WIRE:11/19/2000
12:02:00 ET
Politicians Arrive in Hague for Crunch Climate Talks THE HAGUE (Reuters) - Political leaders arrived for U.N. climate talks at The Hague Sunday, ready for a week of diplomatic arm-twisting over a pact to slow global warming and lessen the risk of more environmental disasters. Delegates said the position of the United States, the world"s biggest polluter, was crucial to the progress of what Green groups call the most important environmental negotiations ever held. "It would be absurd if the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases would not ratify the Kyoto Protocol," EU Environment Commissioner Margot Wallstrom said on British television before attending the first high-level meeting. She was referring to the international agreement made in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997 that industrialized countries should cut output of greenhouse gases by an average five percent by 2010. The U.S. delegation believes it has offered compromises from its earlier positions, but has not seen a similar move on the part of the EU. "Frankly, we haven"t seen the EU take even a nudge forward," said Roger Ballentine, presidential adviser on global warming. Three years on, 185 countries and thousands of environmental and business representatives will try to settle how to implement those cuts during a second week of talks in The Hague. High-level politicians from 40 of the delegations, including Britain"s Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott and U.S. Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs Frank Loy, met the conference chairman, Dutch Environment Minister Jan Pronk, to set the week"s agenda. But even that apparently simple task could prove difficult in these highly charged negotiations. Developing countries say they are being squeezed out of the small negotiating groups Pronk has planned in a bid to overcome major disagreements over how nations can meet the Kyoto targets. OPEC MAY SLOW PROGRESS Some delegates said a potential threat to the success of the talks came from OPEC oil nations keen to promote demand for the strategic commodity on which they depend for export revenue. "Not all countries are willing to reach an agreement. Some have been working since the start to wreck an agreement," said Argentina"s Raoul Estrada, referring to OPEC states. Scientists say emissions of greenhouse gases, mostly by industrialized nations, will help raise temperatures by 1.5 to 6.0 degrees Centigrade (2.7-10.8 Fahrenheit) and cause sea levels to rise by as much as one meter (yard) in the 21st century. Those changes could have disastrous effects on weather, sea levels, agriculture and the spread of disease. Only 30 states have ratified the Kyoto Protocol at home, and none of the major industrialized countries have legally bound themselves to the targets. Many nations, including the United States, are awaiting the rules on how to achieve this before tying themselves to the Kyoto pact. Although talks will continue until late Friday, when negotiators are likely to work through the night to find a compromise, some participants expect signals of an agreement to emerge earlier as the political horse-trading heats up. "By Wednesday things have to be clear," Estrada, who chaired the Kyoto meeting, told Reuters. "If we don"t have something by the middle of the week we won"t have anything." Talks became bogged down in technical negotiations during the first week, the EU sharply criticizing a U.S. plan to use its existing forests and farms as "sinks" to suck up the main pollutant, carbon dioxide, from the atmosphere. For its part, the United States opposes an EU call for a cap on "flexible mechanisms," which would allow a country to buy credits to meet its obligations under the Kyoto targets. The United States wants unlimited use of those tools, which would help it move the Kyoto pact through a skeptical Congress, despite criticism that they could become loopholes and fail to reduce pollution levels. Developing nations, which are linked through a loose-knit negotiating group dubbed G77 plus China, are struggling at the Hague talks to secure financial help from the industrialized world to implement cleaner technology. Developing nations face no pollution targets under Kyoto but argue they will be the hardest hit by climate change. WORLD IS HEATING UP British Environment Minister Michael Meacher, speaking to Sky Television, criticized the U.S. attitude in light of floods and storms recently in Venezuela, Mozambique, India and China. "If all of that can happen in three years, and if it is gradually accelerating -- which it is -- where are we going to be in 20, 50 years" time?" he asked. "In those circumstances, I don"t believe the most powerful, the most important, the biggest country in the world can just walk away." Environmentalists say insurers share their concern. Experts say the world"s hottest year, 1998, was also the costliest year for insured losses from weather-related catastrophes. The storms, floods, droughts and fires around the world in 1998 exceeded all weather-related losses of the 1980s. |