Climate Change Fundamentalists, like all fundamentalists, are not concerned with balance, context and the possibility of being wrong?just moral absolutes. Protect the environment now! Ban pollution! Which is why they miss the obvious reason why a climate deal cannot be struck. The unravelling of the Copenhagen consensus had little to do with the understanding of climate change, and much to do with the equity of the response.

Industrialised countries point to the fact that developing countries account for almost 45% of man-made CO2 emissions today?almost on par with industrialised countries.

They argue that this necessitates that developing countries curb emissions, too. In his speech to the Kyoto Climate Change Conference in December 1997, then-US Vice-President Al Gore said, ?I am instructing our delegation right now to show increased negotiation flexibility if a comprehensive plan can be put in place, one with realistic targets and timetables, market mechanisms, and the meaningful participation of key developing countries.? Developing countries retort that industrialised countries account for 70% of the stock of man-made carbon dioxide emissions. Add in other pollutants and air travel and that figure rises above 80%. Developed countries are rich in part because they raided the environment first and now they want to put a stop to raids. What the world needs, developing countries say, is for the rich countries to get off their well-padded backsides and make meaningful reductions in emissions now.

Carbon dioxide emissions per capita are sharply different with developed countries being on average around 3 times that of developing countries?10 tonne per capita per year versus 4 tonnes. The overall picture of the production of carbon dioxide, or consumption of goods that lead to carbon dioxide emissions in their production, is even starker when rich countries are compared with India given the popularity of Indian vegetarianism. Sir Nicholas Stern of the UK?s Climate Change Report has argued that the single most important thing individuals could do about climate change is to become vegetarian.

The following illustrates the equity issue. Try and achieve a target of reduced emissions per country and you crimp the development prospects of poor countries. Try and achieve the same target by limiting emissions per person and you hit developed countries. Not surprisingly, developed countries have focused on the former approach and complained that developing countries just don?t ?get it? by refusing to accept limits to emissions growth. They then add that if poor countries are not going to shift their weight behind reduced emissions, why should they?

This is rather like saying that on average we eat too much and so we require everyone, irrespective of whether they are underweight, bulimic or starving, to do their bit to reduce world over-eating by cutting their consumption by a similar amount. It ignores context. It is also an odd moral yardstick. It is like a billionaire saying that he refuses to pay taxes unless the poorest pay, too. It assumes that deferring current consumption to improve the consumption of our children is indifferent to issues of income per head, economic growth rates or life expectancies. This is also economic nonsense. This deferral of consumption makes far less sense to someone in India with a relatively low life expectancy who expects their children to have a far better life than they had because of 8% economic growth per year than it does to someone in Denmark with a long life expectancy in a country with relatively slow economic growth. Their future consumption discount rates differ.

The right approach and the one India should hold out for is to limit the amount of production of CO2 per capita and to phase in this limit over time. To throw up a number, the world could agree to limit man-made CO2 emissions to 7 tonne per person per year. Multiplying this number by a country?s population would give a country emission entitlement that could be traded within and between countries. This would force countries with the resources to conserve and protect the environment?resources that were partly accumulated through their earlier degradation of the environment?to do so or suffer a fall in output. And it would support the development of those countries that need developing by boosting their income if they sell their unused entitlements. This global ?cap-and-trade? would reward vegetarianism, forestation and low-carbon growth and penalise McDonald?s and the highly inefficient conversion of grass and grains into meat. On all these grounds and more it is the right solution to the problem of an over production of carbon dioxide. But it would imply a shift in wealth from developed to developing, from those that polluted in the past to those that did not.

The author is chairman of Intelligence Capital Ltd, chairman of the Warwick Commission, and member of the UN Commission of Experts on Financial Reform