The climate negotiations at Copenhagen have only just started, but already the recriminations have begun. Developing countries have accused the developed world of ?climate colonialism?, and the negotiations seem unlikely to move beyond the tired frameworks established at Kyoto in 1997.
India?s own stance has remained reactive to the West?s proposals instead of laying out the country?s interests in its own terms. Even worse, India now appears to be following others? agendas: the Prime Minister changed his mind about attending the talks as a result of the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting, and the government has followed China in pledging to regulate the economy?s carbon intensity. India has missed a real chance at global leadership. The world?s environmental problems will not be solved by tinkering with the details of the Kyoto framework: the real way forward is to change the terms of the argument. And that can only happen if there is a concerted effort to bring a broad bloc of developing countries together on a single platform. An India that seeks to become a world power needs to invest in the bilateral and multilateral diplomacy that would make this a reality?a new Bandung aimed at something bigger than just transcending an ideological divide.
The most important shift that this new diplomacy needs to engender is a move away from looking at environmental problems solely through the prism of carbon emissions. The variables that will determine India?s quality of life in this century?pollution, availability of water, forest cover, flooding?are as key to a lasting global environmental settlement as are levels of carbon in the atmosphere. Both India and the world need to move towards a conception of costs and values that encompasses all of these instead of merely seeking to price carbon emissions.
India can begin to try to shift the consensus by seeking to put a price on pollution and waste: as a first step. It should seek agreement on an international regime that prices environmental protections into the mining of the rare-earth minerals that look to be crucial to the developed world?s new green economies, particularly the production of electric and hybrid cars. It should also seek to change the economics of the electronics and high-technology industries by asking the world to compel countries that fail to recycle their own electronic waste to bear the full ecological costs of recycling it elsewhere.
The carbon problem itself will not be solved by arbitrary targets or carbon-trading markets: the incentives are too small, and the disincentive of high carbon prices is too far in the future to modify current behaviour. What the world needs is a new development dividend that allows urgent GDP-intensive growth in the developing world at the same time as it incentivises low-carbon solutions in the West. This is best accomplished through a scaled emissions exemption available to developed and developing countries alike for the construction of new-build mass-transit systems and high-volume, carbon-light freight transport networks .
This development dividend would enable the developing world to build the infrastructure it needs to seed GDP growth in the present while giving the West a real incentive to move away from resource-destructive road transportation. In exchange, India and other developing countries would offer a package of new energy-efficiency standards for infrastructure-related industries like brick-kilns, concrete plants and steel factories?not because they satisfy emissions targets, but because they make sense within a wider conception value in their domestic economies and eco-systems.
At the same time, India and China in particular need to focus their collective diplomatic energy on the problem of outsourced manufacturing, recycling and waste disposal. No just solution to the problem of carbon emissions can be predicated on a calculation in which goods manufactured, recycled or broken up for Americans or Europeans create carbon penalties for developing countries. The most elegant solution would link the carbon costs of production directly to corporate profits: emissions should be charged to the country in which the parent company is domiciled for tax purposes. America would pay the carbon costs of toys made in China; India the costs of Land Rovers made in Britain.
All this will mean placing a greater burden on multilateral organisations and multilateral diplomacy?and perhaps even creating new institutions to champion these new solutions. The alternative business as usual in the form of targets, peaking-dates and carbon credits?does very little to solve the real problems facing India and the world.
The developed world is unlikely to be willing to move outside the narrow agendas of Kyoto and Copenhagen. But India and the developing world can still change the rules of the game. Diplomats and heads of state are not the only actors in a networked world; a savvy approach could sidestep them and aim directly at their domestic constituencies. If governments won?t play ball, the developing world should take its message straight to Western consumers: their pocketbooks may well be the only short-term mechanism that can spur a real change in the world?s climate politics.
The author has taught Indian history at Oxford and Cambridge Universities