October 9, 2015 – The third-largest greenhouse gas emitting nation has set a series of target reductions that will mean 3.59 billion tons of carbon dioxide will not be added to the atmosphere by India between now and 2030.
India is not capping its carbon emissions. Instead it is playing the same game that Australia and Canada have to date, talking about emission intensity reductions per unit of gross domestic production. In India this target is 35% less than 2005 levels by 2030. At the same time India is pledging to meet a 40% renewable energy target by 2030.
India is the last major government to announce targeted reductions prior to the COP2015 meetings being held in Paris in December. But intensity reductions are really meaningless when you take into consideration projections for India’s future economic growth. That’s because India is expected to become the world’s third largest economy and the world’s most populous country by 2030. Currently the country stands eighth.
So if your economy is growing at a 7.2% clip with increasing gross domestic production then all you are doing through intensity reductions is offsetting that growth, or in terms of carbon emissions, staying in exactly the same place.
It should be noted that the plan is short on policy and the setting of target intensity reductions for specific segments of the Indian economy. A senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, Navroz Dubash, describes the carbon intensity goal as short on details and “conservative at best.” Dubash expresses uncertainty about whether India will get locked-in “into a high-carbon growth pathway.”
As a Canadian living under a Conservative government these past few years that also measures carbon intensity rather than overall emission reductions, it is obvious that the Indian plan is flawed. Canada’s net emissions have hardly moved downward since 2005 even though the government in its latest report claims a 29% intensity reduction. At Copenhagen Canada had committed to a 17% reduction in carbon emissions from 2005 to 2020. But in fact as recent as two years ago greenhouse gas emissions continued to rise in Canada, up 1.5% in 2013 and 4% between 2009 and 2013, or when projected to 2020, 20% above Canada’s Copenhagen commitment.
It sounds like India may commit the same folly as my country by measuring the wrong thing.
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Different meanings arise out of different perspectives. When perspectives are grounded on abstract speculations the meanings become especially problematic. A nutty Scientology recruiter once told me I should submit to auditing, get my mind
“clear,” and see the world from 3-feet behind my head. I retorted that I’m a poor auditing candidate because I already mostly see the world from several light years
behind my head. Obviously, one can view the world from way too many light years
behind the head. If one confronts a hungry tiger an immediate response is required. Even a one-light-minute perspective will prove fatal.
Perspectives on environment and carbon emissions don’t seem as immediately important as perspectives on hungry tigers. A 30-light year perspective on Indian society notices gross overpopulation, rapidly increasing GDP/energy demands, and
rampaging corruption at all levels of authority. It’s hard to assign much broad-perspective meaning to environmental pronouncements from Indian officials. For the next several decades, the Indians are going to mostly be desperately concerned with very immediate hungry tigers.
I’ve had a lifelong interest in the questions of what, if anything, we can honestly
know for sure. Legions of hucksters are constantly promoting false and bad
ideas. Ordinarily, the hucksters cannot reconcile the workings of a common
household refrigerator with the kinetic theory of gases, yet they have hordes
of true-believer followers that bedevil the world. Society is awash in false
beliefs. From time to time I start working on a definitive treatise/book on the
subject. But so far my efforts never seem good enough, and I discard what I
have done and start over. I recently discovered a little inspiring gem of a
book touching on the subject by Robert Burton, a neurologist MD. The book is
titled, “On Being Certain,” [Believing you are right even when you’re not]. I know you are a very busy man, but I strongly urge you to promptly find the time to read/study Burton’s book. It’s chock full of fresh ideas about how to better understand the world. It’s available free PDF at http://media.binu.com/3478699/messenger/98600394449-1e9b64527e41c736/On%20Being%20Certain%20Believing%20You%20Are%20Righ%20-%20Robert%20A.%20Burton.pdf
I preach that all our convictions should pass some sort of mathematical
probability test. 90% sure isn’t good enough to sustain an honest conviction.
What about 99%? What about 99.99%? How many decimal places are needed before it’s absurd to question the validity of a proposition? Science has tested
Einstein’s General Relativity theory to 14-decimal places of precision. Heroic
work is presently underway to improve the precision of testing to 16-decimal
places. What are the odds a discrepancy will be discovered at the 16th decimal place? Why not define a miracle as any event that is inconsistent with the general theory?
0.0000000000000+ is not precisely zero. But I contend humans need to think that it’s close enough to maintain absolute certainty. No proposition known to man is better demonstrated. If we do not have absolute confidence in the general theory we
should place confidence in nothing at all. Dr. Burton doesn’t like my probabilistic approach, and for good reasons, which his book well elaborates.
As a practical matter we rarely have even 90% sure evidence upon which to base
the countless acts of our lives. The best we can do is constantly guess about
likelihoods. We are mortal humans with the fairly certain knowledge the world contains a good number of hungry tigers. It’s likely that sometimes we
will guess wrong and the tiger gets his dinner.
Yes, flawed and yet much less flawed than the cap and trade that is feeding the wall street con game without making any impact of Carbon.
Hi BJ, Cap and trade only works if you keep lowering the cap and stop handing out carbon credits to polluters.Governments need to have stronger backbones to make the system work. I prefer a straight carbon tax on emitters to create disincentives to pollute.
It’s much worse than allowing polluters to continue the same old. It is a major diversion of money that should be spent on clean energy into the Wall Street con machine.