Who gets a seat at the climate change table?

Representatives of developing countries at the UN climate conference in Copenhagen are upset: they say that developed countries aren't addressing their concerns.

Folks, I appreciate your situation. But let me be cruelly blunt. Why are we having international conversations about this in the first place? Because addressing climate change could be expensive, and no one wants to blink first. No country wants to put in place rules stricter than those of its neighbors out of fear that businesses and their investment will relocate to those neighbors. To the people in small developing countries: you are not competing in this staring contest.

The players are:

1. Countries that emit a lot of greenhouse gases
2. Countries rich enough to do something about the gases emitted by (1)
3. Countries to which the businesses from (1) might relocate if regulations were tightened
4. To the extent that a cap+trade+offsets scheme plays a role in any compromise, countries with a lot of offsets to offer

In other words, if you're part of the problem, or you're rich enough to pay for the solution, or you have something critical to sell to either of them, you necessarily get a seat at the table. If you're a victim, and have no ability to stop being so, you don't.

So who are these players?

1. China, the United States, Indonesia, and Brazil.
2. The "G7": the United States, Japan, China, Germany, France, the UK, and Italy. (I'm looking at total GDP here; Luxembourg and Qatar may have higher GDP per capita, but they have so few capita that they're not prepared to be a big part of the solution to this problem.)
3. The G7, China, and India.
4. Indonesia and Brazil. (The link on (1) above applies here too.)

I'm going to coin a term here and call the above countries the "Climate 11" or "C11." (It has more syllables than I would like, although the rhyme between "G7" and "C11" is nice. Perhaps it will catch on. Tell your friends!)

If you want to get people riled up about an issue, holding a UN conference and making a big show about "we're all coming together" is a good way to do it, provided you can back it (which is in no way assured in this case). But make no mistake: any solution will be negotiated among the C11 and might just as well take place in Washington or Brasília as in Copenhagen. Everyone else, though they may suffer greatly from the effects of climate change through no fault of their own, come as beggars to this table.