Published: June 6 2007 19:39 | Last updated: June 6 2007 19:39
When leaders of the Group of Eight leading industrial countries discuss climate change with India on Thursday, they should keep in the back of their minds an image of Mukesh Ambani’s new home in Mumbai. India’s “Mr Big”, the chairman of Reliance Industries and the world’s 14th richest man, is building himself a glass palace in the sky.
Named Antillia, after a mythical island off Spain, the heat-absorbing tower will rise 570ft, the height of a 60-storey residential building, and enjoy an unbroken view over the Arabian Sea. Costing an estimated $500m, according to people close to Mr Ambani, replete with helipad, pool, parking for 168 luxury cars and quarters for an army of staff, it is quite possibly the world’s most extravagant private home.
Such self-indulgence should be a reminder that the G8 is dealing with not one India when it comes to climate change, but two: first-world India and third-world India. First-world India is profligate in its energy consumption. Leaving aside Mr Ambani and the air-conditioners he will need to cool his palace, energy efficiency has yet to enter the vocabulary of the great Indian middle class, a cash-rich population that, according to McKinsey, will expand 10-fold over the next 25 years to nearly 600m. In third-world India, while farmers gorge on free electricity, the government’s goal of “power for all” remains a distant prospect. Half of all households lack electricity. Cow dung remains a common cooking fuel.
First-world India, which boasts a $1,000bn stock market, has the most billionaires in Asia and plans an unmanned moonshot next year, can share the burden of global emissions reductions without compromising third-world India’s development. But as negotiations open on extending the United Nations treaty on global warming beyond 2012, India will once again plead poverty in justifying its refusal to agree to cuts, curbs or ceilings on its emissions. Although it ratified Kyoto, it escaped binding emissions targets, arguing that as its per capita emissions were low and as it was not responsible for the bulk of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, rich countries should shoulder the burden. That remains its position today.
“India is hiding behind its poor,” says Praful Bidwai, a leading environmental analyst in New Delhi. “It simply will not do to contend that India’s per capita emissions are about one-fourth the global average and so it is not obliged to cut emissions. The biggest emissions in India come from wasteful and luxurious energy consumption by the elite and middle classes, who’ve never had it so good. That’s why India must accept deep cuts in emissions, in particular those relating to private vehicles, the profligate use of energy and water by the rich and the rocketing consumption of air-conditioners, washing machines, microwave ovens and plasma and liquid crystal display television sets.”
This is not the view of the government. Anyone doubting that should read the budget-day speech given by P. Chidambaram, finance minister, this February.
“India is not a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and nor will it be so in the foreseeable future,” he said, skating over the fact that India was already the world’s fifth largest carbon dioxide emitter in 2004 and poised to overtake Japan and Russia. Yet, for as long as Indian emissions are significantly below the world average on a per capita basis – at about 1.1 tonnes per head, they were 23 per cent of the world average in 2004, compared with equivalent figures of 20 tonnes in the US and 4.1 tonnes in China – that seems likely to remain New Delhi’s default negotiating position.
It is rapidly becoming untenable. As a prime victim of global warming, India harms itself by providing a figleaf for US inaction: the World Bank estimates, for example, that climate change could cause Indian crop yields to fall by a devastating 30 per cent by mid-century. Furthermore, India’s growth, although there are some signs of improvement, remains highly carbon-intensive. Carbon emissions per dollar of gross domestic product, a crucial measure of energy efficiency, are three times higher than in the US, according to Standard and Poor’s, principally because of India’s dependence on unscrubbed coal for 70 per cent of its energy needs. India’s CO2 emissions will increase almost 2½ times by 2030. With Tata Motors set to launch a car costing just $2,500 next year, emissions from vehicles alone could rise 5.8 times.
Manmohan Singh, India’s prime minister, is expected to resist pressure in Germany while trying not to appear uncooperative. “We expect India to try to present a more positive face in Heiligendamm,” says a UK diplomat. “They’re not going to say: ‘It’s not our problem any more’ – that’s an old line – but the difficulty arises when you talk about targets that are legally binding.” The cost of securing Indian participation in any multilateral emissions reduction process will be high. An editorial in The Times of India this week flatly demanded that the US provide a “Marshall Plan II” to pay for India to go green. “The flow of capital should come with no strings attached,” it warned. Unless the west writes a big cheque to subsidise the transfer of patented technologies, first-world India’s energy binge is unlikely to end any time soon.
