An American soldier was interviewed on British television recently about his role in fighting the forest fires now raging out of control across 11 states of America, from the West Coast to the Rockies, from Canada down to Mexico. He had previously been peacekeeping in Bosnia, he said, and was delighted to at last be doing something for his countrymen. His eagerness and all-American-baseball-kid enthusiasm for the task encapsulated an important truth about the United States. For the main part, the citizens of the world's sole superpower don't want to be global policemen, law enforcers or nannies. They don't want to waste time and money - mainly their money, they might say - in the corridors of international diplomacy. They want to solve their own problems, live their own lives, play their own idiosyncratic sports, water their own front lawns, drive their own gas-guzzling limos - and fight their own fires.
Unfortunately, the rest of the world makes annoying demands on them, the most persistent and irritating of which (from an American point of view) is that, because the US is the world's largest polluter and contributor to global warming - responsible for 25 per cent of all global industrial emissions - theirs should be the most strenuous efforts to enforce reductions. Few, even in the US, now deny that there is a link between carbon emissions and global warming, and that the perceptible rise in land temperatures (0.45-0.6 C over the past century) is increasing climate instability.
Congress has yet to adopt the targets fixed under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, believing that trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to roughly 5 per cent below their 1990 levels in the next decade would have a profoundly negative impact on the US economy. At the next major global-warming conference - The Hague in November - the US plans to propose that certain categories of land use should be able to qualify as a credit towards reducing carbon admissions. In other words, it will argue that reducing CO2 emissions from power stations, industry or cars is not the only way to control global warming. Because trees absorb carbon dioxide from the air, proper management of forests and grazing lands also has a carbon-cutting effect. Such "carbon sinks", the US says, could help industrialised countries reach the first Kyoto target, which kicks in from 2008-12, without damaging their economies.
The environmentalists' fear is that an agreement on such "sinks" would become a giant loophole and the source of futile and time-wasting wrangling (does replanting the ravaged forests count as new growth or old growth?), when the urgent problem is that planet earth faces oblivion. This is fiddling the figures while Idaho burns.
As the unusually dry summer generates the worst fires for half a century, American voters may themselves begin to press their elected representatives to stop equivocating and take action on global warming. They may begin to make connections between the terrible consequences of drought in the western states, and the floods in India and Bhutan, which have killed at least 200 and made two and a half million homeless. In the north-east of Brazil, almost 100,000 people have fled their homes, while drought has brought severe food and water shortages to 3.3 million Kenyans. In Ethiopia, 8 million face drought-induced malnutrition.
Globalisation - the triumph of the American way of life - brings global problems that require global responses. We used to fear catching cold when America sneezed. Now we know, too, that when it burns, we all get singed. America has to take the responsibility that goes with being the sole superpower. There are hopeful signs that politicians finally recognise this. During the primary process, all candidates from the two main parties, including George W Bush and Al Gore, made it clear that they accepted the science of climate change and, therefore, the need for action.
But this action must be more than creative accounting with carbon credits and debits. The US should abandon its arrogant stance in the climate negotiations that other countries, in particular Europe, must work for an agreement that America feels able to ratify. It should now take the lead in setting new targets and funding the search for technologies to achieve them. Global warming is no longer a future threat, it is a current emergency. The people of Montana mourning their million-dollar views of virgin forest, and the Masai of Kenya bringing their cattle into the streets of Nairobi in search of water, are standing at the brink of a shared catastrophe.
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