By Joydeep Gupta, IANS
New Delhi : The US will not sign the successor to the Kyoto Protocol unless India commits to a mandatory reduction of its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, a senior official of the US government said here.
Speaking to IANS, the visiting official, who declined to be identified, said that the US position was “bipartisan” and he did not think it would change according to who occupied the White House in January 2009.
“Senator (John F.) Kerry said the same thing at Bali,” said the senior official of the Bush administration now here for the Feb 7-9 Delhi Sustainable Development Summit (DSDS).
“Major developing countries like India and China have to commit to reductions” in GHG emissions, the official quoted Kerry as saying. “And he (Kerry) is as liberal as you can get.”
US government delegates repeatedly held up progress at the Bali summit with their insistence that there be no mandatory emissions cap unless major developing countries made the same commitment, a position strongly opposed by India.
“There has been some movement in India’s position,” the Bush administration official told IANS Friday evening after a round of meetings with bureaucrats. “In fact, India has been doing a lot to reduce its emissions. I found out about it only after my meetings here now. The problem is that India’s not telling the world what it’s doing. It’s a PR issue.”
GHG emissions are leading to climate change that is already causing a drop in farm output, worsening frequency of and damage from droughts, floods and storms and raising sea levels.
The tussle is over emission of the main GHG carbon dioxide, caused largely by thermal power stations and transport. Developing countries led by India say a mandatory GHG emission cap will constrain their right to provide energy to all and anyway is not fair when industrialised countries are responsible for almost all the GHG in the earth’s atmosphere now. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh stressed the need for global “climate justice” when opening the DSDS Thursday.
The US and some other industrialised countries say China is already the world’s fourth largest GHG emitter and India the fifth, and unless these economies come on board their (industrialised countries’) emission reductions will become pointless. The Kyoto Protocol does not have any mandatory emissions cap on developing countries.
At last June’s G-8 summit in Germany, Manmohan Singh pledged that India’s per capita GHG emissions would never exceed that of industrialised countries, an offer rejected both by the Bush administration and Democratic Senator Kerry. They want to go by a country’s total emissions.
The US government official hoped there would be more “movement” from developing countries at the next climate change meet planned by President Bush in France this May and perhaps at the next G-8 summit in Japan this July.
(Joydeep Gupta can be contacted at [email protected])