President Bush on Saturday defended his opposition to popular Earth Summit treaties and said leadership sometimes requires resisting widely supported positions.
Declaring his "full intention to be the world's pre-eminent leader in protecting the environment," Bush spent the last day of the U.N. Conference on Environment and Development dismissing critics of his policies.Bush angered many environmentalists and world leaders by refusing to sign a treaty on biodiversity and by pressuring conference participants to drop legally binding limits on carbon dioxide emissions in a pact on global warming.
"Sometimes leadership is not going along with everybody else," Bush told reporters during a news conference.
Denying that election-year politics influenced him, Bush said: "We've got sound environmental practices. We are not going to sign up to things that we can't do. We're not going to sign up to things we don't believe in."
Bush said, "American environmental policy is not going to be dominated by the extremes."
He came to the large gathering of world leaders insisting that a balance was needed between protecting natural resources and economic development.
"I believe that economic development as well as environmental protection is in order. I think both things count," he said in defending his position.
Bush was one of the few world leaders at the summit who refused to sign a treaty on biodiversity - intended to preserve rare and endangered plant life and animals.
U.S. negotiators complained that a section of the accord would force American firms to share technological secrets with other nations. Bush has said the United States will comply with other aspects of the treaty but will not honor provisions dealing with biotechnology.
He also angered summit participants by insisting that European Community-led efforts to impose strict emissions standards in the global warming treaty be dropped.
He signed the accord but only after language was stricken that would have limited carbon dioxide emissions in the year 2000 to levels that existed in the year 1990.
Bush hoped to deflect some of the negative onus that has been placed on his environmental policies by challenging other industrialized nations to come up with specific plans for reducing carbon dioxide emissions.
He called for a new conference to discuss those plans before the end of the year - an idea that was met with tepid enthusiasm by the other summit delegations.
Administration officials have been upset that the United States has been turned into a scapegoat at the conference - insisting privately that some of the most vocal advocates of strict limits have no real strategy for meeting those requirements.
U.S. officials also acknowledged they were embarrassed by the proposal of the 12-nation EC to provide $4 billion to further the goals of the Earth Summit.
Bush, constrained by efforts to cut the federal budget deficit, offered no pledge for increased funding. The best U.S. officials could do was point to spending initiatives first unveiled back in January.
He was returning to the United States late Saturday.
Some leaders complained the summit had not lived up to its expectations.
"Expectations for this conference have not been fully met," Pakistani Prime Minister Muhammad Nawaz Sharif told a round-table meeting of up to 100 world leaders.
"But we leave Rio with a new sense of urgency and purpose, determined to work for a more equitable and environmentally sound world order," Sharif said.
More than 175 countries were represented at the summit.