In the end, global warming is what could get us the N-deal soon DR Manmohan Singh's announcement that India would approach the iaea with a draft safeguards agreement for approval within days of his return from Japan has lifted the pall of shame that had been gathering around the country ever since the upa government began to show a willingness to resile from an agreement that it and its predecessors had been working towards for more than a decade. Once India has signed the safeguards agreement, it will have completed its obligations under the 2005 treaty with the US. The rest will be up to Washington. Has India left it too late? Does the fading Bush administration have even the time it needs, let alone the influence, to create the consensus required in the Nuclear Suppliers Group (nsg)? And even if it succeeds, will it then have the time to steer the 123 agreement through the US Congress in the very few legislative action days that will be left before the next election? Unsourced remarks by high US officials, reported by the Associated Press, suggest that it may not. These doubts notwithstanding, there may still be a sliver of a chance to complete the deal during the life of the current administration. For one thing, Manmohan Singh's government has not exactly been idle while Pranab Mukherjee fought his long-drawn battle to placate the Left. It has discussed and virtually finalised the details of the safeguards agreement with the iaea administration. Thus, once a special board meeting is convened, the iaea is likely to lose little time in accepting India's commitments. Both the US and the Indian governments have also been busy 'selling' the nuclear deal to members of the nsg. The great imponderable has always been China, and in a sense this has not changed, for the Chinese press release on President Hu Jintao's meeting with Manmohan Singh in Hokkaido does not contain the explicit reference to nuclear cooperation that the Indian press statement does. But its overall tone is so positive that it would not be unreasonable to expect China not to stand in the way. However, even if the worst comes to the worst and all the above steps cannot be completed before the Bush administration ends its term, once India signs the safeguards agreement the ball will be back in the next US administration's court. And there, despite the less than encouraging noises that have been emanating from the Obama camp, India will find itself with a powerful new all}'. This is global warming. The Toyako G-8 summit saw an acceptance by the Bush administration that the threat from global warmrhg is so serious and so near that it can no longer afford the luxury of abstention from making a common, globally coordinated effort to first stabilise and then reduce C02 emissions drastically by 2050. But the Toyako summit also endorsed a long-held American position that global warming is a planetary issue and every country has to play its part in reducing C02 emissions. While the bulk of the current emissions are from the 37 industrialised countries, unless something drastic is done, the bulk of the increase in future emissions will come from the developing countries and in particular from China and India. India may be contributing only 1.2 tonnes of C02 per person per year, against the US's 20 tonnes. But in absolute terms that still comes to almost 1.5 billion tonnes, which is a quarter of the US's contribution to the accumulation of C02 in the atmosphere. But if India grows only six per cent faster than the US, its total emissions will equal those of the US in a mere 18 years. By then China's emissions will be almost twice that of the US. Thus neither country can hide behind the veil of underdevelopment any longer. To maintain its predicted eight per cent rate of growth, India will have to increase its power-generating capacity by more than 2,00,000 MW in the next nine and another 4,00,000 MW in the nine years after that