He wouldn’t put it this way, but Secretary of State John Kerry announced this week that the U.S. government will turn the screws on India over the country’s environmental record. This is a bold challenge to the Indian government that could become an extremely effective exercise of soft power. But even if AirNow monitoring doesn’t work a diplomatic miracle in time for the Paris climate conference, at least the fact that India’s pollution problem hurts its people will be well-articulated. That can only increase public pressure to clean up India’s development strategy. --Stephen Stromberg, The Washington Post, 20 February 2015
World leaders are now preparing for a global summit on climate change in Paris in December, where they hope to agree on a global strategy. As the world’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, India also needs to make a similarly strong commitment to keep the momentum going. Mr. Modi was elected on a promise to liberalize India’s economy as a means to encourage foreign investment, create new jobs and lift millions of Indians out of poverty. The country has long argued that emissions targets would thwart these goals. Given that about 300 million Indians lack access to electricity and millions more live with shortages, the need for power is obviously great. Even so, the current path — a continued heavy investment in coal — is self-destructive, killing India’s people, taxing its health care system and making the environment so inhospitable that foreign investors could be scared away. --Editorial, The New York Times, 23 February 2015
1) Obama Administration Declares Green War on India - The Washington Post, 20 February 2015
2) At UN Climate Meeting, India Opposes Dilution Of Tasks - The Hindu, 23 February 2015
3) India Lowers Expectations For Paris Climate Talks - Forbes, 20 February 2015
4) Owen Paterson: ‘The Green Blob’ Is Threatening Lives In Africa - The Sunday Telegraph, 22 February 2015
5) Modi Bets On GM Crops for India's Second Green Revolution - Reuters, 23 February 2015
India’s position underscoring the historical responsibilities of developing countries in the context of climate change was up against proposed dilutions to that concept notably by the U.S. and the European Union at the recent climate talks in Geneva. An Indian official said the meeting did not have any high ambition on targets though all countries took an active part in including various points in the draft treaty for Paris. The U.S. suggested doing away with the differences between developed and developing countries and one of the suggestions was that countries should be rated based on World Bank data. --Meena Menon, The Hindu, 23 February 2015
The Paris Climate Conference this December will not produce an agreement that is “environmentally optimal,” according to former Minister Jairam Ramesh who served as India’s chief negotiator at the 2009 conference in Copenhagen. The key to the Paris Conference, according to Ramesh, is not whether countries make contributions, but whether the UN can muster support for an enforcement mechanism to ensure that countries comply with the contributions they make. Developing countries like India may be reluctant to accept any enforcement mechanism that could have the effect of limiting economic growth. Were they asked to rank economic growth against climate objectives, Ramesh said, developing countries would choose growth. --Jeff McMahon, Forbes, 20 February 2015
Owen Paterson, the former environment secretary, will this week accuse the European Union and Greenpeace of condemning people in the developing world to death by refusing to accept genetically modified crops. In a strongly-worded denunciation of the “green blob” of officials and pressure groups, Mr Paterson will warn that a food revolution that could save Africa from hunger is being held back. He will like Greenpeace to the Luddites who smashed textile machinery in the nineteenth century, and accuse the EU of “neo-colonialism at its worst” by restricting food production within its own borders. -- Matthew Holehouse, The Sunday Telegraph, 22 February 2015
This is also a time, however, of great mischief, in which many individuals and even governments are turning their backs on progress. Not since the original Luddites smashed cotton mill machinery in early 19th century England, have we seen such an organised, fanatical antagonism to progress and science. These enemies of the Green Revolution call themselves ‘progressive’, but their agenda could hardly be more backward-looking and regressive. –Owen Paterson, The Sunday Telegraph, 22 February 2015
India placed a moratorium on GM eggplant in 2010 fearing the effect on food safety and biodiversity. Field trials of other GM crops were not formally halted, but the regulatory system was brought to a deadlock. But allowing GM crops is critical to Indian Prime Minister Modi's goal of boosting dismal farm productivity in India, where urbanization is devouring arable land and population growth will mean there are 1.5 billion mouths to feed by 2030 - more even than China. Starting in August last year, his government resumed the field trials for selected crops with little publicity. --Krishna Das & Mayank Bhardwaj, Reuters, 23 February 2015
1) Obama Administration Declares Green War on India
The Washington Post, 20 February 2015
Stephen Stromberg
He wouldn’t put it this way, but Secretary of State John Kerry announced this week that the U.S. government will turn the screws on India over the country’s environmental record.
In a joint event, the State Department and the Environmental Protection Agency declared that they will install air pollution monitoring devices on more U.S. embassies around the world and release their findings. The embassy in Delhi will be among the first. This is a bold challenge to the Indian government that could become an extremely effective exercise of soft power.
Kerry’s first stated motivation is to protect Americans traveling or living abroad – particularly those with respiratory illnesses that nasty particulate matter known as PM 2.5 might inflame. “We have tens of thousands of U.S. government workers who are employed in some 150 posts around the world,” he said Wednesday, “and in many of the cities where those posts are located, believe me, it can get hard to have regular access to reliable PM 2.5 data.”
