New: India vs Kerry on climate change
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25-11-2015, 07:16 PM
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India vs Kerry on climate change
The sabre-rattling over climate change negotiations has begun in right earnest even before country delegations reach Paris in full force. Union environment, forests and climate change minister Prakash Javadekar countered the attack by US secretary of state John Kerry, saying, “His state was untrue and uncalled for.” Javadekar was reacting to an earlier statement of Kerry in media saying India was being overcautious towards the new global climate regime that Paris was expected to put a stamp of seal on.
The war of words between key countries is as expected in the run up to the high profile meeting at Paris, as are bilateral backdoor negotiations in the hope to stitch together arguably one of the most complicated multilateral economic agreements that 196 countries have ever attempted. Kerry, in his statement to FT.Com had said India was “a little more restrained in its embrace of this new paradigm, and it’s a challenge,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of focus on India right now to try to bring them along.” He was additionally quoted saying that India wanted to increase its dependence on domestic coal rather than import what he said was better quality coal which was not the right way to go he claimed. Javadekar when asked to react to the statement in Delhi on Wednesday said, “India is never a blocking country. It has done its fair share to tackle climate change. Mitigation will only happen if all work together. But, developed world needs to vacate climate space.” Union power minister Piyush Goyal had earlier commented (not in reaction to Kerry), that the Indian government would aggressively focus on both renewable energy, energy efficiency but also work to ensure energy security through deployment of larger volume of coal-based power generation. US has been attempted over the past few months to get India to sign a joint statement on climate change along the lines it was able to negotiate with China. But the differences have remained too far to bridge. While both have seen the possibilities of signing up an agreement for future technologies they are yet to resolve radical differences on intellectual property rights in existing clean technologies and how to reduce the cost for the same. At the same time US has pushed hard to breach the firewall between obligations of developed and developing countries as it exists in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, under which the Paris agreement is to be signed. It achieved a minor success with China at the bilateral level, with the latter already conveniently secure of the carbon space its powerhouse economy requires. With India, which would, by government estimates, require to quadruple the use of coal by 2030 to meet its energy needs, such a bilateral agreement has failed to emerge despite repeated attempts. While on some of salient features of the Paris agreement India, China and the US do see eye to eye on some fundamental concerns that impact the future space for economic growth divergent views continue. A senior official that Business Standard spoke to said, “You have to break the Kerry statement in two halves. One is about the Paris agreement the other is looking to create market for its coal in India. That again is a decision India would take based on relative trade-offs at different states of the developing economy.” Power minister Goyal had earlier stated that India’s dependence on coal imports could possibly be done away with 2017. Guests cannot see images and links in the messages. Please register to forum by clicking Register Here to see images. |
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