India to talk HFCs under Montreal pact

The government agreed to discuss the phasing out of refrigerant coolants under the Montreal Protocol, marking a change in its stand from earlier this month when the environment minister had refused to discuss the issue under the same norms.

Updated on: Oct 2, 2014, 24:00:22 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The government agreed to discuss the phasing out of refrigerant coolants under the Montreal Protocol, marking a change in its stand from earlier this month when the environment minister had refused to discuss the issue under the same norms.

The coolants, called hydrofluorocarbons (HFC), are said to be a major cause of global warming and are over 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

The United States has been pressing India to discuss their phasing out under the Montreal Protocol, a global treaty to phase out substances that deplete earth’s ozone layer.

In return, the US agreed that accounting of the phasing out of the coolants can be done under the United Nations convention on climate change that provides for reducing global warming-causing gases.

Environment minister Prakash Javadekar said India would discuss the issue only under the UN convention and not under the Montreal Protocol before he left to participate at the UN summit on climate change in New York last month.

The change in stand came as the US offered India a comprehensive deal on clean technologies for phasing out the refrigerant coolants.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, during his visit to the US, met President Barack Obama and signed an agreement where the US would provide $1 billion to finance renewable energy and new research and development institutes for developing clean energies in India after the government changed its stand on the coolants.

The two leaders also agreed to start a smart energy programme for urban areas.

Two American companies — DuPont and Honeywell — have patented the replacement for the coolant used in the refrigerating industry, which grew by over 15% in 2013. Sunita Narain of the Centre for Science and Environment welcomed the decision but added that compensation for phasing out should be adequate.

The Indian decision on HFCs came a year after China agreed to discuss the phasing out under the Montreal Protocol and also got US funding after the agreement.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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