Cement Energy and Environment

around 2030 owing to continuous energy efficiency improvement as well as decarbonisation in the power sector. Societal notions of well– being and consumption patterns, different from those in industrialized countries, will .lead to per-capita energy use remaining below most other countries with similar GDP levels- around that of Spain– and per-capita C0 2 levels are not likely to rise significantly despite rising per-capita GDP. Clearly, for developing countries, the critical issue is policy space for building infrastructure till the saturation level, or equitable access to sustainable development. It has also now become clear that international cooperation based on multilateral agreements around long-term economy-wide issues, such as climate change, is different from sectoral issues such as ozone problem, as alternative patterns and processes in the human use of nature in developed and developing countries result in tradeoffs for socioeconomic systems that are very different from those focusing only on environmental systems. Recent research establishes that growth and climate protection are rival objectives only in high-income countries. Consequently, when policies focussed on economic growth have confronted policies focused on emission reduction, it is economic growth that wins out every time. At the global level, this has led to downplaying the fact that the largest emission reduction potential consistent with human well-being word-wide is on the consumption side, in the building and transportation sectors. Consequently developed countries have to modify lifestyles, with substantial costs, while developing countries need Global policy must focus on equitably sharing the carbon budget through shifts in consumption and output patterns to modify their growth pathways, without the need for market mechanisms to offset mitigation amounts and costs, as is evident from the transformative impact of the rise of China. Moving away from notions of equity, around the divisive per– capita principle, global public policy now must focus on equitably sharing the global carbon budget through fundamental shifts in consumption and production patterns on to a more sustainable path. The new paradigm, by making social development goals-human well-being supported by sustainable energy and ecosystem services-as the central objective, rejects the way the issue has been framed around environmental damage, targets and time-tables, that shaped the definition and objectives of sustainable development since the Stockholm Conference on Human Environment, held in 1972. In this paradigm, the choice is not between preservation and exploitation of nature, rather, the stress is on conservation through modifying patterns of resource use. There is the recognition that market-based mechanisms will not lead to a technological transformation. The new vision of sustainable development stresses adoption of patterns of resource use that are in– principle common for all countries. The implication for the global rule-based system is that for industrialized countries, frameworks will be needed to change particular kinds of resource consumption, not middle class life-style or human well-being , and for developing countries, the type of infrastructure to be established will largely determine emission levels in 2050. The policy has focus has to be on urban design and behavioral change to eliminate emissions, and reduce consumption of water, from buildings and modal shifts in transport. The key global challenge is making energy available to those who do have it at present, for the eradication of poverty, in an environmentally– sustainable manner. International cooperation in this framework would be based around a global rule-based system reviewing progress in three areas-reaching multilaterally-agreed national carbon budgets, development and sharing of innovative renewable energy, and agricultural biotechnologies- and bringing energy services and adequate food to those in developing countries who do not have access to it. (The author has worked at the policy level in the government of India and the United Nations Climate Change Secretariat) Courtesy: The Economic Times, ufh July 2011. 32