But that is not the only – or, perhaps, even the primary – reason for State’s move. Global air quality monitoring will also offer clear and accurate information to foreign citizens choking under their governments’ haze of environmental neglect. Embassy air monitoring is among the most powerful tools the State Department has to pressure countries to change policy. That’s what happened after the U.S. embassy in Beijing began releasing air quality information, to the Chinese government’s distress.
“There was a time when poor visibility in cities like Beijing was blamed simply on excessive fog,” Kerry explained. “But today, in part because of expanded air-quality monitoring in cities throughout China, the Chinese government is now deeply committed to getting the pollution under control.”
What Kerry didn’t explain fully is why India is top on the list for new monitoring. Delhi is perhaps the most polluted city on the planet. In a very rough estimate, Bloomberg News calculated that President Obama would lose 6 hours of his life following a brief visit to the city last month. Cars, diesel generators, coal burning – all of these sources pump out noxious pollution that fogs the ambient air.
But they all also produce a lot of climate change-inducing carbon dioxide emissions, and that fact reveals Kerry’s underlying diplomatic objective.
India is now the world’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, recently surpassing the European Union. Yet the country is doing the least among the large emitters to combat global warming. Following U.S. embassy air monitoring, the Chinese government made a serious emissions commitment last fall. The Europeans have already made big cuts and plan more. The EPA is clamping down on carbon dioxide in the United States. By contrast, India’s leaders didn’t give much on climate change when Obama visited last month. The president’s disappointment was thinly veiled.
World leaders will meet at the end of this year to complete a global climate agreement. The Obama administration apparently has not given up on eliciting a more impressive commitment from India than observers expect. Nor should it.
But even if AirNow monitoring doesn’t work a diplomatic miracle in time for the Paris conference, at least the fact that India’s pollution problem hurts its people will be well-articulated. That can only increase public pressure to clean up India’s development strategy.
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2) At UN Climate Meeting, India Opposes Dilution Of Tasks
The Hindu, 23 February 2015
Meena Menon
Developing countries have been demanding finance to deal with climate change from industrialised countries.
India’s position underscoring the historical responsibilities of developing countries in the context of climate change was up against proposed dilutions to that concept notably by the U.S. and the European Union at the recent climate talks in Geneva.
An Indian official said the meeting did not have any high ambition on targets though all countries took an active part in including various points in the draft treaty for Paris. The U.S. suggested doing away with the differences between developed and developing countries and one of the suggestions was that countries should be rated based on World Bank data.
Finance, the hitch
Developing countries have been demanding finance to deal with climate change from industrialised countries which has been a bone of contention for some time. The Green Climate Fund has only crossed $10 billion.
There is a need for consensus on cutting emissions by all countries and the idea of “evolving” responsibilities is being pushed by developed countries, according to official sources. The U.S. and others have been maintaining that all countries should aim at cutting emissions and not just the developed world.
At a recent interaction, the EU said Common But Differentiated Responsibilities (CBDR) cannot be looked upon as the single principle to produce solutions. “We need to have a dynamic understanding of differentiated responsibilities and we are talking of an issue area where we discuss dynamics that are relevant over decades and decades,” said Ambassador João Cravinho, Head of Delegation of the European Union to India.
However, he clarified that CBDR was the cornerstone of international dialogue on climate change and the EU fully supported the notion. The EU joined the rest of the developed countries which are against going strictly by the principle of CBDR and in the recent climate talks in Geneva, the U.S. proposed a bifurcation approach which did not make a difference between developed and developing countries.
To keep talking of CBDR in the current context or in the years ahead in the same way would be a mistake, he felt, as the world economy would have changed so much. He called for a process that looked forward as the world could not rely forever on historical responsibility as a magic wand to address problems.
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3) India Lowers Expectations For Paris Climate Talks
Forbes, 20 February 2015
Jeff McMahon
The Paris Climate Conference this December will not produce an agreement that is “environmentally optimal,” according to the member of parliament who served as India’s chief negotiator at the 2009 conference in Copenhagen.
But Paris will serve as a springboard to help the world’s major economies begin to develop low-carbon economies, Minister Jairam Ramesh said last month during a side event at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
“All negotiations on climate present trilemmas—not dilemmas, but trilemmas,” Ramesh said at a panel discussion sponsored by the Energy Policy Institute of Chicago. “You have to have something that is politically feasible, something that is economically desirable, and something that is environmentally optimum.
“And in Paris, what you’re going to get is an outcome that is not environmentally optimum, but that is politically and economically acceptable.”
Ramesh’s remarks (video) came on a day that President Obama was meeting with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi, a visit that produced a memorandum of understanding on clean energy, but not a comprehensive climate agreement like the one Obama had secured with China in November.
Ramesh suggested the Paris agreement, too, may lack substance.
