China and India appeared poised for bold new action on climate change ahead of a UN summit yesterday, in moves that will significantly increase pressure on US President Barack Obama to deliver cuts in US emissions.
The UN climate chief, Yvo de Boer, said that he expects Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) to announce a series of measures today that would put China well ahead of the US in dealing with global warming.
Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh told this reporter his government planned to make “aggressive” cuts in India’s emissions.
The measures by China and India — if fully realized — could represent a breakthrough in bringing the two into a global deal on climate at December’s UN summit in Copenhagen. Almost all observers say those talks are dangerously stalled.
“This suite of policies will take China to be a world leader on addressing climate change and it will be quite ironic to hear that expressed tomorrow in a country [the US] that is firmly convinced that China is doing nothing to address climate change,” De Boer said.
China, India and other developing countries will account for more than two-thirds of the world’s emissions by 2020. They say they cannot sacrifice economic growth and poverty relief to reduce emissions, especially if the industrialized world does not take decisive action on its own.
But Beijing and Delhi now appear to be showing a new willingness to act — even in the absence of a firm commitment from the US, where Obama is struggling to deliver on a promise of an economy-wide plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
In an interview Ramesh sketched out a series of measures he said would go some distance to cutting India’s emissions, so-called mitigation measures.
“India is going to aggressively take on voluntary mitigation outcomes,” he said.
“We are now going to go for domestic legislation [that] will enshrine some targets,” Ramesh said.
These include a mandatory fuel efficiency target to come into effect in 2011; an energy-efficient building code that would come into effect in 2012; and an increase in electricity produced from renewable sources to 20 percent by 2020.
“What India is going to do is to set a target date which is 2020 and introduce a quantitative outcome which is an implicit mitigation target — not explicit target. We will enshrine that into law so that there is a degree of credibility,” he said.
Ramesh said India would not compromise on its goal of achieving 8 percent economic growth a year.
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