The article highlights the issues with the current climate policies which are centred on the inequality.

Inequality and climate change

• Inequity is built into the climate treaty, which considers total emissions, size, and population, making India the fourth largest emitter.
• According to the United Nations, the richest 1% of the global population emits more than two times the emissions of the bottom 50%.
• .China, with four times the population of the U.S., accounts for 12% of cumulative emissions.
• India, with a population close to that of China’s, for just 3% of cumulative emissions that lead to global warming.
• In an urbanized world, two-thirds of emissions arise from the demand of the middle class for infrastructure, mobility, buildings, and diet.
• Well-being in the urbanized world is reflected in saturation levels of infrastructure.
• Growth in the developed countries is consumption-driven not production driven.
• The vaguely worded ‘carbon neutrality’, balancing emitting carbon with absorbing carbon from the atmosphere in forests is a triple whammy for latecomers like India.
• Such countries already have less energy-intensive pathways that will not encroach on others’ ecological space, a young population, and are growing fast to reach comparable levels of well-being with those already urbanized and in the middle class.

What changes are required in the policies

• At present, the focus is on physical quantities which indicates effects on nature.
• The solutions require analysis of drivers, trends, and patterns of resource use. 
• This anomaly explains why the link between well-being, energy use, and emissions is not on the global agenda.
• Modifying unsustainable patterns of natural resource use and ensuring comparable levels of well-being are societal transformations.
• New thinking must enable politics to acknowledge transformational social goals and the material boundaries of economic activity.

India’s unique national circumstances

• India must highlight its unique national circumstances.
• For example, the meat industry, especially beef, contributes to one-third of global emissions.
• Indians eat just 4 kg of meat a year compared to those in the European Union who eat about 65 kg.
• Also to be noted is the fact that the average American household wastes nearly one-third of its food.
• Transport emissions account for a quarter of global emissions.
• Transport emissions are the symbol of Western civilization and are not on the global agenda.
• Rising Asia uses three-quarters of coal drives industry and supports the renewable energy push into cities.
• India, with abundant reserves and per capita electricity use that is one-tenth that of the U.S., is under pressure to stop using coal.

Way forward

• India has the credibility and legitimacy to push an alternate 2050 goal for countries currently with per capita emissions below the global average.
• These goals should include well-being within ecological limits, the frame of the Sustainable Development Goals, as well as multilateral technological knowledge cooperation around electric vehicles, energy efficiency, building insulation, and a less wasteful diet.

Conclusion

Emissions are the symptom, not the cause of the problem. India, in the UN Security Council, must push new ideas based on its civilizational and long-standing alternate values for the transition to sustainability.

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