Quotes of the Day

If you were to draft one international politician to be your front man on climate change, Australian Prime Minister John Howard would not be high on your list. The conservative politician — and "mate of steel" to George W. Bush, according to the U.S. President — refused to enact the Kyoto Protocol and has long expressed doubt about global warming. Australia is second only to the U.S. in per-capita carbon dioxide emissions among major countries, and it's the world's biggest exporter of coal, the cheap, dirty fuel responsible for a quarter of the world's total carbon emissions.

But Howard, who has ruled Australia for more than 11 years, seems to be having a change of heart — at least rhetorically. Australia is hosting the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum this week, and Howard, with Bush's approval, has pushed climate change to the top of the agenda. He wants APEC — made up of 21 nations bordering the Pacific, including big carbon emitters like the U.S., China, Russia and Japan — to consider long-term "aspirational goals" on reducing carbon emissions, rather than the binding cuts called for in Kyoto. Such flexibility, he argues, would help bring major developing economies like China — which isn't required to make any cuts under Kyoto — into the conversation on climate change.

Howard has been cautious in the days leading up to the summit. "There's broad goodwill and there's a broad belief that this conference should provide a way forward on this issue," he told reporters on Sept. 4. Environmental groups like Greenpeace have dismissed the agenda as a vague distraction from the need for stronger action, but Howard's tamer goals might still prove difficult to implement. For one thing, even by the standards of most international groupings, where hot air outweighs actual action, APEC usually accomplishes little of substance, other than the traditional goofy closing photo of national leaders wearing the native dress of the host country. From rich Japan to impoverished Indonesia, APEC is too large and too varied to easily come to agreement on anything. "I don't think it's realistic to expect there will be any major reductions at APEC because different countries are always coming with different perspectives," says Jamie Metzl, executive vice-president of the Asia Society.

But APEC's challenge — getting countries of vastly different levels of economic development on the same page — is the same one that faces the world as it begins to plan a successor to Kyoto, which expires in 2012. For all its path-breaking importance, Kyoto was flawed because it proved unacceptable to Washington and put no clear demands on major developing countries like China, which has just passed the U.S. as the world's top emitter. If Howard's aspirational goals — which emphasize clean technology and energy efficiency over hard emissions caps — get Beijing and Washington talking at the same table, this APEC summit would accomplish more than most. "Howard argues that his approach is the only way to bring major emitters — code for China and the U.S. — into an agreement, and that any agreement without them would be pointless," says Malcolm Cook, program director for Asia and the Pacific at Sydney's Lowy Institute for International Policy.

Fuzzy targets won't be enough to stem the tide of climate change, however. "Voluntary agreements aren't bad, but unless you have hard caps and trade, you can't get the investment going for real innovation," says Annie Petsonk, international counsel for Environmental Defense. For that to happen, voters will have to show that they'll support politicians who support emissions caps. That's long been the case in Western Europe, and it's slowly happening in laggards like Australia and the U.S as well. Howard's sudden conversion on climate change is at least partially driven by the fact that global warming has emerged as a top concern among voters in Australia, which has suffered through years of extreme drought. The opposition Labor Party, which has pledged to sign the Kyoto Protocol, is leading in most opinion polls, and an election will occur before the end of the year. "Environmental issues have moved to the center of mainstream politics here," says Cook.

Progress in the U.S. has been slower, held up in part by Bush and other politicians who still insist that China must move first — and by an American electorate that still remains underwhelmed by the threat of climate change. But there's some hope that progress can be made even if the U.S. and China stay in their corners. Indonesia — the world's third-biggest carbon emitter, thanks to its rapid rates of deforestation — has just announced that it will host a meeting in New York City on Sept. 24 of eight countries with tropical rainforests, to discuss using the international carbon market to fund tree preservation. "Having the world's third-largest emitter leading a group of nations on climate change doesn't break the U.S.-China logjam, but it does put pressure on it," says Petsonk. With the U.N. set to begin talking about a successor to Kyoto at climate change talks in Bali at the end of the year, every bit of pressure counts.

• Bryan Walsh