The Copenhagen summit on global warming and clIMAte change has commenced. Instead of a leadership role, we will now be playing a followers’ role. We fell behind the emerging consensus curve. We held on for too long to outmoded positions of merely harping on per capita emission and common-differentiated obligation while disregarding many other significant factors. The recent decision of China, announcing a 40 per cent cut in its energy...

Even as reports pour in of a softening of food price futures, the spectre of food price inflation haunts households across the country. But to IMAgine that the inflation genie can be put back into the bottle through legislative fiat is the height of parliamentary fantasy. The EstIMAtes Committee of the Lok Sabha has recommended just that! It wants new legislation to check price rise of essential commodities by capping...

It will be 20 per cent of its total land mass At present only 9.5 per cent area is under forest JAIPUR: The desert State of Rajasthan proposes to settle for a modest target of achieving 20 per cent of its total land mass under forests against the 33 per cent envisaged in the National Forest Policy. The figure may appear to be a major climb down but experts here are of...

The road to Khardung La begins in the Indian town of Leh on the northwestern fringe of the HIMAlayas. Exhaust-spewing army trucks rattle up the side of dry rock, past Buddhist monasteries clinging to the craggy mountainside and alongside small farms barely scraping fertility from the earth. Khardung La, the highest motorable mountain pass in the world, is more than 18,000 ft. above sea level, the air so thin that...

A mega conference that may determine the future of the planet opens in Copenhagen tomorrow amid widespread fears that years of labyrinthine, almost tortuous, negotiations won't yield what science demands. An estIMAted 15,000 delegates from 192 countries are expected to converge at the 15th UN ClIMAte Change Conference to finalise a set of strategies to reduce or limit emissions of Earth-warming greenhouse gases [GHG] in the period beyond 2012. But...