Energy conservation: Only lectures won't do

There was a jamboree in town recently, a gathering of the powerful and famous, to discuss the international agreement on climate change that the world must carve out in Copenhagen this December.

But what happened was rather discomforting: We Indians were publicly lectured, castigated and rapped on our knuckles for being bad boys and girls by one and all. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told us that developing countries must make more efforts to address climate change and get on board with the industrialised world for solutions.

"You have to do more", he said, because the climate crisis is a common and shared responsibility and 'countries should not argue on who has to contribute more or less to tackle global warming.'

So, in one stroke, the key issue of differentiated responsibilities and the fact that the industrialised world was not cutting its emissions were swept aside.

Instead, we were told, sternly, President Barack Obama had assured the secretary general he would do his best.

What this meant in real terms -- the US carbon dioxide emissions have increased by over 20 per cent in the last 15 years -- was another matter, of course. We pupils should not question.

Finnish President Tarja Halonen also chipped in: 'India must do more'. United Nations Environment Programme head Achim Steiner went further and asked for a voluntary cap on greenhouse gas emissions.

US Senator John Kerry, on a long-distance link, repeated the old Bush line that climate-renegade US would take action only if China and India took on binding commitments.

The Indian side was stunningly silent. Our external affairs minister Pranab Mukherjee, who inaugurated this bash-India do, was sidelined as he repeated the, by now, much-abused position: "We did not create the problem and we are not required to solve it".

His argument that climate change should not add to a greater burden, by imposing conditionalities on countries like India, was scoffed at. Instead, leaders of the western world got a great opportunity to inform the Indian public of the inadequacy of the government's position.

In this round of the climate-change public-relations game, the Indian government lost badly. Worse, it has lost an opportunity to tell the industrialised world how it wants the entire world to deal with this global catastrophe, which is already beginning to hurt us. We are victims of climate change and the world must not be allowed to forget this.

What should India have made clear?

One, the industrialised world must get its act together to cut its emissions, and not just talk big. Our foreign minister should have shown the door to the European leaders, who glibly said that they would cut their GHG emissions by 30 per cent by 2020, if other countries joined them.

He should have asked each industrialised nation to explain -- to convince us -- how they would actually cut their emissions domestically, given a pathetic track-record.

The hosts of the next conference of parties, the Danes, should have been told, without mincing words, their emissions are increasing and that is not good for the world.

All these nations should have been hauled up for saying they would 'help' reduce emissions in the developing world, taking the cheaper route of buying into ways to 'offset' theirs.

Because it is in all our interest, we should have pushed the industrialised world to reinvent and transform its energy system, drastically, starting now.

Two, we should have said, at the conference and so to the world media, that India was serious about climate change, and was quite aware of the need to cut emissions. The country is already doing a lot, on its own and at considerable cost and pain.

For instance, the government should have boasted it had agreed -- and perhaps it is the only government to do so -- to fund public transport buses, not private cars, as part of its financial stimulus plan; a move that will transform mobility patterns and reduce emissions in the years to come.

It should have explained that the ministry of urban development, managing this programme, had already announced that the purchase of buses would require cities to undertake internal reform, including compulsory waiver of taxes on public transport, and increased taxes on private cars.

Here was a car-restraint strategy that even the richest nations have not attempted. We should have challenged the world to learn and to emulate.

This is not to say that we are doing enough or cannot do more. The fact remains that our constraint is the making of the rich world. We need funds to be able to move faster, to make investments today, not tomorrow. We can, would like to, build solar-powered facilities that would substitute coal-powered electricity production in future.

But we know this energy source is still expensive. We know this because, even as the rich world gives big lectures on good behaviour, it has done little to change its energy systems towards renewables.

It is time India made this clear: We are not the climate-renegades. Till date, all we have got are lectures, but no lessons. That is not good enough. Not for us. Not for the world.