Praful Bidwai is a former Senior Editor at The Times of India and one of South Asia’s most widely published columnists.  He’s also the author of the recent book The Politics of Climate Change and the Global Crisis: Mortgaging Our Future. This book is notable in a number of ways, and not just because it contains a long and coherent chapter called “Alternative Visions: What would an Equitable Global Climate Deal Look Like?”

Bidwai is a rare analyst.  He writes as a man of the South, but at the same time he can be extremely critical of the South’s negotiating postures.  In fact, he devotes an entire chapter — “Rooted in Incoherence: Anomalies and Contradictions in India’s Climate Policy” — to an excoriation of India’s stance in the negotiations, which he judges to be incoherent, duplicitous, and short-sighted, and all of these by virtue of being rooted in an unjust model of development.  His essential claim here is not simply that India’s position is an undemocratic one that ultimately serves its elites, though this is a line he develops at length.  It is also that India’s position is based on unsound ethical claims that cannot possibly support a fair global accord.  That, in particular,

“the per capita norm does not capture, nor is it logically related to, the central concern highlighted by recent climate-related scientific findings: namely, the urgent need to prevent dangerous climate change.”

To be sure, one could argue — and many people do — that the “per capita norm” is an important negotiating tool, and that as such it serves a larger goal of global climate justice.  But Bidwai will have none of it, arguing that class disparities within India are probably larger than global disparities. Moreover, he is extremely critical of what he sees as India’s over-emphasis on historical responsibility. His bottom line:

“A fixation with dividing emissions quotas along North-South lines can easily translate into a right to greater carbon space or a right to pollute.”

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Elizabeth Stanton, an economist at the Stockholm Environment Institute who is active in the Economics for Equity and Environment (the E3 Network), has done a service in Development without Carbon.  It’s a crystal-clear paper that lays out a simple framework for thinking about equitable development within a constrained emissions space — like this planet.  It’s goal, particularly, is to show that traditional economic models are not up to the job, but that the job itself remains doable.

It proceeds by exploring the potential greenhouse gas emissions, and corresponding mitigation obligations, of three “stylized futures” for developing countries:

* Without Development: a business-as-usual (no policy) scenario with the standard economic growth rates found in climate-economics models;

* Development with Carbon: a business-as-usual (no policy) scenario with more rapid economic growth rates.

* Development without Carbon: a policy scenario with rapid economic growth and significant public measures to reduce emissions

Stanton’s approach is influenced by the Greenhouse Development Rights approach, but she considers other justice-based approaches as well.  Her goal is show the problem know known as “equitable access to sustainable development” is a realizable one, if we think about it in a reasonably coherent way.

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This conference summary by Kristen Sheeran of the Economics for Equity and the Environment Network does not deal with GDRs in any length.  In fact, it only mentions it.  But it does so in the context of a very interesting text, one that is essentially a strategic work program for ecologically-engaged economists, and this is enough to make it notable.  That is, it’s important to know that the problem of “equity in global climate control” is and will remain a core issue, and that its one of particular concern to economists.

This nice, user-friendly summary of the Cancun challenge, was published by the UK’s Christian Aid.   Cancun Climate Talks: Bridging the Divide is notable for the use to which it puts GDRs, which appears not as an impractical product of untethered idealism, but rather an reminder of the true scale of the challenge, and as a guide to the needed level of ambition.  Will anything like GDRs ever be on the agenda?  It depends, of course, on a reorientation of the negotiations.   As of this writing, it doesn’t look like Cancun is going to do it.