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EU Criticizes US on Global Warming Move
Leaders from the European Union on Wednesday criticized the United States as being completely wrong to pull out of an anti-global warming accord unilaterally.
Addressing a European Parliament session in Strasbourg, Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson said that the 15-nation union would speak loudly and clearly to save the accord, known as the Kyoto Protocol.
Sweden is holding the rotating presidency of the European Union.
Persson said that the U.S. stance was completely wrong. He rejected the American idea of getting commerce and trade involved into the negotiation on how to materialize the reduction of heat- trapping gases around the world.
"It would be extremely counter-productive to involve the World Trade Organization in the negotiations," Persson said. "Demands like this will only lead to stalemate."
French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin also criticized Bush, saying that his decision not to honor the accord was a serious unilateral act.
"This is not an isolationist administration as has been the case before in the Republican tradition. This is more like a unilateralist administration," Jospin said.
The George W. Bush administration said in late March that it had no plans to implement the accord negotiated in Kyoto, Japan, in December of 1997 because it would be bad for the U.S. economy and the Congress would never ratify it.
The European Commission, the executive body of the 15-nation bloc, said on Wednesday that it would go it alone to save the collapsing Kyoto accord that was signed to roll back global warming by cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
The commission made the statement after its environment troika had failed to talk the United States back into honoring the signed protocol that has committed the United States, the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, to reducing by 6 percent its emissions as against the 1990 levels by 2012 at the latest.
The troika is formed by environment officials from the commission, Sweden and Belgium that is going to take over the EU presidency in early June.
"One country cannot pronounce as dead an international treaty," said a union official.
"The EU will try to get the needed 55 percent to keep the protocol in place," said Annika Ostergren, environment spokeswoman for the European Commission.
The Kyoto Protocol, signed by some 140 countries, needs the ratification of signatory states that combine to emit more than 55 percent of the world's total pollution to be legally binding.
The spokeswoman, however, admitted that without the United States it would be difficult for the EU to muster the required emission percentage.
"But for EU, the Kyoto Protocol is still alive and kicking," said Annika.
The EU environment troika is touring the United States and Canada in an attempt to persuade the North Americans back into the negotiations on how to materialize the Kyoto Protocol.
The same troika will soon travel to lobby Russia, Iran, China and Japan, in that both Russia and China were heavyweights in climate change issues while Iran is now holding the presidency of the Group-of-77 that is the key lobby group within the United Nations conference for signatory states to the U.N. climate change framework agreement.
The Kyoto Protocol calls for OSCE countries to cut emissions of heat-trapping gases by an average of 5.2 percent below the 1990 levels by 2012 at the latest. However, U.S. carbon dioxide emissions have continued to grow since the protocol was signed and are now almost 15 percent above what they were in 1990.
The United Nations said on Monday that it would host an informal meeting for 40 to 50 environment ministers in New York on April 21 to prepare for the sixth conference of signatory states now slated to resume in Bonn in July.
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