Both the developed and developing countries need to make a compromise. Having a standard cut across the board for developing countries doesn?t make sense, unless, as India has asserted, developed nations also agree to a significant cut of around 40%.
The developing economies have an obvious argument that the ?now developed? economies made an environmental mess over the past decades while they were developing. Now, they are imposing unreasonable mandates on the ?now developing? economies trying to reach the ?developed? stage.
I believe there is an interesting (albeit perhaps a little idealistic one) solution that actually lies in the wide proliferation of clean technologies. A way that the developed world can help ease India towards uniform emission standards is by subsidising transfer and deployment of some clean technologies.
India and the US have openly talked about collaboration on energy-efficiency and conservation programmes. There are emerging examples of companies in India that are licensing clean and green technologies from the US and Europe for deployment in sun rich areas for solar, wind rich area for wind power and crop rich areas for bio-energy. Rather than shunt the growth of developing economies, a mechanism simply is to subsidise the proliferation of clean technologies in developing countries, thereby addressing two birds with a single green stone. It can be achieved by having developing countries cut emissions by a certain proportion that is less than what the developed countries should agree to, while assisting them via cleantech subsidies, deployment and expertise.
The bottomline is to have developing economies get to a certain common desired standard of per capita emission by a combination of voluntary emission cuts while subsidising the deployment of cleantech in those very developing economies. A body needs to be set up under the renewable energy ministry to look after IPR and licensing and deployment of such technologies.