China, India, South Africa and Brazil — the so-called BASIC bloc of nations — said the nonbinding deal that came out of the Copenhagen climate summit was just a "political understanding" and that future climate negotiations must not be based on that plan.
The skeletal Copenhagen Accord was brokered among the BASIC nations and the United States in the frantic final hours of the December talks. The UN Conference of Parties 'took note' of its existence but fell short of the full support needed to adopt it.
In a statement released on Jan. 24, the newly powerful BASIC bloc said that it supports the Copenhagen Accord but that formal climate talks must move along two tracks only — one that would extend the Kyoto Protocol for the 184 nations that signed it and another that would add an agreement to govern the United States and emerging economies.
The Indian Cabinet has approved a plan to boost its installed solar capacity by 200 times by 2013, in an effort to increase the nation's leverage ahead of high-stakes climate negotiations in Copenhagen next month.
The plan's passage also coincides with Tuesday's meeting in Washington between President Obama and India Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
The two heads of state are not expected to make any real progress on what they will do in Copenhagen. But India won't get too much of the blame. With its mega-solar plans now a done deal, the nation's climate status is rising a notch. Meanwhile, the Obama administration continues to disappoint international diplomats for failing to commit to specific CO2 cuts and leading other rich countries in a race to the bottom.
A year after Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced the country’s National Action Plan on Climate Change, India appears poised to reject a proposed coal mine that brings together two of the country’s most pressing environmental issues: tiger conservation and climate change.
The Adani mine in Maharashtra State is located in a sensitive wildlife corridor connecting the nearby Tadoba Andhari Tiger Reserve (TATR) to tiger habitat located outside the sanctuary.
Although it is not clear when a final decision will be handed down, it is increasingly unlikely that the mine will go ahead, following comments by Minister for Environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh that he will not approve any mining near the Tadoba Reserve. In all, about 80 tigers live in the Chandrapur district where TATR is located, about half of them inside the reserve, according to the Bombay Natural History Society.
Recent reports also indicate that, in the future, the ministry will only allow mining in degraded forest areas, with moderately and densely forested areas off-limits.
If confirmed, the cancellation of the Adani mine would represent a positive indicator of the government’s intention to implement the National Action Plan, which specifically mentions the importance of preserving wildlife corridors to prevent habitat from becoming fragmented.
Deforestation is responsible for about 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Driven in part by consumer appetite for cheap beef, leather, timber, biofuels, tropical oils and products, as well as paper products, deforestation is proceeding at the rate of an estimated 13 million hectares a year. That translates into 50,000 square miles, an area more than half the size of the United Kingdom, being lost every year.
While there is growing international support for tackling global deforestation -- there's even generous support in the Waxman-Markey bill for the effort -- action has been stymied by the overall lack of progress on a global climate agreement. The circumstance is exemplified by the UN's program on Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation in Developing Countries (REDD). It has only one donor, Norway, and six projects off the ground.
While addressing deforestation has remained difficult, around the world there has been encouraging progress on the opposite process - reforestation and afforestation. Governments, companies, organizations and individuals are putting trees back on some of the lands devastated by deforestation.
Earlier this month, Pakistan broke a Guinness World Record previously held by India for the most trees planted in a single day – 541,176. There are even reforestation vacations for enterprising travelers that want to get in on the act. But popular events are just the tip of the iceberg of a far more difficult process that is proceeding largely unseen in many pockets around the world.
The Indian government has okayed a $19.4 billion plan to scale up solar power generation from virtually nothing at present to 20,000 MW in just 11 years, and 10 times that by 2050 — well, at least in principle.
The draft "National Solar Mission" received a nod of approval from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's council on climate change this week. But deal-breaking issues remain.
Namely: Where will all that money come from?
The Indian government expects rich nations to foot the bill, raising a potential obstacle to the plan's success.
Wealthy countries will be urged to fork over international financing and transfer the low-cost solar technologies needed to realize the world's most ambitious solar vision.
That represents a shift from the previous draft plan, seen by the Guardian, which had called for an Indian government subsidy of around $20 billion and falling production prices to cover the costs of the plan.
Is India on the brink of becoming a solar superpower?
Not quite yet. But, significantly, the government is pondering a massive energy transition that could deliver 20,000 MW of solar power by 2020 and 200,000 MW by 2050, according to a long-awaited draft strategy leaked to The Hindu.
The 200,000 MW goal is 30 percent more than India's current installed power generation capacity across all energy sectors, which stands at nearly 150,000 MW. Solar makes up just 3 MW of that.
If the government's "National Solar Mission" moves forward, it would be the most ambitious solar scheme of any nation, by far. At the very least, it deserves strong consideration.
Solar power's potential in India is off the charts -- a thousand times greater than the likely electricity demand in the sun-blessed nation by 2015.
Wind could produce a whopping 65,000 megawatts -- about half of India's present total installed capacity. And the potential of available biomass, energy from plants, is 30,000 megawatts -- ten times the nation's current nuclear capacity.
But there's a problem of mismanagement at India's Ministry of New and Renewable Energy that's crippling clean energy development, according to a new report from the London-based Commonwealth Business Council (CBC) and the Indian Institute of Management (IIM).
And the result is that vital clean technology dollars are going elsewhere.
The narrator of this video adopts the enticing tone of someone promoting travel and tourism. "Mustaffabad has a secret," she says, invitingly.
This poor, derelict neighborhood is a part of Delhi, but with its own direct connection to the global marketplace.
A happy violin plays incongruously and you see on-screen a bare foot step in a puddle on a muddy street. It makes for a deft and effective bit of cognitive dissonance as the narrator delivers the punchline:
This is where the world's computers come to die.
And then, with the up-tempo tour guide explaining the sights of Mustaffabad, you're taken on a tour of the death rites: women, children, and young men dismantling the world's unwanted digital debris in order to salvage bits of copper and traces of gold.
It's a scavenger hunt through deadly toxins and dangerous conditions that promises scarred lung tissue, developmental damage, reproductive deficits and early death.
This is the endpoint of the global marketplace, the one we rarely see.
