Mary Kissel: A Climate-Change Chameleon - WSJ.com
"The climate world is divided into three: the climate atheists, the climate agnostics, and the climate evangelicals. I'm a climate agnostic."
A direct—some would say brash—man with a penetrating stare, it's hard to believe India's Environment and Forests Minister, Jairam Ramesh, is agnostic about anything. This is the man who dressed down Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last year when she pushed for India to adopt binding emissions targets. He was the first politician of a major nation to question the United Nations' claim that the Himalayan glaciers were melting at a rapid pace. And he's spearheaded his country's very own climate-change research institute—a direct challenge to the U.N.'s now-discredited Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
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For New Delhi, that outcome would be a significant victory. A nation of 1.2 billion people, India has long understood that climate-change "intervention" pushed by the U.N., green activists and Al Gore (an "evangelical," snorts Mr. Ramesh)—namely, binding emissions targets—was code for giving up cheap energy sources in exchange for economically unproven technologies. The result would be higher energy costs for India's vast legions of poor, many of whom don't even yet have access to electricity or gas—effectively consigning hundreds of millions of people to continue living in slums.
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Climate change is "one of the main issues" India faces, Mr. Ramesh says. But is it more important than all the other environmental problems India faces? I ask, thinking of stinking gutters I vaulted over, in high heels, to reach his office. "To say that it is the defining issue, no, there are bread-and-butter environmental issues. There are pollution control issues which are affecting the public health. You know, in many parts of India people are dying of cancer because of excess of pesticides in water, or arsenic in water. That's more important and more urgent than climate change."
Other poor countries agree. China, South Africa, Brazil and India "bonded very well together at Copenhagen," Mr. Ramesh reports, neglecting to mention the group's approach—to use the meeting to pressure developed-world nations to squeeze billions of dollars out of developing-world nations' taxpayers. The minister, a self-confessed "China realist," is no political naïf: "We are united in our desire not to have a binding agreement thrust upon us which will constrict our developmental options."
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We circle back to the original point: Maybe climate change just isn't the international disaster that evangelicals like Mr. Gore said it was. Mr. Ramesh leans back in his chair and a twinkle enters his eye: "When AIDs hit the international agenda, it just meant that malaria, tuberculosis, diarrhea, dysentery all got [pushed] into the background. Climate change has become the AIDs of the environment!" It's a bit dramatic, but not too far off the mark. The question is, does Mr. Ramesh believe it himself?
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