Negotiations between the US and China on a new regime to combat climate change are sticking on the question of technology transfer.

Developing countries have had a relatively small role historically in producing carbon emissions as their industrial revolution was relatively recent (and continuing), but it is feared they will soon make up for lost time.

The general dynamic of talks  between developed and developing countries is expected to be that developing countries will agree to emissions constraints only in return for the transfer of clean technologies to support sustainable high economic growth.

The US, however, is balking at aggravating already poor balance of trade with China.

According to AFP:

"The US House of Representatives this month unanimously voted to make it US policy to prevent the Copenhagen treaty from "weakening" US intellectual property rights on a wind, solar and other eco-friendly technologies."

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While bankers already talk of "turning the corner" and going back to business as usual, others continue to bear the legacy of the banks' imprudence.

This makes grim reading.

On the one hand, the word on Wall Street is that the crisis is basically behind them, and they can now get back to "innovating" as before.

On the other hand, the financial crisis created by the banking industry has been credited by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) with increasing the number of people in chronic hunger and poverty by over 100 million, to 1.02 billion.

Last year, before the crisis erupted, the FAO revised downward its estimate of the number of chronically hungry and poor people from 963 million to 915 million, due to improvements in the global food supply.

When companies talk at Davos about how they might contribute to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals - which include the goal of eradicating extreme poverty and hunger by 2015 - the talk is of philanthropic actions.

It seems to me that the financial sector might best show their commitment by undertaking not to make things worse through irresponsible behavior. Instead, bankers are lobbying like crazy to retain the freedoms they have so massively abused.

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A report on last week's Business in the Community Conference suggests it is getting easier to see who is committed to responsible business.

If a company's responsible business focus is on "giving back" then it appears those initiatives have been the first to suffer as cash flows tighten. Those were hardly indicative of a truly responsible approach to business in the first place.

More disturbing are tales of banks completely stripping out their CSR teams. Either those teams had the wrong kind of skills needed for rebuilding trust in the sector (i.e. they were focused on the goodwash version of CSR rather than on instilling an ethical culture and appropriate corporate governance mechanisms) or financial firms have not realised the extent of the problems their sector faces.

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Starting in 2010, India will begin incorporating measures of natural resource depletion within their measure of national income.

According to the Economic Times, an official from the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation stated that the calculation would incorporate:

"the cost of recovery of polluted resources, which has to be used as a deflator to real GDP. Our green GDP may be significantly lower than real GDP as economic growth is resource-intensive".

China tried to measure a green GDP in 2004, but abandoned it after it triggered infighting between government departments and the political establishment. Environmental degradation had lowered GDP into the red.

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As Congress and governmental financial regulatory agencies fight about just how to protect American consumers, financial institutions watch and wait.

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A positive conclusion from Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman: industrialized economies might actually grow a little this year.

Although catastrophe may have been averted, however, Mr Krugman warned against relying on export-led growth when the recession is so global. He feels a better approach lies in encouraging corporate investment in innovation related to averting the climate change crisis.

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In his New York Times blog, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman berates those touting high economic damage from making carbon cost.

Attacking Robert Samuelson's blog, he says:

"I don’t especially mean to pick on Samuelson, but this column exemplifies a strange thing about the climate change debate. Opponents of a policy change generally believe that market economies are wonderful things, able to adapt to just about anything — anything, that is, except a government policy that puts a price on greenhouse gas emissions. Limits on the world supply of oil, land, water — no problem. Limits on the amount of CO2 we can emit — total disaster."

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TriplePundit argues sustainable agriculture will remain a dream so long as the cost of concentrated animal feedlot operations (CAFO) is externalized.

The point is:

"The externalities of a business like a CAFO include the air and water pollution, public health problems associated not just with their industrial waste but also in antibiotic resistance, obesity caused by meats laden with chemicals and grown in conditions that produce weight in the fastest manner possible, and other health problems arising from their unhealthy products. And, of course, creating an environment in which disease like the swine flu can flourish, mutate, and multiply."

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Robert Solow at the New York Review of Books is understandably taken aback by the new book from one of the US bench's devout libertarians.

He quotes the following passage from Richard Posner's A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression:

"Some conservatives believe that the depression is the result of unwise government policies. I believe it is a market failure. The government's myopia, passivity, and blunders played a critical role in allowing the recession to balloon into a depression, and so have several fortuitous factors. But without any government regulation of the financial industry, the economy would still, in all likelihood, be in a depression; what we have learned from the depression has shown that we need a more active and intelligent government to keep our model of a capitalist economy from running off the rails. The movement to deregulate the financial industry went too far by exaggerating the resilience—the self-healing powers—of laissez-faire capitalism."

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New trade agreements being negotiated between African countries and the European Union "will prevent" achievment of the Millennium Development Goals.

The Economic Partnership Agreements would have the effect of joining African nations into an enlarged free trade area with Europe, according to Thomas Deve, a policy analyst with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Deve goes on in the article to call the accords a "one-way street to disaster".

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