Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [154]
All these pressures were on display here for Frank to witness. Naturally Chinese traders were especially prominent, and behind them the Chinese government appeared to be calling the shots. They were trying to bump the present value of emissions futures, the local American trade representative explained to Frank, by holding China’s potential coal burning over everyone else’s head, as a kind of giant environmental terrorist threat. By threatening to burn their coal they hoped to create all kinds of concessions, and essentially get their next generation of power plants paid for by the rest of the global community. Or so went the threat. Thus the Chinese bureaucrats wandered the conference halls looking fat and dangerous, as if explosives were strapped to their waists, implying with their looks and their cryptic comments that if their requirements were not met they would explode their carbon and cook the world.
The United States meanwhile still had the biggest carbon burn ongoing, and from time to time in the negotiations could threaten to claim that it was proving harder to cut back than they had thought. So all the big players had their cards, and in a way it was a case of mutual assured destruction all over again. Everyone had to agree on the need to act, or it wouldn’t work for any of them. So all the carbon traders and diplomats were in the halls dealing, the Americans as much as anyone. Indeed they, as the newcomers to the table, seemed the ones most desperate for a global deal. It was like a giant game of chicken. And in a game of chicken everyone thought the Chinese would win. They were bloody-minded hardball players in general, and only ten or a dozen guys there had to hold their nerve, rather than three hundred million; that was an eight-magnitude difference, and should be enough to guarantee China could hold firm the longest. If you believed the theory that the few were stronger in will than the many.
It was an interesting test of America’s true strength, now that Frank thought of it that way. Did the bulk of the world’s capital still reside in the U.S.? Did the U.S.’s military strength matter at all in this other world of energy technology? Was it a case of dominance without hegemony, as some were describing it, so that in the absence of a war, America was nothing but one more decrepit empire, falling by history’s wayside? If America stopped burning 25 percent of the total carbon burned every year, would this make the country geopolitically stronger or weaker? One would have to find a perspective to measure situations which took into account many disparate factors that were not usually calculated together. It was a geopolitical mess to rival the end of World War II, and the delicate negotiations establishing the UN.
Then the meeting was over, with lots of emissions trading done, but little accomplished toward the global treaty that would replace Kyoto, and which hopefully would limit very sharply the total annual amount of emissions allowed for the whole world. That was becoming the usual way with these meetings, the American rep told Frank wearily at the end. Once you were making what could be called progress (meaning another way to make money, it seemed to Frank), no one was inclined to push for anything more radical.
Frank then caught a Chinese flight down to the Takla Makan desert, in far western China—a turbulent couple of hours—and landed at Khotan, an oasis town on the southern edge of