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The global community is in near-universal agreement that climate change is a major challenge which requires correspondingly strong action in order to protect the environment into the future. For any agreement to be successful it must follow the following principles:

1. Respect the rights of developing countries to elevate their people's standard of living.
2. Acknowledge the historical responsibility of nations for past greenhouse gas emissions.

3. Recognise the projected future responsibility of nations for past emissions if present development trends are maintained.
4. Take into account the ability of nations to take action to reduce their emissions without creating excessive compliance costs which unreasonably compromise their national economies and people's standard of living.
5. Ensure that the costs caused by climate change related incidents are not unfairly borne by those with the least capacity to pay them.
6. Provide the machinery for reducing emissions to a desirable level that is achievable within the relevant timeframes.

As the most economically developed nation and the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases to date, the US will clearly play a pivotal role in this process [1]. The use of the word hold' in the above proposition implies that the global community will somehow have to force the US to the table and impose targets upon them. However, the most advantageous outcome would be the US taking on a leadership role and putting the pillars in place for a strong successor instrument to the Kyoto Protocol. This would enable American domestic energy policies to be better integrated with the international agenda. It would also remove any grounds for stalling by developing nations and instead provide a strong moral force for accepting climate change measures. In the past, China has cited the recalcitrance of the US and Australia in the adoption of mandatory emission reduction targets [2]. America's aggressive pursuit of a strong climate agreement would close this loophole and create a momentum for substantial targets to be set and the adoption of clean development technologies.

In order to determine how a global climate agreement could be designed that complies with the six guiding principles stated above and the standard for emissions reduction that the US would be obliged to meet, we need to flip the process on its head. The fundamental basis of any agreement must be a clear notion of the target level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Based on the Intergovernmental

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