Kyoto Protocol

The Kyoto Protocol is a protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC or FCCC), aimed at combating global warming. The UNFCCC is an international environmental treaty with the goal of achieving "stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system".

India signed and ratified the Protocol in August, 2002. Since India is exempted from the framework of the treaty, it is expected to gain from the protocol in terms of transfer of technology and related foreign investments. At the G8 meeting in June 2005, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh pointed out that the per-capita emission rates of the developing countries are a tiny fraction of those in the developed world. Following the principle of common but differentiated responsibility, India maintains that the major responsibility of curbing emission rests with the developed countries, which have accumulated emissions over a long period of time. However, the U.S. and other Western nations assert that India, along with China, will account for most of the emissions in the coming decades, owing to their rapid industrialization and economic growth.

Kyoto Protocol: India’s Stand. - I would say although all of us are affected by the climate change, the historical accumulation of carbon dioxide is not as a result of anything that we have done. It is largely a consequence of 150 years of industrialization in major developed countries of the world. India has to put in place a national action plan for climate change to improve our response mechanism meeting the challenge of climate change. We do not have to succumb to the hegamony of the US & Australia led coalition.

India should try to maximize its gains from the treaty when the members meet again in Copenhagen; through technology transfers as well as help in R&D. India should lead the developing countries at such forums, and also leverage its position as a significant world player in its advantage. The developed countries can wait, but India can’t; its time India shows some steel by coming out of such baseless treaties that hinders its growth.

UN climate treaty being renegotiated in Copenhagen this December, The US who is the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases signed, but refused to ratify, the Kyoto Protocol. Similar are stories of Australia and Japan who claimed to cut emission down by 2020, it was just a dress reharsal which failed badly.

Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh has suggested to the PM that India opt out of the Kyoto Protocol, jettison the G77 developing countries, and voluntarily accept cuts in emission without any guarantee of funding or technology from industrial nations in return. This goes against every principle which India has articulated on behalf of all developing countries.

Last Month India, indicated that it was ready to undertake cuts of emissions, although it couched this as part of its internal adaptation strategy. India was even prepared to quantify the cuts over a period of time. Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh had told Hillary Clinton on her visit to Delhi after the G8 meets in Italy precisely the opposite. No less a person than the prime minister has gone on record to refuse to specify what cuts India will undertake, stating that it will never allow its per capita emissions to rise above the current global average of 4.4 tonnes.

Since then the Congress party is already in damage-control mode, In September, Ramesh told the Indian Express regarding the acceptance of voluntary cuts by India: “Yes, there is a nuanced shift. But the shift is not in our negotiating stand. That stand remains the same. We are not going to accept any legally binding commitments on reducing carbon emissions. We will not allow the dilution of the per-capita principle. There can be no compromises on these. The shift is in the atmospherics around the negotiations. For long, this canard is being spread that India has been holding up an agreement…that India is not proactive on climate change. This should be able to nail those lies.

He went on to say that “We are already taking a number of actions that will result in significant reductions of greenhouse gas emissions. We are in a position to quantify these reductions into a broadly indicative number that can be shared with the rest of the world. I see no problem with that…it will completely demolish the myth that India is doing nothing to reduce its emissions. India, which has no historical liability in polluting the atmosphere and has no commitment to reduce its emissions, is doing much more than the countries which are responsible for the current mess and bound by international law to take targeted emission cuts.”

Kyoto Protocol was born out of this convention which the US also signed, and therefore it is the only valid international treaty on which to negotiate when the first phase of the protocol ends in 2012, not the protocol itself. EU has revealed that it already decided on scrapping the protocol one whole year ago. The only reason why the EU was contemplating a change of setting for the drama was the obduracy of the US to the K word, the very mention of ‘Kyoto’.

EU further mentioned that, this had much to do with President George Bush’s explicit statement that the US wouldn’t sign the protocol not only because major emerging countries like China and India weren’t coming on board. He also made the atrocious remark that when it came to cutting emissions, and thereby hurting less energy-efficient sectors of the US economy, it wasn’t kosher because “US lifestyles can’t be compromised”, or words to that effect.

