http://ca.news.yahoo.com/010523/5/59ny.html Wednesday May 23 11:48 AM EST EU, U.S. Talk on Environment But Stay Deadlocked By Eva Sohlman STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - The European Union and the United States remained deadlocked on environmental policies on Wednesday after their first high-level meeting since Washington issued a controversial new energy plan last week. "The situation is unchanged. We disagree on the climate issue," Sweden's Environment Minister Kjell Larsson told Reuters after meeting U.S. Director of the Environmental Protection Agency Christine Todd Whitman. Sweden holds the EU's rotating presidency. He said the new energy plan -- criticized by the EU for promoting use of fossil fuels oil and coal and for doing too little to promote conservation -- made it impossible for the United States to return to a global pact to curb global warming. President George W. Bush had already rejected the 1997 Kyoto protocol in March, stating it was too costly and unfair that developing countries were not included in the pact. Whitman, in Stockholm where she signed a U.N. treaty to outlaw 12 toxic chemicals, said she was disappointed by the outcry at the energy plan and said Bush would prove himself a leader in combating pollution. "I was a little surprised at (criticisms of) the energy plan...It was a little disappointing because...I don't think people have really read it," she told reporters before meeting Larsson. "I think that as we move forward they will see that in fact this president is very committed to these environmental goals and is someone who will be a leader in this area," she added. She said the energy plan would not push up U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases. The separate Kyoto protocol calls on industrialized states to cut their emissions of carbon dioxide by an average five percent from 1990's levels by 2012. "I'm very disappointed that we can't continue to work globally within the Kyoto process," Larsson said earlier. The EU says the plan will aggravate global warming and does little to encourage conservation. Washington has won little credit in Stockholm for signing the U.N. convention with almost 130 other nations on Wednesday to outlaw or minimise use of a "dirty dozen" persistent organic pollutants (POPs). Rick Hind, a campaigner for the environmental watch-dog group Greenpeace, gave Whitman a T-shirt saying "TOXIC PATROL" immediately after she signed and called for the elimination of all POPs in the United States within a generation. Hind told Reuters Whitman had pledged to do so. Whitman told reporters that Bush would soon be ready to outline his alternative plans for combating global warming after he ditched the 1997 Kyoto pact. But she stopped short of confirming whether he would unveil the plan at a meeting with European Union leaders in Sweden next month. Canada, the first nation to sign and ratify the POPs treaty on Wednesday, also predicted that U.S. CO2 emissions would increase as a consequence of the new energy plan, which could raise demand for energy imports from Canada. "The largest energy relationship in the world is between Cananda and the United States," Canadian Environment Minister David Anderson told Reuters, saying Canada exported oil and gas and other energy worth $52 billion a year to its neighbor. "Despite any increase in energy sales to the United States...we will nevertheless meet our Kyoto commmitments of minus seven percent of 1990s levels," he said. Among critics of the U.S. energy plan, the head of the U.N. forum on climate change, Jan Pronk, described it as "a disastrous development" and said it would contribute to push up world temperatures. Copyright � 2001 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Copyright � 2001 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
