White Man’s burden. It is the phrase west used to justify their colonialism. The burden is off the shelves now. Climate change is a new one. The west is ready to even extort money for it to show itself as virtuous.
India registers its apprehensions against Carbon border tax
India has ripped the new protectionist trade policy by the European Union into shreds. In a submission to the WTO, India said that climate change is being used as a veil to justify discriminatory behaviour towards products of trade. “Any measures taken to combat climate change, including unilateral ones, should not constitute a means of arbitrary or unjustifiable discrimination or a disguised restriction on international trade,” read India’s submission.
India’s contention stems from the fact that the European Union has devised a new mechanism called Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM). According to it, if the production line of any import in the EU doesn’t adhere to the Carbon parameters set by them, then the company will have to pay extra tax on them.
Though, on the face of it, tax is well-intentioned, it acts as inflation for consumers. Higher tax means higher cost, which ultimately translates into low competitiveness in the market. In the long run, it can force producers to shelve the idea of export. To put it bluntly, it goes against the idea of free trade. It is also against WTO norms on trade, something which India has been accused of in the past.
West’s failure on climate change has led to frustration
The reason behind this subtlety seems to be the West’s frustration on their own failures. The UK, the EU and the USA share more than 50 per cent credit (discredit) for polluting the Earth. Then when climate change knocked their world, they had gal to ask developing nations to stop growing to save Earth. It was not accepted, so green technology became a buzzword. There are two problems with it. Green technology is itself not defined and secondly whatever is available in the market is quite expensive.
Also read: The Western hypocrisy on Green Energy
On the technology front, research is continuously going on, while to help developing countries adopt them, a funding mechanism was established. Developed countries committed to contributing $100 billion annually to the Green Climate Fund in 2009. (GCF). The total amount was supposed to be $1 trillion by the year 2020.
On this magnitude, the donors have failed as a whole. The total amount contributed to the climate fund by the end of 2020 was only $632 billion. The issue has gotten worse as a result of this. If these nations continue to break their commitments, mitigating expenses will reach $2 trillion by 2025. If they continue to withhold funds even after that, the annual increase will reach $4.35 trillion.
Increasing economic crisis due to the Ukraine-Russia war has worsened the problem. Risk of a great recession looms at large. That is why you see these attempts to pass on the responsibility.
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