The proposal, which the US has lobbied India in bilateral forums and in multilateral meets to accept, asks all countries regardless of existing status, to take obligations. In its present form, when read with other proposals, it seeks to cap India's emissions by 2020 and force further reductions later on. A cap on emissions automatically converts into a cap of how much energy India can use".

India has less than a quarter of carbon dioxide and total greenhouse gas emissions of the leading emitters of the world, China and the United States, in both annual and per capita terms. India’s per capita carbon dioxide emissions are almost a third of the world average of 4.4 tonnes. Each American emits on average 20 tonnes a year. The International Energy Agency (IEA), in its Reference scenario, projects that India’s emissions will grow at about 4% per year, contributing less than 7% of global carbon dioxide emissions by 2020 (though India is home to almost a fifth of world population).

At the Bangkok meet, the EU, which has been the most proactive on climate and has announced a 20% cut below 1990 levels by 2020, rising to 30% if the US comes on board, itself came in for criticism by several international green organisations.

The G8 declaration, astonishingly, left it to individual countries to determine the baselines from which emission levels have to be reduced: 1990 “or later years”. Germany, the UK and other European countries, which are the greenest in this regard, want to cut theirs by 80% below 1990 levels by 2050.

The US, which accounts for a fifth of all emissions, wants to reduce its emissions from current levels. Industrial counties’ emissions have grown both in absolute and per capita terms till 2007. This was precisely at a period when President Bush refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol on the grounds that China and India weren’t agreeing to cut their emissions.

While there is a consensus even in the US that 2050 is the ultimate deadline for the world to get its climate in order, the intermediate goals are by no means settled. For any long-term goals, there have to be credible mid-term goals. If major industrial countries intensify their efforts only as this date looms near, it will be virtually impossible to prevent temperatures from rising beyond 2 degrees, the “tipping point”. The much-vaunted Waxman-Markey bill in the US, which seeks to cap emissions by the world’s biggest polluter, kicks in only towards the end of this period. By some calculations, to keep within 2 degrees, global emissions must reduce by 10% from 2010 itself and 25% by 2012, which no country will accept.

The Obama administration is hoping to win new commitments to fight global warming from China and India in back-to-back summits next month. China and India are both critically important to achieving our international goals on carbon,’’ said Senator Ben Cardin, a Democrat who serves on the Foreign and Environment Committees. India wants help in speeding its adoption of new, greener technologies and expanding its use of solar power.

The US has a time-honoured method of entering into bilateral relationships with developing countries to further, if not force, its national interests, as we have seen in trade talks. On global warming, the Bush administration had introduced the abortive Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Energy & Climate, with Canada, Australia (the erstwhile Ophelia and still a strong contender for the role), Japan, South Korea and India precisely to bypass the UN climate change convention, with its compulsory emission cuts and penalties for violations. The sectors it targeted for an exchange of technologies, like cement, steel and power generation, are precisely those which the US and Australia fear China and India will have a competitive advantage in, if they do not undertake to cut their emissions.

If, as the US and EU are now proposing, the Kyoto Protocol is scuttled and a brand new entity comes into effect, it will presumably funnel some of the funds that will be paid by industrial countries to mitigate climate change but also have the powers to monitor the moves in each country to reduce emissions, rather like the World Bank with its loans or International Monetary Fund with its structural adjustment policies or World Trade Organisation with its eagle eye on removing trade barriers , all of which have plunged the world economy into deep crisis.
These institutions, if formed are far from being democratic, since there is no “one country, one vote” system. The very fact that the US always chooses the head of the World Bank from one of its nationals, and the French, the IMF, speaks for itself.

On October 21st 2009, India signed an agreement with China, the world’s biggest polluter, to increase cooperation on tackling climate change after the countries rejected calls from rich nations to set binding caps on carbon emissions. China and India say wealthy countries including the U.S. should lower emissions by 40 percent from 1990 levels by 2020 and share technology with poorer nations to help them fight climate change.


Winston Dsouza