Emissionary position

When yet another global climate change conference is held, under UN auspices, and when the George Bush-proposed meeting of the world’s 10 biggest polluting nations takes place, India will take to the negotiating table the same apparent sensibleness: Yes, global warming is a problem but, no, as a poor country with low per capita emissions we can’t be expected to agree to any emissions reduction protocol.

Almost all domestic rebuttals of this official position have come from the activist green/radical left, which has argued that the refusal to join an emissions protocol is part of the establishment’s growth mania. Yesterday Narmada, today Nandigram and tomorrow nature will wash away the establishment’s India dream. But there’s also a mainstream, pro-growth argument against the official line. This says the establishment, more than being shortsighted, is selling the country short.

Consider another protocol India, in contrast, is keen on: free flow of nuclear technology. This week may see the Indo-US part of the protocol wrapped up. Multilateral negotiations will follow. Why is there so little hostility globally to the idea of India becoming an all but de jure nuclear power state? Because the world understands the aspirations of a fully functional democracy that is a trillion dollar economy and within striking distance of becoming a middle-income country. Yes, of course, the absolute number of the poor is still vast. But India is not recognised any longer as primarily a host to mass poverty. It’s India’s ability to tackle that poverty that impresses the world.

So India gets a nuclear break as an acknowledged economic power in the making. Yet it tells climate change negotiators that it is too poor to afford emission cuts. The two positions cannot be simultaneously and indefinitely maintained in global forums. There’s a dangerous irony here for Indian policymakers. India and its friends in Washington argued during the earlier phrase of nuclear talks that access to nuclear technology would help this country combat carbon emission problems that come from producing coal-fired electricity.

In his presentation to the US Senate committee on energy and natural resources during the nuclear deal hearings, David G. Victor — he runs a sustainable development study programme at Stanford, is adjunct fellow, science and technology, Council for Foreign Relations and a pro-deal expert — gave a remarkable estimate. Suppose India builds 20 GW (1 GW= 1 billion watts) of nuclear power capacity by 2020 — a US State Department projection — and therefore reduces coal-fired power production by an equivalent amount. Then, annual savings in CO2 emissions, at 142 million tonnes, “could be almost as large as the entire commitment of 25 EU nations to reducing emissions under the Kyoto Protocol”.

Victor adds that the Indian PM is of the view that nuclear capacity can be built up faster post-deal: 40 GW of new nuclear capacity by 2015. That has even more radical emission reduction implications.

It also has radical realpolitik implications. India rapidly reduces coal dependency for power generation and therefore CO2 emissions, thanks to a US-sponsored deal that recognises its strategic-economic potential. But it also keeps insisting that it’s too poor to agree to emission cuts. And, having now indicated that it no longer considers any emission protocol an anti-American conspiracy, the US’s patience with India’s negotiating position is likely to wear very thin very fast.

Already, Western negotiators have started talking about India hiding behind its poor. More important, it is jeopardising its own global standing by invoking the aam aadmi version of the emissions control argument.

A McKinsey report — one of several similar studies coming to the same broad conclusion — says India’s middle class will expand to 600 million over the next decade. Roughly in the middle of the next ten years — 2012 — the Kyoto Protocol will expire. The coming together of increasing mass prosperity in India and the end game of negotiating a post-Kyoto treaty will make this country look like a typical third world double talker.

There are plenty of other critical global negotiations where India will need to exert its weight as a confident middle-income power. Realpolitik demands that it be consistent. In any case, can’t the government see that pleading poverty when India’s middle class is going to be 600 million-strong is a national disservice?

It is a national disservice, too, to not get your country the best deals for tackling complex problems. Even with the best-case scenario for nuclear power capacity addition, India’s growth will remain excessively carbon dependant in the near future, sans large-scale adaptation of what green jargon calls cleantech. Standard and Poor estimates that, for every dollar of GDP produced, India emits three times as much carbon as the US. You don’t have to be a genius to guess what will happen to vehicular emission when ‘Rs 1 lakh cars’ hit the market. No Indian politician can tell the aam aadmi not to buy cars. And a carbon tax, even if it were politically acceptable, may not work.

In an EPW paper (June 16, 2007) that deserves to be widely read, Samantak Das and others argue that Indian industry’s technology absorption capacity is generally low. So a carbon tax, even one as high as 50 per cent, will tend to increase costs and lower production, not spur new, clean production techniques.

Of course, some big Indian firms are already in the game. ITC’s Sonar Bangla is the world’s first hotel to receive carbon emission reductions under the UN convention on climate change. But what Sonar Bangla does today isn’t even thinkable for India tomorrow.

India’s R&D capacity is infamously suspect. Spending is low; in purchasing power parity terms its per capita R&D spending was a shockingly meagre $12.1 in the mid-1990s. Ambuj Sagar (EPW, September 21, 2002) analyses R&D performance in the energy sector and comes to a depressing conclusion that holds five years on: India is a laggard.

So if a carbon tax won’t work because R&D capacity is low, where will India get its cleantech from? From the West, of course. But an India that’s part of an emissions reduction protocol will be differently helped from an India that isn’t. Suppose the country agrees to emission norms but says its precondition is getting special funding and special access to cleantech intellectual property, will the West disagree? No.

What else will India get? The chance to be at the high table and influencing policy as the second round of climate change talks begins. Remember, India’s negotiators are famously tough.

Agreeing to a protocol will also speed up domestic industry’s compliance record. More than half of India’s big industry doesn’t follow pollution norms, according to the World Bank. And these norms don’t even apply to the small and medium enterprises.

A globalised world doesn’t have a lot of time for such casualness. This year was the first time BSE’s top 100 companies filled up questionnaires on how they would respond to climate change. The Carbon Disclosure Project is a group of 284 global institutional investors who manage $41 trillion in assets. Its mandate is to investigate companies’ green commitment.

Multilateral and global private scrutiny of India’s official policy will increase if India continues to hide behind the poverty argument. It needs to come out of the closet. Take an emissionary position.