Sept. 25: In a blow to US hopes of reaching an international deal to fight global warming, environment minister Prakash Javadekar yesterday said that India would not offer a plan to cut its greenhouse gas emissions ahead of a climate summit next year in Paris.
Javadekar said in an interview that the Indian government’s first priority was to alleviate poverty and improve the economy, which he said would necessarily involve an increase in emissions through new coal-powered electricity and transportation.
He placed responsibility for what scientists call a coming climate crisis on the US, the world’s largest historic greenhouse gas polluter, and dismissed the idea that India would make cuts to carbon emissions.
“What cuts?” Javadekar said. “That’s for more developed countries. The moral principle of historic responsibility cannot be washed away.” Javadekar was referring to an argument frequently made by developing economies — that developed economies, chiefly the US, which spent the last century building their economies while pumping warming emissions into the atmosphere — bear the greatest responsibility for cutting pollution.
Javadekar said that government agencies in Delhi were preparing plans for India’s domestic actions on climate change, but he said they would lead only to a lower rate of increase in carbon emissions. It would be at least 30 years, he said, before India would likely see a downturn.
“India’s first task is eradication of poverty,” Javadekar said, speaking in a New York hotel suite a day after a United Nations climate summit. “Twenty per cent of our population doesn’t have access to electricity, and that’s our top priority. We will grow faster, and our emissions will rise.”
India is the world’s third-largest carbon polluter, behind China and the US, and Javadekar’s comments are a first indication of the direction of the environmental policies of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the author of a 2011 e-book, A Convenient Action.
Although the book, a response to the movie An Inconvenient Truth, presents the moral case for action on climate change, Javadekar said that coal, the world’s top source of carbon pollution, would provide more than half of India’s power for the foreseeable future.
In coming decades, as India works to provide access to electricity to more than 300 million people, its emissions are projected to double, surpassing those of the US and China.
