The climate change talks in Paris are round the corner, and tempers have begun to rise in tandem with global temperatures—it’s the heat generated by the warm-up before the sprint. US secretary of state John Kerry called India a “challenge".

“We’ve got a lot of focus on India right now to try to bring them along. India has been more cautious, a little more restrained in its embrace of this new paradigm, and it’s a challenge," he told the Financial Times newspaper. India’s environment minister Prakash Javadekar was having none of it. “There is no pressure from the developed world on India," he said. “The country is also not in the habit of taking any pressure from anybody."

These may be no more than posturing before the home stretch, particularly the last few days of the 30 November-11 December meeting, when the knives will be out in the search for a successor regime to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.

But there’s some good news: Have you noticed how nearly no one in the Establishment challenges the science of climate change any longer? What happened to the sceptics? Well, I am told, they are still mostly in America, and that they are busy trying to block US government proposals for financial assistance to developing countries to fight climate change.

Do note that Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself was portrayed as a bit of a sceptic last year, when he blamed individual behaviour for causing climate change. “Climate has not changed, we have changed," he told schoolchildren. “Our habits have changed. Our habits have got spoiled. Due to that, we have destroyed our entire environment."

In the initial months of the Modi government, individual Indian scientists publicly expressed climate sceptical views, but they appear to have withdrawn as the government found its own voice on climate change: after the usual round of blaming the rich, India has pledged to cut carbon emissions by 33-35% of 2005 levels by 2020.

Still, in spite of what I wrote above, the fact remains that there runs—or appears to run—a kind of covert climate scepticism in the US. What else can explain Kerry’s statement (in the same FT interview) that the outcome of the Paris talks will “definitively" not be a legally binding treaty. However, French foreign minister Laurent Fabius suggests that Kerry is perhaps confused.

“Jurists will discuss the legal nature of an accord on whether it should be termed as a treaty or an international agreement," Fabius said. “But the fact that a certain number of dispositions should have a practical effect and be legally binding is obvious, so let’s not confuse things, which is perhaps what Mr Kerry has done."

Kerry’s remarks are a reiteration of the known US position but came as a disappointment before the conference of 195 countries was to open. However, the US is not alone in this defensive stance. India and China, too, don’t want legally binding commitments.

Both India and China have made ambitious pledges, and their opposition to a legally binding document is marginally more understandable because of the West’s historic responsibility in causing climate change through rapid industrialization and high levels of consumption. After all, the US is yet to ratify Kyoto with former president George W. Bush complaining China and India were getting a free ride while the US suffered “serious harm" to its economy.

Earlier this year, the US came out with a voluntary pledge—it called it “ambitious and achievable"—to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 26-28% from 2005 levels by 2025, ramped up to 80% by 2050. However, Washington retains its natural scepticism of internationally binding multilateral treaties, and will take this posture heading into Paris.

Significantly, this position has been opposed by the European Union, which—as befits the world leader in action against climate change—has binding targets in place for its 28 member-countries.

According to EU commissioner for climate action and energy Miguel Arias Cañete, Europe is on track to not only meeting but actually overachieving its 2020 target for reducing greenhouse emissions by 20%. Already, European emissions have decreased by 23% between 1990 and 2014, reaching the lowest levels on record, while its economy grew by 46% over the same period (at an average of around 2% a year).

Kerry’s remarks could not be allowed to go unchallenged and there was certainly a sense of authority when a spokesperson for Cañete told The Guardian, “The Paris agreement must be an international legally binding agreement. The title of the agreement is yet to be decided but it will not affect its legally binding form."

India, like China, is dependent on coal—now and for the foreseeable future—to power its rapid economic growth. Like the US, it, too, retains a degree of suspicion of treaties that come with sanctions for non-compliance. It, too, hates international oversight of its domestic affairs.

It will, therefore, go to Paris looking for a lukewarm treaty that will not punish countries for failing to meet their voluntary emission reduction targets. It may propose some sort of a compromise between the US and European positions that will get countries to introduce a domestic oversight process.

India’s problems lie elsewhere: it is keen to ensure that everyone—including large emerging economies—are signed up to the principle of common but differentiated responsibility (meaning rich nations that caused the mess must move forward faster with deeper cuts than poor ones).

It is worried that the US will seek to redefine who qualifies to be called a developing country in 2015. “We have to break the old mentality…this is not 1992, this is not 1997, this is not the same Kyoto kind of breakdown," Kerry said.

India will have its hands full in Paris, with the negotiating skills of its diplomats and ministers set to be tested to the full. For it not to walk away from the talks, the rhetoric must stop and the funds and technology needed to construct India’s green economy must start to flow in. A month after the terror attacks in Paris, Europe must climb down a notch but take global leadership.

Dipankar’s Twitter handle is @Ddesarkar1

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