When India failed to show up at climate talks in London last week, the British hosts of the meeting took it as a snub. It was also a stark reminder of how hard it’s going to be for diplomats to pull the global climate back from the brink of disaster, with less than three months to go before the next round of high-stakes negotiations.
The climate meeting in London wasn’t the only recent example of underlying problems. Just two days earlier, an all-night meeting of Group of 20 ministers in Naples, Italy, had failed to produce an agreement on phasing out coal power, the most polluting source of energy. India — the world’s third-largest emitter, which depends heavily on coal — had been a key holdout.
When asked why they didn’t attend the London meeting, Indian officials said they were needed at home and had technical problems that meant they couldn’t login online. But they also said they had already made their views clear in Naples.