How real is the fear of climate change?

Excerpts from India Tonight on CNBC-TV18 Watch the full show » RELATED NEWS Climate change debate: What will India's stance be?

Q: So the best way of making the conclusions that we are coming to more comprehensive and more acceptable is to ensure that there is more research done in the South as well?

Sethi: Absolutely right.

Q: Coming to the manner in which the two big blocks of the developed world and the developing world meeting together in Copenhagen are beginning to approach this issue of climate change. There was a certain accepted agreement after Kyoto and Bali that the world was converging along the same line of thinking, now it seems Denmark and some other Western countries are pushing forward a different draft that suggest significant changes. How important are those changes and how damaging are they to the agreement that emerged out of Kyoto?

Bhushan: The changes are significant there is always differentiation in the world of developing countries and developed countries in terms of who created the problem and in terms of who is going to make the significant cuts.

Q: Just for the sake of audience who doesn't know the subject, this is historically established and accepted that this is a problem created by developed countries and developing countries are not the cause of the problem?

Bhushan: Yes so far. So now what is happening with the Denmark Proposal is that they want to get rid of this differentiation, of this responsibility, they want a singleness in which everyone will do to save climate. What happens in this is that the developed world gets away with doing nothing

Q: There is no denying the fact that the developed world is responsible for the problem that we face and probably for the rate at which it is escalating as well. On the other hand it is also true that the developed world is not going to simply sit back and on its own cut its lifestyle to correct the problem. Very few voters in the West are prepared to cut their own lifestyles. Therefore, given that there is a situation that is fast becoming catastrophic, we need to add quickly. Is there not a moral argument for saying, that maybe we should all do if we can do it immediately and then give ourselves time to agree on a more sophisticated differentiated response, where different countries do different things but to begin with lets all agree to do what we can?

Sagar: I think that is true and in some sense and I also feel India has been doing a lot. Firstly, I don't think India and other developing countries have been doing nothing. Second, is I would like to go back to the framework of conventional climate change which is a legal binding document under which we are all preceding and that does require the Annexe 1 and that is for the industrialized countries to take the lead and actually bear the incremental cost of a transition in the South.

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