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Although India and China have every right to choose their own path of development, they should not follow the American model in their endeavour to improve the condition of their citizens, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said.
"Our argument to China and India is: Yes, you have a right to develop and we want you to develop, and in fact, we admire your commitment to eradicating poverty and we want to help you do that. But you can't do it the way we did it, because you will suffer consequences that will undermine your development," she told CNN's Fareed Zakaria in an interview.
"I think that conversation is a very healthy one for us to have, and to try to figure out how we're going to get to Copenhagen and come up with an agreement that is credible," she said, referring to the key climate change conference to be held in December.
Acknowledging that there are sharp differences with India and China on climate change, Clinton said: "I think we're in the beginning of the hard bargaining and the sorting out. What we want them to do is not match us in absolute terms, but have reductions from business as usual; given the technological advances, don't repeat our mistakes."
Developing nations like India and China have been saying that there should not be binding emission cut targets for them as it might hinder their growth.
Clinton said: "I mean, to be fair to us, for 150 years, the industrial revolution, we didn't really get it. We knew that you couldn't breathe until you had to clean up the air for that purpose, but we didn't understand the connection with climate. We have no excuses left now."
The Secretary of State said both India and China have cooperated very positively with the US.
"In some areas, we are going to see eye-to-eye. We don't want to be in a zero-sum game where if we don't agree with somebody, we therefore don't even try to partner with them on a whole other range of issues that are important to us."
"The arguments that are going on between our negotiators and our countries over how best to approach climate change are not a rejection by either China or India that climate change is real; that, in many respects, it threatens a lot of their territory even more than it threatens us," she said.
The two countries were pointing out that they could not be in the same regime as the developed countries and do not have the historical responsibility, she said.
"I actually think if you look at China, which has done a lot more on renewable and a lot more on some of the technology than they are given credit for, and in some respects, even more than we've done to date; if you look at India, putting $3 billion into reforestation out of their budget, and you ask, 'Well, that's not what we're doing'.
"Their response is, 'We are moving pretty rapidly. We may not be moving exactly as you would want us to move', and India is saying, 'We haven't gotten credit for reforestation, but that's a real effort to mitigate against climate change. We need credit for that'," she said.
Image: US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Photograph: Noor Khamis/Reuters