This column comes to you from Rio where I am attending the UN Conference on Sustainable Development, popularly called Rio+20, the reference being to the original Rio summit of 1992.  The mix of activities is very similar to other such large UN conferences – an acrimonious negotiating process, corporate gatherings to allow a display of social responsibility, a vast number of side events that offer their version of what needs to be done, activist groups that diligently lobby delegates and lots of people looking lost and underemployed.

I was in charge of the substantive work and the secretariat support for the negotiations in the original Rio summit 20 years ago.  That summit produced the Rio Declaration that contains principles like "common but differentiated responsibility" that people swear by even today and a negotiated programme of action called Agenda 21.  We must have got something right because as recently as January 2012  the Republican National Committee in the USA passed a resolution denouncing Agenda 21 and describing it as "a comprehensive plan of extreme environmentalism, social engineering, and global political control" that considers " the American way of life of private property ownership, single family homes, private car ownership and individual travel choices, and privately owned farms; all as destructive to the environment" and that seeks to accomplish social justice by " socialist/communist redistribution of wealth"!

The contentious issues in these global negotiations on sustainable development can be grouped into two sets. One includes those linked to fairness and equity, like the principle of "common but differentiated responsibility" and concessionality in finance and technology transfer. The other involves measures to give concrete expression to the economy-ecology link like greening of fiscal policies, national accounts and so on. The resistance on the fairness issue comes mainly from the USA; but on the economy-ecology link India and China are more likely to voice their concerns because of their fears about surreptitious attempts at trade conditionalities.

If I had to characterise what is going on now in Rio it would be that the USA is trying to roll back what it had agreed to 20 years ago under Bush the father on the fairness and equity issues.  They tried that in Rio+10 at Johannesburg, when Bush the son was in power and are pursuing that agenda with  special vigour at Rio+20 when Obama is in the saddle.  There could be some short-term explanations for US intransigence – ensuring that the Republicans do not get ammunition for the election campaign or bolstering the hard line that the US is taking in the climate process.  But the pattern is too consistent over a long period for such contingent explanations. I believe the problem lies in a gulf between US environmentalism and the green movements elsewhere.

As Ramachandra Guha points out in his recent, misleadingly titled book on environmental history,"How much should a person consume?", US environmentalism has involved two lines of action. One, reflecting the romanticisation of wilderness, is the national park movement in which the US is truly a world leader.  The other is downstream pollution management where also they led the way with their pollution control legislation.  The one characteristic of these two action areas is that they do not require any fundamental reconsideration of the market system.  Removing land from the production system is relatively easy when it is done in the vast emptiness of deserts and mountains. As for pollution control a technological fix is all that may be required. Pollution legislation can be seen simply as an extension of municipal regulations to control potential nuisances. In particular these action areas do not require any reconsideration of lifestyles and consumption nor do they require global cooperation.

European environmentalism was different as it started asking questions about consumption standards quite early on as is evident in the European obsession about recycling. Latin American environmentalism always pointed to their resource exploiting economies and trade pressures as the problems that had to be addressed. As for us in India, our environmentalism came from a concern about agriculture and rural livelihoods. That is why the world other than the USA readily accepted the core ideas of sustainable development that came out of Rio in 1992 and recognised that addressing environmental problems required action in matters like energy, land, forest and water policy.

The threat of climate change reinforced this link between environment and development and gave a sharper edge to the equity issue. At Rio in 1992 the threat was still speculative. But now, with each IPCC report being even more definite and more alarming than the previous one, the case for precautionary action is strong. But the action cannot be end-of-the-pipe clean up.  It has to address and change how energy is produced and consumed.  It has to address the issue of a fair sharing of the space available for carbon emissions. The US way of life and, for that matter, the way of life everywhere has to be up for negotiation because climate change is the mother of all externalities – global, long term and potentially catastrophic in its impact.

Twenty years after Rio we need to strengthen the old agreements not weaken them. That is the message form science. Over the past few days I have been participating in a gathering of scientists who are increasingly concerned that we are leaving it too late.  On climate they doubt if we can keep to the 2 degree goal and are afraid that with present trends we may be in for a potentially catastrophic 4-5 degree change. Of the nine planetary boundaries that we must not transgress to sustain life on earth, according to them, we have already crossed three – atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, rate of biodiversity loss and removal of atmospheric nitrogen for human use.

But these dire forecasts have had no impact on the negotiating process at Rio. At the time of writing it looks as if the UN will cobble together a reasonably respectable agreement with some new commitments on sustainable development goals, green economy measures and institutional strengthening.  This is not good enough.  The risks that confront us require something more bold. The injustices that continue require something more fair. Unfortunately nowhere do we have a government capable of fulfilling its responsibilities to its unborn citizens.