SUCH is the hypersensitivity of India’s elite opinion on climate change that the mere mention of a desirable upper limit for global warming can trigger accusations of a dishonourable compromise and sellout. That is exactly what happened after India signed the declaration of the 17-member Major Economies Forum (MEF) held in Italy in July. It said: “We recognise the scientific view that the increase in global average temperature above pre-industrial levels ought not to exceed 2°C…” and pledged “to identify a global goal for substantially reducing emissions by 2050.”

The declaration was quickly condemned as a retreat from India’s long-standing position that it will accept no binding caps on its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. A former member of India’s climate negotiations team called it “a body blow to everything we have fought for” and said that “India’s poor will pay the price for this political declaration” through deprivation of their fair share of global carbon space.

However, the argument that the declaration allows the rich nations to occupy more than their equitable share of the global atmospheric or carbon space while leaving India “stranded at much lower levels of emissions” is a non sequitur.

For one, this is not a legally binding commitment to a GHG target on India’s part. Indeed, it does not even refer to a limit on the overall concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to a number such as 450 parts per million (ppm) compared with the present 380 ppm.

And for another, it does not mention caps for any group of countries by a specific date such as 2020/2030. (The G-8 statement does, by saying the rich nations are willing “to share with all countries the goal of achieving at least a 50 per cent reduction … by 2050”, but without mentioning the base year. This is a serious flaw.)

The 2°C figure has a solid scientific basis. According to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, there is a 50 per cent probability of averting irreversible climate change if global temperature rise is limited to that limit corresponding to a CO{-2}-equivalent concentration of 450 ppm.

There is growing expert agreement, in the light of new evidence on the rapid melting of Arctic ice, that 450 ppm might be too high; 350 ppm is necessary, corresponding to a lower temperature rise like 1.5°C, as the ultra-vulnerable small island-states are demanding.

Equally specious is the view that the declaration marks a departure from India’s insistence on an equitable allocation of global environmental space to a negotiating strategy that emphasises bargaining about country- or group-specific targets, and that this will impede India’s “development” and its goal of reducing poverty. Equity remains, with environmental effectiveness, the legitimate driving force of the global climate agenda.

Or else, the Kyoto Protocol of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) would not have imposed the target of a 5.2 per cent reduction in GHG emissions from their 1990 levels on the Annex-I industrialised countries, while exempting developing countries from undertaking GHG cuts. Equity is at the very heart of the climate crisis – and its solution.

Indian policymakers’ prickliness over 2°C derives from fundamental ambiguities and contradictory approaches to equity. The real fear of the critics of the MEF declaration is that the forthcoming climate conference at Copenhagen in December will lead to future limits on the amount of GHGs India and other “emerging economies” such as China, Mexico, Brazil and South Africa can emit before they cap and reduce their emissions.

They resent and dread the prospect that India can only treble or quadruple its per capita emissions from its present level of 1.2 tonnes before it must reduce them, whereas the rich nations have already reached 10-12 tonnes (and the U.S., 20 tonnes). “Catching up” with the rich, whose past emissions have brought the planet to the present sorry pass, is not a reasonable notion of equity.

The legitimate question to ask is how India can fulfil the worthy objectives of eradicating widespread poverty and providing access to adequate energy resources for all of its people without wildly raising its emissions by following the unsustainable northern growth model plus trickle-down.

The official Indian premise that we must have high gross domestic product (GDP) growth to eliminate poverty, and that this inevitably entails higher emissions, is questionable. India had higher rates of poverty reduction in periods when GDP growth was lower than in the past decade. Trickle-down is a myth.

What matters is not so much GDP growth as its distribution, which has become increasingly skewed under the neoliberal policy regime. Besides, raising the living standards of the poor need not mean vertiginously higher consumption of fossil fuels and hence higher emissions. There are low- or no-carbon alternatives.

Nor is equity confined to historical contributions to, and hence responsibility for remedying, climate change. Equity also pertains to current emissions, which are rising in the emerging economies much faster than the world average.

China has overtaken the U.S. as the world’s largest emitter. But it is building a big new coal-fired power station every fortnight. India has overtaken Japan to become the world’s number four emitter. India’s emissions are rising at twice the global average rate. Brazil, South Africa and Mexico too are spewing out more GHGs.

India’s stress on per capita emissions as the sole metric or criterion of equity and the only limit it will accept is equally problematic. In an extremely unequal and hierarchical society like ours, per capita emission means little. They can be a cynical way of hiding behind the poor, whose contribution to emissions is low and hardly rising. It is India’s rich and middle classes – which are pampered by the state’s elitist policies, and which are consuming as if there were no tomorrow – that account for the bulk of our emissions increase. There is probably an order-of-magnitude difference in carbon footprints between India’s rich and poor.

Surely, intra-national equity is as important as inter-nation equity. On this criterion, India fails badly. What is needed is an approach based on both equity criteria, which assigns responsibility to different classes of people according to their consumption and ability to pay the poor for making a transition to low-carbon technologies.

Several alternative solutions exist – for example the Bolivian carbon debt proposal, the Mexican proposal for a global climate fund and the “Greenhouse Development Rights” approach advocated by EcoEquity and Stockholm Environment Institute.

This does not argue that the global climate regime is fair. It is not. Most Annex-I countries will not meet even the modest Kyoto target by 2012. If 2005/2006 is smuggled in as base year in place of 1990, they will get a licence to emit 15 per cent more GHGs.

Domestically, most northern countries are not getting on to a low-carbon trajectory. Their GHG-reduction plans rely more on offsets – trading carbon credits with the South – than on cutting their own emissions. Their offers for voluntary cuts by 2020 are meagre, such as 2.7 per cent by Canada, 4 per cent by the U.S., 8 per cent by Japan, and 20-30 per cent by the European Union (half of which could be offsets). This, when a 40 per cent cut is needed.

The U.S., the world’s most greenhouse-addicted country, is debating a climate law that mandates a 17 per cent GHG cut by 2020 (over 2005) and 83 per cent by 2050. Although the second figure is impressive, its date is distant.

The big cuts are to be made through a flawed cap-and-trade system in which 85 per cent of quotas are gifted away to polluting corporations.

Southern governments are right in arguing that the North must be the first to cut emissions and also finance the South’s transition to low-carbon growth, which it has shown little will to do. But soon, the South’s emissions will equal and exceed the North’s. There is no way that the 450 ppm target, leave alone the more stringent 350 ppm level, can be reached through the North’s cuts alone.

The emerging economies will have to reverse their emissions growth trajectories within one to two decades even as the North makes deep cuts, 40 per cent by 2020 and 90 per cent-plus by 2050.

This demands real leadership and statesmanship on India’s part. India must not be seen as obstructionist and a nay-sayer. It is not good enough for us to announce the National Climate Action Plan and then default on generating the eight mission documents. All these were to be ready by December last.

Only five have been drafted so far – largely without consultation with independent experts or civil society groups. Going by what has been leaked, they are incredibly shoddy, without coherent strategies, action plans, timelines or budgets.

India’s climate talks approach and negotiating strategy have become the preserve of a handful of conservative jaded bureaucrats and diplomats lacking a democratic mandate and impervious to external inputs. This must change if India is to assume leadership at Copenhagen.