Experts confer on climatePanel puts heat on U.S. to conformThe Associated PressBUENOS
AIRES, ARGENTINA -- International experts, searching for ways to break a deadlock with the United States over climate change, consulted on many ideas Monday to lure that No. 1 polluter into a joint effort to control "greenhouse gases," along with such second-rank emitters as China and India.
A Chinese negotiator said he thought Washington might accept a concept he favored -- "the bottom-up approach," whereby individual nations decide what steps they can take to rein in carbon dioxide and other emissions.
That would reverse the "top-down" approach of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which the Bush administration rejects and which sets mandatory targets for dozens of nations to cut back by 2012 on the gases blamed for global warming. Environmentalists said, however, that the "bottom-up" approach may accomplish little.
An annual U.N. conference on climate change was midway through its two week meeting as representatives of almost 200 nations refined details of Kyoto in formal sessions, while informally debating how to control emissions beyond 2012.
Official talks on that future framework are expected next year. But since July the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, a private Washington research group, has brought together policy-makers and experts from the United States and 14 other nations for closed discussions on the next steps to slow global warming.
At a briefing Monday, the Pew Center's Eliot Diringer said the participants thus far have agreed that "a future climate approach should aim, No. 1, to engage major emitters."
The United States is the biggest, emitting 21 percent of the world's greenhouse gases in 2000, according to a report issued Monday by the Pew Center and the World Resources Institute of Washington. The No. 2 emitter is China, accounting for 15 percent of the gases, more than the entire 25-nation European Union's 14 percent.
The Kyoto pact seeks to control six gases that trap heat that otherwise would escape the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide, the most common, is a product of coal- and oil-burning power plants, automobile exhaust and other fossil fuel-burning sources.
