Climate change meets global hypocrisy, Samir Saran and Vivan Sharan for DNA, June 2012

http://www.dnaindia.com/analysis/column_climate-change-meets-global-hypocrisy_1709255

And so the saga concludes. A tired, weather-beaten group of States have retreated from Rio de Janeiro after a half-hearted attempt to rescue the world from a host of unsolved problems including climate change and unsustainable development. What unfolded was largely predictable. The Rio+20 declaration, ‘The Future We Want,’ is punctuated with old rhetoric around action and responsibility, laden with sweet murmurings on change, some affectionate recognition of imminent apocalypse and defined by absence of commitment.

The highly contested Kyoto Protocol remains the last substantial effort at the global level on environment. With developed countries lacking resolve to agree and/or act to achieve the set of common goals at the recent Durban Summit, and now, at Rio+20, it is becoming clear that global action is illusory, utopian and certainly less efficient.

It is ironic that at the same time as we dither on committing finance and technology to save the Earth, nations have, with great alacrity and commitment, pumped in trillions of dollars in concert to save wanton banks and financial entities that have failed to meet even basic regulatory and supervisory norms. The US alone has doled out $1.5 trillion to save its financial institutions following the financial crisis created by the same entities, while the developed world collectively put forth around $3 trillion for the same.

In stark contrast, the mightiest leaders of the world gathered at Copenhagen nearly three years ago and pledged, very proudly, a meagre $100 billion a year from 2020 as a collective financial response to climate change. A commitment to provide ‘new and additional’ resources approaching $30 billion for 2010-2012 was also made as part of a ‘fast start’ process. As of now, the fund has still not been capitalised and even the physical location where the fund will be hosted remains uncertain.

The message for Joe the plumber and the aam admi is unambiguous. Saving the banks is a multi-trillion dollar effort requiring action today. Saving the planet will cost only a fraction and can wait for 10 years. So it is hardly surprising when surveys reveal significant decline in interest on matters climate.

And the hypocrisy continues. Most recently, at the G20 Summit at Mexico, BRICS nations, including India, collectively pledged $75 billion through the IMF, to save the failing Eurozone economy from imminent collapse. That developing nations’ policymakers and economists rely on the unsustainable consumption of the western economies for their own obsession with perverse growth makes us willing accomplices. India, Russia, Brazil, South Africa, China are no victims, they just seem eager to sustain the lifestyles of the rich. Lifestyle emissions today account for nearly two thirds of total emissions.

According to the seminal Stern Review on ‘The Economics of Climate Change,’ global atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide equivalent gases must stabilise in the range 450-550 parts per million (ppm) by 2050. Anything higher would ‘substantially increase risks of very harmful impacts.’ Arctic monitoring stations reported this year that the concentration of these gases has already reached 400 ppm and the global average is predicted to reach this level in a few years (2016).

Developed countries currently occupy approximately 80% of the greenhouse gas (carbon) stocks. Developing countries like India need room to grow and per capita energy consumption will have to rise to enable this economic growth and development. Even to rise above the energy poverty level prescribed by the UN, India and Africa will need to increase their energy production by at least three times.

Carbon space will be a natural requirement. This space is now being denied. Hypocrisy becomes malafide now. 
The alchemists of capitalism have turned the sparse carbon into ‘carbon real estate,’ available for sale to the highest bidder. The weak and poor have been priced out. And at the G20, we have just offered to subsidise the rich to buy more.
The core issue of equity still eludes all debates and was missing at Rio+20 as well. Mitigation commitments being discussed are just not enough; they are deceitful as they undermine the sovereign rights of other nations. Developed countries will need to vacate their holding of carbon stocks.

One sixth of humanity cannot continue to hold 80% of the total carbon space that is available if western science is to be believed. This is what needs to be negotiated. The time lines and specific action by which these countries have carbon negative footprints must be sought.

It is unfortunate at the very least, if not downright conspiratorial, that countries like China and India have not been able to see through the haze created by the multilateral discourse and identify the real priority: to evict the developed countries who are squatting on carbon real estate that does not belong to them rather than negotiating the partaking of what is left.

Samir Saran is a vice president and Vivan Sharan an associate fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi.

