It is the cheapest passenger car in the world. In a reference to its price tag of 100,000 rupees, its manufacturer, Tata Motors, calls it the “one-lakh car”. Environmental activists believe that the Tata Nano will soon be known as “the car that ate India”.

Certainly, an affordable car for the Indian people is going to have an impact on carbon emissions and traffic congestion. Indeed, without a radical shake-up in the local pricing of congestion and the global pricing of carbon, this is a sample of what business as usual is going to look like for the next couple of decades: as wealth grows in India and China, so, too, will carbon emissions.