as the most economical and feasible source of energy for millions of people unconnected to the electricity grid and having no electricity to light their houses or cook their food. This energy poverty is disabling and needs to be eradicated.

India’s response: point by point and blunt

For once, India’s submission to the climate secretariat (AWG-LCA) was blunt and took on the US head on.

India launched its National Solar Mission last year. The aim is ambitious – to build capacity of 22,000 mw by 2022. Clearly this is critical: if we can upscale our solar energy generation, we also build the ‘learning’ needed for the world – prices will drop, technology will grow, new answers will be found. But the question is how is this programme working?

Three negotiation related documents that I have been sitting on, which need to be put on public record, are:

As I watched President Barack Obama speak on the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico many thoughts crossed my mind.

Sorry for the long silence in the blog space. But I was fatigued and rather frustrated with the same old arguments and going-nowhere debates. So in the last few months we have been busy with new research to bring different perspectives to the old problems -- how will we share the increasingly scarce budget in an increasingly at-risk carbon constrained world.

India (letter dated January 30, 2010, National Focal Point to Yvo de Boer) Late Saturday night (around 9.30 pm reportedly from the media release), the Indian government sent a letter to the UNFCCC secretariat in Bonn.

Copenhagen Accord: country submissions

By now, Australia, US, China and EU have all sent their letters to UNFCCC secretariat regarding their ‘willingness to support’ the Copenhagen Accord or not. It is interestingly to break down the communication and to read between the lines.

Somebody recently asked me why India supported the Copenhagen Accord. It is correct to say that the proposed accord has no meaningful targets for emission reduction from Annex 1 (industrialized countries). Global emissions will increase or reduce at best marginally. So it will be bad for the world’s efforts to combat climate change. We are victims of climate change.

Monday, December 14, 2009: Standing in line in the freezing cold, waiting to be registered to the conference of parties to the climate change convention being held in Copenhagen, I have strange sense of foreboding that this will be an eventful but disappointing week.

The Copenhagen conference will definitely go down as the worst meeting in global climate negotiations. There is a complete mess here: lines of people standing outside the Bella Centre, where the conference is taking place, wanting to get in. Inside the meeting has broken down for the umpteenth time because industrialized countries refuse to commit to cutting emissions.

Late yesterday, US president, Barack Obama and the Chinese president, Hu Jintao, issued a joint statement on climate change. The statement was much awaited. It was believed that President Obama on his maiden visit to the region would get the Chinese to change their position on climate change.

It is now more or less clear that the world will not be ready with an ambitious legally binding agreement at Copenhagen, which sets interim targets for industrialized countries or the funds and technology for participation of developing countries. Already the Kyoto Protocol, which sets binding targets for the industrialised countries is being bashed.

Let me be straight: As the clocks ticks to Copenhagen, how low is the world prepared to prostrate to get climate-renegade US on board? Is a bad deal in Copenhagen better than no deal?

Gopalkrishna Gandhi, the governor of West Bengal knows that we need to learn to walk the talk. He lives, as he says, in a 84,000 sq feet building – the majestic Raj Bhawan (Governor’s residence) – in a massive 11 hectare plot of land in the heart of Kolkata city.

The leader of the newly elected Democratic Party of Japan Yukio Hatoyama created quite a stir with his bold mid-term target for emission reduction -- 25 per cent from 1990 levels by 2020.

There has been a growing interest in the issue of black carbon -- light absorbing carbon particles, also called soot in our world. It was earlier believed that these particles cooled the Earth, now scientists say the impact is the reverse. The particles absorb sunlight and warm up the atmosphere and so the earth. Also, deposits on snow, absorb sunlight and so heat and melt the glaciers.

The latest fuss about the 2°C global temperature target India apparently acceded to at the Major Economies Forum in L’Aquil, Italy, is important to unravel.

It was the biannual gathering of over 100,000 Protestants in Bremen, a small town in Germany. As the articulate minister for environment, Sigmar Gabriel, came to participate in a discussion on energy security for a climate-secure world, many stood up. Soon the hall was full of blue placards, held high, all saying: “No to coal.” The minister, I could see, was riled.

The global meltdown led to expectations governments would use money to reinvent economies for climate change. The plan was simple: spend obscene amounts of public money in infrastructure and other projects, to stimulate national economies.

There was a jamboree in my town recently, a gathering of the powerful and famous, to discuss the climate change agreement the world must carve out in Copenhagen by end 2009. But what happened was rather discomforting: We Indians were publicly lectured, castigated and rapped on our knuckles for being bad boys and girls by one and all.

I spent a week at the climate change conference in Poznan, and realized the world is in deep trouble and deeper denial. Worse, the denial is now entirely on the side of action. It is well accepted that climate change is a reality. Scientists say we need to cap temperature increases at 2

Let’s cut to the chase. If we are serious about climate change then we have to be serious about changing (drastically) the way the world generates and uses its energy. But even as the rich world talks glibly about ‘decarbonisation’ of its economy it has done precious little to reinvent its energy system and to wean itself from its fossil fuel addiction.

The Prime Minister has released India’s national action plan on climate change. For those engaged in the business of environment and climate, the plan may offer nothing new or radical. But, as I see it, the plan asserts India can grow differently, because “it is in an early stage of development”.