 Hello and welcome to NewsClick, this program with Real News. We have with us D. Raghunandan, member of the Low Carbon Committee of the Planning Commission and of the Delhi Science Forum. We will be discussing the Paris Agreement and India's ratification of the same recently. India has ratified the Paris Agreement and with this we are very close to the 55 percent figure, which is when the treaty comes into force, I think we are now at the 52 percent mark. That question held it to be an inequitable treaty, even though we had agreed to, we are a party to it, but it had really said that Paris Agreement is not really equitable. It has dropped historical responsibility, we denied it for some time, but later on the United States clarified, forget all about historical responsibility and so on. Should this treaty have been ratified at all, why should this treaty be ratified in that case? My take on this is that once countries had discussed all the pros and cons and approved the treaty at Paris, then not to ratify it really doesn't come across as logical unless you can cite some either new reasons or come out in the open and say frankly we have done a rethink and we don't think we should have signed the treaty in Paris. We should have agreed to this treaty. So if you have agreed with it in Paris, then I think it would take some rather special circumstances or reasons for any country to now say they will not ratify. European Union is still not ratified, any reasons why? They actually were going through a rather tortuous process of ratification, which meant individual countries had to sign on and then the European Union as a whole would ratify. I think the European Union is highly embarrassed at the fact that and I think this was also one of the reasons for India ratifying this because I think the US and other countries pushed India into ratifying saying it would be diplomatically better for India to be seen to ratify it in the lead up to the 55 percent requirement to be one of the leading countries contributing to ratification rather than do it post facto. When everybody else is ratified then you say okay I will also join. The EU is in that position today and I think India's ratification has put the EU under pressure. They have held an emergency meeting of the council. The European Commission has agreed now to ratify and they are going to deposit their instrument of ratification with individual countries ratification coming thereafter. Okay, so they have reversed the process. They have reversed the process. You know the other issue is well this is a there could two arguments against the Paris Agreement and both remain valid. One is it puts the really the responsibility of stopping climate change much more on the developing countries then on the ones who have caused the problem. They continue to emit large amounts and what they are really doing is using up the remaining carbon space so that those countries which are lead developers particularly the LDCs including countries like India which have really low per capita emissions but they are denied of carbon space. So this is one part of it. Any redressal on this what are the arguments that are going around? I think as you said in your introductory remarks we have long argued many of us in this country and elsewhere in the world that the Paris Agreement is an iniquitous agreement. It does do precisely what you say by ignoring historical emissions and adopting only a forward looking approach. You are now looking at a situation where emissions from China, India and other large developing countries are on the rise and justifiably so while those from the developed countries are either climbing slowly or are plateauing and declining. So at this stage if you only look forward naturally it looks as if the big emitters are China, India and the others and they are on a growing trajectory. Unfortunately this is the structure which the world has accepted at Paris. Now question is therefore it became either we have a bad deal or no deal and no deal is ultimately could be a civilizational collapse. So that is why finally we gave into the developed countries pressure to sign this in Paris. That and partly it is as a result of the European Union which could have taken a much tougher stand on this issue. The European Union has always come across or like to be seen as a green champion adopting a moral position on climate if you like. But in the lead up to Paris the European Union has really bent over backwards to accommodate the United States and the United States from the beginning has made it clear it would not accept a firewall between the developed and the developing countries which was there in Kyoto and that it would only accept a forward looking agreement. When you say forward looking you mean no historical emissions. No historical emissions you do not look back at all that is what has happened look from now onwards. Which could be called grandfathering I have captured so much of the carbon space I will continue in the future to also capture that amount. Coming to this the augury for global climate does not look very good because we already at the 1.6 degree 1.8 degree kind of threshold. So 2 degrees the argument that we could just be limited below 2 degrees does it seem feasible at the moment? Not at all there is no assessment of projections. No scientific body has made any projections which would show that with the nationally determined contributions the voluntary contributions in emission reductions that countries have now made. If