India Moves into Third Place among Greenhouse Gas Polluters

India has a long way to go to catch up to China and the US when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions but it has finally passed Russia on the list taking over third position. At the moment India only accounts for 3% to 5% of emissions compared with 23% and 22% for China and the US, respectively, but with its huge and growing population and rapidly growing economy it is bound to close the gap with at least the US over the coming years. As it is, India, China, and the US account for about half of all emissions and this proportion will grow as India and China keep lifting people out of poverty and having such people adopt a much more energy hungry Western type of lifestyle.
Those who say that these three countries should get together and come to an agreement on limiting greenhouse gas emissions instead of relying on the UN process which requires that almost two hundred countries arrive at an agreement seem to make more and more sense as the UN process appears to be getting nowhere. The UN meeting in Cancun, Mexico in a couple of months should provide more information about whether or not the UN process should be abandoned. A more or less complete failure should be a signal that a new type of process is needed.

Indian Environment Minister Says Westerners Need to Live with Only One Car Not Three

With the countdown to the UN’s climate meeting in Copenhagen reaching the 100-day mark yesterday India’s environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, gave a speech in Delhi in which he reiterated that India will not agree to a target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. According to an article in The Guardian, Ramesh said that “For us this is about survival. We need to put electricity into people’s homes and do it cleanly. You in the west need to live with only one car rather than three. For you it is about luxury.” Luxury? Wait a minute! Perhaps if Ramesh has a family with a teenage driver he should rent a McMansion in one of our cul-de-sac suburban developments for awhile and try to live with one car. Good luck! He would quickly find out that to get to anything other than a nearby neighbor’s house that he would have to drive. If he takes the car to work his wife would be either stranded at home all day or unable to get to her job. If the teenage driver takes the car to see a friend in the evening or on weekends they would both be stranded at home. Ramesh would quickly come to realize that two cars are a necessity and even having that third car avoids a lot of conflicts. These houses don’t have three-car garages for nothing. To really change things Ramesh would have go back in time to the 1950s and stop our government from building the interstate highway system and subsidizing mortgages through the GI bill. In other words, he would have to stop the things that made building our sprawling suburbs possible. We can’t now in 2009 turn back time. “The die has been cast.” If Ramesh and India are waiting for us to go from three cars to one car it promises to be a very long wait.

India Poised for 25 Years of Increased Coal Burning

While scientists in the US are calling for a moratorium on the building of coal-fired plants to limit greenhouse gas emissions India has plans to quadruple its burning of coal during the next 25 years according to a report by Reuters. To make sure his country has enough coal to burn the minister for coal in India says that India is acquiring “coal properties abroad.” Based on India's plans, world climate scientists apparently have even less influence in India than they do here in the US. According to the UN, India is already number four in the world on the list of greenhouse gas emitters. With about 150 coal-burning plants in various planning stages in the US it hard to see how we are in position to urge India to change its plans in order to prevent possible catastrophic climate change.