At the opening of the summit, US President Barack Obama said, “Targets are set not for each of us, but by each of us”.
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“The solar alliance we are setting up today is an alliance of countries that want to seize the abundant resource of sun energy”.
“We would have wished to be further along than we are at this point, but the text being forwarded so far reflects our key priorities”, said Thoriq Ibrahim from the Maldives and chair of the Alliance of Small Island States. Any plant that comes up, has to be more efficient than the rest. “She recognises that. It’s not ideological”.
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, president of the climate talks, says “there’s very strong momentum” but that’s not enough.
The breakthrough, though, appears to be, first, that China and India are more and more becoming aware of their own self-interest in reducing choking air pollution and protecting their coastal population centers against sea level rise.
In the weeks before the Paris summit, Indian negotiators blocked G20 nations from issuing an expansive climate accord. “Climate change is not of our making”. The CSE, under its outspoken founder Anil Agarwal, was part of the official delegation and helped articulate some of these views.
Rich nations pledged in 2009 to muster $ one hundred billion (ninety two billion euros) per yr from 2020 to assist creating nations shift away from fossil fuels and shore up their defences towards climate change-induced harms. And 12 million young people are pushing each year on the country’s labor market.
Developing nations additionally need assurances that the quantity will improve over time, however rich nations are loath to make new, lengthy-time period commitments.
While the climate talks are important for the global economy, it is also significant for India.
India is the world’s third biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. To put that number in perspective, India is basically planning to add more renewable energy capacity in the next seven years than Germany has added energy capacity in the previous 200 years of industrialization.
India has also been targeted by the western media on its expansion plans of coal usage to meet its energy requirements. Solar and wind energy are at the top of the list.
The availability of gas in India and China is low, we have coal and we use it, ” he said. “The balance will be met by what is our cheapest source and one that we know how to use – coal”. But the country had to find a different way of doing it, even compared to the greenest European countries, he said. “I could quote you statistics forever but suffice to say the amount of energy supply in India is 0.8 tonnes of oil equivalent per person per year”. Scientifically plausible disaster scenarios are awful: Much of South Asia could experience literally lethal temperature increases in which humans cannot survive outdoors for more than a few hours; Mumbai could be underwater; and society may not be able adjust to these changes peacefully.
The World Energy Agency recently concluded that the sub-continental giant would likely account for a full quarter of the growth in energy demand in coming years.
“We don’t want to lock people into perpetual energy poverty and income poverty…”
Yet many observers argue that the world can not afford to have India nowhere near to reaching peak levels of coal consumption when even China is hoping to reach peak carbon emission by 2030.
But there is another, related reason why climate policy is dead: Carbon emissions have peaked and are going down in many rich nations, including the United States.
The Indian Prime Minister’s reference to the Protocol stood out at the COP21 conference, where the discussions were mostly future-focussed, for the post-2020 era. It’s heavily coal dependent. “We need the industry in India and the world to collectively come work together so that we can enhance efficiency”, he said. The country’s fourth-largest city, Chennai, has been virtually isolated by floodwaters, placing the nation’s military on a “war footing” in its response and prompting stunning acts of heroism to rescue survivors.
The initiative, which seeks to mobilise $100 billion in investments to rapidly develop solar energy in tropical countries, is consistent with Modi’s call for wealthier countries to accelerate the transfer of clean energy technologies to poorer nations.
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The Paris climate agreement must signal a vision similar to that of the Solar Alliance you lead. The Indian pavilion, with its hi-tech wizardry wowed delegates: at intervals, water whooshed down the frontage and coloured laser lights projected brief messages for participants on the falling water.
