article: India is already the world's third biggest emitter of greenhouse gases and it plans a massive increase, proposing to treble CO2 emissions within the next 15 years. What is more, unlike virtually every other country attending the Paris conference - including the two biggest polluters, the US and China - India has not set a future cap on emissions, let alone proposed cuts. That's because, for India, economic growth comes first. And because India's energy policy is based on coal - the dirtiest fuel there is - the pace of economic growth sets the rate of emissions. The scale of what India is planning becomes shockingly real when you visit one of the country's many open cast coal mines. Looking across the vast pit is impressive enough: the opposite bank blurs into the blue distance. But it is only when you get up close to the operations that you get a true sense of scale. The dozens of bright yellow trucks you saw from your eyrie rumbling with their loads across the valley floor take on vast proportions. Every one of this monstrous insect army is the size of a family home. But even these behemoths are dwarfed by the queen that squats at the heart of the operation. She is a true titan, a giant crane whose gaping jaws take great bites from the 20 metre high wall of coal before spewing it into the waiting trucks. And the numbers are as large as the machines. India plans to open a mine like this every single month until 2020 as part of its strategy to double coal output to a billion tonnes a year. And, it can maintain that output for the next 300 years, if it so wishes, because according to the Indian coal ministry the country has 301 billion tonnes of accessible coal. Now hold those huge numbers in your mind as you recall the ambitions of Paris conference: to reduce carbon emissions to avoid catastrophic climate change. It isn't hard to conclude that India is effectively saying to the world: "Climate change is your problem, you deal with it!" But India has some powerful arguments to justify its position. It talks in terms of "climate justice". First off, it says it isn't responsible for the emissions that are causing the current warming. That's down to the developed world which used fossil fuels to power its path to wealth. If you look at emissions since 1850 - what is sometimes called the "carbon space" - then US is responsible for a third of the total, Europe and the other developed countries for 45%. India, according to figures from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, accounts for just 3% of emissions to date. And that tiny total explains why India is still so poor. Remember, India is the second most populous country in the world with one and a quarter of a billion people. Hundreds of millions of those still live in terrible poverty. India's enduring poverty explains the second arm of India's argument: the fact that Indians use way
summary: If any single country embodies the challenge of reaching an agreement at the huge United Nations climate conference that begins in Paris on Monday, it is India.