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deal?”
     
    “Exactly.”
     
    “Why is that, do you think?” asked Benton. “They face the same problems as us. John has just said, the projections show swaths of their southern coast becoming uninhabitable because of inundation and storm activity, and they’ll have a considerably greater problem than us with desertification in their central provinces.”
     
    “Exactly,” said Ball again.
     
    “Then shouldn’t they have done a deal?”
     
    “Joe, they’re not going to do it bilaterally. Particularly not with a president who’s desperate to do it for electoral reasons.”
     
    “But they should have figured they’d get a better deal in that situation than they could get any other time,” said Eales.
     
    “True. And yet still they didn’t do it. Doesn’t that prove my point?”
     
    “On the other hand,” said Eales, “maybe they figured a president who cut a deal out of desperation wouldn’t be able to get the Senate to ratify, and they’d be left exposed. If that’s the case, if they wouldn’t do one with a president who was desperate for electoral reasons, maybe they’ll do one with a president who isn’t.”
     
    Benton glanced at Eales. He knew that the big Chicagoan often tested ideas to destruction by getting behind them and seeing what arguments came back, even when he didn’t agree with the ideas himself.
     
    Ball smiled. “You can’t have it both ways, John.”
     
    “Sure, but what I’d like to know is which way is the right way.”
     
    Ball laughed.
     
    Benton was thinking through the implications of what Ball had said. “What you’re suggesting, Alan, is by making this information public, taking it into the Kyoto process, that makes China more likely to cut a deal.”
     
    “And everyone else. Not just China. India, the EuroCore, Japan, Brazil, Russia. All the big emitters.”
     
    “Plus a hundred and fifty other countries,” said Eales.
     
    Benton glanced at Eales again. A hundred and fifty countries. He could imagine the special pleading, the side deals, the concessions, the watering-down that would go on to get a deal between so many parties. Mike Gartner’s words came back to him. Spend two years negotiating, another five years verifying and finding out no one’s in compliance, then start negotiating again. And all the time, the feedback loop would be ramping itself up. He couldn’t help thinking that cutting a simple, straight, sanctions-backed deal with China—if it could be done—and then using that deal as combined leverage with everyone else, really was an attractive alternative.
     
    Throughout the campaign, Joe Benton had been rock solid in support of Kyoto 4, which was scheduled to kick off toward the end of the following year. He had promised that his administration would create a leadership role for the United States within the process so that this Kyoto treaty, unlike its three predecessors, would provide the framework for a truly just and lasting solution to the emissions problem. But Benton knew that his statements about a leadership role in Kyoto were generic, and he and his advisors had done very little thinking about what this would actually translate to, or what could realistically be expected out of the new treaty. He was also sufficiently self-aware to know that, like many incoming presidents, he had little direct experience of foreign affairs, and he felt that this was where he would be most vulnerable when it came to heading the executive. Listening to Gartner had made him feel like a novice, and Benton was pretty sure Mike Gartner was aware of it. Enjoyed making him feel like that. Yet on this question Gartner really did know what he was talking about, a lot better than Joe Benton did. Gartner had been a midwife to Kyoto 3, as much as any American politician had been. It was his signature on the treaty. If he had opted for a bilateral approach with China now, maybe there really was more to it than the hope of pulling a rabbit out of a