President Barack Obama has taken office pledged to control global warming both by reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in this country and by pursuing negotiated worldwide GHG limits. The two efforts cannot be separated. Success in future GHG reduction will depend on international controls that reach beyond the industrialized world.

China is already the world's largest GHG emitter, while India will become third largest within 10 years. Since discussion of GHG limits first began, China, India, and other poor countries have resisted binding limits on their own emissions, while supporting such limits for richer countries like the United States. Less developed countries argue that they did not create the current warming problem, which results from emissions over the past century, and that it would be unjust to impose a GHG control burden on their efforts to rise out of poverty. In 1997, the Kyoto Conference on global warming accepted these arguments, and adopted a Protocol that prescribed emissions limits only for 39 developed countries, excluding, among others, Brazil, China, India, and Indonesia.