India Balks At Carbon-Caps While Bengali Tigers Dwindle

A meeting today in India between American Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Indian Minister of Environment and Forests began innocently enough. It was meant to be just another dull photo op, one more chance for the venerable state figures to shake hands, mug gleaming, straight aristocratic grins for the cameras and have their pictures snapped by hordes of press photographers, this time in the ITC Green Centre, corporate headquarters of the ITC hotel chain and a "platinum certified green building", to punctuate the message that India is committed to limiting it's carbon footprint.

But then, everything went wrong.

“There is simply no case for the pressure” the U.S. is exerting, considering India produces among the lowest per capita emissions in the world, Minister Jairam Ramesh told Clinton during an unexpected discussion of climate negotiations during an event intended to showcase U.S.-Indian cooperation on clean energy at a “green” office building outside New Delhi.

“As if this pressure was not enough, we also face the threat of carbon tariffs on our exports to countries such as yours,” Ramesh said, referring to a climate-change bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on June 26 that imposes tariffs on exports from countries that refuse to adopt greenhouse gas controls by 2020.

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“We look upon you suspiciously because you have not fulfilled” the commitments made by developed countries in earlier climate treaties, Ramesh told Clinton and Stern, adding there’s a “credibility crisis” that industrialised nations will have to overcome in their demands of poor nations.

This is, of course, problematic for the Obama administration, which has been pushing for emissions caps on the developing world since the G8 summit earlier this summer, likely to ramp up worldwide support for a binding cap-and-trade initiative come December at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. Thus far the response from those developing nations has been tepid at best and at worst hostile -- witness China's visible absence from the G8 summit this year, along with their stated intention to increase emissions in response to demand.

The signs of ecological decay aren't far from the ITC Green Centre. You need only travel to one of India's largest swaths of protected wilderness, Panna Tiger Preserve, to see for yourself the end result of our impact on the environment.

The park, in the central state of Madhya Pradesh, was part of the country's efforts to save the famous Royal Bengal Tiger from extinction.

State Minister of Forests Rajendra Shukla said that the reserve, which three years ago had 24 tigers, no longer had any.

A special census was conducted in the park by a premier wildlife institute, after the forest authorities reported no sightings of the animals for a long time.

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While this controversy rages, there have been reports that another national park in Madhya Pradesh, Sanjay National Park, which was included in the tiger project three years ago, also has no tigers left.

One is lead to wonder if the iconic Bengali Tiger, symbolic of the exotic and mysterious character of India, will become another statistic, another miscalculated sacrifice for the creeping lurch toward unipolar regional dominance.

(Sources:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601091&sid=aLjVkAtjjyr0
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8150382.stm)