The global community has forged a strategy for slowing the juggernaut of climate change, but the outcome of this two-year plan now lies greatly in the hands of US voters, experts say. The "roadmap" set down on Saturday at the 13-day UN climate conference in Bali names a deadline of end 2009 for completing a pact for tackling dangerous greenhouse-gas emissions beyond 2012.
But the exhaustion and bickering in which the map was born on the Indonesian resort island gives a hint of the nightmarish difficulties ahead. Even though scientists warn the chances of averting catastrophic climate change are narrowing by the year, swift action is being crippled by defence of national interests and reluctance to pay the bill for solving it.
Over the next two years, negotiations under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change must find a way of encouraging rich countries, especially the United States, to commit to deep, bold cuts in the fossil-fuel gases that drive global warming.
They must also wheedle pledges from big developing economies, led by China, to do more to rein in their own surging carbon pollution. This is where a complex game of poker starts.
US President George W. Bush says he will not sign up to binding emissions cuts-the format taken by industrialised countries under the Kyoto Protocol Bush has rejected-unless China and other emerging giants do the same.
Poor countries, though, argue that industrialised nations got rich by gorging on the oil, gas and coal that have caused today's warming, and must make the biggest concessions. And, says the developing bloc, binding targets are out of the question for economies that need to burn coal, oil and gas to haul themselves out of poverty.
This deadlock means negligible progress on the thorniest issue of all can be expected in 2008, the final year of the Bush presidency, diplomats admit. "The US elections are now the single most important factor in the equation," said Steve Sawyer, a veteran of the climate debate and secretary-general of the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC), a Brussels-based lobby for the wind-turbine industry.
The great hope of Europeans and developing countries is that the next White House incumbent will emphatically re-engage the US in the international process after eight years in the wilderness, he said.
But there are many "ifs" for this to happen. The next president will not only have to embrace a Kyoto-style format. He or she will also have to race against the clock, after assuming office in January 2009, to set up the new administration-a process typically taking several months in the United States-ahead of the climax to the negotiations in Copenhagen.
That leaves the next president with maybe four or five months in which to rally US opinion, which by and large is deeply conservative whenever economic interests clash with environmental imperatives. "There are a lot of issues on the plate, there is Iraq, there is the economy, it's very difficult to predict what will happen," said Elliot Diringer, director of international strategies at a US thinktank, the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.
At the same time, powerful momentum for action on climate change is building in the United States, and US activists say the mood is ripening for a post-Bush U-turn. Sawyer said that the worsening impacts of climate change would also drive opinion. Another hurricane similar to Katrina in 2005, another Midwestern drought or deepening alarm over water scarcity in California would be a sharp spur for a policy turnaround, he said.
Even assuming the United States starts playing serious poker in 2009, there is still the business of whether this will coax a similar response from Asia's emerging giants, on track for becoming massive carbon polluters. "Everyone is focussing on the United States for blocking things, but in a couple of years, the blockheads will be India and China," a European diplomat cautioned.
Fernando Tudela, Mexico's under-secretary for environmental policy, said the rows, haggling and drama of Bali would be minor compared to what to expect when the roadmap nears its destination. "The mother of all battles will be in 2009," he told AFP. "This is just a warm-up."