Mr. Bush spoke today in advance of a summit meeting next week of the Group of Eight major industrial nations, to be held in Germany. Global warming will be a big part of the agenda at the summit.
Mr. Bush said his proposed conference on emissions should include China, India and the large European countries, as well as the United States. Industrial leaders from each country, including people involved in power generation, transportation and alternative fuels, would gather at the talks, which might last as long as 18 months, and pool their knowledge of clean-energy technology.
“It’s important to ensure that we get results, and so we would create a strong and transparent system for measuring each country’s performance,” Mr. Bush said today, in remarks at an international development conference in Washington.
Mr. Bush offered no specifics about what emissions standards and curbs the conference should set. But his remarks were significant because it appeared to be the first time he has said that the United States should set itself a specific goal for lowering emissions.
“The United States takes this issue seriously,” Mr. Bush said, rebutting charges that the United States has long dragged its feet on climate change. “The United States will work with other nations to establish a new frame work on greenhouse gas emissions for when the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012.”
The United States is, in aggregate, the world’s biggest producer of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane. Since its first weeks in office, the Bush administration has refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, which lays down mandatory caps on greenhouse gases, because two other major producers, China and India, are not included and because of concerns that complying with it would harm the American economy.
That policy of shunning the Kyoto agreement, which the Clinton administration helped negotiate, has estranged the United States from other countries, including some traditional allies, on environmental issues.
That estrangement widened, and at an unfortunate time, less than a week ago, when the United States rejected Germany’s proposal for deep long-term cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. The German proposal had been endorsed by Britain and Japan, among others.
But Mr. Bush sought today to dispel the image of a stubborn United States standing alone on the issue. “My proposal is this,” he said. “By the end of next year, America and other nations will set a long-term global goal for reducing greenhouse gases.
“In addition to this long-term global goal, each country would establish midterm national targets and programs that reflect their own mix of energy sources and future energy needs.”
Mr. Bush appeared to be belatedly seeking to take leadership of a cause that other countries, international organizations, American states and even cities have adopted as their own, and one that finds strong support from Americans and others around the world in opinion surveys.
For years, the president has resisted European calls for specific reduction targets to curb emissions of carbon dioxide, which scientists have linked to a global increase in temperature. He has insisted that voluntary use of new technology would suffice.
But in recent months he has appeared to accept the idea, widely held by scientists but often disputed in conservative circles, that the available scientific evidence shows a clear relationship between human activity and the global warming that many people, like the Floridians now experiencing a worst-in-a-century drought, believe they are seeing with their own eyes.
Since Mr. Bush rejected the Kyoto protocol early in his term, European leaders like Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany have been trying strenuously to raise the profile of the climate change issue, calling it one of the gravest challenges facing the planet. They were joined more recently by the new president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy.
In March, Britain proposed binding laws to enforce sharp cuts in carbon emissions, aimed at a 60 percent decrease by 2050.
As the host of the Group of Eight summit meeting next week, Ms. Merkel has been pressing hard for a new accord on greenhouse-gas emissions to replace the Kyoto protocol, which begins to expire in two years.
Opposition from India and China, the two big, dynamically developing economies in Asia, to making any painful economic sacrifices in the service of emissions cuts has been a major hurdle.
But Germany announced this week that those two nations and others in Asia had thrown their support behind European calls for a new treaty at a meeting in Hamburg. China’s prime ministers gave similar signals during a visit to Japan earlier this year.
“We agreed that there should be a follow-up regime to Kyoto,” said the German foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, according to The Associated Press. “Secondly, negotiations will be started and have to be started seriously this year, and by 2009 they will have to be concluded.”
It was not immediately clear whether Mr. Bush’s proposal sought to preempt that agreement, build on it or complement it.
Source : www.nytimes.com
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