Will net zero emissions targets by 2050 help mitigate climate change?
Sunita Narain, director-general, Centre for Science and Environment traces the inequities of emissions that has led to runaway climate change. Issues such as cumulative historical emissions are slowly being phased out of the climate change discourse, thereby removing the responsibility of a handful of countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Japan, Russia, Canada and Australia, for creating the problem of global warming.
Since 2001, China has also become part of the problem. Together, the seven rich countries, along with China, will control over 70 per cent of the carbon space left between 2020 and 2030.
Sunita Narain traces unjust share of carbon emissions that have helped a certain group of countries develop, while putting pressure on poor countries that are still developing to take unjust mitigation measures. Will net zero emissions targets by 2050 help mitigate climate change? Narain says probably not, because that will mean emitting now and trying to offset it later.
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