Bali Road Map

The world now has another Road Map, It must be hoped that the “Bali Road Map” to agreement on limiting climate change fares better than the Middle East Road Map on bringing peace and justice to the Palestinians,The common destructive denominator to both road maps is Washington, which has successfully blocked real progress on both issues. But Friday night in Bali, when it was faced with the anger of virtually every other UN Climate Change Conference delegation in a full plenary session, Washington finally backed down. The Americans had been insisting on firm commitments on carbon emission control from the developing countries before they themselves would enter into a process that would at last bind the United States to similar undertakings. Until the very last minute, it looked as if Washington was going to stay out of any final Bali agreement, which would have produced another Kyoto-type half-deal that achieved little except more rhetoric and hot air. And hot air is what the climate deal campaigners are seeking to control. The compromise that brought the Americans on board was that no firm emissions targets would be set at Bali but that in the coming two years, intense negotiations would fix such goals, which would be embodied in a binding international agreement in Copenhagen in 2009. There will be those who will wonder why another 24 months of uncontrolled carbon emissions should be permitted when rising sea levels are already threatening the physical existence of some low lying Pacific Island states, if not by inundation, then by the “salinification” of their water tables. Nor are emissions likely to be cut very quickly thereafter. There will be rows and cheating and defiance as the final deal is implemented and policed. But politics, especially on a global scale like this, is always the art of the possible. At least one positive measure emerged in the agreement that wealthy countries should pay poorer countries to protect their tropical forests. The mechanism has yet to be worked out but it seems clear that states with tropical woodland need to earn more from not cutting them down than would from doing so. This includes the economic cost of farmland that will no longer be cleared, as well as the earnings from timber. The Indonesians are to be congratulated for the way they ran the Bali conference. It now seems feasible that when the world meets again on Nov. 30, 2009 in the Danish capital there will be a pretty clear deal on the table, to which everyone, including the United States, will sign up. Indeed, it may be that by then a new Democrat president could have already seen through Washington’s ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. It is almost certain that by the next meeting there will be further compelling scientific evidence of climatic change and the extent to which man-made pollution is contributing. There may even be a new sense of urgency to signing the comprehensive worldwide deal, which George W. Bush, in the very first demonstration of his infinite capacity for error, scuttled in 2001.