ENVIRONMENTALISTS have reacted with fury and dismay to a White House decision not to back the Kyoto Protocol on global warming – a deal previously agreed by the Clinton administration.
“The world is tottering on the brink of climate disaster,” Friends of the Earth Europe said in a statement, in which it accused President George W Bush of deciding “to rat” on the UN treaty.
“The Kyoto Protocol is the only international treaty capable of addressing climate change,” the organisation’s climate campaigner, Roda Verheyen, added. “The science is proven, the political momentum is there and so this latest move of the US administration just looks shabby.”
“George Bush is attempting to tear up the Kyoto Protocol in the face of world opinion,” said Greenpeace’s climate campaign director, Bill Hare. “This has been a tremendous coup by the (US) fossil fuel industry, a coup of epic proportions.”
Kyoto, hammered out in 1997, is a skeleton treaty that sets out national quotas that would cut the output of “greenhouse” gases. These are carbon gases disgorged from oil, gas and coal that scientists say could catastrophically change weather patterns in the coming century.
But the framework accord is a dead letter at present. Its rules and operating procedures have to be agreed and then ratified by at least 55 countries accounting for at least 55 percent of global emissions by developed nations at 1990 levels.
Only industrialised countries have quotas; developing nations do not, because of the economic cost of reducing emissions.
Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace urged the EU to take a firm line and not water down the deal to meet US demands.
Hare said there was a “very good” chance of ratifying and implementing the treaty without the US, which by itself is the biggest single source of greenhouse gas, accounting for a quarter of the world’s total.
The Kyoto process was scheduled to have wrapped up last November in The Hague. But those negotiations were crippled by a conflict between the European Union (EU) and the US over market mechanisms that would soften the cost of meeting the treaty’s targets.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said the Bush administration, in line with the president’s campaign stance, was opposed to Kyoto because it did not include populous developing countries in its quotas of gas emissions. The administration would not present the treaty to the US senate for ratification, he said. – AFP
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