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UN climate talks end with pivotal deal
(AP)
Updated: 2005-12-11 13:50
MONTREAL - A U.N. conference on global warming ended Saturday with a
watershed agreement by more than 150 nations ¡ª an unwilling United States not
among them ¡ª to open talks on mandatory post-2012 reductions in greenhouse
gases.
The Bush administration, which rejects the emissions cutbacks of
the current Kyoto Protocol, accepted a second, weaker conference decision,
agreeing to join an exploratory global "dialogue" on future steps to combat
climate change. However, that agreement specifically ruled out "negotiations
leading to new commitments."
The divergent tracks did little to close the climate gap between Washington
and the Kyoto supporters, which include Europe and Japan. But environmentalists
welcomed the plan to negotiate "second-phase" emissions cuts.
"The Kyoto Protocol is alive and kicking," said Jennifer Morgan of the World
Wide Fund for Nature.
Before finally gaveling the two-week conference to a close early Saturday
after working overtime in snowy Montreal, conference president Stephane Dion
told delegates, "What we have achieved is no less than a map for the future, the
Montreal Action Plan."
But Dion, Canada's environment minister, later acknowledged to reporters, "I
would prefer to have the United States in Kyoto."
The Montreal meeting was the first of the annual climate conferences since
the Kyoto Protocol took effect last February, mandating specific cutbacks in
emissions of carbon dioxide and five other gases by 2012 in 35 industrialized
countries.
A broad scientific consensus agrees that these gases accumulating in the
atmosphere, byproducts of automobile engines, power plants and other fossil
fuel-burning industries, contributed significantly to the past century's global
temperature rise of 1 degree.
Continued warming is melting glaciers worldwide, shrinking the Arctic ice cap
and heating up the oceans, raising sea levels, scientists say. They predict
major climate disruptions in coming decades.
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