India's complex game of carbon trade-offs

Never mind the rhetoric: New Delhi may yet be stealthily moving towards embracing emissions cuts
India's environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, did the rounds in Washington and New York last month, trying to persuade US officials, thinktanks and journalists that New Delhi was open to revising its longstanding climate policy.
Ramesh even offered specifics on the changes India would be prepared to make.
So it was a bit bewildering to see the Indian delegation revert to the traditional negotiating posture at the Bangkok climate change talks earlier this month.
In a nutshell, this is that, since it was the developed world that caused the global warming problem, and since incomes and carbon emissions are a fraction of those in the west, India refuses to accept limits on its growth in order to make emissions cuts.
India helped lead the attack by developing countries on an Australian proposal that would allow individual countries great latitude on how much to cut greenhouse gas emissions. And it was even more confusing to learn that Ramesh apparently approved that negotiating position.
But now it seems the environment minister may be involved in his own delicate internal negotiations, trying to get the Indian bureaucracy to move away from a long-established position. The Times of India reports today on a leaked letter from Ramesh to India's prime minister, Manmohan Singh.
In it, the environment minister warns that India could suffer an international backlash if it is seen to be obstructing a climate change deal at the UN talks in Copenhagen in December. He advises that India distance itself from the developing countries, and ingratiate itself with the G20 industrialised economies.
"We should be pragmatic and constructive, not argumentative and polemical," he says in the letter. "India must listen more and speak less in negotiations."
Ramesh declined to comment further to the Times of India, and he did not immediately respond to an email from the Guardian. But it does seem as if India, along with Indonesia, Brazil, and China, is floating new proposals about how much it may be ready to do on climate change – in the hope, presumably, of getting some kind of commitment in return from the US and other industrialised countries to help adoption of new green technology they will need in the future.
How far India is really prepared to go will probably be a slow-reveal between now and Copenhagen, with Singh's state visit to Washington on 24 November a key moment to watch.