“The commitments that countries are making—unfortunately, even the word commitment has been diluted. It’s now contributions, as if countries are doing a favor to humanity. It’s now, in UN Speak, INDC: Intended, not even pledged, but Intended Nationally Determined Contributions.”
Ramesh predicts many countries will be making such contributions in Paris, promising to limit their carbon emissions, “but what you have to lock, in Paris, is a system that will ensure compliance with these contributions.”
So the key to the Paris Conference, according to Ramesh, is not whether countries make contributions, but whether the UN can muster support for an enforcement mechanism to ensure that countries comply with the contributions they make.
Developing countries like India may be reluctant to accept any enforcement mechanism that could have the effect of limiting economic growth. Were they asked to rank economic growth against climate objectives, Ramesh said, developing countries would choose growth.
“It’s a no-brainer. They will rank the growth objective higher than the climate objective. That was clear at Copenhagen,” he said. “We are in a very serious situation that will make any solution to the climate problem environmentally suboptimal because the growth objective will always predominate.”
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4) Owen Paterson: ‘The Green Blob’ Is Threatening Lives In Africa
The Sunday Telegraph, 22 February 2015
Matthew Holehouse
Owen Paterson, the former environment secretary, will this week accuse the European Union and Greenpeace of condemning people in the developing world to death by refusing to accept genetically modified crops.
 Mr Paterson will warn that a food revolution that could save Africa from hunger is being held back Photo: David Rose/The Telegraph
In a strongly-worded denunciation of the “green blob” of officials and pressure groups, Mr Paterson will warn that a food revolution that could save Africa from hunger is being held back.
He will like Greenpeace to the Luddites who smashed textile machinery in the nineteenth century, and accuse the EU of “neo-colonialism at its worst” by restricting food production within its own borders.
Speaking in Pretoria, South Africa, on Tuesday, Mr Paterson will say that the world is on the cusp of a green revolution, of the kind that fed a billion people in the 1960s and 1970s as the world’s population soared.
But such a transformation is being imperilled by well-meaning Westerners who are imposing their food “fetishes” on the developing world, he will warn, in the single greatest challenge in the modern world.
The use of genetically modified crops is expanding in the United States and South Africa, and approval has been given to trials of drought resistant strands in the Middle East and Africa.
Mr Paterson will accuse the “green blob” of “mythmaking and misinformation” by opposing such trials, even where they are supported by farmers.
He will accuse the European Union of “strong-arming “ African nations into not growing GM crops, and threatening to cut off imports if they refuse.
He will also condemn the scrapping of the role of EU science adviser, held by Professor Anne Glover, a supporter of GM crops, after protests from Greenpeace.
Some 6,000 children a day die in the developing world due to vitamin A deficiency – but the deaths could be prevented by modified Gold Rice that has been opposed by Greenpeace, he will say.
“This is a time of extraordinary opportunity for Africa. Progress in the plant sciences is opening up the promise of a second Green Revolution, one that can not only feed the 9 to 10 billion people that will inhabit our planet in 2050, but feed them well – one that can finally end the shame of the nearly one billion who still go to bed every night hungry and malnourished,” he will say.
“This is also a time, however, of great mischief, in which many individuals and even governments are turning their backs on progress. Not since the original Luddites smashed cotton mill machinery in early 19th century England, have we seen such an organised,fanatical antagonism to progress and science. These enemies of the Green Revolution call themselves ‘progressive’, but their agenda could hardly be more backward-looking and regressive.
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5) Modi Bets On GM Crops for India's Second Green Revolution
Reuters, 23 February 2015
Krishna Das & Mayank Bhardwaj
On a fenced plot not far from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's home, a field of mustard is in full yellow bloom, representing his government's reversal of an effective ban on field trials of genetically modified (GM) food crops.
The GM mustard planted in the half-acre field in the grounds of the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in New Delhi is in the final stage of trials before the variety is allowed to be sold commercially, and that could come within two years, scientists associated with the project say.
India placed a moratorium on GM eggplant in 2010 fearing the effect on food safety and biodiversity. Field trials of other GM crops were not formally halted, but the regulatory system was brought to a deadlock.
But allowing GM crops is critical to Modi's goal of boosting dismal farm productivity inIndia, where urbanization is devouring arable land and population growth will mean there are 1.5 billion mouths to feed by 2030 - more even than China.
Starting in August last year, his government resumed the field trials for selected crops with little publicity.
"Field trials are already on because our mandate is to find out a scientific review, a scientific evaluation," Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar told Reuters last week.
"Confined, safe field trials are on. It's a long process to find out whether it is fully safe or not."
Modi was a supporter of GM crops when he was chief minister of Gujarat state over a decade ago, the time when GM cotton was introduced in the country and became a huge success. Launched in 2002, Bt cotton, which produces its own pesticide, is the country's only GM crop and covers 95 percent of India's cotton cultivation of 11.6 million hectares (28.7 million acres).
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