Under all round attack back home over his dramatic turn on India’s stand on emission cuts, environment minister Jairam Ramesh on Friday claimed he was “nuancing” the country’s stand against legally-binding cuts as the climate change conference here struggled for a consensus.
Mr Ramesh’s statement is considered as an attempt to break the stalemate in the conference, which has been marked by differences on various issues, but detractors back home were unsparing in their criticism that the minister has made an unilateral statement exceeding the Parliamentary mandate.
They accused Mr Ramesh of deviating from the long-held Indian position that it will not accept any internationally legally binding emission cuts.
Mr Ramesh said there has been no shifting of the goal post and that he stood by India’s position that it will not accept internationally binding cuts “at this stage” because he does not know what are the conditions that accompany them.
“We remain anchored in non-negotiable but we are expanding our options,” he said.
“All I said was that all countries must take binding commitments in appropriate legal form. This does not mean that India is taking on a legally binding agreement at this stage. That’s our position,” Mr Ramesh said.
Mexico scrambled to break an impasse between rich and poor nations over future cuts in greenhouse gas emissions on Friday as 190-nation climate talks went down to the wire.
Delegates said there was little progress in overnight talks in Mexico’s beach resort of Cancun and that the negotiations, due to end on Friday. If successful, the two-week Cancun meeting will create a fund of $100 billion a year for developing countries threatened by altered weather patterns, and give them the technology to leapfrog old petroleum-based economic development in favor of clean energy. In a late-night session, negotiating groups reported they had settled some disputed wording and clauses, but other knotty issues remained to be sorted out. One issue, related to pledges by industrial and developing countries to rein in emissions of heat-trapping gases, appeared deadlocked.
“It’s in the hands of the Mexican presidency,” John Ashe, who is chairing key discussions about the future of the Kyoto Protocol, said. The Kyoto Protocol currently binds almost 40 rich countries to cut greenhouse gases until 2012, but wealthy and poor nations are divided over what obligations they should all assume over the next few years. Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron spoke with Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan by telephone to discuss the standoff after Tokyo said it would not sign up for an extension of Kyoto beyond 2012 unless developing nations also commit to cutting their greenhouse gas emissions. The position has angered many developing countries. A Japanese foreign ministry statement said that Kan would work to make the talks a success.