Bring the US
back to the climate conclave
CSE media briefing insists on finding ways to re-engage the US in climate
change negotiations and setting up a democratic framework with right incentives and
disincentives for rich and poor alike
There should be no talk of commitments by developing
countries towards mitigating climate change until the negotiators of the Eight Conference
of Parties (CoP-8) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)
find a way to deal with the world’s biggest polluter, the United States of America.
According to the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), this is the only way to ensure
that the world moves towards just economic and environmental governance.
In a well-attended CSE media briefing at the India Habitat
Centre, Lodi Road, New Delhi, on Tuesday a day before the inauguration of the CoP-8 in the
Capital, Sunita Narain, director, CSE, argued that the success of CoP-8 will be largely
determined by whether the negotiators succeed in re-engaging the US, the world’s
heaviest polluter, which is resisting all efforts to take responsibility for its enormous
emissions and rejecting multilateralism in the global climate change negotiations.
"The US and all industrialised countries will have to
begin to put into place policies to reduce their emissions before they can coerce
developing countries into emission commitments," she said, "It is now payback
time for industrialised countries, who have all overdrawn on the earth’s natural
capital to feed their industrial growth."
Anju Sharma, co-ordinator, Global Environment Governance
Unit, CSE, emphasised that what is urgently needed is "to move from carbon energy to
renewable energy or the world stands in danger of being locked into carbon for another
century. The only option left is to transit to a zero-carbon system." She, however,
cautioned against policy instruments like the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) designed
by industralised countries under the Kyoto Protocol to aid in this process.
"Under the CDM, developed countries can invest in clean
energy projects in developing countries to help reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere. But these are just ploys that puts our atmosphere up for trade and profit as
these countries only bear the step-up costs towards clean technology and not the actual
costs and even claim trading credits for it"
In the Delhi Declaration, India and the developing countries
should insist "all technology transfer from the North to the South be in frontline
renewable technologies." Otherwise it would mean the use of CDM by industrialised
countries as a cheap way to meet their targets without making any changes to cut down
emissions in their own countries, Sharma maintained.
Touching on the issue of the use of sinks under CDM (at the
CoP-7 in Marrakech, it was agreed that industrialised countries could use credits from
sinks, i.e. land, forests and oceans which absorb carbon dioxide and act as reservoirs,
towards meeting up to one per cent of their reduction targets), Sharma dismissed it as
"controversial" and "complex" in terms of procedure.
India should take a firm position in CoP-8 to restrict such
projects to local communities, as sink projects are currently the only means of ensuring
that poor communities benefit from emissions trading, she added.
View CSE's Media Briefing presentation: CoP-8 - History,
Politics, Issues
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