Resisting the cynical politics of climate negotiations
By Prakash Kashwan and Praneeta Mudaliar
India’s Energy Minister Singh recently called on the world’s wealthy countries to set targets for net-negative emissions to remove the carbon they have released into the atmosphere in the form of greenhouse gases (GHGs) responsible for the ongoing climate crisis. The rationale for these demands is that the wealthy countries have achieved prosperity by colonizing and plundering the global South from the 15th century onward.
India has been right to raise the question of climate injustice between North and South, but climate justice within countries is equally compelling.
Historically, the US has refused to undertake binding emission reduction targets, while demanding that countries with rapidly growing economies, such as China and India, must also reduce their emissions. Last week, President Biden announced that the United States will reduce emissions by 50 percent by 2030 compared to 2005 levels. While this is encouraging, the US is using its new target to cajole other major economies, including India, to make steep cuts. Such demands ignore the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR) that undergirds the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
India has been right to raise the question of climate injustice between North and South, but climate justice within countries is equally compelling. Reversing historically entrenched socioeconomic inequalities is closely intertwined with climate action.
Climate justice with development
The “growing economies” are home to more than 2 billion people who are deprived of basic amenities such as safe drinking water and robust sanitation systems. Over a quarter of India lives in conditions of food insecurity and unsafe sanitation, without access to clean water or reliable and affordable energy. The provision of such amenities requires energy and produce what has been referred to as survival emissions. Countries that need to build these basic infrastructures cannot be expected to easily reduce these emissions, especially while the world’s wealthiest people continue to splurge “luxury emissions.”
When India claims to represent the interests of poor countries, it is pertinent to ask: which India is being represented in global politics? Is the India where the richest one per cent hold more than four times the total wealth of the 953 million people who make up the bottom 70 per cent of the country's population?
Notwithstanding the legitimate developmental needs of the poor, there is little evidence that India is taking any meaningful action to rethink its development approach to focus on poverty alleviation and the human development needs of its poor. Despite two decades of economic growth, India ranks 131 out of 189 countries in the Human Development Index. In the 2020 Global Hunger Index, India ranks 94th out of 107 countries. A 2021 study shows that the goals of climate change mitigation and poverty alleviation in India are not contradictory, but the government has yet to come up with meaningful efforts to pursue either of these goals. On the contrary, the Indian government’s record on environmental and climate policy under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s regime includes investing in fossil fuel development, rushing through industrial permits linked to large-scale deforestation, undermining indigenous rights, and repressing environmental activists who demand state accountability.
Environment and climate activists continue to be jailed for demanding that the Indian government enforce and not weaken its environmental and climate action. The internet service provider hosting the Fridays for Future India website was served an anti-terrorism notice for an online campaign urging the environment minister to not undermine the already poorly enforced environmental impact assessment regulations. More recently, Delhi police arrested Disha Ravi, a youth environment and climate activist, for editing an online Google Doc that Greta Thunberg circulated in solidarity with the Indian farmers’ movement.
At the same time, the Indian government has prioritized corporate and commercial interests in extractive industries at the cost of environmental and social protections. These outcomes should be seen in light of the corporate-politician nexus visible in the so-called electoral bonds used for funding extravagant election campaigns. As such, the promotion of industrial interests has little to do with national interests, including that of promoting economic development. Instead of investing in forward-looking policies, the government of India is promoting coal mining, even as the cost of solar-powered electricity is already 14% lower than that of coal-fired power. These failures are a product of missing mechanisms of public accountability that are essential for protecting the environment and the environmental human rights. Further, rising inequity in India, greatly exacerbated because of the ongoing COVID19 pandemic, continues to pose a significant barrier to addressing climate change.
