Amid calls for 'more ambitious action,' U.S. defends stance on global warming

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — The chief U.S. climate negotiator on Monday defended Washington's stand against compulsory caps on global-warming emissions, and said the Bush administration was unlikely to change its policy.

At the opening of a two-week U.N. treaty conference on climate change, Harlan Watson told reporters the United States is doing better at restraining the growth of such gases voluntarily than some countries committed to reductions under the Kyoto Protocol.

"With few exceptions you're seeing those emissions rise again," Watson said of countries bound by Kyoto.

Developing nations, the European Union, environmentalists and others are urging Washington to sign onto obligatory cuts after 2012 — when Kyoto expires — in emissions of heat-trapping gases blamed by scientists for global warming.

"The international community will need to a take much more ambitious action after 2012," Stavros Dimas, the European Union environment commissioner, said in a statement. What is needed, he said, is "an international consensus," meaning a controls regime that includes the biggest emitter, the United States.

"There is a need for a common commitment," Kenyan Environment Minister Kivutha Kibwana told the conference, which elected him to a one-year presidency of the body governing the 1992 U.N. treaty on climate change.

The 1997 Kyoto accord, an annex to that treaty, requires 35 industrialized countries to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012.

Scientists attribute the past century's 1-degree rise in average global temperatures at least in part to the accumulation of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere — byproducts of power plants, automobiles and other fossil fuel-burning sources.

Continued global warming will lead to shifts in climate zones, seas rising from heat expansion and runoff from melted land ice, and more extreme weather, scientists say.

Here in Nairobi, the Kyoto countries will continue talks on what kind of emissions targets and timetables should follow 2012. But many, before committing, are waiting to see whether the United States, accounting for 21 percent of the world's greenhouse gases, will submit to a mandatory regime of cutbacks. Watson's words seemed to rule that out for the next two years.

He was asked at a news conference whether reported pressure from British Prime Minister Tony Blair might have led to a change of attitude in the Bush administration toward Kyoto-style controls.