All That Hot Air in Bali

The Bali conference will at best clear doubts on what the posturing is going to be about. Anyone can see the obvious — the Bali conference is going to be a failure. Of course, some consensus statement will be put out, some MOUs may also be signed, and promises to meet again shortly and further engage on the topic will also be made. The result therefore is going to be continued emissions at increased rates.

What is the problem really? There are two related points. First is the now incontrovertible fact that human activity is leading to emission of certain gases, like CO2 and methane, that are contributing to the heating up of the earth. We have already released so much of it that even if we stopped doing so as of now, the earth will keep on warming up for the next few decades. However, current trends do not merely show an increase, but an acceleration in greenhouse gas emissions. A good international agreement would therefore aim to reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, not just reduce emissions.

An agreement based on having international per capita carbon emission benchmarks will not solve the problem, but merely delay the full extent of the negative impact. Take for instance the case of India, China and the US. Roughly, India and China have a combined population of 2.5 billion and the US has 300 million. Suppose the Bali conference is so wildly successful that the US agrees to halve its emissions to 10 tonnes per capita per year from the current figure of 20 tonnes. US annual emissions will therefore go down to about 3000 million tonnes per year. But then India and China would go on increasing theirs from 1 and 4 currently to the 10 tonnes per person per year potentially agreed upon. Overall global emissions would consequently be far higher in the future, even after the pact.

A universal per capita emission benchmark is therefore not only politically unfeasible, it delays the full emergence of greenhouse effect problems.

The second issue is more important. Over the next few decades, as we continue on a high growth path, the developing world will account for a very large part of greenhouse gas emissions. Since we are taking technologies and economic models from the West, we are likely to contribute to the mess in the same manner. The more successful we get, the greater the mess we will create.

Given these considerations some environmentalists that are calling for letting environment take precedence over growth even in poor countries. The argument being, survival precedes all growth and equity objectives. The problem with that argument is, it is highly unfair to the poorer countries and the poor within them. No leader would agree to something on these lines.

In other words, the Bali conference will at best delay the problem. Let’s take that as a given. We can go on with our respective posturing, but we should be aware that reducing emissions is not a sustainable solution to focus our efforts on. We need to find a better solution.

The eventual solution will come from technology. Nature has given us one such technology, photosynthesis. We need to develop others that can absorb CO2 and other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere on a mass scale and at low costs. Instead of asking developed countries to reduce their emissions, we need to ask them to invest heavily in developing such technologies. The Bali agenda should therefore be a technology-driven agenda, on what technical solutions can be investigated further, how we can work together in doing this, how such research and development can be made profitable, how public- private and international partnerships can be created.

This is, of course, not to say that we should not reduce emissions. Emission reductions will help delay the problem, while new technologies are developed. And the best solution to that is sharply increasing the prices of petroleum and coal. Yes, we do need more nuclear power, we also need to refocus emphasis away from ethanol, whether from jatropha or corn or sugarcane based, towards other non-combustible energy sources. We need greater use of other non-greenhouse energy alternatives, such as hydel, solar, nuclear, and wind power.

In the net therefore every country needs to work on such emission reduction alternatives unilaterally — including India. An international agreement on this will be quite difficult to put in place, will not solve the problem, and will not build international cooperation. But together with the developed countries we can work on creating cooperative and sustainable technology driven greenhouse gas reduction solutions.

The writer heads the economic research firm, Indicus Analytics laveesh@indicus.net