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U.S. Not Ready To Commit To Global-Warming Gas Reductions

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By CHARLES J. HANLEY The Associated Press

Published: December 9, 2007

BALI, Indonesia - The United States will come up with its plan to cut global-warming gases by mid-2008, and won't commit to mandatory caps at the United Nations' climate conference here, the chief U.S. negotiator said Saturday.

"We're not ready to do that here," said Harlan Watson, the State Department's senior climate negotiator and special representative. "We're working on that, what our domestic contribution would be, and again we expect that sometime before the end of the Major Economies process."

That process of U.S.-led talks was inaugurated last September by President Bush, who invited 16 other "major economies," including the Europeans, Japan, China and India, to Washington to discuss a future international program of cutbacks in carbon dioxide and other emissions blamed for global warming.

Environmentalists accuse the Bush administration of using those parallel talks to subvert the long-running U.N. negotiations and the spirit of the binding Kyoto Protocol, which requires 36 industrial nations to make relatively modest cuts in greenhouse gases.

The United States is the only major industrial country to reject Kyoto and its obligatory targets. U.S. leadership favors a more voluntary approach in which individual nations determine what they can contribute to a global effort without taking on obligations under the U.N. climate treaty.

Watson's comments reaffirmed that the Bush administration views its talks as the main event.

The European Union, on the other hand, has committed to binding emissions reductions of 20 percent by 2020. Midway through the two-week Bali conference, many of the more than 180 assembled nations also were demanding such firm commitments from Washington, as the world talks about a framework to follow Kyoto when it expires in 2012.

"It would be useful for Annex I, non-Kyoto countries code for the United States to indicate what level of effort" they'll make, said M.J. Mace, a delegate from the Pacific nation of Micronesia, whose islands are threatened by seas rising from global warming.

The conference's main negotiating text, tabled for debate Saturday and obtained by The Associated Press, mentions targets, but in a nonbinding way. Its preamble notes a widely accepted view that industrial nations' emissions should be cut by 25 percent to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 to help head off climate change's worst impacts: expanding oceans, spreading droughts, dying species, extreme weather and other effects.

Delegates made progress on other matters as establishing a system for compensating tropical forest nations for reducing deforestation, a major source of carbon emissions.

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