The Greening of the South was something really interesting — a well-informed and honest article from a significant British magazine (Prospect) that looks hard at the core political challenges of global climate stabilization and then draws some actual conclusions.  It’s written by Simon Retallack, who knows his way around both the climate policy debate and the climate movement.

The 13th Conference of Parties in Bali (December of 2007) brought GDRs a number of notices, particularly in the developing world.  See for example “The road from Bali”, an excellent piece in the Business Standard (a major Indian business magazine) by veteran diplomat Nitin Desai, which explains the GDRs approach with admirable simplicity.  Or Business Rules, a far more “radical” analysis (though published in Front line, a national news magazine) by grassroots activist C.E. Karunakaran that embeds the GDRs analysis in prose that’s far less restrained than Desai’s.

At the end of 2007, the Bali debate was everywhere, but one easy place to dip into it was via the three articles on Bali that EcoEquity’s Director Tom Athanasiou wrote for Gristmill: Rational expectations, Elephants in the room, and Where do we  go from here? The third of these, in particular, raises the key question, well expressed in the old quip about the optimist, who thinks that this is the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist, who fears that this may well be the case.

Major media notices of Greenhouse Development Rights began in August of 2007, with a fine article in the Sydney Morning Herald, based on an interview of EcoEquity’s Tom Athanasiou, called Rich will have to help poor to save climate

In May of 2007, an Oxfam International report, Adapting to climate change: What’s needed in poor countries, and who should pay?, marked a major step in the evolution and diffusion of the GDRs approach.  Not that Oxfam’s “Adaptation Financing Index” is exactly the same as our “Responsibility and Capacity Index.”   For one thing, we apply the RCI to mitigation as well as adaptation obligations.  But the two systems share both a common DNA and a common vision, and they point in the same direction.