FRONT PAGE | Monday, December 21, 2009 | Email | Print | 
Big deal, say India, US; not true, claim NGOs
S Rajagopalan/PTI | Washington/New Delhi
Fresh from the world climate change talks which reached a last-minute non-binding deal, Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh will make a statement in the Rajya Sabha on Monday where he is expected to say that India’s sovereignty has been well protected.
Ramesh on his return home after attending the nearly two-week long 193-nation conference in Copenhagen met Congress president Sonia Gandhi on Sunday and briefed her on the provisional deal cobbled together by a small group of countries, including the US, India and China for fighting global warming.
“I will make a statement in the Rajya Sabha on Monday at 12 noon,” Ramesh told PTI here on Sunday evening when his comments were sought on Government’s strategy in Parliament post-Copenhagen Accord. Ramesh, who was part of the Indian negotiating team, earlier said on the outcome of the crucial negotiations in the Danish Capital that the accord was “a good deal”.
“The red lines have been met,” Prime Minister’s Climate Change envoy Shyam Saran said, noting that India did not have to compromise on any of its fundamental stands on the issue.
Meanwhile, on his return from Copenhagen, US President Barack Obama termed the climate change accord that he helped broker with the large emerging economies, including India, an “important breakthrough”. But critics dubbed it a non-binding agreement that is more in the nature of a hope than a deal.
“After extremely difficult and complex negotiations this important breakthrough lays the foundation for international action in the years to come,” Obama said, soon after arriving in a snowstorm-ravaged Washington.
He admitted that the progress achieved is “not enough”, but stressed that it is for the first time in history that “the world’s major economies have come together to accept their responsibility to take action to confront the threat of climate change”.
“So even though we have a long way to go, there’s no question that we’ve accomplished a great deal over the last few days. And I want America to continue to lead on this journey, because if America leads in developing clean energy, we will lead in growing our economy and putting our people back to work, and leaving a stronger and more secure country to our children,” he said adding he will continue with these efforts in the coming weeks and months.
“Going forward we’re going to have to build on the momentum that we established in Copenhagen to ensure that international action to significantly reduce emissions is sustained and sufficient over time,” he said, noting that within the US, this would mean giving a push to efforts to build a clean energy economy that would also involve passing legislation to create requisite incentives.
Meanwhile, Greenpeace, a prominent environment NGO has strongly condemned world leaders at the climate summit for failing to finalise a “legally binding” treaty and brokering a “take it or leave it” deal which it said was full of loopholes.
Terming the Copenhagen Climate Summit “a huge missed opportunity” Greenpeace today in a statement claimed “the world’s most powerful countries have betrayed future and current generations.”
The environmental organisation accused the world leaders of “fleeing to the airport”. “Whilst en route to the airport they claimed the deal was done, it was not. All they left was chaos and confusion in their wake,” it said in the statement.
“Rather than coming together to secure a future for hundreds of millions of people by agreeing an historic deal to avert climate chaos, leaders of the world’s most powerful countries have betrayed future and current generations,” Greenpeace International executive director Kumi Naidoo said in the statement.
In the US, the Republicans were quick to slam Obama’s push. “We’re not going to let jobs be destroyed in America for some esoteric environmental benefit 100 years from now,” Congressman Joe Barton said. If Republicans regain control of the House of Representatives next year, Barton expects to become chairman of a key House panel, a position that he would use to “repeal” such measures. “We don’t have an icecap in Texas,” he quipped to reporters in Copenhagen.
Meanwhile, leading water conservationist Rajendra Singh on Sunday said there is a “huge gap between political will and social will” and that is the reason the Copenhagen summit failed to finalise a “legally binding” deal.
“There is a huge gap between political will and democratic social will and by having a principle that we are a big and strong democracy will be of no use if we do not practice it,” Singh said at a function in Mumbai.
Two other Republican lawmakers have asked Obama to use federal dollars allocated for climate change science to investigate the recent “climategate” controversy over hyping the threat posed by climate change. Representatives Jerry Lewis and Mike Simpson also took the stand that Obama’s climate bill and a recent move by the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gases are “not grounded unequivocally in sound science”.
The American media has also been far from enthusiastic about the eleventh hour deal brokered by Obama in Copenhagen. The Wall Street Journal called the deal “a pre-emptive dead letter because countries like China, Brazil and India said they were unwilling to accept anything that depressed their economic growth”.
The agreement isn’t bold, with many of the details still to be set, the Washington Post commented. “Still, this outcome, however imperfect, should prod the US Senate to take up climate change legislation. Even if China hadn’t moved, reducing America’s dependence on foreign sources of energy and tackling domestic pollution are strong enough reasons to pass a bill,” it said.
The pro-Republican Washington Times slammed the “flop” summit, commenting: “The promised treaty — billed with the characteristic understatement of the alarmist community as “the single most important piece of paper in the world today” — was an anticlimax.”
The White House touted support for the deal from some environmentalists industry leaders and Democratic lawmakers. It quoted Michael Eckhart, head of the American Council on Renewable Energy, as lauding Obama’s “wisdom in achieving an agreement on the aspirational goal”. Carter Roberts, president of World Wildlife Fund in the US, said the “agreement that will capture commitments of key countries”.
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