时间：2022-02-09 03:05:20
Remember the widely broad- cast television ad by an insurance company in which actor Irrfan Khan offers his companion a tiny, paper umbrella to protect himself from the pouring rain? The world– and India’s – efforts to combat and reverse climate change have been broadly similar. Despite all the recent chatter about ‘going green’ and‘clean energy’, the truth – as this book by journalist-turned-academic Praful Bidwai reveals – is that emissions are still increasing by three per cent every year.
Global warming needs to be capped at two degrees above preindustrial levels; it is already 0.8 degrees above, and rising. The maximum atmospheric carbon dioxide level the world can tolerate is about 450 parts per million (ppm); the current level is around 390 ppm and going up by 2 ppm each year. The impact of climate change is already upon us in the form of a sharp increase in natural disasters, altered temperature and rainfall patterns, melting glaciers and much more – and will get worse with each passing year.
And the irony is that though it is the developed countries, with their long record of emissions since the Industrial Revolution that are primarily responsible for the crisis, it is the poor in the developing countries who will suffer the consequences of global warming much more.
Worse, the much publicised annual international climate conferences, or COPs, have lately been contributing to the problem, not the solution. The conferences at Copenhagen in 2009 and Cancun the following year saw near-total deadlocks, with the developed countries hardening their stance against the developing countries’demand they foot the bill for cleaning up the earth. The Durban meet last December – this book was completed just before it was held – managed to stave off complete disaster by at least extending the Kyoto Protocol – the only legally binding treaty enforcing emission cuts which would have expired this year– to 2017. But it has come at a cost: a new protocol by 2015 is on the cards in which all nations – especially the emerging big economies-cum-emitters like China and India – also agree to legally binding emission cuts. This is precisely what India had been trying to avoid all these years.
But Bidwai’s book is not merely a summing up of the existing precarious situation. It is also a strong critique of the ‘market-based solutions’, as he puts it, such as carbon trading, being pursued to check climate change. They amount to “artificially quantifying complex relationships and reducing them to homogenous entities measurable in so many rupees, dollars, euros or yuans,” he says. “This is voodoo economics at its most ludicrous.”
Bidwai is equally scathing about India’s climate stance. India is currently the world’s fourth-largest polluter, but in per capita emission ranks 147th, largely because its poor people possess so little, they hardly pollute at all. Indian representatives at climate talks keep harping on its low per capita emission, which, Bidwai maintains “is a shield that enables India’s elite to hide behind the poor while indulging in profligate consumption and evading responsibility”. He also finds serious flaws in India’s mitigation efforts, including the eight national missions – the solar mission, etc – embarked upon by India’s National Action Plan for Climate Change.