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Preparing for Rio+20: Emerging Dilemmas , First Published as ORF Analysis, June, 2012

At the first Rio Summit, global leaders met over the course of ten days to discuss ways to save the planet. At the upcoming Rio+20 summit in June, two decades after the initialisation of a comprehensive multilateral process to respond to climate change risks, global leaders will meet over a shortened period of three days to try to save the world from completely falling off a sustainable trajectory. 

The draft-zero of the declaration of the Rio+20 Summit mentions the phrase “green economy” twenty two times without ever defining it. It is also no surprise then that one of the architects of the Kyoto Protocol, Ambassador Raul Estrada of Argentina publicly expressed “serious concern” about the reversal of the Kyoto process back to “square one” at the recent Bonn negotiations which were a follow up to last year’s COP summit.

At the 1992 Earth Summit at Rio, the world agreed to the idea of “Common but Differentiated Responsibilities” to build a viable framework to mitigate the imminent risks posed by the gradual changes in the environment. This principle was the key takeaway from Rio and was received well by the developing world at large as it flowed out of the equitable and fair notion of “polluter pays”. 

Even if the principle in itself has not lead to the optimal desired outcome, the very idea of developing countries being entitled to grow and to receive financial and technological support by the advanced developed economies has been a central pillar of the responsibility discourse. The role that this messaging of ‘differentiated responsibilities’ has played has been decisive in how developing counties have traditionally positioned their arguments at multilateral fora.  

Antonio Gramsci the famous Italian philosopher wrote that “history has left us an infinity of traces” and that the task before all of us is to “compile an inventory of the traces that history has left us”. Multiple rounds of meetings and negotiations have followed after the first Earth Summit and the diffusion of the core principle of differentiated responsibility has been a consistently visible trend. 

At the multilateral level, there is a fairly clear push towards disposing off with differentiation altogether (led by the EU and its cohorts) and as the Rio+20 conference draws nearer, developing counties including India continue to struggle to articulate themselves coherently or envision an alternative long term agenda for action. Besides keeping equity at the forefront, India needs a strategic vision. The pattern of negotiations has been that developed countries give ‘incremental concessions’ to developing nations (for the lack of a better term) to pre-empt dissent.

There is definite scientific consensus that the Earth’s atmosphere is changing. The multilateral discourse on climate change also indicates that there is broad political agreement about imminent threats posed by climate risk. The Kyoto Protocol was perhaps the most honest attempt by the global collective of nation states to recognise two fundamental facts – that climate risks are real and imminent, and that developed countries have a greater historical responsibility to act and facilitate mitigation and adaptation actions of developing counties. 

With the first phase of the Kyoto Protocol coming to an end, and with no foreseeable consensus on the future course of action, developing countries have everything to lose and nothing to gain from new frameworks or catchphrases that may evolve in the near future. In this context, it is surprising that even countries, with significant economic weight and bargaining power such as India, have refrained from becoming proactive champions of a progressive discourse rather than continuing on as reactionary rule takers. 

The blame should not of course be limited to bad policymaking.  We are regularly bombarded by apocalyptic climate change scenarios as well as overwhelming narratives of poverty and probably are functioning within a collective denial of the information that confronts us – whether on the lack of intentions in the alleviation discourse or the actual systematic degradation of the planet. The human tendency to herd into binaries of affirmation and negation leads to formation of ideological coalitions without suitable contexts. Some of this obduracy and short sightedness of individual thought no doubt translates into decision making at the highest political levels.

Interestingly it can be argued that in 1992, it was the developing world that wanted to use multilateral agreements such as those on climate change, as possible access points into the consumer spending driven markets of the developed economies. With the ongoing financial crisis continuing unresolved, and no end in sight for a faltering European economy, Western countries are now looking for greater access into emerging markets and are actively trying to peddle a new kind of reverse protectionism by obfuscating the discourse. The world has changed considerably over the past 2 decades and yet such characteristics of global governance remain inherently hegemonic. 

India has relentlessly argued that stark levels of energy poverty and basic sustenance are more immediate and relevant concerns. Images of the Environment Minister at Durban, waving her arms around, defending India’s right to emit greenhouse gasses no doubt made for provocative news coverage, perhaps even inciting patriotic fervour in some of us. However the sad truth is that as a country we have seldom been able to act with strategic foresight on issues of long term significance. With clearly increasing patterns of inequity, social strife and marginalisation based on identity divisions, India’s policymakers must understand that they cannot continue to articulate its pro poor agenda shamelessly at the global high table, without first enabling visible socio-economic transformation at home.