Opinion: Don’t ask India for net-zero pledge

In India, we look at such promises with the skepticism they deserve. Instead of pressuring our leaders to issue similar bogus promises, rich countries should be thinking more about how to accelerate the changes we set out to make.

It is important to remember that goals set out by others are nowhere near as ambitious as they seem. A 2018 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change argued that, if warming is to be limited to 1.5 degrees centigrade, the global economy would have to reach net zero by 2050.

In fact, this would mean that places that could afford decarbonization – China and the West – would have to hit more than zero, very quickly. It would be unjust to expect both rich and poor countries to reduce their emissions to zero at the same time. Moreover, it is not going to happen – and Western political leaders have announced far-right goals to satisfy activists.

Second, those targets are scientifically unreliable. They rely on the development of some sort of carbon capture technology in the distant future to compensate for the pollution rich countries pollute today. Planetary-scale carbon capture is fantastic – that is, currently fantasy or, more accurately, science fiction. Really anyone concerned about warming rather than the total amount of carbon these economies intend to emit – the location at the bottom of their emissions curves, not the date at which those curves become zero.

Policy makers know that net-zero goals are meaningless. This is why many countries committed to the 2050 or 2060 goals are still quietly commissioning new coal plants or revamping old ones. Germany opened a new coal plant late last year and is still clearing populated land to dig new coal mines. Faced with high gas prices and the coming winter, other European countries may also turn to coal. Even the British hosts of COP26, who have worked hard to remove coal from their production mix, had to set fire to old coal plants last month.

China’s target is even more ridiculous. After President Xi Jinping announced it last year, there was a flurry of announcements for new coal-fired power projects in the first months of 2021. The Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air estimates that “a total of 18 new blast furnace projects and 43 new coal-fired power plant units with a total capacity of 35 million tonnes per year were announced” in the first six months of 2021. .

Perhaps the real question is this: If zero targets are truly meaningless, why aren’t more developing countries signing up? The Government of India has not faced any problem in setting various economic targets especially for the distant future, which we are unlikely to achieve.

One answer is that developing countries have very few cards left to play in climate change negotiations and choosing a net-zero target is one of them. The fact is that emerging economies like India are ready to move out of coal but cannot do so alone. Whatever energy mix coal replaces — natural gas, renewable energy, nuclear power — the transition is going to cost money. We need cash to liquidate coal capacity, to invest in renewable-friendly power grids, to compensate power distribution companies for their long-term power purchase agreements with coal plants, and much more. Will be

Several such proposals are under consideration. The Asian Development Bank wants to set up a fund to buy coal plants in Southeast Asia. South Africans accustomed to their coal, state-owned power company Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd. We are looking for help in reducing our debt so that they can start investing in green energy. Similar plans have worked in some parts of the developed world. (Michael Bloomberg, founder and majority owner of Bloomberg News’ parent company Bloomberg LP, has pledged $500 million to launch Beyond Carbon, a campaign aimed at shutting down remaining coal-fired plants in the US by 2030.)

We are used to thinking of summits as successes if – as in Paris in 2015 – world leaders stand together on one platform and announce an “accord”, even if the agreement has no real significance. . But a distant future filled with new promises about COP26 will be a failure, not a success. I wish the end of the conference was not a big headline, but some new mechanism to funnel cash towards decarbonizing electricity and steel in the emerging world.

If you want countries like India to sign up for empty goals as well, you have to pay something in return. Saying no to the ridiculous net-zero target is a sign of our commitment, not our indifference.

Mihir Swaroop Sharma is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is a Senior Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi and heads its economy and development programme. He is the author of ‘Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy’ and co-editor of ‘What the Economy Needs Now’.

This story has been published without modification in text from a wire agency feed. Only the title has been changed.