Headline: Jairam Ramesh: Climate Agreement will be “politically acceptable but environmentally suboptimal”

COP21

India is poised to become the world’s most populous country by 2025, and it is currently the most rapidly growing economy. This development has profound implications for emissions of greenhouse gases. “While the current per capita emissions of two tonnes a year are still relatively low, India’s share of worldwide emissions will grow from 6 to 15 percent by 2030,” explained the former Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh at a public presentation on “India as an Evolving Actor in International Climate and Energy Policy” on 28 September at the IASS. It will not be possible to completely abandon fossil energy carriers in the foreseeable future, but India is making efforts towards greater diversification of its energy supply.

For Ramesh, who is currently a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the IASS, the main problem lies in India’s dependence on coal. Around two thirds of the country’s electricity supply comes from coal. But given its increasing energy consumption, India will not be able to reduce the amount of coal it produces in the foreseeable future. “So the goal should be to expand the use of non-coal energy sources while ensuring that coal is not as malignant as it has been by using technologies that make coal cleaner,” said Ramesh. India is investing increasingly in solar energy, improved energy efficiency and the expansion and enhancement of green areas. Covering around 25 percent of the country’s electricity generation capacity, hydropower is already a significant source of energy.

With a view to the UN Conference on Climate Change at the end of this year, Ramesh claimed that the Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) are not ambitious enough to achieve the two-degree target. He considers global warming of between 3.5 and 4 degrees to be more likely. While he does expect that a new climate agreement will be adopted, it will probably be “politically and economically acceptable but environmentally suboptimal.” Ramesh was India’s chief negotiator at the Copenhagen Climate Conference in 2009, which failed to produce a legally binding agreement.

In the discussion that followed his talk, Ramesh was asked if India looked to the German Energiewende as a model. He praised the expansion of solar energy, which is something India also strives for. But what most impresses him about the Energiewende is the overall strategy: “Structural transformation is very important, the investments in public transport, the electric grid and new housing.” When asked about the prospects of a decoupling of economic growth and emissions, Ramesh said that while the technology necessary for that was certainly available, India’s situation could not be compared with that of Germany, where such a decoupling has already been taking place for some time. “The magnitude of the increase in our energy production is huge: we’re increasing our capacities by 20 gigawatts a year for the next 20 years,” he stressed. For that reason, any decoupling of growth from emissions must be a gradual process.

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07.10.2015