Hiding Behind the Poor

Greenpeace India just released this brief, fantastic, report (at the climate COP in Bali (December 2007). It deserves huge kudos, and a great deal of attention, for it shows that India — in claiming that its emissions are too low to demand mitigation — is actually relying on misleading average emission data. Which is to say that India’s elites are “hiding behind” their own poor. The authors show this in just the right way, by doing their homework. They break India’s population down into what, for lack of a better term, we might call “emission classes,” and — surprise — it turns out that there are about ten million people within India who have emissions above, and sometimes far above, the sustainable global average.

Highly recommended and, we hope, a sign of the times.