The shipping ministry has already written to the EU opposing its proposed emissions levy on ships
India plans to oppose at an environment conference in Washington later this month the European Union’s (EU’s) proposal to levy carbon emissions taxes on aircraft and ships.
The aviation ministry will present India’s opposition to the EU’s emission trading scheme (ETS), said two government officials who declined to be named.
Consultations with the environment ministry on the matter ended last week.
The European Union earlier this year began considering a proposal to bring the maritime sector under the purview of its carbon emissions levy, though it has been facing resistance from several nations, including India, to a similar levy for airlines using its airspace.
The EU “proposes to regulate emissions arising from all ocean-going ships which touch their boundaries or ports by including their emissions in the EU-ETS,” said one of the officials mentioned earlier.
“This is a dangerous trend since while inclusion of aviation in the EU-ETS remains contentious, the EU is going ahead with the inclusion of the maritime sector also in the scheme,” the official said.
India’s shipping ministry has already written to the EU opposing its proposed emissions levy on ships entering EU waters, a ministry official said, also declining to be named.
The likely impact of the proposed new levy on Indian ships couldn’t be ascertained immediately.
The EU spokesman for climate action, Valero Ladron, said the EU is pursuing an international agreement on global measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from international maritime transport.
Considerable efforts are being made primarily in the International Maritime Organization (IMO) and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), he said.
“In the light of these efforts, the EU is considering all the options to address maritime emissions. Bringing maritime into the EU-ETS is just one of the options that are being assessed. No decision has been taken yet,” he said.
The EU has maintained that the levy under its emissions trading scheme is not a tax and is challenging countries opposing its proposals.
An environment ministry official, who, too, did not want to be identified, said India will oppose in the IMO if the EU includes the maritime sector for emissions taxation.
“It is not clear yet as to when they plan to put it in place. They have only started consultations. It hasn’t come to a stage where we need to think of steps to be taken, though just like the aviation sector, there are a series of steps which are possible,” this official said.
“The EU is trying to take it out of the negotiations in UNFCCC by taking it to the IMO and they are trying to force it through that route,” the official added.
Prodipto Ghosh, distinguished fellow with New Delhi-based non-profit The Energy and Resources Institute, said the EU is setting a bad precedent.
“The EU-ETS has already been very strongly resisted. Thirtyfive countries have agreed on countermeasures to be taken and to put sanctions on the EU…. If we allow them to do this in these sectors, then EU can propose to do this in other sectors such as mining, power, land transport, steel, etc., which are all energy-intensive sectors,” he said.
R.S. Vasan, head of strategy and security studies at the Centre for Asia Studies, said the EU’s proposal for the maritime sector is a concern for India because a lot of the country’s exports and imports are dependent on the sea.
“But unlike China, the number of ships owned by India is a small percentage. So China is more at risk because it has more number of ships. Developing countries should come together and look at some precedents of instances where India and China have resisted before. They should resist this in organized forums and take their time to first upgrade technology,” Vasan said, adding that more often than not clean technology from the developed world is denied to the developing world.
Source: Live Mint
