Sustainability and policy - Climate Change: Biological and Human Aspects - page 500

In common with many other developing countries whose economies in the 1990s
and 2000s were seeing considerable growth, part (although not all) of their increase in
carbon emissions is due to carbon gain from developed nations. This is the opposite
of carbon leakage. Such rapidly developing countries are tempted to take on energy-
intensive industrial processes to make goods or raw materials for export to developed
nations.
On 30th June 2008, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh released India's first National
Action Plan on Climate Change (from the Prime Minister's Council on Climate
Change, 2008), which outlined existing and future policies and programmes to
address climate change: both mitigation and adaptation. The plan identified eight
core 'national missions' covering the period up to 2017. These were related to solar
power, improving energy efficiency, sustainable homes, water, Himalayan ecology,
forestation, agriculture and strategic climate change knowledge.
With regard to 21st-century carbon emissions, neither China nor India are capable
of sustainably accessing fossil carbon inside their own borders to fuel their intended
ongoing decades of economic growth. This means that they will become increasingly
subject to external fossil limitations, other than (for much of this century) for coal. In
theory, should oil petroleum imports become sufficiently expensive, both India and
China could synthesise liquid fuel from coal. Both China and India have a policy of
increased fossil energy consumption to drive growth. However, should the developed
(OECD) nations provide low-emissions technology at the same cost as the necessary
investment in conventional energy technology (what economists call at no extra
'opportunity cost'), then they would explore this option. What they are not prepared
to do is to halt their economic development.
This technology transfer from the developed nations is enshrined in the Kyoto
Protocol. Participation of developing countries in carbon-emission mitigation is not
specifically quantified by the Protocol, although it is a goal: India and China were not
therefore required to limit their carbon emissions by 2012. However, the commitment
to mitigate per se was conditional on the fulfilment of developing countries' own
commitments to transfer to developing nations the enabling finance and technology.
By 2012 this had not happened to the degree necessary to curb increases in emis-
sions, let alone the rate of increase in emissions so far this century (see Figures 8.6
and 8.7).
Here some (not all) politicians in OECD developed nations, such as those from
North America and Europe, argue that until countries like India and China curb
their emissions there is little point in OECD curbing emissions. This view is a
minority political view at the national level in Europe but sufficiently strong in North
America to, so far, prevent the USA and Canada from committing themselves to
binding emission reductions. One implication of this is that as North America and
China together produce over half of global emissions, and less-developed nations are
increasing their fossil carbon consumption, currently (two decades on from the first
IPCC assessment in 1990) we are still on a Business-as-Usual emissions track.
Although European politicians (at national level) have policy aims of reducing
emissions, neither they nor their North American, nor their Chinese or Indian,
counterparts have closely examined the question of economic carbon leakage. Not
all the economic growth derived from fossil fuel consumption in either India or (and,