Just who is in charge of climate change?

It is rather unusual, if not unimaginable, to expect the world's mightiest and the richest nation face the prospect of isolation. Yet that is what the United States of America, the sole super power of the world, faced at the two-week conference on climate in the holiday island of Bali in mid-December. The fear of becoming a pariah nation forced the US delegation at Bali to fall in line with the wishes of the majority of the 190 nations that had assembled in the hope of preparing the roadmap for a new climate treaty after the Kyoto protocol ends in 2012.

A meeting of United Nations member states in Bangkok on Monday to discuss climate change is the first in a series this year at which the action plan adopted at the UN Climate Change Conference in Bali, Indonesia, in December 2007, will be translated into concrete steps on the road to a new global climate change agreement. We, the president of Indonesia and the prime ministers of Poland and Denmark, have decided to join forces in a coordination group at the highest political level. Our goal is to facilitate an ambitious climate change agreement in Copenhagen in 2009.

The new government of South Korea, among the world's largest emitters of greenhouse gases, plans to cap emissions at 2005 levels for the next five years in spite of Seoul's exemption from cuts under the Kyoto protocol. The environment ministry presented the proposal to freeze emissions until 2012 in a report to Lee Myung-bak, the president, in a bid to join international efforts to fight global warming.