What we should do is require or at least permit innovators to license their green innovations free of charge in exchange for public payments based on the impact this innovation has on the environment - emissions averted or something of this sort.

Income inequality matters more on a day-to-day basis. Wealth matters more for political influence.

We have this highly irrational system of incentivizing innovation for clean and green technologies, where we allow the innovator to have a temporary monopoly and then mark up the price of the product or sell licenses at high prices to those who want to use the kind of product that the innovator has invented. This system is collectively irrational because many people, to avoid the inflated prices of still-patented cleaner and greener technologies, opt for some older technology that is much more polluting.

The collective income of all these people - the bottom half - is less than three percent of global household income, and so there is a grotesque maldistribution of income and wealth.

You may know that in India now the Tata car is becoming all the rage; you can buy it for one lakh - $2000 dollars - it's very, very cheap. So India seems to be going the route that China went a few years ago and that developing countries all over the world seem to want to follow, namely, to rely on these personal vehicles, which is just an irrational way of organizing transport.

If you ask yourself who is paying for pharmaceutical innovation today, the answer is that it's the more affluent populations paying for still-patented advanced medicines at the pharmacy, for comprehensive insurance coverage or for a national health system.

Large multinational corporations, often acting through their industry lobbies, exert a powerful influence on the formulation of domestic rules and on their application - but their influence on supranational institutional design is even larger because it faces practically no opposition there.