WASHINGTON (AP) — Since the collapse in November of global warming talks at The Hague, the Kyoto climate treaty has been on life support. Now President Bush appears to have pulled the plug — at least as far as U.S. involvement goes.

"We'll be working with our allies to reduce greenhouse gases, but I will not accept a plan that will harm our economy and hurt American workers," the president told reporters Thursday when asked about the climate agreement reached in 1997 in Kyoto, Japan.

He said he would remain "open minded" on addressing the threats of global warming. But he maintained the Kyoto agreement's mandatory reductions in heat-trapping greenhouse gases, principally carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels, and short timetable are too expensive and unwise when the country faces energy problems.

He reiterated his views in a meeting Thursday with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who had sought to convince Bush that U.S. support of the Kyoto agreement was essential for international success in tackling the global warming threat.

"We agreed on practically everything except ... the Kyoto Protocol," Schroeder told reporters afterward.

Three years and four months ago, then-Vice President Al Gore hailed the Kyoto agreement, which he personally helped craft, as a breakthrough in addressing climate change. It called on industrial nations to cut heat-trapping emissions to below 1990 levels by 2012.

No industrial country has yet ratified the agreement and none, except possibly Britain, is at this time on target to meet its reductions requirements. Attempts to work out mechanisms to implement and enforce its provisions have foundered.

At the same time, U.S. carbon dioxide emissions have continued to grow to where they're now nearly 15 percent higher than 1990 and climbing. Many scientists believe such emissions are causing the Earth to warm up significantly.

EPA Administrator Christie Whitman insisted that while the Kyoto approach was "deeply flawed," the president remains "absolutely committed" to continued engagement with other countries on the climate issue.

The United States will participate in the next round of climate talks in July in Bonn, Germany, administration officials said.

But what remains unclear is what proposals U.S. negotiators will take to Bonn, which is supposed to be a followup meeting in which 160 nations hoped to work out an implementation plan for the Kyoto treaty.

Even senior presidential advisers such as Whitman and Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, who philosophically have embraced the need to deal broadly with climate change, have suggested a fresh way be found outside of the framework of Kyoto.

Others such as Vice President Dick Cheney and Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham have favored a path of voluntary actions and little more. The mandatory cuts demanded by Kyoto would boost energy prices and harm the economy, they have argued.

To the consternation of many environmentalists, the Clinton administration also recognized that if the Kyoto agreement was too expensive it would never pass muster in the Senate, which has yet to ratify it.

So at The Hague talks four months ago, U.S. negotiators argued forcefully for a range of measures aimed primarily at reducing the economic cost of Kyoto. Among them was a proposal to allow unlimited international trading of carbon credits and broad use of "carbon sinks" — principally forest lands that absorb carbon dioxide — in calculating Kyoto compliance.

But the Europeans balked, arguing that the United States needed to make more actual carbon dioxide emission cuts at home, so the negotiations ended in chaos.

By renouncing the Kyoto accords, Bush has embraced "a new direction, a common sense effort on climate policy," said Glenn Kelly, executive director of the Global Climate Coalition, an advocacy group funded largely by the fossil fuel industry.

Many environmentalists as well as Clinton administration diplomats who have spent years battling the Europeans over details of the Kyoto agreement say the Bush action will harm America's credibility on the climate issue.

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"This threatens years of work to build (international) support for a market-based approach to global warming. It's a huge step backward and an enormous mistake," said David Sandalow, former assistant secretary of state and a member of the Clinton negotiating team at The Hague in November.

But the Kyoto agreement always has been an inviting target, says John Holdren, a Harvard professor of environmental science and former chairman of a White House science and technology advisory panel in the Clinton administration.

"It can be criticized both for being too much too soon and too little too late," Holdren, who supports the treaty, said in a recent interview. Many view its emission reductions and timetable as impossible to meet, while others say even if they were attained, such reductions would have only modest impact on actual concentrations of heat-trapping pollution accumulated in the atmosphere.

Still, "Kyoto is so important as a symbol of the international commitment to do something about this problem that it would be better to fix it than to forget it," he added.

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