Clinton: Bush 'flat wrong'
on climate
Friday, December 9,
2005
MONTREAL, Quebec (AP) -- Former U.S.
President Bill Clinton told a global audience of diplomats, environmentalists
and others on Friday that the Bush administration is "flat wrong" in
claiming that reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to fight global warming would
damage the U.S. economy.
With a "serious disciplined effort" to
develop energy-saving technology, he said, "we could meet and surpass the
Kyoto targets in a way that would strengthen and not weaken our economies."
Clinton, a champion of the Kyoto Protocol, the
existing emissions-controls agreement opposed by the Bush administration, spoke
in the final hours of a two-week U.N. climate conference at which Washington has
come under heavy criticism for its stand.
Most delegations appeared ready Friday to leave an
unwilling United States behind and open a new round of negotiations on future
cutbacks in the emissions blamed for global warming.
"There's no longer any serious doubt that climate
change is real, acclerating and caused by human activities," said Clinton,
whose address was interrupted repeatedly by enthusiastic applause.
"We are uncertain about how deep and the time of
arrival of the consequences, but we are quite clear they will not be good."
Canadian officials said the U.S. delegation was
displeased with the last-minute scheduling of the Clinton speech. But U.S.
delegation chief Paula Dobriansky issued a statement saying events like
Clinton's appearance "are useful opportunities to hear a wide range of
views on global climate change."
The former U.S. chief executive spoke between the
official morning and afternoon plenary sessions of the conference, representing
the William J. Clinton Foundation, which includes a climate-change program in
its activities.
In the real work of the conference, delegates from
more than 180 countries bargained behind closed doors until 6:30 a.m. Friday,
making final adjustments to an agreement to negotiate additional reductions in
carbon dioxide and other gases after 2012, when the Kyoto accord expires.
Efforts by host-country Canada and others to draw the
United States into the process were failing. The Bush administration says it
favors a voluntary approach, not global negotiations, to deal with climate
issues.
"It's such a pity the United States is still very much
unwilling to join the international community, to have a multilateral effort to
deal with climate change," said Kenya's Emily Ojoo Massawa, chair of the
African group of nations at the conference.
Clinton's vice president, Al Gore, was instrumental in
final negotiations on the 1997 treaty protocol that was initialed in the
Japanese city of Kyoto and mandates cutbacks in 35 industrialized nations of
emissions of carbon dioxide and five other gases by
2012.
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
Fahrenheit (0.7 degree Celsius). Continued warming is expected to disrupt the
global climate.
In the late 1990s the U.S. Senate balked at ratifying
Kyoto, and the incoming President Bush in 2001 formally renounced the accord,
saying it would harm the U.S. economy.
The Montreal meeting, attended by almost 10,000
delegates, environmentalists, business representatives and others, was the
first annual U.N. climate conference since Kyoto took effect last February.
The protocol's language requires its member nations to
begin talks now on emissions controls after 2012, when the Kyoto regime expires.
The Canadians and others also saw Montreal as an
opportunity to draw the outsider United States into the emission-controls regime,
through discussions under the broader 1992 U.N. climate treaty.
But the Americans have repeatedly rejected the idea of
rejoining future negotiations to set post-2012 emissions controls.
The Canadians continued to press for agreement early
Friday, offering the U.S. delegation vague, noncommittal language by which
Washington would join only in "exploring" "approaches" to
cooperative action. While rejecting mandatory targets, the
Bush administration points to the U.S. government's spending of $3 billion a
year on research and development of energy-saving technologies as a
demonstration of U.S. efforts to combat climate change.
Copyright 2005 The Associated