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G8 Ministers Wrangle Over Troubled Treaty On Global Warming
TRIESTE, Italy, March 3 (News Agencies) - Group of Eight (G8) environment ministers struggled here Saturday to find a face-saving compromise over the Kyoto Protocol, the U.N. treaty on global warming that is caught in crossfire between the U.S. and Europe.
Ministers were trying to draw up a communiqué that would somehow balance European demands for an unshakeable commitment to Kyoto and insistence by the new U.S. administration that it is not automatically bound to the policies of the Clinton era.
Italian Environment Minister Willer Bordon said the meeting "unanimously" agreed on dangers of greenhouse gas, but admitted that the message about Kyoto that would be conveyed by the meeting remained unsettled.
"Where there is not a unanimous stance is the tools" for addressing global warming, he said.
The U.S. representative, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) chief Christie Whitman, was making her maiden appearance at an international meeting in her new job.
Her every word was being scrutinized as to whether President George W. Bush would cripple or kill off Kyoto.
While on the campaign stump, Bush said he opposed Kyoto, apparently reflecting the view of many American conservatives that the global warming crisis has been exaggerated by Greens.
But since his election, a flurry of new scientific data has confirmed that the Earth's atmosphere is warming quickly as a result of burning fossil fuels, helping to spur a change in American opinion.
Whitman, meeting here Friday with global warming activists, industry and trade union representatives, impressed those present with her insistence that Washington took global warming seriously.
But she sidestepped any reference to Kyoto, making it clear that Washington was keeping all its options open for the time being.
She reiterated to ministers Saturday that her government was "reviewing" the policies of the Clinton administration, remarks that "somewhat chilled the atmosphere," a delegate said.
Talks to complete the 1997 "framework" agreement resume in Bonn in July, eight months after negotiations fell apart in The Hague.
Dutch Environment Minister Jan Pronk, who is chairing the global warming talks, said here Saturday there would be talks on Kyoto's technical issues among ministers meeting in New York on April 21st to discuss sustainable development.
Bordon said the final communiqué on Sunday might express concern about the destruction of Afghan statues by the ruling Taliban militia.
"The cultural heritage of Afghanistan is obviously universal cultural heritage.... What is happening is casting a shadow on our cultural heritage," he said.
"A declaration on this may be included in the final communiqué."
As G8 meetings continued, several thousand environmentalists, students and leftwing protesters marched through the streets of this Adriatic port city here Saturday, shadowed by squads of helmeted riot police.
In a powerful show of strength, the Italian authorities brought in around 3,000 police to barricade the streets surrounding a historic palace in the port where the environment ministers were meeting.
The local press predicted Saturday that the talks could be overrun by thousands of "Seattle people," opposed to globalization, who were being stealthily organized through the Internet.
Police dogs, teargas grenade launchers and dozens of buses and Land Rovers, filled with backup police in full anti-riot gear, were held in reserve, but were unneeded.
The march was noisy but good humored and there were no reports of violence. There was a brief moment of tension near the venue when a handful of protestors launched firework rockets into the sky and tossed a few colored smoke bombs at police to make their views known.
"There are the criminals, there are the people responsible," shouted an activist from the radical group Tute Bianche through a massive loudspeaker system, placed on the back of a truck which crawled through the rain-soaked streets, blasting out rap and reggae music.
Five demonstrators, dressed in sombreros, taunted the police with a Mexican-style rendition of the theme music to the Laurel and Hardy movies.
Raffaela Bolini, a member of an Italian grass-roots environmental group, Arci, said she came from Rome to express her concern about the world's deteriorating environment and what she said was the undemocratic clout of the rich industrial nations.
"We believe that the G8 is not a democratic, legitimate organization to govern the world. We have a legitimate organization, which is the United Nations," Bolini said.
A young woman who gave her name as Georgia, a 16-year-old student from Trieste, said that environment questions were the biggest concerns of today.
"We can try to save the world by acting at the grass roots, making even the smallest contributions count," she said.
Scientists paint global warming as the biggest environmental peril in human history.
Carbon dioxide levels in the lower atmosphere, disgorged by burning oil, gas and coal, are at their highest levels in more than 400,000 years, according a new report by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The panel predicts a mean global temperature rise of up to 5.8 C. (10.4 F) by 2100. An increase of that scale would be enough to change weather patterns around the world, threatening crops and habitation, it says.
The G8 comprises Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States.
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