India Rejects ANY Emission Caps Until 2020

In an update to a story I posted last week, Jairam Ramesh, the India’s environment minister, went on record today that India would not even discuss signing up for any legally-binding limit on greenhouse gas emissions until at least 2020. This means that both India and China, home of 1.17 billion and 1.31 billion people respectively, have now refused to set any emission limits in the near- or mid-term because "their fast-growing economies should not be hampered when western countries were responsible for climate change."

Don't they see the difference between the United States, who only accounts for 4.5% of the global population, and themselves, home to 37% (almost 2 out of 5) of the global population? I realize that the current situation with our environment is due primarily to the industrialized world (with the US being the number one emitter of greenhouse gases) but what will happen once these massive nations repeat the same mistakes?

I'm anxious to see how this affects the upcoming international climate convention in Copenhagen later this year.

India Rebuffs Hillary

As a follow up to my story on global emissions and their effect on the Amazon, it seems India will not be part of the solution.

Hillary Clinton, US secretary of state, is on a 5-day trip to India to convince it's leadership to embrace a low-carbon future. The US did not, however, get the response it was looking for:

“There is simply no case for the pressure that we, who have been among the lowest emissions per capita, face to actually reduce emissions,” Jairam Ramesh, India’s environment minister told Mrs Clinton. “And as if this pressure was not enough, we also face the threat of carbon tariffs on our exports to countries such as yours.”

Even though it looks like India will continue to set their own targets, Hillary reassured them that the United States will not stand in the way of the world’s largest democracy’s economic progress.

It seems that both India and China are using the same argument that it isn't fair that the U.S. rose to economic power through buring carbon-based fuels but they cannot. They both argue that it is up to the already-developed nations to clean up the mess they've already made.