Two Cheers for Incremental Progress: The U.S.-India Climate Change Agreement

Over at The Week, I have a piece summarizing the outcome of President Obama’s bilateral meeting in Delhi with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. While not a blockbuster deal like his previous agreement with China, the two sides did make significant progress. India will continue its aggressive investments in solar energy, paired with efforts at expanded financing through the United States. India will also try to assuage concerns about its nuclear energy liability law, which has been seen as a significant hurdle to foreign investment. Altogether, these efforts should be celebrated, even though much more remains to be done:

On the larger context of the commitment to do more on climate change, much remains to be seen over the course of this year. The next major raft of announcements will come this spring, when the 195 countries that are party to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change are due to submit their INDCs for tackling greenhouse gas emissions, a commitment that grew out of the Lima conference in December. This process has been strengthened immensely by what the Obama administration has done in Beijing and Delhi over the past three months.

You can read the rest of the article here.

Tags: climate change, narendra modi, barack obama