U.S. Going Empty-Handed to Meeting on Global Warming

By DOUGLAS JEHL

The Bush administration reconfirmed today that it opposed the Kyoto Protocol, the international treaty to fight global warming, and would not submit it for Senate ratification.

"The president has been unequivocal," the White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, said. "He does not support the Kyoto treaty. It is not in the United States' economic best interest."

Mr. Fleischer, who was asked at a White House briefing to clarify the administration's stance, said the administration was developing other strategies to deal with change in the world's climate.

The meeting of the Western Hemisphere's environment ministers will be the first such gathering since the Bush administration announced earlier this month that it would not seek to regulate power plants' emissions of carbon dioxide, a decision that amounted to effective abandonment of the Kyoto accord. 

"We're going into the lion's den unarmed," said a senior administration official who expressed deep frustration that a new policy had not yet been formulated.

The American delegate to Thursday's meeting will be Christie Whitman, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, who had advised against the decision on power plant emissions but was overruled by the White House. At a news conference on Tuesday, Mrs. Whitman repeated the White House's position that it had "no interest" in carrying out the treaty negotiated in 1997 in Kyoto, Japan.

Administration officials sympathetic to Ms. Whitman's position said she had tried in vain to obtain clear instructions about how to answer questions from United States allies concerned about the carbon dioxide policy. The administration's new stance reverses a campaign pledge made by President Bush and was at odds with the position that Ms. Whitman outlined to other environment ministers just four weeks ago at an international conference on global warming in Italy.

"She's essentially not been given anything to say," one senior official said of the two-day meeting in Montreal, adding that the only thing Ms. Whitman would be able to state authoritatively about the administration's position on global warming was that it was the subject of a cabinet-level review.

Several foreign leaders, including the German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, have been outspoken in their criticism of the administration for its opposition to the Kyoto accord. Mr. Schröder is to meet with President Bush at the White House on Thursday, and global warming is expected to be high on their agenda.

A senior official who defended the White House position said foreign governments should not be surprised either by Mr. Bush's opposition to the Kyoto accord, which he has criticized since early in the presidential campaign, or by the lack of a policy so early in a new administration.

"Diplomatically, we're hearing a lot of criticism from a lot of countries, and I suppose at every meeting we go to we'll hear more," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "At the same time, it's been no secret what the president's position on the treaty has been." 

The murmurs of dissent within the administration reflected a view attributed to Ms. Whitman that the White House had been unwise to declare its opposition to the Kyoto pact before it could point to an alternative.

In a memorandum to Mr. Bush earlier this month, before the decision on carbon dioxide emissions, Ms. Whitman warned that most other industrialized nations regarded the Kyoto accord as "the only game in town." 

"There's a real fear in the international community that if the U.S. is not willing to discuss the issue within the framework of Kyoto, the whole thing will fall apart," Ms. Whitman wrote in the memorandum, whose contents were first reported in The Washington Post.

"Mr. President, this is a credibility issue (global warming) for the U.S. in the international community," she wrote. "It is also an issue that is resonating here at home. We need to appear engaged and shift the discussion from the focus on the K-word to action, but we have to build some bonafides first."

The Kyoto accord would require the United States and other industrialized countries to reduce emissions of heat-trapping gases by an average of 5.2 percent by 2012 compared with their 1990 levels. The United States and more than 100 other countries signed the treaty, but no industrial country has yet ratified it. An effort by the Clinton administration to win its ratification by the Senate was defeated 95 to 0.

In the United States, most industry representatives have strongly opposed the accord, warning that it would impose enormous costs on the American economy.

An official of the Global Climate Coalition, which reflects industry views, said today that the Bush administration had a right to sever any association with the Kyoto treaty's specific guidelines for emissions reductions.

"There's a fundamentally more effective way of dealing with climate change, which is one based on technological development, and that's the one we support," the official, Glenn Kelly, said.

But a former Clinton administration official, David B. Sandalow, who helped to negotiate the 1997 accord, said the stance would undercut American credibility.

"It's a textbook case of unilateral diplomacy, which rarely works and always brings resentment," Mr. Sandalow said.

An environmental group, Friends of the Earth, called the American stance "environmental isolationism." 

The meeting of environment ministers that begins in Montreal on Thursday will include representatives of Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and other countries from the Western Hemisphere in advance of a meeting of heads of state in May that will be known as the Summit of the Americas.

In terms of global warming, a more important gathering will take place in July, when heads of state have been invited to Bonn under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Global Warming, which President George Bush signed in 1992. That meeting had initially been scheduled for May, but was postponed at the request of the current administration.