U.S. takes heat over global warming

MONTREAL — The United States, after fiercely resisting any new international talks to address Earth's warming climate, agreed Friday night to a nonbinding dialogue to respond to climate change as representatives of nearly 200 nations concluded two weeks of meetings on the issue.

Brushing aside the Bush administration's initial protests, all the industrialized nations except the United States and Australia were near an agreement Friday night to embark on a new round of formal talks aimed at setting new mandatory limits on greenhouse gas emissions after 2012, when the existing pact known as the Kyoto Protocol expires.

In a separate set of negotiations aimed at extending a second, voluntary climate compact, the United States dropped its resistance and brokered language that would allow for nonbinding talks.

The agreement to begin a process that would extend the Kyoto pact underscored how many nations now see global warming as the world's most serious environmental threat. The Bush administration disavowed the Kyoto Protocol in 2001 and has opposed any kind of mandatory limits on carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels, arguing that research, new technology and market forces are the best way to address warming linked to the buildup of greenhouse gases.

"We would have wanted a stronger outcome, but we should not underestimate the strength of this package," Stavros Dimas, the European Union's commissioner for the environment, told reporters. "Kyoto is alive and kicking."

The last day was marked by high drama as former President Clinton delivered an applause-filled speech that the Bush administration had tried to block, according to sources close to Clinton who did not want to be identified.

Clinton said President Bush was "flat wrong" to claim that reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to fight global warming would damage the U.S. economy. But the ex-president urged the negotiators to find a way to "work with" the current U.S. administration.

Few question that the world is now warming at an unprecedented rate, due at least in part to human activity. On Thursday, scientists at NASA's Goddard Space Center plan to release data showing that 2005 remains on track to be the hottest year in recorded history, with land temperatures between Dec. 1, 2004, and Nov. 30 at 1.3 degrees above average. Scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and in Britain have interpreted the same data more conservatively and consider 2005 likely to be the second hottest year on record.

Such statistics, coupled with evidence of melting glaciers, rising sea levels and more intense hurricanes, have prompted many policy-makers to press for stricter limits on greenhouse gases.

Under Kyoto, the 157 countries agreed to cut their greenhouse emissions by an average of 5 percent between 2008 and 2012, and the same nations pledged Friday to begin negotiations on a new, tougher set of emission cuts.

The United States, which generates a quarter of the world's greenhouse gases, had earlier refused to engage in even nonbinding talks on the subject. When the Europeans and Canadians proposed such talks Thursday, chief American climate negotiator Harlan Watson rejected it on the grounds that it would be tantamount to formal negotiations.

"If it walks like a duck and talks like duck, it's a duck," Watson told the other delegates, according to several participants in the closed midnight session.

As Watson walked out, one of the other delegates, baffled, responded, "I don't understand your reference to a duck. What about this document is like a duck?"

The Kyoto participants' agreement to pursue a new round of emission limits amounted to a bet that the United States will change its position once Bush leaves office, participants said.

"We can't have an effective global regime without the U.S., but we can move ahead with the discussion about what the regime will be with everyone else at the table, leaving a seat for the U.S. and hoping the U.S. will fill its empty seat," said Michael Zammit Cutajar, Malta's ambassador for international environmental affairs, who helped oversee the initial Kyoto negotiations. "After all, things will change in the U.S. in a few years. There will be a new constellation of forces, and maybe there will be a greater readiness to engage."

The agreement among Kyoto parties both commits most of the world's most influential nations to negotiating a new set of emission cuts and forces them to evaluate at its 2006 meeting whether the current climate regime is working.

In the second, broader pact, nearly 200 countries agreed to start an informal dialogue to determine what else should be done to address climate change. This accord calls for developing nations such as China and India, which are not obligated by the Kyoto targets, to adopt voluntary emission cuts that they could trade for credits on the international carbon market established under Kyoto.

The Associated Press

contributed to this report.