Head-on | After polluting the world for 300 years, the West lectures India on climate change

Kevin Rudd is a former Australian prime minister. He is the global president of the New York-based think tank, Asia Society Policy Institute.

The institute constituted the “High-Level Policy Commission on Getting Asia to Net Zero”. This is a laudable initiative. Climate change is one of the most serious challenges facing the world.

The question is: who must bear the maximum burden? With the next climate change conference COP27 scheduled from 6-18 November in Egypt, answering the question assumes urgency.

India has taken the goal of reducing carbon emissions seriously despite contributing to just a fraction of global pollution since the 18th century. At COP26 in Glasgow last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced India’s pledge to attain net-zero carbon emissions by 2070. The country’s investment in green renewable energy is among the world’s most ambitious.

The West has been responsible for the overwhelming majority of carbon emissions since 1751. It industrialised at the cost of the rest of the world and created today’s climate crisis. It continues to spew carbon dioxide into the atmosphere through copious use of cars, planes and cattle for food.

Yet Rudd, like other Western politicians, points a finger at India for not doing enough to fight global warming. In an op-ed in The Economic Times (26 August 2022), Rudd and his co-authors, former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Columbia University professor Arvind Panagariya, wrote: “If the world’s third-largest polluter drops all ‘ifs’, ‘ands’ ‘buts’ and — despite its low per-capita income — wholeheartedly joins the global effort to save the only planet we have, it is bound to capture the imagination of those countries that remain sitting on the fence. Formally submitting India’s targets to the UN will, therefore, be important.”

Note that Rudd refers to India as the world’s third-largest polluter. But, disingenuously, he doesn’t add that on a per capita basis, every Indian emits on average one-tenth the amount of CO₂ every American, European or Australian emits.

Let’s look at the numbers. Between 1751, when Europe’s industrial revolution was about to begin, and 2022 a total of 1.7 trillion tonnes of CO₂ have been spewed into the atmosphere, causing unprecedented global warming. The United States and Europe account for nearly 1 trillion tonnes of this total.

The West’s role in fouling the air we breathe is not just historical. The US and Europe together continue to be the world’s largest current polluters. The US alone emitted over 5.5 billion tonnes of CO₂ last year. Germany and Russia emitted a combined 2.5 billion tonnes of CO_2. Together North America and Europe currently account for over 12 billion tonnes of carbon emissions every year.

China has overtaken the US as the world’s single largest emitter, releasing 11 billion tonnes of CO₂ a year. But in per capita terms, an American on average still spews twice as much CO₂ as a Chinese.

While India is presently the third largest emitter of CO_2, releasing 2.6 billion tonnes per year, in per capita terms an average American emits over eight times as much CO₂ as an Indian.

That doesn’t mean India should slow its green energy mission. On the contrary, it must strive to make renewables as large a portion of its energy mix as possible.

Rudd and his co-authors concede: “Access to finance is a big challenge. Getting India to net-zero by 2070 requires around $10 trillion in economic-wide investments. International finance would free up Indian resources to mitigate negative impacts on product prices and household consumption.”

What Rudd doesn’t say is that the pledge of developed countries to contribute $100 billion a year to help developing countries mitigate their climate change costs has still not been honoured, despite promises made at last year’s COP26.

Not surprisingly, Rudd and his co-authors make no mention of the historical role of developed countries in polluting the world but instead slip in a veiled threat: “In the coming years, India will likely find it hard to compete for finance with other Asian economies eyeing net-zero emissions like Japan, South Korea and China. Meanwhile, the impact of climate change and pollution will continue to hamstring development.”

What Rudd, in all honesty, should have said but didn’t, is this: We in the West industrialised, developed our economies, colonised others, stopped them from industrialising and in the process, over 300 years, brought the world to this sorry state of affairs where global warming is a catastrophe in the making.

India has meanwhile taken the climate crisis head-on. Jayant Sinha, the former junior finance minister, put the country’s efforts in perspective in an op-ed in Business Standard: “Our net-zero pathways require massive and immediate investments in green technologies such as solar and wind power, electric mobility, green hydrogen, and plant proteins. Green technologies are believed to be more expensive than brown technologies. Bill Gates has termed this the green premium. However, innovative Indian businesses have transformed the green premium into a green discount.

“Round-the-clock solar power is now being delivered at prices 20-30 per cent cheaper than coal-fired baseload thermal power plants. More than 90 per cent of auto-rickshaws being sold in India are now all-electric. Not only is it much cheaper to operate these electric rickshaws, they also cost less than fossil fuel-based rickshaws. Meanwhile, all-electric fleets using Indian electric vehicles (EVs) are providing much cheaper rides to commuters than diesel and petrol cabs. India’s top business groups are working with leading technologists around the world to drive the cost of green hydrogen down to a dollar per kg.”

Bjorn Lomborg, president of Copenhagen Consensus, has long exposed the hypocrisy of the West over climate change. In a searing article in The Economic Times (30 August 2022), Lomborg wrote: “A single person in the rich world uses more fossil fuel energy than all the energy available to 23 poor Africans. The rich world became wealthy by massively exploiting fossil fuels, which today provide more than three-quarters of its energy. Solar and wind deliver less than 3 percent of the rich world’s energy. Yet, the rich are choking off funding for any new fossil fuels in the developing world. Most of the world’s poorest 4 billion people have no meaningful energy access. So, the rich blithely tell them to ‘leapfrog’ from no energy to a green nirvana of solar panels and wind turbines.”

India is in a piquant situation. It played no historical role in polluting the world. Even today it emits a fraction of the carbon emitted per capita in the West. It is using its own scarce resources to make green energy the future.

But as Lomborg points out, and Rudd predictably doesn’t, renewables like wind and solar power have their limitations. That is why India has dialled down its target of installing 500 GW of renewables by 2030. Coal is not easily replaceable in a developing economy as the West discovered during its industrial phase.

India will have to balance its laudable 2070 net-zero target with a gradual but pragmatic shift away from fossil fuels without sacrificing an iota of its economic growth potential.

The writer is editor, author and publisher. Views expressed here are personal.

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