US shirks green duty, turns screws on India

Nitin Sethi | TNN

New Delhi: With seven days of negotiations remaining before Copenhagen, the industrialised countries have still not made a single offer of financial compensation to poor and developing countries for their mitigation actions.

At Bangkok negotiations, the US turned around instead to demand that India and other developing countries put their entire set of emissions reducing actions under international scrutiny. The 192 members of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change had in Bali in 2007 agreed that the industrialised countries would undertake a higher level of emission cuts to counter the enhanced risks of climate change. The rest would undertake actions as per their national circumstances. The countries also agreed that the actions that were “enabled” by financial and technical support from the industrialised countries would be scrutinised by the UN process and verified. The logic then was simple, while developing countries were not responsible for the globe reaching a tipping point, it would undertake mitigation actions as long as those responsible for the climate crisis paid the full incremental cost of such actions.

But the US and the European Union, using the recession as a ruse in informal talks, have on several occasions indicated that it would be politically impossible for them to provide money to the “emerging economies”. Now, the US proposal demands that regardless of whether there is any money on the table, the developing countries too put up their actions for international scrutiny.

With just 7 days to Copenhagen meet, the 1st world nations are yet to stick by the 2007 Bali pact and offer financial compensation to developing nations for their mitigating actions for climate change