Perilous Pandemonium

Apprehensions for global warming and environmental crisis have been further aggravated as the world is passing through a phase of manmade disasters across many war zones in Asia, Europe and Africa. Genocide in Gaza is the worst human tragedy that the world leaders have miserably failed to address since 2022. Unrestrained use of deadly weapons destroys the total ecosystem by contaminating air, water, and land. The destruction and displacement caused by war, along with the resulting pollution and resource depletion, significantly hinder efforts to mitigate climate change and exacerbate its effects.

In such a crisis period, the President of the USA—the nation that holds the dubious distinction of being the second largest annual emitter of planet-warming gases, and the highest total emitter since the late 19th Century—has declared to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, which was adopted by nearly 200 countries in the French capital in December 2015. It came into force on November 4, 2016, and nearly all the nations, including the USA, agreed to cut the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming.

After returning to the Oval Office for the second time in January 2025, President Trump signed an executive order that argued that such agreements “do not reflect our country’s values or our contributions to the pursuit of economic and environmental objectives” and “unfairly burden the United States”, citing costs to American taxpayers. He made a similar announcement in 2017 at the start of his first presidency. His successor, Joe Biden, rejoined in 2021 at the start of his term as president. This time, under UN rules, the US has to wait a year until it is officially out. The US is the only nation to have withdrawn from the Paris deal, and joins Iran, Libya and Yemen as the countries outside the agreement.

Against this climate politics, on Wednesday (July 23) in a ground-breaking advisory opinion delivered at the Peace Palace in The Hague, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) said, states must act urgently to address the “existential threat” of climate change by cooperating to cut emissions. The ICJ President called the climate crisis “an existential problem of planetary proportions that imperils all forms of life and the very health of our planet”. Remarkably, the court said, “a clean, healthy and sustainable environment” is a human right and the industrialised nations have a legal obligation to take the lead in combating climate change, due to their greater historical responsibility for emissions. While the ICJ’s ruling is not binding, it said that countries themselves must take binding measures to comply with climate treaties.

Weaponisation of climate and environmental crises

In the 21st century, the transnational corporations (TNCs) play a more important role than the sovereign nation states in developing rules and regulations of different multilateral treaties, about important issues like climate change, intellectual property rights etc. ‘Weather’, which had a strategic importance as ‘weapon’ to a nation state during the Cold War period, has evolved into a strategic importance of a different type (as an ‘economic good’) to a TNC-dominated world order of this century (D Dey 2006).

In a study titled, ‘Weaponisation of climate and environmental crises: Risks, realities, and consequences’ (December 2024), Quan-Hoang Vuong et al observes that in recent times, the climate change agendas have been weaponised to varying degrees, ranging from the international level between countries to the domestic level among political parties. In such contexts, climate change agendas are predominantly driven by political or economic ambitions, sometimes unconnected to concerns for environmental sustainability, but rather are used to serve other political or economic agendas, often unrelated. Now, climate change is often considered “a threat multiplier,” which triggers, accelerates, and intensifies the existing instabilities, especially in regions with water insecurity and political instability.

During the last four decades, Europe has indeed been at the forefront of creating a climate-centric economy and, in doing so, has addressed the petrodollar system by linking the use of fossil fuel to global warming. This approach aims to shift energy consumption away from fossil fuels, reducing their dominance in the global economy and, consequently, the influence of petrodollars.

Cold War between the USA and Europe

After the disintegration of the Soviet Union and before the emergence of China as a global power, Europe wanted to challenge the USA’s hegemony on the global economy using climate and environment as an effective weapon. It may be recalled that until the 1970s, the scientists discussed the possibility of a return of the Ice Age. Then, from the mid-1980s onwards, especially after the Chernobyl Nuclear disaster in 1986, a section of scientists and policymakers directed our attention to a gradual rise of the Earth’s average surface temperature.

To address this issue, the UN had established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in 1988. Climate change in IPCC usage refers to any change in climate over time, whether due to natural variability or as a result of human activity. In their first Assessment Report (AR1), published in 1990, IPCC identified ‘natural variability’ as the main cause of global warming. But this did not satisfy the business lobby and a group of global leaders (the Club of Rome) who wanted to convert this crisis into an opportunity. The Club of Rome, established in 1968, believed that the possibilities of continuous economic growth have been exhausted and that timely action is essential in order to avert a planetary collapse. Their first report, ‘The Limits to Growth’ (1972 made a tremendous influence on academia, policymakers, and environmental activists across the globe. It had been predicted that by the year 2000, the world would face an environmental holocaust due to overpopulation and other environmental problems.

After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the Cold War came to an end, and the need for a huge defence budget for national security reduced considerably. In this transition phase, again, the Club of Rome came out with a new prescription in their widely-read book, the ‘First Global Revolution’ (1991). It wrote, ‘in searching for a common enemy against which we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine, and the like, would fit the bill.’ (p 75)

The 1992 Rio Earth Summit, aimed at saving Mother Earth, apart from leading to the formation of the United Nations Framework Convention of Climate Change (UNFCCC), had put emphasis primarily on three important issues: (i) sustainable development; (ii) protection of biodiversity; (iii) global warming. Climate change in UNFCCC usage “refers to a change of climate that is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and that is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable periods.” In this new definition, the cause of climate change has been assumed to be linked to human activities! Thus, the climate has been weaponised.

