The Hindu Business Line : Nations under growing pressure to cut energy intake

India is home to a sixth of the world’s population but its carbon emissions are less than 5 per cent of that of the globe. China’s emissions are much higher, about 19 per cent, but notwithstanding its huge population, are still less than that of the US, which has a billion fewer people.

K. Venugopal

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New Delhi, July 6

When members of the world’s eight leading industrial nations, the G8, sit at a lakeside resort in Toyako, Japan on Monday to debate ways to slow down the pace of climate change, they could not have found a more compelling backdrop than the current spurt in the price of crude oil to keep them focussed and serious.

At over $140 a barrel against around $70 exactly a year ago, oil prices have begun to hurt economies the world over. There is growing pressure to reduce energy consumption if only to ease the strain on the wallet; the earth and its climate will be incidental beneficiaries.

Cutting emissions

Exactly a year ago at the previous G8 summit at Heiligendamm in Germany, these countries set themselves the target of halving global greenhouse gas emissions from current levels by 2050. The promise was solemn, yet the schedule was so far extended as not to mean anything for the near term. Indeed, a study released by the World Wildlife Fund last week, pointed out that carbon emissions in five of the eight countries have been rising, not falling.

In recent weeks, the US President, Mr George W. Bush, has talked of the means.

“The only way to achieve these goals is through continued advances in technology,” he said in April this year. Britain’s Prime Minister, Mr Gordon Brown, spoke last month about the urgency for action. The German Chancellor, Ms Angela Merkel, in greater earnest has said the world could improve upon the commitment it made last year at where the goal set was to halve emissions by 2050. All of them want China and India to join in cutting energy consumption.

“We can’t have an effective agreement unless China and India are a part of it,” noted Mr Bush last week.

India, china

India is one of the group of five emerging economies that will hold discussions with the G8 on the margins of the summit on Wednesday. The Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, who leaves New Delhi for Toyako on Monday, will hear more of that rhetoric when he gets to meet Mr Bush and other leaders of the G8. It is a refrain he heard in Heiligendamm; his quick response then was he would make a commitment that per capita emissions of greenhouse gases in India would be no more than that in the developed world.

Yet it is the rising scale of the emissions in these two countries, spurred by rapid economic growth that is the object of attention.

At a meeting a couple of months ago, environment ministers of the G8 countries concluded that “For countries with rapidly increasing greenhouse gas emissions, it is especially critical to strive to curb the rate of increase.”

Trade off

For India and China, that may mean an unhappy trade off between energy use and economic growth.

In a statement on the eve of his departure, Dr Singh said, “In our view there can be no solution without taking into account the developmental imperatives and aspirations of developing economies. For us, the foremost priority is the removal of poverty, for which we need sustained rapid economic growth.”