On the heels of his visit to India last weekend, John Kerry is pushing for an India-US partnership aimed at reducing emissions from the rapidly developing country:
[T]he beauty of today’s technology is that India can grow clean – an option the United States didn’t have during our time of economic transformation from an agrarian to an industrialized nation.
Andrew Revkin weighs the challenges for the secretary of state:
Kerry will likely face resistance in seeking lockstep commitments, of course, given that India’s prime challenge is bringing reliable electricity and affordable fuels by any means to its billion-plus citizens — some 400 million of whom were unaffected by last year’s blackouts because they have no access to electricity at all. …
In his New Delhi speech, Kerry spoke of India joining “China and the United States and other major economies in order to rapidly develop joint technology and pilot programs for low- or no-carbon strategies.” This is a sound idea, but could rub Indian officials the wrong way. More than a few times, Indian diplomats and officials have told me they bristle every time they see India lumped with China in discussions of obligations to eschew fossil fuels, given that India’s per-capita energy use is less than a third that of China. Still, Kerry is right that the prosperous, urban side of India, with a straining, highly inefficient electrical grid [pdf], traffic-choked streets and other sources of energy waste, can do plenty to cut emissions even as it boosts energy access.
John Upton has more on Kerry’s visit:
The Americans’ arrival in Delhi coincided with deadly floods in northern India that some Indian officials have linked to global warming. But though climate change poses urgent dangers in India, Kerry’s speech was not received warmly by all of the nation’s environmentalists. Some felt they were being lectured to by the secretary of state, a representative of a nation that is second only to China in total greenhouse gas emissions.
Kerry has long warned of the dangers of climate change, and it’s been one of his favorite topics to discuss abroad since he was sworn in as Obama’s top diplomat. “Everywhere I travel as secretary of state — in every meeting, here at home and across the more than 100,000 miles I’ve traveled since I raised my hand and took the oath to serve in this office — I raise the concern of climate change,” he wrote just last week in an opinion piece in Grist.
The Dish 