US Fails In Bid To Kill Off Kyoto Process

[hatrack]

Governments from around the world yesterday narrowly succeeded in keeping the international bid to combat catastrophic global warming alive, in the face of determined attempts by the re-elected Bush administration to kill it off.

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More than 36 hours after the conference was supposed to have ended - following two all-night negotiating sessions, and while workmen were physically dismantling the facilities around them - delegates finally agreed on a series of compromises that avoided complete breakdown and kept some life in the negotiations.

The US said that "on balance" it was "very pleased with the outcome", but its obdurate obstruction of even anodyne proposals at the two-week conference bodes ill for the future of the talks, which are designed to hammer out the next tough steps to be taken after the Kyoto Protocol runs its course in 2012.

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But this autumn Washington was shocked and angered when Russia agreed to ratify the protocol - completing the number of countries needed, under its complex rules, to bring it into force. Environmentalists say that the re-elected Bush administration has decided to do everything it can to sabotage any further international measures, and is not concerned about the international condemnation it will incur in the process. This transformed the Buenos Aires conference, which was expected to be a routine and relatively uncontroversial meeting, the last before negotiations on the follow-up to Kyoto begin in earnest next November. Its chairman, Raul Estrada-Oyuela, an Argentinian diplomat who played a central role in the negotiation of the protocol seven years ago, proposed an apparently inoffensive series of informal meetings over next year to prepare the ground for the talks.

But this was vigorously opposed by the US, which insisted there could only be one informal meeting, and that no ideas for the future could be discussed at it. The Americans also objected to mentions of the need to tackle global warming as opposed to adapting to it, and backed an extraordinary demand from Saudi Arabia that oil-producing states should receive billions of dollars in compensation from the rest of the world if they burned less oil."

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http://news.independent.co.uk/world/environment/story.jsp?story=594502

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