Is green technology like vaccine technology?

India's former intransigence on GHG emissions has unfortunately quickly reasserted itself after a brief hiatus.

Then just yesterday, India’s prime minister ratcheted up the rhetoric again, reiterating the need for developed countries to provide developing countries with the wherewithal to clean up their economies—essentially for free. From the FT:

“Climate friendly and environmentally sound technologies should be viewed as global public good,” [Prime Minister Manmohan] Singh told the United Nations-sponsored Delhi High Level Conference on Climate Change: Technology Development and Transfer. “Such an approach has been adopted successfully in the case of pharmaceutical technologies for the benefit of HIV/Aids victims in developing countries. The moral case of a similar approach for protecting our planet and its life support systems is equally compelling.”

Chinese officials quickly echoed the call, saying that access to advanced technologies was “crucial” to the outcome of the Copenhagen climate summit. That repeated call for unfettered access to clean technology is the one thing that unsettles big companies (such as General Electric, Siemens, and the like) which are otherwise thrilled about the business prospects of a world dedicated to rebuilding its entire energy infrastructure.

The comparison of green technology to pharmaceutical technology is a brilliant one for developing countries – if I were them I'd ride it for all it’s worth.