[topspin]

Indeed. India has a coal glut on their hands. India was opening one new coal planet every month at the end of 2015. Around the same time India's Arvin Subramanian coined the term “carbon imperialism" during Paris accord negotiations because India didn't like the terms.

As expected, much more favorable terms were renegotiated to get India on board; India now gets to grow their CO2 emission as a function of GDP. A simple extrapolation of this shows they'll double their already huge CO2 output by the end of the decade, far surpassing the US.

Made the deal a lot easier to sign.

[vthallam]

India had to negotiate because it's emissions relative to emissions of the developed countries were minuscule. And then, you can't come say, let's make an agreement which shares equal responsibilities and burden.

Also, The Indian govt has a moral obligation to give it's citizens the basic amenities like power to the houses. They have been parallelly using coal and renewables to do it, now the cost of solar per unit is lesser than coal, so it's planning to cut down on coal.

[matt4077]

India consumes only 1/15 as much energy as the US (per capita). To insist that they should further reduce further is simply disingenuous: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.ELEC.KH.PC?contex...

[throwawayjava]

> far surpassing the US

Why is this a problem? India has 4x the population...

[pkaye]

For one, health issues related to air quality have no basis on per capita pollution.

[fellellor]

But air quality degeneration does have a lot of basis on per capita pollution. The per capita argument was good enough to set the tone at Paris, for an agreement between all the nations on this planet. The argument against per capita pollution contribution is just willful ignorance.

Besides, none of you have even bothered to look at the figures. India's current coal consumption is less than 30% of the US, for a population 4-5 times larger. Even if we double our coal consumption, it wouldn't outstrip US at their current levels.

[pkaye]

> But air quality degeneration does have a lot of basis on per capita pollution.

Can you explain to me how this works?

[notyourwork]

Why is this not a problem? In the world of pollution and environmental health, using justification of because another country does it doesn't work.

[cscurmudgeon]

So is an Indian worth less than an American?

[notyourwork]

Neither is worth anything if we as a society kill the planet we call home so this isn't about race or worth. It is about us as a planet deciding to keep our planet healthy. Like I said, just because one country does it doesn't make it right for others. The others should be scolding the US not following in their naive ignorant foot steps.

[sumedh]

> The others should be scolding the US

How can other countries do that?

[woodandsteel]

>A simple extrapolation of this shows they'll double their already huge CO2 output by the end of the decade, far surpassing the US.

You have to look at the trends. India has radically changed directions in the last few years, and we can expect in the coming years it will change even more.