Indian view on energy rationing.

Cartoon: By Ramirez.

While Australia, the US, and much of Europe push to legislate feel good legislation that is supposed to stop climate change in its tracks after forcing the rest of the world to accept the idea of energy rationing there seems to be little support for it in many countries. In some such as India there is downright hostility towards the west on the issue. Without nations such as India and China on board, Rudds Ration and Tax (RAT) scheme, is even more futile than the idea that any reductions of Australia’s miniscule proportion of world emissions will change anything anyway.

It has long been apparent that developing countries were going to generally ignore the efforts of the west to impose limits and keep on developing power stations anyway. I was not aware of the hostility being generated in those countries until I read an article by Deepak Lal in the Business Standard, “Spiking the road to Copenhagen” outlining the feelings involved from an Indian standpoint:

Three cheers for Jairam Ramesh! India at last has an environment minister who is willing and able to denounce the hypocrisy and immorality of the West in twisting the arms of India and China to curb their carbon emissions. He is right to make it clear that India has no intention of signing the new ‘climate change’ treaty in Copenhagen in December, which would put curbs on the carbon emissions of the Third World. If they do not comply they are being threatened by the draft bill going through the US Congress to levy carbon tariffs on their exports.

As this column has argued many times, this is a blatant attempt to prevent these countries from industrialising and achieving the standards of living of the West. For, until technological advances can allow alternative ‘green’ energy sources to compete with the fossil fuels, whose use is gradually eliminating poverty in the Third World as in the West’s own ascent from poverty, a call to put any curbs on carbon emissions is in fact to condemn their billions to continuing poverty. ….

Whilst the salving of their consciences by buying carbon offsets (as Al Gore claims to do every time he jets around the world) is akin to the Papal indulgences sold by the Catholic Church, which allowed its richer adherents to assuage their guilt and ‘fornicate on clean sheets’. For Gore to have the lights on his mansion blazing throughout the night, and seek to restrict the emissions from Indian power stations, when most Indians don’t even have an electric light bulb, is deeply wicked. …

Those development economists and sundry celebrities, who on the one hand, want to see the end of world poverty and on the other, to curb Third World carbon emissions, should be ashamed of themselves for advocating the latter path which will make the former goal impossible to achieve.

This is particularly heinous as the claim by the IPCC that, it is scientifically proven, CO2 emissions are the cause of global warming, is increasingly being questioned by climatologists. Particularly, as since 1997, both the terrestrial and more accurate satellite temperature readings (which are not contaminated by the ‘heat island’ urbanisation effect) show global cooling, even though there has been a large increase in CO2 emissions. This is also the period in which the sunspot activity in the Sun has ceased. …..

The full article can be found here.