Progress on Climate

The world community can heave a sigh of relief that the Paris climate pact still remains on track, thanks to the last gasp agreement that came through in the latest talks at Katowice in Poland. How difficult it is to make headway in combating climate change can be gauged from the fact that oil majors were not even ready to welcome a UN commissioned report calling for ‘unprecedented changes’ to limit the Earth’s temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Saudi Arabia, the US, Russia and Kuwait managed to pull their weight, so that ‘gratitude’ was expressed for the IPCC report which nations can access for climate-related information. Primarily, the 196 nations that came together for the 24th ‘Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’ (COP24), managed to finalize a rule book so that Paris pact provisions can be operationalised from January 2021. If the rise in average world temperatures is to be capped within 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, this rule book details how nations will report and monitor their pledges to curb greenhouse gas emissions. It will put the focus on action (rather than endless promises) so that responsibilities are shouldered. In Paris in 2015, nations had agreed to set emission reduction targets for themselves as well as hold themselves accountable over their targets. While a section of climate activists have decried the Katowice talks as too little too late, developing nations still remain in the dark as to how the climate change fund of 100 billion dollars per year will be mobilised by 2020. It further remains to be seen how guidelines emerge for establishing new climate finance targets from 2025 onwards.

It also speaks volumes that the US, the world’s largest emitter, pushed coal as a ‘clean fuel’ in Katowice and fought against any move to limit coal burning. This approach is in line with Donald Trump, who wants the US out of the Paris pact, championing the cause of American coal industry whose miners are part of his blue collar vote base. Trump is also enamoured of Saudi Arabia’s so-called initiative to keep oil prices down, gleefully dubbing it “a big tax cut” that Americans should enjoy. However, oil producers will do anything to keep intact their stranglehold on world economy — OPEC has already joined hands with Russia to cut output, which will again raise oil prices next year. As for the US, the world’s largest oil producer, its strenuous effort to push exports of its relatively costlier oil could explain why the Trump administration is hell bent on choking Iran’s oil exports. While oil is the single largest source (among fossil fuels) of carbon dioxide emissions heating up the atmosphere, strategic ploys by oil producers to keep the world hooked to cheap oil have hurt collective climate action. It is only because China, India and the European Union continue to be committed to the climate cause that the Paris pact is still largely holding. For India, the Katowice talks were fruitful in the sense that the rules binding nations to their climate action contributions are anchored on the Paris pact. While developed nations were forced to part with more details about climate finance, the developing bloc had to agree to a more rigorous transparency regime for performance appraisal.

With nations bargaining hard about over how to bring about a low-carbon future, the buzzword was again ‘equity’. Developed nations, due to their coal and oil fuelled growth, are primarily responsible for global warming, while the capability to deal with climate change is distributed unequally among nations. This is where the concept of equity, or rather justice, comes into play because each nation is unwilling to make greater commitments towards combating climate until and unless other nations are willing to do their share. India in Paris pledged to cut emissions by one-third (below 2005 levels) by 2030, generate two-fifth of its energy from non-fossil sources and plant more forests to absorb carbon dioxide (carbon sinks). Equity is therefore something India is striving for, because delivering on such commitments will require huge sacrifices. But the Katowice agreement is being criticised for ‘dilution’ of equity in stock-taking mechanism, clearly under pressure from the developed nations. Another failure is the continuing disagreement over carbon market — which would reward nations keeping within carbon emission limits, as well as put in place mechanisms like pricing and taxing carbon to push producers into low carbon emission paths. All such issues have been deferred to the next round of climate talks, so India cannot afford to lower her guard.