At their annual summit in Tokyo, European and Japanese leaders have called for “ambitious and binding” targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

Their statement says curbing climate change will need mobilisation of “unprecedented investments and finance” mainly from the private sector.

Endorsing last year’s assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the statement says that “global emissions of greenhouse gases need to peak in the next 10 to 15 years”, and to fall swiftly after that.

“Japan and the EU stress that a highly ambitious and binding international approach is required to deal with the scale and urgency of the climate change challenge of promoting a low carbon, high growth global economy,” it says.

But there is still a yawning gulf between the developed and the developing world.

While the Tokyo Summit was taking place, India’s Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon was asking reporters: “The US says it will only accept caps if India accepts caps; where is the logic in this?

Logic has nothing to do with it…