The eighth climate conference (CoP-8) is in our city, Delhi. It’s about an issue that concerns all of us deeply. Scientists tell us that climate change will not come only in the form of increased temperatures. It will come without a warning. More droughts, more floods, more heat waves, more cyclones. We will experience these extreme weather events season after season, but nobody will tell you that it is climate change. Don’t be lulled. Take the extraordinary heat waves or delayed monsoons in India this year. Or the extraordinary floods in Europe. These are early warnings of more to come.

But what is even more frightening is that something so dramatic is beginning to happen in our world and we are helpless about finding a solution. This is because the solution to climate change is not easy. We know that the heating of the earth’s atmosphere is primarily caused by carbon dioxide emissions from the use of fossil fuels, that is burning coal in power stations, using petroleum for running automobiles and doing just about everything that keeps the economy going. Climate change is therefore, less about the environment. More about the world economy as we know it. This is why the leader of the world’s largest economy and largest polluter — the US — has said that he rejects the Kyoto Protocol — the agreement to cut emissions in the industrialised world — because it will hurt the US economy and "cost us jobs". We know that the answers will lie in reinventing or reforming the energy economy of the world — moving towards renewable energy systems. But this is a task easier said than done.

Climate change is too important to be left to governments alone. It is about the economy, yes. But it is also about sharing the resources of the world. The Earth’s atmosphere can take only that much abuse. Industrialised country emissions are far beyond ‘that much’. Call it the natural debt of these countries; they have overdrawn on the Earth’s natural capital to feed their industrial growth.

In this scenario, there is no option but to limit and share the total greenhouse gas emissions of the world. But as carbon dioxide emissions are so closely related to economic growth, restricting emissions will also mean limiting economic growth. Therefore, unless we want to accept permanent freeze in economic inequity, we have to find ways of sharing the total greenhouse gas emissions on a fair and equitable basis. We have to find ways of moving towards a non-fossil fuel based economy in the future. Less emissions in the industrialised world so that poor countries get the "ecological space" to grow. Less use of oil and more of solar and wind and biomass technologies.