Sustainable Development Goals – Are There too Many?

Across the world, politicians are going out of their way to promise fantastically expensive climate policies. US President Joe Biden has promised to spend US$500 billion each year on climate policies－about 13 percent of the entire federal revenue. And the European Union has vowed to spend 25 percent of its budget to combat climate change.

The developed world’s response to the global energy crisis has put its hypocritical attitude toward fossil fuels on display. Wealthy countries admonish developing ones to use renewable energy. Last month the Group of Seven went so far as to announce they would no longer fund fossil-fuel development abroad.

Kofi Annan once highlighted that the then abstract idea of sustainable development needed to be turned into a reality for the world population. Unfortunately, a lot of progress still remains on that front. The world’s—and India’s—performance on the relatively straight-forward Millennium Development Goals (2000-15) was impressive but far from impeccable. Since then, the global community has adopted a much grander set of promises called Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).