www.frontlineonnet.com/stories/20080509250909600.htm
FALLING BACK ON PSEUDO-SCIENCE?
by Praful Bidwai
Indian policymakers are clutching at straws to
duck their responsibility to reduce the country's
greenhouse gas emissions.
AS Indian policymakers come under growing
pressure from global scientific and political
communities on climate change, they are
increasingly resorting to disingenuous, devious
or downright specious arguments to avoid taking
purposive action to cap and reduce the country's
greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, which are rising
three-and-a-half times faster than the world
average.
Instead of acknowledging the universal
responsibility that devolves on all states to
contain and reverse global warming and
demonstrating a strong will to seize the
initiative, they are preoccupied with averting or
deflecting that pressure.
Three of their arguments are by now familiar.
One, hide behind the poor and claim that the
developing countries cannot afford to give up on
poverty reduction by controlling carbon
emissions, which are low in per capita terms and
need to increase if all their people are to have
access to, say, electricity for lighting. This
hides huge (and growing) differentials in
consumption, and in GHG contributions, between
their own rich and poor and makes blanket per
capita comparisons meaningless.
A second argument makes any Indian effort to
control GHG emissions conditional upon something
else: for instance, emissions trading under the
clean development mechanism (CDM) agreed to in
the Kyoto Protocol; grants from the rich to
develop less carbon-intensive technologies; and
incredible as it might seem, international
support for the United States-India nuclear deal.
The recent appointment of former Foreign
Secretary Shyam Saran as the Prime Minister's
special envoy on climate issues has been
described in official briefings as signifying
India's intention to "use the climate change
argument to push forward its nuclear deal". As a
newspaper reported: "The government is working on
the argument that the deal is important for India
and good for the world because it addresses the
issue of climate change. If India is not to burn
the world out of the galaxy [sic] with fossil
fuels, it is in the global interest to let India
go through with the nuclear deal." This argument
will come in especially handy if a Democrat
becomes the next President of America.
However, as this Column has argued (Frontline
September 7, 2007; August 12, 2005), nuclear
power can at best make only a marginal
contribution to reducing GHGs. Besides, the
"give-us-the-deal-or-we'll-spread-the-plague"
line sounds more like a threat from an
irresponsible nation than a logically persuasive
argument. It is unlikely to find many buyers.
The third argument is that India is already doing
enough. As another daily put it: "Saran's first
job" is to "get the record right", and declare
that India is "already clean". Saran is quoted as
saying: "Nationally, we are already doing a lot.
While our economy has grown by 8-9 per cent, our
energy intensity has only grown by 4 per cent."
Similarly, he contends, India recycles 70 per
cent of its waste and is among the leaders in
wind energy. It cannot be asked to do more.
This reasoning is dubious. The 70 per cent
recycling (of what?) figure has been bandied
about without a remotely systematic, let alone
rigorous, study. This factoid is probably of the
same quality as former Environment Secretary
Prodipto Ghosh's claim that even the affluent in
India, with their hugely energy-intensive
lifestyles, fuel-guzzling cars and armies of
servants, live frugally because they sell off old
newspapers.
True, India is the world's Number 4 in wind
energy, but this contributes less than 2 per cent
to its power generation. More important is
India's other Number 4 rank: among the world's
biggest GHG emitters, a position from which it
has just displaced Japan. Equally, India is
already the world's Number 2 as far as the
expansion of coal-based electricity goes.
Much of India's recent GHG increases have come
from the "luxury consumption" of the rich,
related to privatised transport, posh housing,
air-conditioning, water overuse, and so on. There
is huge scope for reducing the energy and carbon
intensity of output, which only an irresponsible
and profligate country would ignore.
And now, Indian policymakers seem to be seeking
solace in outright denial of the need to do
anything about global warming at all, in
particular, undertake major GHG reductions. On
April 2, Planning Commission Deputy Chairman
Montek Singh Ahluwalia called for a
"comprehensive debate on the issue of climate
change" because, reported The Hindu, there is "an
element of uncertainty" on whether climate change
is as serious a threat as projected.
