VoxEU published an op-ed by CGD president Nancy Birdsall and senior fellow Arvind Subramanian jointly appointed to the Peterson Institute.
From the article:
"What constitutes a fair deal between the developed and developing countries on climate change – including for example between the US on the one hand and China and India on the other? In the academic and policy literature, the answer to this question is emissions-focussed and mostly arbitrary.
The Stern Review implicitly endorses equality of greenhouse gas emissions per capita as a desirable long run objective, and derives from this objective an emissions reduction allocation of 80:20 for rich and poor countries, respectively. Other authors (Frankel, 2009; Jacoby et. al., 2008) have tended to discuss fairness in terms of allocating the future “rights” to emissions across countries based on such parameters or combinations of them as current total emissions, cumulative past emissions, emissions per capita, per capita income and so forth."