India Says

India, whose people on average have one twentieth of the carbon dioxide emissions of those in the U.S., will negotiate new global greenhouse gas limits with developed nations to curb climate change, a government official said.

“It’s a self-obvious truth” that rich nations should agree to cut emissions because their output is causing global warming, R. H. Khwaja, an official at India’s Ministry of Environment & Forest, said yesterday in an interview in Vienna. “We are willing to negotiate without any conditions.”

Khwaja, representing India at talks on climate change at a meeting of United Nations members this week, declined to specify what the nation wanted from negotiations to set limits starting 2013, when limits set by the 1997 Kyoto Protocol end. Under that treaty, developing nations can sell emission credits from greenhouse-gas reducing projects to rich nations that overshoot targets.

India has 0.8 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide emission per person a year, according to a January report by the European Renewable Energy Council. That’s compared with 15.6 tons a person in the U.S. The European Commission, the regulatory arm of the 27- nation European Union, wants developed nations to cut their greenhouse gases by 30 percent by 2020 compared with 1990 levels and to half of 1990 levels by 2050.

Europe is pressing developed nations to curb emissions in a bid to prevent temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius. Under one commission proposal, developing nations would be allowed to emit more as their economies grow, peaking around 2020, according to a Jan. 10 statement. The U.S. has a population of about 300 million and India 1.1 billion.

Harlan Watson, the senior climate negotiator for the U.S. Department of State, said Aug. 28 some of the world’s developing nations make a good case for being allowed to increase their emissions. China and India say they should be allowed to increase output to produce the energy needed to stoke economic growth, and that “is a very compelling argument,” Watson said.

Tags: Economy, Global warming, india, political, United States, World

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