Critics skeptical of claims of progress on warming

WASHINGTON — European Union and U.S. leaders are hailing what they say is a major step toward bridging their sharp differences on global warming. Academics and critics of President Bush's policies, however, question whether he really gave any ground.

At issue is a little-noticed sentence deep in a joint statement signed during an EU-White House summit Monday. It said senior officials would meet at a climate forum in Europe this year to discuss "market mechanisms, including but not limited to emissions trading."

The EU's top official in Washington, John Bruton, said this signaled a new U.S. willingness to discuss the EU's cap-and-trade emissions trading system, in which mandatory limits are placed on carbon dioxide levels. The Bush administration has strongly opposed U.S. participation in such a system.

"This is an important step," Bruton said in an interview. "It's an acknowledgment of cap and trade. We think there is nothing casual in the language."

The U.S. ambassador to the EU, C. Boyden Gray, said, "I think it was a concession on our part."

Some analysts say officials are exaggerating the significance of the wording because both sides wanted to demonstrate improving relations and to be seen as having made progress in international cooperation on global warming. It is an issue that is gaining political importance on both sides of the Atlantic.

"The international community is so exasperated by U.S. intransigence that they will applaud any effort to appear engaged in this issue in the hope that engagement will lead to real participation," said Paul Wapner, director of the Global Environmental Politics program at American University.

Henry Jacoby, co-director of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, said the Europeans "tend to attach the greatest significance to the smallest pieces of information out of the United States."

But he said there are signs of loosening on other U.S. policies, so anything is possible.

The joint statement was among several that emerged from a summit where U.S. and European leaders sought to highlight closer trans-Atlantic ties after years of disagreements over the Iraq war, U.S. treatment of terror suspects and global warming.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has made trans-Atlantic ties a priority of her country's current term in the rotating EU presidency. She made clear, however, that she would not raise carbon caps at the summit, instead putting off intensified talks until a June meeting in Germany of the Group of Eight major industrialized nations. Germany also chairs the G-8 at the moment.