After the tough time they faced at Bali, India’s climate change negotiators may now have some support from unexpected quarters. A serious scientific enquiry that sought to apportion moral responsibility for climate change among countries now provides data that should prove useful to them. A paper titled “Differentiating Responsibilities for Climate Change” by noted climate change scholar, Benito Muller, and his colleagues, soon to be published by the Oxfo rd University, places India at the very bottom of the list of countries assessed to be morally responsible for the problem the world has dug itself in. India has been pretty much saying the same for years but this paper may prove more effective for it uses Aristotelian logical framework that appeals easily to the Western mind.

At the Rio Conference in 1992, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change accepted differentiated responsibilities as the underlying principle for addressing the problem of climate change but the United States and Australia refused to cut their emissions citing high levels of emission by China and India. Mr. Muller and his colleagues have now sought to address the problem by distinguishing between contributions to climate change from the responsibility for it. This differentiation is easy when the cause does not lie in human action like the 1628 BC eruption of Santorini volcano in the Aegean Sea that caused global cooling by 1.5 degrees for the succeeding one hundred years and literally froze the Minoan Civilisation of the bronze period out of existence. But in the case of anthropogenic emissions, the distinction is often not clear and they found the Aristotelian framework useful in distinguishing and defining them. Aristotle recognised that blame and praise for actions with harmful and beneficial consequences are deserved by only those who are in control of their actions and are aware of the immediate and delayed consequences their actions might have. Delayed consequences involve intervening time and the discount attached to it. Further, the consequences themselves might not be universally harmful or beneficial. For example, an unexpected rainfall could simultaneously be a harbinger of good fortune to a farmer and misery to the neighbouring potter.

Using these principles, Mr. Muller and others define what they term the basic allowance of harmless emissions since earth’s natural ecosystems, terrestrial and oceanic, absorb roughly half of the annual global anthropogenic emissions of about 28 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide thereby protecting us against the full impact of our actions. Of these, the terrestrial sink is considered the sovereign property of nations while the oceanic sink, that absorbs about seven billion tonnes of carbon dioxide is a common global property over which every human being living anywhere in the world has equal right. So, seven billion tonnes of carbon dioxide, absorbed annually by the oceans that are a common global resource, divided by the global population, becomes the basic allowance of harmless emissions of greenhouse gases. This concept of equal sharing of a real sink capacity that causes no harm is the central contribution of this work and is different from earlier attempts at equity based on equal rights to pollute. Also it does not challenge national sovereignty over lands and only seeks to reinforce the already accepted notion of oceans as a common resource. Chances of a wider acceptance of this concept are, therefore, better.

Next they define subsistence allowance of emissions required for survival. The emissions needed to overcome abject levels of poverty (below $1 per day existence), a central objective of the Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations, are seen as a duty cast on the countries that face such poverty and thus, in Aristotelian terms, an unavoidable action or an action beyond the control of countries. The subsistence allowance, estimated at 2 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per capita annually, is available only for that part of the population of a country that is below the poverty threshold.

Since greenhouse gases are very long lived, even those emitted hundreds of years ago continue to cause warming. It is thus important to include the emissions made in the past for fixing responsibility. Mr. Muller and his friends decided on 1890 as the cut-off year up to which fairly reliable records are available and estimated the historical contribution to climate change arising out of total greenhouse gas emissions since 1890 at U.S. (19.7 per cent), EU15 (14.8 per cent), China (10.8 per cent), OPEC (7.3 per cent), Russia (6.5 per cent), Small Islands & LDC (5.7 per cent), Brazil (4.3 per cent), and Japan (2.8 per cent). India’s historical contribution was found to be a low but significant 3.9 per cent which actually should have been much lower since India was a colony till 1947 and was not in control of actions taken on its behalf. Certainly, the emissions linked to the war efforts should have been excluded which were taken up in spite of strong nationalistic opposition. But when they took basic allowance for harmless emissions into account, the share of India dropped to a negligible low of a mere 0.3 per cent. For the rest of the countries and groupings, the shares stood at U.S. (25.6 per cent), EU15 (15.9 per cent), OPEC (7.4 per cent), Russia (7.3 per cent), China (6.4 per cent), Brazil (5.2 per cent), Small Islands & LDC (4.1 per cent), and Japan (2.8 per cent).

Next, they applied the Aristotelian condition of awareness of the consequences of actions as a precondition for moral responsibility. On taking the ignorance factor into account by restricting assessment to emissions since 1990 only, when all countries were expected to be reasonably aware of the consequences of their actions, the responsibility score tells a story of its own. Seen thus, the responsibility of China, already high at 6.4 per cent, nearly doubles to 12 per cent while that of the U.S. and EU15 drops significantly to 20.1 per cent and 14.7 per cent respectively. And while OPEC’s and Japan’s share of responsibility rises to 9.8 per cent and 3.9 per cent, that of Russia (6.8 per cent), Brazil (5 per cent) and Small Islands & LDC (4 per cent) drops marginally. Rising from an extremely narrow base, India’s contribution rises sharply by more than three times to one per cent and yet it remains at the bottom of the responsibility hierarchy.

Further, when the subsistence allowance, the moral duty of raising the economic condition of all the poor citizens living below the $1 threshold that will cause the emission of 2 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent annually, is factored in, the responsibility ranking shifts to the U.S. (20.3 per cent), EU15 (12.4 per cent), China (11.5 per cent), OPEC (9.5 per cent), Russia (6.8 per cent), Brazil (5 per cent), Small Islands & LDC (4.7 per cent), and Japan (3.8 per cent). India’s contribution again remains at the very bottom at 0.6 per cent.

Thus, seen every which way, India’s responsibility for global warming remains at rock bottom. These concepts of basic allowance of harmless emissions and subsistence allowance should prove handy during tough negotiations that lie ahead provided they can find a wider acceptance. It does not, however, mean that we need to do nothing except negotiating smart. We ought to choose the lowest carbon path for development, consistent with the need to bring 330 million people out of poverty loop. And, above all, we have to act on population front just as China has done. Higher emissions are caused not only by higher consumptions but also by the higher number of people who consume. Between now and 2050, the world’s population is likely to increase by about 3.50 billion which would be entirely contributed by the developing world. Those who feel strongly for equity do injustice to their cause by being silent on the issue of population.

For all its sins of emissions, on the population front China is in an altogether different league. Its rate of population growth in 2002 was 0.87 per cent against India’s 1.51 even though both were similarly placed in 1950 with an equal total fertility rate (TFR) of 6 children per woman. This could well be China’s trump card in future climate change negotiations. We need to realise that the post-Kyoto climate regime is going to be much more nuanced than the only two categories of the developed and the developing countries in the climate change treaty of today.

One more important issue which is conspicuous by its absence in this entire debate is the desire to reach equity in a world which is structurally organised to promote the exact opposite. On one side, the global community has allowed just five countries, four of which belong to the same cultural, religious and racial continuum, to have overriding power over the rest of humanity for all times to come and it hopes that the privileged would agree to give in to others on such an important issue as the use of energy. Energy is the reason they are where they are and it is futile to expect them to give up their ‘right’. In the ultimate analysis, equity in emissions would come when equity forms the basis of the organisational architecture of the global community. In the absence of such structural changes, one can only expect occasional gifts, like the Kyoto Protocol, flawed as it is, and one can be sure that equity would never form the contents of such gift packages.

(Promode Kant is Director, Institute of Global Warming & Ecological Studies, Noida.)