Bali Chai

“Chai” is the Hebrew word for “living,” and what word could be more fitting to describe this past weekend’s events in Bali, events that brought new life to the world-wide effort to reduce global warming.

It took two weeks of negotiations to produce an agreement — and if you think herding cats would be a challenge, consider trying to bring 187 nations to a consensus — but in the wee hours of our Saturday morning, a great miracle happened there.

Now we all know it has taken a good long while for President Bush to overcome his disdain for the idea that some kind of action might be warranted to curb our own contributions to climate change; only this year did the matter make it to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the administration’s Environmental Protection Agency is required, believe it or not, to protect the environment.

In the meantime, there have been extraordinary efforts by some of the President’s close friends in Congress to derail any prospect of understanding, let along reducing, the threat, such as Joe Barton’s demand of the nation’s leading climate scientists, in 2005, that the Congressman be given all their documentation, to prove to him (an engineer, not a scientist), that their research was sound.

Not a shining day for Texas. As the New York Times wrote then, “It's going to be hard enough to find common political ground on global warming without the likes of Representative Joe Barton harassing reputable scientists who helped alert the world to the problem in the first place.”

But that was then and this is now. Last week, for example, during the Republican debate in Iowa, presidential candidate John McCain spoke the should-be-obvious truth as only McCain can do:

I think that climate change is real.... Put it to you this way: Suppose that climate change is not real and all we do is adopt green technologies, which our economy and our technology is perfectly capable of. Then all we've done is given our kids a cleaner world.

This month, even though the Bush administration declined several years ago to sign on to the Kyoto Treaty (the previous international effort to address global warming), it was now a new day, and hopes were high that America — by now the only non-signatory to the Kyoto Treaty —would finally come around.

So, over in Bali, which is more or less half a world and thirteen hours away — a country so small you have to wonder how they could even accommodate thousands of delegates from 187 countries — after two weeks of meetings and sometimes difficult negotiations, events suddenly began to unfold in dramatic fashion.

Just when things were about to wrap up near the end of the conference, India proposed an amendment that had to do with the role of developing countries in combating climate change (a role urged by the United States), concerning the matter of rich countries’ assistance to poor countries by providing the technological and financial assistance they would need to reduce greenhouse gases.

The United States delegation said the amendment’s wording was not acceptable. Loud booing and hissing ensued, and things got pretty heated. At one point a conference organizer abruptly left the podium in tears of fatigue and frustration; at another, European delegates threatened to boycott Bush-sponsored meetings down the road. The Harvard-educated delegate from Papua, New Guinea stood:

“We seek your leadership,” he said, addressing the United States. “But if for some reason you are not willing to lead, leave it to the rest of us. Please, get out of the way.”

No American ally came to its defense and many spoke in favor of the amendment. America was reported to be completely isolated. It seemed to those of us hearing the news reports that all was lost.

Then, the United States relented:

“We came here to Bali because we want to go forward as part of a new framework, we believe we have a shared vision and we want to move that forward, we want a success here in Bali,” said Paula Dobriansky, speaking for the United States. “We will go forward and join consensus.”

There was applause and celebration as the delegates realized what had happened.

For us tree-hugging news junkies, this was akin to watching the home team make one of those 40-yard runs to the end zone and touchdown in the last 15 seconds of the game.

Pretty intense.