Free Ultimatum by Matthew Glass

of fiction in the world. Someone has to have the courage to kill Kyoto and liberate us from it. I would kill it, day one.”
     
    “And how do you envision that we get to the mechanism you mentioned?”
     
    “Bilateral negotiations with the Chinese. Start there. Once an agreement’s in place, we apply sanctions to those who don’t join. The moral force of the argument will be powerful. The economic force of combined sanctions from the U.S. and China will be irresistible.”
     
    “That only leaves the slight problem of how to get the Chinese to agree.”
     
    “I wouldn’t call it a slight problem, Senator. But they’re going to have to agree one way or another, at some point, whether through Kyoto or another mechanism, so there’s no way of avoiding it, is there? Kyoto doesn’t solve the problem for you—it just puts it into a context that’s a thousand times more complicated.”
     
    Joe Benton didn’t say anything to that. Olsen’s point struck him with a strange force. If Chinese agreement was the sticking point—and it had to be, with China being by far the world’s biggest polluter—somehow it had to be overcome, whatever the framework.
     
    “Senator, we’ve had thirty years of Kyoto treaties. Kyoto itself, then the Copenhagen round, then Santiago. How long do you keep going before you admit a process isn’t working? The people who negotiated that first Kyoto Protocol would not believe the world we live in today. Southern Europe is on its way to becoming a desert. The fire in the Amazon has been burning for the past four years and no one has any idea how to put it out. How much of the Greenland ice pack is left? Every country with a coastline accepts that millions of people are going to have to be moved. Already we’re seeing ethnic conflict over this. That’s the world we live in, Senator. Do you think when they agreed on the first Kyoto Protocol in 1997 they thought this was what they were going to achieve? If those people were here today, do you think they’d count this a success? Senator, those people, if they were around today, would be the first ones to declare the process dead. They’d tell you, Stop! For God’s sake find another way.”
     
    Olsen stopped. He shook his head slightly, as if struggling to contain his exasperation.
     
    “Tell me why you think Kyoto’s been such a problem,” said Benton quietly.
     
    “It gives too much room for cover. Too much diffusion of responsibility. It’s too easy to avoid agreeing any kind of meaningful sanctions. It’s all promises and no way to enforce execution. Senator, you and I differ in outlook. I think multilateral negotiations rarely work, not when we’re talking about something on this scale with so much at stake and so many parties involved.”
     
    “I don’t know if I agree with that. What about the World Trade Organization?”
     
    Olsen smiled, the kind of smile, Benton imagined, he might use in his seminar room at Yale. The senator didn’t much like it.
     
    “The outcomes of the WTO can afford to be imperfect,” said Olsen. “And they are. Very imperfect. But the future of the planet doesn’t depend on them. The analogy here for me isn’t the WTO, it’s the SALT and START treaties between us and the Soviets in the later decades of the last century. Bilateral negotiations on limiting nuclear weapons. Senator, let’s look at history. Why did they work?”
     
    “We were the only countries involved.”
     
    “Not so. A number of other countries possessed nuclear weapons at the time, and had the means to deliver them. The limitation by the two leading exponents created an irresistible pressure on those others to limit proliferation as well, which led to the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty. But would there have been a multilateral test ban agreement without the bilateral treaties between the two global arms leaders to create the imperative? I submit that there would not. The lead shown by the dominant nuclear