A Sacred River Endangered by Global Warming
Glacial Source of Ganges Is Receding
By Emily Wax
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, June 17, 2007; A14
VARANASI, India -- With her eyes sealed, Ramedi cupped the murky water of the Ganges River in her hands, lifted them toward the sun, and prayed for her husband, her 15 grandchildren and her bad hip. She, like the rest of India's 800 million Hindus, has absolute faith that the river she calls Ganga Ma can heal.
Around Ramedi, who like some Indians has only one name, people converged on the riverbank in the early morning, before the day's heat set in. Women floated necklaces of marigolds on a boat of leaves, a dozen skinny boys soaped their hair as they bathed in their underwear, and a somber group of men carried a body to the banks of the river, a common ritual before the dead are cremated on wooden funeral pyres. To be cremated beside the Ganges, most here believe, brings salvation from the cycle of rebirth.
"Ganga Ma is everything to Hindus. It's our chance to attain nirvana," Ramedi said, emerging from the river, her peach-colored sari dripping along the shoreline.
But the prayer rituals carried out at the water's edge may not last forever -- or even another generation, according to scientists and meteorologists. The Himalayan source of Hinduism's holiest river, they say, is drying up.
In this 3,000-year-old city known as the Jerusalem of India for its intense religious devotion, climate change could throw into turmoil something many devout Hindus thought was immutable: their most intimate religious traditions. The Gangotri glacier, which provides up to 70 percent of the water of the Ganges during the dry summer months, is shrinking at a rate of 40 yards a year, nearly twice as fast as two decades ago, scientists say.
"This may be the first place on Earth where global warming could hurt our very religion. We are becoming an endangered species of Hindus," said Veer Bhadra Mishra, an engineer and director of the Varanasi-based Sankat Mochan Foundation, an organization that advocates for the preservation of the Ganges. "The melting glaciers are a terrible thing. We have to ask ourselves, who are the custodians of our culture if we can't even help our beloved Ganga?"
Environmental groups such as Mishra's have long focused on pollution of the Ganges. More than 100 cities and countless villages are situated along the 1,568-mile river, which stretches from the foothills of the Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal, and few of them have sewage treatment plants.
But recent reports by scientists say the Ganges is under even greater threat from global warming. According to a U.N. climate report, the Himalayan glaciers that are the sources of the Ganges could disappear by 2030 as temperatures rise.
The shrinking glaciers also threaten Asia's supply of fresh water. The World Wildlife Fund in March listed the Ganges among the world's 10 most endangered rivers. In India, the river provides more than 500 million people with water for drinking and farming.
The immediate effect of glacier recession is a short-lived surplus of water. But eventually the supply runs out, and experts predict that the Ganges eventually will become a seasonal river, largely dependent on monsoon rains.
"There has never been a greater threat for the Ganges," said Mahesh Mehta, an environmental lawyer who has been filing lawsuits against corporations dumping toxins in the Ganges. He is now redirecting his energies toward the melting glaciers. "If humans don't change their interference, our very religion, our livelihoods are under threat."
Mehta and other environmentalists want to see the Indian government here enforce strict reductions of greenhouse gas emissions, the primary cause of climate change.
But during this month's Group of Eight conference of the major industrialized nations, both India and China, eager to protect their market growth, joined the United States in refusing to support mandatory limits on greenhouse gas emissions. President Bush has instead pushed a plan for nonbinding goals to reduce emissions.
"It is a fact that more and not less development is the best way for developing countries to address themselves to the issues of preserving the environment," Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said in a public statement before leaving for the G-8 summit in Germany.
While India is one of the world's top producers of greenhouse gas emissions -- along with the United States, China, Russia and Japan -- it argues that the United States and other developed countries should reduce their own emissions before expecting developing nations to follow suit.
Environmentalists call that kind of thinking shortsighted and say India desperately needs strong laws in place at a time when the country is growing so quickly.
"Economic growth is important, but can you imagine a billion cars in India?" Mehta asked. "As people become affluent, they want cars and air conditioners and refrigerators. What effect is that going to have on the environment?"
About 1 million pilgrims a year visit this ancient, hardscrabble city, many traveling hundreds of miles on foot. Many of them leave with vials of Ganges water to wear around their necks or display in their homes, sometimes sprinkling droplets of water into their town's wells, spiritually purifying their drinking water.
On the stone steps leading up to the Ganges' famous temple ghats, graffiti reads: "Happy is the person who lives by Ganga, Ma" and "I love my India."
"The government should realize that climate change will hurt not just communities, but also businesses and even the Ganga itself, our most sacred river," said Srinivas Krishnaswamy, a climate and energy expert for Greenpeace in India.
"When the Ganga River is threatened, Indians will have to wake up the government to this crisis."
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