India's pollution level soars as does fossil fuel use, climate fight gets tougher

Even as the talk of the undying smog in northern India finds reverberations in the vast, cold corridors of the Olympic stadium in Baku, a major fossil-fuel producer and host of the 29th edition of the annual United Nations climate-change summit, two critical reports, released on the sidelines of COP 29, reflect India's growth conundrum.

- S DINAKAR

The first was new data from the 2024 Global Carbon Budget project, a peer-reviewed collaboration of more than 100 experts led by Pierre Friedlingstein, at the University of Exeter, UK, released on November 13, showing India to be the fastest-growing emitter of greenhouse gases from fossil fuels; the second, a report by the United States Energy Information Administration (EIA), released on the same day, noted India's elevation as the leading source of growth in global oil consumption.

What is unclear is the cause of this.

But the fresh data puts further pressure on New Delhi to clean up its air even as Indian negotiators have huddled in the chilly environs of Baku to stave off pressure from wealthy, Western nations pointing fingers at developing countries for increasing emission and burning more oil and coal.

Developing nations, led by India, are trying to secure $1.3 trillion in transfer from rich nations to the developing world as reparations for historical pollution while trying to preserve the carbon budget to grow their economies.