05-09-07 Industrial nations meeting in Vienna to discuss a global climate change deal to succeed the Kyoto Protocol after 2012, failed to agree on binding emissions cuts but showed support for a revived proposal that would eventually allot equal emissions rights to individuals, wherever they lived in the world.
The proposal, if adopted, could have serious repercussions in the Arabian Gulf, where four of the world’s top five per capita emitters of carbon dioxide (CO2) are located.

Speaking in the Japanese city of Kyoto, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said developing countries should be allowed to increase their emissions per capita while industrialised nations cut theirs, until both sides reached the same level.
"Once [developing countries] reach the level of industrialised countries, the reduction begins," she said. However, countries like Qatar, UAE, Kuwait and Bahrain, with low populations and high CO2 emissions due to their hydrocarbon-intensive economies, already have the highest per capita emissions in the world, according to the World Resources Institute.

Leading the table, Qatar produces almost 68 tons of CO2 equivalent (tCO2e) per head per year, almost double the 36.1 tCO2e of second-placed UAE. By comparison, the average emissions per head in the industrial world and developing world are 14.1 and 3.3 tCO2e respectively (all figures are for the year 2000).
Merkel has focused on climate change while Germany chairs the G8 group of leading industrialised countries, brokering a statement in June calling for substantial emissions cuts. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh raised the issue of per capita targets at that G8 summit.

India and China are fuelling their rapid economic growth by burning fossil fuels, especially coal, causing ballooning emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide as a result. But they are reluctant to accept emissions limits because they blame the problem of climate change on the rich, who have benefited from more than two centuries of industrialisation. They point out that per head of populations their emissions are much smaller than most other countries, an argument that wins some sympathy.
According to one study this year, China has already surpassed the United States as the world’s leading emitter of greenhouse gases by total volume, but on a per capita basis is way down the table in 95th position with around 15 % of sixth placed America’s emissions.

Aubrey Meyer, a climate expert at the Britain-based Global Commons Institute, is credited with bringing into common currency in 1995 the notion of per capita quotas. He welcomed Merkel's proposal.
"People have rained abuses on it but they can't knock it down, it's bullet-proof in its methodology," he said of the idea, which he terms contraction and convergence. "It's a constitutional standard. All social revolutions have committed to straight equity: one person, one right."

Meyer wants to see tough action soon, entailing US citizens, for example, cutting their per capita emissions to one fifth of their present levels by 2020. Meyer envisaged a system with some in-built flexibility, where everyone in the world would get the same quota of emissions permits, but people who couldn't meet that level could buy from others who did not use theirs.
About 1,000 delegates at the Aug 27-31 UN Vienna talks agreed in a statement that industrialized countries should aspire to cut their emissions to 25 % to 40 % below 1990 levels by 2020. That statement is nonbinding. And it leaves unanswered how the burden would be apportioned among specific countries, industries and consumers.