Chief Economic Adviser Arvind Subramanian and former environment minister Jairam Ramesh recently made a bizarre call that India should not ask the developed countries for funds for its climate change-combating programmes, because it is not pragmatic to expect financial aid. Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar is reported to have said that sufficient funds will come from the ‘Make in India’ initiative. He echoes what Ramesh said, that “we are perfectly capable of generating the finance and technology ourselves”.

Oh, really? India’s only energy resource is coal. You burn coal, you produce carbon dioxide, the atmosphere’s leading louse. The only way to burn coal and not mess up the climate is to bury the CO 2 using a technology called ‘carbon capture and storage’ — frightfully expensive. Or take wind, another big resource. India has a huge offshore wind potential which is, again, very expensive. You need to incentivise the industry to start putting up projects to slowly build scale, or they will never take off. Who will pay for the additional costs of CCS or incentives for offshore? The Subramanian-Ramesh doctrine doesn’t explain why we shouldn’t ask for funds just because they are difficult to get. Demand, you may or may not get something; don’t, you get nothing.

If anything, the demand that the developed countries should pay should be stronger. It was promised that the Green Climate Fund would mobilise $100 billion a year by 2020. After five years, the fund has only $5.8 billion. There is a tendency to paint everything with the ‘green’ brush, so that even ‘regular’ funds are now pushed under mobilisation commitments as ‘green’.

Clearly, the developed countries, having developed themselves by messing with the atmosphere, are now playing the game hard. They have to be prevailed upon to own up, and pay up.

Senior Deputy Editor

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