Last week's World Bank report on greenhouse gas emissions should be viewed with caution. Prima facie, it holds India and China responsible for driving up these discharges by 15 per cent, fuelling climate change.
Going a step further, it even holds the low-income and middle-income countries together accountable for about two-thirds of the total increase in carbon dioxide, the most abundant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. As such, the report gives the impression that the developing countries are the main culprits in raising the content of heat-retaining gases in the atmosphere.
The numbers may be factually correct, but if this were to result in finger-pointing at rapidly growing low-income countries, it would be a perverse result.
First, as the same report points out, the industrialised countries with much smaller populations, led by the United States, continue to be the worst offenders when it comes to carbon dioxide generation. The US alone (with about 5 per cent of the world's population) contributed about 24 per cent of total harmful gas emissions and the 12 nations of Europe's eurozone accounted for 10 per cent.
The logic of the Kyoto Protocol is precisely that poor countries should not be held back merely because they now account for more economic growth than the rich ones, lest it result in economic apartheid.
Second, an alternative perspective on the roles played by the developed and developing countries in ozone layer depletion can be obtained by reading the greenhouse gas bulletin issued in March by the World Meteorological Organisation.
This has revealed, perhaps for the first time, that though the overall concentration of the three main greenhouse gases -- carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide -- reached their highest recorded levels in 2004, the concentration of methane (for which India and China are squarely blamed) was tending to level off. The data indicate that the atmospheric content of methane showed virtually no increase in 2004, and rose earlier by less than 5 parts per billion annually since 1999.
This is the gas generated mainly by activities like paddy cultivation, bio-mass burning and ruminant farm animals. All these factors, apparently, are prevalent more in the developing economies, including India, than in the developed ones.
But, on the other hand, gases like carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide generated by fuel combustion, fertiliser use and industrial processes, which are more abundant in the developed countries, are still continuing to rise fast.
This is not intended to undermine the need for using clean development mechanisms in the developing countries. But it underscores the point that the bigger polluters, like the US and Europe, need to do much more than what they have been doing in protecting the environment.
From this point of view, the US refusal to participate in the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas reduction is untenable. There also seems to be something amiss in the recent scaling down of gas emission targets by some European countries, which has led to a price crash in the carbon trading market.
India would be among the worst hit as over 90 of its companies already possess certified carbon credits that can be traded.
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