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| Jeffrey Sachs with Rajat Gupta, Chairman of Governing Board, ISB, and M Rammohan Rao, Dean, ISB |
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| “We need strategies of mitigation and strategies of adaptation. The challenge is to reduce the greenhouse gas emission in a way that does not stop economic development.” |
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higher greenhouse gas concentrations.
India does face a problem. India’s per capita emission is the sixth, or the last of what they are in the rich countries. India is so big and its growth is so fast that there is no solution to this global problem without India mitigating its emissions compared to a business’s usual course quite significantly. In other words, certainly an emission per unit of GNP will have to be far lower than they are right now. The emissions will have to grow much less rapidly than GNP growth.
We need strategies of mitigation and strategies of adaptation. The challenge is to reduce the greenhouse gas emission in a way that does not stop economic development. One has to figure out a way to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions at a low cost, consistent with India still achieving double-digit growth rates over the next 30 years. This, I think, should be this country’s goal, and is an achievable goal.
There are two big challenges to the goal – technological development and technological adoption. Technological development is a public-private partnership problem. It is never just the problem of |
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private sector or the public sector alone. The nature of innovation entails public good, and needs public support as well as private motivation. It is certainly true for low emission technologies. We need public-private partnerships to get them done. The adoption challenge is setting an economic incentive framework requiring businesses and households to adopt more expensive and low emission technologies in the future. Alternative technologies are not more expensive than the standard technologies. The rich world would help the poor countries to pay part of the price of adopting them so that nothing is crippled in terms of the equitable, political, and social requirement of the living space for rapid development of countries like India.
I believe that the solution for this is a whole range of technologies. We need to plug in hybrid vehicles, alternative energy resources – and to some extent nuclear and solar – rather than bio-fuels, simply because of the land issue. We also need to ensure safe, clean fossil fuel use by capturing and sequestering the carbon dioxide that comes from the combustion of fossil fuels. Carbon capture and sequestration technology is the |
