If U.S. diplomats consider India to be a major obstacle to global climate-change negotiations -- and they do -- it might be because of Sunita Narain. The director of the influential Centre for Science and Environment, Narain can be as caustic as she is intelligent, and never more so than when she is taking rich nations to task for what she sees as their hypocrisy on global warming. They pressure the developing world to control carbon emissions even as they refuse to move themselves, she says. "The rich have to reduce their emissions so the rest of the world can grow," says Narain, speaking in her office in New Delhi. "This is about sharing growth between nations and people. If we can't, then India has to be a naysayer for a bad climate agreement."

India has emerged as a keystone for global climate-change negotiations, and so far its role has indeed been mostly negative. The country of more than 1 billion -- a populace that encompasses the very rich and the very poor, and whose carbon emissions are microscopic on a per capita basis but massive overall -- is uniquely vulnerable to global warming yet suspicious of international efforts to stop it. As a leader of the bloc of developing nations, India has repeatedly argued that since rich nations like the U.S. are responsible for most of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, they should take the lead on cutting emissions before asking the developing world to step in.

The result is a global standoff. The U.S. has been reluctant to cut emissions unless major developing nations -- meaning India and China -- take steps of their own on a global level. The conflict has stifled international climate negotiations for years, and threatens to scuttle the vital U.N. climate-change summit in Copenhagen next month. "The developed?developing country divide that has run down the center of climate-change discussions for the past 17 years is still, I'm afraid, alive and well," said Todd Stern, the U.S. envoy on climate change, speaking to the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee on Nov. 4.