COP16 in Cancun – Indian feeling back home

Published 06th December 2010 - 0 comments - 1136 views -

COP16 now a week’s old and big negotiation likely to start by Tuesday the 7th December, what India is feeling at home? Execpt for Times of India, most national dailies are finding local politics, WikiLeaks mud-slinging and French President Nicolas Sarkozy and first lady Carla Bruni wishing for a baby boy in Fatehpur Sikri saleable news and Cancun is nowhere. Climate Change is not ‘serious’ news in India.

However, CSE (Center for Science and Environment), an NGO headed by Sunita Narain (introduced in my previous blog) is coming down heavy on the Indian Government (read Jairam Ramesh, the controversial Minister for Environment and Forests of India) criticizing India’s proposed middle path by proposing International Consultation and Analysis (ICA), which CSE finds an unnecessary, even harmful compromise that will serve no purpose. The same goes for MRV (Monitoring, Reviewing and Verification).

“It is important to understand that MRV is a tool to remove differences between Annex 1 and non-Annex 1 nations. Therefore, even if our mitigation actions are voluntary and domestic, now they will be both reported and verified. This becomes a backhand way of breaching the firewall between industrialized countries with historical emissions and responsibility to cut emissions and the rest of the world, which needs the rights to development. This is why the US has made it clear that all other action in the negotiations will be dependent on the progress made in this area,” says Narain.

Narain sees no point of India ‘bending backwards’ to be a deal maker for the US. This view has a popular appeal as it is already known, courtesy WikiLeaks, that US launched a diplomatic campaign to pressure small countries (LDCs) to agree to the infamous ‘Copenhagen Accord’, in some cases promising money, which none of these LDCs has yet seen. ICA and MRV are tools that US insists before they start negotiating. This ‘high-handed’ stance of the US is understandably not seen with any degree of fondness in India and Mr. Ramesh is up for a media lynching. See detailed news here.

Times of India, however reports that India has won a major score in Cancun by ensuring technology transfer to check Climate Change backed by EU and G-77 countries. Detailed news is here.

Amidst all these, UNEP’s report reveals that the most ambitious emission cuts pledged by all countries in ‘Copenhagen Accord’ would remove 7 GT of CO2 e from atmosphere by 2020 while business-as-usual’ scenario of emissions would add 56 GT of CO2 e by that year leaving a huge gap of 49 GT. That’s very depressing. Download the UNEP report from here.

With as many people I have interacted (select few, I assure you, most people just gape at me when I start talking Climate), none holds Japan as ‘bad-boy’ since the declaration that they are not interested in continuation of Kyoto obligations beyond 2010. Understandable. If you have a protocol for 20 years that the biggest polluter simply rejects and most countries fail to honor in terms of absolute numbers, why any country would ever be interested to continue it? In my opinion from the point onwards from ‘Copenhagen Accord’, USA has succeeded in destroying the underlying principles of Kyoto, legally binding targets for developed countries and the guaranteed developmental space for the developing countries. Most sadly big money has now come into it – the old oil mafia style of reward and gift scheme for obedient and silent suffering. It is not unusual that poor and vulnerable countries will swallow the bait.

Ok we have caused your country to drown Maldivians – how much do you need for your drowned shanties and fishing villages? Take it and f*** off.

Members of the Sierra Club in Cancún make their feelings clear about countries they say avoid the issue of climate change. Photograph: Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP/Getty Images

(Courtesy Guardian, UK)

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Pabitra Mukhopadhyay
Kolkata
Civil Engineer

Pabitra is an Honors graduate in Civil Engineering from Jadavpur University, Kolkata. He has specialized in the field of River Hydraulics working for more than two decades training rivers, protecting banks and beaches and fighting erosion of the river banks/beds. He has worked with Bio-Engineering models involving mangroves using them as tools for cost effective and natural means of anti-erosion technology.His work is mostly concerning the extremely morpho-dynamic Hugly estuary with Bay of Bengal In course of his work, he got exposed to indegenious people of the Sunderban wetlands, who are fighting a losing battle against agressive Industrialization. Pabitra loves to read and write and he is full of crazy ideas. He believes that he has a tryst with the strange river-country south of Bengal.

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