Critics Say U.N. Climate Talks Lagging
13th Nov 2006, 18:11 GMT
Environmentalists complained Friday that negotiators for industrial nations are moving too slowly at a U.N. conference to set controls on global-warming gases after the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012. A leader of the talks said, however, that slow might be better if eventually the United States signs on to mandatory emissions reductions. Tuesday's Democratic election victory in the United States heartened those looking for a change in U.S. attitudes. "The new Congress will challenge the Bush administration's global warming policy on several fronts," an unofficial conference newsletter told the 5,000 participants at the two-week session, which ends next Friday. The annual meeting of some 180 member nations of the 1992 U.N. climate treaty is dealing with complex issues of implementing the Kyoto Protocol, an annex of the treaty that obliges 35 industrial nations to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. The United States and Australia are the only major industrialized countries to reject the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, an annex to the climate treat. President Bush says it would harm the U.S. economy, and that it should have required emissions cutbacks in poorer nations as well. Scientists say the atmospheric accumulation of carbon dioxide, methane and other heat-trapping gases -- byproducts of power plants, automobiles and other fossil fuel-burning sources -- is at least partly to blame for a 1-degree Fahrenheit rise in global temperatures in the past century. Continued temperature increases may dangerously disrupt the planet's climate, they say. Behind closed doors here this week, the 165 Kyoto countries have discussed how to shape a post-2012 emissions regime of quotas and timetables, but no major advances have been reported. Environmentalists said time was running out. "We are calling for an agreement to happen within 2008," Richard Worthington, a South African leader of the international Climate Action Network, told an activists' seminar...
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