India is the only G20 country that has fulfilled all the promises it made in Paris on climate change, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Thursday, asserting that India will not only fulfil its responsibilities but will also help others including the US in this critical area.
The Prime Minister was referring to obligations under the 2015 Paris Agreement.
"As far as India is concerned, the environment, and climate, are extremely important in our cultural traditions for us. The environment is an article of faith. This is not just something that we need to do for convenience. We believe this. We do not believe in the exploitation of nature.," Modi said in response to a question by PTI at a joint news conference with President Joe Biden in the East Room of the White House.
"In order for all of creation to work, we can make nature -- we cannot have exploitation of nature and we have always believed this," he said.
And on the basis of these values, India is not only doing things for itself but is taking some global initiatives as well, he said.
"You perhaps know that of the G20 countries, the promises they made in Paris, of all the G20 countries, India is the only country that has fulfilled all the promises it made at the G20. Not just that, in the area of solar energy in Glasgow, we have set ourselves a target to achieve 500GW of renewable energy by 2030," Modi said.
India has set itself the target to make Indian Railways net zero.
"And you must understand the scale of Indian Railways. When we talk about Indian Railways, it means that every day the entire population of Australia travels in wagons on our trains. And we have set ourselves the target to achieve net zero for our railways," Prime Minister Modi said.
"We have also set ourselves targets for solar energy for ethanol, a 10 per cent mix of ethanol. We have completed this target before the set date," the prime minister asserted.
India is also working in the area of green hydrogen, he said.
"We want India to be a green hydrogen hub and we are working towards this. International Solar Alliance has been launched by India and many countries have joined it and are working with India," he said.
"We will not only fulfil our responsibilities, but we will also help you in the area of climate change There is a lot of destruction of infrastructure as well and therefore because of climate change, the kind of crisis we are feeling we need to develop infrastructure that is resilient," he said.
President Biden said climate change is an existential threat to humanity.
"It's the most serious problem we face as human beings. We have to keep it below 1.5 degrees Celsius. We've made enormous progress here in the United States in dealing with this issue by doing three things. Number one, by insisting that we move every one of our industries into a position where they can take advantage of cheaper and more extensive and more available renewable energy," he said.
"Whether it's solar or wind or hydrogen and green hydrogen. There's a whole range of things we've been working on. In addition to that, we find ourselves in a position where what we've done is that we have significantly reduced for example, I made a commitment that we are going to make sure that by 2030, 30 per cent of all our land and sea and oceans, were in conservation, could not be developed," he said.
The US is well on its way to doing that and that's also absorbing carbon from the air as a consequence of that because of conservation, Biden said.
"We are in a position...we have provided for a significant increase in funding for a whole range of issues, not just for the United States but for the rest of the world," said the president.
"We're trying to work with other countries to maintain their carbon sinks so they don't have to develop them like we did and causing pollution. And we're trying to figure out how to work out to pay them not to develop certain areas like the Amazon and Brazil. But there's a lot of technology that's available that we're sharing and we share with one another," he said.
"We've learned how to do solar energy, which is considerably cheaper than fossil fuels. The same way dealing with not just solar but dealing with wind. So there's a lot of technology that we've developed and we're well on our way to meeting the commitment we made in Paris," Biden said.
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