By Arun Kumar, IANS
Washington : Two US think tanks have suggested that Washington take the lead in fighting climate change and engage India and China as part of a broader strategy of geo-politically informed climate policy.
“Just as many adaptation policies have clear national security dimensions, so do many possible mitigation initiatives,” said Joshua W. Busby, an expert with the Council on Foreign Relations, a US think tank, citing the cases of China and India.
“Engagement remains the most important strategy to encourage China to become a status quo power and reduce the risk that China’s rise leads to confrontation between the great powers. The same is true of India,” he said.
While the India-US civil nuclear deal was designed to reduce the threat of nuclear proliferation, from a security-oriented climate perspective, it also has the potential to restrain the country’s greenhouse gas emissions, said Busby, an assistant professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs.
The Council on Foreign Relations estimates that if India were to build 20 gigawatts of nuclear power as envisioned in the 2006 agreement, this could save 145 million tonnes per year of carbon dioxide emissions that would otherwise have been belched from coal-generating plants.
“As part of this broader strategy of geo-politically informed climate policy, the United States should make sure that enhancing formal participation by China and India in important global institutions is a part of its climate change mitigation strategy,” Busby said.
In particular, it should promote closer engagement between China and India and the International Energy Agency (IEA), he said, as it would help advance climate goals while further integrating the two Asian giants into the rules-based global order.
Busby suggested that concentrated impacts of climate change will have important national security implications, both in terms of the direct threat from extreme weather events as well as broader challenges to US interests in strategically important countries.
For instance, devastating floods in Bangladesh could send tens of thousands of refugees across the border to India, potentially leading to tension between the refugees and recipient communities in India.
In the event of such an emergency, the US would likely be called upon, given its relief efforts in the region after the 2004 tsunami and the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan.
Even if the US has limited strategic stakes in Bangladesh, support for adaptation measures would still be the right thing to do and much less costly than disaster response, Busby said.
A new pact on clean energy technology transfer to China and India would bolster support for the rules-based global order that the US has nurtured since World War II, he said, noting that for these policy recommendations to have traction, institutional reform is needed.
Another expert, Carlos Pascual, vice president and director of foreign policy at Brookings, noted that it doesn’t matter where the next unit of carbon is emitted.
He said: “Whether it comes from Detroit or Beijing, or Delhi or Newcastle it still has the same impact of putting more carbon into the atmosphere.
“As a result of that you need every country that is major emitter of carbon to participate in order to have a real impact on the problem.”
Pascual added: “All of us have a stake in this and all of us have to be part of the solution. It becomes more complicated because countries like China and India will look at the industrialised world and say, ‘You know it was you, the industrialised world, that actually created the concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to begin with, so why should we pay the principal cost?'”
“And the fact that the United States and China and India have approached this with such hesitation has made it extraordinarily difficult to actually get traction on some form of effective set of negotiations,” Pascual said asking the US to play a leadership role.