Date: Fri, 01 Jan 1904 02:35:37 +0100 From: "secr(MG!)" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Climate Talks Stall Over Air Pollution Rules ----- forwarded message ----- Subject: [mayday2k] Reuters: Climate Talks Stall Over Air Pollution Rules Date: Thu, 23 Nov 2000 15:04:00 EST From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] 'It's like a running race. We're at the 'get set' stage before the 'go','' Belgian energy minister Olivier Deleuze said. ''If we don't do something on that, we'll have to bring out the thermometer and watch it go up and say 'Oops, we messed up'.'' You already messed up my friend. Don't you still realize? Sabri ********************** Climate Talks Stall Over Air Pollution Rules By Margaret Orgill THE HAGUE, Nov. 23 (Reuters) - The United States and the European Union were locked in disagreement over emissions control on Thursday, with just one day left to get a deal at a U.N. conference intended to forestall global climate change. ''We do not have much time. Major issues have still to be resolved,'' said conference president Jan Pronk as protesters sounded a siren outside the venue and said millions of lives in flood-ravaged poor nations depended on the outcome. Pronk said a deal to stop the planet heating up and causing environmental turmoil could still be reached by the Friday night deadline. He would try to break the logjam by proposing ideas involving both benefits and pain for all parties. ''Pessimism is not justified at this stage. There is no retreat, no backtracking, only some stagnation,'' he said. He said differences among key groups in the gathering of 180 nations centered on disputes over using forests to claim credit for tackling global warming, transferring clean energy technologies to poor nations and the enforcement of any deal. Scientists say continuing to burn fossil fuels that produce ''greenhouse gases'' like carbon dioxide will alter the climate, raise sea levels and bring more floods of the kind that hit Europe this month and southern Africa and Venezuela a year ago. U.S. AND EU AT ODDS But many American corporations and farmers worry that measures favored by the EU to stop the earth heating up could have punitive costs for economic growth and jobs. The bickering centers, in effect, on which countries in the developed world will pay the most for cleaning up the planet under the terms of a 1997 pact reached in Kyoto, Japan, that set targets for cuts in so-called greenhouse gases. One of the main disputes is between the United States and 15-nation EU over a U.S. plan to allow developed nations to count carbon dioxide soaked up by forests, so-called ''carbon sinks,'' against emissions reduction targets set in Kyoto. The Kyoto pact sets a five percent average cut by developed nations from 1990 levels of emissions by 2010. The current talks seek to agree the practical steps those nations must take to reach those goals, and to help poor nations avoid becoming big emitters themselves as they try to develop. Poor nations, and especially those threatened by rising sea levels, have angrily accused the United States of shirking its responsibility as the world's biggest polluter to make the cuts it promised at Kyoto. Nigerian Environment Minister Sani Daura, speaking on behalf of developing nations in the G77 grouping plus China, said rich nations should be ashamed that progress had been so slow. 'DEVELOPED WORLD MUST SEE REASON' ''It is in the court of the developed nations to see reason. They have the money. They have caused our problems. It is now for them to flesh it out,'' he said in a heated address. ''It is a big shame that, despite the truth which is available for everyone to see, they have not been able to come to terms with the concerns of the developing countries.'' U.N. experts say long-term damage from climate change could trigger a drop in food production in Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, and raise the likelihood of increasingly severe and deadly shifts in weather patterns. But the two big players are at odds. ''It's like a running race. We're at the 'get set' stage before the 'go','' Belgian energy minister Olivier Deleuze said. ''If we don't do something on that, we'll have to bring out the thermometer and watch it go up and say 'Oops, we messed up'.'' Deleuze said Washington's enthusiasm for carbon sinks was the main obstacle in its talks with the EU. Chief U.S. negotiator Frank Loy says the U.S. proposal is a pragmatic solution that takes account of worries among U.S. firms about the impact of climate pact on economic growth.
