No problems with Nano, says UN climate change boss
Wednesday, 25 March 2009, 15:24 IST
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London: A key UN climate change official said Tuesday Indians have the right to aspire to own cars - just as people in wealthy countries. Speaking a day after the launch of the Tata Nano, the world's cheapest car, Yvo de Boer, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), however said automobile makers should use more green technologies in order to meet the challenges of global warming. "I am not concerned about it (the Tata Nano) because people in India have the same aspirational rights to own cars as people elsewhere in the world," de Boer told IANS at a press conference. But he said it was crucial to support the automobile industry so that they produce "the automobiles of tomorrow rather than the automobiles of yesterday". "There is an aspiration, not only in India, to drive cars," he said, but warned that this will have a climate change impact. De Boer, who is the UN point man for ongoing global efforts to devise a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012, said the transportation sector has "worrying implications" for emissions of greenhouse gases. The world needed "new kinds of fuels, vehicle technologies and more efficient engines", he said in comments ahead of the launch of global negotiations in the leadup to a climate change summit in Copenhagen in December.
Source: IANS
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