- Saturday, April 20, 2024
By: Shubham Ghosh
Indian external affairs minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar on Monday (12) took a dig at the developed nations, ones that have huge carbon footprint, saying they were passing the buck onto other nations without carrying out their share of emission control.
Speaking on climate justice at the India Global Forum in Dubai, UAE, the diplomat said the promises made by the developed countries at big climate events such as COP remain unmet.
Jaishankar headlined the event.
Spoke at India Global Forum in Abu Dhabi this morning.
Brought out the relationship between globalization, rebalancing &multi-polarity.But underlined that more perennial competitive forces are also at work.Far from witnessing an end of history,we are seeing a return of history. pic.twitter.com/Oj9LRpi5Gw
— Dr. S. Jaishankar (@DrSJaishankar) December 12, 2022
“Those who are occupying carbon space have kept promising that they would help others. And frankly they have kept shortchanging the world. And they come up every COP with some new argument, some evasion,” Jaishankar told the media on the first day one of the four-day forum.
“The real problem that you are facing today is same problem we had multiple COPs ago, which is that the developed countries are still not sincere about keeping their promises… The more climate events and emergencies you have, the more there’s going to be the sense that these countries are unwilling to walk the talk,” he added.
At times, there are “very clever narratives which are designed to confuse”, he added.
“You suddenly will bring up a subject like this country is a big emitter… that country may have per capita emission which is one-tenth that of the rest of the world. But here it will say they are a big emitter so maybe they should step forward. Hello! This is not the country which occupied carbon space. Somewhere people need to be truthful about it and say who’s really responsible for global warming and the countries which are need to step up,” the Indian foreign minister said.
In November 2020, the US had pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord, which aims to curb global warming by cutting emissions and eliminating greenhouse gas pollution, blaming Asian powers such as India and China.
Donald Trump, who was the president of the US then, had alleged that the Paris accord, which India had ratified, gave a better deal to “some of the world’s highly polluting countries” such as India and China and left the US hamstrung.
India, he said, “makes its participation contingent on receiving billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars in foreign aid… China will be allowed to build hundreds of additional coal mines, India will be allowed to double its coal production; we’re supposed to get rid of ours,” he had said.
India has consistently said that the developed nations need to pull their weight when it comes to emission control.
Ahead of India’s signing the Paris accord in 2015, the country’s then environment minister Prakash Javadekar had said that the developed nations’ actions are “far below” than their historical responsibilities and fair shares.
