ABSTRACT
Since the early 1990s, virtually all developing countries have refused to adopt greenhouse gas emission reduction commitments in the name of fairness. In fact, the very suggestion that poorer nations limit their industrial growth has led to a hostile negotiating environment. At the Kyoto summit, China’s lead negotiator said, ‘In the developed world only two people ride in a car, and yet you want us to give up riding on a bus.’ Brazil’s Chancellor Luiz Felipe Lampreia said flatly ‘We cannot accept limitations that interfere with our economic development’ (Rossi 1997, A-15). Ten years later, after rounds and rounds of painstaking international negotiations, the position of most developing countries has not changed significantly. The head of China’s National Development and Reform Commission stated in mid-2007 that ‘[i]t is neither fair nor acceptable to us to impose too early, too abruptly, or too bluntly measures which one would ask of developed countries. … People are not putting the blame on those countries with large historical emissions [and] high per capita emissions’ (Ford 2007).
