Trust Poses Challenge for Reaching Paris Climate Accord

Echoing its Prime Minister’s sentiments, India has said that it is ready to cut back on coal usage further only if developed countries promise to increase their technology and financial aid. Many other countries do.

Leaders from around the world have convened in Paris this week to begin negotiating a landmark climate agreement that may alter the course of climate dialogue for the future. At the centre of India’s INDC is the proclamation that India intends “to reduce the emissions intensity of its GDP by 33-35 per cent by 2030 from 2005 levels”.

The lifestyles of a few must not crowd out opportunities for the many still on the first steps of the development ladder.

“In terms of electricity, basically India wants everyone to be covered by 2022, so there is a need to ramp up its availability [as soon as possible]”. India’s policy to increase coal plants and production of coal based energy is devastating to the overall goal of controlling carbon emissions. Engie is a major world energy player, with 1.5 lakh employees.

It will not be easy to compel self-interested politicians in the USA to take action on climate change. To put that number in perspective, India is basically planning to add more renewable energy capacity in the next seven years than Germany has added energy capacity in the previous 200 years of industrialization. READ ALSO: Six reasons that scientists are sure global warming is happening But to slow the climate change requires a rapid shift to clean energy – mainly moving away from burning coal, oil and gas for energy. And this can only happen if, at Paris, countries agree on an architecture of fair allocation of the carbon budget and fair burden-sharing between countries for curbing further emissions and adapting to climate change.

“We look forward to an agreement that enables financial support from the countries that have developed on the backs of cheap energy, to those who have to meet their energy with more expensive but low carbon energy”, Ajay Mathur told BBC.

The senior Greenpeace official strongly backed Prime Minister Modi’s argument that India is not at all responsible for the climate change.

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“Hydro. Nuclear”, says Mathur, who is director general of India’s Bureau of Energy Efficiency.

They argue the country has the potential to “skip” the carbon-intensive economic growth of China and the West.

The Indian delegation would be pushing for a “just and sustainable agreement” here in Paris, Dr Mathur said. The memory of Copenhagen is still raw, and US President Barack Obama has invested enormous political capital in a successful outcome.

The CIFOR report has warned that coal mining threatens more than 1.3 million hectares of forests in Australia, more than 1.1 million hectares in Canada, 850,000 hectares in Indonesia, and more than 250,000 hectares in India.

Dr. Marthur denied that India’s strategy, somewhere between leading the transition to solar power and staunchly guarding traditional fossil fuels, was contradictory.

“In [the state of] Uttar Pradesh for example, there’s 50 million without electricity, so that’s a big market”, he said. The dichotomy of development and environmental impact is an orientalist concept.

In usually-arid Rajasthan, farmer Ram Kumar Yadav points to a solar-powered pump and panels on the roof of his family home, about 30 kilometres from the city of Jaipur. “It was a good conversation”, he said.

The Climate Change conference in Paris has coincided with the unseasonal torrential rains that led to floods in Chennai and which have already claimed hundreds of lives. We see the risk to our farmers.

(LtoR) Florentin Mossavou of Gabon, French Ecology Minister Segolene Royal, and French Education minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem attend a meeting on actions of the banking sector for climate on December 4, 2015 in Le Bourget, near Paris, as part of the COP21 climate summit. The Prime Minister sought a “comprehensive, equitable and durable” agreement in Paris.

“Justice demands that, with what little carbon we can still safely burn, developing countries are allowed to grow”, he wrote.

“But we’re going to continue to work in that multilateral forum to bring the world together”.

“Without the finance and the technology it is going to mean a lot of dirty coal being burnt in India”, he said.