J M Mauskar

My article in @the_hindu - India’s presence amid a broken template of geopolitics To get its economic and technological trajectory right, India needs to get its geopolitics right It is time for India to punch it’s weight and enhance its global presence

Misplaced Optimism!! Misleading Sub-text!! US Retreat Sparks New Push to Save $45 Billion Climate Deals bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

Adherence to multilateralism is not genuflection to a moral principle but necessitated by the inherent and irreducibly global nature of the global warming challenge. With @tjayaraman thehindu.com/opinion/lead/br…

HOW "BEST AVAILABLE SCIENCE" MAKES IT ALONGSIDE YOUR MORNING COFFEE AS NEW CLIMATE POLICY.. A classic example of how climate-scenarios-based "science" leads to so-called "policy analysis" that feeds the global North narrative. At lightning speed by 16th August @CarbonBrief has a comment out on a paper that has just been published on 12th August (see here for paper nature.com/articles/s41558-0…).

The climate crisis just got incredibly worse!! The leading superpower, that refuses to acknowledge its historical responsibility for global warming, refuses to accept binding emission reduction targets has just undone whatever little it has been doing so far!! nytimes.com/2024/06/28/us/po…

Important and timely article -- but there are some key loopholes and the danger of "jumping only halfway across the well." In particular the headline takeaway: "Labelling emissions pathways by single actors using long-term temperature goals (e.g. ‘1.5°C’) is questionable and should be avoided." is especially problematic. The solution -- as we have long argued, the only option, is to continually monitor to what extent individual countries are taking up from, or overdrawing beyond, their fair share of the global carbon budget. Let me explain. 1. @HarryWinkler and Frank Lecoq correctly point out that when individual countries, or , even worse, regions and individual multinationals, unilaterally claim to be "1.5 deg aligned" or "2 deg aligned", such claims are bogus. This is absolutely correct and @KanitkarT and myself also have always said so. 2. What they don't tell us is what the rest of the world is doing. So their claims to be aligned to some temperature goal can only be understood in the light of those assumptions. 3. This is because temperature increase is essentially controlled by cumulative emissions. So any single claim, on whether it is aligned or not to the temperature goal, can only be judged in relation to the share of the global carbon budget that is claimed, and assumptions of how much will be left to the rest. 3. It is not only countries and organisations/institutions but also academic authors and scientists who make use of such temp-aligned language and should know better than to do so!! @KanitkarT and I have also said this, and so has @HarryWinkler I am sure, but now it is put down in print. 4. Not only us, but the entire LMDC fraternity as Governments, has been saying this as well, individually and collectively, though perhaps in different language. Most importantly, they have steadfastly ignored the claims of what developed countries say they are doing. Instead of which they put down what they think developed countries should be doing. And this is exactly on the lines of carrying Harald's arguments logically forward, though not in the same language. 5. So far so good -- but the recommendation that all temperature labelling should be given up is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The danger is that this will carry greater leverage since @HarryWinkler is an acclaimed co-architect of the Global Stocktake process in the actual implementation of its Technical Dialogue. 6. Consider the NDC of the US, where, ridiculously, it claims that its NDC emission reduction target is fair and ambitious because instead of emissions reducing in a straight line till 2050, they actually reduce faster. Now this is laughably absurd a claim, that reducing faster than linear is ambitious and fair. 7. But we need a metric of debunking this claim AND we need a way of saying what they should do. Unfortunately, the paper leaves with no options on both of those necessities. 8. This is particularly dangerous for the second GST, since then we are left with no metric of discerning individual responsibility. Who is to do how much, and what is their fair and equitable share, in the light of the temperature goals of the Paris Agreement, is a question that does have to be answered. And as many genuinely bewildered citizens would ask, are countries doing what they should? 9. For developing countries this is especially unsatisfying given their challenge of getting adequate carbon space for sustainable development. To be told that there is no metric for discerning what the rich should be doing is not helpful. 10. Plus like the unfortunate ruling of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, this will mean a call for all countries to basically "do as much as they can"...And we all know how far that will take us!! 11. What is the solution? As the LMDC fraternity of countries and many others have argued (including @KanitkarT and yours truly), the only way is to monitor what is the share of the global carbon budget that the individual country is taking up. The pathway itself in all its detail is not that important, but it is the cumulative emissions of CO2 that is the true indicator. 12.⁠ ⁠For developed countries, that have universally overdrawn beyond their fair share, it is a matter of the most rapid reduction possible and moving towards increasing negative emissions. Monitoring the progress of this, or charting this progression would be the way of determining whether they are temp aligned to some particular temperature. 13. We all know where @HarryWinkler and Frank Lecoq's argument begins and that is appreciated, but where it ends is less than helpful and a positive danger. I look forward to the authors urgently fixing this problem!! @KevinClimate @n_thanki @chilledasad100 @TasneemEssop @harjeet11 @bforboseman @3rdworldnetwork @moefcc @KanitkarT @sciencebwoy @JMauskar @JRBhatt60 @doreenstabinsky @ysaheb @victormenotti @KarthaSivan @AthanasiouTom @Sreejaiswal

