Tough talk

India has remained firm in its negotiations at the COP Summit, and leading the team is environment ministry’s additional secretary Richa Sharma

- REKHA DIXIT

ROBERTO CINGOLANI was frazzled at the end of the energy and environment ministers’meet of G20 countries this July. Cingolani, who is Italy’s ecological transition minister, had chaired the two-day meet. He said that negotiations with India and China were particularly tough and that the group failed to agree on a common language for their document ahead of the Conference of the Parties (COP) Summit to be held in Glasgow.

The G20 is a group of the world’s top 20 economies and therefore is a grouping that best reflects modern-day realities. Most other important groupings do not give representation to emerging nations like India. The failure of the G20 ministers’ summit to arrive at a consensual vocabulary may have been a disappointment to Cingolani, but his comment that India is a tough negotiator is a backhanded compliment. India is putting up a tough resistance to the bullying by advanced nations, as it seeks out space and carbon budget for its development. The advanced nations, having reached saturation levels of energy consumption, are now preaching to developing nations to cut down on consumption, reduce the use of coal and raise their climate mitigation ambitions. The buzzword these days is net zero, which effectively means to reach a stage when the amount of carbon dioxide captured from the atmosphere is equal to or more than the amount of greenhouse gases emitted, thus nullifying temperature rise.