What next, then?
AGAINST the odds, European negotiators emerged triumphant this week from the Bonn conference on climate change. When the world's environment ministers gathered to negotiate the final details of the Kyoto Protocol, a UN treaty on global warming, the prospects of a deal looked poor. In the event, they pulled off a deal that 178 countries (though not the United States) signed up to. Greenpeace/MolinariAdding hot air to the debateHow did they manage this? The Europeans were so desperate not to fail that they were willing more or less to give away the store. Three factors forced the EU to soften its previously rigid stance. First was the memory of the collapse of an earlier round of talks held in The Hague last November, when a moralistic EU team rejected sensible proposals for more flexibility made by the Clinton administration. Soon after that fiasco, George Bush came into officeand promptly declared that he would have nothing to do with Kyoto. That, too, helped to focus minds in Bonn. The third factor was that the EU desperately needed Japan's ratification, without which the treaty cannot enter into force at all. To win that support, negotiators changed tack on the use of carbon sinks and flexible trading mechanisms that should reduce Kyoto's cost. The irony is that the deal agreed in Bonn looks very much like the version that America was ready to sign up to in The Hague. Yet Mr Bush is unmoved. He has made it clear that he will never accept any version of the Kyoto treaty. This creates a huge problem, as any international treaty hoping to tackle this most international of problems must (in the long run, at least) include the United States, the world's biggest energy guzzler. Will it ever happen? Optimists point to signs of a backlash in Congress and among some parts of American industry. Several senators and congressmen now have domestic legislation in the works. A number of big industrial firms, including even some coal-fired utilities, fret that Mr Bush's stance creates so much short-term uncertainty that they will not be able to make sensible investment decisions in long-lived assets such as power plants. They, too, are pressing for domestic regulation. Eileen Claussen's Pew Centre represents several dozen big American firms (including United Technologies, IBM and DuPont) that have publicly called for action on climate change. She reckons that this backlash could add up to a new climate-change strategy. Start, she says, by setting clear rules for recording and disclosing greenhouse gas emissions. What is then needed is a mandatory emissions-trading system. Designed properly, such a system could be made compatible with the Kyoto framework in the hope that some day the two could be merged. Maybe. But in the long run, America will be merging not with Bonn but with what comes after Bonn. This week's flexible pact deals only with the treaty's first time period (till the end of this decade or so) and calls for no cuts in emissions by poor countries. By 2005 or so, the next big round of negotiations over the following decade's cuts will be under wayand China and India, not just the EU, will be involved. Developing countries have already made clear their central demand: that emissions targets be based not on political and economic might, but on population. That could prove a bigger obstacle, even, than Mr Bush.