Zeenews Bureau
Mumbai: Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, the oldest and largest grassroots environmental organisation in the US, has appealed to both India and the US to focus on the opportunity for containing climate change through collaboration, rather than get bogged down in who’s to blame or who needs to make the bigger sacrifice.
“We will make progress faster at stopping bad things if we focus more of our energy on doing good things because we both stand to benefit. We need to explore how we can start doing lots of good things for the planet -- building more wind turbines, improving insulation in more buildings, lowering the cost of solar cells by taking their deployment to scale, launching the electric vehicle revolution, restoring more degraded grasslands, saving more tropical forests. When we start doing this, the negotiations will have a very different tenor and pace,” Pope told mediapersons in Mumbai on Tuesday.
He added, “I suspect one challenging aspect of the negotiations in Copenhagen is that India wants to discuss finance and technology first, pathway second, and ultimate target last. The US and Europe probably want to go in the opposite order. For me, the more serious question is: Are the US and the other industrial nations prepared to take responsibility for bringing their emissions down really fast? Not if the US Congress has to lead, based on its performance so far.
“However good President Obama may be, and however much progress we have made, we are still the world's biggest atmospheric thief. That’s why the Sierra Club is here with Indian Americans. We are representative of Sierra Club’s growing interest in building international partnerships to address climate change mitigation and adaptation, and symbolise a coming together of the concerns of people of both countries to tackle global warming issues.”
Pope is here along with a group of Indian Americans from the Sierra Club for the presentation of the first ever “Green Energy & Green Livelihoods Achievement Award” for India, instituted by the club. The award is being shared by two Indian NGOs – Ecosphere Spiti from the mountainous Himachal Pradesh Spiti valley in the trans-Himalayas, and Barefoot College in Rajasthan, led by social entrepreneur Bunker Roy.
First Published: Tuesday, July 28, 2009, 16:49