Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is off to India to talk of many things, not the least of which is climate change. In a session at the Council on Foreign Relations earlier in the week, she said “We know that India and China have understandable questions about what role they should be expected to play in any kind of new global climate change regime. Our Special Envoy for Climate Change Todd Stern will be with me. And it is our hope that we can, through dialogue, come up with some win-win approaches.” Todd Stern is, to my mind, one of the top-tier American diplomats – at least this year – on a par with George Mitchell, Richard Holbrooke and Dennis Ross. As I’ve written here numerous times, the Obama Administration is working hard to effect progress, both on the international front and on domestic legislation. The two, of course, go hand in hand.
Secretary Clinton and Ambassador Stern in this visit, and the President and others at meetings such as the recent Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate (MEF) in Italy, continue to emphasize the importance of getting the major industrializing economies on board. The “Times of India” in an article today about some of the domestic push and pull on the international climate change negotiations, noted that “For the US, the meeting would hold as much significance as the Obama administration is hard pressed to prove to its domestic audience that India and China will also sign on to a global deal where they also undertake ‘meaningful’ and ‘prompt’ emission reduction actions. Obama would find it difficult to get an international agreement accepted at home which commits US to emission caps but leaves out India and China.” You can say that twice.
Clinton wants India to “leapfrog” its way to a clean energy economy, avoiding the pitfalls – including all the attendant pollution – of a hyperindustrialized society reliant on fossil fuels. In remarks yesterday, as reported by the AP here, she said “Just as India went from a few years ago having very few mobile phones to now having more than 500 million mostly cell phones by leapfrogging over the infrastructure we built for telephone service, we believe India is innovative and entrepreneurial enough to figure out how to deal with climate change while continuing to lift people out of poverty and develop at a rapid rate.” Bingo.
The developed economies have long-since stipulated that technology transfer and financial support should be part of the formula for achieving this felicitous outcome. To what extent is a key part of the international negotiations in the run up to Copenhagen.
Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution, had a good op-ed in the “FT” this week in which he addressed Clinton’s visit and climate change. He concludes by writing “Indians (like many Americans) need to be persuaded to see the urgency of prompt action. There are few voices more persuasive than that of the Indian scientist R. K. Pachauri, the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change who shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. He believes that the world has about six years to impose drastic and effective reductions on greenhouse gases. That will only happen if Mr Pachauri’s and Mrs Clinton’s governments can make common cause.”
