The Climate Policy Needs New Ideas

Context: 2021 will be the year for a new global climate policy, and India has the soft power to bring together the high and low emitters.

Factors Supporting Need of New Global Climate Policy

• High well-being and saturation of infrastructure: with consumption (not production) resulting in high urban per capita emissions (two-third) in urbanized countries.
  • Infrastructure worldwide will need half of the available carbon space before comparable levels of infrastructure are reached globally around 2050.
• Inequity in climate treaty: Parameters like total emissions, size, and population label developing countries as the largest emitter (India is the fourth largest emitter)
  • As per United Nations richest 1% of the global population emits more than two times the emissions of the bottom 50%.
  • Peaking of emissions has already taken place in the West before net-zero emissions are considered. By 1950, the contribution of the U.S. to total emissions peaked at 40%.
• Global climate agenda lacks a link between well-being, energy use and emissions:
  • Focus on physical quantities indicates effects on nature, whereas solutions require analysis of drivers, trends and patterns of resource use.
  • Transport emissions are the symbol of Western civilization and are not on the global agenda.
• Triple whammy for latecomers like India: in terms of vaguely worded ‘carbon neutrality’ and balancing emitting carbon with absorbing carbon from the atmosphere in forests.
  • Carbon neutrality by 2050 applies only to countries with high per capita emissions, Gross Domestic Product and well-being.
• Colonialization of industrialization and urbanization policy:
  • Keeps the commodity prices low, is overly resource-intensive, defines progress as material abundance, and assumes technology as the solution to the ecological problem.
  • Urban transformation with growth in per capita incomes drives consumption and vehicle emissions becomes the driver of increasing material use.
• Variation in the share of global resource use and ecological damage:
  • North America and Europe (less than one-quarter of the world population) are responsible for half of global material use, whereas that of Asia (half the world population) has declined to one-fifth.
  • Cumulative emissions of countries with four times the population of the U.S. (like China-12% and India-3%) is less than U.S.

 Key Elements of India’s Soft Power in Shaping Equitable Global Climate Policy

• Highlighting emissions from the meat industry and transport: Indians eat just 4 kg of meat a year compared to those in the European Union (65 kg) and America (100 kg).
  • Transport emission has surpassed emissions from the generation of electricity in the U.S.
• Coal-based energy use: Asia uses three-quarters as coal drives industry and supports the renewable energy push into cities. India’s per capita electricity use is one-tenth that of the U.S.
• Push for Civilizational and long-standing alternate values: for the transition to sustainability at the United Nations Security Council
  • India is doing better than the West in each sustainability benchmark (like housing size and density, public bicycle transport and eliminating food waste).

 Conclusion: “Emissions are the symptom, not the cause of the problem.”

• The rising prosperity of the world’s poor does not endanger the planet; the challenge is to change wasteful behaviour in the West, and these changes occur at decadal scales.
• New thinking must enable politics to acknowledge transformational social goals and the material boundaries of economic activity and not the latter without the former.