 It is spring and the harsh winter months are finally over. This is the time for all the birds to return from the tropics and meet their friends. Ah, you are back, Tweety. Long time, Daddy. How have you been? I'm good, I'm good. So, where are you coming from? Oh, you know it. India. India. Again. What the hell takes you there, year after year? Oh, I just love it there. Love it? Really? You've got to be kidding me. I've heard there are just too many of them there. A billion or so or something like that. Yeah, yeah. And they're spewing so much of that dirty carbon that is melting on my eyes. Look at that. Those seeds look so thin now. Oh, hold on, Daddy. You need to get your fats right. Well? You need to go to India to know what's happening there. Really? This is the time of year India is most vulnerable to being hit by cyclones, killing at least three people, uprooting trees and telephone towers and damaging buildings and power lines. Jamun Kashmir has not had a natural disaster on this scale in living memory. This is the worst floods that's hit the state in the last six decades. India's roots, her land, her people are being jolted more than ever before. It's been described as the Himalayan tsunami. Days of heavy monsoon rain have swept away roads and buildings. Thousands of people are still missing. The flood situation in Jammu and Kashmir is very grim and steadily deteriorating. The number of dead in the floods has reached 148. In Srinagar, while the average norm for the 4th of September is less than 1 millimetre of rain, almost 52 millimetres of rain or 77 times the average took place. One fury after another. Thousands of lives snuffed in moments. Millions displaced. But science says, hold on, there is more to come. The impacts of climate change pile up in the extremes. Extreme high temperatures. Extreme droughts. Extremes of intense precipitation. And extremes associated with high sea levels. In Uttar Pradesh's Hamirpur district, devastated after his standing rubbish crop was lost to the rain, Indrajit committed suicides in his own field. Economists call it the tragedy of the commons. The rich countries that industrialized first overused the atmosphere as a dump for greenhouse gases. It cost them nothing. But the price of their mistake, committed over centuries, is now being borne by people all over the world. Especially the poor who have done nothing to cause climate change. In 1992, at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, all nations of the world, 178 of them gathered to correct this mistake. We have been the most successful species ever. We are now a species out of control. All countries signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The rich countries agreed to take the first step to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. And further promised to enable poor countries to fight climate change by extending funds and technology. But these were empty promises. Twenty conferences have gone by. The world is expecting us to reach some kind of agreement concerning climate change and not just continuing discussing procedure, procedure, procedure. The rich countries have neither reduced emissions nor have they delivered the billions of dollars they committed to support poor countries in their fight against climate change. I was born in 1992. You have been negotiating all my life. The fact is in Rio there were two parts of the agreement. They will reduce, we will have the space to increase. The second part of the agreement was they would give money and technology so that when we develop we can develop differently. Now if you look at what has happened since Rio is, annex one countries have not reduced at the scale that they should have. And I'm talking about all annex one countries including Europe. Okay, okay, I got it. You don't have to go on and on about it. You just love to rake up the past, isn't it? That's not true, Teddy. I don't agree. I don't agree with that. Sure, there must have been some oversights, some goof ups. But now these guys in India are making the same mistakes all over again. I just don't get it. Yes, of course you won't get it. Because you really can't look beyond your nose. Just like those guys in your backyard who have those big dirty cars, heated homes, highways, broadband and... Hold on, hold on. What's wrong with that? It's a blessed way of life. It is very... Blessed way of life. Blessed way of life. Your blessed way of life needs five planets. We just have one. The blessed way of life lived by the developed countries has obviously come by spending a good fortune. Science calls it the carbon budget. If the world has to limit warming to no more than two degrees above pre-industrial levels to avoid catastrophic climate change, then it has a limited budget of carbon dioxide to emit. 2,900 billion tonnes from the dawn of the industrial revolution to the end of this century. Two thirds of this budget has already been used. The United States, the European Union, Russia and Canada together have emitted 50% of the carbon dioxide during this period. In comparison, India has just emitted 2.8%. At the current rate, the world will effectively finish the entire budget in the next 20 years, leaving nothing for the development needs of the future generations. Let's talk about the United States in particular, which till date has occupied the maximum carbon space and how. America is addicted to oil, addicted to oil, addicted to oil. The US per capita coal consumption is five times higher than India's. An average American consumes 34 times more electricity than an Indian. In 2013, an American household purchased items 44 times that of India. 86% Americans drive cars in comparison to 10% in India. 40% of total food in America goes uneaten. Currently, India's per capita emissions are at 1.7 tonnes of CO2, while Americans are at 16.5 tonnes. With its much celebrated climate commitments by 2030, the United States will reduce this to just 14 tonnes. Whereas India, with its most elevated trajectories, will still remain below the 2005 global average of 4.22 tonnes. Whatever happened to the promise of equity?