There’s no doubt about it: I’m biased. I like Anant Sundaram, a highly respected professor of finance at Tuck, a lot. He’s a middle-aged South Asian man with a congenial smile. And he has very good manners, which is a pleasant relief given their general decline in this country.

Last Spring he taught the first course on business and climate change which is odd because, as I said, he taught finance for many years and it's his expertise. And yet, right now, he’s leading a small group of Tuck students to the Copenhagen climate change summit (COP15 as it’s commonly known).

He has leveraged his finance background to come up with a new financial metric called the fossil fuel beta which shows how sensitive a company’s share price is to the price of carbon. He’s also brought senior executives to the school spanning a wide swath of different industries to discuss the business implications of climate change and the creation of a new asset class based on carbon.

Before flying off to Copenhagen, I asked him a few questions about his views about the summit and climate change overall:

What are the prospects for a global deal at Copenhagen? What can come out of this conference?

Preceding such mega-gatherings are always breathless expectations of a deal. Especially from segments of the media and folks who start to hyperventilate about the do or die nature of it all.

I think reality is more prosaic. Copenhagen more precisely called ‘COP15’ for being 15^th in the series of ‘conference of parties' is merely the kick-off to a process that is expected to culminate in 2012. That is the year the framework currently in place, the Kyoto Protocol, will expire.

There are three years to nail it down. At COP15, we will probably see the opening moves in a long drawn-out process. Some preliminary offers will be made, and negotiating positions staked out. Everyone will come away flashing victory signs, but what really matters is what we will end up with in 2012.

At the core of Copenhagen is the dilemma between the demands of the BRICs for exemptions on carbon caps while the West demands more cuts, especially from Europe. Can any deal still be made based on these competing demands?

Yes, this does pose a major dilemma. Consider this: Industrialized countries are highly carbon efficient compared to the BRICs. For instance, the US emits a half ton of GHG emissions for every $1000 in GDP produced, the EU one-third of a ton. India and China require 1.5 and three tons of emissions, respectively, to do the same.

Two issues arise from this.

First, much of the global economic growth in the next few decades is going to come from the BRICs, i.e. the countries on the wrong side of the global average of carbon efficiency. At current rates of emission per $1000 GDP in these economies, we are going to be spewing a lot of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Second, these are countries with very low per capita incomes. For example, India and China, with 2.5 billion people, have an average per capita income of $2,000. Compare that to $47,000 in the US.

India and China are not looking to get to the US level of income tomorrow. They're aspiring to get to, say, one third of today’s US level in twenty years. Such growth is impossible without energy.

There is little doubt that to place a huge price on carbon will negatively impact their ability to create such growth.

Moreover, the BRICs point to the unfairness of the EU, the US and Japan having already reached prosperity unfettered by carbon constraints.

Ultimately, any deal will have to recognize the reality that, short of successfully condemning hundreds of millions of people to ‘poverty levels’ of both emissions and income, you can’t stop the engine of growth in the emerging economies. Yet, that is where the carbon inefficiency exists.

One outcome from COP15 might be that advanced economies commit to absolute cuts in greenhouse gases while BRICs, especially India and China, commit to cutting the greenhouse gas intensity of their economic activity. This will be probably backed by mechanisms to enable emerging economies to adopt carbon-efficient practices, including better land use and use of renewable energy.

Will this happen in Copenhagen? Unlikely. But the process will start, knowing there is a three-year window. As a result, COP15 could result in no major agreements at all.

Are summits the best way to tackle climate change? It seems that we’ve had a lot of summits but, as the G20 has shown us, only a massive and urgent crisis provokes multilateral action. Are there better approaches? What alternatives are there?

This is a great question. I often wonder about it myself. There are tens of thousands of people who congregate, including heads of state with their aircraft fleets and hangers-on, all manner of international NGOs, countless global bureaucrats, academics, anti-globalization types, and so on.

Moreover, they do this a lot: we've already had fourteen COPs in the past two decades, with pre-COP preparatory meetings, and even meetings preceding those meetings. Quite apart from the insane carbon footprint associated with these gab-fests – incidentally, Tuck is buying verified offsets to neutralize its carbon footprint from air travel to COP15 – one has to be somewhat underwhelmed by what is actually achieved. There has to be a better way.

If it was up to me, I’d dispense with a lot of this, and tell the multilateral bureaucrats and the heads of state to focus on just two issues. Then, get out of the way.

The two issues I would have them address are: one, develop a mechanism to put a global price on greenhouse gas emissions and two, develop institutions to oversee its fair, transparent implementation.

The rest, I would leave to global businesses to solve. Ultimately, if the problem of climate change is going be solved, it is global corporations that will do it. The reason is simple. Companies are the constituency with the largest cause-and-effect relationship to climate change. Through their resource use and emissions, they are the largest cause. And, the effect of mitigating and adapting to climate change will be a major source of costs for some, and benefits for others.

Forward-thinking companies are already tackling this issue head-on within their operations. What they are looking for is regulatory clarity: a system that transparently places a worldwide price on carbon.

Here is an alternative approach to COP15. Put the CEOs of the hundred largest global corporations in a room and allow them to share with each other and spearhead - without antitrust concerns - the process of achieving emissions reductions. Tell them they can deploy resources to that part of the global value chain where they get the most bang for their energy-efficiency buck. Give them the incentive to do this by offering one-for-one credit for emissions reduction in the global carbon pricing system, regardless of the country in which they achieved their reduction.

I think an approach like this could produce an outcome that will not only blow past Kyoto goals, but the emissions reduction innovations will quickly diffuse across the globe. What is more, the local or smaller competitors to these corporations will have no choice but to follow suit, since they would face the negative effects of the higher costs associated with carbon otherwise, further amplifying the positive outcomes.

I believe a process along these lines could achieve far more than recurrent gab-fests!

Can we expect developing countries to be taking great leadership on climate change?

They already are. They've realized they need to find ways to grow in a carbon-constrained world, a world in which a price on emissions is inevitable. They're also worried that they could face a border tax on the carbon content of their exports some day. China is already considering pre-empting this with an export tax on its own producers, so as to give them the incentive to become more carbon efficient.

The biggest moves are in the area of non-fossil fuel-based energy. While the US is still discussing a demonstration project for clean coal, China is getting plants on stream at the rate of one per week.

While there are a dozen nuclear power plants under construction in India and China, there are zero in the US. China is now building the largest wind and solar power projects in the world in its Mongolian deserts, with a goal to get 20% of its electricity from renewable sources in the next decade. It has instituted aggressive fuel economy standards for vehicles, and is investing massively in electric vehicles.

India recently adopted a National Action Plan to address climate change which calls for 20,000 megawatts of solar capacity in the next decade. To put that number into perspective, the current global capacity of solar is 15,000 megawatts.

The Indian company Suzlon is the world’s third largest wind turbine manufacturer (after Vestas of Denmark, and GE of the US).

Bottom line: yes, developing countries are already taking on a major leadership role, and it might behove us to perhaps be a tad less arrogant and a tad more attentive!

Tom Park is studying for an MBA at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, class of 2010. He studied law at McGill and public policy at Harvard. Between 2004 and 2007 he worked in the International Criminal Court in The Hague, the OSCE Mission in Pristina, Kosovo and the UN Khmer Rouge Tribunal in Cambodia. Previously he was an associate at McCarthy Tetrault, Canada's largest law firm. Tom is currently an intern at McKinsey in Toronto