Canada faults U.S. on global warming

MONTREAL — Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin took aim Wednesday at the United States for its refusal to negotiate a new global warming treaty, telling a U.N. conference that the world's most powerful economy needed to resume participating in international talks to reduce greenhouse gases.

"Climate change is a global challenge that demands a global response. Yet there are nations that resist, voices that attempt to diminish the urgency or dismiss the science, or declare, either in word or indifference, that this is not our problem to solve. Well, let me tell you, it is our problem to solve," Martin said as he opened the high-level talks at the U.N. Climate Change Conference here.

Martin's remarks triggered applause from a conference hall filled with delegates from dozens of countries, who are in Montreal to start talks on a new global warming treaty to take effect once the original commitments of the current pact, the Kyoto Protocol, expire in 2012.

Later, in a news conference, Martin, who is in the midst of an election campaign, singled out the United States by name, saying "To the reticent nations, including the United States, I say this: There is such a thing as a global conscience."

The United States, the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and Australia are the only two large nations to reject the Kyoto Protocol, which requires developed countries to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases to roughly 5 percent below 1990 levels.

Most climate scientists say much steeper reductions in greenhouse gases — emitted en masse when fossil fuels combust in cars and power plants — will be needed in order to truly curtail the greenhouse effect, which already has begun to increase temperatures, raise sea levels and affect weather patterns around the world.

President Bush, who has argued that the Kyoto Protocol's firm caps on greenhouse gases would damage the U.S. economy, has dispatched a negotiating team to the conference that has flatly opposed any talks on a new pact — a stance that has begun to draw open criticism from other nations.

In addition to Martin, Stavros Dimas, the European Union's top environmental official, criticized the Bush administration during a meeting with reporters, saying, "We will continue to talk to our American partners and remind them of their commitments."

Dimas and other European officials contend that by refusing to discuss new global warming obligations in Montreal this week, the U.S. is reneging on a pledge Bush made at a G-8 summit in Scotland earlier this year with leaders of the world's other major economies.

Undersecretary of State Paula Dobriansky, the highest-ranking U.S. official at the Montreal talks, forcefully defended the president's negotiating position Wednesday. She said the Bush administration believes it can accomplish more to reduce greenhouse gases outside of international treaties.

"It is our belief that progress cannot be made through these formalized discussions," Dobriansky said, adding, "one size does not fit all."

The Bush team said Wednesday that it was sending more senior administration officials, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, to the first formal meeting of the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate scheduled for January in Sydney, Australia. The partnership represents a nonbinding agreement between the U.S., Australia, China and other nations to share clean-energy technologies that the administration has begun touting as an alternative process.

Such initiatives have not appeased critics such as Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., who told reporters that Bush was failing to lead on global warming. Bingaman was one of two dozen U.S. senators, including 20 Democrats, who signed a letter criticizing the Bush negotiating position this week.

On Wednesday, 25 economists, including three Nobel laureates, released a similar statement calling on the U.S. to establish market-based approaches to reducing greenhouse gases to avoid what they predicted would be the far more costly consequences of a changing climate.

Meanwhile, the governing council of the indigenous Inuit people filed a human-rights claim against the U.S. government, accusing the U.S. of threatening their hunting-based economy and entire cultural existence by causing mass melting of sea ice in the Arctic.