But while China has earned plaudits from Western environmentalists in recent months for its green policies -- including hundreds of billions in government spending on renewable energy -- and its newfound flexibility on climate change, India is often cast as the spoiler, a country that wants the right to continue emitting carbon with impunity while insisting that the West takes on strict caps. India has come to be seen less as an impoverished nation than an economic competitor, which aims to use climate-change negotiations as another way to catch up, and perhaps surpass, the West. "It's an image that plays to the fears of people: 'First they take away our jobs to Bangalore, now they want to take away our cars,'" says Narain.
It's worth asking whether that image is rooted in reality. Like China, India is a major developing power -- indeed the country is rising, its economy having grown more than 7% in 2008, even during the recession. Major Indian firms like Infosys and Tata Group are world leaders. Yet the reality is that much of the country is still unimaginably impoverished -- a third of the world's poor live in India, more than in all of sub-Saharan Africa. As a result, its per capita carbon emissions are miniscule -- just 2.77 tons of CO2 equivalent, compared with 19.81 tons for the average American and 4.4 tons on average for the world as a whole. Less than half of India's population has access to grid electricity -- and even those that do suffer frequent brownouts. There are just 12 cars per 1,000 people in India, compared to more than 800 in the U.S., and thanks to stiff taxes, gasoline and diesel cost more in India than in the U.S. or China. Even in their diet, Indians put significantly less pressure on the planet: Indians eat one twenty-fifth the amount of meat that Americans do, and their mainly vegetarian food source emits a lot less carbon. "India has gotten its income through very low levels of energy intensity compared to the E.U. or the U.S.," says Girish Sant, a coordinator with the Prayas Energy Group.
The main reason that India emits so much less carbon than the U.S. -- and will continue to do so for decades -- is, of course, because it is poor. Energy equals wealth, and right now, energy still equals carbon. So when Indian diplomats argue that it is unfair to expect their country to accept limits on growth to combat a problem that Western nations are still overwhelmingly responsible for, it's hard not to be sympathetic. "If the U.S. is concerned about a depression [due to carbon caps], we are concerned about keeping our people in poverty for another three generations," says Prodipto Ghosh, a former Indian climate negotiator.
