My youngest son, Wolfie, a 19-year-old college sophomore and a half German, had the opportunity to live and go to school in Berlin for most of his high school career. There he studied cello and was fortunate enough to travel to Beijing with an international honors orchestra. This was during China’s building boom, as the bird’s nest stadium was rising along with thousands of hotel rooms, office buildings, etc. What an incredible cultural opportunity, right? But when Wolfie returned, I heard little raving over the Forbidden Palace or the Great Wall. Instead, I was greeted with an onslaught of 17-year-old complaints about the thick, putrid, yellow air that had “a taste, and not a good one.”

So it should come as no surprise that this week at the U.N. meeting Chinese President Hu Jintao vowed to take action on his country’s greenhouse gas pollution—if only for the sake of improved public relations.

Per the Associated Press:

[Hu] outlined an ambitious program that included plans to plant enough forest to cover about 150,000 square miles — an area the size of Montana — and generate 15 percent of its energy needs from renewable sources within a decade.

He said the communist nation would also take steps to improve energy efficiency and reduce “by a notable margin” its growth rate of carbon pollution as measured against economic growth — though he did not give any specific numerical targets.

“At stake in the fight against climate change are the common interests of the entire world,” Hu said. “Out of a sense of responsibility to its own people and people across the world, China fully appreciates the importance and urgency of addressing climate change.”

Still, China and other developing nations “should not … be asked to take on obligations that go beyond their development stage,” Hu said.

Meanwhile, President Obama, who also pledged to place stringent cuts on U.S. emissions, has run up against fierce opposition from senators of both parties.

No single nation appears able to step up and be the ‘bigger nation’ at this point. There are so many reasons not to take decisive action and these reasons all come in the form of open-ended questions: Should the U.S. lower its carbon emissions if China and India don’t do it, too? Should any country sign an international climate treaty if it doesn’t have a domestic treaty first? Should climate change take a backseat to the world’s financial recover or could climate change actually help bolster the global economy?

So as the U.N.’s Copenhagen Climate Change meeting in December bears down upon world leaders, they need not worry about solving too much. They can easily sidestep the issue with their old standby: Who’s on first? What’s on second? And I don’t know is on third.