Letter to the Readers, Mainstream, Dec 16, 2003

Letter to the Readers, Mainstream, 16 Dec 2023

The 28th United Nations Climate Conference (COP28) held in Dubai, United Arab Emirates just concluded on Dec 13, 2023. This conference was crowded with technocrats & lobbyists, and dealers from the Carbon trading market, and salesmen of unimaginably expensive technical fantasies of Carbon Capture and Storage (estimated to cost some 30 trillion dollars) to fix the Climate crisis …… . Countries most vulnerable to climate disasters tried hard at this conference to push implementation of financial pledges for an agreed upon fund at COP27 intended to compensate for the “loss and damage”. The volume of funds for this loss and damage fund is smaller than the combined annual contracts of world’s top ten footballers [1]. There was much drama when the first draft of the conference declaration made no commitments on the phase out of fossil fuels. But then finally a compromise text at COP28 was agreed which for the first time ever committed to exit fossil fuels.The final agreement at COP 28 remains vague with loopholes that may not permit staying within the 2° limit of global warming — a commitment made in COP 21 conference in Paris. There is always a distance between what gets committed at International fora and its actual implementation nationally. India is a major emitter of greenhouse emissions and massive air pollution is choking India’s Cities. A study published in the highly respected health Journal The Lancet showed that Air pollution killed 2.3 million people in India [2]. The record of Government of India’s measures to check Air pollution is abysmal. Whose responsibility is it take drastic measures to protect public health?. While India sets targets and makes national plans of an energy transition it has also been diluting of environmental norms and protections in the name of ease of doing business; protecting big business interests from public scrutiny. Social movement activists or ecologists blowing the whistle and asking for accountability are shooed away or increasingly targeted with criminal charges. Protecting our environment, is a matter of life and death should be treated as that and not be about fighting imperialism in emission targets at UN climate conferences…
December 16, 2023 —HK