Once upon the time, India looked upon international climate meetings with something akin to distaste.
Then-Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi played the role of malcontent at the 1972 Stockholm conference that launched modern environmental diplomacy, characterizing such concerns as a luxury for rich countries that poorer nations could not afford to indulge.
In 2009, then-Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh waited until the last minute before deciding to even attend the Copenhagen UN climate summit, and faced criticism from the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party for doing so.
That attitude is changing. The developed countries that have long been in the vanguard of climate efforts look to be falling behind. India is taking the initiative, fueled by the growing self-confidence of a country that is the world’s most populous and is seeing the fastest economic growth this year among the G20 major economies.
Consider the outcome of the G7 meeting last month on climate and energy — the appetizer to the three-day G7 summit that ended on Sunday. It was a squib, rejecting a push to end unabated coal power generation by 2030.
That is disappointing, but hardly surprising. The US has a 2035 end-date and Poland, a key member of the EU at the G7, plans to keep burning coal in 2049. Host nation Japan is pinning its hopes on gasification and ammonia cofiring projects that would prolong the life of existing coal plants at extortionate cost and with slender environmental benefit. It even managed to get language on its ammonia policy into the official communique.
The backsliding is not just evidenced by words in statements.
Despite G7 leaders last year pledging to end public support for international fossil fuel projects by the end of last year, the US government’s export credit agency this month approved a US$100 million loan to expand an Indonesian oil refinery. Meanwhile, Japan is still building coal-fired power stations, with about 1.8 gigawatts due to start delivering to the grid in the next few months alone.
The contrast with New Delhi is striking. India has made green development, climate finance and sustainable lifestyles its No. 1 priority in its G20 presidency this year, and has reportedly weighed joining the Climate Club proposed by Germany’s G7 presidency last year as a way to reduce industrial pollution.
“India must become one of the first countries in the world to industrialize without carbonizing the world,” Indian emissary to the G20 Amitabh Kant, who is coordinating the country’s policy toward the group, said in a speech in Delhi last week.
It has also convened a group, chaired by former US secretary of the treasury Lawrence Summers, to reform multilateral lenders such as the World Bank.
Summers last year called for shifts in the World Bank’s model and capital base to drive an extra US$100 billion in annual lending, directed mostly toward the energy transition.
It would be wrong to think these shifts are entirely unselfish. India would be one of the biggest beneficiaries of a change in development banks’ lending policies.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said his country alone would need US$1 trillion in funding from rich countries this decade to meet its target of reaching net zero emissions by 2070.
Similarly, India’s enthusiasm about joining the G7’s Climate Club could well represent an attempt to sail with the shifting winds of trade policy and geopolitics. One objective of such a clique would be to prevent “carbon leakage” — the move of industrial activities away from countries implementing green policies to take advantage of lower costs in places that do not price their emissions.
Becoming a key member of the Climate Club, fueled by cheap World Bank finance for decarbonization, would put India in an emerging quasi-trade bloc alongside the rich world. That would help meet its ambitions to rival China as a center for global manufacturing supply chains. It could even use membership of the club to water down rules that might be too arduous for its own firms to implement.
India has not even made up its mind on the path that it is going to take. A report earlier this month that the country was about to halt approvals of new coal-fired power plants appears to have been dashed, after the electricity regulator issued plans calling for a net 14.1 gigawatts beyond what is currently being built.
India is working alongside China to introduce the concept of “multiple pathways” to net zero in G20 negotiations, unnamed officials told Reuters this month.
That could function as a way of resisting calls for a coal phase-out date from rich nations.
The uncertainty about the direction New Delhi is taking just emphasizes how the center of gravity is shifting. India’s emissions likely overtook those of the EU last year to be the largest in the world after China and the US. Within five years, it should have the third-largest national economy, too.
With the world’s fate increasingly in its hands, India can no longer afford to stand aloof from climate debates. Instead, it is working out how to shape them to its own ends.
David Fickling is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy and commodities. Previously, he worked for Bloomberg News, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times.
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