17 November 2015
Our friends at India Climate Justice (ICJ) have released their most recent issue of Mausam.
A brief message from the editors:
This fifth issue of Mausam focuses on India’s Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC) submitted to the UN Climate Convention in early October. We think it was not nationally determined, however. Nor does it contribute in any way towards solving the climate crisis: if anything, it can only help worsen the crisis.
It was not ‘nationally determined’ because there was little or no discussion in the public domain before its submission to the UNFCCC. For such an important document touching upon a number of crucial areas of public policy, a draft should have been introduced and discussed thoroughly in Parliament. The government should have asked for inputs and feedback on a publicly circulated draft should from citizens, people’s organizations and unions, along with other informed opinion. Nothing of the kind happened.
The importance of other areas notwithstanding, the most crucial aspect of climate policy is mitigation, which hinges on the extent of carbon emissions, and its control. At the centre of India’s INDC is the proclamation that India intends “to reduce the emissions intensity of its GDP by 33-35 per cent by 2030 from 2005 levels”. That is, the volume of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions, measured as carbon dioxide-equivalent (CO2-eq), would be about one-third less for every unit of GDP. India’s emissions in 2007 were about 1.9 billion tonnes. Even based on conservative estimates of GDP growth over the period 2005- 2030, it implies that India’s emissions in 2030 will shoot up to at least five billion tonnes of CO2-equivalent, very likely more.
The Indian government and – we are sorry to add, but not surprised – most large NGOs and policy experts justify this by saying that India needs this huge jump in emissions in order to ‘develop’. Such deliberately naïve generalizations ignore that the one big generic ‘India’ is in reality several entities: it includes a complex, stratified society that has become more unequal over the last few years. Implicit in the pro-development/pro- emissions argument is an utterly unsupported assertion that the gains of such emissions are well distributed. Nothing can be more false: though India’s electricity generation capacity has trebled over the past decade – to 2,34,000 MW by 2014 – electricity access for the poor has been limited. As one of the articles in this issue points out, 25 per cent of India’s population still gets no electricity at all – 304 million people, the INDC admits – and another 25 per cent gets supply for only a very few hours a day. Which means that much of the electricity generated has only catered to elite demand. Many social indicators suggest that the lot of the poor has improved at best marginally: real wages for factory workers, after taking inflation into account, are less now than they were in 1996.Nutrition levels for small children are abysmal, poverty levels are still staggeringly steep and much higher than official estimates. At a time when the INDC and government policies are largely business-as-usual, there’s no reason to believe that the poor will benefit significantly from a much higher emissions development trajectory. On the contrary, it is the underclasses that will disproportionately pay the costs of higher emissions in terms of climate impacts, as we have witnessed in the Uttarakhand disaster, in cyclones, and most of all in small agriculture in many regions. And they will pay those costs for centuries, because of the long-lived nature of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. ... The urgency that these feedbacks demand is completely missing from India’s INDC and from the INDCs of most other large emissions countries. Clearly, the only way that governments can be pushed to act with greater urgency is from stronger, wider and sustained resistance by people’s movements, at all levels, and by effectively linking anti-capitalist struggles with those of climate justice. Only an entrenched resistance to capitalism can offer us hope, not the INDC kind of game the governments and corporations love to play.
Read the full text by clicking the link below.