The major beneficiaries of the climate economy are (i) green technology providers and their consultants; (ii) traders of clean air. Clean air is mostly traded in units of CERs (certified emission reductions). One unit of CER is equivalent to one tonne of carbon dioxide (CO2) avoided or removed from the atmosphere. EU-ETS (European Union–Emission Trading System) is the largest trading market for emission reduction certificates. The greenhouse gas brokers have organised themselves in various lobby groups such as the Emissions Marketing Association (EMA) and the International Emission Trading Association (IETA).

In their third annual meeting, Conference of the Parties (CoP3) at Kyoto, UNFCCC agreed to a Protocol on the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. The Kyoto Protocol created a huge market for green technology and emission trading. US President Bush had withdrawn from the Kyoto Protocol in 2001 as he thought it would “severely damage the United States’ economy”!

President Trump withdrew from the Paris Climate Agreement in 2017 and again in 2025. The Parties to the Paris Agreement are legally obliged to submit national climate plans, known as Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), every five years. As the United States submitted a new NDC and a biennial transparency report in December 2024, it is currently in compliance with the key obligations under the Paris Agreement.

In President Donald Trump’s idealised framing, the United States was at its zenith in the 1890s, and he touts Gilded Age tariffs, an era that saw industrial growth together with poverty. “We were at our richest from 1870 to 1913. That’s when we were a tariff country. And then they went to an income tax concept,” Trump said days after taking office. In the two decades that followed the Cold War’s end, globalism gained ground over nationalism. Simultaneously, the rise of increasingly complex systems and networks—institutional, financial, and technological—overshadowed the role of the individual in politics. But in the early 2010s, a profound shift began. Trump’s dislike of universalistic internationalism aligns him with Putin, Xi, Modi, and Erdogan. These five leaders share an appreciation of strong national identity in the ‘new age of nationalism’, observes Foreign Affairs. US President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement on climate change and the World Health Organisation (WHO) should be analysed from this changed perspective.

Where India stands

India’s net-zero targets are set for the year 2070. As per the latest assessment (September 2024) of the Climate Action Tracker (CAT), the overall rating of India’s climate targets and action remains “highly insufficient”. The “Insufficient” rating indicates that India’s climate policies and action need substantial improvements to be consistent with the 1.5 degrees Celsius temperature limit. If all countries were to follow India’s approach, warming would reach over 2 degrees Celsius and up to 3 degrees Celsius. The CAT estimates that India’s emissions will be around 4.0-4.3 GtCO2e in 2030 under current policies.

A 2022 study, based on a dataset of 20 years from 1999 to 2019, by the Azim Premji University, revealed that climate change is not an important issue among Indian Parliamentarians. Only 0.3 per cent of the questions asked in Parliament were on climate change, and they were not asked by the states most vulnerable to climate change. Overall, very little is being done to use Parliament to drive climate action. For the first time, only in the 2019 national elections, climate change featured in the manifestos of the two major parties — the BJP and the Congress. In the 2024 election, both major parties in their manifestos have articulated their plans to mitigate climate risks and bolster India’s climate resilience. However, what has not changed is the fact that climate change remains largely omitted from the election campaigns of political parties.

On July 11, 2025, the Indian Environment Ministry exempted the majority of India’s coal-based thermal plants from installing systems that were designed to remove sulphur dioxide (SO2) emissions, a key contributor to air pollution. Known as flue gas desulphurisation (FGD) devices, these systems cut SO2 from flue gas, which is a residue from thermal plants. This decision has reversed a decade-old mandate to install $30 billion worth of clean-air equipment, easing sulphur emission rules for most coal-fired power plants, a government order said. Earlier, it was reported that the government was reviewing 2015 norms that required nearly 540 coal-based power units to install flue-gas desulphurisation (FGD) systems that remove sulphur from the plants’ exhaust gases in phases starting in 2027. The gazette notification exempted 79 per cent of the coal-fired power plants, outside a 10-km (6-mile) radius of populated and polluted cities, from the 2015 mandate. The mandate to install FGD for another 11 per cent of the plants near populated cities would be taken on a “case-by-case basis,” the notification said. The balance of 10 per cent of the coal-fired power plants closer to New Delhi and other cities with a million-plus population will be required to install the desulphurisation equipment by December 2027, reports the Economic Times.

In 2015, member states of the United Nations adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Aimed at achieving human progress, economic prosperity, and planetary health, the framework outlines 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Recent studies reveal that environment, carbon emission, biodiversity, and malnutrition are among the issues that remain neglected by certain groups of countries. India, home to one-sixth of the world’s population, is critical in determining the success of the SDGs globally.

Sustainable Development Report (SDR) ranks countries by their overall score and total progress towards achieving all 17 SDGs. The score can be interpreted as a percentage of SDG achievement. A score of 100 indicates that all SDGs have been achieved.

According to SDR 2025, India ranks 99 out of 167 countries surveyed. Table 1 reveals that, out of six major economies, India’s SDG score was lowest in 2023. Compared to India, China was much ahead, ranking 49, marginally behind the USA at 44. Germany, the UK, and Japan have very high SDG scores among the major economies. Notably, these are the countries that pioneered a climate economy and played a pivotal role in establishing the UNFCCC.

Views expressed are personal