Right Track on Climate Change

It's heartening to see our policy makers are on the right track on climate change. While Manmohan, as usual, began to make some worrying noises about climate change, Foreign Secretary gave an indication of how India looks at the issue:

Foreign Secretary Shiv Shankar Menon, in fact, said the best means for countries like India to deal with climate change is via more development. “If you are poor and you stay at a subsistence level, your ability to deal with it (climate change) is that much more difficult.”[IE]

While rich countries became rich, and stay rich, by using vast amounts of cheap energy, in the process generating greenhouse gases, now they claim they can better cope with climate change because they are rich. The only way poor countries can become rich countries is by using cheap energy for development. If newer cheap energy does not produce greenhouse gases, fine. If not, we still need cheap energy. Staying poor by using little per-capita energy is not an option.