India Lowers Expectations For Paris Climate Talks

The Paris Climate Conference this December will not produce an agreement that is "environmentally optimal," according to the member of parliament who served as India's chief negotiator at the 2009 conference in Copenhagen.
But Paris will serve as a springboard to help the world's major economies begin to develop low-carbon economies, Minister Jairam Ramesh said last month during a side event at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
"All negotiations on climate present trilemmas—not dilemmas, but trilemmas," Ramesh said at a panel discussion sponsored by the Energy Policy Institute of Chicago. "You have to have something that is politically feasible, something that is economically desirable, and something that is environmentally optimum.
"And in Paris, what you're going to get is an outcome that is not environmentally optimum, but that is politically and economically acceptable."
Ramesh's remarks (video) came on a day that President Obama was meeting with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi, a visit that produced a memorandum of understanding on clean energy, but not a comprehensive climate agreement like the one Obama had secured with China in November.
Ramesh suggested the Paris agreement, too, may lack substance.
"The commitments that countries are making—unfortunately, even the word commitment has been diluted. It's now contributions, as if countries are doing a favor to humanity. It's now, in UN Speak, INDC: Intended, not even pledged, but Intended Nationally Determined Contributions."
Ramesh predicts many countries will be making such contributions in Paris, promising to limit their carbon emissions, "but what you have to lock, in Paris, is a system that will ensure compliance with these contributions."
So the key to the Paris Conference, according to Ramesh, is not whether countries make contributions, but whether the UN can muster support for an enforcement mechanism to ensure that countries comply with the contributions they make.
Developing countries like India may be reluctant to accept any enforcement mechanism that could have the effect of limiting economic growth. Were they asked to rank economic growth against climate objectives, Ramesh said, developing countries would choose growth.
"It's a no-brainer. They will rank the growth objective higher than the climate objective. That was clear at Copenhagen," he said. "We are in a very serious situation that will make any solution to the climate problem environmentally suboptimal because the growth objective will always predominate."
Nonetheless, Ramesh was not without optimism for Paris.
'Paris will be a springboard. It will not be the final destination. It will be a springboard to a low-carbon economy for the major economies of the world."
Read More: