MORE THAN a month ago, the BBC world service conducted a live programme from Mumbai on global warming. They were trying to assess how seriously people in the city viewed the dangers posed by the gradual warming up of the earth's surface and the inevitable rise in sea levels. They had presumed, one expects, that people living along the coast would be informed and concerned. If they had done a street poll, they would probably have discovered that not many people know what the term "global warming" means leave alone the impact it could have on Mumbai.

Many in India are also not aware that earlier this month an important meeting on global warming ended inconclusively in Nairobi, Kenya. Representatives from 165 countries met there to hammer out what steps needed to be taken in the next years to ensure that economies around the world reduced their dependence on fossil fuels, thereby cutting down the amount of greenhouse gases (GHG) accumulating in the atmosphere.

Although they came up with nothing new, there was little disagreement about the serious nature of the problem. Almost 15 years after the 1992 U.N. Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro and the Framework Convention on Climate Change, and nine years after the Kyoto Protocol that set targets for 35 industrialised countries to reduce emissions of GHGs, the world is much clearer about both the science and the economics of global warming.

There are still some doubters; there are also countries like the United States, one of the biggest contributors to GHGs, which refuse to accept externally set targets or timetables for GHG reduction. But, by and large, industrialised and developing countries now accept that the accumulation of carbon dioxide (CO2), one of the chief greenhouse gases, has already begun the process of global warming as evident in rising temperatures. Most countries are clear that we need action now to stem the deterioration even if it is too late to reverse the process.

Only a few countries, principally in Europe, have taken the issue seriously and have made a genuine attempt to reduce emissions of GHGs. The U.S., on the other hand, continues to follow its own agenda. The response that the former U.S. Vice President, Al Gore, is getting to his film on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, holds out a slim hope that ordinary people in the U.S. will finally get the message about what "the American way of life" has done to the world. California, the most populous American State, seems to have understood that and is the first to put a cap on GHG emissions for utilities, refineries, and manufacturing plants despite having a Governor who belongs to same party as President George W. Bush.

The 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which came into effect in February 2005, only set targets for reductions in emissions of GHGs. It did not envisage a phasing out or substitution of fossil fuels. There has also been considerable debate about whether one of the mechanisms devised as part of the effort to reduce global warming, namely the Clean Development Mechanism, is effective. Despite several billion dollars being spent by industrialised countries to provide clean technology to developing countries to compensate for their contribution to global warming, the results are disappointing. The switch to cleaner technologies is not on a scale to make a difference. Meanwhile, industrialised countries continue on their old path with only minor adjustments. In the long run, such small steps will not stave off what could be a big disaster in the decades to come. This is one of the many reasons that there has been a demand to review the Kyoto Protocol. However, there was no agreement on this in Nairobi. All that was agreed upon was to meet again in 2008.

Unfortunately, conferences and negotiations do not stop a process like global warming. The latest document to add to the mounting evidence that things are going very wrong in the world was the report by a former Chief Economist of the World Bank, Sir Nicholas Stern, to the British government. The Stern Review stated that global temperatures have risen by half a degree Celsius as a result of carbon emissions and that if nothing is done, there is a 75 per cent chance that temperatures will rise by two to three degrees Celsius over the next 50 years. This will have a devastating effect on weather patterns resulting in floods, droughts, melting ice caps, and rising sea levels. The countries that will bear the brunt of this are the poorest. The Stern report estimated that there would be a loss of one per cent of the global gross domestic product caused by extreme weather.

Such a loss will affect everyone, including the fast growing economies of India and China. Inevitably, one of the issues that came up in Nairobi was whether India and China, because of the size of their economies, should also take some steps to limit greenhouse gas emissions. In 1992, when the problem was first addressed, there was an agreement that poorer and developing countries should not be penalised for a problem that had been created largely by the industrialised countries and their burning of fossil fuels to power their economies. The concept of "common but differentiated responsibility" was accepted. It was also argued that to ensure that the developing countries adopt cleaner technologies, the industrialised world needed to finance their efforts to "decarbonise" energy systems by providing them with the latest clean technologies.

Alternative forms

Energy is central to that growth and the cheapest form of energy is coal-based. More coal-based plants necessarily mean we are adding to the carbon dioxide accumulation in the atmosphere. Are efforts to promote alternative energy forms even as we use the cheapest forms of energy, such as coal, necessarily mutually exclusive? Is enough being done in this country to promote energy saving and efficiency as well as clean energy? It is interesting how wind energy is only just being recognised as a viable option in India when it has been promoted and used in several European countries for some years now. An Indian company producing wind turbines has shown spectacular growth because of this global demand. India comes fourth among countries using wind energy.

The argument against putting any pressure on countries like India and China at the moment is that they were not responsible for the problem, so they should not be bound to slow down or change the pattern of growth. While 15 years ago this argument had some validity, today we need to re-examine it.

Logic would suggest that it is better to start the process now rather than wait until it is too late. The country's economy need not suffer if there are fewer fossil fuel burning cars on the road and better public transport. The economy need not be affected if we use building techniques for our growing cities that are less energy intensive rather than following the Western pattern of glass-fronted high rises that require a huge amount of electricity to keep cool or warm as the case may be. And our energy requirements can be met if we work harder to minimise transmission losses, introduce energy saving at every level, and promote non-polluting forms of energy generation.

The path-breaking study by Professor A.K.N. Reddy two decades ago of Karnataka's energy scene had vividly illustrated how energy budgets could be drastically altered if such steps were taken. That approach is even more relevant today as we face the problem of generating more energy to fuel the economy and at the same time reducing the amount of carbon dioxide we generate.

This is as much of an ideological and philosophical choice as the one to ensure that economic growth will not take place at the cost of the poorest. We must ask whether we have some responsibility towards addressing global warming. Our current pattern of development is already making the air in our cities unfit to breathe. Our water sources are polluted, our fields are laden with chemicals that travel through the food chain into our bodies, and our forests, the lungs of this country, are disappearing faster than any effort to plant more trees. Is there any point in rapid economic growth if people have to drink, eat, and breathe poisons? In the long run we damage not just the global environment but ourselves too. A tough negotiating position in international meets need not detract from policies at home that contribute to an environmentally benign pattern of development. If there is one thing the debate on global warming should teach us it is that, ultimately, if you treat your environment carelessly in one part of the world, the consequences will catch up with you in another.