USI Library

News Information Service

Statesman, 23-06-2017

Trade-off post Paris

  • Prasenjitchowdhury

June 23, 2017 | 02:41 AM

The decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement by the USA, the second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world next to China, is the zenith of irresponsibility.

By seeking a better deal, the US delivered a body blow to the global movement against climate change. But that should spring little surprise.

The US decision to withdraw from the Kyoto Treaty occasioned a verbal joust between President George Bush and then Chancellor of Germany Gerhard Schröder, with the former averring: “We will not do anything that harms our economy, because first things first are the people who live in America.”

The comment provoked an interesting response from the former Italian prime minister Romano Prodi: “If one wants to be a world leader, one must know how to look after the entire earth and not only American industry.”

The Bush administration, let it be remembered, was on the same page as the Trump one, that while articulating support for efforts to limit carbon emissions into the early days of the presidency soon abandoned the posture with a vengeance as it viewed such measures as potentially harmful to economic interests of the US.

In 2001 Bush formally withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol, which the Clinton administration had signed but not ratified.

Veering between grudging accommodation and blatant hostility to international efforts to control greenhouse gas emissions, the stance of the Bush administration might very well be the hallmark of the Trump administration as well. The USA has been the main obstacle to quick action on emissions reductions in the early negotiations, forswearing any moves to include binding greenhouse gas emissions reductions, so Trump toes a predictable line.

Trump says the Paris deal ‘unfairly’ puts constraints on the United States coal industry, and ‘unfairly’ allows some countries (read China and India) to continuing to pollute at a greater rate than others.

He also complained that it was a threat to US sovereignty.

Indeed, a sovereign nationstate has never endorsed an agreement that prizes the goal of achieving a sustainable global environment over its own interests. See how Norway, Japan and Greece, which have largescale shipping industries, resisted agreements on marine pollution from oil tankers, while Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Sweden were very flexible on this because somehow their economies were far less dependent on such industries.

While the economically prosperous industrialised nations have long resisted initiatives to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to curb global warming, it is a matter of life and death for thirtytwo small island nation-states, along with those with densely populated coastal plains, such as Bangladesh, Egypt and the Netherlands.

Besides, there is the inevitable clash, alongside interactions, between human systems and environmental systems, in the course of which we now get an “environmentalist view” side by side with a “real-world view”. By the early 1990s, the real-world view is that at least 75 per cent of the problem could be attributed to fewer than ten states if we consider the EU as a single entity.

Per capita, however, the US pumped out more CO2 than China and India combined in 2015.

What makes the US brazenness particularly galling is that each individual living in the United States contributed 16.07 tons to the country’s total, while each individual living in China and India contributed 7.73 and 1.87 tons on average, respectively.

With China and the US being in the league of top emitters per kiloton in 2015, Americans emitted more than twice as much as the Chinese and over eight times as much as Indians per capita in 2015.

The sad takeaway, therefore, is that the Paris agreement, because of its nonbinding nature imposed absolutely no practical or legal constraint on US actions — not to speak of either its trade policy or its domestic energy policy.

How can an agreement so heavy on goodwill but light on enforcement, heavy on wishful thinking but lax on observance have a modicum of legal sanctity? Without a liability mechanism under the Paris Agreement, a basis of liability and compensation for claims, the deal is a non-starter. Set against the strongly parochial stand of the US, our Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vow to go "above and beyond" the Paris Agreement on climate change, after the US said it would quit the deal, is too divine to be true.

"As far as the Paris accord is concerned... our government is committed irrespective of the stand of anyone, anywhere in the world," Environment Minister Harsh Vardhan told reporters recently.

That places India in a curious context. On the one hand, it has made tall pledges ahead of the 21st Conference of Parties (COP21) in Paris, while it is likely to face challenges both nationally and internationally in the continued trade-off between economic, social and environmental imperatives. India has so far approved a clutch of national missions for climate change mitigation and adaptation, that range from protecting ecological systems (forest cover, habitats, the Himalayan ecosystem, and coastal resources), health and livelihoods (water, agriculture, and health), and energy security (through solar power, energy efficiency, wind and waste-to-energy).

Former US President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Narendra Modi teamed up to combat climate change and support in various projects envisaging huge investment in the renewable energy sector.

In its Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC), India committed to a goal of massive increases in “nonfossil” fuel sources, amounting to 40 per cent of electricity capacity by 2030, which, according to a research, “will require adding an amount of renewable energy (solar and wind) close to the entire size of India’s current electricity capacity by 2030”.

With Trump not only backing out from the Paris deal, but also casting doubt on the Green Climate Fund, the challenge for Modi is make Trump’s administration pay for the huge sacrifices by India. As the application of diverse equity approaches has most important implications for policy recommendations, to press for the principle of equity and fair distribution of the remaining carbon space is a worthy one.

Modi must not fight shy of convincing Trump in the US that change in climate has significant implications for intra-generational and inter-generational equity, and the application of diverse equity approaches has most important implications for policy recommendations.

Is India free from the apparent ‘pettiness’ of the bread-and-butter issues that wins hands down over the destructive environmental impacts of large-scale human activities?

With 10 million to 12 million young people in need of jobs every year, with some 300 million Indians yet to have access to electricity, with the crying need to raise infrastructure needed to develop the country and improve the standard of living of hundreds of millions of Indians, here is chance for Modi to do that balancing act of becoming a Lee Kuan Yew for India and becoming a green crusader all at the same time.

Here is Modi’s chance to show by example that the world needs to essentially decarbonise energy and transportation systems over the course of this century, that a world worth inheriting is one where the inhabitants are living within their economic and natural budgets, and thus, to steal a march on Trump and China.

The writer is a Kolkata-based commentator on on politics, development and cultural issues.