Monday, July 13, 2009

Expect China and India to drag feet on climate intiatives

Visualize this: The temperature outside is 105 degrees, with about 80 percent relative humidity. There is no electricity, which means no air conditioning.

That was my experience on the third day after arriving in Chennai, India’s fourth largest city with a population of more than 7 million.

I suppose I have been spoiled by the temperate conditions in the paradise that is the Willamette Valley, and am no longer able to bear the weather conditions in which I spent the first 22 years of my life. The power supply was restored after a few hours. After a couple of more days in Chennai, I headed to the cooler temperatures of Mysore to, at least temporarily, escape the heat and humidity.

As I was walking around a little after the sun went down in Mysore, everything turned dark because of load shedding in the electric power grid. With the entire area in darkness, the well-lighted Royal Palace stood out as a fantastic spectacle, while being simultaneously a symbol of India’s paradoxical problem of shortages and consumption.

When I wrote in this paper a few months ago about energy and water problems in India, I had no idea I would experience the shortage within a short time. In addition to the power shortage, there are widespread worries about a water shortage because the monsoon has been delayed, and rainfall is expected to be below normal.

A below-normal monsoon might well be the proverbial last straw to this country of a billion, which has managed to weather the Great Recession without too many problems. Agriculture, which is mostly rain-fed, will have significantly lower productivity as a result.

Electrical generation will drop as well with a decrease in hydropower. As will China, India too will ramp up its consumption of coal to produce electricity in order to try to keep pace with the dizzying growth in demand.

That means a larger volume of carbon dioxide emissions from the power plants. And there will be a lot more of carbon dioxide — from automobiles.

One report suggests that automobile sales in India can be expected to double in the next 15 years. Tata Motors, the manufacturer of the much talked about Nano — the $2,000 car — has enough orders to keep it going for years. It is the same Tata that is also the owner of the upscale Jaguar and Land Rover, which it has introduced into the Indian markets.

Meanwhile, Nepali and Indian scientists have been collecting and analyzing data on glaciers and glacial lakes in the Himalayas. Preliminary reports indicate that the lakes have become larger. That is no cause for celebration, because the lakes’ increased size comes from glaciers that are melting.

All these experiences from this trip thus far are valuable indicators of the intense arguments that are forthcoming when the world gathers later this year in Copenhagen for the United Nations Climate Change Conference.

It is clear that the energy needs of India are immense, and they will continue to grow at dizzying rates that will match China’s. We can expect both these countries to continue to state at the conference that advanced countries are higher polluters on a per-capita basis and that they should therefore share a larger burden than the much poorer nations of India and China, which are low per-capita polluters.

I am confident that Bob Doppelt, who has been writing in these pages about climate change issues, will agree with me that India and China will press hard the case that slowing their economic growth rates will not be viewed as feasible, politically or morally.

In a casual dinner table conversation about Chennai’s pollution levels, my parents asked me whether America, too, polluted a lot. It was a tough question in many ways. For one, I was representing America at the table. And as an academic, I am expected to be “neutral” and stick to the facts.

I gave them examples, from places where I have lived, of how America also polluted its way to economic prosperity — from how even the Willamette River was a convenient dumping ground to how Los Angeles used to be even dirtier than it is now.

I added that the old U.S. model is not sustainable. America has got to change its habits, and other countries need to avoid the unsustainable aspects of the American model.

Well, if my dinner table conversation is an indicator, then maybe the Copenhagen meeting will be successful only if it is attended by a lot more mothers.

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