A Bigger Climate Fund, But The Same Old Fights At COP30
Even as climate finance rises, COP30 exposed the unresolved battle over historic emissions, carbon removal and shared responsibility.
The Gist
COP30 in Brazil concluded with mixed outcomes for climate action.
- The conference promised to triple climate funding from wealthy nations to developing countries.
- India aligned with fossil fuel-dependent nations, opposing an immediate phase-out of fossil fuels.
- Critics highlighted the lack of a concrete action plan to combat climate change, raising concerns among climate activists.
The 30th Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, COP30 for short, concluded last week in Belem, Brazil, promising to triple the funds that the rich would transfer to developing countries for climate action and refrained from outlining any action plan to phase out fossil fuels, much to the dismay of the garden variety of climate activist. New Delhi, an energy-poor nation, was with the petro states in opposing an immediate phase-out of fossil fuels, and rightly so.
The biggest polluters are poverty and want, Indira Gandhi told the first UN Conference on the Environment in 1972, in Stockholm. This was, of course, before her image makeover as destroyer of democracy during the Emergency.
Her forceful position made the gathering Green movement in Europe wake up to the reality that the rich world’s developmental phase of enormous violence on the environment — cutting down forests for hardwood to burn to make steel, before the use of coal became widespread to fill the skyline of any major town with belching chimneys and black smoke, clearing pastures and woods for new mines, roads, farms and towns, polluting rivers and lakes with urban sewage and the effluents of a growing chemicals industry — might be behind them but that the rest of the world was just embarking on that journey, and needed technological solutions and forbearance.
Who Cleans History?
New Delhi has not wavered, ever since, from privileging development, while being as mindful as possible to minimise environmental damage. Growth calls for lots more of electricity, and we cannot rely just on non-fossil sources to supply the power needed to build the prosperity of a poor, aspiring population that is 1.4 billion strong.
In the global effort to combat climate change, beginning with the Rio Earth Summit of 1992, and particularly in the 1999 conference that created the Kyoto Protocol to the UNFCCC, which enshrined the goal of slashing emissions as the path to combat climate change, India and other developing countries slipped up. We conceded the notion that global warming is to be fought by reducing the emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs), demanding only special and differential treatment for developing countries while setting emission reduction targets.
Rich Nations And Climate Loopholes
The sensible strategy would have been to demand that the rich world take out from the atmosphere the greenhouse gases it had pumped into the atmosphere to grow rich. The Sixth Assessment Report submitted to COP26 held at Glasgow in 2021 brings out the problem in stark detail. Beginning 1850, till 2019, the world had pumped out 2,400 Gigatonnes (Gt) of CO2 equivalent into the atmosphere, and 58% of this depredation took place before 1990.
What is CO2 equivalent? Different GHGs have different warming potential. Methane, for example, is 28 times more potent than CO2 in warming the planet, so one tonne of methane would be 28 tonnes of CO2 equivalent, and so on for all the other GHGs, depending on their global warming potential.
The significance of emissions up to 1989 is that they have almost entirely been by the rich world. China began its reforms in 1979, true, but began growing fast in the 1990s, and became a manufacturing giant only after it joined the WTO in 2001. India began its reforms in 1991. If the rich world accounted for the bulk of warming gases in the atmosphere, the appropriate climate action is for them to remove it.
If Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) had been identified as the most effective and appropriate means of climate mitigation, the onus would have fallen squarely on the rich world: the polluter pays, goes the principle. But the rich world framed climate action as reducing emissions, which is a shared responsibility for all those who emit GHGs, including the developing countries.
For a long time, the only way to remove CO2 from the air was to use giant fans to blow the air onto material that absorbs CO2, and releases it on heating, for storage underground or to mix with minerals such as basalt to form carbonates. This is expensive.
The challenge is to find not just less expensive ways to remove CO2 from the air but also to use the captured CO2 to produce useful materials, such as graphene, ethylene, and other molecules that are the darlings of the petrochemical industry. The world needs more R&D to innovate chemistry and biotechnology to this end.
A Federal Flashpoint
Another significant development last week has been the Supreme Court’s response to a Presidential reference, in the wake of an April ruling by a two-member bench of the apex court that set a timeline for Governors and the President to decide their course of action on bills presented to them after being passed by state legislatures.
The April ruling came in the wake of the Governor of Tamil Nadu refusing to act, for years on end, on a raft of bills presented to him for his assent. A governor has to choose one of three actions once a bill is presented to him by a legislature for his assent: one, grant his assent, two, refer the bill back to the state legislature with his reservations or advice, and three, reserve the bill for the consideration of the President.
In case they choose option two, and the legislature revalidates the same bill with or without modification, the Governor is supposed to grant his assent. Inaction on the bills amounts to thwarting the will of the people of the state, as articulated by the state legislature, by a representative of the central government.
The result would be the same if a governor refers a bill for the President’s consideration, and the President again sits on the bill indefinitely. The April 8 verdict by Justice Pardiwala and Justice Mahadevan set timelines for action by the Governor and the President after a bill is presented to them, so that within six months at the outer limit, the bill would become law. In the case of a bill being referred to the President, and the President entertaining doubts about the constitutional validity of the bill, this verdict said the President should seek the advice of the Supreme Court, using the power of presidential reference.
Last week, a Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court overruled the Pardiwala-Mahadevan verdict and said there could be no timelines constraining the Governor and the President. If there was inordinate delay, the Court’s help could be sought to mandate a decision on the bill. But if a gubernatorial authority withholds assent, that decision would not be justiciable.
This ruling gives the Centre overweening power, and negates states’ rights. If the Goveror and the President can withhold assent to a state bill on arbitrary grounds beyond adjudication, this undermines the constitutional scheme of division of legislative authority between the Centre and the states, and gives the Centre the power to overrule the states’ views even on matters in the States’ List in the Seventh Schedule of the Constitution. This has set the ground for future federal friction.
Flexibility Needs Fairness
The markets have been cheering the possibility, asserted by a member of the Federal Open Markets Committee, of a December rate cut in the US, and also by the notification in India of the four labour codes that have been ready for long. States are yet to frame rules to operationalise the Codes, however.
The expectation that the new Codes would make a big difference to the ease of doing business overrates the hindrance posed, in effect, by the earlier set of labour laws, and underestimates the ability of Indian businessmen to get around legal obligations towards labour by hook or by crook.
Unions have to appreciate that labour flexibility is a prerequisite for effective participation by Indian producers in globalised growth, with its rapid technological change and demand fluctuations. Industry must appreciate that one, it is unfair to expect labour alone to bear the cost of instituting such flexibility and reskilling, and two, that a well-paid workforce is the only way to secure growing demand for industry’s produce, that is, to grow the internal market.
