No India Ink on a Copenhagen Climate Treaty
Nicolas Loris /
Leaders from different longitudes and latitudes will make the trip to Copenhagen for the climate change summit from December 7th through the 18th, but many of them are coming empty-handed. The latest comes from India’s Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh who won’t be bringing his treaty-signing pen, “There is no question of India accepting a legally binding emission reduction cut.”
This comes a day after Australia’s Senate rejected its Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, its emissions trading program, for the second time. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd had hoped to take this to the show-and-tell part of Copenhagen, but now it’s been defeated – twice. More analysis here. Geoffrey Lean of the Telegraph points out that “Gripped by a 13 year drought, [Australia] is thought to be the rich country most vulnerable to global warming. Its climate is already hot and dry. Agriculture, so badly hit by the drought, is central to the economy. And most people and industry are concentrated on coasts, vulnerable to the rising seas and fiercer storms expected to accompany a warming world. On the other side of the coin, it also emits more carbon per person than any other country on earth.”