”After you”…”I’ll cut only if you do”…”our greenhouse gas emissions are only a tiny part of the world total”…”everybody has to join in”.

Many countries are skilled at pointing the finger in the debate over who is responsible for climate change. Of course, this may be a good negotiating tactic to resist making big promises too soon, but not much gets done to tidy up a playground if all the kids say “the mess is not my fault”.

President George W. Bush has called a meeting of big emitters in Washington on Thursday and Friday at which countries are meant to start thinking about long-term curbs and announce their plans by the end of 2008.

Rich countries say big developing nations like China and India need to get on board if there is to be any hope of slowing global warming, but poorer states say they have done little to create the quandary and their booming economies need more energy.

“If they don’t sign up, nothing we do is going to matter very much,” the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, C. Boyden Gray, said this week about China and India. He said retaliatory steps complying with world trade rules could be used against those two countries if they failed to help efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

The United States is the world’s top emitter. China is drawing neck-and-neck overall, but each of its inhabitants account for less than one quarter of the 20 tonnes per year produced by the average American.

“India is very little in terms of emissions and we are not the biggest polluters when compared to the developed nations,” former Indian Environment Minister A. Raja said last December. “We are not doing any harm to the entire world.” 

India ranks number 4 in emissions with 5.1 percent of the world total and just 1.2 tonnes per capita per year. Raja had a point, because if all countries emitted so little per capita, there would probably be no warming.

Poor countries argue developed nations have become rich partly by burning fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution and say it is unfair to deny them more energy to lift millions out of poverty. 

How do you share out the global burden? Any advice to the big emitters meeting in Washington on how to break the deadlock?