"Washington refused to ratify the protocol. President George W. Bush argued it would hurt the U.S. economy while making no demands on emerging economic powers like China, which has surpassed the U.S. as the world's biggest polluter.
A breakthrough came at last December's talks when China and other developing countries agreed to share the burden of controlling emissions -- though without accepting the same limits as the industrial countries, and only if they get help to switch to lower-carbon economies."
Last December, the US did sign on to a treaty that corrected the main reason the Senate would not have passed Kyoto. It had a compromise that did constrain third world carbon production - while realizing that the third world could not be treated as the first world was. They needed the opportunity to develop, but they needed to avoid the errors we went through.
Here were two Senate hearings on what happened in Bali, but the SFRC site appears to be down. Here is another source that has part of one of the hearings. This one was in April 2008 - the earlier one was in January 2008.
http://www.kerryvision.net/2008/04/in_defense_of_treehuggers.htmlWhat is clear is that some of the people on the US team did work very hard to get something out of Bali. In addition, Senator Kerry went as the Congressional delegation. He spoke of the fact that every Democrat running (and McCain) were willing to do more than Bush and he worked towards keeping us in the works. On the link above, Ambassador Stuart Eizenstat (around 4 minutes in) said:
"The fact that we had a treaty was significantly due to the fact that Senator Kerry was there. He was a virtual part of our negotiating team, without his day and night support and lobbying of the EU. we would not have gotten a treaty."
Given Gore's work educating people and the work started to get a better treaty, we may be in better shape than we were in the late 1990s when it was known that changes were needed to get Kyoto passed. I think the treaty that they hope to have by December 2009 will go through the SFRC, so it is good that someone as committed as Kerry will be the Senator leading the effort to pass it.