Just who is in charge of climate change?When, last month, the prime minister appointed former foreign secretary Shyam Saran, the country's key interlocutor for the Indo-US nuclear deal, as his special envoy on climate change, many construed it as an extension of using the climate change argument to push through the nuclear deal. It also showed that the government was alive to the possibility of the new administration in theUS that might seek to renegotiate the nuclear deal. India can then use the clean energy argument to push the deal.The government has been working on the argument that the nuclear deal is important for India and good for the world, because it addresses the issue of climate change. If India is not to turn into an ash heap by burning up fossil fuels, it is in the global interest to let the nuclear deal go through.At another level, the appointment also shows that mea has won the turf war within the Indian system about which should be the nodal ministry to deal with climate change issues with the rest of the world. In fact, within mea, climate change, which is now regarded as a significant foreign policy issue, is handled directly by foreign secretary Shiv Shankar Menon.It's also not well-known that as foreign secretary, Saran was a sherpa at the Gleaneagles G8 summit in 2005, where climate change first climbed on to the world's high table. India is expected to face some tough decisions at the forthcoming G8 summit in Hokkaido, Japan, which will focus on climate change and former Japanese pm Shinzo Abe's 'cool earth' plan.But ultimately, observers felt that it would be Saran's job to work on countries like Japan, Canada and Australia on both issues. And there is an increasing overlap between climate change and the nuclear deal. As Saran travels in nsg member countries to plug the safeguards agreement and push for a 'clean' exemption, one of his most potent arguments will be about the 'convergence' of the nuclear deal and climate change.Profusion of authoritiesAll this would have been fine had not there been a sudden profusion of authorities in the government, all of which claim to be tasked with handling climate change. The discord has surfaced just at a time when the pm is trying to hammer out a national action plan on climate change. Apart from the pm's envoy, the ministry of environment, the ministry of renewable energy, the ministry of science and technology and the Planning Commission are said to be writing separate scripts.To make confusion worse confounded, finance minister P. Chidambaram, while presenting Budget 2008-09, spoke of an 'institutionalised response' to climate change. Officials of the finance ministry say that the mention in the budget alluded to the need to create a dedicated government node with specialists and ministry of external affairs officials on board, to deal with the international negotiations on climate change, that are expected to run till 2012, when a new climate pact will replace the Kyoto Protocol.The pm's difficulty in creating such a node arises from the power play that is being witnessed among different individuals handling the subject. Man-mohhan Singh, in the first meeting of his council on change, had asked his principal scientific advisor, R. Chi