While releasing a report by the Civil Society
Coalition on Climate Change (CSCCC) and its
Delhi-based affiliate, the Liberty Institute,
Ahluwalia said: "It [the report] needs to be
thoroughly discussed, and if it is true, then it
is for the developed countries to mitigate the
damage caused to the environment while the
developing countries can resort to adaptation to
prevent global warming." Significantly, other
members of the establishment, including former
Environment Minister Suresh Prabhu and the
Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and
Industry secretary-general Amit Mitra, besides
Liberty Institute office-bearers, were also
present at the release.
The report (available at http://www.csccc.info)
attacks the principal conclusions of the United
Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) and rejects any capping of GHG emissions
as this would be "counterproductive": undermine
economic development, "harm the poor", and
probably fail to address climate change problem
"in a meaningful way".
Instead, it advocates "economic development"
(read, limitless market-driven growth) and yet
more consumption, denies a link between climate
change and the growing incidence of diseases, and
zealously demands privatisation of water and
other resources and the lifting of all taxes,
tariffs, subsidies and entry barriers - to
promote "free enterprise".
Some Indian newspapers gave the report prominent
coverage, virtually equating the CSCCC, despite
its lack of expertise or scholarship on climate
issues, with the IPCC, which has 2,500 scientists
from the world over and whose deliberations
lasting 20 years led to four detailed
peer-reviewed assessment reports.
The CSCCC was only established in February 2007
and has 40-odd member-organisations, which
function as industry-friendly think tanks or
corporate lobbyists, and have names like the
Institute for Free Enterprise, Institute for
Market Economics, Hayek Institute, Free Market
Foundation, Minimal Government Thinkers, and
Liberty Institute. Earlier, the CSCCC was based
mainly in western Europe and North America and
was coordinated through the so-called
International Policy Network; now these groups
are trying to spread their influence to India and
China. Articles by their members are carried in
Indian newspapers.
The CSCCC comprises hard-core libertarians of the
Ayn Rand variety, who dogmatically advocate the
free market, including "tax freedom", minimal or
no government, unrestricted individual liberties
and strong intellectual property regimes.
Libertarians are even further to the right than
neoliberals. Many CSCCC constituents are funded
by big corporations such as ExxonMobil. (See
http://www.exxonsecrets.org, and some interesting
facts in Manu Sharma's blog,
http://orangehues.com/blog/2008/04/climate-change-in-media-ht-reaches-new.html#ref4)
Such libertarians have a "one-size-fits-all"
approach to all social, economic and political
problems, regardless of context or content. They
subordinate democracy, or the rule of the people,
to the rule of property. They do not deal with
specific issues. For instance, it is irrelevant
to them whether and what kind of human activity
may have led to global warming and what the
multifarious consequences of a rise in the
earth's temperature would be. (In fact, they are
anti-environmentalists or are climate change
deniers, like Bjorn Lomborg.)
In the past, CSCCC members have questioned the
existence of global warming on spurious or
frivolous methodological grounds, argued that
people should adapt themselves to climate change
rather than prevent or stop it, and lobbied
governments against signing the Kyoto Protocol
and participating in its follow-up conference in
Bali.
Flimsy report
The CSCCC report is utterly flimsy and fails to
grapple with the issues at the heart of the
climate debate, including the extent of global
warming and its relationship to GHG emissions;
the likely physical, ocean-related and
climatological effects of a rise in global
temperatures under varying scenarios and their
consequences for different biological systems,
human habitats, health and economic activities;
and different ways of stabilising or reducing
emissions, their differential costs and the
distribution of these costs across different
countries.
It only looks at one minuscule aspect, disease,
and summarily rejects the World Health
Organisation's detailed findings on the
climate-health link. It concludes on the basis of
vague, uncorrelated numbers that deaths from
climate-related disasters have fallen
dramatically since the 1920s as a result of
economic growth and technological development.