you totem all up together we are looking at something like 3.3 degrees to 3.5 degrees some estimates show even more of a temperature rise this is what we are looking at. So 2 degrees is forget it we are already past that stage where you are going you know you are going to reach 2 degrees Celsius more so that is I think a non-reachable solution. It still remains to be seen now once you have crossed 3.5 somewhere in the middle of the century maybe at 2070 or 2080 whether you can manage to pull it back a little bit below 3.5. So this nationally determined voluntary cuts as it were or emission figures that are being offered really is not addressing the problem what should be the total global emissions and therefore how should we control this rather it is more ok we will live with what people are offering and hope for the best. That how you would describe absolutely I mean this is a drive to the bottom that is the way I would see it because once you say we will go along with the system of voluntary contributions and the logic was a top down system which the Kyoto protocol was which had set targets for countries but with no penal provisions no way by which you could penalize a country for not reaching those targets meant that people were not adhering to the convention. So the argument in favor of this bottom up voluntary contribution method was since you are volunteering it you are likely to abide by that because it is your own commitment rather than a target given by anybody else but what this means then is all countries are volunteered extremely low targets in terms of what could be done and the developed countries in particular have placed extremely low targets on the table. In fact if you apportion the voluntary contributions made by the developed and the developing countries all the developing countries put together have offered emission reductions of about 2.5 times the emission cuts of the developed countries. So already we are making huge contributions much larger contributions to solving the problem than they are after having agreed to grandfathering of the emissions. The other set of questions which arise the internal government had pledged to the parliament that they will not cross the red lines before they had gone to Paris or what had been said by the parliament and they will come back and explain what the implication of the Paris agreement would be for Indian policies power sector burning of fossil fuels and so on but nothing has been placed on the on the record and even say three weeks before they are announcing they could design the Paris agreement they had said we have to work out the legal and other implications of the Paris agreement again nothing has been forthcoming on that. So what does this indicate flip flop? Two aspects to this I think one is the question with which we began was India right or wrong in ratifying it. To me what was the big puzzle was when the issue of ratification came up India suddenly seemed to be doing a lot of toing and froing on the question first saying we have lots of problems we have not gone through the internal processes. This is the G20 platform. At the G20 platform then saying you know the NSGE agreement of the nuclear suppliers group is hanging fire so unless we are assured of nuclear supplies we do not think we would be able to really come up with what we have said although frankly speaking none of the INDCs that we have suggested or the emission reductions are really contingent on nuclear power. In any case being a member of the nuclear supplies group and nuclear supplies are two different things. And two different things because we have anyway got exemption as far as nuclear supplies fuel supplies go. So it is really irrelevant why India suddenly started making these noises is very difficult to explain except perhaps somebody has told somebody let us use this opportunity to extract whatever we can. Before I think wiser councils or saner councils prevailed saying look here is an opportunity for India not to be the laggard on climate issues as it is always done. But for once be among those who are leading the charge. Now last question on this is that India has said it has signed it with certain conditions. But the Paris Agreement does not allow any conditional signing. You can at the most give an interpretation of what your signing means. That is all that this is an interpretation I read the Paris Agreement. So this whole argument India signed with condition is a bogus. Completely bogus argument. There are no conditions once you have submitted the INDCs then you can say a lot of you can use English in what you have said but what the convention is interested in are the headline numbers that you have. In fact even all the details given in the nationally determined contributions are more for your own domestic sake the kind of things that you said what kind of power mix do you adopt what kind of public transport do you do going forward how much of rail and road do you. These are internal discussions how you reach the figure the headline numbers that you have put forward or what the convention is interested in and there are no conditionalities attached to that. In fact as I said you can only give an interpretive statement that is about the only thing that you can do. This is my understanding of what I am saying but really nothing beyond that. Ragu good to discuss this with you hope that we will discuss these issues and other issues with you further. Thank you very much. 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