Event report: Individuals can reduce India’s carbon footprint: Jairam Ramesh (includes video)

Individuals can help in lowering India’s carbon footprint through lifestyle choices and contribute significantly to the country’s response to the climate change challenge, said Jairam Ramesh, MP, Rajya Sabha, and Senior Visiting Fellow, The Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy, at a public lecture on “Climate Change and India’s Energy Policy” in Bengaluru on November 10, 2014. The event was organised jointly by The Hindu Centre and the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS) on November 10, 2014, and focused on the policy options before India both domestically and internationally.  

“Individual choices in cooking, in lighting and in transportation [are] very, very important”, Mr. Ramesh said, when asked by a participant as to “what a common citizen can do to help the government”.

In a detailed reply, the former Union Minister said: “The first thing is don’t eat beef. The biggest contributor to global warming is methane, and methane comes from large areas devoted to managing cattle. I have often said this to my western friends [who] are not very happy. If you stop eating beef you reduce your carbon footprint."

“Secondly, certainly, efficient use of lighting. Go home and throw out that CFL [compact fluorescent lamp] and replace it with LED [light-emitting diode bulb], you would have reduced your carbon footprint. The LED is, from a climate change point of view, any day superior to CFL. This is scientifically incontrovertible.” Yet another lifestyle modification advocated by Mr. Ramesh was to do with transportation. “If you have a choice between private transport and public transport, exercise the public transport option.”

These were simple steps that could be taken by individuals that could reduce India’s carbon footprint, as a nation’s carbon footprint was the sum total of individual emissions, Mr. Ramesh said.

Dr. Baldev Raj, Director, NIAS, who moderated the public interaction, highlighted the importance of individual contributions. “The denominator can become a multiplier” Dr. Raj said.

In the long term, however, Mr. Ramesh was hopeful that there would be a situation when individuals could become producers of solar energy as was the case in Germany now. Striking a note of disappointment on the efforts in India to improve solar energy, he pointed out that three decades ago, India was the leader in solar energy, but it now had to buy technology from China.

In reply to another question, Mr. Ramesh said the country could take the advantage of being a latecomer and could leapfrog into the non-HFC route directly by taking big steps in solar, wind and nuclear energy.

On the position to be taken by India in international fora, Mr. Ramesh noted in his lecture that the nation’s traditional argument had been that it had the “right to pollute and the right to emit” from the development point of view. “That window is closing slowly, but definitely,” he said and struck a note of caution that “India will be called upon to make some major mitigation commitments” in the next decade.

India, he said, “must play a pivotal role in designing a new architecture for a new climate change agreement at Paris in December 2015.”