This comment by @HMcJeon on our paper "Equity assessment of global mitigation pathways in the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report" doi.org/10.1080/14693062.202… thoroughly misunderstands our work. It a) disregards the normative dimension of models and scenarios that are used in the IPCC AR6 WGIII assessment, especially with regard to equity between countries and b) shows naivete or egregious disregard of how the AR6 Working Group III results on scenarios are being used. So here we go: 1. "If you give me an unequal world..." -- Nobody asks the modellers to choose an unequal world as the future, least of all from the global South. It is a conscious choice that modellers make. 2. @HMcJeon was "asked" to model "more equal" worlds by unnamed "certain stakeholders" but chose not to publish them. Precisely our point -- that equitable scenarios are missing from the IPCC AR6 in the (large) subset of scenarios for which adequate information is available. And since the scenarios are submitted voluntarily it is clear that modellers, by and large, are ignoring equity. 3. If @HMcJeon's claim is that some of his individual models and scenarios can stand out from the mass of the rest and demonstrate equitable outcomes -- well that is precisely what the IPCC WG3 assessment does not provide for. We have pointed out that instead of faux statistical averages (faux because the scenario set is not really a statistical sample), examining differences between scenarios and models as well as paying attention to outliers with innovative solutions could be far more useful to the world at large. 4. A sweeping claim is made that the choice is either 2 deg warming and equity or 1.5 degree warming and no equity. Among other things, we point out in the paper that lack of equity is so pervasive in modelling that even when considering 2 deg warming, equity is set aside. 5. This easy formula of "2 deg and equity vs 1.5 and no equity" will not happen with the bulk of scenarios and models because NONE of them (to the best of our knowledge) focus on going beyond "grandfathering" of emissions and account for responsibility. Which as the literature has pointed out repeatedly is far from being considered equitable. 6. Models also use economic theories and methods from a particularly narrow stratum of the wide spectrum of economic thought -- a particular brand of neo-classical economics with particularly simplistic assumptions for reasons of computability among others. However, such assumptions are typically violative of equity. Least-cost and Pareto optimality for instance are pervasive in models and are virtually guaranteed in the setting of most scenarios to ensure lack of equity. 7. While all this is problematic enough, the use of "statistical averages" over collections of scenarios, such as "median" emissions reduction by 2030 and 2035, actively hawked to the world at the UNFCCC by the scientific community of the global North as the "best available science", is even worse. Countries, especially the global South, are called upon to accept such "targets" without any clear acknowledgement of the caveats and assumptions. 8. At COP28, in an earlier draft of the GST decision, the caveats and caution on the use of scenarios from the IPCC AR6 Synthesis Report were quoted verbatim in a footnote. Some countries actually opposed their inclusion and they were finally dropped except for a very minimal acknowledgement that such caveats exist. Indeed, scientific rigour demands that these be acknowledged fully in such decisions. 9. Modellers and scenario builders must acknowledge responsibility for the uses to which their models and scenarios are put. They must present their results in the public domain in policy making with due acknowledgement up front of caveats and assumptions. 10. There are versions of an ethical code around for modelling covering other disciplines. The IAM community needs to formulate one and implement it if they are to be credible in policy, especially in the global South, of whose concerns they have been particularly dismissive so far. @KanitkarT @schipper_lisa @ysaheb @KevinClimate @HarryWinkler @Peters_Glen @Oliver_Geden @JimSkeaIPCC @JMauskar @ambtstirumurti @moefcc @bforboseman @chilledasad100 @3rdworldnetwork @NITIAayog @n_thanki @harjeet11 @doreenstabinsky @victormenotti

#Budget2024 The Dept of Pharmaceuticals used to have a fairly small budget in the past, but with Dr Mandaviya taking up the dual responsibilities as the Minister of @MoHFW_INDIA as well as Chemicals and Fertilizers of India, its budgetary allocations have gone up considerably

1/n TWN briefing paper by @tjayaraman and me, deconstructing the push for global targets for emissions reductions, global peaking of emissions, tripling of global RE capacity, and doubling of energy efficiency. twn.my/title2/briefing_paper…

@KanitkarT @JMauskar @sciencebwoy @gsaipsn @JRBhatt60 @TedNordhaus @NAASIndia @NationalBiodiv

The focus of climate public finance has turned from grants for climate and development action to history-blind taxation. This is just another attempt to get developing countries to pay for a climate crisis they did not create.

MOONWALKING CLIMATE RESPONSIBILITY. This Nature article walks historical and current responsibility backward -- putting the onus on developing countries. Despite the pious initial remark of how responsibility for solutions shouldn't fall on those whose contribution is the least.

EU SCIENTIFIC ADVISORY BOARD ON CLIMATE CHANGE accepts that equity considerations should be based on national fair share of global carbon budgets. India's own fair-share-of-budget deniers should take note at least now!! climate-advisory-board.europ…

HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT: In IPCC AR6 scenarios, more stringent mitigation radically reverses current global trends of improving food security. In 1.5 degree warming scenarios, mitigation leads to the maximum increase in the population at risk of hunger.

The credibility of forecasts that extend beyond the lives of forecasters is about as robust as astrology. They are done to scare poorer geographies into paying for decarbonisation. You will find many rich country controlled banks think tanks etc doing this in the future

1/n Does the fact that an IAM is open source and the results are transparently available make the fact that their very structure disallows distributive justice any less true? No.

BIG STORY🚨 IPCC-guided #mitigation efforts are disproportionately shared btwn countries, requiring only some of them to make historically unprecedented efforts, writes @rishpardikar Read how #IPCC models are biased & perpetuate inequity. #NetZero carboncopy.info/ipccs-climat…

A guiding light of India's climate policy for two decades. Steadfast in adherence to the principles of the climate Convention (#UNFCCC), and the foundational principles of equity and common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities.

With the passing away of Chandrashekhar Dasgupta, we have lost one of India’s finest diplomats, who was both a brilliant strategist and a consummate practitioner, writes Shyam Saran business-standard.com/articl…