When India claims to represent the interests of poor countries, it is pertinent to ask: which India is being represented in global politics? Is the India where the richest one per cent hold more than four times the total wealth of the 953 million people who make up the bottom 70 per cent of the country's population? As such, Indian leaders have no legitimate basis for speaking on behalf of the world’s poorest people. Arguments that countries in Africa “need to develop” seem to be an exercise in namedropping African countries to serve Indian leaders’ cynical agendas in global politics. How do these claims square up with the record of Indian government-backed investors engaging in massive land grabs in Africa? Is there any evidence to suggest that India is investing in promoting low carbon development pathways on the African soil?[1] The irony of the Indian government’s lack of accountability at home and abroad should not be lost, even while it demands accountability from wealthy nations.
Accountability for the Global North
[1] The authors are grateful to Masego Madzwamuse for this insight.
This said, the rich countries cannot be allowed to use these gimmicks and controversies created by unaccountable government leaders in the global South to escape accountability for their own actions. To be clear: nothing can replace the need for reducing luxury emissions linked to profligate consumption among the affluent sections in the global North. Because a small fraction of global population has already consumed more than 80% of the world’s carbon budget, the rich countries owe carbon debt to the world’s poor people. According to Oxfam’s report, ‘Confronting Carbon Inequality,’ during a critical 25-year period of unprecedented emissions growth the richest one percent of the world’s population were responsible for more than twice as much carbon pollution as the 3.1 billion people who made up the poorest half of humanity. Tim Gore, Head of Climate Policy at Oxfam and author of the report said: “The over-consumption of a wealthy minority is fueling the climate crisis, yet it is poor communities and young people who are paying the price. Such extreme carbon inequality is a direct consequence of our governments decades long pursuit of grossly unequal and carbon intensive economic growth.”
Nothing can replace the need for reducing luxury emissions linked to profligate consumption among the affluent sections in the global North..the rich countries owe carbon debt to the world’s poor people.
The failure of the wealthy countries to drastically reduce their emission cannot be compensated by demanding aggressive emission reductions in large poor countries, especially when it requires building large hydropower projects in ecologically sensitive and fragile areas. The recent hydropower disaster in the Himalayas in February 2021, which left more than 200 people dead, comes a few years after the 2013 flash floods in Uttarakhand that killed 5700 people. India’s hydropower industry is also mired in corruption. It is irresponsible and dangerous for the EU to cite hydropower as a savior for countries with economies in transition. These disasters are linked to the impacts of climate change, but the role, responsibility, and culpability of international and multilateral agencies—such as the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, and national energy corporations—who fund, support, and implement these projects cannot be ignored.
Questions of accountability and effectiveness are also pertinent for the ongoing debate over negative emissions. The two mechanisms of tree planting and direct air capture to remove carbon from the atmosphere are controversial. While tree planting has widespread support, the recent history of these projects in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean suggest that native people have been forced off of their lands for trees, in what is dubbed as carbon colonialism. The climate effects of tree planting can be uncertain, and it can have negative impacts on biodiversity conservation. The second option of sucking carbon out of the atmosphere—direct air capture—is also controversial with risks of large-scale environmental impacts. Where countries going to put all that carbon and what other environmental and social consequences could result from carbon storage are unknowns. These technologies are attracting the interests of fossil-fuel corporations taking control of the use of such technology, with some arguing that these initiatives be publicly funded. John Kerry’s statement on the “need to get carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere,” during a conversation at the Earth Day Climate Summit about climate financing with Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser, further reinforces the inappropriate intrusion of commercial and financial interests.
The lesson here is that the world’s poor deserve environmental and climate justice but the governments of both wealthy and poor countries need to be held to account for their failures. Rich countries must heavily and aggressively tax profligate consumption and deal with luxury emissions as if they were socioeconomic pandemic.
Dr. Prakash Kashwan is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Co-Director of the Research Program on Economic and Social Rights, Human Rights Institute at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. He is the author of Democracy in the Woods: Environmental Conservation and Social Justice in India, Tanzania, and Mexico (Oxford University Press, 2017).
Dr. Praneeta Mudaliar is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies and Science at Ithaca College, New York. Her expertise is in environmental policy and governance and she has published several articles on power dynamics in resource governance in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania, India, and the US.
This article is original content published under a Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
