AFTER TWO WEEKS of meetings in Bali, Indonesia, representatives of 187 nations eventually managed to produce an agenda for devising a treaty to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on global warming. Even with this limited goal, the conference came close to collapse. The near failure of Bali made more clear than ever the need for leadership on this issue from the world's two biggest producers of greenhouse gases, the United States and China. But even with a new administration in Washington in 2009, the United States will be in no position to provide such leadership unless presidential candidates make climate change a much bigger issue in the campaign.
Kyoto expires in 2012 but will have to be drastically revised no matter what, if the world is to cope with the higher temperatures that are melting glaciers more quickly than scientists had predicted. Kyoto exempted China and other developing countries from any mandatory emission reductions, and it did not directly address deforestation, which accounts for 20 percent of all man-made increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.
The biggest shortcoming of Kyoto, which was no fault of those nations that put it together, has been the unwillingness of the United States to join. The successor agreement that goes into effect in 2012 will be at best marginally better than Kyoto if the United States does not accept its responsibilities as a leading emitter of greenhouse gases, especially as measured on a per-capita basis.
Without the United States as a born-again leader on global warming, China and other developing countries are unlikely to agree to emissions limits that, they believe, will sacrifice economic growth. Without policy changes, China's dependence on coal for much of its electricity means that it is likely to more than double its emissions by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency. Even at that level, its per-capita emissions would be just half those of Americans. That is one reason China wants developed countries to meet tough emission reductions - up to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.
The developing countries will be hard put to cut emissions substantially without access to technologies for renewables and carbon capture and sequestration developed by advanced countries. Finding a way to make this available to poorer countries must be a main element of the post-Kyoto treaty.
Any notion that Washington's weak record on global warming will change completely once the Bush administration leaves town is belied by last week's vote on the energy bill. Supporters of tax credits for renewables, to be paid for by ending tax breaks for Big Oil, failed to get the 60 votes needed to stop a filibuster in the Senate. A would-be president who wants to lead on global warming will have to start creating a mandate for it now.
