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Bush says Kyoto pact is flawed

Aziz Haniffa
India Abroad Correspondent in Washington

President George W Bush on Monday dismissed the Kyoto pact on global warming as "fatally flawed" and said it was unfair and a threat to the American economy because major polluters like India and China were not a party to the protocol.

However, in an effort to disarm his critics as he left for his first presidential trip to Europe, Bush mapped out steps to boost research and development on global warming, which he said required the participation of developing countries like India and China and more science-based technological initiatives.

He did not offer any specifics on what his administration's alternative is to the 1997 Kyoto Treaty that requires industrial nations to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

In a Rose Garden statement, Bush declared: "The Kyoto Protocol is fatally flawed in fundamental ways. But the process used to bring nations together to discuss our joint response to climate change is an important one."

"That is why," he said, "I am today committing the United States of America to work within the United Nations framework and elsewhere to develop with our friends and allies and nations throughout the world an effective and science-based response to the issue of global warming."

Bush acknowledged that there is no longer any scientific doubt that the earth's surface temperature has been rising and that man-made pollutants exacerbate this global warming by trapping heat in much the same way as the emission of greenhouse gases does.

"There is a natural greenhouse effect that contributes to warming. Greenhouse gases trap heat and thus warm the earth because they prevent a significant proportion of infrared radiation from escaping into space," he said.

Bush conceded that the United States is the world's largest emitter of manmade greenhouse gases. "We account for almost 20 per cent of the world's man-made greenhouse emissions," he said, but quickly added, "we also account for about one-quarter of the world's economic output."

He said: "We also recognise the other part of the story -- that the rest of the world emits 80 per cent of all greenhouse gases. And many of those emissions come from developing countries."

He pointed out that "India and Germany are among the top emitters," and complained, "yet, India was exempt from Kyoto."

"These and other developing countries that are experiencing rapid growth face challenges in reducing their emissions without harming their economies. We want to work co-operatively with these countries in their efforts to reduce greenhouse emissions and maintain economic growth."

Bush said that Kyoto was, in many ways, unrealistic. "For America," he said, "complying with those mandates would have a negative economic impact, with layoffs and price increases."

He said this was why 95 members of the US Senate had "expressed reluctance to endorse such an approach. Yet, America's unwillingness to embrace a flawed treaty should not be read by our friends and allies as any abdication of responsibility. To the contrary, my administration is committed to a leadership role on the issue of climatic changes."

But leading environmental groups and a US senator, who chairs the Senate Commerce Sub-committee on the Oceans, criticised Bush's speech as long on rhetoric but short on specifics.

Elliot Diringer of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, while acknowledging that the one hopeful sign was the administration's acceptance of the broad scientific consensus that this problem is real and growing worse, said: "But all that does is put the administration where the rest of the world was a decade ago."

Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, said Bush's statement was analogous to "commissioning a study on fire while your house burns down."

Senator John Kerry, Massachusetts Democrat, accused Bush of cloaking "an aggressive negative agenda" with his rhetoric on global warming and vowed to hold congressional hearing on the subject shortly and challenge the administration on its bona fides to alleviate climate change.

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