New Delhi has just received a lesson already learned in Ottawa: In the US, bilateral relations yield to the domestic politics of environmental activism.
President Barack Obama surprised no one on Feb. 24 when he vetoed legislation declaring the Keystone XL pipeline border crossing ready for approval. Obama had promised the veto. House and Senate Republicans expected it. The Canadian and Albertan governments, for which dawdling over the project imposes great cost, had no good reason to expect a different outcome.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, though, might have been somewhat less prepared for an American poke in the eye. On Feb. 18, US Sec. of State John Kerry and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy ceremoniously agreed to an expansion of an EPA program called AirNow, which provides warnings about air quality. India, they said, will be the second country in which Americans assigned to diplomatic outposts will be able to check local air quality online. The first such country was China.
Climate plaudits
Obama last fall earned plaudits from environmentalists for reaching an agreement on climate change with the People's Republic. While committing China to very little, the pact represented cooperation between two major emitters of greenhouse gases (GHG), a diplomatic triumph both can flourish in global climate talks next December. The American president no doubt wanted to strike a similar deal with India during his visit there late last month. He didn't get one. So India will wear the AirNow warning label. That the program monitors fine particles and not GHG emissions doesn't matter. This is foreign relations, not science.
Kerry connected these dots in his comments announcing India as the next country due AirNow monitoring. "We're hoping that this tool can also expand international cooperation when it comes to curbing air pollution," he said before noting that pollution spreads beyond national borders. "So the deep concern that the United States and China today share when it comes to curbing pollution has also led to unprecedented cooperation between our nations in addressing one of the greatest threats, which is climate change."
Like China, India has a huge population, rapid economic development, and-of course-dreadful air quality, especially around its teeming cities. But unhealthy air is one serious problem among many. Indian officials don't have the luxury of making air emissions their prime concern.
Which, for example, is the more critical problem: diesel fumes from the overcrowded trains that carry 3-4 million Indians into and out of Mumbai every workday or the 10-12 people/day believed by transport officials to die falling off them? Should Indian leaders act first on dirty air, or on dirty drinking water, or on the inadequacy and in many cases absence of toilets in urban slums and rural villages?
With an estimated 10 million people/year moving into cities from the countryside in what the World Bank calls "the largest rural-urban migration of this century," India faces daunting infrastructure challenges. While its workers build desperately needed roads and bridges and modernize overly burdened railways, they indeed stir up dust and burn hydrocarbons. Are they supposed to stop?
India has made great progress recently. Its economy is growing. The middle class is expanding. Opportunities are developing for 1.2 billion Indians. Indeed, air pollution is a serious problem. But so is the welfare of 400 million Indians still living in poverty, including, the World Bank says, 217 million malnourished children.
Myopic priorities
The environmental agenda that so strongly motivates Obama too often demands immediate action in service to myopic priorities. India thus receives a US nudge to subordinate growth to environmentalist preferences for uncompetitive energy. From the Indian perspective, this is costly and unrealistic. From the environmentalist perspective, it's short-sighted. In developing countries with environmental problems, impediments to growth, such as officially levitated energy costs, inevitably hamper environmental progress.
In case Modi has new questions about US friendship, meanwhile, he might profitably consult Stephen Harper, his counterpart in Ottawa.
