Some are encouraged as Bush discusses warming, but most want mandates
WASHINGTON — President Bush’s call on Friday for a new fund to reduce global warming fell flat with Europeans and environmentalists who say U.N.-mandated cuts in greenhouse gases are what’s needed.
To show he meant business, Bush designated his treasury secretary to talk to other nations about getting worldwide contributions to the fund. The money would pay for clean-energy projects in poor countries.
“This here was a great step for the Americans and a small step for mankind,” Germany’s environment minister, Sigmar Gabriel, said after Bush’s speech at the State Department before representatives of the nations that are the world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases. “In substance, we are still far apart.”
In his speech, Bush acknowledged that climate change is real and that human activity is a factor.
“By setting this goal, we acknowledge there is a problem, and by setting this goal, we commit ourselves to doing something about it,” he said. “We share a common responsibility: to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while keeping our economies growing.”
The president’s speech capped two days of talks at a White House-sponsored climate conference that brought together the U.S. and developing nations such as China, India and Brazil that are not required to make cuts under the Kyoto Protocol, the U.N. treaty for reducing greenhouse gases that expires in 2012.
“There was lots of talk about mandatory caps,” said Yvo de Boer, the top U.N. climate official. “I don’t think it would have been realistic to expect at this first meeting to expect any country to change its position.”
He said he found Bush’s speech “encouraging because it indicates that the U.S. wants to develop this discussion among the major economies, get into the substance, including on the question of goals and the type of regime that’s appropriate, and then feed that into the larger U.N. process.”
Bush said his purpose was to begin setting a new worldwide goal for cutting carbon dioxide emissions after 2012 and to help developing nations pay for the changes that would be needed. The president said the reduction goal should be finished by next summer, along with ways to measure progress toward it.
He said each nation should establish for itself what methods it will use to rein in the pollution problem without stunting economic growth.
But he refuses to sign onto mandatory emission-reduction obligations, preferring to encourage the development of new technologies and other voluntary measures, and won’t participate in any talks toward a global agreement that do not include energy guzzlers from the developing world.
John Ashton, a special representative on climate change for the British foreign secretary, said: “One of the striking features of this meeting is how isolated this administration has become. There is absolutely no support that I can see in the international community that we can drive this effort on the basis of voluntary efforts.”
The ball is now in Congress’ court, said Fred Krupp, president of Environmental Defense, who was one of the few outsiders to address the panel of mostly midlevel government ministers.
“Congress needs to lead. The president is not giving us the leadership we need. Ultimately what we need are mandatory caps,” Krupp said. “No air pollution problem in the world has ever been solved without having legal limits.”
Democrats Barbara Boxer of California and Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, who both chair committees in the Senate, said they would provide that leadership and work toward legislation with mandatory carbon controls and a cap-and-trade system.
Boxer called Bush’s speech an improvement on what he has said about climate change in the past “but unless it is followed up with mandatory cuts in global warming pollution, it will amount to little more than empty words.”
