What do you do when you know that the position your country is taking at an international conference is wrong and should not prevail?

It would risk being the moral equivalent of a Pittsburgher rooting against the Steelers because for some reason or other he thought they should lose.

That was more or less the position of most Americans watching the representatives of the Bush administration seeking to obstruct progress toward agreement on worldwide action to curb greenhouse gas emissions at this month's U.N. Climate Change Conference in Bali, Indonesia.

The spirit of the conference turned distinctly and nearly unanimously against the United States. One delegate said that if the United States was not going to cooperate in reaching an agreement, it should at least have the decency to "please, get out of the way."

From an international and U.S. domestic point of view, matters became even more complicated when former U.S. Vice President Al Gore spoke at the conference, in light of his winning an Oscar for his movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," and his sharing of a Nobel Peace Prize with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for his efforts to inform and sensitize the world about the need for specific, urgent action to curb greenhouse gas emissions. The object of the efforts is to at least slow down global warming, which seems to be accelerating.

Every delegate at the conference knew that if Mr. Gore had won the 2000 presidential election -- or, for purists, if the U.S. Supreme Court had affirmed rather than overturned his 2000 electoral victory -- the position of the United States at the Bali conference would have been a very different one from that which Paula J. Dobriansky, undersecretary of state for democracy and global affairs, insisted upon. It is worth noting Ms. Dobriansky, the head of the U.S. delegation, was a third-echelon State Department official.

The science of all this, in my mind, is still not entirely clear. The Greenland ice cap is melting, for sure, but Greenland had arable land as late as the 15th century, so it is possible that global climate change is cyclical and thus very hard to head off. At the same time, the rest of the world and even most Americans, apart from the Bush administration and its profit-oriented industrial supporters, are steamed about this -- no pun intended -- and believe that mankind, especially the United States of America, should do something serious about trying to slow global warming.

I personally couldn't care less if the beachfront properties of the rich and famous are washed away, but some of the other results of a rise in sea levels would be catastrophic. Some island nations would simply disappear. And if we thought Katrina trashed New Orleans, that was nothing compared to what will come.

At the very least, the changes will be destructive and expensive to mitigate or adjust to, including in the United States. At the worst, the displacement of people and the destruction of basic infrastructure will be cataclysmic.

In the end, it looked like the Bush administration climbed down a little at the Bali conference in the face of substantial international pressure to be reasonable. Ms. Dobriansky agreed that the United States would participate in the coming two years of negotiations that are supposed to result in a treaty by 2009 to succeed the famous -- or infamous, depending on your point of view -- Kyoto Protocol to the Framework Convention on Climate Control, which is set to expire in 2012. The United States remains, of course, the only major industrialized country not to have ratified Kyoto, even though it has for decades been the top greenhouse gas emitter.

In order that I not give the false impression that our country was the only evil force in this drama, it is important to note the other villains of the piece. China, India, Brazil, South Africa and other countries characterized -- some dubiously -- as "developing countries" had steadfastly held to the equally irresponsible position that they were excused from any curbs on their emissions because of their economic status. At Bali they conceded that they, too, would need to agree in the coming negotiations to cut emissions, although they insisted that a more conciliatory position on their part was tied to a more reasonable attitude on the part of the United States.

So what has the Bush administration been doing all these years by sticking its fingers in the eyes of the Europeans and other "right-thinking" people like Al Gore on this subject? Its most appealing argument is that remedies will have costs. Meeting benchmarks and respecting caps on emissions will cut into industry profits.

That is true, but it cost industry money to clean up Pittsburgh. It would be cheaper in terms of cash to just flush our toilets right into the three rivers. But we don't. Pollution -- carbon dioxide emissions -- are not good for the environment we inhabit and, besides, aren't we prepared to pay some kind of a price not to seem to be thumbing our noses at the rest of a world that is very concerned -- for good reason -- about greenhouse gases and global warming?

It is also clearly the case that some interesting technological innovations could come out of industry efforts to maintain production but with a greener environmental signature.

The Bali conference was a case where the U.S. home team -- at least as its signals were being called by Mr. Bush, backed by his oil business campaign donors -- needed to go three-and-out.

The game is not over, however. The negotiations for a treaty will now begin. Whatever the Bush administration's real intentions now, there will be a change of U.S. administration before Kyoto expires. Bali is the beginnings of a much-needed deal.