New US-India Green Partnership Improves Prospects for Global Climate Deal
In a guest post to Climate Progress, a leading blog on climate-related issues, Julian Wong of the Center for American Progress discusses the bilateral deal that the United States and India reached on green issues, largely mirroring what the United States agreed to with China just over a week ago. Yes, Manmohan Singh and Barack Obama did more together than enjoy a fancy dinner. The first and most interesting feature of the announcement is a commitment to a strong outcome in Copenhagen, grounded in “full transparency. While the United States and India have gone further in their rhetoric than ever before in declaring the need for efforts to comprehensively cover “mitigation, adaptation, finance and technology,” the areas that UN laid out, does this signal a commitment to a Kyoto-like agreement on a five or six page declaration of intentions? The other two I find far more positive and concrete – comprehensive collaboration on clean energy development and deployment, as well as capacity building in India for climate adaptation and effective environmental governance. No matter what happens this December, the United States, China and now India will be working together to improve their own climate futures. With an agreement between the United States and Brazil be next? An analysis of the strategy behind these agreements sounds like the foundations of a future column…
