Wednesday, December 16, 2015

No, India Was Not The Villain Of The Paris Summit

Ruchir Ferrero Sharma in Swarajya Magazine:

The New York Times
Over the last few weeks, editorials across the Western media have abounded with articles about how India was holding the world hostage at the Paris Summit. These included headlines such as “Narendra Modi Could Make or Break Obama’s Climate Legacy” in the New York Times and “China Won’t Block Global Climate Deal In Paris, But India Might” in Forbes. The latter in particular being outstanding for having no basis at all in fact, amazingly not even including the word “India” once in the actual article, but using the title to take a cheap shot at the country.
 and
The story behind the scenes is that the Indian government, on its own accord, launched its own ambitious green energy target in 2013, which was then upgraded 5-fold by the new Modi government in 2015.

and

....we see an even more egregious example of crass propaganda in Rupert Murdoch’s mouthpiece, The Australian.

The Australian

A part of the News Corp media empire has consistently supported the backward-looking Australian government and coal lobby in pushing coal as the only solution for desperate poverty. It is no surprise that with a tasteless piece such as this, they can hit three of their favourite right-wing bullseyes at once – discrediting solar power, disparaging international development aid, and mocking the poor for their poverty.

One feels the need to point out that it is not as if the Indian poor can eat Australian coal, as much as the benevolent coal industry representatives would have us believe, in order to push through their planned destruction of the Great Barrier Reef for the sake of the poor starving masses.

 Another cartoon:


The Times of India