Todd Stern, the chief US climate negotiator, believes that the “strong relationship” that President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Narendra Modi have developed played its own important part in hammering out the global climate deal in Paris earlier this month.
“What I can say is that President Obama and Prime Minister Modi have a very, I think, strong and productive relationship, not just on climate change but broadly,” Stern told the foreign media on Tuesday.
While he would not go to the extent of saying that the agreement would not have been reached had Obama not spoken with Modi on phone a day before the deal was finalized, Stern spoke of the series of close deliberations held at the highest levels.
“It was a quite extraordinary fact that within the space of four months there were two head of state visits, one first to the United States and then — in September of 2014 and then Prime Minister Modi invited the President to India just four months later in January. And then there were communications during the year,” Stern said.
Then came the discussions between the two leaders on the margins of the UN General Assembly in New York in September, and thereafter the meeting that Obama held with Modi in Paris on the opening day of the global summit.
“It was a very warm and positive and cordial and detailed, substantive exchange,” said Stern, recalling that they spoke so long that they were a little bit late to the following event where the big Mission Innovation idea on R&D that was to be announced.
Maintaining that the United States is “strongly supportive of the notion of differentiation”, Stern said developing countries cannot be expected to “act in ways that are inconsistent with their own imperatives of development, growth, poverty eradication, and so forth”.