I have reached Cancun few hours’ back to attend the 16th Conference of Parties (CoP-16) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and have been greeted with news that can only be characterised as bad or worse.

The post-2012 emissions reduction commitments for Annex 1 countries under the Kyoto Protocol (KP) are presently going nowhere. Japan had fired the first salvo when in the opening plenary, it categorically stated its opposition to the second commitment period of KP. Now, countries like Australia, Canada, and some European nations have joined the chorus to disband KP.

One of the eight Missions under India's National Action Plan on Climate Change, the revised National Mission for a Green India (GIM for short) professes responding to climate change by a combination of adaptation and mitigation measures, which would help:

Navi Mumbai airport gets 'green' signal

- Business Line, 23 November 2010

For a naive and non-scientist, it would be obvious that the liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) is a clean fuel. Especially in the cities, it is the most common fuel for domestic cooking. There is also a small fraction of light duty vehicles which run on LPG and has proven to be clean compared to their counter parts - diesel and petrol.

Developing countries must guard against a repeat of the situation at Copenhagen, where negotiations under the UNFCCC were deliberately stalled, and Heads of State/Ministers from developing countries were pressured to agree to “something” to save the climate regime from collapse.

“…………… what was the question?”

If you ask someone living in one of our medium or large cities to name the most serious civic problem faced by his city, he will more likely than not say it is the growing problem of traffic.

1. While India is seriously engaged in global climate talks, it has simultaneously launched a highly misconceived plan to set up private “merchant” power plants based on coal.
   

I suggest that the Government of India issues the following statement of policy on production, use and release of genetically modified organisms (GMOs).