India's local route to fight climate change
India has unveiled for the first time a national policy on tackling climate change. Unlike the Group of Seven industrialised nations, which continues to evade concrete policies, the Indian document outlines a comprehensive plan, draws on the market efficiency that comes naturally to the private sector to meet its targets and once again illustrates that Asian policies emerge from local values and concepts.
Launching the plan, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh articulated the culture which produced the document. 'India', he said, 'has a civilisational legacy which treats nature as a source of nurture and not as a dark force to be conquered and harnessed to human endeavour.' Rooted in local culture, the idea is common sense to Asians - many of whom display their reverence for the natural world by worshipping it - but radically different from Europe where modern science developed as a tool to dominate the natural world.
The manner in which science developed explains why the west refuses to take action on climate change. The developed world is unwilling to reduce greenhouse gas emissions because it entails cutting back on the excesses of a consumerist lifestyle. Though the G8 agreed to a common vision of reducing by 2050 emissions by 50 per cent, there is no mention of the base year from which this reduction is to be measured.
The developed world ensures that it can maintain the lifestyle it has grown accustomed to by refusing to take action and yet demanding that India and China curtail their efforts at improving the lives of some of the most deprived people in the world.
In keeping with its culture, India insists on improving the lives of the poor and preserving the natural world. The most innovative aspect of Dr Singh's plan is that public power grids purchase renewable energy from the private sector.
Indian companies are at the forefront of a global trend to invest in clean technologies, reports the UN Environment Programme. Last year, the private sector attracted US$2.5 billion in asset finance for mostly wind power projects, almost four times more than in 2006, adding a capacity of 1.7 gigawatts. Solar energy production will be increased to 1GW by 2017, the decrepit power grid will be refurbished and access to public transport will be improved, saving 10,000MW by 2012.
The industrialisation of western Europe and the United States has produced 56 per cent of the world's carbon dioxide emissions. In contrast, India is delaying its massive regeneration programmes and favouring investment in renewable energy. Its modernisation will be powered not by fossil fuels but by renewable energy.
Though India's per capita emissions are just 4 per cent of those of the US and 12 per cent of the European Union, Dr Singh is ensuring that India's development is not at the cost of the global future. It is time the west matched India's commitment by taking responsibility for the global past.
