Though the recently released Stern report has barely registered a blip in the pages of India's main newspapers (only one blip, it seems, with the Indian Express running a piece by Sir Nick himself), climate change remains in the news.
The rising Bay of Bengal recently "devoured" 100 tiny islands in the swampy Sundarbans delta region of West Bengal, displacing 10,000 people. The Sundarbans - a ghostly realm of folktales, endangered tigers, and sudden unforgiving tides - also contains some of the region's poorest people.
Will the bullish Indian public connect the dots? The urgency of climate change is surely not lost on many Indians, as a plethora of NGOs lobby the government routinely on environmental issues. Yet Indians - and others from the global "South" - resent the limitations that universal green standards will invariably place on their booming economies. Not only does the "North" bear the greater share of responsibility for global warming, critics say, but our industries were deliberately repressed in the colonial era to the benefit of the insiduous metropole.
In working towards a greener world, can such historical grudges be accommodated?
