It's one of those arguments where everybody's got a point and everybody stands to lose because of it.
The two emerging economic megapowers - India and China - have grown very leery of the G8 and all the focus on global warming. They see greenhouse gas initiatives as the bandits trying to lock them out of their own store. Writing in today's Guardian, Randeep Ramesh explains the outsiders' approach:
"What is emerging ahead of the G8 is a loose coalition of the big poor. Lower-income, populous countries with strong economic growth are aware of the trap being laid by richer nations, whose interest is to maintain their place at the top of the global pecking order.
"So we had Brazil's President Lula in Delhi earlier this week. Separated by culture and language as well as starkly different economies, Brazil and India joined hands to blast the west on climate change - a day after Beijing had snubbed richer nations on the same subject.
"The joint Indo-Brazilian declaration made it clear that the developing world was not ready to accept the burden of a problem poor nations did not create.
"'The solution to the problem of climate change, which is essentially the outcome of the unsustainable production and consumption patterns in the developed world, cannot lie in the perpetuation of poverty in developing countries,' the declaration said.
"On a whole range of issues, large developing nations are attempting to come together and build relationships that ensure they cannot be played off against each other. As the Doha round of trade talks have shown, the big poor are able to stick together.
"They will resist the rich world's exhortations to liberalise markets and strengthen intellectual property regimes. If such actions are taken precipitately, the advantages almost exclusively accrue to the investor (read the rich).
"There is also an understanding developing that hostile impressions must be dispelled fast. When American, Japanese and Indian battleships gathered in the South China Sea earlier this year for war games, New Delhi quickly dispatched vessels to take part in joint exercises with the Chinese navy.
"While the developing countries' rise is not assured, it has been predicted. A team of Goldman Sachs economists coined the term "Bric" in 2003 - for Brazil, Russia, India and China - and said that, given luck and the right policies, Bric economies together could become larger than those of the world's six richest nations in less than 40 years."
There's another message in this beyond the text of diplomatic declarations - India, China and Brazil are not ready to acknowledge that the worst impacts of climate change will hit them much harder and much earlier than they will be felt in the West.
India and China are already facing a looming water crisis. Part of this results from the disappearing snowpack and receding glaciers in the Himalayas. Part of this has been caused by over reliance on groundwater stocks. Compounding this is unrestrained water pollution. This is the 800-pound gorilla in their boardrooms. No water, no economic miracle.
They also miss the point of their dependence on the West for fueling their economic ascendancy. Much of the Chinese industrial surge has been the result of Western investment in their economy and, of course, Western markets for their production. India, too, is dependent on the West. It's a tap that can be turned off, quickly and very powerfully.
The Chinese and Indians might like to pretend they don't feel it but there's a knife at everyone's throat. Only in their case those knives are bigger, sharper and much, much closer.
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