Last week I took a look at China's offer for Copenhagen, and a few days later India laid down its own proposal. How bold is the Manmohan Singh government being?
India's basic offer is to reduce the energy intensity of its economy by 20 to 25 percent by 2020. If you compare this with China's offer, during the same time frame, to reduce intensity by 40 to 45 percent, then India looks very timid. But as I said last week, these comparisons are more complicated than looking at one number.
First, some good news: Historically, India has insisted that because rich countries in the West created the climate problem, and it was up to them to solve it. And India has strongly emphasized not only the current overloading of the atmosphere by Europe, the U.S., Canada, and Japan but also the historical carbon debt that has resulted from decades of fossil-fuel burning by the industrial world. India's math is impeccable -- but historical carbon debt is an unhelpful line of argument, because a) the people who emitted that carbon are dead and b) they didn't, until, say, 1980, have a clue what they were doing.
It's understandable that India might be attracted to this carbon-debt idea -- much of the fossil fuels used by the British empire from 1800 to 1947 were burned to occupy, impoverish, and colonize India. But if we focus on the past, we'll never get the future right. And the good news is that India's primary focus in the lead-up to Copenhagen has been on future carbon emissions rather than on carbon debt.
And India's offer for Copenhagen -- the numbers it has put on the table -- comes with a broader package. As I discussed last summer, India's new Minister of Environment and Forests, Jairam Ramesh, had already pulled together a new formulation.
India has accepted the global goal of keeping climate change below 2 degrees centigrade. India, Ramesh has asserted, will keep its per capita emissions below those of the industrial nations -- so the faster we reduce our emissions, the faster India's per capita emissions will peak. India insists in return that new clean energy technology be shared. And if the world wants India to reduce its emission still further -- committing to remaining well below the industrial world average per capita -- then India expects the rich nations to help finance India's extra commitment to low-carbon development.
Now Ramesh has put a number down -- at least a 20 percent reduction in carbon intensity. How does this stack up?
Remember, there are three numbers to track: total carbon emissions, per capita carbon emissions, and carbon intensity.
In terms of total carbon, India is small potatoes compared to the U.S. and China, but it's still the world's sixth or seventh largest emitter. So India is certainly consequential by that measure. And If India's economy were to grow for the next decade at 7 percent, and if its carbon intensity were reduced each year by 2.5 percent, then India's total emissions over that decade would grow by 50 percent, or 700 million tons.
Even without factoring in India's population growth, by 2020 the country would be emitting only 2.25 tons/capita, which is only slightly higher than the assumed global goal of 2 tons/capita. So India would not, in 2020, still really be part of the problem. It would be using about as much of the world's carbon sinks as it is entitled to.
On an energy-intensity basis, India would have reduced its intensity to about 1.45 tons/$1,000 GDP. China would be emitting three times as much CO2 for every unit of economic output as India, but India would still be using carbon only half as efficiently as today's global average.
Now India is, in the eyes of many economists, about to shift from being a service and agricultural economy to a more industrial and infrastructure one -- which unavoidably drives up carbon intensity, since industrialization and infrastructure take lots of steel and cement, the world's big carbon hogs. (Both use fossil fuels as a fuel source, but beyond that, both processes actually emit huge quantities of carbon dioxide from their basic chemistry.) But it's also -- leaving former communist economies aside -- one of the least-efficient users of carbon in the world.
So here's my evaluation of the Indian offer: It's consistent with India's pledges in the short term -- no way is the industrial world going to get below 2.25 tons CO2/capita by 2020. It still leaves the Indian economy with a lot of room to increase efficiency -- but how much room depends on the shape, as well as the size, of the Indian economy of 2020. It poises India to become a serious problem after 2020 -- because one assumes its economy will continue growing, but it hasn't made enough progress on using its carbon efficiently.
But like almost all of the players, what India is offering is almost certainly less than what it is actually willing to do. In India's case, for example, the government just in September established what should be very effective feed-in tariffs to encourage solar and wind. And India is a major factor in one of the world's short-term global warming crises -- the impact of black carbon (soot) in melting glaciers and ice caps. The Himalayan glaciers are viewed by most scientists (but not the official Government of India surveys) as melting alarmingly rapidly, and this melting is greatly exacerbated by soot emitted from open cooking fires (which also cause major health problems). And because open fires use their fuel -- usually wood, sometimes cow dung -- very inefficiently, they are also waste forests, money and rural women's time.
For decades now the government of India has sought a solution to the problem of finding a cheap stove that will substitute for these open fires -- but it has just launched the most serious effort yet. Although carefully downplaying any connection to the problem of climate, Farooq Abdullah, the Minister of Renewable Energy, has declared that this latest effort will try to reach beyond India's 135 million biomass-cooking households, and that India will try to develop stoves to serve the global market.
India refuses to link action on black carbon to the Copenhagen negotiations presumably because, unlike CO2, black carbon is a greenhouse pollutant that is emitted in large quantities by poor countries. So, once again, we see that the basic frame of these negotiations -- as a win-lose battle among nations -- is hindering collaboration and keeping countries from putting on the table what they're actually willing to do. Yes, India can and should do better on its own -- but the world should help India achieve that goal. The world would benefit if it did so -- but I'm not hopeful that we'll figure that out during this gray, wet Danish winter.