WASHINGTON (AP) — European leaders are trying to salvage a 1997 agreement for reducing global warming despite President Bush's declaration that its mandatory cuts on carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels and short timetable are no longer acceptable to the United States.
Ambassadors from the 15-nation European Union scheduled meetings Tuesday with Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christie Whitman and other administration officials.
Whitman, after attending a conference on global warming in Italy, warned Bush last month that the issue was a matter of "international credibility."
The president, nonetheless, reversed a campaign pledge to treat carbon dioxide from power plants as a pollutant and said the reductions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases called for in the 1997 treaty were too expensive to implement.
The administration said it instead will seek an alternative that would include poorer, underdeveloped countries now exempt from treaty commitments.
No industrial country has yet ratified the treaty negotiated four years ago in Kyoto, Japan. An effort last November at The Hague to come up with a plan for implementing the accord collapsed in a disagreement between the United States and Germany over trading pollution credits.
Led by Kjell Larsson, Sweden's environment minister, and Margot Wallstroem, the EU's environment commissioner, the delegation hopes to revive momentum for the Kyoto accord. It also plans to travel to China, Russia, Iran and Japan to seek support for keeping the treaty alive.
Larsson has said supporters of the pact have a "morally very strong position for the talks."
Meanwhile, New Zealand's foreign minister also called on the United States to get to work on the problem.
"This is a real problem. It has to be addressed," Phil Goff, minister for foreign affairs and trade, told reporters in Washington on Monday. "We would expect the United States to remain involved and to work with the international community to find a solution ... to the problem of global warming."
U.S. business and trade groups want the EU delegation to accept a new direction in climate talks when they resume in July at Bonn, Germany.
"I don't know what they will be able to do," Frank Maisano, a spokesman for the business-oriented Global Climate Coalition said Monday. "We need to find a fresh new breath, and we think the market-based technology approach is the way to do that."
The Kyoto protocol calls for countries to cut heat-trapping emissions by an average 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. However, U.S. carbon dioxide emissions have continued to grow since the treaty was signed and are now nearly 15 percent above what they were in 1990.
Many scientists believe such emissions are causing the Earth to warm up significantly; Whitman has said she agrees.
The United Nations said Monday it will host an informal meeting of 40 to 50 environmental ministers in New York on April 21 to prepare for the Bonn talks.
On the Net: EPA global warming site: www.epa.gov/globalwarming