The United States on Wednesday rejected a Canadian bid to draw Washington into future global talks on climate change, a new round that would extend mandatory cutbacks in carbon emissions.
MONTREAL — The United States on Wednesday rejected a Canadian bid to draw Washington into future global talks on climate change, a new round that would extend mandatory cutbacks in carbon emissions.
"It is our belief that progress cannot be made through these formalized discussions," U.S. delegation head Paula Dobriansky told reporters as a two-week U.N. climate conference, involving more than 180 nations, entered its final days.
Arctic natives, meanwhile, announced they had filed an international human-rights complaint against the United States, to try to pressure Washington to cap the "greenhouse gases" they blame for the accelerated warming that is melting their icy homelands.
Bangladesh Ambassador Rafiq Ahmed Khan, whose low-lying land faces future flooding from seas rising with global warming, spoke on behalf of the poorest nations.
"Only strong political will can show the way," he told delegates. "These impacts are felt mostly by the people who are poor and most vulnerable."
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It was the first annual U.N. climate conference since the Kyoto Protocol took effect last February, requiring 35 industrialized countries to curb emissions of carbon dioxide and five other gases that act like a greenhouse trapping heat in the atmosphere.
Among major developed nations, only the United States and Australia reject that agreement, worked out in 1997 in Kyoto, Japan, and designed to produce an average 5 percent reduction of emissions below 1990 levels by 2012.
Under the protocol, talks must now begin on emissions controls after 2012, and Canadian Environment Minister Stephane Dion, looking for a compromise route forward, this week proposed a plan for "discussions to explore and analyze approaches for long-term cooperative action to address climate change," with a deadline for agreement by 2008.
The Bush administration says it prefers to deal with other governments on a bilateral or regional basis, on financing new energy-saving technologies, and on voluntary approaches to reducing emissions.
"We also believe firmly that negotiations will not reap progress, as indicated, because there are differing perspectives," said Dobriansky, a U.S. undersecretary of state.
But Dion suggested acceptable language might still be found to get the Americans on board. Closed-door talks "have been frank and productive," he told delegates at Wednesday's open session. "There is an urgent need to send a signal to the world about the future."
The European Union's environment commissioner Stavros Dimas was harsher, suggesting the Bush administration was backing off a commitment made at the last G-8 summit, in Gleneagles, Scotland, to a "global discussion on long-term cooperative action."
"I am looking forward to hear from our American partners how they intend to translate this pledge into action," said Dimas.
A broad scientific consensus agrees that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, byproduct of automobile engines, power plants and other fossil fuel-burning industries, has contributed significantly to the past century's global temperature rise -- of 0.7 degrees Celsius, or 1 degree Fahrenheit.
In October, NASA climatologists projected from thousands of temperature readings that 2005 would end as the warmest year globally since records were first kept in the mid-19th century.
The potential impacts are extensive: Small islands fear expanding and rising seas; poor nations face water shortages if warmth washes away glaciers; climate change may kill off traditional crops.
An authoritative, intergovernmental study last year found that rapid warming in the Arctic, by disrupting animal and plant life, already threatens "the destruction of the hunting and food-gathering culture of the Inuit in this century," noted Paul Crowley of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, representing native northerners worldwide.
Crowley announced that the ICC was filing a petition with the Inter American Human Rights Commission seeking a decision pressuring the United States to act more urgently to avert climate change.
In 2000, the latest year for which statistics are available, the United States was by far the world's leading greenhouse-gas emitter, accounting for 21 percent of the total.
U.S. President George W. Bush rejected the Kyoto Protocol in 2001, saying limiting fuel-burning would crimp the U.S. economy, and complaining that fast-growing economies such as China's and India's weren't targeted under the accord.
China in 2000 accounted for almost 15 percent of emissions, but its per-capita emissions were less than one-sixth that of the United States. The Canadians and others hope, however, that such major developing countries will take action on climate in the next phase.
Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin, opening Wednesday's high-level phase of the conference, addressed the American economic argument.
"Surely we realize by now that a greater cost will be exacted if we lack the will or tenacity to change," he said to loud applause.
Source: Associated Press
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