How they see us: It’s time to get serious about climate change

In Bali this week, all eyes will be on the U.S., said Moritz Kleine-Brockhoff in Germany’s Frankfurter Rundschau. Representatives of nearly 200 countries and hundreds of organizations are meeting for two weeks at the world’s biggest-ever conference on climate change. The Bali summit is intended to kick off more than a year of global negotiations to produce a successor treaty to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol—presumably, a treaty that mandates even deeper cuts in emissions of greenhouse gases. The main flaw in Kyoto was that it did not include developing countries such as China, and for that reason the U.S. refused to ratify it. Yet the U.S. and China are No. 1 and No. 2, respectively, in emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. “One of the greatest challenges for Bali” will be to get the U.S. to truly commit to the “fight against global warming.”

It’s going to be a tough sell, said Vincent Defait in France’s L’Humanité. The Bush administration has persisted in its refusal to ratify Kyoto. It’s unlikely to “even consider a new treaty that is even more restrictive.” Instead of supporting mandatory emissions cuts, the U.S. keeps pushing for investment in new, “clean” technology. The danger in Bali is that the other participants will be so eager to strike a deal that the Americans will ratify, we could end up with another toothless agreement.

Fortunately, we can negotiate with Ameri­cans who aren’t in the Bush administration, said Caroline de Malet in France’s Le Figaro. Plenty of representatives of “the other America” will be there, including the likes of former Vice President Al Gore and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. In the words of one European delegate, “those are the guys everyone wants to talk to,” since they will be key in determining American environmental policy after Bush’s second presidential term is up.

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Europeans shouldn’t be so smug, said David Cronin in Britain’s The Guardian. At least the Americans were honest about where they stood on climate change. We Europeans, by contrast, professed a deep commitment to Kyoto yet failed to meet its targets. We all agreed, for example, that emissions from transportation must fall, yet 2007 was “a year of capitulation to car makers.” First the European Union diluted its plan to limit car emissions, then it abandoned the attempt to impose a carbon tax. Even the emissions cuts the E.U. expects to log over the next year don’t come from actual cuts; instead, they “depend on member states buying carbon credits from foreign countries.” The U.S. may be a laggard on climate change, but Europe is hardly an inspiring leader.