The Bali Deadlock

The most important participant at the Bali climate change summit is the United States.

The most important objective of the Bali summit, the key to a workable international agreement, is acceptance, by the United States, of hard caps on its carbon emissions.

So far, the United States is rejecting the hard cap option, still clinging to the "intensity-based" voodoo that will doom the entire venture in a world already pushing out far too much greenhouse gas.

Canada and the United States, in digging in on the intensity-based concept, are saying they reserve the right to increase their nations' total carbon emissions. They ignore the reality that the world is already producing far too much carbon. They implicity reject that science and maintain the atmosphere can actually take considerably greater carbon emissions. Their approach could be described as short-term gain for long-term devastation.

What the rest of the world, the sane nations, ought to be doing is to approach the problem differently. They ought to ask the United States what terms it would want to get it to accept binding hard caps. What would it expect to see from China, from India, from the rest of Asia and from Africa?

Shifting the focus from "will you do it?" to "what will it take to get you to do it?" could do a number of things that are essential to moving forward, quickly. If Washington says there is no deal that would get it to accept carbon caps, there it is - out in the open. America becomes the global pariah - and gets there entirely of its own doing. It will lose what remains of its treasured world leadership and the rest of the world can begin looking elsewhere - Europe and China, for example. You see, I don't think America can actually afford to say no to caps if they're really pressed on it.

However if Washington does come up with a carbon cap proposal the conditions will exist to then engage both India and China on a compromise that will still allow them strong economic growth by investing some of China's vast cash reserves in cleaner energy generation. That, by the way is a "win/win" deal for China where its coal-fired economic miracle is poisoning the country itself. Even if Kyoto or Bali had never existed, China is facing an environmental catastrophe at home that will be its ruin if not dealt with effectively. China knows that. India knows it faces the very same problems.

America comes to Bali unbowed but also disarmed. Decades of fiscal madness from the Savings & Loans fiasco, to the Dot.Com sham to the Subprime Mortgage disaster coupled with insane federal deficit spending; a military left bent and nearly broken by two relatively small wars; dependent on foreign oil and even more dependent on foreign lendersm, America has lost a lot of its clout and a lot of the respect it once commanded.

Despite the swagger of American exceptionalism, Bali may be the moment when the rest of the world simply stops noticing. Want to bring the United States to the table? Start buying their debt in Euros. Start selling them oil in Euros. Let them know the greenback isn't going to rule in a world they're bent on destroying. And then sit back and watch how fast they scramble to get on board.