India's familiar stance on climate change

In the five years I worked as a reporter in India, I sat through many uncomfortable silences during interviews about Pakistani terrorists, the pervasive caste system and Indian Muslims sensitive issues that, on the face of it, seem more controversial than carbon parts per million. But these subjects rarely stirred up as much ire as India's stance on climate change.

The topic has become a matter of national pride, a symbol of sovereignty and growing global clout.

This autumn, when I mentioned to the Indian government's chief econ-omic policymaker that the United States considers India "intransigent" on climate change, the poised, Oxford-educated Montek Singh Ahluwalia looked slightly stunned for a moment. Pursing his lips, he seemed to struggle to suppress anger. "If I were using a cool description, those are either gross misperceptions or deliberate distortions," he said in clipped British English. "The Indian approach on this has been, ‘Let's first decide a fair pollution entitlement for different countries.'"

India's position on climate change as the hardline negotiator standing up for the moral rights of the developing world is a familiar one. India is the world's fourth-largest emitter of carbon dioxide, but for months now it has come across as an obstinate child, leading the developing world in insisting that industrialised countries bear the brunt of the responsibility for global warming and have no right to dictate reductions to poor countries. [Though India's environment minister has said the country may have to be more flexible over climate change talks after China unveiled its first firm targets to cut carbon emissions].

No showdown

The international climate conference in Copenhagen next month won't be the showdown it was originally billed as, but the United States and other nations are certainly not going to let up in their insistence that India and China accept hard emissions targets. During Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's visit to India this summer, the country's environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, rubbed the United States the wrong way when he had a climate outburst of sorts. Standing beside Clinton, he declared to a bank of reporters: "There is simply no case for the pressure that we, who have among the lowest emissions per capita, face to actually reduce emissions."

In a country where almost half a million children die each year from water-borne diarrhoea, providing access to basic services such as clean drinking water is more pressing than cutting emissions. And to do so requires energy. "You cannot say that because there is climate change the developing world shouldn't grow," was the outraged response when I asked Chandra Bhushan of the Centre for Science and Environment, a New Delhi-based research group, to explain why it is unfair to ask India to cut its emissions. "You're essentially saying, ‘No more electricity to your house, close your factories, go back to the fields.'"

Like many in India, Bhushan draws a bright line between India's "survival emissions," from burning energy to produce food, for instance, and American-style "luxury emissions," from things like SUVs and central air conditioning.

In every conversation I had about climate change in India, the lines were clearly drawn: Americans, who emit 20 times more than the average Indian, are greedy over-consumers refusing to make lifestyle changes that would allow the rest of the world to grow.

In a country with a healthy tradition of civic engagement and anti-government protests, I was surprised that no environmentalists were urging India to accept international limits. But high-minded nationalism has a proud history there, too; when officials use phrases such as "climate injustice" and "Gandhian moral authority" to describe India's position, it rings a bell.

Although India accounts for only about 5 per cent of the world's emissions, that includes a wide range of carbon output. The 800 million people who earn less than $2 (Dh7.35) a day have a carbon footprint of almost zero. But the tiny fraction of rich Indians who use air conditioners and drive big cars are "eating into the carbon space of millions of poor in India," in the words of Vinuta Gopal of Greenpeace. The polluting middle class should be forced to pay a kind of carbon tax, she says.

In India, environmentalists often bring up the issue of the greenhouse gases the West emitted not only during its decades of industrialisation but also in fighting wars. And they aren't referring just to Iraq and Afghanistan the world's carbon waste in 1941 was mentioned in my interviews more than once.

Essentially, the United States wants India to commit to reducing its emissions and India wants to be able to do so at a pace of its own choosing. But the two countries actually have a remarkably similar position: The international community isn't going to tell us what to do. This doesn't bode well for action on global climate change — not next month or in the sessions that are sure to follow in the future.

Miranda Kennedy's book about women and globalisation in India will be published in January 2011.