Your long and, frankly, rambling article on the circuitous journey of Ban Ki-moon, the secretary-general of the United Nations, to the Indonesian island of Bali, where the replacement to the Kyoto protocol that expires in 2012 will be tackled next month (“The Icy Road to Bali,” November 3, 2007), takes more than two pages to reach its final and decisive paragraph, in which you consider the likely response of the chief carbon-emitter, America. Indeed, Bali is likely to fare there no better than Kyoto has done, no matter how circuitous the secretary-general’s journey through countries affected by climate change may be. Not only does America consider such arrangements as compromising its sovereignty, as you mention, but it also has very little trust in the UN as an organization. This does not pertain only to the political elite, but to the population at large, which the elite has been teaching for generations that the UN is up to no good. A grand global bargain on how to deal with climate change thus crucially depends on the perception of the UN in America rather than on anything else. And that is where Ban Ki-moon should focus his energies instead of undertaking long journeys across the barren southern hemisphere.