But that is like saying that one should not
invest in new medical discoveries because some of
the biggest gains in health indices have occurred
because of better sanitation and nutrition.
The report is an exercise in charlatanry and
sophistry, which adopts a sanctimonious tone in
speaking of the poor and their stake in not
combating global warming.
What is astonishing is that Ahluwalia should have
bestowed respectability upon such a junk-science-
based, dogma-driven, fact-free report. True, he
"wondered aloud whether the IPCC could go so
horribly wrong as the current report" makes out.
But this criticism was oblique and mild, within a
general commendation of the document. This stands
in sharp contrast to his scathing attack on the
United Nations Development Programme's Human
Development Report, which too he released last
year, for asking India to make GHG cuts. In any
case, it is doubtful whether he would have lent
his weight to a radical (as against corporate or
free market) environmental agenda.
It is sad, embarrassing, even shameful, that our
policymakers should countenance giving any
quarter to libertarianism and fall back on its
pseudo-science to resist the eminently reasonable
demand that fast-growing, big economies such as
China and India must stop using resources
profligately, limit elite consumption, adopt
energy-efficient technologies and move towards
capping their emissions.
Deeper cuts needed
What makes this even more deplorable is the
evidence emerging from solid scientific studies
that suggests that the world needs to make much
deeper cuts in GHG emissions than suggested by
the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report, or rather,
its politically negotiated, widely circulated
"Summary for Policymakers", which has influenced
policymakers and the media.
The prestigious science journal Nature (April 3)
published a remarkable article entitled
"Dangerous assumptions" by Roger Pielke, Tom
Wigley and Christopher Green, which argues that
the IPCC's Summary holds that the world economy
is moving towards decarbonisation (reduced use of
fossil fuels per unit of production) and that
energy efficiency (the amount of energy needed to
produce, say, Rs.10 crore worth of goods) is
falling.
Under this trend, the world will spontaneously
achieve about three-fourths of the reduction in
GHG emissions needed to stabilise atmospheric
carbon dioxide levels at around 500 parts per
million without policy intervention such as
tightened regulation and incentives and
disincentives. Such reductions are built into the
IPCC's reference scenarios. Thanks to this "free
ride" provided by decarbonisation, the world will
only have to bring about a much smaller GHG
reduction under different scenarios.
"In all [scenarios], the IPCC assumes that most
of the challenge (between 57 per cent and 96 per
cent) of achieving stabilisation Šwill occur
automatically, leaving a much smaller
emissions-reduction target for explicit climate
policies," say the authors.
Alas, this is not to be! In reality, the world is
recarbonising, "thanks to the economic
transformation taking place in the developing
world, especially in China and India. As
development proceeds, rural populations move to
high-rise buildings that consume energy and
energy-intensive materials. This process is
likely to continueŠ all over populous South Asia,
and eventually Africa, until well beyond 2050."
The IPCC assumes that Asian carbon dioxide
emissions will rise by 2.6 to 8.4 per cent a year
between 2000 and 2010. But more realistic
estimates, based on actual observation of energy
intensity and efficiency, are much higher, as
high as 13 per cent for China. Therefore, much
deeper GHG cuts will be needed in developing Asia
as well as the developed West. These will demand
improved efficiencies not just across countries
but "in individual energy-using sectors",
especially, heavy energy consumers such as
electricity generation, construction and cement,
chemicals and metals production.
The IPCC will no doubt revisit these scenarios
but is not due to do so until 2013. The world
cannot wait that long to start the process of
decarbonisation. It has become imperative to
break the link between poverty reduction and
carbon emissions and recognise that GHG emissions
cannot be adequately controlled by setting
binding output targets and relying on CDM
markets, as Kyoto does. What the world needs is a
combination of GHG reduction targets and massive
plans for new technology development and
technology transfer to developing Asia.
The sooner our policymakers accept this, the better
for us.*
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