India Offer to Curb Emission Intensity May Help Climate Talks
By Gaurav Singh
Dec. 4 (Bloomberg) -- India's offer to voluntarily reduce the amount of carbon emissions per unit of gross domestic product after numerical pledges from the U.S. and China may move the climate-change talks ahead.
Asia's third-biggest energy consumer can reduce its emissions intensity by as much as 25 percent from 2005 to 2020 through forestry measures and by becoming more energy efficient, Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh said last night.
Three days ahead of the opening of the United Nations- sponsored climate summit in Copenhagen, the offer "will certainly help the negotiations process and is something India should be doing for external and, more importantly, for internal reasons," said Rajendra K. Pachauri, chairman of the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
"It takes the wind out of the sails of developed countries who were trying to push India," Pachauri said. India continues to oppose binding emission-reduction goals and a date for when its emissions would peak, saying its 2008 plan to increase solar power, energy efficiency and forestation will reduce emissions of the greenhouse gases mainly blamed for global warming.
Negotiations for a new global climate treaty in Copenhagen to replace or extend the 1997 Kyoto Protocol beyond 2012 are deadlocked as rich and poor nations failed to agree on issues ranging from emission targets to financial aid for developing countries to help them cope with the effects of climate change.
Environmental organizations welcomed India's proposal. "These targets are a good, positive step toward quantification of India's action on climate change on the eve of the crucial Copenhagen conference," said Vinuta Gopal, climate campaign manager for Greenpeace India.
Low-Carbon Model
"We hope that this will be a strong step in moving toward a low-carbon sustainable model of development since the targets will be met through the use of better and more efficient technology," said Ravi Singh, head of WWF-India.
Together with the Chinese announcement, India's move "puts enormous pressure on the developed countries, in particular the U.S. to get their act together," Prodipto Ghosh, a climate expert at The Energy and Resources Institute, said from New Delhi. Ghosh called for developed countries to come up with ambitious targets that "are clearly understood by science."
China, the world's biggest polluter, last month offered to cut output of carbon dioxide per unit of gross domestic product by 40 percent to 45 percent over 2005 levels by 2020. The U.S. proposed to reduce emissions by about 17 percent for the same period provided that dovetails with a new domestic climate law.
Scientists describe carbon intensity as the amount of carbon dioxide emitted for each unit of GDP.
India and China have said their emissions need to rise because otherwise they won't produce the economic growth to lift millions of their people out of poverty.
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